Miami Midnight

by Davis, Maggie;

  She closed the telephone book and put it aside. She could use what she had in the sidebar Jack Carty wanted, and hope that it was enough. At least an unlisted telephone number gave her an excuse not to go further. She wrote the few lines for the sidebar and left the copy on Jack’s desk.

  She glanced at the telephone, realizing with some surprise that she needed to see Dodd. She knew if she called him he would come downtown and take her home. She was suddenly depressed and needed to talk to somebody normal. She was deathly tired of the Santo Marins, the sidebar, newspapering. She wanted not to have to think about any of it for a long time. Like until tomorrow. She could leave a message in photographic for Crissette about her ride.

  She had just lifted the receiver when the door to the microfilm room swung open. A tall, slim, pretty black woman in a tailored denim shirt, matching skirt, and gold bangle earrings stood there with both hands on her hips, surveying her unhappily.

  “Gabrielle,” Crissette said, “I’ve got a problem.”

  Chapter 6

  “I’m kicking that turkey out!” Crissette exploded. “He thinks he’s going to come home with me tonight. But I told him, you lose another job, man, you are out in the street!”

  He, Gaby knew, was David Fothergill, the photographer’s live-in boyfriend. From what Crissette had told her the relationship was a stormy one, mostly because David was chronically unemployed.

  Crissette tucked Gaby’s hand under her arm as they went down in the elevator to the lobby. “I’m glad I’m giving you a lift home, honey. I need somebody around when I go out to my car. Mister Wonderful said he was going to meet me outside after work, but I already know the message. He’s out of a job again.”

  “Crissette,” Gaby said, trying to pull her hand away, “you and David go on if you want to talk. You don’t have to take me home.” There was still time, she thought, to call Dodd and have him pick her up. She was hungry and the idea of dinner in some quiet, elegant place that only Dodd could afford was appealing.

  But Crissette hung onto her determinedly. “That cat works for a couple of months, and then he finds out that if anybody’s going to get laid off it’s the ones the company’s paying off the books, under the table. You know, who haven’t got working papers. Especially if they think immigration is going to come around the construction site and stage a raid.”

  The elevator doors slid back and they stepped out into the lobby. Gaby had seen David Fothergill only once, a towering, soft-spoken islander with a brilliant smile.

  “You mean, he hasn’t got working papers?” she asked. She was being steered to the outer door by Crissette’s grip on her elbow. “You mean your—that David is here illegally?”

  The other woman snorted. “Honey, ain’t everybody? Gabrielle, this is Miami.”

  Gaby hung back. If Crissette’s boyfriend was an illegal alien he could be arrested, she supposed, at any moment. “Crissette, I think you better leave me out of this. I’ll—I’ll just take a cab home.”

  Crissette wasn’t listening. “My family is just raising pure hell with me about him, and they’re right. That good-for-nothing dude is taking me for free food and free rent! If David could swing it, he’d marry me so he could get his green card. That’s all those calypso cats are looking for, anyway.”

  The humid summer night was soggy. In the newspaper’s parking area a tangible veil of water drops hung suspended in the air like fog. As Crissette pulled Gaby along, looking for her car, Gaby couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  “He wants his green card?”

  “Yeah, honey. If he marries a U.S. citizen he gets to be a legal resident. He can work steady without having to run.” The slender black woman steered her toward the front line of cars facing the street. “My mother keeps telling me, ‘Crissette, you went to college, got a degree, a good job on a big newspaper, just to end up with him? Some bum from the islands like you can find anyplace in downtown Miami at night, sleeping in doorways?’”

  She stopped, hands on hips, looking around. “My mother’s been teaching history in the Dade County school system for twenty years, Gabrielle. I got one brother who’s a CPA, another one who’s a social worker in Fort Lauderdale. You know what they say to me? ‘Girl, what happened to that nice intern at Miami Beach-Mount Sinai who was so crazy about you last year? Now that cat had a future!’”

  Crissette gave an abrupt scream. “I see you there!” She darted forward. “Get out of here, David!”

  The muscular young man in a muddy white T-shirt, muddier jeans, and work boots, and wearing a bright blue hard hat, came out of the shadows by Crissette’s Fiero GT. Gaby was sure David Fothergill had heard every word.

  “‘Lo, dah-leen,” he greeted Crissette in his soft, lilting Trinidad accent. He gave a formal duck of his head to Gaby.

  “Dump it, man,” Crissette snarled. She pushed Gaby toward the passenger side of the Fiero. “You’re gonna tell me they didn’t even have time to pay you off, right?”

  He sighed. “Honey lamb, I told you. The immigration people come up to the site with buses, they was ready to catch us and haul us away. Me, the others who got no papers, we just run like hell.”

  He laughed, showing white teeth, but Crissette pushed past him angrily. He followed her. “I ran back streets, back alley all the way to Miami Springs, with no time to stop to clean up, get the mud off me.” He paused and looked down mournfully at his jeans and tight-fitting shirt. “And no money, love,” he murmured. “I’m sorry.”

  Crissette opened the door to the car. “You’re not coming home with me,” she said in a fierce whisper. She was full of fury, her dark eyes flashing. “I told you that on the phone.”

  He gave her a pleading look. “Dah-leen, don’t talk like that. Just let me explain.”

  Tactfully, Gaby turned away. She walked around the front of the Fiero, realizing that David was in love with Crissette. Unless he was a consummate actor, it was written all over him. And, Gaby had to admit, there was something in Crissette’s strident anger that sounded as though she knew it, too, and was fighting it.

  Gaby leaned against the hood of the car, feeling exhausted. Most people’s lives were a tangled mess. She hadn’t done too well herself. She wondered what Dodd was doing.

  The August night was oppressive after the newspaper offices’ chill air-conditioning, but the city around them was sparkling. To the south, lighted glass towers rose against a black sky. Music drifted from an all-night coffee shop in the next block, a Ruben Blades rock-blues-jazz-Latin tune, “Buscando America.” The street was deserted except for a long black car that had just pulled up to the curb and stopped, headlights on, its motor running.

  Thinking of the coffee shop made Gaby even hungrier. She started to walk slowly down the sidewalk, trying not to listen to the couple arguing loudly behind her. Reading about James Santo Marin had depressed her. So why couldn’t she just forget it? Why worry about someone who’d found a particularly loathsome way to get rich?

  The black limousine idling across the street was a custom-built stretch Cadillac, probably driven by a chauffeur. Since the windows were tinted Gaby couldn’t really tell. Perhaps it was waiting to pick up someone from the Times-Journal, she thought. But not Gardner Hedison. The publisher had gone home hours ago. Yet it was possible somebody had a late date. A rich late date.

  A rich late date? She mentally ran through all the newsroom personnel, including the food editor and even the rewrite desk, and rejected them all. When she came to dour Jack Carty, the idea that the features editor might have a wealthy lover in a Cadillac was so ludicrous she almost smiled.

  Then she frowned. Actually, she mused, a long black limousine had been in the same place the night before. It had left abruptly when she’d gotten into her car to go home. She also remembered that she’d had to wait when she was pulling out of the parking lot to let it pass. Feeling a little chill of apprehension shiver down her spine, she turned back toward the lighted parking area, quickening her step.

 
; There was no reason, she told herself, to think someone inside the car was watching her. But now that she thought about it, the black Cadillac, or one that looked exactly like it, had pulled into that same space, just past the corner of Fiftieth and Biscayne Boulevard, the night before at approximately the same time, nine-thirty. And two nights before that it had been sitting there when she came out of the Times-Journal building. Why hadn’t she paid attention to it before this?

  Gaby broke into a little trot. She wasn’t frightened, she told herself, she just wanted to hurry. But wasn’t it true that you could literally feel someone’s eyes on you when you were being watched?

  She was not going to run, she thought. She could see David and Crissette from there. She was not going to do anything crazy. But her thoughts were churning. If she had witnessed some sort of deal that afternoon at the fashion show and the Colombians thought she was a newspaper reporter—a real newspaper reporter—what would they do? And how about James Santo Marin, rich, powerful, inscrutable. Was that his limousine? Would he sit there at night, waiting for her to get off work, not making himself known?

  Gaby cut around Crissette’s Fiero at a run. The photographer and the Trinidadian stopped their arguing as she skidded to a halt. “Let’s get out of here,” she gasped. “That car is following me.” When they only stared at her she almost yelled, “It was here last night too!”

  Crissette and David turned toward the street. As they did, the limousine’s motor revved up and the car slid away from the curb. Without undue speed it continued down Fiftieth Street, around the corner onto Biscayne Boulevard, and disappeared.

  “There’s somebody in that Cadillac following me.” Gaby was beginning to feel like a lunatic. “It’s been here three nights this week and I didn’t even notice it. Let’s go before they come back!” She took Crissette’s arm and tried to pull her to the door of the Fiero. “Please, please,” she begged her. “Let’s get out of here!”

  The other woman looked amazed. “What’s with you anyway? Are you seeing drug dealers again?”

  “Yes. No? They’ve been watching me. Either that, or I’m losing my mind! Can’t we—”

  “Gabrielle, are you trying to drive me nuts?” Crissette freed herself. “You’re working too hard, baby, but you just can’t freak out like this.”

  David Fothergill put himself between them. “Easy, love.” He took advantage of the moment to open the Fiero’s passenger door and shove Gaby into the back seat. Then he jumped into the front himself and slammed the door.

  “Oh, no, you don’t!” Crissette shouted. “David, you get out of there!”

  He stuck his head out of the window, smiling angelically. “Dah-leen, I got to get my clothes and things from your house, don’t I now? Let’s take lovely Miss Collier home first.”

  Gaby leaned over David’s shoulder to the front window. “Crissette, please!”

  “I’m going to kill you, David,” the photographer said between her teeth. But she went around to the driver’s side and got in.

  The Fiero sped down Biscayne Avenue to the causeway with Crissette at the wheel, flying through a number of traffic lights just turning red. Gaby huddled in the back seat, hardly noticing. She knew she’d just made a fool of herself in the newspaper parking lot, but at this point it didn’t seem to matter.

  “Anything’s possible, love,” David was saying. “Now, Miss Gabrielle say she sees two men in a garden making a drug deal—”

  Crissette cut him off. “The whole thing’s in Gabrielle’s head. It was a fashion show, man, a fashion show. Drug pushers are not going to be making deals in the woods while the biggest latino society bash of the summer is going on, with photographers and reporters crawling all over the place. Gabrielle’s got a case of culture shock from being in Europe too long.”

  He shook his head. “Love, in Miami drug dealing is all over, you can find it anywhere.”

  “Listen, you don’t know how strung out this girl is.” Crissette looked at Gaby in the rearview mirror. “She comes back home and finds out her family’s money’s all gone, her mother has a terminal drinking problem, and she has to find work quick to keep them off welfare. Gabrielle is a nice chick, but she hasn’t got any self-confidence. She’s seeing things.”

  “I’m not neurotic,” Gaby said listlessly.

  “I didn’t say that, did I?” The other woman stared hard at her in the mirror. “What you saw at the Santo Marin place was a Cuban and a Colombian doing something you didn’t understand. But Gabrielle, in a newspaper job you see a lot of strange things. You can’t let your imagination run away with you. If you do, you’re in big trouble.”

  “But they did look like they were involved in some sort of a deal.” Gaby was tempted to go ahead and blurt out everything. But, she reminded herself, David was there.

  “Forget the whole thing, will you?” Crissette sped through another red light near the port of Miami. “Just go home and get a good night’s sleep.”

  Gaby sank back into the seat. She was turning over in her mind the idea of telling Crissette about James Santo Marin’s visit. How he had arrived in a huge power cruiser in the midst of a thunderstorm to threaten her. And then started to make love to her, yet stopped. She bit her lip. Not a wise move. Crissette already thought she was pretty strung out.

  “Gabrielle, honey,” Crissette went on more gently, “you shouldn’t let Jack Carty and the newsroom staff bug you. They do it to everybody.” She turned onto the old Palm Island bridge with its concrete balustrades and 1920’s-style globe lampposts. “How’s your mother? Things any better?”

  James Santo Marin had warned her that she hadn’t seen anything that afternoon in Coral Gables. On the other hand, why would he come to her house in the middle of a raging storm just to tell her that, unless she had seen something important? Was it James Santo Marin in the big Cadillac? Gaby knew he was dangerous. Could he be unbalanced? Oh God, a drug user himself? She closed her eyes for a moment. “My mother’s not much better. If you mean the drinking.”

  The Fiero turned into Royal Palm Way, tires screeching, and stopped abruptly at the Collier front door in a shower of crushed shell.

  “Lord, what a beautiful house.” Crissette leaned out the car window to look at the shadowy Moorish-Spanish outlines of the old mansion. In the moonlight, the towers, tangled bougainvillea vines clinging to the stucco, and myriad wrought-iron balconies were mysterious. “Even if it does look like the Munsters live here.” She turned to Gabrielle in the back seat. “Let David see you to the door, hon.”

  David didn’t move. “I been think-een, love, maybe you should ask our Miss Gabrielle why someone could be following her. Those two men in the garden could have been dealing drugs, yes. It’s possible.”

  Crissette glared at him. “Will you stay out of this?”

  But David Fothergill’s expression said that he, at least, took Gaby seriously. “If things keep happening,” he told her, “you keep track. Like, if anybody bothers you, Miss Gabrielle, you let me know.”

  He got out of the car and helped her from the backseat. “You don’t have to see me to the door,” she said. “I’ll be all right. And thanks for the ride.”

  They waited as she walked the few feet to the front door. Just before the entranceway she ducked under the overgrown hibiscus bushes. As she did, she almost stumbled over something lying on the path.

  She bent, peering in the moonlight, trying to see what it was. “Jupiter? What are you doing here?”

  The old Labrador lay stretched out on the path, his body flattened, legs extended in a curious attitude.

  She supposed she already knew Jupiter was dead before she touched him. His fur felt dusty, lifeless. Gaby fell to one knee with a muffled cry. There was a cord around the dog’s neck, twisted tightly.

  She lurched back to her feet. Instead of turning back to the car where Crissette and David were still waiting, she ran up the front steps and pushed at the door so she could reach into the hall and turn on the outside light. She h
ad to look at Jupiter. He couldn’t be dead. Not with a twisted cord around his neck. There was some mistake.

  The door wouldn’t yield. Something inside was holding it shut. Numbly, she bent to look through the letter slot. A body was lying on the floor just beyond.

  Her mother, she realized, peering through the slit into murky dimness. Something had happened to her mother too.

  Chapter 7

  Gaby sat on the living room couch beside Crissette, listening to Detective Sergeant Antonio Lopez tell Dodd Brickell what the police had found. It was the third or fourth time Detective Lopez had gone through his summary, once to Gaby and Crissette and at least once over the telephone to headquarters, and Gaby’s head was pounding. She really wanted to ask Crissette about David Fothergill, but when she turned to the photographer, Crissette gave her a warning look and shook her head no.

  Gaby sighed. She supposed Crissette was right. It was no time to discuss David, not with the police around. Crissette had hustled the big Trinidadian out of the house before the patrol car arrived, and Gaby wondered if David was lurking around somewhere on Palm Island. And whether some of the more security-conscious residents, seeing a gigantic man in muddy clothes and a hard hat who obviously didn’t belong there, would call the police. She choked back an unhappy urge to giggle. All the police, the squad car with two uniformed policemen and another car that had brought two plainclothes detectives from the robbery detail, were right there, in the Collier house. They probably couldn’t answer another call in the neighborhood if they wanted to.

  Crissette heard the muffled sound. “Let me get you a drink,” she whispered. “You look like you need it.”

  Gaby shook her head. Drink was a dirty word in the Collier household. To find a bottle of booze they’d have to ask her mother. And Jeannette was in no condition to tell them anything.

  “God,” Crissette muttered under her breath, “I wish this was over.” Across the room a policeman and the Brickell family doctor, whom Dodd had called, were leaning over Jeannette Collier. She was propped upright in one of the sala’s faded armchairs. “Let them take her to the hospital,” Crissette said to Gaby. “Just tell them.”