“That’s what Jake told me.” A second after he realized what he had said, Manny gasped.
I pretended not to have heard anything. “Were there autopsies conducted?”
“Yes. The results were sealed, but my boyfriend found out that they had mixed GHB with alcohol.” Manny paused. “The victims’ families were told that their boys had died as a result of drug overdoses.” He lit a new cigarette off the burning end of the one he had just finished. “I guess the families didn’t ask too many questions. They were probably embarrassed their sons died in gay nightclubs, high on drugs.”
Through a cloud of smoke, Manny looked at me. “You know, Lupe, we may live in a free and easy place here, where anything goes and all kinds of lifestyles are accepted, but that’s not the way it is in the rest of the country.”
“And that’s why the guys come to South Beach,” I said.
Manny smiled, glad that I understood what he was telling me. “Because they can be themselves here. And not have to put up with any bullshit about who they are and how they lead their lives. A lot of these guys have families who don’t want to know anything about their sons’ lives — as long as they’re in the dark, they don’t have to confront the fact that their sons are gay. It’s an old story, everyone in denial. And that’s how the police got away with giving the families so few details about how these boys died. The families really didn’t want to know. And then the police can say that they didn’t disclose detailed information out of respect for the families.”
I considered what Manny was saying. Keeping the deaths quiet served more than one purpose. The families didn’t have to confront too much information about their sons’ lifestyles, and the police didn’t have to admit that they weren’t solving a case that involved the serial murders of six young gay men.
“Is the investigation still ongoing?” I asked. If it was, I had to be very careful. There were strict rules for private investigators in such cases.
“Nothing much is happening right now,” Manny said. “The police are hoping that there are no more deaths and that the whole thing just goes away. Starting a high-profile investigation right now would kill tourism. It would be nothing but bad publicity. There might be a few ghouls — like those tourists who have their pictures taken on the spot where Gianni Versace was murdered — but most people would be scared off.”
I knew what Manny was talking about. On more than one occasion I had seen tourists milling around the wrought-iron gates outside the Versace home, trying to get close to the cordoned-off area where the designer had been shot and killed in broad daylight. It was gruesome.
Manny shook his head with a touch of disgust. “The police figure there’ll always be deaths from bad drugs on South Beach and that this situation is really no different. They’re playing the whole thing down.”
“But your boyfriend doesn’t agree,” I said. “And that’s why he thought of the idea of hiring a private investigator.”
Manny nodded. “You got it.”
“And you knew about me through Leonardo,” I said, almost adding the word relationship but stopping short.
“Leonardo always bragged about what a great detective you were, Lupe,” Manny smiled. “He said that if anyone was going to find out what happened to those six guys, it was going to be you.”
I felt myself blushing at the compliment. I was a little surprised to hear that Leonardo had spoken so highly of me to his friend.
A few customers were starting to arrive; they were looking around expectantly for a maître d’ to show them to a table. It was clear that things were going to get busy soon, so I stood up to leave.
Before I did, though, I had one question for Manny: “If it had been six straight men who had been killed, does your boyfriend think the police would have handled the situation differently?”
Manny’s silence told me everything I needed to know.
Five
After I left Manny, I decided to check out the alleys behind the clubs, which run parallel between Collins Drive and Washington Avenue, so I could have a look at where Jimmy had told me the bodies of the young men were dragged out and left.
Each club was about half a block wide and occupied the space from Washington Avenue to the alley directly behind it. I began walking the alley behind the Neptune, the most northern club. The back door was unmarked steel secured by three prominent dead bolts. There were no markers to indicate where the door led. There were trash cans outside the back door and there was no one in the alley at that time of early afternoon, unless I wanted to count the mangy cats who were pawing through the garbage.
The smell in the alley was almost overwhelming and grew stronger the longer I stood there. It smelled like rotten fruit, animal waste, vomit, and other fluids that I didn’t much want to contemplate. The heat was baking it all to the point at which I felt like gagging.
Looking around, I was filled with sadness for those six young men who had been unceremoniously dumped back there like so much refuse. And if what Manny had told me was true, nothing much was being done to investigate the deaths. If I had access to active police sources, I might have had leads to follow and facts to pursue, but for now I had little more than instinct.
The alley behind the Neptune was yielding no secrets, so I moved on to the next one. The Zenith was also in the middle of its block, with a dumpster next to the back door. It smelled a little better back there — a little. The Zenith’s back door was also protected by big dead bolts, along with a sign next to the doorknob warning that the area was protected by twenty-four-hour surveillance. I looked around for a camera but didn’t find one, not even a phony one to frighten away amateur thieves. As far as I could tell, the sign was nothing more than a bluff.
The third club, the Majestic, was on a street corner a block away from the Zenith. Unlike the other two clubs, its back door opened onto a side street. That meant, in order to dump a body, someone would have to carry it around the corner in full view of passersby. That wouldn’t be easy, with the door in plain sight. I knew that South Beach was crawling with police on a Saturday night. They were out in force, setting up roadblocks and stopping drivers who might be impaired. Washington Avenue was typically well patrolled, with cops busting underage drinkers and arresting anyone who got drunk and disorderly.
South Beach came alive after dark. Most clubs didn’t even open until eleven at night and closed around five in the morning. And then the after-hours places opened, from five to eight o’clock, sometimes even until ten. So whoever carried the bodies out of the Majestic would have had little opportunity to wait for the crowds on the street to thin out.
I decided to drive back to the office without making any more detours. I had something that I wanted to look into.
Back at Solano Investigations, I went straight to my office and turned on the computer at my desk. Leonardo had left for the day, probably heading home before going clubbing that night. I waited for my computer to boot up and banished from my thoughts what he might be wearing for such an evening.
I was pretty much computer illiterate, but I was able to find a few drug-related websites. I struck out on the first two, but the last one confirmed my suspicions about GHB.
I was almost sure the guys who died didn’t know they were taking GHB. The last website I visited said that it was possible to boil down GHB to a point at which it cooled, became a powder, and then resembled Special K — which could be taken with alcohol without any deadly consequences. What if someone substituted GHB for the victims’ powdered Special K without their knowing about it, or sold them GHB while saying it was Special K?