The burnished gold of the lavish bathroom fixtures glowed in the flashlight’s beam. From the other side of the door came the unearthly sounds of shutters being ripped away by an angry, scratching, howling beast.
My ears kept popping from the pressure.
“¡Dios mio! This cannot be. This cannot be.” Reyes was hyperventilating.
“We have to keep the door from opening,” I muttered. Like a wild animal, the storm was loose in the house, crashing, smashing, and tearing. He kept his shoulder to the door. I lay on the floor, braced against the sink, feet pressed against the door. The wind pushed and we pushed back. I listened, ready to scramble into the tub and crouch beneath a mattress if the ceding gave way. “We may not live through this,” I cried. “What about the boys? Where are they? Did you betray my father? Tell me the truth about what happened to him!”
He grunted, turning the other shoulder to the door. “Truth? That’s all your father wanted. He did not see the big picture: politics, countries, governments, survival. You are like him. You miss the big picture.” He laughed, a vile sound that mingled with those of the storm. “You babble on about truth while the storm of the century rages around us, when survival is all that is important. He did not survive.
“But I will! I am a survivor. Always,” he ranted. “The Bay of Pigs, the cold war, business and politics. I survived them all. I have Secret Service clearance! I occupied the podium with the President when he last visited Miami. I have been to the White House!”
“How will you explain Bravo’s body?”
I strained to hear as he lowered his voice. “People disappear in a storm like this. They are never found. Swept away. This is a perfect time for somebody to disappear.”
Despite the suffocating heat in the small room, I felt chilled. Did the barrage seem to be subsiding? The pounding wind and the roar were no longer as loud. The eye of the storm must be approaching: my chance to escape. My only chance. I could make it to my car and across the bridge before the second half of the storm hit. I could find a safe place to ride out the rest of the hurricane.
I got to my knees, in a crouch. Reyes stretched and stepped away from the door.
More terrified of him than of the storm, I flung the door open and ran out. The darkness was pitch black, the water ankle-and then knee-deep. Splashing. He came after me.
“Wait,” he shouted. I him heard crash against a wall. I groped in the darkness. The shutters were gone. The windows were out, the storm was in. Green lightning flashed again, in the distance. The roof had peeled away and one wall was gone. It was raining inside. “Wait, stop!” Reyes shouted, lunging after me.
The stench was horrible. Water was rising. The sewer lines have ruptured, I thought, nearly gagging as I kept moving, his flashlight beam dancing behind me. Lightning flashed again, and I saw another face, in front of me. A skull, grinning. I recoiled, screaming.
Reyes stumbled over a fallen timber and his flashlight fell into the water. Floating and bobbing, driven by the wind and storm surge, its strong beam illuminated horror after horror like a macabre light show. I was hallucinating. Was I dead? Bones, skulls, bodies in various stages of decomposition and mummification. Staring up in terror at the shattered walls, I saw limbs, arms and legs, dangling from the crawl space beneath the broken roof.
Oh God. I was alive. They were real.
He saw them too. With a cry of anger and despair, he caught my right arm and ripped the diary from my waistband. I fought to keep it, thrashing off-balance in the stinking water, the horrifying tableau still playing all around us at the whim of the spotlight s wavering beam.
He hit me in the face, so hard I saw an exploding sun and fell back onto a water-soaked chair. Dazed, I heard him at the splintered front door. “No! What have you done?”
Sobbing, gagging, I lurched to my feet and chased the bobbing light, caught it, picked it up, and stumbled toward the door. I heard the engine of the Range Rover. I saw it, covered with tree branches that fell away as it rolled slowly out of the driveway, picking up speed. I had to stop him. Knees shaking, I tried to find my car but couldn’t see it. Branches, debris, and fallen trees were everywhere.
Taking a deep breath, I steadied the light and slogged through water to where my T-Bird should be. Instead there was an impenetrable thicket, a mountain of green branches as high as a house. My T-Bird was beneath the fallen ficus tree that had stood sentry in the courtyard, flattened like a smashed toy.
The Range Rover was gone, its four-wheel drive somehow navigating the obstacles, downed trees, water, and floating lumber. The wind was receding to a whisper, the sky awash in stars, more than I had ever seen before, because now there was no other light to diminish them. Suddenly I became aware of the sound of high-pitched wails. Panic swelled in my chest. The storm was returning. Only after several moments did I realize that it was the sound of burglar alarms from other houses on the island.
But the storm would be back.
I struggled through the branches to reach the cellular phone in my car, and my gun, in case he came back. Bruised and cut, my knuckles bleeding, I managed to reach the bag with the phone. Nothing. Only static. Then I realized that even if I could call for help, none would come. I cut myself on broken glass but wrestled my portable radio out through a broken window. No way to reach the gun in the glove compartment.
The starry sky and the water were absolutely calm now, with an unnatural beauty. I clutched the radio, my only link to the world. I would have to conserve the batteries, I thought, wading through water and wreckage, alarms sounding around me, the entire island empty.
The Libertad was splintered wreckage, scattered by wind and water. Poles and power lines were down, roof riles everywhere.
The thought of reentering Reyes’s house of horror made my skin crawl, but the radio warned that the second half of the storm was about to strike and would be just as vicious. The sky began to close in again. The night grew darker, the stars vanished, and the wind stirred ominously. Where to go? Back to that bathroom? I would rather die. I shuddered convulsively. But I must survive this, I thought, to tell what he has done.
The house across the street, away from the water, on higher ground, had a collapsed patio structure but looked otherwise intact. I knocked hopefully and tried the doorbell. No one there. Locked and shuttered. I checked under the mat for a key. Nothing. As the wind picked up, something at the side of the house began to slam back and forth.
I skirted the house. Across the street the bay seethed and began to rise again. The slamming continued as I trained the flashlight. Something moving. A dog, a golden retriever, whining, running in and out of his doggie door as the winds began to regain their strength-His owners must have left him behind when they evacuated. I called out, hoping he was friendly.
He gave a small bark and came running, tad frantically wagging, as glad to see me as I was to see him. If I can get inside with the dog, I thought, I’ll be safe. On hands and knees, I crawled in through the doggie door. He followed and I secured it from the inside.
He wore a red scarf and a collar with a tag that said his name was Waldo. We sat together on the kitchen floor, both whimpering.
Sick at heart, I thought of Charles Randolph, Butch, and the others. Resisting their images, I forced myself to my feet.
There were matches and candles on the kitchen table. I lit one and put it carefully on a china saucer. No time to be careless with fire, with nowhere to run and no fire department to respond. Rummaging in the kitchen cabinets, I found some cognac and drank straight from the bottle. I thought of Jorge Bravo and drank some more. I found dog food but no manual can opener, and the electric one was useless. Everything would spoil anyway, so I fed Waldo sliced turkey and cold cuts from the refrigerator. Then I drank more cognac. The storm howled and shrieked around us, as Waldo and I climbed up onto the big formal dining room table and went to sleep.
By dawn the storm had gone and the alarms had died, leaving an eerie
silence. I stepped outside to a city changed forever.
21
The utter devastation evoked an almost mystical quality. More than 150,000 people were left homeless. Hundreds more, dead or missing. One condo complex lost an entire wall, exposing ten floors of apartments like an open-ended doll-house. A blind woman safely rode out the storm in her seventh-floor apartment, then plunged to her death when she reached to close a window in a wall that was gone.
Reyes was apparently still trying to make his way across the causeway when the second half of the storm hit. His wrecked Range Rover was found overturned and partially submerged. His body was not recovered, though forty-one others were. The diary disappeared with him.
The horrific story of Reyes’s crimes, which would have dominated front pages for weeks, took a backseat to storm coverage, to the survival of a city.
Large housing developments had been obliterated, wiped off the map, as though by a nuclear blast. County Walk, where the Goldsteins had sought shelter, was devastated. They and Seth barely escaped with their lives. They managed to cling to Bitsy and Billy Boots, who were saved from the terrible fates of thousands of bewildered pets lost in the storm or abandoned by owners left homeless.
For thousands of people who scrambled from room to room in order to survive as their homes disintegrated around them, the drenched clothes they wore were the only possessions they had left. Those trapped inside by fallen trees had to cut and tunnel their way out. Mobile-home parks were reduced to acres of torn sheet metal.
Miamians had no power, no ice or food, no police, fire, or emergency medical service. Tap water was contaminated. Epidemics were feared.
The storm had wobbled slightly at the last minute, deviating from its once head-on course for Miami Beach and downtown Miami, and slammed ashore ten miles south instead. If not for that, the toll would have been for worse.
My mother’s shuttered condo went undamaged. But at her coworker’s home, windows shattered and the garage blew away. They huddled under blankets in a closet after the front door blew open and rain blasted into the living room and bedrooms.
Miami looked like war-torn Beirut with exploded storefronts and shattered glass. Huge highway signs had crashed to the streets, and thousands of traffic lights were knocked out. Florida Power and Light crews worked to the point of exhaustion, but company officials said it would take weeks to restore power to Miami Beach, and the hardest-hit areas would have no electricity for at least six months.
Miamians lost their homes but not their spirit. Good and decent people do not change, nor do those who are neither.
Thank God so many Miamians are well armed. Had they not been, what little they had left would have been taken. Gutsy gun owners fought off looters. Crude signs appeared, spray-painted on buckled walls.
YOU LOOT, WE SHOOT.
LOOTERS WELCOME. WE NEED TARGET PRACTICE.
Government could not protect them. Overwhelmed police and firefighters did what they could, but many were homeless themselves.
Some looters took only what they needed from damaged convenience stores and supermarkets, others emptied entire shopping centers, then swarmed over Tamiami Airport, stripping expensive electronic equipment from damaged planes.
Twenty thousand Florida National Guardsmen were called in to maintain order. Unfortunately, a local newsman broadcast the fact that the guardsmen had no arrest powers—and no ammo. Within an hour, guardsmen carrying empty guns were being robbed at gunpoint by punks with loaded weapons, and the wrong people now had Ml6s.
Relief efforts were totally disorganized. Disaster plans had focused on evacuation and shelters, not the aftermath. As bureaucracy floundered, lives were saved, not by government, the Red Cross, or the Salvation Army, but by the Jaycees and the Kiwanis and Lions clubs. They and heroic private citizens mobilized, rolling south with truckloads of food and water.
Even the simplest tasks were impossible. Lines stretched for blocks in brutal heat to use the only functioning telephone for miles. Mail could not be delivered; mailboxes, houses, and entire communities were missing.
Jorge Bravo was not buried on the island where he had hoped to die but 250 miles away, in Miami. Though he remains forever in exile, his heart was true to Cuba.
His coffin, draped in a Cuban flag, was surrounded by members of his wretchedly small band of Sancho Panzas. He was laid to rest in a cemetery full of fallen trees and broken monuments, like broken promises. Eloy and especialista Luisa saluted el comandante for the last time. His wife cried. So did I. For Jorge and for Cuba.
I found my Aunt Odalys conducting her own relief effort. The woman, frozen into near paralysis, barely able to function before the storm, was vital and vigorous, helping the elderly, boding water for the neighborhood, and distributing candles. Her house was unharmed, her stove was gas operated, and Lord knows the woman had an endless supply of candles.
“You’re all right!” I said, hugging her.
“Si, mi hijita. It was so after the storm in Melena del Sur.”
“You were right about the mala bora,” I said weakly.
She held my lace in her hands and searched my eyes solemnly. “It is yet to come,” she whispered. “The most difficult hour still lies ahead.”
Lottie’s house, in El Portal, to the north, sustained only landscape damage. Pulitzer, her rescued greyhound, was frantic and hyper but he’s always that way. She shot unforgettable pictures throughout the storm and its aftermath.
The walls of houses left standing were stained green by the chlorophyll from pulverized foliage pounded against them during the storm. Trees still upright had been defoliated. Once-shady neighborhoods were left naked, exposed to the merciless late-August sun.
Without refrigeration or air conditioning, ice became a precious commodity. Entrepreneurs sold it for five and ten dollars a chunk. People waited in line for hours and were turned away when supplies ran out.
Andrea Vitale had been in the auditorium at Coral Reef Hospital with 250 pregnant women when the storm hit and the power went out. While she delivered four babies singlehandedly—three girls and a boy—Bramblewood was demolished, sweeping away her home and all the photos and mementos of her only child. The Kearnses lost their house and the nursery. Vanessa Clower was flooded out of her Surfside home. Her ex-husband’s business suffered severe damage. The Randolphs lost their spacious L-shaped Florida room and their carport, but the rest of the house and the Quicky Lube came through fine. For all of them the devastation of the hurricane was overwhelmed by the grief and horror of the truth. The storm they all survived had brought back their sons, in plastic body bags, with cops as pallbearers.
They were all there, Charles Randolph, the Kearns brothers, David Clower, Butch Beltrán, Watson Kelly, Lars Sjowall, the Swedish exchange student—all of them and others who may never be identified. A total of twenty-one bodies.
In various stages of decomposition, they had been concealed in an attic, in the crawl space, and the walls. The storm had done much of the work for the cops, excavating Reyes’s own private boneyard.
Detectives sifted the wreckage of the house piece by piece. Despite the chaos around them, the cops and medical examiners excavated the site as meticulously as an archaeological dig. Wearing protective charcoal-filtered masks, they crawled on hands and knees and unearthed gruesome finds in the upper crawl space and beneath the house, under air-conditioning ducts, long depressions covered with cracked coatings of dried gray lime. The heat and the noise were horrendous. Because of the water table, they had to use pumps and generators. Their shovels unearthed rib cages and spines, knee caps and lower leg bones. The fresh excavation smelled like a sewer and resembled a scene from a horror movie, with flies, gnats, and maggots, and puddles containing thousands of tiny writhing worms.
Reyes had wrapped the bodies well, using lime and acid to mask the smell. Those under the house were buried beneath eighteen inches of earth. Their clothing and personal effects were missing exc
ept for the few souvenirs that police found: Charles Randolph’s ring, Butch Beltrán’s Swiss Army knife. Dr. Schlatter had been correct: the killer did collect mementos.
Detectives also confiscated books on pederasty, erotic films, handcuffs, and a police badge. Reyes may have posed as a police officer to persuade the boys to accompany him.
Charles Randolph was the first positively identified through dental records. Aware that Charles was missing, his dentist had made a point of keeping the model he had made for the boy’s enamel cap.
The biggest story of my career was overshadowed by the storm’s wake of looting, crime, lawlessness, and misery.
The News published. The presses rolled, powered by emergency generators. There was no air conditioning for the staff. Some had lost their homes, Fred among them. He moved his fetidly in with friends and, like all the others, never missed a day of work.
For many Miamians their newspapers arrival was the first sign that life might be normal again someday. Editors, delivery men, and even reporters climbed over downed trees and rubble to hand them out in otherwise inaccessible neighborhoods.
They were welcomed. Many people cried.
Our Miami Beach apartment house withstood the storm with only minor roof damage. My bank opened after three days, but allowed only two-hundred-dollar withdrawals because the money supply was limited.
A rash of deaths, not directly attributable to the storm, were related nonetheless. Heart attacks, stress and grief, fatigue and heat, a lack of medication and medical help took a deadly toll on the frail, the elderly, infants, and the chronically ill. Accidents soared: amateurs wielding chain saws, others trying to patch their own roofs or clear heavy debris.
We all worked to exhaustion. It was hell. I yearned for ice and luxuries such as a glass of water or a cup of hot coffee. Brushing my teeth with Pepsi got old fast. I yearned for a hot shower or even a cold bath, but we were warned not to bathe in the contaminated tap water. Heavy rains, humidity, and ravenous mosquitoes compounded the misery.
Act of Betrayal Page 27
