He ducked under foliage, scraping a hibiscus branch from the back of his neck. “Where did you find the dog?”
“Over there,” she said reluctantly, pointing.
She really didn’t want to talk about it. To James Santo Marin, or anyone. Jupiter had been such a good-hearted dog, expecting nothing but kindness in this world. But somebody had wrapped a cord around his neck, probably while he was wanting to be petted, and strangled him.
Santo Marin dropped to one knee, his hand brushing the ground. “The dog hadn’t been cut open or anything?”
Cut open? The idea was horrifying. She turned away, feeling ill. “What’s your interest in all this? Are you just satisfying your curiosity?”
He got to his feet. “My interest is just what you said. That somebody came out here and frightened you half to death with this crap.”
She stared at him. “This crap?”
“Yes, this crap, this stupid junk.” He glowered at her, his eyes hard. “I don’t care what George Castaneda’s been telling you, it’s garbage. And the lunatic who did this ought to be locked up. Take me around the back of the house,” he ordered. “That’s where they put the rest of the bilongo, isn’t it?”
“There’s nothing to see.” He started down the side path and she followed him. “You’re not telling me everything!” she cried, frustrated. “I’ll bet you know who did it, don’t you?”
“No.” He didn’t turn to look at her. “But I’m sure as hell going to find out.”
He pushed through the untrimmed bushes to the back of the house, then stood there, staring at the porch door. “They told me you think you’re being followed.”
The back terrace was blisteringly hot, even though a breeze blew across the turquoise waters of Biscayne Bay and ruffled her hair. When he turned to her, squinting against the light, the intensity of his darkly handsome face seemed as vivid as the burning sun. But his eyes were angry, dangerous.
“A—a stretch black Cadillac limousine.” She knew he wasn’t going to believe her. “It’s followed me home from work.”
Amazingly, he considered it. “There are a million stretch black Cadillac limousines in Miami. Who’s in it, can you tell? Man or woman?” He paused a fraction of a second. “Two men?”
She gasped. “Oh, my God, your Colombian drug dealers are following me!”
“Jesus, don’t say that!” He was genuinely alarmed. “You’re jumping to crazy conclusions. Besides, I don’t know any Colombian drug dealers.”
But when he started for the sun porch door, she yelled, “Don’t just walk away from me. There were Colombians there at your house, I saw them. That’s what this whole thing is about, isn’t it? That I saw something I wasn’t supposed to!”
He hesitated, then started forward again. “Let’s go inside. I want you to tell me about the things you hear inside the house at night.”
He even knew about that. It made her furious. “Who told you that? Your friend with the computer?” How she regretted, now, letting the whole story spill out in the babalawo’s office. “Did you know the babalawo said somebody was trying to kill me?”
“With Santería?” He looked at her contemptuously. “Are you kidding? You don’t believe in that stuff.”
“I don’t know what I believe in anymore,” she wailed. “It was all pretty convincing today—the little African iyalocha, your school chum with the computer. Was that all for my benefit? To warn me off again? Oh, God.” She moaned, turning away. “I’m so sick of you people!”
“You people?” He grabbed her arm and whirled her around. “What do you mean, Miss Collier?” he asked softly. “Are you referring to us uncouth, greasy latinos?”
She flinched. “No, no. I’m sorry I said that. I didn’t mean it that way.”
“The hell you didn’t. I know what Anglos think of us, Miss Collier, you don’t have to spell it out.” He let her go so suddenly, she staggered. “Did you think I was any different? Did Castaneda tell you how altaclase I am? About my mother’s pure Castilian blood? And did he brag on his own nice brown skin? Well, I hate to disillusion you, but I’m Cuban, too. My father’s Cuban. He’s still there, in Cuba.” He spat out the words. “He’s one of Fidel Castro’s long-term political prisoners, an old man in a wheelchair who’s had a stroke, under twenty years’ house arrest. He’ll probably die there.”
He turned away from her, his shoulders stiff with anger. “The reason I’m here is that I don’t want you defiled with our ignorant superstitious practices. When I find out who did this to your genteel Anglo household here on Palm Island, I’m going to gouge his eyes out. Barbarically. Disgustingly. Does that satisfy you?”
She was horrified. “That’s unfair! I don’t feel that way, I don’t know why I said that. It’s just that this whole thing, going to the iyalocha today, the high priest with the computer...” Her voice trailed away. “I didn’t ask you to come here,” she reminded him. “Why don’t you just go back to your boat?”
“Forget it.” For a long moment they stood glaring at each other, irresistibly drawn by their conflict, neither willing to give an inch.
Finally he turned away. “I want to check the inside of your house.”
Gaby followed him slowly. Watching him stalk toward her house, captivated by the tightly wound grace of his narrow-hipped, long-legged body, she remembered the babalawo’s words. Tiger. Fireball. He had talked about gouging someone’s eyes out. He’d told her his father was still being held prisoner in Cuba. Twenty years. The cruelty of it made her wince. But he still hadn’t answered any of her questions. Neither had the others.
He was waiting for her at the door to the sun porch. “You said you heard noises at night,” he said tautly. “And something about a tape recorder.”
She got her key out and unlocked the door. “I don’t know what I heard anymore,” she admitted. “There isn’t a tape recorder in the walls. I just said that.”
The house was tightly closed against the heat and smelled mildewed, like all old waterfront places. Their footsteps were loud on the tile floors. Gaby couldn’t help thinking nervously of the night of the storm, when James Santo Marin had come into her house. In the sala she avoided looking at the old slipcovered couch. She still remembered too vividly how she had lain there in the darkness, half naked, practically panting for him to make love to her. And his passionate mouth, his long body lying heavily on hers, his trembling hands caressing her bare, aching breasts.
“I need a drink of water,” she said loudly. She started for the hallway and the front of the house. “I can’t describe the sound, anyway. It’s probably all in my imagination.”
“Wait,” he said.
She didn’t stop in the kitchen for the water. The memory of his hard, sexy body followed her like a heated ghost. She rushed through the hall, threw open the front door, and stepped out into the drive, gulping the steamy air. Just the way he looked affected her, she thought wildly, and she couldn’t let herself be that stupid. He was bad, evil, dangerous. He was mixed up with drugs! Stop thinking about him!
“What about the family that lives here?” he asked from behind her. “Have you been up to check out the apartment since they left?”
“No.” If she walked out to the driveway and the Lamborghini, she thought frantically, maybe he would take the hint and leave. “The police looked at it, but I’ve been busy. And there have been so many other things.”
He started toward the garage. “Do you even know if they’ve been back? Have they removed any of their stuff?”
“No.” She had to run to keep up with him. Get rid of him, she told herself. He threw her off balance, raised this strange sexual panic that she couldn’t cope with. He had to go, if only for the sake of her sanity. Besides, she had to get back to the paper that afternoon. That was no lie. “I don’t know if I’ve got the key to the garage apartment with me,” she said. Ordering James Santo Marin off the property would do no good. She had to outmaneuver him. “The key may be in the house. We probably ca
n’t get in.”
He had reached the downstairs door. When he turned the knob the door swung open into darkness.
“You won’t need it,” he said. “Somebody’s already been here.”
If the sea was an ink pot
And the sky made of paper,
The evil in women
Could not all be written.
If the sea was an ink pot
And paper the sky,
There would be no room for telling
How deeply men lie.
SPANISH FOLK SONG
Chapter 12
Gaby wandered through the apartment in a daze. The bedroom was even more of a shambles than the living room. The larger pieces of furniture were still there, but the Escuderos had taken the curtains, the braided rugs, wiped the kitchen clean of cooking utensils. Even the mattress cover was gone from the stripped bed. Someone had been in such a hurry to pull down the bedroom curtains that the metal rod was bent almost in a bow.
Gaby unhooked the damaged rod and laid it on the windowsill. The box fan was still in place. She turned the switch to see if it had been left because it didn’t work, but it hummed into life, pulling a strong, much-needed breeze into the room.
James Santo Marin stood in the doorway, thumbs hooked into his jeans, watching her. “I’m sorry,” he said softly.
She shrugged. “Don’t be. You didn’t do it.”
She ran a finger over the top of the battered dresser, through a layer of spilled talcum powder. There’d always been a collection of photographs proudly displayed there: Angel in his First Communion clothes, Elena’s dead husband, Rafael, a number of snapshots of all the relatives still living in Cuba. Now there were only tracks in the talcum where pictures had been hastily scooped off the dresser.
“Elena was always so neat, so terribly clean and tidy. I can’t believe she’d come back and take everything and leave the place like this.” Gaby blamed herself for not checking the apartment sooner. Now, she remembered, there was no one left to help with the cleaning and the yard work. She was going to have to spend the weekend cleaning up the apartment alone. The thought dismayed her. She sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the mess.
“They didn’t do this,” he told her. “Somebody came back and cleaned the place out for them.”
She lifted her head. “Why do you say that?”
“Whoever it was didn’t know what to take. So they took everything that wasn’t nailed down.”
She threaded her fingers through her sweat-damp hair in a gesture of weariness. “It could have been burglars,” she said without conviction. “They rob places for money for drugs.”
His black gaze followed the movement of her arm as she pulled her hair up from the back of her neck and held it there, briefly, for a little coolness. “They’d have hit the big house for that,” he said. “There’s nothing in servants’ quarters to steal.”
He ought to know, she thought with sudden bitterness. Restlessly, she shrugged out of her jacket and laid it on the mattress. Her blouse was damp with perspiration. “Miami certainly wasn’t like this when I was growing up.”
He leaned against the doorjamb, his expression enigmatic. “There wouldn’t be any drug trade, Miss Collier, if the citizens of the United States didn’t fall all over themselves to shove the stuff up their noses. You can’t supply a market unless the demand exists.”
“Drug dealers are just giving people what they want?” Her voice was tinged with sarcasm. It seemed a century since she had had lunch with Dodd in the Brickell Tower restaurant and she was tired. The trip to Calle Ocho in search of answers had come to nothing. Except that she’d made a fool of herself, and been badgered first by the yuppie voodoo high priest and now by this arrogant Latin hunk who thought himself above the law.
His face tightened. “Are we back to that? Because I’m a latino, I’m automatically guilty of undermining upright American society?”
“You said it,” she snapped. “I didn’t.”
He pushed away from the doorway. “All right, Miss Collier. Should I tell you how many times I’ve been approached in boardrooms, in the men’s rooms in expensive restaurants, on the damned country club tennis courts by total strangers, by your hotshot Anglo social register types, Miami’s leading citizens, because their subtle prejudice says that as a latino I look like I ought to be able to fix them up with a couple of keys of their favorite recreational drug?”
Gaby’s lip curled. “I haven’t accused you of anything.”
“Or that I ought to do your friends a chummy favor,” he went on in the same ominously soft voice, “and pop them a few lines of cocaine if, uncouth grease-ball that I am, I want to be really accepted in sacred WASP inner circles? Do you know what that does to my tender latino ego? How goddamned flattered I am by it all?”
“I don’t want to discuss it.” He was standing over her, and she wished she hadn’t taken her jacket off. Her silk blouse was sticking to her, outlining her breasts.
“But I want to discuss it. I want to tell you how I feel when I’m trying to close a business deal with some arrogant Anglo asshole who’s sniffed so much snow into his brain that he can’t see the paper he’s signing, can’t understand the terms his lawyers and mine have carefully delineated—but who is going to accuse me, two or three days later, of being a dirty conniving spick who screwed him out of his money. And”—his voice hardened—”who tells me on the telephone after he’s thought it over that I could make things right if I just let him in on a little dealing occasionally?”
She looked away from him. “I don’t have anything to do with your problems!”
“Oh, but Miss Collier, you do.” He sat down on the bed beside her. Very close beside her. “Because I see it in your eyes, that same speculation about my Latin viability. Only it’s not,” he murmured huskily, “whether I can pass you a little cocaine, is it? It’s something even more interesting.”
“Don’t start that.” She tried to get up, but he held her by the arm. “Let me go.”
“What’s the matter?” His hot black eyes were inches from hers. “Worried about the stereotype of the indestructible screw-anything-anytime Latin sex drive?” he asked softly. “Or even about your own uninhibited Anglo willingness?”
She managed to free her arm. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He raised his eyebrows mockingly. He was so close she could feel his body heat through her clothes. “You don’t? Hey, every time I see those beautiful silvery eyes of yours run up and down my body, I know you want to sample the goodies. But you’re not sure if I will live up to your expectations, right?”
She tried to inch away from him. “I wasn’t ‘uninhibited,’” she croaked. “That’s a lie! I’m not like that at all!”
“Beautiful Miss Collier, you could have fooled me.” He lifted his hand and touched the tumbled strands of her damp hair, frowning when he saw her flinch. “The flowers I sent you were supposed to say that I, at least, remembered all of it—very clearly.”
Gaby’s heart was pounding. She eyed the doorway desperately. “I’ve never done anything like that in my life. Usually I’m not, I mean I never have been...” She saw his eyebrows raise again. “I don’t mean I’m a virgin or anything like that.”
The words had burst out in spite of herself, and she blushed. It was rank insanity to be in the same room with him. He always did this to her. “It was the storm,” she said breathlessly. “You took advantage of me.”
“I took advantage of you?” For a moment he was genuinely startled. “Lady, you’re the one who grabbed me and pulled me down on top of you, and then felt me up.”
Her mouth fell open. “Is that what you thought? That I—that I grabbed you?”
“Well, I couldn’t say no, could I?” He was so close his breath brushed her lips. “God, you tempt me,” he muttered to himself. “And I thought this would all go away.”
She knew he was going to kiss her. She was trembling from the closeness of that ch
iseled face with its incredible eyes. Yet she felt compelled to say something to stop him. “You have your own hang-ups,” she said breathlessly, “about p-promiscuous Anglos.”
“I specialized in Anglo girls in college.” He lowered his dark head. “I know what I’m talking about.”
She shuddered as he pulled back her damp hair, turning her face up to him. She still couldn’t move. “I’m not going to be one of your experiments,” she whispered.
“Believe me, you’re no experiment.”
He ran his warm, firm mouth lightly along her cheek, toward the shivery sensitiveness of her ear. Gaby quivered helplessly. His sensuous mouth hovered over hers, stirring an almost violent rush of need in her body. It was like electricity, the erotic spark that leaped between them. She’d almost forgotten its devastating magic. Totally captive to it, she lifted her arms and wound them around his neck, pressing her body into his.
A soft groaning sound broke from him. His arms tightened around her almost painfully. He smelled of male sweat with an underlay of soap, his body hard and warm, and her mouth opened to him. She felt him tremble, suddenly blazing with desire. Ah, how she remembered that passionate trembling, she thought dizzily, his sexy body and its steely strength!
She was aware that what she was doing was reckless, eminently dangerous. James Santo Marin was almost certainly a criminal, even if he was nearly too handsome to look the part. How could she be doing this, she wondered, wanting everything? When she was sure the attraction was only physical?
She deliberately put the questions out of her head. Everything had passed her by. Love, happiness, even sex, nothing had ever touched cowardly little Mouse. Right now she didn’t want to think about anything but this.
Miami Midnight Page 13
