The Death Box(50)

Morales pulled a 3 x 5 picture from the pocket of a black velvet workout suit, a head and shoulder shot of Leala Rosales taken, as was the custom, of every piece of imported product, the photos typically used in the marketing aspect of the enterprise, giving potential employers a chance to study the goods.

“Put copies in the hands of our people,” Orzibel said. “And others whose eyes can see without tongues wagging. Say that good information will receive both my gratitude and a thousand-dollar gift. Also make it known that anyone helping this bitch will feel my steel in their bellies.”

Chaku edged close. “Rosales will be somewhere in Little Havana or very close, Orlando. She will feel safer near her heritage.”

“A good thought. I will handle Mama, you cast the net in the community.”

The huge man cleared his throat. “You will now go upstairs and tell Amili Zelaya of the trouble, Orlando?”

Orzibel’s eyes tightened into slits. “It falls on me to shovel the dung like I have always done. I will have Leala Rosales back very soon, and no one need know.”

“What will you do when Rosales is returned, Orlando?”

“I will fix the problem permanently, Chaku,” Orzibel said, nodding to himself as if a decision had been made. “And make big money at the same time.”

Miguel Tolandoro’s silver Toyota pickup led a plume of brown dust into the rural village. He was eating a piece of fried chicken and scattering chickens from the road as he wove down a street of brown dirt. Exiting the truck he tossed the bone at a pack of skinny dogs, setting off a fight. He tucked his shirttails into his pants, his voluminous belly making it a job of feel, not sight.

Tolandoro’s pointed boots clicked down the cobbled alley as he passed a large four-paned window looking into a simple kitchen, three panes of glass broken out and replaced with tin and wood scraps. The next address was the one he sought, the Rosales household. It seemed the timid little Leala Rosales was proving a handful in the States, but he’d soon make the proper adjustments in the situation.

Tolandoro’s rough knuckles pounded the sun-bleached wooden door and he spoke the words memorized on the drive. “Señora Rosales … I bring word from Leala, who is living an excellent life in America and working hard for you. She wishes you to have a gift from her labor and to call her on my telephone. May I enter your fine home?”

Nothing. Tolandoro tried again, louder. A face at the neighboring hovel peered out the remaining glass window, then disappeared. Seconds later the door opened and a wizened woman looked out, her eyes filled with anger.

“She is gone. Go away. Stop your noise.”

“Where is she, old one?”

“You took her daughter, did you not?”

Tolandoro puffed out his chest and his chin. “Leala Rosales wanted to earn her fortune. It is my business to make the beautiful dreams come true. Where is the mother?”

“You are a pimp,” the old woman hissed.

Tolandoro’s jaw clenched and his eyes slitted. “Where is the mother, old woman? Tell me before I—”

“She has left for unknown places. She knows her daughter is gone forever. Stolen by a liar and procurer.”

“Do not address me like that!”

The door slammed but the old woman continued to yell. “Filth! Pimp! Stealer of babies!”

Miguel Tolandoro started away, but halted after three steps to snatch a rock from the gutter. He turned and smashed it through the last window, which would now need covering to keep out the flies.

“Live in the dark, crone,” Tolandoro called through the hole before striding back to his vehicle.





26





Hattie Doyle was in her seventies, wore a pink housedress, fluffy matching mules, and too much lipstick. After apologizing for hair in curlers – “I gotta set it ev’ry day or it looks like I’m wearin’ a windstorm up there” – she invited us into her home, small and tidy and filled with inexpensive souvenirs from places like Rock City, Nashville and Branson. Ms Doyle was a transplant from the coal fields of West Virginia whose husband, Delbert, had died three years back from black lung.

She held a cigarette in one hand, an ashtray in the other, and nodded toward the former Carosso household, eighty feet distant over a chain-link fence threaded with moon vines. A sickly twelve-foot palm tottered in Carosso’s side yard, held in place by two-by-fours.

“Mr Paul had some ornery-looking critters over there at times, men mostly,” Ms Doyle remembered between sucks on the smoke. “A few ladies who didn’t really look much like ladies, if you gennelmen get my drift. They’d barbecue burgers out back and get drunked-up. I figured they was folks he worked with at the concrete plant.”