Men in Miami Hotels Read online

  She’s almost said his name out loud.

  They drive up the beach and stop at Christie’s market for some mangoes, imported from Mexico. Christie and his two sons are in back drinking pulque around the large table with a few of their customers. His wife Estella waits on her and the two women exchange looks filled, so it seems to Ella, with fealty and an understanding that contains a timeless wisdom. Lord, what we know about this world. And those running around in it. She no longer believes there is much you can do about any of it. Back in the cab she thinks again of her husband, who, when he made the tea, would drink a chilled jar of it standing out on the little back second-floor balcony looking into the courtyard. The feral cats lived out there during the day. Rafael would call to the cats, whistle softly to them as if they were dogs, and the cats would come.

  4

  That night they all eat over at Marcella’s house, feasting on a second batch of shrimp and dorado the police who drove the car home picked up. Jackie’s there along with Arthur Haskel’s mother and his brother Hauck. Hauck wanders away down the back lane before supper is served, swinging his crippled left hand as he goes. He says he wants to go down to the store and play a round of pool. It’s just something he says, everybody knows that. He probably doesn’t know what he wants to do, he only has an itch to move. “Come back soon,” Marcella says, and Hauck looks at her out of his hooded friendly eyes as if he’s afraid of the pressure she’s putting on him.

  They eat the shrimp on the upper gallery overlooking the big bamboo patches on Chastain Street. As children he and Marcella ran up and down that dark street waving sparklers. The streetlight on the corner has been put out, and Cot wonders about that and then he doesn’t wonder, and he gets up and goes down the outside stairs, around the house and slinks along the big silvertop bushes—careful not to step in the drained fishpond where twenty-five years ago Marcella’s father burned his law books—until he gets under the big poinciana that belongs to the pie-maker, Frank Bacon. When Cot was a boy Mr. Bacon’s place smelled of baking pies, but no longer. Now the pies—fruit and custard—are mostly baked in a facility up in Marathon. Over behind the wall of the Church of Holiness grounds children at play shout. It’s dark, but they don’t want to go home yet, that’s clear. A car, sputtering and backfiring, passes: Donnie Cantrell on his way home to explain himself to his wife. Tourists on bicycles, their tiny LED lights blinking, wobble by, moving in a slow motion that must be a feature of the tropic dream they have purchased for themselves. Right after them he sees a figure enter the street, pause, then slip so quickly it’s as if it wasn’t there, between two dilapidated sheds beside the old Terrence house. A familiar buzzing sets to in his head.

  He crouches and angles around to the other side of the pie-man’s yard and through a gate that opens into a little fenced-off area where the Hertzels next door used to keep chickens in the days before local poultry became ornamental and consigned to the streets. In a minute the somebody—a man moving fast, carrying something like a long valise—crosses the street and enters a vacant lot. Cot slips around to the right, easing in among and out of big hibiscus bushes massively flowering, and comes around the side of the dark and shuttered tourist house across the street. He waits in the shadow of the tourist house. Crouched in the lot among stacks of loose bricks and boards, the man, darkly clothed, is working on a small, bulky piece of equipment on the ground.

  Cot can barely make it out then barely believe what it is: a sniper rifle.

  He takes three quick steps into the lot and with the pistol, Bert’s pistol, shoots the man once in the head. The sound of the shot is loud, but it is only one shot and a single shot you can always just wonder about and let go. He leaves the man where he falls, a stocky man in a dark shirt, someone he doesn’t know. He takes the half-assembled rifle in his hands—for a sec marveling at its compact uncomplicated shape—jams it between two large coral stone boulders, bends the barrel sideways and tosses the rifle into the bushes and shakes the .308 ammo out of its little cartridge holder and flings it into the bushes too. The ammo makes a rustling sound like lizards moving among the leaves as it hits. From where he stands he can see the lights of Marcella’s balcony through the still-bare branches of the big mahogany trees behind the pie-maker’s.

  They’re all enjoying themselves, drinking rum drinks and watching a Cuban comedy show flown in each week to Miami. His mother and Marcella look up at him from the couch where they sit side by side, and they both get up at the same time and come to him. Marcella’s mother pays no attention. The two women—still his favorites—touch him lightly, brushing little special places that maybe seem out of synch or stained, their hands just reaching him as he crosses the room and goes out on the darkened second-floor gallery with the women following. A throbbing presence inside urges him to keep going, keep moving, even if movement is only a small and futile agitation, but he makes himself stop. Above the yard bats stitch up the night. His mother sits down in one of the big armchairs. Marcella, letting the skirts she has gathered up to run after him fall, pushes unrestrained straight into him in the old way, as if she is setting off on a walk right through and all along the byways of his body. He catches her and gently holds her off. He remembers where he is. “We need more firepower,” he says and laughs and looks out into the yard that seems to be disappearing in fog.

  “We’re all right,” Marcella says and runs her hand over his, picking lightly at the skin.

  “No. We’re not.”

  “Ordell has the police on alert.”

  “Concerning what?”

  “Marauders in the neighborhood.”

  “I didn’t see any cruisers.”

  “They’re around.”

  He never really trusts letting others take care of things. He doesn’t especially believe in his own ability to manage, but it’s familiar and he believes in possibility, in increments adding up if you conduct the affair deeply enough in the shadows and keep at it. Or has. Even this is slipping away. What he believes in now, in this moment—a sniper?—has become tatters and figments, outlines drifting like ghosts above where the body’d been.

  They bolted the doors and he put Jackie downstairs on a mattress pulled out of a spare bedroom (Arthur’s mother slipped out as soon as she got a good look at Cot). He himself simply stayed awake walking around the house in the dark. The clamminess, the polluted sweat, was still on him. His insides shivered and sloshed. If anybody was coming it would be in the blank precedence before dawn. But you couldn’t be sure. The house still smelled of rosewood and cinnamon and of bay leaves crumpled in jars as it had when he was a child and Marcella’s father, the old padrone, roved the premises giving orders no one minded. He had been knocked dead of a heart attack when Marcella was thirteen. She’d found him on his knees, bent over the bed, his pants around his ankles. And she had taken the time to rearrange him before she called her mother.

  For a while she stayed awake with him. He didn’t tell her about the sniper, but he talked to her of his crime, of CJ, of the emeralds glittering somewhere, elsewhere, out on the earth, glowing he said like little lit furnaces left over from worlds so long forgotten no one remembered there had ever been such worlds, and, as if answering a question, she said chain of being which was a phrase they had gotten stuck on in high school the year before he left for Miami, and they laughed at this and then on the couch in her old bedroom where they had made love for the first time they made love in their rude and troubled fashion, bumping and shoving as if in a locked trunk they were trying to get out of, and she said, only a moment afterwards, that it was the one thousand four hundredth time, a number she made up afresh each time, high or low, depending on how she felt about him, about things in general, and then he walked around the house and sat a while on one of the creaky bamboo couches on the upper gallery, and got up again and walked around the gallery as well, and sat on the glider that he was careful not to set in rusty motion and watched the dawn stumble eventually to its feet out of the ocean’s basements be
yond the scattered and brushy islands to the east.

  When the sun is up finally over the horizon he walks to South Beach and swims for half an hour. There’s a slimy mess of seaweed on the rough slab-coral beach, and tourists are out at the old hotel next door talking about it. It’s only sea lettuce, and every year around this time there are expected vagaries in the water, but it doesn’t look appetizing this dank vegetable wallow and smells bad. The hotel’s been freshly painted and looks like a vision of the tropics that anyone would go for. Blinky Borden, the proprietor, comes out as Cot starts up the street and he goes in and they have coffee on the hotel’s big back porch. Blinky wants to know how things are between Ordell and Marcella.

  “Nothing much I can tell you about that.”

  Blinky like so many others has been in love with Marcella all his life, but he’s never made much headway. It makes him feel good, makes him feel as if he’s in the mix and important, to talk about her. Cot sees this. He doesn’t mind. Somehow it makes him feel connected to the world, up to something like everybody else, a cohort and celebrant among the multitudes, and this soothes him a little as it’s going on, even if it doesn’t later. After a while he excuses himself and walks back to the old house. Nobody’s there. He runs around the rooms, coldly angry, shouting under his breath, but everybody’s gone. The cars are gone. He calls Ordell, and he says he doesn’t know where they are. He has already pulled the police detail off the job. “Were they ever on it?” Cot says. Ordell’s voice sounds weak and Cot wonders if he’s been crying. “I’m sorry,” Cot says. This is the day he’s supposed to produce the emeralds. He doesn’t have a clue where they might be, but, as he understands it, he has until late this afternoon before his time’s up. He calls Spane on a cell he found on the kitchen counter, first time doesn’t get him, but the next, five seconds later, he does. Spane says he’ll check on the time. “I’m on my way after them now,” Cot says. Just outside the window a bird in a little red vest dawdles in a skinny lime tree. High up Cot can see clouds lined up in dots and stripes as if they’re about to become messages. No special telegraph of the astral needed here, thanks. He goes outside and stands in the big yard, one of the last big yards on the island. The sun sprawls yellow and helpless on the meager grass. The big flamboyants on the street side take the breeze in their arms and fling it back, gently, as if the breeze is a bully charmed into sweetness. Cot sits down in one of the white-painted cast-iron chairs under a little pollarded orange tree. The fruit is green and small in the branches. He thinks about where Marcella and his mother might have gone but can’t get a reading. Then the phone rings.

  A man whose voice sounds vaguely familiar tells him they—“Who’s they?” Cot says but the man ignores him—are keeping everybody—“Who’s everybody?” Cot says but the man goes right on over his asking—and the detainees will be okay, returned to him—as if he is speaking of lost pocketbooks—when he delivers the emeralds to the mailbox of a house on Scooter Lane up the Keys at Summerford. “You know where that is?” the man says. Cot knows. “You get ’em there by twilight time and everything’ll be jim-dandy.”

  “That the beginning of twilight or do I have all the way to the end?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Twilight lasts a while. Do I have . . .”

  “Just bring the fucking stones.”

  “Okay,” Cot says.

  “What’d you say?”

  “Okay. I’ll get them there.”

  “I thought you didn’t know where they were?”

  “Who is this? This you, Solange?” Solange worked for Albertson on the administrative side.

  But whoever it is, is gone.

  He leaves the shade and stands in the full sunshine of the new day shaking. The yard—a corner lot—opens on two sides onto the street. A string of tourists on pink and yellow bicycles pedal orderly by, parents and three young children, dressed up. Natty gray mockingbirds tumble in the big grapefruit tree at the edge of the old, now unused, driveway. Cot tries to redial the caller, but the number’s private, not available. He takes Marcella’s car that’s still in the new garage beside her mother’s aged Buick and drives to the police station. Everybody there knows a little something about the CJ affair, but nobody has a really good idea of what to do. “You see,” the chief is saying into a cell phone as Cot waits to talk to him, “the only thing you got backing up a hustler is neediness and a yearning for unearned pleasures.” He winks at Cot. “He falls apart in a minute.”

  “Well, nada on top of nada on that one,” the chief says to Cot concerning the Cross Dresser Killers as he calls them. Under his right eye he has a small scab from a skin cancer excision that moves as he smiles.

  They haven’t yet found the body over in the vacant lot.

  Cot sits on the station front steps running down the possibilities. Each is fey and shaky, thin, bubbles coming through milky surfaces. Buzzards circle high above the parking lot next door, taking their time. A man in red shorts chases a little boy around the lot and appears unable to catch him. In one of those little abrupt clicks in time Cot can’t remember where he is, who he is, which world he’s in. Then everything snaps back into place, same old arrangement. What he’s done is carved into tablets leaned against a rough stone wall, letters and florid phraseology shining in a dusty murk. You can’t miss what the words say.

  He goes around to Ordell’s office but Ordell isn’t in. His secretary says he’s taken a leave of absence. He finds the sheriff and asks him about this but the sheriff says there isn’t much he can tell him. What about CJ’s case? With a silver penknife the sheriff carefully peels a small guava into an ashtray as they talk. He looks at Cot as if he doesn’t know what he’s referring to. Maybe they are in an alternate universe, some place where just now a big poinciana waves its massed orange flowers in the window and a flock of gulls fresh in from sea duty peck at a dead chicken on the sidewalk.

  “None of y’all got the heads-up, ay?” Cot says.

  “CJ?” the sheriff says again, touching his lower lip with the blade of the penknife.

  Maybe it was you, Cot wants to say. Maybe you did it. In a moment of blind slippage, of modal disharmony, this traveling second of spiritual beggary, everybody looks guilty. That’s how it gets, he thinks, when you won’t face up to your business.

  He goes around to Jonny Day’s on Front Street and sits in a window seat drinking salted coffee and tapping into a rented computer. He tries one or two of CJ’s social pages, but everybody there is in mourning, baffled and without a clue (though some make raging, preposterous claims). He calls Tommy in Miami and asks him to find out what he can about an arrest in Lauderdale. Killers under lock and key for a Key West murder. Tommy says he’ll get back to him. Bert passes on the sidewalk and Cot goes out to meet him.

  “We probably shouldn’t be talking,” Bert says, wincing. He wears a straw cowboy hat with a feather crest.

  “Haven’t you lost weight?” Cot says.

  Bert grins. “If I have, it’s from worry.”

  “You know anything about a kidnapping?”

  “You into that too?”

  “Not me—my family.”

  “Your family’s kidnapping people?”

  “No.”

  “I get it.”

  “They’re gone and somebody called a while ago and said he had them.”

  “Probably Willie Rollins.”

  “He’s back in town?”

  “Got in last night.”

  “Where’s he staying?”

  Over at the Sea Farm as it turns out. Bert says he doesn’t know anything about Willie fronting a kidnapping, but Cot drives Marcella’s car up there anyway. Before he leaves he goes around to the house and packs a few things for Marcella in a bag. Then he goes around to his mother’s house to get a few of her things. A street crew is digging up the pavement; the undersoil, a white, jagged marl, looks like the fossilized innards of a huge dessicated body. The men, powdered with white dust, stand in the street drinking Cuba
n coffee from tiny paper cups. Jackie’s up under the house sleeping on a lounger. Cot wakes him up. “I thought you were kidnapped.”

  “Not me. Not by a long shot.” He’d left early and come back over to the house. “I can’t get no sleep in a strange bed.”

  Cot tells him what’s happened. Tears fill Jackie’s big wide-set eyes. Gray eyes that always looked cloudy—Cot remembers it. Jackie, who used to play small forward on the high school basketball team when Cot was a boy, who said he was leaving for New York to start a singing career. He’d returned a year later riding luggageless in the back of a pickup truck. “How could that—a kidnapping you say? How could it?”

  “The usual reasons. You don’t know about it?”

  “When I left they were all sleeping like babies.”