Kill City USA

by Warren Roberts

  Jay was looking nervously over her shoulder at the frosted door as someone was leaving the travel agency opposite.

  ‘I refused to look at anything.’ She turned back to me. ‘Before his death, Nils had become worried about Sayers’ frequent trips to Florida. And about the nasties he was hanging out with. Then, one of Sayers’ mates was arrested there on gunrunning charges.’

  ‘You been to the cops?’

  ‘I didn’t want to. There might be publicity. I just want to sell my shares to someone other than him, and end this chapter of my life. I imagine the cops would tend to get a little excited these days where gunrunning’s involved. Nils dealt with governments only. And usually with export licences. He’d never get involved with the Sayers lot. Plus, I don’t want this to escalate and have the Inland Revenue looking into his estate. There certainly were monies paid offshore and not declared. Nils hated paying tax. Who doesn’t?’

  ‘How long’s this pressure from Sayers been going on?’

  ‘The last couple of months. But the last few weeks have been terrible. He and Irish have been at me non-stop. So I told them I was getting help. Professional help. They became more threatening. And started following me.’

  ‘They in the bar last night?’

  ‘I didn’t see them there. Who knows?’

  There was a sharp single rap on the glass pane. Jay visibly jumped in her chair and looked at me for reassurance. I grinned and I walked over and unlocked the door. A tall figure in sunglasses and black motorcycle leathers stood profiled against the light in the doorway. Two crash helmets were in his hands. He leaned against the door arch, surveying the office. The sort of person you wanted on your side on a dark night. Or even a sunny day.

  ‘Yo, bro.’ He held one of the helmets out. ‘For the lady.’

  ‘Meet Jay,’ I said to Jonah, as she walked towards the door.

  He bowed slightly. ‘Yo, Jay.’

  ‘Yo, Jonah.’

  2

  Missing In Action, I hoped not.

  I was looking at the MIA airline tags on my luggage at the check-in counter as I left for Miami from Hea-throw the following afternoon. I’d used air miles to fly business class, with the executives. The plane left on time and I lay back in comfort, looking forward to the warmth of Florida as I wondered what lay ahead. Dooley wasn’t given to melodrama. If he said he had a problem, he had trouble. Big time.

  The seat next to me was empty – a bonus. I skipped the airline lunch out of respect for my digestive tract. I’d eaten take-out Chinese as a precautionary measure at my desk, while I had cleared a few matters in the office before departure.

  The modern classic High Fidelity was available on the flight video system. I’d read the book. It gave a sad but truthful insight into the complications of being modern Homo Sapiens. My girlfriend at that time read the book after me, to see what all my laughter had been about. She thought it might help her understand me better. To get inside my mind, were her exact words. To read the danger signals, green to amber then amber to red. After finishing the novel she told me she understood me better. A lot better, she’d said, while giving me a self-help book to read, a sure sign of her-him meltdown. You’re beyond hope and not worth resuscitation, I remember her saying. So goodbye then, not fare-thee-well, Milo. Exit girlfriend, noises off.

  After the movie, I flirted with Eva, the only flight attendant who didn’t act like a paid-up member of the Women’s Disciplinary Association. She kept me well lubricated with drinkable wines from the first class cabin. I studied the immigration landing card that Eva handed me for completion. ‘Are you seeking entry to engage in criminal or immoral activities?’ I said, ‘Is this a multiple choice question? Either/or?’ Eva’s chuckle, head to one side, hadn’t been taught in the flight attendant’s manual. In the unexpurgated version, maybe.

  ‘And don’t forget to answer the one above that. About crimes of moral turpitude,’ she said just loud enough for other nearby passengers to hear. We exchanged names and numbers and she told me that she hung out at The Delano when she overnighted in Miami, as she wheeled her trolley rearwards. A pot-bellied suit across the aisle gave me the benefit of his prying leer.

  When I wasn’t fantasising about Eva on the flight I thought about Jay and the events of yesterday. The rumble in the office had provided a kick-start to my day. I’d had some business to do in the afternoon so after introductions and background details Jonah had taken Jay back to her home.

  She called me later to tell me Sayers had left a couple of threats on her answer machine, through which she’d been screening calls. Jonah had spent the night at her house. His definably reassuring and potentially menacing presence might dissuade an advancing riot squad, so it didn’t take too much persuasion. Jay was seemingly unconcerned about her mansion-trash neighbour’s views on how his visit might adversely affect Elgin Crescent’s property values.

  I received a call to tell me that ‘you’ve ‘ad it Milo’ early in the evening. It wasn’t Sayers’ voice and as I hadn’t stepped on too many toes lately, it didn’t require a call to Stephen Hawking to work out who the cockney caller was. I briefly wondered how he’d got my unlisted home number.

  Jay had a house in Sanibel on the Florida Gulf Coast so I’d suggested that she visit it for a while. She’d lent it to a friend who was looking for a house of her own in the area. It would be easier for me to keep an eye on her if we were in the same part of the world. She agreed to having Jonah travel with her. ‘S’cool,’ he’d said, so they booked on a flight later in the day. We arranged to contact each other after arrival and she paid a retainer into my account.

  Eva’s PA announcement that the temperature in Miami was a balmy 82 degrees brought me back to reality. We landed on time and I felt the sense of Miami torpor that overcame me each time I arrived in Florida from London. I smiled a reciprocated au revoir to Eva as I disembarked.

  The Cuban cigars, bands removed, remained undetected at US customs by the sniffer dogs hoovering around the baggage and the passengers in the luggage hall, their eyes so busy following their noses that they missed my guilty look completely. I bought a copy of The Miami Herald at the airport and stepped out of the air-conditioned arrivals hall into a pungent mixture of petrol fumes and steamy heat, like sucking on a gasoline-fuelled hairdryer, then took a cab at the taxi rank for the fixed-price fare to South Beach.

  The paper’s front page detailed the usual shoot-outs of the previous day. So I skipped straight to the comics as we passed a cola billboard; Miami, Where the Pepsi Generation Meets the Dyspepsia Generation in God’s Waiting Room, I swear its message read.

  The taxi sped down the Airport Expressway past the Jai-Alai stadium and on to the I-95 while the driver played Cuban music by whatever septuagenarian group was popular at the moment. The sexiness of their hauntingly melancholic songs was ageless.

  I told him I’d spent time in Cuba and he launched into a tirade in Spanglish about tourists supporting the Castro regime. It was too complicated to tell him I hadn’t been there as a holiday maker but on matters more covert. But hey, it was too hot to argue, the cab’s air-conditioning being out of order. I thought of debating the merits of politicians with beards until after Castro, I could only think of Ho Chi Minh. As I said, it was a hot, hot day.

  ‘I came to the United States of America to be free,’ the driver said in response to no question of mine. He turned, grinning his nicotined teeth towards me, while steering by Braille. ‘Free. Yeah. Free to make money.’

  His eyes went back to the road with a burst of manic laughter. We were near South Beach and we drove past the restaurants and hotels advertising the all-you-can-eat early-bird dinner specials, be out by 6.30. The avenues of uninviting apartment buildings with optimistic names promised grandeur far above their actual high-rise.

  We swerved into the hotel forecourt, the unyielding shudder of the speed bump against the cab’s front end and my teeth was my welcome to Miami gringo and also told me the cab wasn’t owned by the driv
er.

  The Shelborne was built during the Art Deco boom and is on the edge of the fashionable part of South Beach. The reception area has retained its forties feel with its Art Deco decor and large period posters plus the regulation acreage of electric blue neon. I could hear a Dooley Wilson refrain from somewhere but there was no Bogey or Bergman around. Just a few Japanese golfers in Battenberg cake trousers.

  The elevator slowly creaked its sixty-year-old way up to the eighteenth floor, via Cape Horn. My room was mock-stucco painted and faux-period furnished, with a view of the pool and the beach and the sea beyond, where the small afternoon waves were rolling in with the wind behind. A few white sails and a half dozen or so container ships broke the line of the horizon. There was a message waiting for me from Dooley, to meet him at the office the following morning.

  I unpacked, putting my passport and wallet in the room safe and changed into swimming trunks and a T-shirt. I went back to the ground floor, then past the pool with its Deco waterfall-effect diving board and its no diving sign.

  I felt the prevailing easterly and the unmistakable and welcoming smell of late afternoon ocean as I stepped onto the beach. The white sand felt hot and gritty against my bare feet. I rented a recliner. It was time for a swim and a follow-up nap. The Atlantic felt refreshing and I stayed in for about thirty minutes, washing the urban grot of London and the stuffiness of the flight out of my system.

  I dozed for a while until the declining sun told me it was time for a sundowner. I showered the salt and sand off my body in my room and put on a linen shirt and trousers, rumpled from my suitcase. I felt sorta fashionable.

  The Hotel Delano is a couple of blocks from the Shelborne. Minimalist and ultra cool is how the guidebooks describe it in the Miami Chic section of magazines for those influenced by such headings. I walked through the huge, billowy white curtains across its entrance and down to the bar via the Philippe Starck interior. Minimalist is one description, as is stark, depending on how much you want to say you spent for so little. I remembered its wonderful original Art Deco interior before it had been gutted and desecrated in the interests of profit and Miami chic.

  Nevertheless I decided that a vodka martini, Deco drink of choice, would probably work in these new surroundings. I walked to the bar from the lobby, where a pianist was maltreating his Yamaha but thankfully sparing us his voice. I noticed a bottle of Moscow Cristal partly obscured on a mirrored shelf so I ordered a martini, diluted with a twist. The bartender greeted my selection with a nod of approval, code for the size of the tip he would expect from a drinker of such discernment.

  He blended a drizzle of vermouth into the vodka with the single-mindedness and application of a research chemist before returning its geometrically glassed mix to me, an expertly looped twist inside. I looked in admiration at the world’s sexiest-looking drink.

  ‘Na zdrowie,’ I said, raising the glass to eye level, putting a fifty on the bar. Big spender me. He took it and walked toward the cash register.

  I stood there contemplating the Milo martini rules. That one is never enough. That two is probably about right. But the third is the one I really enjoy, depending on the company and the surroundings. That’s the one that sets the rules of engagement for the evening and which should be drunk only if the battle plan is becoming clear, or more probably, slightly blurred.

  ‘This one’s on the lady over there,’ the bartender said, washing over my thoughts as he nodded behind him while giving me back my money but holding on for his tip. I gave him ten bucks. What the hell. I looked behind him as Eva charged her martini glass to me from the other end of the bar.

  ‘Lead us into temptation,’ I said solemnly to the bartender and walked towards Eva behind the long salad bar of stooled drinkers with their fruity daiquiris.

  In civvies Eva looked as good as she had done in her uniform. She wore a low-cut semi-sheer white dress that stopped at a thought-provoking height above her knees. It loosely wrapped around her tall willowy body, hinting at the curves beneath. She also wore a smile that would have melted the tundra, and effervescent eyes that said hello and I’m glad to see you too.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’ve made my day twice now.’ This was the second time in a couple of days that a good-looking girl had bought me a drink in a bar. I hoped this one would not involve another fracas. And there is such a thing as a free drink. And Santa Claus.

  ‘My pleasure. Should I be working on a third time?’ she said, with a kittenish expression suggesting an intimacy beyond being newly-mets. ‘You looked thirsty after that long flight.’

  I grinned. ‘I shouldn’t be. You took good care of me.’

  ‘Well. I’ve caught up.’ She tipped her glass at me. ‘I’d hoped I’d find you here. Prost.’

  ‘Likewise. Skol.’

  ‘So what brings you to Miami, Joe?’

  ‘My friends call me Milo.’

  She held out the business card I’d given her on the flight. ‘So what brings you to Miami, Milo, Joe S, Confidential Investigations?’

  ‘We’ve an office here so I’ve come to work for a while. Plus it’s warmer here than London. If I earned enough to worry about the Inland Revenue, I’d say this trip is tax deductible.’

  ‘What’s the S stand for?’

  ‘S.’

  ‘S?’

  ‘As in Harry S Truman.’

  She smiled again and twisted her head slightly. ‘The other flight attendants thought you seemed pretty interesting. Until I told them you are were a colonic hydrotherapist off to an irrigation conference in Toledo. To present your paper on organic cider vinegar as a colonic irrigant.’

  ‘ Colonic hydrotherapist. I’ll return the favour some time.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to that. Your real work sounds as if it could be interesting. Or put it this way, you look as if you could make it interesting. Or exciting. Is it dangerous?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘You carry a gun?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘A big one?’

  ‘I have this theory about the proportion of gun size to a man’s ego.’

  ‘Proportion to their what was that?’

  ‘That as well.’

  ‘Then I bet that you carry a very small gun.’

  ‘Flattery’ll get you everywhere.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  I ordered another couple of drinks. The bar was full of drinkers as determined as sheep in a dip, a watering hole herd like The Enterprise’s, except these inebriates were perma-tanned and wore fewer natural fibres, making their roués less moth-eaten. Instead, they had the discerning Swedish golfer look of multi-toned shoes and accessorised trousers, while the gold-sandaled women with push-up bras and Sergeant Pepper outfits had the cloned vacant beauty of shop-window mannequins.

  A couple of tall seventy-plus Texans were standing near us looking like large dollar signs above crotch-tight denims. They’d been hitting on Eva with their eyes before their wives had joined them, a couple of ageing Barbies heavily overdosed on their jewellery and designer ensembles, with alarming hair. They were in their seventies as well, but major parts of their body were much younger after years of cosmetic surgery as a recreational sport. If they had it, they flaunted it. If they didn’t, they had it surgically adjusted. Except for their sun-drenched necks, which had the texture of Chinese crispy duck. All four wore hand-tooled snakeskin boots with elongated toes, in case they were mistaken for Yankees. And they were drinking Manhattans. In Miami.

  I said, ‘If you can take your eyes off those four, would you like to eat?’ as Eva imperceptibly gave the wives a woman’s all-encompassing once-over, almost hiding her distaste.

  ‘I was wondering if your inverse proportion theory applied to the size of cowboy boots as well,’ she said as we walked to the Asian noodle bar in the hotel lobby. The service was quick and efficient and the food and the ambience suited our moods. We drank Kirin beer and chasers of sake of such good quality that it was better on the rocks than w
arm, and we fed each other small portions of sushi and sashimi and crab in ginger and chilli and vegetable tempura and miso-marinated sea bass with tamari-yuzu sauce. Our conversation was that of kindred souls who’ve recently met and immediately felt attracted to and comfortable with each other. Spontaneous laughter. Repartee unexpurgated, unrehearsed and amusing. No scoring of points. No expletives deleted. To envious outsiders it seemed we were a couple of lovers who also enjoyed intimacy when clothed, and that pleasure from both activities is neither mutually exclusive nor a contradiction.

  Eva said, ‘So do I get to see the calibre of this gun?’ as I paid the check.

  We doubled and singled some slurred entendres on our way back to my hotel. I didn’t tell her that my automatic was in our Miami office safe. I didn’t tell her it was in my hotel room either. So, I figured that I hadn’t really misrepresented things.

  It turned out to be irrelevant, after all. She didn’t bring the matter up again.

  3

  Eva’s flight was returning to London in the late morning so she had to leave the hotel early. She declined coffee and juice. I saw her to a cab. She wound down the window. ‘And Milo. Don’t get shot. I ain’t finished with you yet.’ We kissed au revoir.

  She left and I realised I’d forgotten to thank her for making my day for the third time.

  It was still early and the hotel guests were nursing their holiday hangovers so the pool was empty. I did aerobic lengths for about an hour in the already hot Miami morning, alternating overarm and breaststroke, with a smile.

  Hotel guests were drifting to the pool and it was getting crowded, so I went back to my room and changed.

  Our office was at the southern end of South Beach. Dooley was well connected in the Miami-Cuban community and had secured a long lease in a well-positioned building at the edge of the Art Deco district.

  I walked from the hotel to the top of Ocean Drive and the start of the trendy beach area where all the major human sexual subspecies may be found at any given time, and where public greetings involve kissing more than two cheeks.