Charles Willeford_Hoke Moseley 01

by Miami Blues

  “You ever eat at Manny’s?” Mrs. Freeman said. “You can get a crabmeat omelet, and they give you a basket of hot rolls with butter and honey. And it’s the only place left on the Beach with free coffee refills.”

  “Sounds good.” Freddy nodded. “I used to eat crabmeat omelets a long time ago on Fisherman’s Wharf, when I lived in San Francisco.”

  Manny’s was tucked away between a four-story kosher spa and a boarded-up two-story warehouse. Mrs. Freeman parked her cab in the weedy warehouse lot and they went into Manny’s. The fish odor inside was strong. Mrs. Freeman ordered the crabmeat omelet, but Freddy shook his head.

  “I’ve changed my mind. Give me a Denver omelet.”

  “What’s that?” The Pakistani waiter asked.

  “It’s eggs scrambled up with chopped ham, green peppers, and onions.”

  “What he wants,” Mrs. Freeman said, “is a western omelet.”

  “That we got,” the waiter said, and went off to the kitchen.

  “In California, we call it a Denver omelet.”

  “So you’re from California?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You just said, ‘In California—’”

  “Just because I said that I’d been in California doesn’t have to mean that I’m from California. People are too quick to imply bad things about people before they’ve thought them out.”

  “So you live in Miami, then?” Mrs. Freeman shook her gray curls. Her gray dentures had a translucent quality. Her pale blue eyes were clear.

  “Yeah. What I’m looking for is a nice little house, but what I’ve seen of Miami Beach so far doesn’t appeal to me. What’s up a little farther north?”

  “Well, after we pass Bal Harbour, WASP territory, we start to hit Motel Row. The Thunderbird, The Aztec, theme places like that. They cater mostly to Canadian and British blue-collar vacationers in the summer, and American families down here on the cheap during the season. Mostly families from New York, Jersey, and Pennsylvania. But if you’re looking for a little house to rent, we can go on past the row and over to Dania. There’re some nice little houses there, and it’s a quiet town, too, except for the jai alai fronton.”

  “We’ll take a look.”

  “What they do in Dania, they sell antiques. There’re dozens of little antique shops along US One. Fakes mostly, but the furniture’s a lot better made nowadays than the real thing used to be.”

  “I like new furniture.”

  “Well, that’s what you buy in Dania. New antiques.”

  Freddy liked the looks of Dania. The small stucco homes reminded him of southwest Los Angeles, down around Slauson and Figueroa. The main street was also US 1, which would give him a straight shot into Miami, where US 1 became Biscayne Boulevard. He told Mrs. Freeman to cruise slowly up and down the tree-shaded streets so he could look for For Rent and For Sale signs. There were several, but Freddy told her to stop at a small white house surrounded by a white picket fence. There were two towering mango trees in the front yard, and the owner had planted a border of geraniums alongside the house on both sides of the front door. There was an attached garage as well.

  Freddy knocked on the door and negotiated with the owner. She was a widow whose husband had died recently, and she wanted to sell the house and move back to Cincinnati to live with her daughter and son-in-law. Until she sold the house, she wouldn’t have enough money to leave.

  “I don’t know whether I want to buy or not,” Freddy said, “but I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll rent it for a couple of months, and then if I like it you can give me an option to buy it. If I don’t buy, you’ll still have two months’ rent money to spend, and you can leave for Cincinnati right away. How much are you willing to rent it for?”

  “I don’t really know,” the widow said. “Would two hundred and fifty be too much?”

  “That’s not nearly enough. I’ll give you five hundred a month, in advance, and you can leave the furniture, pack up, and go on up to Cincinnati tonight.”

  “I don’t know that I can get ready that soon—”

  Freddy counted out $1,000 on the fake cobbler’s bench.

  “But I guess I can make it all right,” she said quickly, scooping up the money. Freddy got a receipt, and after two phone calls the widow said she could be out of the house by ten that night, and that she would leave the keys next door when she left. Freddy returned to the cab and told Mrs. Freeman he had rented the little house.

  “Furnished or unfurnished?”

  “Furnished.”

  “How many bedrooms?”

  “One, I think, but I didn’t look. There’s a big screened porch out back, too.”

  “I’m not trying to pry into your business, mister, it’s just that you’re so innocent-like. How much is she charging you?”

  “What’s it to you? You’re a nosy old bat, Mrs. Freeman. Did anybody ever tell you that?”

  “Lots of times. You should’ve let me negotiate for you. They call this town Dania because it was settled by Danes, and it takes a Jew to outsmart a Dane. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “I never question prices. Money’s too easy to get in Miami. That’s why the prices are so high down here.”

  “In that case,” she said, shaking her curls, “you can give me a ten-dollar tip when I drop you off at the Omni.”

  When they reached the Omni, Freddy gave the old lady a $10 tip. “You’re not as sharp as you think you are, Mrs. Freeman. I was going to give you a twenty.”

  Her high, cackling laughter followed him into the lobby.

  Susan, wearing white cut-offs and a KISS T-shirt, was eating a tuna salad sandwich and drinking a Tab when Freddy unlocked the door and came into the room. The bed had been made, the curtains were drawn back, and the room was delightfully cool.

  “Why aren’t you watching TV?” Freddy said.

  “I was. I did the exercises with Richard Simmons, switched over to cable, and then did aerobics for five minutes. And that was enough TV for me. I sent your pants with the little tennis rackets and your blue guayabera to the cleaners. They’ll be back by three, the boy said.”

  “Good. I like that. I’ve been out getting oriented and thinking about what to do, so I rented us a little house up in Dania.”

  “By the fronton?”

  “No, but it’s only about eight blocks away. Maybe we can go some night. I’ve never seen any jai alai. They don’t have it in California. Not that I know of, anyway.”

  “The first game you see is exciting. But after the first game it’s almost as boring as watching greyhounds.”

  “We’ll go anyway. But I don’t want to talk about that right now. Let me have the rest of that Tab. It’s hotter than a sonofabitch outside. What I wanted to ask you was this—” Freddy finished the Tab. “You said your girl friends up in Okeechobee got married, right?”

  “Most did, those who didn’t leave for someplace else, or just stay home and mope around. There isn’t much choice up in Okeechobee.”

  “What do they do then, after they’re married, I mean?”

  “Take care of the house, shop, fix dinner. Sue Ellen, who was in the eleventh grade with me, has three babies already.”

  “Is that what you want? Babies?”

  “Not anymore. Once I did, but not since the abortion. I’m on the pill, and I use foam besides—unless the John says he wants to go down on me. But now that we’re married, I guess I can go off the pill and quit using the foam, too.”

  “No, stay on the pill. I don’t want any babies either, but if you did, I thought I might try it that way some time. Right now, I like the way we’re doing it.”

  Susan blushed happily. “Would you like the other half of this tuna sandwich?”

  “No. I had a western omelet for a late breakfast. What else do the married girls do up in Okeechobee?”

  “Not a lot, the girls I ran around with. They don’t work because there isn’t much work there to speak of, and their husbands wouldn’t want them to
, anyway. It makes a guy look bad if his wife has to work, unless they’re in business together or something and she has to help him out, sort of. They visit their mothers, shop at the K-Mart, or go roller-skating at the rink sometimes over at Clewiston. On weekends there’re barbecues and fish fries. I guess the married girls my age do the same things they did in high school, except they just go with one guy, and that’s usually the same guy they were fucking all the way through high school anyway. The best thing, though, they get away from home and their parents. They can stay up late and sleep late, too. If it hadn’t been for Marty, I probably would’ve been married now.”

  “Okay, so let’s say we’re married, which we are, even though it’s a platonic marriage. Is that what you’d like to do? Keep house, fix regular meals, go shopping? I know you’re a good cook. I liked those stuffed pork chops a lot.”

  Susan smiled and looked at her wriggling toes. “I did all the cooking at home. You just wait till you taste my chuck roast, with sherry in the gravy! I make it in the Crockpot with little pearl onions, new potatoes, and chopped celery and parsley. I use just a tiny pinch of curry powder—that’s the secret to Crockpot chuck roast.”

  “It sounds okay.”

  “It is good, too, let me tell you.”

  “I’ve never been married before.” Freddy took off his jacket and kicked off his Ballys. “I lived with a woman for about two months once. She never cooked anything or kept house or did much of anything a wife’s supposed to do. But when I came home, you see, she was someone to be there. I came back one night and found that she’d left, taking the five hundred bucks I had stashed under the carpet with her. I was going to look for her, and then I realized that I was damned lucky to get rid of her so easily. She was a junkie, so I didn’t try to find her.

  “I had a Filipino boy living with me once, too, in Oakland. But he was a jealous little bastard, and he questioned me all the time. I don’t like to be questioned, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “What I’m getting at, Susie, or what I want, is a regular life. I want to go to work in the morning, or maybe at night, and come home to a clean house, a decent dinner, and a loving wife like you. I don’t want any babies. The world’s too mean to bring another little kid into it, and I’m not that irresponsible. The niggers and the Catholics don’t care, but somebody’s got to—d’you know what I mean? Do you think you could handle it?”

  Susan began to cry and nod her head. “Yes, oh, yes, that’s what I’ve always wanted, too, Junior. And I’ll be a good wife to you, too. You just wait and see!”

  “All right, then. I’m going to take a shower. You can stop crying and pack up everything, and then we can get moving. If you think you’re happy now, wait’ll you see the little house I’ve got for you in Dania.”

  Susan wiped her eyes. “But what about your shirt and pants I sent to the cleaners?”

  “The bellboy’ll hang ’em up in the closet. I’m not giving up this nice room. It’ll be like an office for me, because most of my work’ll be in the Omni shopping mall.”

  But it wasn’t that simple. The widow in Dania, as it turned out, couldn’t leave for two more days. They spent those two days shopping for things they needed for the house, including a new microwave oven for Susan. Then, when they did get into the house, the water and electricity had been turned off, and it took Susan an entire morning to find the water company and Florida Power to put down deposits. There was also the gas company to contact, and they had to have a man come out to fill the propane tank outside the kitchen window.

  Freddy also sent Susan to the bank to exchange the ten thousand pesos he had lifted from the Mexican pickpocket, but she brought the money back.

  “The man at the bank told me they weren’t changing pesos anymore,” Susan said. “He said my best bet would be to go out to the airport and find someone who was going to Mexico and to make a deal with him. Should I?”

  “I think not. The airport’s too dangerous to be bothering the tourists out there. Remember what happened to your brother? Just put the pesos back in the Ritz cracker box with the rest of the money.”

  When they got into the house, Freddy streamlined the house by moving everything he didn’t like into the garage. Susan wanted a telephone, but Freddy didn’t.

  “If we had one,” he said, “who would we call?”

  “The repairman for the washer. The washer works okay, but there’s a leak in it or something because there’s always a big pool of water after every load. And you might get in trouble sometime and want to call me from jail or something.”

  “Don’t put a damned jinx on me.”

  “I’m not, but a house isn’t like an apartment where you can always call the manager to fix something. We’ve got a septic tank out front. Did you see the bright green grass in the big square patch under the mango tree outside the living room? That’s where it is, and I’ll bet you those roots are breaking through the tiles. If you treat ’em right, septic tanks work like magic, but if you don’t, they’ll back shit up through the John and fill the whole house.”

  “Get a phone, then. But put it in your name, not mine.”

  Susan wanted the car; so did Freddy. They compromised and Susan drove Freddy to the Omni every morning at nine. She picked him up at four P.M. and brought him back to Dania.

  In the mornings, Freddy would go directly to his hotel room and change into slacks, running shoes, and a sports shirt with long square tails. The tails covered the holstered pistol he wore at his back, and the handcuffs on his belt were also hidden. He carried the sap in his right hip pocket, and his badge and ID in his right front pocket.

  He got to know each shopping level well, and he had escape routes mentally mapped out for quick getaways from each floor. He was soon able to tell vacationing South Americans from permanent Miami Latin residents. He could spot the South American men by their dark suits; and the women did not, for the most part, have that little shelf above their buttocks that Cuban and Puerto Rican women had. If he was unsure, he could listen to them talk: the South Americans spoke Spanish softer and slower than the Cubans.

  He came to realize how lucky he had been on that first day when he had mugged the Mexico City pickpocket.

  There were a good many security people working the mall, some in uniform, and others in plain clothes. He could almost set his watch by the security officer in Penney’s. The man wore a billed fisherman’s cap, a flowered sports shirt, and jeans. He spent an average of fifteen minutes on each floor and took fifteen-minute breaks at 10:30 A.M. and 3:30 P.M. in the employees’ lounge. Every day at lunchtime he ordered the special, whatever it happened to be, in the deli on Level Three.

  There were others, Freddy was sure, who were not that regular and much harder to spot. If they didn’t have uniforms, they could be damned near anybody. But Freddy felt protected with Sergeant Moseley’s buzzer in his pocket. The lost badge was undoubtedly on the computer of the Miami Police Department, and any Miami cop might question it, but the MPD didn’t pass on that kind of information to the private agencies that firms like Omni International and the department stores hired. So, if he got into any trouble, all he had to do was flash the buzzer, and he could get out of almost any situation.

  During his first three days of work at the Omni, the only thing Freddy managed to steal was a package he took out of an unlocked station wagon on Rose Two. Later, when he opened the package in his hotel room, he found two pairs of kid’s jeans, size eight, husky. He gave the jeans to one of the Jamaican maids.

  His fourth day of work was also frustrating. That night after dinner he took the TransAm and drove around the city, then broke into an appliance store on Twenty-seventh Avenue. The alarm went off the moment he heaved a concrete block through the wire-mesh window of the back door. He reached in and opened the door, and grabbed an RCA color TV set and two electric digital clocks. Forty minutes later, when he cruised slowly by the store, driving in the opposite direction, the alarm bell was still ringing and the
cops still had not investigated.

  Susan hooked up the TV set to the aerial that was already on the house, and the set worked fine, except for a snowy Channel 2, but neither one of the digital clocks kept accurate time.

  The next day was better. Freddy caught two pot peddlers in the Jordan Marsh restroom on the second floor. They were arguing fiercely about money when he came in and didn’t even look in his direction until he had them covered with his .38.

  “Freeze. Police,” Freddy said.

  They froze. He took their wallets and six ounces of marijuana in a plastic Baggie. He handcuffed both of them, left wrist and right wrist, around the pipe in the first toilet stall, and left the restroom. He would have left the keys to the handcuffs just out of reach, but he didn’t have them. They could explain their situation to whoever it was that rescued them, he supposed, but at least he had plenty of time to get back to his room in the Omni Hotel.

  There were $300 in cash, four $50 unsigned travelers’ checks, and a gold St. Christopher’s medal in the wallets. There were no credit cards, and only one driver’s license—a license for Angel Salome. The wallets weren’t worth keeping, and neither was the driver’s license, but the small medal was a nice gift for Susan. The unsigned travelers’ checks were good to have, and it was the first time he had ever seen completely blank checks like that, which a man could sign with any name he wanted.

  Susan settled in very quickly to a domestic routine. She cooked ample breakfasts for Freddy, surprising him with Belgian walnut waffles, shirred eggs, and French toast made with sourdough bread. Then, after she dropped him off at the Omni, she shopped at the supermarkets, cleaned house, and planned her dinners. One day she was able to buy Okeechobee catfish, which she fried, together with hush puppies, and she served steak fries and collard greens on the side. Freddy didn’t like the catfish because of the bones, but he enjoyed the other meals she prepared. She always topped off the dinners with tart desserts, too, like Granny Smith apple pie, bubbly with butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon. One night she baked a turkey breast and served it with all the trimmings, including a mince pie that she baked from scratch.