Miami Midnight (5 page)

Gaby wasn’t going to consider such a thing. “Jupiter helps me. After all, I can’t watch Mother constantly, especially in the middle of the night when she roams through the house with her shaker of martinis, playing old Frank Sinatra records. I’ve got to sleep sometime, too, you know.”

“Gaby, she can’t take care of herself when she’s here alone.”

“She’s not alone in the daytime,” she reminded him. “Angel and Elena are here.”

The Escuderos lived in the Colliers’ garage apartment. Elena did housework for families on Palm Island, and her son Angel tended yards.

“Those damned Cubans,” Dodd said, exasperated. “Your grass hasn’t been mowed in weeks. And while we’re on the subject, Angel’s probably the one supplying your mother with booze.”

“You don’t know that.” They always argued about this, she thought. Dodd felt the Escuderos ought to be paying rent. And if they couldn’t afford it, the garage apartment ought to be let to someone who could.

“Those two are about as much good around here as the damned old dog. Which brings us to another subject. Gaby, you’re not going to like this, but I’ve got to remind you this old place isn’t safe. In fact, living on the waterfront anywhere in Miami these days is dangerous.”

Gaby braced herself against the sink, overpoweringly tired. “Please, Dodd, I’ve had a—” She caught herself just in time. There were no words to describe the day she’d just had “Can we discuss this some other time?”

He took her by the shoulders and turned her around to face him. “Gaby, I’m serious.” His craggy face showed that he was. “We’ve had an epidemic of waterfront burglaries where gangs pull power cruisers up to private docks, break into houses, and ransack them. It’s almost like a military operation. You wouldn’t believe it. They storm these places like commando teams.”

She shook her head. “We haven’t got anything to steal.”

“They don’t know that,” he said grimly. “These thugs don’t think. They’re too coked-up, drugged-up, to know what they’re doing. With two women alone in this place—” He stopped abruptly.

Gaby felt a shiver of sudden fear. Burglary attacks like he was describing should not happen in a modern day city, but Dodd was saying that in Miami, they did. “Elena and Angel are right there in the garage,” she said. “They’d call the police if something like that happened. And there are neighbors on both sides of us.”

“Don’t rely on the Cubans. And half the houses on this street are empty.” His expression was still hard. “Honey, I know you don’t want to believe all this, sometimes I don’t believe it myself, but Miami was an entirely different place four or five years ago, when you left. Before we started being overwhelmed with the garbage we’ve got here now.”

She gave him a startled look. “Oh, Dodd, that’s not fair?

“Fair? There’s nothing fair about it!” He turned away from her, running his fingers through his hair. “Gaby, these
latinos
are turning Miami into a damned banana republic. In another ten years they’ll outnumber the Americans.”

“What’s happened to you?” she asked. “I’ve never heard you talk this way!”

“What’s happened to me?” He paced the length of the kitchen. “I’ve been living in Miami, that’s what’s happened. You have to be here to realize the extent of the problem.”

“But the Latins aren’t the only minority group in Miami,” she protested. “You can’t blame them for everything. What about the Haitians, the Jamaicans, the—”

He whirled to face her. “Gaby, before you accuse me of being bigoted and intolerant, just remember—we’ve had a flood of refugees big enough to overwhelm any city of this size. They clog the welfare rolls, their politics are just about what you’d expect, and culturally they’re still somewhere in the twelfth century.”

“Dodd—”

“They have a high rate of poverty and disease,” he went on adamantly. “They’re uneducated, ignorant, corrupt, and superstitious. They even practice some kind of filthy voodoo!”

There was a silence, then Gaby murmured, “Are you through?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t expect you to agree with me. But then you haven’t been here the last five years.”

“Dodd, I went to school with Cuban kids. The exiles I knew weren’t ignorant and uneducated. Most of them were professionals, doctors and lawyers, people who’d had money once.”

“You went to Ransom Country Day,” he reminded her, “an elite private school. You weren’t going to meet the other kind.”

“Maybe. But from what I’ve seen since I’ve been back, the Latins in Miami have done very well. Why, this afternoon I was on assignment at a fashion show at an estate in Coral Gables—”

She stopped, dismayed, remembering the scene in the Santo Marins’ garden. It practically reinforced everything he was saying!

Dodd didn’t notice her abrupt silence. “Oh, the
latinos
have made money all right. I deal with them every day. Multimillionaires big in South American banking, export-import, Miami real estate...” He paused significantly. “And the biggest drug empire the world’s ever seen.”

Gaby couldn’t speak. She was thinking it all made sense. And yet it was too simple. Too patently unfair.

“Look, Mouse, everything you’ve heard about Miami is true. The extent of the drug traffic here boggles the mind. There’s so much money from cocaine in circulation that the second biggest problem, after how to smuggle drugs into the country, is what to do with all the cash.”

Gaby thought of the two men making their deal under the palm trees. She shuddered.

This time Dodd saw it and said quickly, “Lord, I’m sorry, honey. You’re tired and I didn’t mean to come on so strong. The last thing I want to do is scare you to death. But if you live in Miami you have to be careful.”

For a long moment they simply gazed at each other in silence. The quiet of the humid night enveloped them there under the bright kitchen lights. There was so much between them that needed to be said, and neither was willing to begin.

Finally, Dodd sighed. “Gaby, your mother is right about one thing,” he said softly. “It would be a lot easier if you did marry me.”

It wasn’t a proposal, it was a statement of fact. And so very like Dodd, she thought, to come out baldly with it like that. She didn’t know the details of Dodd’s marriage or divorce, but she knew he would tell her if she asked. Everything about him now said that he was willing and ready to explain.

Suddenly she wasn’t sure that she wanted to hear it. That surprised her. But in the last five years she’d learned that who had loved whom—especially at eighteen—and who had not was no longer burningly important.

“I think,” she said evenly, “we ought to go see if my mother’s ready for bed.”

A half an hour later they walked out to Dodd’s Porsche. As he got into it, the storm that had been threatening all evening heralded its arrival in a wild burst of wind that made them gasp.

“I’d better help you shut up things.” Dodd had to shout as a gust ripped into the trees and sent palm fronds and leaves showering down.

Gaby grabbed at her hair, pulling it out of her eyes and mouth. “No, I’ll do it. I have to put out pots for the leaks.”

“Hell, I forgot about that damned roof.” He peered up at her through his open window. “You’d better let me help.”

She only wanted him to leave. The day had been endless, and she was exhausted. “No, I’m used to it.”

“Don’t forget to lock all those glass doors,” he shouted. “Remember what I told you about the waterfront side.”

On impulse, she bent to the open car window. “Dodd, do you know someone named James Santo Marin?”

“What?” A pelting burst of rain spattered around them, almost drowning their words. “Yes.” He grimaced. “Why?”

Gaby was immediately sorry she’d asked. “Nothing, just a name someone mentioned today.”

“Flashy son of a bitch. Runs Santo Marin Hermanos Imports. And a bank.” A roll of thunder blotted out some of his words as he put the car into gear. “—and stay away from him!”

Gaby stood for a moment watching the red dots of the Porsche’s taillights as Dodd slowed for the security check at the Palm Island guard gate, then turned onto the bridge to the MacArthur Causeway. Beyond, the giant white cruise liners in the port of Miami were bathed in a pool of garish light. Lightning ripped a blazing crack in the dark sky above the ships, then died away.

She turned back to the house. The driveway was already littered with torn leaves. She made herself pick her way carefully as the wind whipped at her clothes. The lights in the Escuderos’ apartment were off. There wasn’t even the blue-white glow of the television set. Angel and his mother had gone to bed.

Jupiter met Gaby at the front door. The old Labrador was terrified of thunderstorms and he pressed his body close to her, whining pitifully.

Gaby shoved him away. “Oh, Jupe, don’t have a nervous breakdown.” Jupiter’s place of refuge during thunderstorms was an old tool shed near the boat dock. “I’ll let you outside in a minute.”

The old dog managed to stay under her feet all the way to the kitchen. She collected an armful of saucepans and pots and carried them to the front hall.

The roof had leaked for years. She set a pan under the first ceiling stain and carried the others into the cavernous old
sala grande
. The drips in the living room had a long way to fall; the beamed ceiling rose more than thirty feet above the bare, somewhat dusty tile floor.

In Miami one was never very far from the water. On Palm Island in the middle of Biscayne Bay, the air was always moisture-saturated. Now, before the oncoming thunderstorm, the downstairs was like a steam room. Gaby put down the last pot and unfastened the braid of her wind-ravaged hair, raking it loose with her fingers. She was still wearing the tailored shirt and skirt she’d put on that morning for work, clothes that she’d walked in, sat in, and sweltered in all day. Pulling down her hair, letting it swing free, gave her a vast sense of relief.

A second later a burst of lightning, blue-white and blindingly close, hit the island. The lamp in the living room winked, then went out.

In the sudden blackness there was no holding Jupiter. He threw himself at the sun porch’s glass door in a frenzy, scratching at it with his long claws and yelping. Gaby pushed the door open. The wind promptly caught it and slammed it away, and the old Labrador bolted into the night.

She stood in the open doorway, savoring the sudden, sharp coolness of the night wind. The storm was rolling across the bay, whipping the black water into whitecaps. Gaby hoped it wasn’t going to be one of the notorious South Florida tempests that pounded boats at their moorings, tore down television aerials, and uprooted trees before going on to set lightning fires in the everglades. If so, there was no telling when the electricity might come back on.

The leading edge of the storm was both violent and spectacular. In one almost continuous electrical assault, brilliant ball lightning hung over the whitecapped water like a searchlight.

Gaby squinted. Or was it a searchlight? No, it couldn’t be. Certainly no one in his right mind would take a boat out on Biscayne Bay in such a squall. Another bolt of lightning cracked open the sky. In that brief, blinding moment the world turned dazzlingly, starkly blue-white and black. And what Gaby saw by its light was a huge white power cruiser, streamlined as a space ship, cutting through the black water right in front of the Collier dock.

The next moment it was dark again.

She stayed where she was, positive she’d been seeing things. But another flash of lightning showed the cruiser was really there, its ghostly white shape, its searchlight probing the churning black water. The light found the dilapidated pilings of the dock and stayed.

The storm suddenly threw the full force of its wind at the island, ripping loose palm fronds and hurtling them across the back lawn like missiles. Gaby could still see the searchlight. It
was
a cruiser, she thought, stunned. And it was putting into her dock!

In that moment, all that Dodd had said about gangs of robbers attacking waterfront homes leaped into Gaby’s consciousness. It was almost midnight. She was alone except for her mother sleeping upstairs. It couldn’t be happening, her rational mind tried to tell her. But this was Miami. And it was.

She turned and stumbled back into the sun porch. Hurrying through it to the lightless living room, she hit the edge of a chair in the darkness. She heard something fall.
Oh God, why did the lights have to be off?

Another crash of lightning lit the living room. She blundered into the end table by the couch, then groped across the table for the telephone. Burglars or drug dealers were perhaps, at that moment, jumping from the biggest, sleekest cruiser she’d ever seen in her life, automatic weapons in their hands.

Her shaking fingers found the telephone’s old-fashioned dial. She had to call 911. She had to be calm. She had to be able to speak when she got the operator. There was a possibility it would turn out to be nothing at all. Just boaters lost on the bay, putting into her dock to wait out the storm.

She didn’t believe that.

She lifted the base of the telephone close to her face, trying to see the numbers in the darkness. Trying not to scream.

She was alone in the house except for her mother, drunk and helpless. There was no gun, no pistol anywhere. But, she remembered, there were knives in the kitchen. In the next instant she knew she couldn’t use a kitchen knife to defend herself. Even to hold off robbers coming from the water. She was helpless with anything violent.