by Miami Blues
“Not much.”
“How much? Sebring can’t pay Miami’s union scale.”
“I know. It’s only fourteen thousand, Hoke. I’m making thirty-one in Robbery, but the chief said there’d probably be another two thousand a year when the new Sebring budget comes out.”
“Christ, Red, that’s less than half of what you’re making now.”
“I know, and I don’t give a shit. It doesn’t cost as much to live in Sebring, and the chances are that I’ll live a hell of a lot longer up there.”
“There’s nothing going on in Sebring. They have the race once a year, and that’s it.”
“I know. That’s why I took the job. Last week, a kid in Overtown threw a brick through my window.”
“You shouldn’t drive your car in Overtown. You know that.”
“It was a squad car, Hoke. I was down there with Nelson to pick up a fence. We never found him, either. But that brick was it. I’d been wavering, because of the money and all, but the next morning I called the chief in Sebring. He’s a nice guy, too, Hoke. You’d like him. He’s a retired detective from Newark. That’s in New Jersey.”
“I know where Newark is, for God’s sake.”
“Don’t get pissed off, Hoke.”
“I’m not pissed off, I’m just surprised, that’s all. I know damned well you aren’t going to like living in a little town like that. Why don’t we meet some place and talk about it?”
“I can’t, Hoke. I’ve got a lot of things to do and then I’ve got to meet Louise later when she gets off work.”
“When are you leaving, Red? I’ll see you before you go, won’t I?”
“Oh, sure. I’ll be in town for another week at least. If I can’t sell my condo, I’ll have to rent it out. But we’ll get together. We’ll tie one on to celebrate.”
“Right. I’m here at the Dupont bar, if you can get away for a while before you pick up Louise.”
“I can’t, Hoke. Not tonight.”
“Call me, then.”
“I’ll call you.”
“I’m real happy for you, Red, if you think that’s what you want.”
“Thanks, Hoke. It’s what I want.”
“Call me.”
“I will.”
Hoke racked the phone, and the bartender put it beneath the bar again. “Another beer, sir?”
“Yeah. And a double shot of Early Times. I don’t want any more of the stuff on this plate either. Can you dump it for me?”
Hoke took his shot of whiskey and fresh bottle of beer over to a table by the window. He really hated to see Red Farris leave the department. He was one of the few bachelor friends Hoke had left. Red was almost always available to go out for a few drinks, or a little bottle pool, or to bowl a few lines. And Red Farris had saved his life, too. They had gone to pick up a wife-beater who was out on bail. The man’s wife had died, and that upgraded the charge from assault to second degree murder. It was a simple pickup; the man didn’t put up any fight or argument. He had been too shocked by the news of his wife’s death. And then, just as Hoke had started to put the handcuffs on him, the man’s twelve-year-old son had come out of the bedroom and shot Hoke in the chest with a .22 rifle. Farris got the rifle out of the kid’s hands before he could get off another shot, and Hoke spent six weeks in the hospital with a nicked left lung. It still hurt if he took a very deep breath. But if Red Farris hadn’t twisted that rifle out of the kid’s hands—Well, the kid was in a foster home somewhere, the kid’s father was up in Raiford, and the boy’s mother was dead. In Miami, a family could break up in a hurry
It used to be a lot different when Hoke was still married. Four or five couples would get together for a barbecue and some beer. Then, after they ate, the women would all sit in the living room and talk about how difficult their deliveries had been, and the men would sit in the kitchen and play poker. The big kids would watch TV, and the smaller kids would be put to sleep in the bedroom. That had been real Florida living, but now all the white families were moving away. There were six different detectives Hoke had known who had left Miami in the last year alone. And now Farris—that was seven. Of course, Henderson could get out for a night once in a while, but Bill Henderson was married, and he always worried about staying out too late.
Hoke looked out at the river, never the same river. He wanted another double shot of Early Times, but not at these prices. Hoke left the bar and got his car from the parking ramp. As he checked the window locks, the smell of the vomit on the back seat was almost overpowering. When he got to the Eldorado Hotel, he’d get one of the Marielitos who lived there to clean it out.
7
The one-way street was narrow after they left the well-lighted area of the Columbus Hotel on Biscayne. The sidewalk was cracked and broken from recent roadwork, and there were few pedestrians.
“Where’s the parking garage?” Freddy took Susan’s thin arm as they skirted a Bob’s Barricade horse and a flaming kerosene pot.
“Up about four blocks. I didn’t want the detective to see my car. I’m sorry now I even mentioned it to him. If he lets it slip out to daddy that I’ve got it, he’ll take it.”
“That prick detective’s pretty sharp. Unless he does it on purpose, he won’t let anything slip out. He sure picked up on me in a hurry. I think I had him fooled on the dessert business, because I really was in a foster home in Santa Barbara. But he knows that a man can’t hold down a regular job and still work out six hours a day building up muscles like mine.”
“Why’d you tell him your name was Ramon Mendez? You don’t look nothing like these Cubans.” She pointed to four ragged Marielitos across the street. They were unwrapping a large bundle of clothes between two parked cars.
“I told him Mendez because I checked into the hotel under the name of Gotlieb with a stolen credit card. Wait. Let’s go over there and see what they’ve got in that bindle.”
“Let’s don’t! You don’t want to have nothing to do with these people, Junior. It’s just something they stole, anyway.” She tugged at his arm.
“Okay. But it’s always interesting to look into a bindle. You never know what you’ll find.”
“You mess with these Cubans and they’ll pull a knife on you.” At the next corner, they waited for the light to change. “If your name isn’t Gotlieb, and it isn’t Mendez, what is it?”
“Junior, like I told you. My last name’s Frenger. I’m really German, I suppose, but I don’t remember my parents. I was in four different foster homes, but no one ever told me anything about my parents. They said I was an orphan, but they could’ve been lying about that. They lied about everything else, so it’s possible my parents are still alive somewhere. I’ve always thought my father must’ve been an important man, though, or he wouldn’t’ve named me Junior. At least that proves I’m not a bastard. You don’t name a kid after yourself if you aren’t married. What d’you think?”
“I’m too upset to think right now. On top of everything else, I think Mr. Turner’s going to make us write a haiku, and I don’t think I can do it.”
“It seems simple enough to me. There’re only seventeen syllables. Five, seven, and five. I’ll write some for you, and you can keep ’em in your purse. Then, if he gives you a makeup paper in his office, you can just copy them in your own handwriting.”
“Suppose I have to explain what they mean?”
“I’ll tell you what they mean after I write them.”
“Would you?”
“Sure. We’re engaged, aren’t we?”
“Did you really mean that? When you told Mr. Turner we were engaged?”
“Why not? I’ve never been engaged before.”
“Me neither. I’ve never even gone steady before.”
They reached the six-story parking garage. Susan showed her parking pass to the attendant behind the bulletproof window. He took her keys from the board, raised the grate an inch, and slid them across the Formica countertop.
“I pay eighty dollars a month to park
here. And that’s the student rate. Some of these downtown lots charge three dollars an hour, and they make so much money they won’t give you a monthly rate.” They took the elevator to the fifth floor. “But they’re nasty about it here. If I don’t get here early enough in the morning to get a space, the garage fills up and they put out a full sign. So even though I’ve paid in advance, I still can’t park. It isn’t fair.”
“You use that word a lot.”
“What word?”
“Fair. Now that you’re twenty years old—”
“Only by one month—”
“—you’d better forget about things like fair and unfair. Even when people talk about the weather, fair doesn’t mean anything.”
“But there’s such a thing as—”
“No, there isn’t. Jesus, is this your car?”
Susan unlocked the driver’s door to a white 1982 TransAm. There was a flaming red bird decal on the hood and flowing red flames painted on all four of the fenders.
“It’s mine now, if they don’t take it away from me. It was the first thing we bought when we had enough saved for the down payment. Marty was crazy about it. But he only got to drive it two or three times. What he wanted was a car that would impress his friends when we went back to Okeechobee. That’s why I’m pretty sure he never told daddy about the car. He wanted to surprise everybody. These are real leather seats, you know. Black glove leather. D’you want to drive, Junior?”
“No. I can drive, but I’m not a very good driver. And even though I’ve got three California licenses on me, I don’t fit the descriptions. Besides, you’d have to tell me where to turn and all.”
Freddy got into the passenger’s soft bucket seat. He felt as though he were sitting in a deep pit, even though the visibility was excellent through the tinted front window. The side and back windows had been layered with chocolate film; they were almost black.
Susan started the engine. “I’ll turn the air conditioning down in just a second. It’ll really freeze your ass off if you leave it on high very long.”
“Do you need gas? I’ve got Ramon Mendez’s Seventy-six card.”
“This thing always needs gas. It only gets about nine miles to a gallon. Something’s wrong with the carburetor, I think.”
“Well, don’t worry about gas. I can get all of the gas credit cards we’ll need.”
Susan roared down the spiraling driveway and into the street. She drove through the streets aggressively, taking the Eighth Street ramp to the overhead freeway to South Dixie. But once on South Dixie, in three lanes, the traffic was heavy, and it was stop-and-go driving until they reached South Miami and Sunset Drive. The heavy traffic thinned out slightly when she turned west on Sunset.
“People can’t see in at all, can they?” Freddy said.
“Not very well. To see inside you have to put your face right up against the glass.”
“I haven’t seen much of the city, either.”
“You can’t see much at night. I’ll take you around tomorrow, anywhere you want to go.”
They had the car filled at a Shell station. Freddy paid for the gas with Gotlieb’s credit card. As the attendant wrote down the license number on the sales slip, Freddy shook his head. “I forgot they did that. Tomorrow we’re going to either get some new license plates or a new car. We should’ve stopped along the way so I could’ve picked up some new license plates. I could’ve changed them before we got the gas.”
Susan opened the door, jumped out, and dashed after the attendant. She got the credit slip back, and paid the man cash for the fuel. She got back into the driver’s seat and tore up the credit slip.
“I’ll probably lose the car, but we might as well keep it as long as we can.”
“That was quick thinking, Susie. I’m so used to using credit cards, I never thought about paying cash.”
“I always pay cash. Still, I try not to carry more’n fifty dollars on me at a time.”
“Tomorrow I’ll get us some out-of-state plates we can switch. And tomorrow night I’d better get some Miami credit cards. I’ll get some for you, too, some ladies’ cards, so you can buy things when I’m not around.”
There were thirty four-story condominium apartment buildings in the complex that made up Kendall Pines Terrace, but only six of the buildings had been completed and occupied. The other buildings were unpainted, windowless, concrete shells. Construction had been suspended for more than a year. Almost all of the apartments in the occupied buildings were empty. For the most part, their owners had purchased them at preconstruction prices during the real estate boom in 1979. But now, in fall 1982, construction prices had risen, and very few people could qualify for loans at 17 percent interest.
“There’s been some vandalism out here,” Susan said, when she parked in her numbered space in the vast and almost empty parking lot. “So they built a cyclone fence and hired a Cuban to drive around at night in a Jeep. That’s stopped it. But sometimes, late at night, it’s a little scary out here.”
There was a tropical courtyard in the hollow square of Building Six-East. Broad-leaved plants had been packed in thickly around the five-globed light in the center of the patio, and cedar bark had been scattered generously around the plants. There was a pleasant tingle of cedar and night-blooming jasmine in the air.
Susan had a corner two-bedroom, two-bath apartment with a screened porch facing the Everglades. There was eggshell wall-to-wall carpet throughout the apartment, except for the kitchen, which had a linoleum floor in a white brick pattern. Both bathrooms had been tiled in blue and pink. The furniture in the living room was rattan, with blue-and-green-striped cushions. There was a large brass bed in the master bedroom. In the smaller bedroom, Susan’s, there was a Bahama bed and a rattan desk. There were antique white Levolors in all of the windows, but no curtains or draperies.
While Freddy looked around the apartment, Susan got two San Miguel beers out of the refrigerator. She took Freddy out to the screened porch and pointed toward the dark Everglades.
“In the daytime you can see them, but not now. For the next four miles or so, those are all tomato and cucumber fields. Then you get to Krome Avenue, and beyond that it’s the East Everglades—nothing but water and alligators. It gets too drowned with water to build on the other side of Krome, and Kendall Pines Terrace is the last complex in Kendall. Eventually, the rest of those fields will all be condos, because Kendall is the chicest neighborhood in Miami. But they won’t be able to build anymore in the ’Glades unless they drain them.”
“This apartment looks expensive.”
“It is, for the girl that owns it. She put every cent she had into it, and then found out she couldn’t afford to live here. She’s just a legal secretary, so she had to rent it out, furniture and all. We only pay her four hundred a month rent, but she was glad to get it. She tried to sell or rent it for four months before we came along. Even with our four hundred, she still has to come up with another four-fifty every month.”
“Where does she live now?”
“She had to move back with her parents in Hallandale, and she’s twenty-five years old. I know how bad she feels. I’d never move back in with daddy. I’d rather die first.”
“This is good beer.”
“San Miguel dark. It’s the best, and it comes all the way from the Philippine Islands. The man at Crown gets it for me. Of course, in addition to the four hundred a month, the electric bill comes to another two hundred.”
“No shit?”
Susan nodded. “On account of the air conditioning. And it’ll be going up again soon. The anchorette on Channel Ten said so last night. Without the money from Marty coming in, I don’t think I can handle it. I’m worried.”
“Don’t be. We’re engaged, so I’ll take care of it.”
Freddy put his fingers on the screen. The dead man in the morgue was sure as hell the same guy at the airport. He hadn’t meant to kill him; all he had wanted to do was break the guy’s finger. Just because of the jacke
t, and now he didn’t even have the leather jacket with him. What he did have was the simple-minded younger sister. He could feel the damp jets of air coming through the screen. There were only six cars parked in the ten-acre parking lot. The white TransAm, in its numbered slot, seemed to glow in the sixth row. Every other parking light in the lot had been turned off, to save energy, perhaps, and the other lights had been dimmed. The moon wasn’t up yet, and beyond the cyclone fence was blackness. Looking out and down into that dark land mass, Freddy felt as if he were on the edge of an abyss. Perspiration from his armpits trickled down his sides.
“Let’s go back inside,” Freddy said. “Doesn’t it even cool off at night?”
“A little. Around four in the morning it’ll drop down to seventy-seven or so, but then the humidity’ll go up.”
Freddy took off his shoes and his shirt. Susan sat on the couch in the living room. “D’you want to watch some TV, Junior?”
“Not now. I’ve got to make a phone call. Where’s the telephone book?”
“There’s two books over there, under the breakfast table. The phone’s on the—”
“I can see the phone.”
Freddy looked up the number of the International Hotel. He called the desk, checked out, and told the clerk to charge everything, including his barber bill, to his Gotlieb credit card. “Yes,” he finished, “I did have a pleasant stay.”
Freddy joined Susan on the couch and told her to bring him a pair of scissors. He cut up the Gotlieb credit and identification cards, and put the cut pieces into the ashtray.
“Now,” he said, “Mr. Gotlieb’s no longer in Miami.”
Freddy patted the lounge, and Susan sat beside him. “I liked the way you handled yourself at the morgue, Susan. What were you thinking about, anyway, when you saw your dead brother?”
“I was thinking about the times when he used to bend my fingers back when he wanted me to do something. It really hurt, and after a while he didn’t have to bend them back. All he had to do was threaten to do it, and I’d do whatever he wanted. He was religious, I guess, but he was awfully mean. He said he wanted to go to heaven, and now he’s finally got what he wanted.” She was lost in thought for a moment, then she looked up.