Miami Noir

by Les Standiford

  Woody had never seen Isolde so unguarded, and he told her of course she could have it, he wanted her to have it. When they embraced, he felt Isolde’s hand move up to the back of his head, support a woman only offers a baby or a lover. Over her shoulder, Woody too had a vision of paradise, with green grass, flowering shrubs, fruit trees, birds arriving and departing, and their real estate agent furtively field-stripping a cigarette.

  Everything fell into place. When they visited Woody’s mother in Bolinas, she and Isolde got on right away. “Such a beautiful girl,” Woody’s mother told him. “What an interesting life she’s had.” She smiled at Woody. “You’re going to learn a lot from Isolde.” Woody’s mother helped them buy their house. Knowing she didn’t have much time to live, she gave Woody a loan against his inheritance. Isolde came up with some money too, quite a lot of it, money she said her grandmother had left her. So they married and put a hefty down payment on the house.

  Isolde loved their house, but the pool gave her the creeps. She’d refused to swim in it long before the alligator arrived. Woody insisted that they couldn’t have afforded the house if not for the corpse that had been found in the pool. News of the corpse had made the house a hard sell, even after the price was slashed. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that Isolde was inspecting the kitchen when the real estate agent told Woody the story in the garage.

  The house had been owned by a gay couple. One of them, Howard, wound up dead and floating. The police suspected murder, but nothing could be proved. Isolde didn’t hear about Howard until after she moved in. A retired pediatrician from down the street told her. A pool’s a perfect place for murder, he said. If you’re going to do it, do it in a pool.

  Isolde was furious. “You knew about this?” she said to Woody.

  “You wanted the house so badly.”

  “You never would have told me, would you?”

  Woody apologized, saying that he’d been waiting for the right moment.

  Soon after they married and moved into their house, Isolde’s mother, Thais McCracken, arrived. She was tall, bulky, gray-haired, silent. She wore bright muumuus and took over the back porch. She spent mornings on a rattan lounge chair studying the Miami Herald, drinking coffee, and chain smoking Marlboro Lights, and afternoons watching soap operas, chain smoking Marlboro Lights, and sipping from a tall, never-empty glass of gin and tonic. To Woody, she represented another secret chamber in Isolde’s heart. Mrs. McCracken seemed to regard him with grim amusement. He was delighted to drive her out to the airport to catch her flight back to Boulder.

  On the way home, he said to Isolde, “Didn’t you tell me your mother was dead?”

  Isolde said that she must have been talking about her stepmother.

  In the late afternoon, their flight from San Francisco landed, nearly as scheduled, in Miami. The airport shops and restaurants had closed, and travelers clustered around television sets in the terminal waiting areas, watching an orange circle spin northwest over a map of the Bahamas and the Florida Straits.

  Isolde and Woody retrieved their luggage and found a taxi. While they rode south through sunstruck, emptying streets, they held hands and made plans. Woody would put up the hurricane shutters; Isolde would drive to the supermarket and the gas station.

  When the taxi turned into their driveway, Isolde gasped. “Oh my God.” Woody saw the doors of his house and garage wide open and his junkie brother Chip and another man putting metal shutters on the front porch windows.

  The taxi stopped near the open garage. Woody apologized for his brother, saying that the last he’d heard, Chip was living in a halfway house over on Miami Beach. Isolde said, “He can go back there right now,” but Woody explained that Miami Beach had probably been evacuated.

  “I can’t leave my little brother out in a hurricane.”

  Isolde said, “Let them go to a public shelter. Please, Woody, tell Chip and his friend to go away. I hate junkies. I’ve told you that before. Send them away. They’ll be all right.”

  Woody replied that Chip was his little brother and needed his help.

  Isolde said that Woody just didn’t get it. Chip didn’t care about anyone. He cared about drugs. He’d send Woody naked into the hurricane in two seconds if he had to do that to get his hands on drugs. Chip was a junkie, not a brother.

  By this time Chip had put down the metal shutter he’d been carrying and was ambling toward the taxi. He was skinny, sallow, balding, twenty-eight, with acne scars on his cheeks. Woody thought he looked like the actor who played Salieri in the film Amadeus. Chip wore dark prescription glasses and talked with a lighted cigarette stuck in the right corner of his mouth. In the past, he’d survived on menial jobs and handouts from their mother. Now he walked around to Woody’s side of the taxi and tapped on the window. Woody lowered it.

  “Hey, bro,” Chip said, his cigarette bobbing. “Hey, Isolde.”

  Woody let the silence hang on them. Finally, he told Chip, “I persuaded them to drop the lawsuit. It’s all coming out of your part of Mom’s estate, that and the value of the other things you sold, so you were only stealing from yourself.”

  Right after their mother died, Chip insisted on flying out to Bolinas to “do his part” preparing her house for sale, while Woody went to Brazil on business. Chip sold her Leica cameras, her good rugs, and her silverware for cash to buy drugs. He also sold her sickroom medical equipment—oxygen tanks, hospital bed and bedside table, special toilet seat, even her walker—not knowing that it had been rented. Woody was their mother’s executor, so the medical equipment company had been hounding him for restitution.

  “Thanks, bro,” Chip said. “I really mean it. I’m sorry for the trouble.”

  Woody asked Chip who the other guy was.

  Chip said, “A guy from the shelter. Would you believe he’s an English lord?”

  Woody looked more closely at the man. “What are those scars?”

  Chip glanced over his shoulder and said they were bullet wounds. Those were just entrance scars. “Wait till you see where they came out. He used to own a bar in Jamaica, shipped a lot of ganja, until some bad guys came into the bar and let loose with a couple of Mac-10s.”

  Isolde and Woody stood blinking in the heavy sunshine as the taxi reversed down the drive. Woody asked Chip how he’d gotten into the house; the alarm was on.

  Chip said, “I cut the phone wires at the main box and disabled the alarm.”

  “You cut my phone wires?”

  Chip said the first thing a hurricane did was blow down phone wires, everybody knew that. “And I was in a real sweat to put up your hurricane shutters.” Chip added, “Got your cell phone?”

  Without thinking, Woody handed it over. Chip slipped the cell phone into his shirt pocket.

  Woody waited, then said, “I thought you were going to use the phone.”

  “Yeah.” Chip nodded, his eyes sliding around the yard.

  “Don’t let me stop you.”

  Chip laughed. “Like, half a mo, bro.”

  “Make the call.”

  “I’m taking it for a walk in the yard, okay? Gotta speak to this guy.”

  “I want it back.”

  “In just a minute, okay?” Chip, looking amazed and a little hurt, spread his hands and, turning to Isolde for support, said, “I hope you can find something in the medicine cabinet to calm him down.” Isolde looked steadily back at Chip and said nothing.

  Woody asked how Chip had gotten over here. Chip said, “We found a bike.”

  Woody laughed, said, “The two of you on a bicycle?”

  “No, no,” Chip replied. “We, you know, found a bike.”

  Woody said, “You stole a motorcycle?”

  Chip grinned boyishly, then said, “Did you know you’ve got an alligator in your pool?”

  “Karma,” Isolde said. The English lord with the bullet scars had come around the corner of the house and was moving, slightly bent over, toward them. He was a slim, good-looking man in his early thirties, with curly
brown hair and the bluest eyes Woody had ever seen in man or woman. Woody thought he looked remarkably like the Byron of Count D’Orsay’s 1823 Genoa sketch, which made the poet appear thin, almost convalescent. In another life Woody had written his Master’s thesis on Don Juan.

  This lord was shirtless, wore dirty khaki shorts and orange flip-flops, and had a thin gold ring in his left earlobe. His four bullet scars formed an irregular diagonal from right shoulder down to left waistline. He moved with a tentative air, and, smiling as he came up, he told Woody that it was awfully kind of them to take him in at such short notice.

  Chip introduced Isolde and Woody to Peregrine Balfe, Lord Balfe.

  “Please call me Perry,” the Englishman said. He nodded, friendly, but didn’t offer to shake hands. Perry said that he hoped Woody didn’t mind that they’d begun putting up the shutters. It seemed the right thing to do.

  Woody said he was glad they’d begun.

  Isolde, without a word, turned and walked into the house.

  “Long flight?” Chip asked, watching Isolde.

  “Bumpy landing,” Woody said. Chip glanced at Perry, then wandered into the yard, opened the cell phone, dialed, and began to talk. Perry was immediately at Woody’s side, obliging, cheery, picking up their suitcases with a grunt. Perry looked much too weak to carry both, but he insisted. Woody led the way indoors.

  Isolde passed them, saying that she had to get to the supermarket before it closed.

  The house, partially shuttered now, was dark and humid. The television muttered in the living room. They paused to check on Hurricane Ernestine. A weatherman pointed at the bright orange circle and said it would intensify and come ashore in the middle of the night. Woody led Perry into the master bedroom, where he put the suitcases down and then, turning away, leaned a hand against the wall for support.

  “Those suitcases were monsters,” Woody said, fascinated by the bullet scars on Perry’s back. They were bigger than on the front: like smooth, fleshy flowers, almost.

  “Light as a feather.” Straightening up, Perry looked around the bedroom with an expression of unbelief. “Right,” he said. Woody assumed he was speaking to himself.

  In the living room, they paused again at the television as a man dressed in yellow foul-weather gear, standing under a torrential downpour, shouted, “It’s raining in the Bahamas!” Woody led Perry out the back door and onto the pool deck.

  Perry said, “Chip told me you keep the alligator as a pet.” It was about ten feet long and lay motionless on the bottom of the pool. They stared at it. Perry asked how long it could stay down there. Woody shrugged and said he didn’t know, exactly.

  Perry said, “So it isn’t a pet?”

  “God, no,” Woody said. “It’s a pest. We think it’s male, because in May and June, mating season, it came and went and upset the neighborhood. Every time the Fish and Game wardens arrived to pick it up, it disappeared. They swore that somebody was tipping it off. It went away for a long while, and we thought, phew. But it came back last week.”

  Perry said, “Does it have a name?”

  “Mrs. McCracken.”

  Perry’s laugh turned into a fit of coughing. Woody stared at him and said, “You know her?” Perry, smiling, said the name had a good, bone-crunching sound to it.

  Woody said, “Tell me about your bar in Jamaica.”

  Perry said, “In Negril. Perry’s, it was called. Not very original. Maybe I should have called it The Green Parrot.”

  Woody said, “Everyone came to Perry’s?”

  “That’s it,” Perry said. “Everyone came to Perry’s.”

  Woody said, “I wonder if my wife ever went there.”

  Perry frowned, thinking hard. He said, “You’re referring to Isolde?”

  Woody thought, Who else would I be referring to? He said, “She used to spend winters sailing in the Caribbean. Maybe she came to Perry’s too.”

  “Might have,” Perry said. “She very well might have. So many people did.”

  Woody said, “My brother says you’re a lord. Is that true?”

  Perry said that it was.

  Ancestral acres? Woody asked. Marble halls?

  Perry said, “Sadly, none of that. My grandfather was given—some say purchased—a peerage. He was a surgeon, rather famous in his day. He pioneered the use of rubber gloves during surgery, and said such memorable things as, ‘Every surgical incision is an adventure in bacteriology.’”

  “That’s food for thought,” Woody said.

  “I remember it,” Perry said, “every time I cut my thumb.”

  Woody said, “You ever been married?”

  Perry nodded. “I was, some time ago. Actually, I think I still am, in a way.”

  Isolde was in shock from seeing her house wide open and Chip and Perry wandering around. Now, pushing an empty cart into the supermarket, she felt grateful for the cool air that soothed her sweating skin. She saw the coiling checkout lines, the aisles dense with shoppers, and she sensed their fear. Dizzy, thinking, This is all too much for me, she fought down the urge to turn and run. Where could she go? She’d worked so hard to create a new life with Woody. She ordered herself to concentrate on the task at hand.

  The supermarket was about to close. The aisles were full, the shelves empty. The ululations of the disappointed rose into the fluorescent light. Isolde saw how fragile and transitory her life was. Her carefully constructed happiness was toppling. She hurried around, crossing unobtainable items off her list: water, Sprite, Coca-Cola, ginger ale, canned soup, canned tuna, sardines, salmon, Spam, baked beans, bread, crackers, Oreo cookies, nuts, potato chips, canned milk, long-life milk, powdered milk, peanut butter, jelly, batteries, toilet paper, paper towels, Chlorox, ice. Her cart was empty. Still, she had the stockpile of water and supplies at home. But with four people that wouldn’t last long.

  Then she had an idea. Their stove was fueled from a propane tank. She’d cook pasta and vegetables. That might last until stores reopened. She found lots of pasta. She tossed boxes of it into her cart, then hurried into the fresh produce section. The fruit was gone, but Isolde filled her cart with onions, peppers, garlic, tomatoes, mushrooms, carrots, celery, fresh herbs.

  Near her, the double doors leading to the back of the supermarket swung open and twelve policemen in riot gear, lace-up black boots, black bulletproof vests, carrying shotguns and batons, filed into the produce section and spread out across the back of the store. They took up positions at the ends of the aisles against the back wall and muttered into microphones on their left shoulders.

  A voice blared over the public address system: “Attention all shoppers, this store is shutting down NOW. All shoppers must report to the CASHIERS. I repeat, all shoppers must report to the CASHIERS. This store is shutting down NOW.”

  The policemen yelled, “Let’s GO! Let’s MOVE it!”

  Isolde froze. The supermarket, she’d often thought, was her last refuge. Now she thought, There’s no place safe for me. The nearest policeman, a giant block of a man with a thick black mustache, swiveled his body toward her, shotgun held ready across his chest. He yelled, “C’mon! MOVE it!” He stepped closer.

  Isolde was shaking. Her voice came out in a bleat. “I need food.”

  “Whatever’s in your cart,” the policeman said, “that’s it. Take it to the cashier.”

  Isolde pushed her shopping cart to the front of the supermarket. She was weeping. The policeman, shotgun at the ready, kept pace behind her. Policemen with guns herded shoppers toward the cashiers. Isolde wept as the startled checkout girl rang up her pasta and vegetables, she wept as an old man pushed her cart of groceries out to the parking lot. He loaded the grocery bags into her car, and Isolde blindly pressed money into his hand and got behind the wheel. Leave, she told herself. Drive north. Outrun the storm.

  She knew Perry Balfe’s crooked heart well. She saw how he’d deteriorated, how junk had taken over. And now Woody, the man she loved and wanted to build a life with, to have children w
ith, a man who truly loved her, Woody would learn she’d been married to, had probably loved, Perry Balfe, con man, dope runner, junkie, child murderer.

  In her heart, Isolde had known this day would come. She’d always expected Perry to reappear. The deeper her love for Woody, the sunnier her new life, the more certain Isolde became that it couldn’t last. She didn’t deserve it. She’d forfeited the right to happiness. She’d sent up clouds of prayers, and now they were falling like dead letters around her feet. Soon she’d have to explain herself.

  By “explaining herself,” Isolde imagined telling Woody something like, “Woody, my love, it’s this: I met Perry and we got married and had a baby girl, Fiona, and one day when Fiona was almost two years old, she was playing with, of all things, a pair of rabbit-ear television antennae, and her daddy, who was supposed to be watching her for just five minutes while Mommy takes a shower, decided to shoot up. While Daddy’s nodding off in a chair, Fiona sticks the broken end of one of the antennae into an electric outlet, so when Mommy comes back and sees…what she sees, she goes clean off her rocker.”

  She’d practiced telling Woody this every day since she fell in love with him. When she ran away to Key West, it wasn’t because she was shocked to learn he’d been married. It was because she saw that either she told him the truth about herself, or she was lost. But she worried that if she told Woody the truth, she might, probably would, lose him. How could Woody love her, once he found out about Fiona? How could Isolde find words to explain, to make acceptable, her desolation and her nervous breakdown? How could Woody believe she would ever be a fit mother again?

  She felt that by not telling Woody, she was continually denying Fiona, who had the right to a public place in Isolde’s heart. But no amount of practice made it easier for her to say to him, My baby died. After she got married, she thought, I’ll wait until I get my degree in Early Childhood Education. It might help convince Woody that I’ll make a good mother. Every day brought a moment when Isolde yearned to tell Woody. And every day, for fear of losing him, she decided to wait for a better moment.