Blood Relations (8 page)

The woman smiled up at them. They laughed silently in the viewfinder, and their feet in the water kicked up froth but made no sound. Again and again.

The camera whirred and clicked. Finally Caitlin signaled the end of the roll.

Someone was whispering midway through a story.

“She puked down his back, all over his jacket, which was this really fab green silk, and he was looking the other way and he didn’t even notice because he was like totally smashed, and she just walked out of the restaurant-”

Tommy trotted back down the beach to reload. Caitlin could have done it, but he considered it his job. Rafael stayed where he was, arms crossed, kicking idly at a scrap of driftwood. With deft movements, Tommy detached the camera from the lens, attached a loaded camera, then took the film out of the first. He marked the roll, zipped it onto a bag on the cart, reloaded, then jogged back to the models, his black hair flowing out behind him.

Sullivan asked, “Who is that kid? He looks sort of Asian.”

Caitlin said, “His father’s Chinese, and he’s eighteen years old. Leave him alone.”

“You’re in a funny mood. I was only asking.”

Caitlin grabbed some bottled water out of a small ice chest and unscrewed the cap. She had planned to shoot the other roll of film. Just in case. In case what? Maybe Martin Cassie, hired by the Grand Caribe Resortand who happened to be Uta’s husband-wouldn’t like any of these. Maybe Marty didn’t like doing favors.

Maybe Caitlin hadn’t kissed Uta’s fanny sincerely enough. Maybe it would have been better not to have taken this job at all.

Still waiting, the male model cupped his hands and shouted, “Are we about done? I have to take a leak.”

Caitlin tossed the bottle back into the cooler. “Yes!

That’s it! We’re done.”

Sullivan swung his feet off the beach lounger. “You girls go to the van and fetch me some water, will you?”

“Have some of mine.” The Haitian girl held out her insulated tumbler with the straw through the top.

“Don’t make me be rude. Go on, I have to talk to Caitlin. And tell that Chinese kid to give us a minute as well.” He waited for them to leave, then walked over to where Caitlin was unsnapping the latches on her camera case.

“What is it, Sullivan?”

“Are you going to testify against Klaus Ruffini, if there’s a trial?”

“I haven’t thought about it.” She laid the camera into its fitted nic’he and closed the lid.

“Have you been to the state attorney’s office yet?”

Caitlin stopped with the telephoto half off the tripod.

“No. What for?”

“They had me down there for two hours yesterday, asking questions. You mean nobody called you? I went with Mirabelle-you know Mirabelle. She said she didn’t see much, but she certainly did. Anyway, we got lost in the criminal courts-God, what a freak show!and finally stumbled into the right building. Not gray and blocky, as you would expect. The walls are turquoise, and the carpet is deep pink. Sort of Kafka tropicale.

They wanted to know exactly what I saw, what I was doing at the club that night, who else was there, who I had come with, whether I was high. As if I were on trial. You’ll never guess who’s in command of the interrogations.”

Caitlin lowered the lens into its case. “Who?”

“You remember that boy who died in a motorcycle accident last year? Stavros? Don’t look so blank, Caitlin.

You know who I mean. You and he worked on a French sportswear catalog.”

She stared at him for another second, then said, “Yes, of course,”

“Well, the prosecutor is Stavros’s father. Can you believe it? His name is Hagen, a hulking, stone-faced man with a government haircut and an atrocious blue suit. I’d never have guessed, because there’s not much resemblance to Stavros, but when I told him I was a model, he said his son was a model on South Beachwas, as in deceased. So I asked who, and he said Matthew Hagen, who had also called himself Stavros. So I said, yes, of course I had known his son, that we’d been friends, in fact, and that I was terribly shocked when he died, although I had been out of the country at the time.”

Caitlin began to fold up her tripod.

Sullivan said, “Hagen asked me if I would testify if it came to a trial, and I said I would. Are you sure he hasn’t tried to contact you?”

“Positive.”

“He must have done. You were a witness.”

“He has you,” Caitlin said. “You saw more than I did.”

She lowered the umbrella.

Sullivan followed her back to the cart. “I’m not keen to be the only one. Not that I’m afraid of George Fonseca or a half-rate movie actor or even Klaus Ruffini. In fact, the publicity couldn’t hurt. But if I’m the only strong witness besides Ali-well, I’d feel quite outnumbered.”

She loaded the tripod and jammed the umbrella into a corner of the cart. “Sullivan, for a minute there I thought you were developing a conscience. I mean, you didn’t do a damn thing when Ali was attacked.”

Squinting slightly in the sun, he lowered his face to hers. He smiled. “Neither did you, darling.”

“Caitlin?” Tommy Chang was standing a few yards away with the reflectors, which he had twisted into smaller silver circles. “You ready to go?”

She turned. “Sure. Do me a favor? Load up everything and take it to the studio, okay?” She grabbed her Nikon and slung the strap over her shoulder. “And run the film by the lab.”

“Where are you goings”

“To get paid for this. See you later.”

Sullivan waved his fingers. “Ciao.”

Caitlin headed west, crossing Ocean Drive with its slow traffic and packs of tourists, then going farther into the business district of South Beach. Marty Cassie lived on Jefferson Avenue. He had said he would be there. Maybe this time she wouldn’t have to go to hell and back, looking for her money.

She had brought her camera along because she always brought her camera, a used Nikon she’d bought in New York years ago. She could hide behind its 70-to 210-millimeter zoom and shoot inconspicuously from a distance.

Commercial photography paid the bills, but her heart was elsewhere.

On Washington Avenue she stopped under the shade of an awning outside a market. She looked through the lens at a thin, gray-haired woman across the street bathing herself with water from a garden hose. Caitlin had seen her before, usually on one of the benches near the police station. The woman wore red shorts and canvas slippers, and her breasts hung loosely inside a faded halter top. The hose curled out the side door of a French bistro, and a white-jacketed kitchen helper leaned on his elbows on the railing, smoking, waiting for her to finish so he could mop the steps. The water made rainbows of mist. Caitlin could see everything so clearly through the lens. The white wall, white jacket, blue painted railing, red shorts, the woman’s glistening black skin, and a splash of silvery water.

In the instant before her finger pressed the shutter release, she wondered if the finished print would show all this. Too often, between the lens and the developer the light changed, or the balance shifted, and the result would be no better than an ordinary snapshot. Sometimes, though, her photos were good. More than good. They made her certain that yes!, she could do this, put it all on film, more real than life. Caitlin used to work hard at taking photos that would look good in a galleryOnce she had wanted them to mean something. She didn’t think much about that anymore. They meant what they meant.

The woman was singing now. Caitlin could see her mouth move, see her thin arms swaying above her head.

The kitchen helper stuck his cigarette in his mouth and applauded. Caitlin kept her finger on the shutter, and the camera clicked and whirred to the end of the roll.

She had thousands of photographs, color and blackand-white and weird combinations, with no idea what they meant. Less idea now, in fact, than when she had begun.

She found Marty Cassie’s apartment on a shady residential block in a fourplex dating from the sixties. Whoever had renovated the place had painted it pink and put a horizontal stripe of purple at the top, trying to get the art deco look, though the architecture was a few decades off.

Caitlin pressed the buzzer outside his door on the first floor. A business card was taped under the peephole: Martin Cassie, Tropic Realty and Investments.

In the still air, she took off her cap and fanned her face.

A muffled salsa tune came from upstairs. The tiled hall ran straight back through the building, opening up to flowering shrubs and a fountain. A plump gray cat in the next doorway got up, stretched, then came to see who she was.

Frank Tolin had persuaded Marty to let Caitlin do the resort brochure. Frank was a lawyer downtown, and the two men had some business dealings together. If Marty didn’t pay Caitlin, Frank would handle it. But then she would have to listen to Frank tell her how much he had done for her, and wasn’t she lucky?

Rumbling with purrs, the cat wound itself around Caitlin’s ankles. She bent over to scratch under its chin.

“Hello, kitty-cat.”

She and Frank had an off-on relationship. Currently on, she thought. In the middle of the Miami Vice craze, she had come down to see what was going on, liked the sunshine, and stayed. No, not entirely true. She had been fired from a Vogue shoot for showing up stoned and had no money to get back to New York. Frank had let her stay at his place in Coconut Grove till she found an apartment.

They had been together-off and on-ever since. Nobody was talking about marriage. Frank had been married and divorced twice already, and Caitlin liked to come and go as she pleased.

She pressed her ear to the door of Marty’s apartment.

“Damn.” She rang once more, then gave up. He could be anywhere.

At a pay phone a couple of blocks away she left her number at his office and on his beeper. She carried a beeper herself; Marty couldn’t say he wasn’t able to reach her. She checked a few of the sidewalk restaurants and two real estate offices. No one had seen Marty Cassie.

Unwrapping a deli sandwich as she walked, Caitlin headed north toward Lincoln Road. Tommy Chang had an extra key to her studio; he would have taken the cart and equipment up there by now. She owed him a hundred dollars. That and processing the film they had shot would just about clear out her account-unless she put off paying the rent on the studio for another week or so. Or borrowed the money from Frank. At least she didn’t have to worry about her apartment. Frank owned the building and wouldn’t let her pay.

Stopping at a crosswalk in a crowd of pedestrians, Caitlin waited for the light to change. In the middle of the next block she spotted the Apocalypse, looking pretty tame in broad daylight, Just another white concrete front with an awning over the door, except this building used to be synagogue, which might have amused her under other circumstances. It had curves like Mosaic tablets at the roof-two curves and a dome with silver paint. She supposed the congregation had died off or had moved a few miles north, or off the Beach entirely. A year ago, sure of herself, Caitlin had lain in wait with her camera until a family of Hasidic Jews had wandered by, father in black suit and hat, mother in calico dress and head scarf following behind with the children. Caitlin had clicked happily away, and when she got the photos back, they were one cliche after another.

The traffic light changed. Caitlin didn’t move, only gazed through her sunglasses across the intersection.

The prospect of having to talk to Sam Hagen was going through her mind. Having to sit across a desk from him, being interrogated, as Sullivan had been interrogated.

That Sam had not already contacted her might mean he wasn’t going to. But if he did, what then?

Why had she been at the Apocalypse that night? Well, taking freelance society photographs for a local magazine. And why had she not confronted those men, pulled her friend to safety, screamed for help?

Because in the dark I couldn’t see; then it was too late.

And because, if you really want to know, at first I was mad at Ali, that she would let this happen, for nothing, for a laugh, for the pure hell of it. Sam knew such things happened, because she had trusted him enough to tell him about that other life. .

Sam Hagen, his steady gray eyes on her. As if he had a right to make judgments about her. About anybody, the bastard, They had met when he started working at Frank’s office. She had joked around with him. Nothing serious. But the way he looked at her, she knew what he was thinking.

He didn’t do anything about it, though. Then later, after he’d gone back to his old job as a prosecutor and she was in one of her off periods with Frank, Sam Hagen showed up one night at her door, and she, like a fool, opened it.

He let her believe he was unhappy, that he would leave his wife. Then after several weeks, and with a suddenness that stunned her, he said he couldn’t see her anymore. So sorry. Good-bye. She might have brought herself to forgive him-he had a family, after all-if she hadn’t found out that he’d expected to be named as the interim state attorney. Cheating on your wife is one thing; fucking your career is another.

By pure accident, Caitlin spotted Marty Cassie coming out of a bank on Lincoln Road. His hair was pulled back into a little ponytail, which he had fastened with a red rubber band, and he carried a small leather bag and a cellular phone.

When she planted herself in front of him, he held out an arm. “Caitlin! How’s it going? You look great!” He smiled at her through a pair of Polo sunglasses.

She didn’t smile back. “I went by your apartment. You said to come pick up a check.”

“Today?” He seemed puzzled and began to walk west on the mall. Years ago auto traffic had been replaced with planters, fountains, and pedestrians. “It’s Saturday.”

Caitlin fell into step. “I don’t care what day it is, Marty.

You said you’d be home. You’d pay me when I finished the shoot for the Grand Caribe brochure. It’s finished.

Where’s the check?”

He shrugged. “Where are the photos?”

She said, “The money is for processing costs. You gave me a retainer of a thousand dollars. Now I need five hundred for processing and printing. After that, I’ll want the balance.”