Lassiter 03 - False Dawn (14 page)

Eventually, the traffic cleared, and I headed into town, passing Sweetwater, home to several thousand Nicaraguan refugees, heading into Little Havana, then south on Ponce de Leon, through the Gables, and into Coconut Grove. My head was clanging by the time I downshifted into second and pulled onto Kumquat Street. The neighborhood was quiet, except for the buzz and crackle of insects and the warbling of a mockingbird in the marlberry bush in my front yard. By this time of night, most birds were nuzzling their mates and telling whoppers about the fat, juicy night crawler that got away. But here was my mocker chirping midnight melodies. He sang his own song, then a few he picked up during the day from a yellow-billed cuckoo, and if I could whistle “Raindrops Are Falling on My Head,” he’d give that a try, too.

Mimus polyglottos
, Charlie Riggs calls my feathery friend. Mimic of many tongues. I like him because he’s a tough bird who chases away crows and cats and even an occasional German shepherd. Charlie says he’s a bachelor, just like me. They’re the only birds who sing at night, crooning their own Personals ad.
High-flying male mocker with stunning white wing patches seeks sleek mate for dining, gliding, and more
. So far old Mimus hadn’t had much luck. He was still serenading the crickets, but then, who was I to gloat?

My neighborhood is what the guidebooks would call eclectic, if they called it anything, which they don’t. To me, it’s just weird. Not fancy enough for the
crème de la
crumbs, real estate developers and drug dealers, it is home to a collection of what I call soloists, men and women who reject marital and suburban bliss.

In the blank marked “occupation” on the census form, my neighbors are all “other.” Geoffrey, who lives in the stucco house behind the poinciana trees, is a free-lance cameraman who works the wee hours and peddles videos of late-night car crashes and drug busts to the local TV stations. On the other side of the limeberry shrubs, Mako is esconced in a wooden tree house reachable only by rope ladder. He trades custom-made hammocks for Florida crawfish with Homer Thigpen, a lobster pot poacher down the street. Phoebe with the bright red hair hosts swingers parties complete with nude diving contests in her swimming pool. And Robert and Robert—art gallery owners—keep to themselves behind the hibiscus hedge. All of which makes me the most bourgeois of the bunch.

My parking spot in the gravel under a chinaberry tree was occupied by a red BMW convertible. On my front porch, a lady in a red leather mini and white silk blouse sat in Granny Lassiter’s cherrywood rocker. Granny used to rock while sipping from a Mason jar filled with liquid propane she called home brew. Now the Lady in Red sat there holding a supermarket bag. A loaf of Cuban bread stuck out the top. You hungry? Lourdes Soto asked.

In the glow of a three-quarter moon enhanced by the misty light of the mercury vapor anticrime lights, Lourdes appeared as an apparition, her creamy complexion in soft focus. Her slight smile had the peacefulness of a Madonna, and for a moment I thought maybe I’d been hit harder than I realized. When I got close enough for her to see my face, she let out a low whistle. A fine and dandy lady whistle. “Is this what you downtown lawyers do on weekends? Flex that Y-chromosome, burn off some testosterone?”

“I was working.”

She sniffed at the air and didn’t smell frangipani. “You sure you weren’t runner-up in a beer-guzzling contest?” She showed me a wide smile, giving me a good look at scarlet lips and white teeth. “Maybe I should put something on those scrapes,” she said.

I gestured toward the groceries. “After you cook some dinner.”

“
Cook
? What do you think, I came here to make paella and
boniatos
? I’m not one of those traditional Cuban girls, convent schooling, black beans and rice with Mami, waiting for the men to come home. That went out with chaperones. We’re having sandwiches, Jake.”

“Okay, okay. Sandwiches are fine.”

I put a shoulder against the humidity-swollen front door and gave a good shove. It groaned open and I chivalrously allowed Lourdes to enter my palace. She surveyed the surroundings and remained graciously silent. In decorating, I have spared great expense.

Lourdes didn’t blink an eye at the coffee table made of a sailboard propped on concrete blocks. She didn’t fuss at two weeks of newspapers spread across sofa and floor. She ignored a rusty scuba tank, a wetsuit that had dripped itself dry into a potted geranium, now comatose with saltwater poisoning, and she didn’t comment on my architectural skill at building a giant house of cards out of empty cartons of home delivery pizza.

I flicked on the lamp with the translucent rotating Dolphins helmet for a shade. She looked at me in the orange-and-turquoise light and gently touched my forehead with what I took for sisterly concern. “You have any hydrogen peroxide?”

“You gonna nurse me, or you planning to burn this place to the ground?”

“Forget it. Your head is so hard, a few dents and scrapes won’t do any damage.” She put a hand on my shoulder and steered me toward the stairs. “Why don’t you shower? I may tidy up a bit.”

“You sure? I don’t want you to violate some feminist manifesto.”

“Don’t be a jerk. Go!” She ran a hand through my beer-sticky hair, then paused, a puzzled look crossing her face. “Is it my imagination or is that a peanut in your ear?”

I
showered and slipped into blue nylon running shorts. The occasion didn’t seem formal, so I skipped the shirt, socks, and shoes. I found her in the kitchen. The living room had been rearranged, dusted, and sorted out. “What I assumed to be garbage, I stacked in the corner by the door,” she said. “The cans and bottles are in separate bags, the newspapers tied in bundles for recycling.”

“Thanks. Those sneakers with the missing tongue and flapping soles were my favorites, but I can live without them. And that’s quarter-inch outhaul line around the papers.”

The coffee cups and cereal bowls that had filled the sink were now in the dishwasher, which had come out of retirement and was happily chugging away. The countertops had been wiped clean, and the floor mopped. And I always thought the kitchen tile was gray.

I gave her a look. “What was that speech about not being the domestic type?”

“You exceeded even my limits of tolerance.”

“I guess the place could use a woman’s touch.”

“Or even a human touch,” she said.

She rooted around in a drawer and came up with a hammer, a screwdriver, some matches, a deck of playing cards, and some plastic gizmos that were once attached to some appliance or another. “Don’t you have any flatware, or do you just use your hands?”

“The
flatware
,” I informed her, “is with the
al fresco
utensils.” I opened a drawer filled with paper plates, paper cups, and plastic forks, spoons, and knives.

“Environmentally unsound,” she said.

“I reuse the forks and spoons,” I replied, defending myself against charges of pillaging the earth.

“I can see that.” She was inspecting a fork for toxic scum. After some sudsing and rinsing, she made sandwiches of roast turkey, cream cheese, and strawberry jam on Cuban bread. I watched her slender hands moving quickly. I watched the muscles in the calves of her legs as she moved across the small kitchen. I watched myself watch her and wondered what was going on.

“You know Cubans have a weakness for sweets.” She added an extra dollop of jam to her bread. “This one’s yours.” She slid a plate across the counter to me. It contained a thick sandwich, a garnish of fresh pineapple, and a pile of banana chips. “Beer?” she asked.

“No, thanks. I filled my quota today. Besides, the combination …”

She shrugged, opened the fridge, and found some milk that didn’t predate the Carter Administration. We ate standing up at the counter, looking at each other, contemplating the situation. At least that’s what I was doing. What
was
going on here? After a moment of silence, I said, “We sure needed the rain, huh?”

She looked at me as if I were a complete fool, which of course I was. There is that peculiar mating dance for the species that doesn’t sing songs or lock antlers to win its mate. We paw the earth and shuffle and smile and chat about everything and nothing and send out little coded signals. I decided to dispense with the meteorological insights. She touched her ebony hair and smoothed it back over an ear. She cocked her head and looked at me from under dark eyelashes. I responded by taking a bite of my sweet turkey sandwich and leaving a glob of cream cheese stuck in the corner of my mouth. When it comes to
savoir faire
, I come up a little short.

“Let me,” Lourdes said, with a come-hither look. She moved close enough for us to breathe each other’s air, and she scraped up the cream cheese with the ruby red fingernail of a pinky. Then she stuck the fingernail in my mouth. And then the whole finger. When the finger came out, her tongue went in. We stood there, kissing soft and slow, pressed against each other, my hands running from her shoulders to her buttocks. She arched herself into me, running the tips of her nails across my bare back, full lips caressing mine. I cupped my hands under her leather-clad bottom and lifted her off the floor, bringing her to my height. She wrapped her legs around me, and we stood there, motionless except for the grinding of loins.

“The bedroom’s upstairs,” I whispered.

“Here’s fine,” she said.

And it was. I stepped out of my shorts. She wriggled out of her mini and pulled the white silk blouse over her head. Underneath she wore lacy white panties and matching bra. From somewhere she produced a foil-wrapped condom. She opened the foil with her teeth, smoothing the condom on me with steady fingers. She slipped out of the panties and bra with no help from me and was left in her red stiletto high heels. The shoes stayed on as I lifted her again, feeling her moist heat pressed against me. My hands flowed over her, from the shoulders through the smooth valley of her back to the silken skin where her hips flared into that wondrous sweep of womanhood.

“I want you,” she breathed into my ear.

“Whatever the lady wants.”

Our engines hummed along, the fires building. She raised her breasts to my mouth, cradling them in each hand. Her nipples were taut and erect, startling in their darkness against the creaminess of her skin. I lifted her buttocks higher and pressed into her. As she took me into her sweet soft vise, her body stiffened and her eyes widened, nearly fearful. Then she exhaled a slow warm breath, closed her eyes and locked onto me. There was a perfect meshing of gears, temperature rising, cadence matching. When my pace increased, hers matched stride. When my breathing deepened, hers followed. Our tempo built to a crescendo, she dug her nails into my back, wailed some entreaty in Spanish I had never heard, threw her head back, and tightened her grip while spasms shook us both.

“Good Lord,” I said, at last.

“
Ay, Dios mío
,” she breathed in my ear.

Later, upstairs in the bed under the paddle fan, her head cradled in the crook of my right arm, she said, “I nearly forgot why I came to see you.”

“It wasn’t to cook—sorry—make sandwiches?”

“No.”

“Or to clean my kitchen?”

“Hardly.”

“Or to fix my clock?”

“That just happened.
Yo no planee
.”

Uh-huh.

“Want to talk about it?” I asked. Lately, I’ve become sensitive to a woman’s needs. I’m not sure why, but it seems only fair. My rules are simple: I say what I feel, and I never pretend, mislead, or say
I love you
unless I mean it, so the words have seldom been heard. After an encounter, I try to talk, and not about the recent narrowing of the goalposts in college football. Some years ago, in the dentist’s office, I picked up one of those women’s magazines with a bosomy woman in a low-cut dress on the cover. I took a quiz on my lovemaking skills and made Dean’s List in technical proficiency but flunked the part about postcoital cuddling and conversation. So I read some of the other stuff, too, about connection and communication. Now, I’ve picked up the buzzwords about how men and women misunderstand each other. Men speak the language of power and independence; women speak of closeness and intimacy. Men
report
what they do; women
reveal
their feelings. So here I was, a former varsity member of the AFC Eastern Division All-Star Party team, master of the one-night stand, lying entangled with Lourdes Soto with lots of me touching lots of her, trying to make sense of it all.

“Talk about it?” she responded.

“Like what just happened. What it means.”

She chuckled into my ear. “You mean, will I call you tomorrow?”

She was mocking me, just like
Mimus polyglottos
.

“I was just surprised, that’s all. I wasn’t expecting this.”

“So you want to analyze it?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. I just thought that, as a woman, you might want to talk… .”

“Hey, big guy, just lean back and enjoy it.”

She was tracing figure eights on my chest with her manicured nails. And then the eights moved south to my stomach. And then lower still. Soon her lips took over the movements. I gave up and did what I was told to do.

I
have some news for you about the Crespo case,” Lourdes Soto said, her head resting on my chest.

“No business now. Let’s enjoy the moment.”

“
Good
news.”

“Whatever it is can wait.”

“Okay, but I’ve got sworn statements from two witnesses that the Russian threatened Crespo on several occasions and once attacked him with a knife.”

“What? Who?” I sat up so quickly Lourdes nearly slid off the bed.

“Tomas Rivera and Lazaro Soler. They’re on your witness list.”

“Sure they are. I listed everybody who worked for Atlantic Seaboard, just to cover all the bases. But I’ve interviewed them, and they didn’t see, hear, or know anything.”

Lourdes propped herself on an elbow and ran a fingernail across my thigh. “Maybe you didn’t smile when you asked the questions.”

I wanted to believe her. And when we want to believe, we sometimes do. But Francisco Crespo never told me about being attacked. “Crespo told me he owed Smorodinsky some money, and they argued about it, but he said nothing about a knife.”