Men in Miami Hotels Read online

  “Everything work out?” she says.

  “Partially.”

  He has Bert’s pistol in the pocket of the old duck jacket he wears. His own gun is in the other pocket. Two guns make him feel worse not better. He takes this as a good sign, a sign that informs him of his own humanity. “I’ve put Mama in a way of trouble.”

  “That’s nothing new.”

  He wishes he was sitting in the Caribe Diner in south Miami eating eggs scrambled with shrimp and reading Virgil. The Georgics is really becoming his thing. Farm advice, life in the country—these soothe his troubles. Which are what exactly? General reduction of force, confusion, this ghostliness formalizing itself into a story he is telling himself of ghostliness, entropy, slippage, the look in her face adumbrated, only half there, age muddying the water. She says she’s troubled—with her forefinger rubbing her nose that always itches—and can’t stop lying, but this is not fresh news: both of them, they’ve always loved to tell untruths. A night bird lets loose a little rounded-off cry, interrogatory, just something it wants the lowdown on. Marcella inclines her head to his shoulder, rubs her face lightly against the cloth of his shirt. “Are you going to do something about whoever killed CJ?”

  “I’ll settle it, yeah.”

  “I’m glad of that. I don’t think Ordell can do it.”

  “I guess now Ordell won’t know what you think.”

  “It’ll be a relief, believe me.”

  He feels for the cool spot under her hair in back, the one that’s been cool since she was a girl, but he can’t find it. Her hair like thick silk in back, heavy, smelling like a lemonized horse. The smell alone used to take him to another world. Where he figured prominently and was thrilled by this and safe. “Mi caballo,” he says. “Or mi yegua. My mare? That’s not quite right.” He can’t see if she’s smiling and doesn’t think she is.

  The next morning early he’s over at the courthouse talking to one of the deputies.

  “He’s part of that Miami hoodlum element keeps showing up around here. That’s why we locked him up. You know anything about him?” says the deputy, a short, bald young man who you think has a limp but doesn’t. “He says you attacked him.”

  “I was all night over at the Cord house.”

  “At the courthouse? Nobody here saw you.”

  “Cord. Marcella’s mother’s house.”

  “You heard she kicked Ordell out.”

  “Yes, I did. Have you seen him?”

  The deputy leans to the side. It looks like he’s favoring a bad leg. “He might not be in at all today. No—there he is now. I misread the evidence.”

  Ordell, slumped, his tobacco-brown hair slicked to one side, carrying his briefcase in his arms like a true love, slopes in the door.

  “Man,” says the deputy, Bobby Briggs, “he’s cleaned out.”

  Ordell acknowledges Cot with his eyes—soft brown, sampling despair—and shuffles down the hall into his office, Cot following.

  “Get you some coffee?” Cot says.

  “That might wake me up. I don’t want that.”

  “I’m sorry for your trouble.”

  “Well, you know what she’s like. Did you see her?”

  “I stayed over at her mother’s place last night. She seemed a little winded.”

  “Her mother?”

  “Marcella too.”

  “I can’t stand the house—our house—without her in it. I get spooked. I took the dog and the cat, and we’re staying at La Concha.”

  “D’jou get a room where you can watch her house?”

  “Of course.”

  “D’jou see anything?”

  “She was shooting that damn pellet gun, I know that. I should of had her arrested.”

  “You find out anything yet about CJ?”

  Ordell raises his head like a man raising his face out of a bowl of soup and stares at the ceiling, squinting as if the answer is written up there. “I don’t think it’s local.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I thought it might be one of CJ’s acquaintances. Somebody with a grievance. But it’s not.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The way he was killed.”

  Cot just looks at him. Out in the street someone shouts, happy to be at US 1 Mile Zero.

  “He was shot,” Ordell says.

  “I thought . . .”

  “It was a pro job.”

  Cot feels a chill down his back. That’s what he’s been afraid of. He turns away to the window. Down in the street a hen followed by six buff-colored biddies moves along. A shirtless man, a fat man, waves them by like a traffic cop. Cot thinks of his father, leaning over his writing board in Havana. A picture of his apartment shows tall peeling walls, rattan rugs, hardly any furniture. Cot wishes he was there, in Havana, walking down a shuttered street, eating a chicken empanada. No, that’s not right—he wishes he was in Miami, sitting on a bench in Flamingo Park watching the tennis players. But not—

  “What should I do about Marcella?” Ordell says.

  “Nothing much you can do,” Cot says still looking out the window. Go over to Solly’s for banana pudding—that was something to do in Miami. “I’ve never been able to head her off.”

  “You don’t have to,” Ordell says bitterly. “You always know she’ll come back to you.”

  Cot turns around. “No, Buck, I don’t know that. Nobody can know something like that about Marcella.”

  He leaves and heads down the stairs. Outside the day is big with itself, full spring in the Keys, trumpet trees yellowly flowering, poincianas ruffling their red spangles, the island plump with life. Sam Butler, the mayor, passes on his scooter, on his way, Cot knows, to get a drink at Passerine Dooly’s house, his true love—both drink and Passerine. What is he going to do? Maybe it would be best to go back to Miami—draw off the stalkers. They are stalkers—right? But what could he do in Miami? And how do they know he’d taken the stones in the first place? Do they know that? Had CJ—well, it could be anything. Maybe Jimmy, maybe sensors in the ground, maybe a damn force field thrown around the whole of Florida Bay. A springing misery shivers and clips him as it passes.

  He catches a ride on the tourist train back to his mother’s house. Buzzy Staples, the guide and driver, is talking to the tourists about sponge fishing when he lets him off, making that sloppy profession seem like a tale of romance and plunder.

  Jackie says his mother is over at the botanical garden by Higgs Beach, conducting a class in exterminating vermin. “You never know what she’s going to be up to,” he says when Cot gives him a look.

  He phones Spane, but Spane isn’t answering. He starts over to the garden on his bike, but halfway there he thinks he had better go to Miami and pedals out to the airport and buys a ticket. The plane is scheduled to leave at three. He goes over to the garden looking for his mother, but she’s gone. He sits under a little spicewood tree and stares at the ocean. A flat pale blue expanse that looks gelatinous in the heavy morning light. He again calls Spane who isn’t picking up and leaves a message saying he’s got the stones. He’s ice cold the whole time he’s speaking, a voice not very deep inside saying fool fool. “I’m going up to the island to return them,” he says. He’s making mistake after mistake, first on the list—after taking the stones, after getting Albertson’s operative locked up, after running around here like he knew what he was doing, after putting his mother at risk, and Marcella too and who knows who else—making such a call, even if it’s on an unregistered phone (they don’t let you off just because you put the money back in the bank); sticking his head in a noose. But it’s like he doesn’t care—or not that exactly: it’s as if he’s only half awake, only half there. Essentials decoalesce, drift away like scents into the trees. Yes, that’s it. His mind seems half gone, private areas looted, policies and imprimaturs faded, old sureties hollowed out, schemes disassembled. Do you know me? is a question he could ask himself.

  A man in long white shorts is throwing a rubbe
r ball into the shallows for his dog. The dog, a sleek black retriever who knows his business, brings it back every time. He’s a retriever who’s gone off. He wants to put money on something, jai alai maybe, preferably on Zabala and his partner Bidarte, but it’s too early in the day. Feelings, like quivering animals, range in his body, nameless feelings on strange errands.

  In a minute the phone rings. It’s Spane. “You have trouble,” Spane says.

  “I know that.”

  “You don’t have the stones.”

  “I know that too.”

  “The Big says he’ll give you forty-eight hours to find them and put them in his hand.”

  “I’m on it right now. Mikey?”

  “What?”

  “Thanks.”

  There’s a silence on the line. Through this silence Cot can feel Spane, solid as coral rock, feel him leaning toward him, the shadow of his presence reaching for him, the blank malfeasance, substance without form, no mercy involved. And Spane can hear him breathing into the line, breath traveling through the air 150 miles over water and stubby islands, faint as whispers, signaling to him, even a sigh expressive of everything a life is, sum and parts, and it’s as if he can lift the life out of the substrate it inhabits and hold it in his hand and pick at and ponder it and toss it aside when he’s done. There’s been a wariness between them for a while now, a displacement, a shift, but this changes nothing really.

  “Don’t call me again,” Spane says.

  Cot sits in the shade looking out at the ocean, a bleak expression on his face like that of a man marooned on an island nobody will discover for years.

  3

  He caught up with Ordell at Sammy’s Lunch, but Ordell told him there were no new developments in the case.

  “Not even whispers?”

  “It’s a complete mystery.”

  An orange cat sat up in a lime tree staring at some little black-faced birds flickering around in the top of a nearby manila palm. The birds didn’t seem to mind. Ordell’s dark thick hair like the mournful pelt of a just-extinguished species, strands of gray setting tiny trails in it, shifted as he turned to look from the patio they sat on at four hugely fat old men in ponytails passing on their Harleys.

  “How about footprints and DNA and your CIs—all that,” Cot said, tapping Ordell lightly on the knuckles. “How about spoor and signs?”

  “None such.”

  “How about known criminals.”

  “You’re the best known we got.”

  “Come on.”

  “We’ll catch them.”

  “Them?”

  “Whoever it is. You talked to Marcie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does she say anything about me?”

  “Not really.”

  “What does she say?”

  “She thinks the world of you.”

  “I got to elevate myself out of this.”

  “Okay.”

  Ordell squeezed a few drops from a greenish wedge of lemon onto his fingertips and patted them on his tongue. “You remember when people in Bahama Village used to raise goats?”

  “They say before the big hurricane in the thirties it was a real agricultural paradise down here.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  Cot knew that Ordell was slightly homosexual, Marcella knew and others did too, but no one mentioned this to Ordell. Ordell, as far as anyone was aware, never mentioned it to himself. After lunch they walked back to the courthouse together. Cot’s phone rang. It was Marcella. “How’s he doing?” she asked when he told her who he was with.

  “Maybe you ought to come see for yourself.”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “He’s suffering.”

  “That her?” Ordell said.

  “She’s beside herself.”

  Ordell made little grabbing motions for Cot to give him the phone, which he did.

  “Honey,” Ordell said first thing, “I will do anything. Honey . . . ,” then he listened. Then he said, “But, honey . . .” then silence, then, “But . . .” silence “ . . . but . . .” silence . . . “But goddamn it, Marcie, I didn’t . . . but . . . but . . .” and then he snapped the phone shut and put it into his pocket. He stood in the street looking straight at the sun. The light sparkled on the lenses of his dark glasses. “God almighty,” he said, “Goddamn almighty.”

  Cot pedaled out to the airport and cashed in his ticket. He thought about taking the flight anyway, taking the one he’d paid for and then another, a string of them, until he wound up, dusty and dazed, sitting at a rickety table in a river café in some Kinshasa of distance, drinking a cup of bitterroot tea and calling himself Frederick Boykins. He reached for his phone, but he hadn’t gotten it back from Ordell. He had already talked to Dover, who told him he hadn’t seen Connie that night. Told him nobody he knew had seen him. Cot wanted to ask him the same set of questions again. Not because he didn’t believe Dover, but because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. I could walk up and down the streets knocking on people’s doors. Dial the phone book. He pedaled back to town and stopped at a few bars and knockout joints but no one had seen CJ that night. “I saw a pompadour of yellow feathers off in the distance,” Randy Bunker said, “but I didn’t see who was under it.”

  “Where was this?” Cot said.

  “Over on Olivia. I caught sight of somebody in the cemetery, flitting among the graves.”

  Just hearing this little bit made Cot’s heart beat faster.

  “I’m so sorry,” Randy said. He worked under the stage name Impressionella, a rangy fellow from Stakelight, Arkansas, sans, so he said, his sack of troubles now. In KW many made such a claim, tiny dabs of shame gleaming like melted sugar in the corners of their eyes.

  He walked down Fleming, going slowly, planning to arrive at his mother’s and rest a while, but just past the library somebody stepped out from behind a big orangely flowering bougainvillea and popped him in the head. He went down on his face into a jasmine bush. When he came to an older couple was standing over him. “We thought you were dead,” the man said, a thin prospector-type holding a large yellow hat.

  “Do you know me?” Cot said.

  “How could we know you?” said the woman, slim too, a little too much sucked out of her to really wear the slimness well. “We’re visitors.”

  “Do you know yourself?” the man said. He was old. Dark grape-wine stains of age, or eternal night, on the hand that gripped the big hat.

  “That’s a good question,” Cot said.

  “Were you on your way to the library?” the woman said.

  “I wouldn’t doubt it.”

  “We thought so,” the man said.

  “We thought you slipped and hit your head,” the woman said.

  “I did.”

  He was sure it was last night’s stalker, Lewis his name was, Bert, a worker for Albertson, an auxiliary, a friendly person generally. He lived in a hotel on Washington Ave. out at the beach. Bert. Damn. But if he hit him that meant he didn’t have a gun. Or did it? Albertson had probably pulled him off the job. But Bert still had a little personal business with him. Well, you could go on and on figuring things out. Cot preferred revelation, as he often said, over deduction, but you couldn’t always count on it to show up when you needed it. Clouds, puffed and richly white, had a permanent look about them, high in the center of the sky. He was always falling for something that looked permanent. His head hurt. He went into the library, cruised briefly through the stacks, and checked out a volume of Korean poetry. After all this time his card was still good. He loved how they trusted him in here, were willing, despite everything, to let him walk out with a book, their only copy of poems by Ko Un and Ku Sang, as if they had faith in him. Maybe they’d testify as character witnesses at his next hearing. Down at the laundromat Billy Gomes, a guy he knew, was entertaining some tourists with stories about free diving in the Tortugas, a place Cot felt sure he’d never visited. Cot wondered if anyone ever dreamed when they were kno
cked out. Last night he had dreamed of jealousy and ordinance. Of Marcella revising her opinion of him downward, of his pulling a trick gun, a gun made of horehound candy, and of being forced by elemental but crazed powers to eat it. Everything in the dream had been a bad sign. He pulled Billy off to the side. Billy was sipping pineapple juice out of a green coconut. “What you got?” he said.

  “I need you to help get my mother out of town.”

  Billy’s eyes shipped fear like a summons. It was amazing how that went—eyes instantly alerting the universe to a change in mode. “OK,” he said.

  “I mean I need you to make a suggestion or two.”

  “I don’t know if I can ever do that.”

  It was as if they had been talking an hour, fruitlessly. Maybe the head blow had done more damage than he thought. Wright Sunderson pedaled by on his bike, pulling his little cart filled with flowers he’d gathered in people’s yards for sale to the tourists. Down the street a large man in a faded orange shirt crossed and climbed the steps to the old Stampen house, now empty so long it looked abandoned. Maybe the house had finally been sold. The man—that was what was sticking to his mind—looked like Bert. “Come on,” he said and started off down the street. He wanted to pull his gun but thought better of it. Billy came along behind, apologizing to the tourists as he left—the tourists, decked in tourism finery, looked relieved he was going—and caught up with Cot in front of the Big Wreck Hotel. He and Marcella had tried when they were thirteen to get a room there but the management—Cooper Nutall, an extremely short man in a blond Elvis haircut—had called their parents.

  “What is it?” Billy said, loping along. He was wearing white calypso pants, a striped blue-and-white shirt, and a gray weathered sailor cap.

  “This guy sucker punched me.”

  “Just now?”

  “Almost.”

  Cot sent Billy around behind the Stampen house—tall, weathered to a tallowy gray, two-storied with double galleries, rusted weather vanes depicting ships under full sail and lightning rods like spearheads on top—and he ran up the front steps and into the front hall. There he stopped and listened. Nothing but the creaks and frets of an old empty house. Here he had played poker with the Stampen twins when he was eight, on rainy days up on the second-floor gallery, once losing his favorite Aloha shirt to Benny. The twins were gone now, one dead of a blood disease, the other, a drunkard he’d heard, just hanging on, in Panama City or someplace, selling used boats. He held himself carefully and loosely quiet. He could hear breeze fiddling with the roof tiles, the shake and swish of palm fronds. “Bert,” he called.