Miami Midnight

by Davis, Maggie;

  “How big is the crowd, anyway?” the head of photographic asked.

  “At last count, somewhere over three thousand.” Someone whistled softly. “Also, we’ve been notified the governor’s bringing his staff and half the legislature from Tallahassee. Upscaling Miami’s image is the idea.”

  He handed Jack the assignments schedule. “Let’s see if we can slide those celebrity interviews with the stars to the airport. Do them at Vizcaya only as a last resort. Don Johnson lives here on Star Island in Miami. Why can’t we get to him now?”

  “He’s out of town until Saturday night.” Jack pushed the revised schedule down the conference table to the reporters. “Placido Domingo’s just canceled. But I’ll see what we can do with Julio Iglesias and Linda Ronstadt.”

  The managing editor leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “We cover the event tomorrow night with four teams working until deadline. That means everybody but Frank has to be back here by nine-thirty.”

  The inside sections of the Times-Journal Sunday edition were made up by Thursday except for the front and second pages, which were held open for late-breaking news. But this week the front page and the second photo pages were being held, too, for the Vizcaya coverage. Which put all of them, except the reporter covering the stage show, whose story would go in Monday’s edition, on tight deadlines.

  The managing editor went on. “Frank covers the show, Elizabeth and Pete do features, color, and also any unexpected hard news, like the fireworks blowing up ahead of time.” He looked down the table. “The fashion desk covers what every one of the three thousand is wearing.” He actually smiled. “You can handle that, Gabrielle?”

  “Sure.” Gaby could hardly speak. The photographic chief and Jack Carty were smiling at her too. For the first time in a Times-Journal staff meeting, Gaby realized through her hangover, someone had actually said something friendly, even encouraging, to her.

  When Gaby got home, David was in the driveway to meet her.

  “You’re in for a pleasant surprise, Miss Gabrielle. Your former tenants brought your things back. The television, the utensils for the kitchen. They even put the curtains back up.”

  Gaby stared, uncomprehending. “Elena and her son? They don’t want the apartment back to live in right now, do they?”

  He shook his head, walking with her to the door. “They say relatives in Sweetwater are putting them up. You know the boy was involved with what happened here at your house, don’t you?” he added quietly. “I had a chance to talk to him, away from his mother. Angel’s story is that strangers came here to the house that night and threatened him, and he had to help. But not killing the dog,” he said, seeing her face. “Angel says he doesn’t know how that happened.”

  “Do you believe that?” Gaby stopped and turned to him. Tiredness had her trapped, her nerves screaming. She didn’t know if she could stand any more. “I’d like to get my hands on Angel. I’d get a straight story out of him! Who were these strangers, did he say?”

  “A man and a woman.” When Gaby started, he went on, “Yes, that’s what I thought, too. The man could have been a chauffeur, but Angel’s not sure. The woman wore sunglasses, even though it was night, and he thinks she had a scarf over her head.”

  Her thoughts were whirling. She really was too tired to think. “No wonder the Escuderos left. Angel was a part of it! And they left my mother in the front hall...”

  “I know,” David said. “I was here.”

  “And this is the way those people repaid us for everything my mother and father did for them! Gaby was almost screaming. “Angel let—let criminals onto our property to do unspeakable things, harm my mother, and then they just took off!”

  “They were frightened, Miss Gabrielle.”

  “Angel says someone forced him to help with Santería voodoo? They made him put chicken blood and feathers all over my back door, kill my dog, and he doesn’t know who they are? I don’t believe it!” Her hand was shaking so she couldn’t find the lock to the front door. David took the key from her. “I’m going to call the police. That detective, what was his name?”

  He stood back and held the door open for her. “Don’t do anything rash, Miss Gabrielle. It was not the iyalocha that night who came here to do the bilongo. It was a man and a woman the boy never saw before.”

  She stopped short in the hallway on her way to the telephone. “What?”

  “Today,” David said quickly, “I had a talk with Mrs. Escudero, while she was here, too. She told me a lot of things.” His expression changed. “Don’t be downhearted,” he said gently. “It’s hard on you now, but you will see, Miss Gabrielle. Everything is going to turn out very all right.” His old smile returned. “I tell you, it’s practically guaranteed.”

  Gaby took back the door key. She was exhausted and aching, very close to weary tears. “David, nothing’s going to turn out all right. You just don’t know how messed up things are.” She took a deep breath, hating the way she sounded. “But I guess I’ll survive.”

  “Oh, you will do more than that.” He stepped down the steps into the driveway and into the shadows. “Believe me, Miss Gabrielle, all good things are going to come to you. You see, Angel’s mother, she told me where you went last night.”

  Chapter 18

  Vizcaya was spectacular.

  Hidden spotlights came on at the moment the red ball of the sun dropped down into Biscayne Bay, illuminating clipped hedges called parterres, terraces, urns, statuary, and a profusion of fountains behind the late James Deering’s seventy-two-room replica of a Venetian palazzo.

  Crissette adjusted the settings on a small Minolta camera and groaned. “Oh, man, why can’t I be freelancing this? Why do the best shots always happen when I’m covering a story for the newspaper?”

  They were on Vizcaya’s main garden level where pools of water flowed down through carved stone waterways to the miniature Palladian folly the Deering heir had called a “casino.” The gardens were patterned after those of the Villa d’Este in Europe: branching off from the main paths were the walled Secret Garden where booths were selling champagne and soft drinks, the maze, the Marine Garden, the Theatre Garden, and finally the Fountain Garden, where a Latin orchestra and a rock band alternated in a travertine structure imported from the town square of Italy’s Bassano di Sutri.

  Crissette switched from the Minolta to her Nikon, training it on two University of Miami students, one dressed as Saint George and the other as a papier-mâché dragon breathing real smoke. “Gabrielle, did you remember to bring all our lists?”

  Gaby had them all, including a few she was sure they wouldn’t need. During the evening they would be working with the names of publicity-seeking guests who’d notified the Times-Journal in advance as to what they’d be wearing, and how they hoped to be photographed. They included the prestigious Palm Beach socialites who came down to Miami’s bigger galas, the wealthy young Fort Lauderdale professionals, the chic, influential Jewish community from Miami Beach, wealthy Latin society, and a sprinkling of black politicians.

  The Times-Journal planned a special eight-page Sunday supplement on summer festival week, and coverage of this last event had been allocated maximum space. In case Gaby ran out of material—or, heaven forbid, Jack Carty wanted another sidebar—she’d been provided with a guidebook that told how the heir to the International Harvester fortune and his sybaritic artist friend, Paul Chalfin, had designed and built Vizcaya in the early 1900’s, and how in the 1950’s the city of Miami had acquired it from the Deering family for a museum.

  The night, the surroundings, were beautiful. Excitement was in the air. Gaby’s main problem was navigating Vizcaya’s distances in her eighteenth-century costume. She wasn’t the only one. Crissette, working with several cameras slung around her neck, had already stashed her bicorne hat in a concrete urn. And at the VIP reception at the main house Dodd Brickell, dazzlingly handsome in an eighteenth-century condottièro’s uniform, had given Gaby a hasty kiss behi
nd some potted palms, swearing he’d have heatstroke if he didn’t get out of his watered silk jacket and into something cooler in time for the star-studded show.

  Crissette climbed up to a stone table to take a shot straight down the stair-step pools that glimmered romantically in the concealed floodlights. “I thought this would look like a TV costume movie,” she said. She trained the Nikon on a troupe of masked gondoliers, courtesans of the quattrocento, Venetian doges, and Harlequins and Columbines from some imaginary commedia dell’arte. “But this is ridiculous. It looks real. It’s spooky!”

  Gaby smiled. “I knew you’d say something like that.”

  The predicted full moon hadn’t risen, and the sky was hot and overcast. A soggy veil that was not quite mist lay over the sparkling fountains and merrymakers in a convincingly dreamlike haze. The gardens at Vizcaya looked as though they’d been waiting for years to come alive in just this way.

  “Say, Gabrielle,” Crissette called to her, “did you know Deering bought all this land from a Mrs. William Brickell? Any relation to the guy you’re engaged to?”

  “She was Dodd’s great-great aunt, I think.” At the reception Dodd had murmured something to Gaby about not working too hard that night, and giving up the damned fashion job at the earliest possible moment now that they were going to be married. The remark had bothered her. She knew she was going to have to talk to him about it. Gaby was beginning to like what she was doing very much.

  The flow from Vizcaya’s main gates grew heavier and the costumes even more interesting, although not always in keeping with the announced theme of a masked ball in eighteenth-century Venice. Looking for interviews, Gaby stopped a tall, good-looking Mark Anthony and a button-nosed Cleopatra while Crissette took their picture. The grinning pair, both actors at a Miami Beach dinner theater, admitted their costumes were “sort of left over from last year’s New Orleans Mardi Gras.”

  Hordes of bodies filled the paths on each side of the reflecting pools. Some of the guests were coming from earlier cocktail parties around Miami and showed it. Gaby had to squeeze through the crowd gripping her heavy skirt with both hands, as it had a tendency to wrap around people’s legs.

  The last time she’d seen herself in a mirror, at the VIP reception at the main house, she’d wondered all over again at the convincingly doll-like eighteenth-century court lady she appeared to be in yellow-and-blue satin, her swept-up hair adorned with loops of fake pearls, her little breasts pushed up seductively. The trade-off, she was learning, was the trouble one had in stiffened petticoats and hoops in milling crowds.

  A publicity assistant from the museum caught up with her just below the steps to the casino. “Gabrielle Collier, it’s me, Muffy Schantz!” Gaby recognized the Harlequin in cone-shaped hat as a debutante of some years back. “I didn’t even know you were back from Europe,” Muffy cried. “But I saw your engagement announcement to Dodd Brickell in the papers.”

  She turned to two women wearing satin gowns and high, white powdered court wigs, who were about to be interviewed by a WLVE-TV camera team.

  “Estancia, I want you to meet an old friend of mine, Gabrielle Collier. Gaby, this is Mrs. Fernando Santo Marin and her daughter, Pilar. Mrs. Santo Marin is on the Mercy Hospital Board, one of our charities.”

  It was bound to happen sooner or later, even in a city the size of Miami. Still, Gaby was taken by surprise and embarrassingly tongue-tied. Unfortunately, being embarrassed made her blush. She nodded to James Santo Marin’s mother and sister awkwardly. The older woman gave Gaby a quick smile of acknowledgment before she turned back to the TV camera. But the young sister fixed Gaby with a particularly venomous glare, not even extending her hand.

  “I know you.” Pilar Santo Marin’s voice was low, the words barely audible.

  How could she? Gaby wondered. She’d never met James’s family. She noticed she and Pilar Santo Marin were wearing similar gowns in blue-and-yellow silk, although the other’s was exquisitely made, obviously not rented from a costumer, like Gaby’s. Both Santo Marin women were lovely, even more so than their newspaper picture, with their dark eyes and sculpted features—features that Gaby suddenly found too familiar.

  The admiration, Gaby saw, was not mutual. Pilar Santo Marin gave her another pointedly baleful look and deliberately turned her back to watch the television crew.

  At Gaby’s elbow Muffy Schantz was chortling. “Dodd Brickell, you lucky dog! Remind me to take you to lunch and tell you all about the ex-wife, will you?”

  “Yes,” Gaby said automatically. A cameraman for the television news team pushed in between them just as Crissette came loping up, reloading her camera. “Hey, Mama Santo Marin’s still a foxy piece, isn’t she, Gabrielle?” she said sotto voce. “I got some good shots.”

  Gaby had hardly paid attention to Señora Estancia Santo Marin. The younger woman’s words still troubled her. I know you. Gaby wracked her brain, fruitlessly. She was sure they’d never met. And equally sure James hadn’t said anything about her to his family. But there had to be some reason, she thought, baffled, for the ferocious dislike she’d seen in the woman’s eyes.

  A sudden surge in the crowd pulled Gaby toward the front of the wooden stage where technicians were trying out the microphones. In the Fountain Garden the Latin dance band was playing “Abracame,” a Brazilian song made popular by one of the guest stars, Julio Iglesias, who was still at the reception at the main house. Floodlights bounced off the low-lying clouds, and from time to time there were a few sprinkles of rain.

  “Hey, Gabrielle!” Over the heads of the crowd Gaby saw Crissette pointing to a Greek temple-style gazebo above them on the second terrace. “I’m going to get some wide angle shots from the high ground,” the photographer yelled. “Meet you behind the stage later.”

  They had arranged a regular meeting place if for some reason they were separated: around the back of the casino where the television vans were parked and where the gardens ended in an artificial waterway that emptied into Biscayne Bay, hidden by the trees of Mercy Hospital next door.

  While Crissette took her wide angle shots from the upper terrace, Gaby got the names and addresses of a Venetian doge and his gray-haired wife who were collectors of the Murano glass of Venice, and wanted to talk about it in detail. After the Murano glass collectors, Gaby spent some time with two interior decorators from Chicago. Finally, dry-mouthed with talking and with slightly aching feet, she approached a muscular young gondolier who turned out to be one of the hired security guards.

  “Hey, if you don’t want to interview me,” the gondolier said from behind his black satin mask, “how about a pizza later? I get off at two o’clock. I can meet you any place you say.”

  Gaby sighed. “I’m working. But thanks.”

  “You’re gorgeous,” he called after her. “I’ll be here until two A.M., remember?”

  Gaby ran right into the arms of a stocky domino standing in the cross axis of the gardens.

  “Do you want to be interviewed?” she asked. The domino was big enough to be interesting, about the shape and size of a small mountain. “I’m a reporter from the Times-Journal. I’m doing a story on why people are wearing the costumes they—”

  “Honey, you don’t want to interview me.” The figure in the all-encompassing black gown and hood had a definite baritone Florida drawl. “But I’d appreciate it, Miss Collier, if you’d let me keep you in sight.”

  Gaby stepped back. For the second time that night she was speechless.

  The domino took her by the elbow, moving her out of the way of a group of strolling minstrels carrying mandolins and guitars. “I have to keep looking for the top of that pretty curly head,” he said in her ear. “The way you’re ducking in and out of this crowd, it ain’t easy.”

  “Harrison?” He was the same size and shape, but with the concealing folds of the black domino Gaby couldn’t be sure. “Harrison Tigertail?”

  He pushed back the mask, his copper features impassive. “Just stay around where I can
keep an eye on you, hon,” he said in his rumbly voice. “I don’t want to have to send the whole Miccosukee nation out into the everglades looking for you.”

  Gaby could do nothing but stare, open-mouthed. What in the name of God was the roofing contractor doing at Vizcaya at a glitzy fancy dress ball? Telling her not to move around too much? So he could keep an eye on her?

  “Harrison?” She couldn’t stop repeating it, it was so bizarre. But the big man was already moving away. In seconds, the tentlike black shape of the domino disappeared in the crowds.

  Gaby looked around, still shaken. The floodlit gardens, the surreal make-believe revelry reinforced a return of the horrible feeling that she was being followed—and watched! She put a trembling hand to her forehead. She could never be completely sure she wasn’t going crazy. That was one possibility she’d never rule out.

  A couple headed for the dancing jostled her to get past. Someone spilled champagne down the front of her costume. She didn’t even hear the apology. She whirled around, stumbling on her skirts, suddenly filled with a compelling need to see Dodd. As always, she needed his reassurances, his strength; she needed him to take her in his arms and just hold her for a few minutes. She needed him to reassure her about her sanity!

  Getting through the crowd to the foot of the terrace stairs was a major undertaking. As Gaby stepped out of the flow of people into the shelter of the clipped-hedge entrance to the maze, the crowd parted for the governor’s party. They were coming from the reception with a wake of reporters, press aides, and television cameramen, headed for the stage where there would be opening ceremonies at nine o’clock. Gaby spotted Dodd’s blue satin condottièro costume on the periphery of the group.

  “Dodd!” She knew she didn’t have much time. Crissette was probably waiting for her by now behind the casino. She moved along with the governor’s party and when Dodd got close enough she grabbed him by the sleeve.

  He had had more than a few drinks that evening. Gaby could smell the liquor on his breath. But he looked devastatingly handsome, big and broad-shouldered and rather swashbuckling in the bright blue Venetian soldier’s costume.