Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  “‘C’mon. I’ll show you.’”

  When Andrew arrived, he gave Miriam Hernandez, the manager, a French passport and a driver’s license stating that he was Kurt Matthew DeMars, age twenty-seven. The real Kurt DeMars was a friend of Andrew’s who lived near San Francisco and worked in advertising for Out magazine. Andrew had spent a lot of time with DeMars in April, in San Francisco, shortly before his killing spree began.

  Miriam Hernandez is a kindly Cuban woman in her sixties who spends long hours behind the Normandy Plaza’s front desk. On May 12, about 8 P.M., Andrew walked in wearing the same outfit he would wear for the next two months: shorts, a tank top, flip-flop sandals, and a backpack. He told Miriam he was a tourist, and paid her for room 116—$29.99 plus tax. Miriam is very sweet but also very firm about getting her room rent. The hotel accepts only cash. “The next morning I call at ten A.M. ‘Good morning. How are you?’ At ten-thirty he paid another day. At eight P.M., I saw him come out for something to eat. Next morning, same process. Andrew said, ‘I’ll pay you one day more.’” Again Andrew went out at night, but just for a few minutes, and returned carrying take-out. But the third night Andrew went out, Miriam didn’t see him come back. On the fourth day he asked about weekly rates. “I’ve come here looking for an apartment,” he told Miriam, “and I don’t see anything I like.”

  She offered him a better room. He moved to a room on the second floor near Ronnie that cost $32.50 a night plus tax. He declined phone service. Then he started coming down at 8 or 8:30 every night to buy food. He would eat and go out at 10 or 10:30. “I never see him come back. We open the gate to the beach at nine P.M.,” Miriam explains. “You can go out without coming round here. One night he asked me for the laundry facility. ‘You have laundry powder?’ I get the chills. I never seen such a beautiful smile. The teeth were perfect.” In all Andrew’s time there, Miriam had never seen him smile. She thought of him as “very lonesome. He never brought any company in or talked to another guest.” Miriam, however, had no idea about Andrew’s secret life with Ronnie.

  Andrew regularly bought crack cocaine from Lyle, a dealer who sold him $10, $40, or $100 rocks (the last weighing a little over two grams). “He definitely liked his dope,” Lyle says. “I had a couple of girls working for me who sold to him. I met him personally a dozen times. He’d come three or four times a week. He was low key, always looking over his shoulder.” Andrew spent several hundred dollars a week on crack, but nobody asked any personal questions. “I was dealing with thirty or forty people per week,” Lyle says. “He was just one of them. It didn’t make any difference to me who he was. All I wanted was his money.” For Lyle, “Andrew just blended into the scenery. He was a loner.” Ronnie adds, “For people who are straight, the gay world is like any other. What the gay world is, is if you take care of me, I’ll take care of you. In the gay community we are all a close-knit people. We don’t reveal.”

  Andrew slipped into a netherworld of prostitutes, pimps, and drug dealers who frequented the neighborhood—the underbelly of the glittery world of Versace a few miles to the south. Lyle would walk past the red truck every day until Andrew transferred it on June 12 to the Thirteenth Street Municipal Parking garage a few blocks from Versace’s villa. Meanwhile, Andrew would contact Lyle on his beeper and often send Ronnie to pick up the dope at the McDonald’s two blocks from the hotel or at the nearby Denny’s. Andrew smoked the dope in his room or in Ronnie’s room. He also made a daily habit of going across the street to a liquor store and buying a pint of cheap McCormick vodka, which he sometimes downed all at once in front of the annoyed owner. When high, he’d disappear into the bathroom. “I had no idea what he was doing,” says Ronnie, who maintains that they never had sex. Ronnie was merely Andrew’s facilitator; he took umbrage whenever people at the hotel referred to him as Andrew’s “bitch.” “I’d go and cop and he’d give me twenty bucks, which is great. He never said anything as to why he was here. I copped for him. There’s other people who went out and copped for him. I knew what he was doing. He was hiding. I didn’t know it was for killing people.

  “What happened was, I was sitting out back one day. He walks by and I’m looking at him, scoping him.

  “‘You see something you like?’ Andrew asks.

  “‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You’ve got a cute ass. I could make some money off you.’

  “‘How could you make money?’

  “‘You hustle?’

  “‘I’ve done that before,’ Andrew said.

  “I asked him how big he was, and he told me. I brought him up here and he showed me. I picked up the phone. That’s how it got started.”

  He told Ronnie his name was Andy, and Ronnie helped him become a hotel-back-gate man. “He never said where he was from. I set him up with a few old men, old rich guys around here. They would use my room. I got money that way.” Ronnie claimed he knew a “sir,” knighted by the Queen, “older than God, worth ninety-three million,” whom he had met while working at a chic church in nearby Bal Harbour. “Wealthiest people in the world live there … Saks and Neiman and Gucci all have stores. Bob Dole and Sir are members of the same church.” Sir was Ronnie’s first fix-up for Andrew. According to Ronnie, Andrew also made his own pickups, on the gay cruising beach, which was five blocks away, or at the hotel next door catering to German tourists. “One day this guy he brought in had a Cartier bracelet,” Ronnie says. “When he came in, he was wearing the Cartier. When he left the building, he didn’t have it on.”

  After a while, Andrew’s cash started to run low, and Lyle sensed he might be losing a good customer. So he decided to intervene. “Two times I set him up with a couple of guys—male prostitutes.” Soon Andrew and the others were stealing jewelry. According to Lyle, “He was a male prostitute, but he was also doing burglaries, doing whatever he could to get money. He’d stay in the hotel all day long and he’d go out at night—sneak out the back and go in the back. Nobody knew his business.” The thefts were mostly jewelry—“stuff,” Lyle says, “he could fit into his backpack.” Lyle is very proud of the signet ring Andrew traded him for crack. “He took the ring right off his finger. He gave it to me and I handed him a twenty-dollar rock for it.” Andrew also traded a Walkman and a gold razor for drugs.

  On June 26, Robin Avery’s wallet was stolen from her grocery cart at a supermarket two blocks from the Normandy Plaza. Avery had noticed someone who looked like Andrew in the store just before the theft occurred. Later, a person matching Andrew’s description used one of Avery’s credit cards to purchase some items at the neighborhood Radio Shop.

  Roger Falin, the owner of the Normandy Plaza, does not venture above the lobby level. “I’ve made it a point never to go upstairs because of liability problems. I just don’t go upstairs except with a police officer.” Nobody but Ronnie paid any attention at all to Andrew, and the world he inhabited was petty and bleak. After two weeks of renting by the week, he came down to Miriam one night and said, “Miriam, I can’t find the apartment I’m looking for. I want to pay you for a month.” She gave him the key to room 322, which faced the beach, and made him a deal for rent—$650 for the month. Andrew had told her, “I love it.”

  Room 322 is entered through a narrow hallway with a closet on the left. A floral-printed polyester bedspread in kelly green with pink, peach, and blue flowers covers a double bed. The furniture is painted different colors, and the rug is green. The curtain rod is bent, a TV is stuck in one corner, and a tiny, rusted stove, sink, and refrigerator sit off to one side. There may be a view, but the windows are filthy. The tiny bathroom with a tub shower is tiled. The hotel hallways are clean and smell of ammonia, but the crystal chandeliers are broken and most of the bulbs are burned out.

  Inside his small, dingy room, which he rarely let the maids in to clean, Andrew surrounded himself with books detailing the worlds he preferred to inhabit, and into which he could further escape. By the dim light of his shabby hideout he read mostly about the famous rich—Sally Bedell Smith’s bio
graphy of William Paley, In All His Glory; Caroline Sedbohm’s biography of Condé Nast, The Man Who Was Vogue; Slim Keith’s memoir Slim, written with Annette Tapert. There was one best-seller, How the Irish Saved Civilization, and two books by Robert Graves on the emperor Claudius—a favorite subject of Andrew’s since his days at Bishop’s. In addition he was reading about the Arts and Crafts movement in John Updike’s essays on art, Just Looking, and Kenneth Clark’s The Romantic Rebellion, plus a half-dozen other books on art and architecture and one on the contemporary artist Francis Bacon, who was known to pick up rough trade. For his supper Andrew would get a slice of pizza at nearby Cozzoli’s or a tuna melt at the sub shop before disappearing out the back metal gate attached to the Cyclone fence and into the humid night.

  Andrew also apparently frequented some of South Beach’s better-known areas. Books & Books is a popular bookstore on Lincoln Road, the upscale pedestrian walk-way lined with restaurants, boutiques, and galleries. In May, Andrew must have purchased some books there, because a flier about the store’s book club sent to him under the name Andrew DeSilva was returned to the store for having the wrong address. Three employees at the Pleasure Emporium, a large porn store laid out like a supermarket on Alton Road, about a mile from Books & Books, also remember Andrew as a regular customer who purchased gay porn magazines. “He bought Jock and Inches magazines and was very polite and reserved,” says Marcia Suarez. “He was one of our regulars. He always paid cash. He’d say hello and smile, but if I tried to make conversation, he wouldn’t talk. He stayed quiet.” She adds, “He blended in with everybody on the street.”

  On July 7, it was nearly two weeks since Andrew had last visited Lyle. Andrew was getting desperate. He walked around the block near the hotel to the Cash on the Beach pawnshop owned by Vivian Olivia and showed her a gold coin that he had stolen from Lee Miglin. Olivia weighed the gold and told him she’d give him $190. Andrew was upset. “Why are you paying me so little if I paid so much more for it?” he whined. “I explained to him how the pawnshop worked,” Olivia recalls. “So I ask him for his I.D., and he gave me his U.S. passport, which said Andrew P. Cunanan. I asked him his address. Andrew answered, “6979 Collins Avenue, room 205.” Instead of his own room, 322, he had given Ronnie’s. Olivia remembers that he had a two-day growth of beard. His skin was pale, and he was wearing a baseball cap and round glasses. He signed the papers “Andrew Cunanan.” “It’s nineteen dollars a month,” Olivia explained. “You miss three months, you lose it.” Andrew assured her, “I’ll be back before three months.”

  As required by law, Olivia immediately turned over the paperwork, including a copy of Andrew’s signed application stating he was residing at the Normandy Plaza, to the Miami Beach Police Department. There it languished.

  Whether Andrew sought other ways to make money on the run is subject to question. Jack Campbell, a politically prominent, wealthy gay bathhouse owner in Miami Beach who hires models for videos and spends part of the year in San Diego, claims Andrew first applied for a job with him in San Diego. Andrew kept his business card and in May looked Campbell up at his house in Coconut Grove. Two Venezuelan employees who are no longer around to verify the story apparently gave Andrew directions in Spanish on how to get to Campbell’s house by Metrorail. Campbell is under the impression that the person he dealt with was bilingual—Andrew was not. When he showed up, Campbell says, he didn’t recognize him. “I must have given him my business card and said, ‘If you’re ever in South Beach …’ I do that to a lot of young men.” Campbell, who advertises in several gay publications, says, “I just assume he was looking through and saw my name and recognized my name.”

  Campbell recalls that Andrew, who was wearing a baseball cap and carrying a black backpack, was much too unattractive to be a model. He balked at taking his shirt off to be photographed and would remove only his shorts. He wouldn’t give an address, saying, “I live in South Beach. I’m moving, so I’ll let you know.” Campbell told him, “To be a model you have to have a tan. You’re so pasty-faced. You’re fleshy. I don’t know what kind of model you think you’d be.”

  On June 21, the day before Campbell left on a trip to Europe, he claims, Andrew showed up looking for work again at his health club, Club Body Center. “He was pasty as can be and fatter than ever. I said, ‘Don’t bother. I don’t want anyone looking like you working here.’ He had a growth of beard, his cap on backward, with glasses and that big bag. I was sort of nasty to him.” Andrew was nasty right back: “I don’t give a fuck whether you hire me or not!”

  Considering the pains Andrew was taking to hide himself at the Normandy Plaza, the best explanation for his interest in model work—if indeed he sought it—is that it might have been a more upscale way to hustle. The only bar in Miami Beach that Andrew is known to have frequented—at least until a few days before he shot Versace—was a gay hustler bar called the Boardwalk in North Beach. A pickup place for older men, it features go-go boys who semi-strip on the “block,” a wooden platform in the front, and then go around pressing themselves up against the patrons, who shove tips into their underwear. Mickey, one of the bartenders, says Andrew’s “was a face we remember seeing a lot of” in May and early June. As for South Beach, Bobby Guilmartin, vice president of the Florida Hotel Network, who knows the scene well, says he doesn’t think that someone like Andrew, in search of older men, would spend much time trolling there. “South Beach is about being Venezuelan, twenty-one, and having designer pubic hair.”

  One place he did drop in was the popular 11th Street Diner on Washington and Eleventh. Andrew was definitely remembered there, and the location carries a special irony. The diner is located right across the street from the Miami Beach police department, and the chief and his minions eat there on a regular basis.

  29

  What’s Gay Gotto Do with It?

  IN EVERY JURISDICTION where Andrew had previously murdered, law enforcement was convinced that he was gone and never coming back. “We knew he was headed east; we thought he was headed south,” says Kevin Rickett, the Minneapolis-based head of the FBI’s Cunanan investigation. “We didn’t see him backtracking. He wasn’t staying around to make friends where he was.” But where would Andrew go?

  William Hagmaier, the head of the FBI profiling unit, who had taken Ted Bundy’s final confessions, remembers that in a meeting in late May he speculated, “This guy’s making a Bundy run; he’s going to hit Florida next.” Bundy, after crossing the country from the Northwest, killed in Milwaukee and Chicago before going through New Jersey and Washington and Atlanta and ending up in Florida. “It was a wild guess, because at that point we didn’t know where his contacts and where his holes might be. But then, Bundy had none in Florida either. He just decided to head south because it was cold.” Hagmaier’s hunch was on target, but he was not really listened to. The profiling unit had not been invited to join the case until after William Reese’s murder. Moreover, according to FBI records of May 20, the unit had not received copies of pertinent interviews about Andrew or investigative reports or copies of crime-scene and autopsy photos, which the Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit (CASKU) considered “important to fully develop offender characteristics.” (In another CASKU report, dated July 16, the day after Versace’s murder, the profiling unit would again state that it “does not have the necessary information … to assist in providing an assessment of Cunanan.”)

  The FBI was following its policy of not paying close attention to character traits in a fugitive investigation, and Kevin Rickett, a thirty-one-year-old, fresh-faced, analytical type who looks more like a grad student than an FBI honcho, didn’t think he needed any profiling help. “We already knew who Cunanan was,” Rickett said dismissively. “We interviewed hundreds and hundreds of his associates. We don’t need the profiling unit to tell us he’s going to hang out in gay bars.”

  On May 13, Philip Merrill called the FBI in Chicago to volunteer his and Liz Coté’s help in finding Andrew, whom he characterized as �
��a delicate butterfly who constantly fantasized about being rich.” Later he spoke to an FBI agent in the Los Angeles office. Merrill says, “When the FBI asked, ‘Where do you think he’ll go and who do you think he’ll get in touch with?’ I said ‘Florida’ and I said ‘Versace.’ There is no question I said this to the guy, the local FBI agent.” Merrill is adamant. “When the FBI asked who would he hook up with, I said, ‘Gianni Versace and Harry de Wildt should be identified. And think of Florida and nice places. Plus he’d have an easier time concealing himself there.’ I told that to the first local agent.” (The FBI agent in Los Angeles did not file a report on the conversation, and refuses to comment.)

  Merrill says he told the FBI, “Think places you’d see on Robin Leach [host of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous]. He’s not going to go to Newark.” In Merrill’s FBI report, filed from Chicago and obtained with his permission under the Freedom of Information Act, Florida and Versace are not mentioned. Merrill is merely quoted as saying “he lived ‘the lifestyles of the rich and famous’ by hanging on and pretending” and “if and when the authorities caught up to Cunanan he would probably be found in some exclusive country club or expensive restaurant.”