Miami Noir

by Les Standiford

  “Does he have all his teeth and hair, though?”

  She laughs. “No.”

  Mainly to change the subject, I say, “You know, what you said before, that would be a good name for a business: The Noir Boudoir That stuff is big on Lincoln Road, things from that period: satin nightgowns and marabou slippers and dresser sets.”

  She says, “I do handle some old cosmetics and compacts and so on, which you can’t get so much for on-line. People need to touch them to buy.”

  “Cast some glamour on them and you can get more. Anyway, it’s a memorable name.”

  “You want it?” she says casually.

  “No,” I answer. “Not at all. Your idea.” Punctilious as always, we go back to work.

  When I’m done I stop by Alex in the living room, now cleared of furniture other than his chair. I tell him what I think my haul is worth to me and write him a check. He doesn’t dicker; he knows I know he’s seen everything I have. I cart my stuff out and then come back up to do a trip for Sharon, carrying down some garment bags and hat boxes to her car. When I leave, the old guy is filling a carton with partially used cleaning products from under the sink, and Hank and Jeff are moving the dressing table base, murmuring to each other. I ride down after them. It’s hot outside, well up in the eighties. I take a moment to check on the dog, but he looks fine. There’s a bowl of water on the floor of the passenger side in the shade. He’s got short white hair, a barrel chest, and thin bare legs. I put him down for some sad mix of terrier and Chihuahua.

  Somewhere, the newspapers that reported on the death of William Dorsett may be intact. Everything is still on paper somewhere, that’s my theory. But not where it’s supposed to be, at the library or the newspaper’s own morgue. Microfilm and scanning keep the text but not the context. The juxtapositions of facing pages, the ads, the color process, the smell of the paper itself, are gone, and with them a lot of the meaning. Still, I put in some time at the library on Wednesday, getting a headache from the smell of the microfiche baking as I read what I can find.

  In February 1962, William Dorsett’s horse, Panama Sailor, had been ailing, putting in poor times at practice. On a Saturday at Hialeah Park, Dorsett went to the stables to check whether he’d have to scratch him from a race that afternoon. Or, at least, so he’d said to several people in the clubhouse, where he left the missus in full view of many.

  In the stables, running to where they heard sounds of distress, a pair of stable boys found him, bleeding from his stomped-on head and chest, the horse over him, the vet there trying to calm the animal. The vet said he had been treating the horse at Dorsett’s behest, and when the owner came into the stall, it had gone loco. The horse’s right foreleg was badly smashed, and they had to put him down.

  Between editions the cops must have sweated the vet, Dr. Lucas M. Pryor, because soon he told a different story.

  On Dorsett’s orders he’d been doping the horse. Panama Sailor’s “ailment” was just one more ploy to help the odds. The horse was fit and then some. He was supposed to “recover” and win—but the scheme backfired on Dorsett. This was a crime, but the death itself, Pryor insisted, was accidental.

  There it sat till the trial. In the interim the newspapers dug into Mrs. D.’s first husband, also a William, this one called Billy Hogarth. The Hogarths were down for the winter in 1953, from Pittsburgh. Dorsett was from Ligonier, horse country, not right next door to Pittsburgh but both in western Pennsylvania. So Mr. and Mrs. Billy Hogarth could have known Dorsett, but that was unconfirmed. On March 2, 1953, Billy Hogarth, having had some cocktails, was walking back to his hotel, crossing Collins Avenue midblock, when he was struck and killed by a 1950 Studebaker belonging to one Roy Robineau. Robineau got out after he hit Hogarth and readily admitted he was drunk. Being drunk was its own excuse then, not a crime the way it is today. The 1950 Studebaker had the distinctive “bullet nose” front end which hit Billy Hogarth just right—or just wrong. Young Mrs. Hogarth was having her hair done at the hotel salon, in honor of a party they were going to that night.

  By the trial’s opening, reporters had gotten Helena’s original name, Helen Immerton. A songbird from Kentucky—some implication of trashiness about Kentucky can be picked up even on microfiche—right across from Cincinnati. She’d sung with a band in Cinci and on live Ohio radio in the ’40s under the name Helena Mar, or possibly Marr—it was printed both ways in different editions. She married Billy Hogarth in 1948 and had a daughter, and all was well till Billy Hogarth intersected with Robineau’s front end. Dorsett married the pretty widow in 1954. She was twenty-six. Thirty-four in 1962 when she was tragically—the papers invariably appended “tragically”—widowed again. Nothing much was said about the daughter. She’d been away at school. Age twelve, but the rich ship them off young, and she was a stepdaughter. One columnist mentioned Roy Robineau not being locatable, rumored to have moved out west.

  Between the lines, I imagine how hard the cops worked to find a connection between Dr. Pryor the vet and the lovely Helena Dorsett, whose photos from various social do’s were reproduced: jaunty in sports clothes and shapely, but never vulgarly so, in evening wear. There were frequent references to their house on Leucadendra Drive, which clearly meant something about class and money. Dorsett looked handsome and strong-jawed, like an ad for aristocracy, and Dr. P. had the heavy glasses of the period and a crew cut, and that’s about all you could tell about them from the microfiche. Everyone looked middle-aged in 1962.

  The vet never implicated her. She testified that she had no idea of anything untoward in Mr. Dorsett’s horse breeding and racing “hobby.” But some dirt on her husband came out, a complaint the defense had found about a misrepresented horse he sold someone in Ligonier and a settlement, which tended to support the doctor’s story, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been a falling out between them. So Dr. P. got second degree murder. He went away to state prison for fifteen to twenty years—maybe a lot for second degree, but they’d loaded on some other charges about tampering and prescriptions. Took away his vet’s license, of course.

  And Helen(a), née Immerton, a.k.a., Mar(r), Hogarth Dorsett, twice widowed, presumably sold the house on Leucadendra Drive, and moved, perhaps straight into the Delphi. Who knows? On her inheritance she lived long and wore fine clothes and tried out drinks from the Esquire Book of Cocktails and played cards and did crosswords and died on her satin bedspread at seventy-seven. What’s so tragic about that?

  When I get home, I tell myself I need to buckle down to work. In the dining room, which is my workroom (I usually eat in the living room in front of the TV), I have stacked boxes full of papers I’ve picked up: billing records from long-gone businesses and vintage department store ads and menus and greeting cards and falling-apart old children’s books and what have you. Take them apart and shuffle them up and chuck an assortment into a Ziploc and there you go: Ephemera Samplers. Very popular with scrapbookers who come by my booth on Lincoln Road on Sundays. This scrapbooking fad has raised interest in everything with old typeface or illustration. My samplers let me get rid of things of little value, though I find I go too slow because I get interested, wondering when they served broiled grapefruit as an appetizer at the Senator Hotel and setting that menu aside to keep, which is defeating my purpose.

  This is tedium without much edge. I’ve got the lovely Helena’s picture on my work table where I can see her. The photo has that strong line between light and shadow they liked in the ’40s. Call it noir or chiaroscuro, it’s dramatic. She seems a hard, lovely woman. But this isn’t getting me anywhere. I assign myself to sit back down and make at least two dozen Ephemera Samplers.

  I jump at the phone when it rings.

  It’s Alex Sterling, asking if I can come meet him at Café Nublado—right by his house and not that far from mine—to discuss something. “Sounds serious,” I say, and he says it is, and so I allow as how I’ll tear myself away from work and drive down to see him.

  Café Nublado is Spanish fo
r coffee with clouds. They do the usual Cuban coffee and guava pastries, but to compete with the high-end espresso chains, the walls are painted with idealized piles of cumulonimbus and the house specialty has a soft puffy topping you have to suck through to get any caffeine. Whatever happened to Sanka? I like to grumble, but the girl knows me and gives me a decaf skim Nublado.

  Alex Sterling is in one of the big wicker planter’s chairs out back, wearing chinos and a well-cut yellow shirt. I see he’s looking worried, so I forego small talk. “What gives?”

  “Somebody has burgled Sharon,” he says. “She called me.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “She’s upset, naturally. I told her I’d ask you to go there. The police came and took a report, but I thought you might advise her on security. And then…”

  I wait. It seems convoluted to meet here, so he must have something in mind.

  “Do you think,” he says, “I overlooked something yesterday?”

  “At the Delphi?”

  “She says the stuff they took was all from there. And I’m wondering if someone knows there was something of great value and got it.”

  “But you’d looked it all over—”

  “Meticulously. You know me. It all seemed clean and organized. I didn’t find anything hidden. But I didn’t search every square molecule of space.”

  “I think you’re as thorough as anyone could be. Did you go through the flour and sugar?”

  He grins. “She didn’t have any flour. I doubt she ever baked. And her sugar was lump.”

  “Really,” I say, admiringly. “You never see that anymore, lump sugar. But you obviously looked. How ’bout the salt shaker?”

  He shakes his head. “What would be in there?”

  “Diamonds?”

  “You’re teasing me, Ray.”

  “Somewhat,” I say. “Anyway, everything Sharon had was from the bedroom. And you’d been through that.”

  “Yes, and then Sharon handled it all, and she says she didn’t find anything concealed. Did you?”

  “Well, I haven’t gone through every page of every book. She could have used a thousand-dollar bill as a bookmark. I’ll be sure to check.”

  “If I overlooked something, you know,” he shrugs, “that’s the way it is. What I don’t like is the idea that it could be one of the people who was there yesterday, who spotted something and then burgled Sharon to get it.”

  “Wouldn’t be me. I was in the bedroom alone enough, I could have taken anything then.”

  “I know,” he says. “And you were a policeman.” Alex always says policeman, as in, Say hi to the nice policeman. “Couldn’t you maybe figure out what it was and who took it? If it was someone on our team?”

  “Tall order.” I finish my Nublado. I want a cigarette but I had one an hour ago.

  “Yes,” he says. “But you could try, Ray, couldn’t you?”

  “Well, let’s go see,” I say.

  He pulls out his cell phone and calls her to tell her we’re on our way

  So I drive us over to Sharon’s place, also not far from Café Nublado. We people with a taste for old things are clustered in the neighborhoods of Miami’s Upper Eastside, where the houses were built in the ’30s of cinderblock and stucco, in styles they’re now calling Mediterranean Revival and Masonry Vernacular. I’m in Belle Meade, Sharon in Bayside, which is an historic district. Alex used to live there, but recently he cashed in and moved into a fixer-upper in Palm Grove, west of Biscayne Boulevard, for a long time the western frontier on realtors’ maps. Lately, people good at restoration like Alex—that is to say, the gay guys—have hopped the line in search of fun and profit there.

  On the way he tells me he keeps nothing of value in his house. He has safe deposit boxes at several banks. He adds that Mrs. Dorsett’s daughter made it clear that her mother’s real jewelry had been in her safe deposit box. All that remained was costume, and even that the daughter had gone through carefully. I ask what the daughter was like.

  “Like a respectable woman from Connecticut,” he says. “She was organized and I think she knew the status of her mother’s estate in advance. No nonsense. I just don’t see what it could be,” he muses.

  Sharon is out the back door to meet us as we pull up. Unadorned, wearing a white T-shirt and leggings, with her hair pulled back, she is a smaller woman than I’d thought. Perhaps she puffs herself up and puts on beads when she’s working with us guys to hold her own.

  She shows us where they came in. They simply bashed in window glass by the back door to the Florida room, reached in, and twisted the lock—no deadbolt. The alarm went off, of course, as soon as the door opened, but—as I’m telling her—there’s a limit to alarm systems.

  “The noise is useless. Neighbors won’t stir to take a look. The important factor is the signal through your phone line to the alarm company, who then call your house in case you set it off yourself and can give them the secret code to revoke the alarm. If you don’t answer, then they call the cops. And then the cops have to get here, so altogether your thief has a good ten to fifteen minutes. A real pro will take out your phone line, do a thorough job. What you have here is someone looking to smash and grab and run, usually kids wanting something to hock for drugs.”

  “Right,” says Sharon. “But if so, why didn’t they take the portable TV right here in the Florida room, six feet from the door?”

  She leads us through folding doors to her dining room and down a hall to the back bedroom she runs her business from. He definitely went out of his way to get to this room.

  “Forgive the mess in here,” she says.

  Of course, it looks far better than my place on a good day. Garments fill a chrome clothing rack, each hanger tagged with notes. Along the opposite wall, a long table holds a computer, scanner, postal scale, packing materials, and a piece of blue velvet with a desk lamp aimed at it, set up for photographing smaller objects. The open trash bags piled on and around an old couch under the windows are the only disorderly note. Heavy shades darken the room. I look behind them—jalousie windows, old thick glass, hard to break.

  “Did you have your digital camera here?” says Alex.

  “I’d been using it to shoot clothes outside, in sunlight—I hang them from my grapefruit tree. Afterward, I put it in the bedroom. It’s still there.”

  “So what did they take?” I ask. Like Sharon, I say “they,” even though I’m assuming it’s a “he.” It helps to keep it less vivid, I figure.

  “I’ve been making a list. The police want one and my insurance will too, but I don’t think it’s going to be enough for my deductible.” She picks up a pad. “Shoes, clothes, linens.”

  “Which?” asks Alex.

  “Not the nicest ones, really.” She opens the closet’s pocket door and reveals shoe racks. “I’d put the best away in here. I guess they never opened this. So they just got a couple of pairs of day shoes, some blouses that were here on the arm of the couch—things I was setting aside to take to the women’s shelter. The women always need clothes, especially for job interviews, work. Well, they took that whole pile. Oddly, they took the satin pillowcases but not the bedspread. I think some of the makeup and perfume is gone. They spilled some powder, see?”

  “Young transvestites in the neighborhood?” I say.

  Alex gives me an amused look. “Yes, probably.”

  I say, “They most likely used the pillowcases to carry the other items. That’s common.”

  “Well, it breaks up the set,” Sharon says, pointing to the spread, which looks much less glamourous in here, I notice.

  “Had you gone through everything from the estate before the break-in?” I ask.

  “Not really. I hung up all the finest clothes when I got home—that was the most important thing, to keep them nice. And then I was tired and my daughter and her family took me out for sushi. In the morning, I went out to the post office to ship things—I try to go early every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, so I don’t get behind.”r />
  “Someone seeing you leave with packages would probably assume you’d be gone awhile.”

  “I suppose. I was gone about forty-five minutes. When I came back the police were here, and I turned the alarm off.”

  “Wasn’t there some costume jewelry?” asks Alex.

  “Yes. I put it in here.” Sharon pulls out a vanity case from the closet floor. “It’s mainly brooches. Substantial ones that look good on her suits.” She opens a jewelry roll on the blue velvet piece and snaps on the light and they shine: fake pinwheels and starbursts.

  “She wore the pearl one on Sundays,” I say.

  “That’s the best,” says Sharon. “Miriam Haskell.”

  “There was a decent coral one,” says Alex, “set in fourteen-carat gold, which I have. The rest was costume, which is Sharon’s territory.”

  “Any missing?”

  They both shake their heads.

  “Well,” I say, “first thing to do is fix the window. And I think you need a deadbolt on that door—no reason to make things easy for them. I can do that for you, if you’d like.”

  “Thank you,” she says, and gives me a big smile. She takes us into the living room, a quiet space in greens and beiges. One end is nearly empty. A low table holds candles and a mat is unrolled in front of it on the pickled pine floor. She sees my glance. “I do meditation,” she says, “to calm down.”

  “Does it help?” I ask.

  “Yes. You should try it sometime. It’s good for your blood pressure. You tune in to yourself and just notice what there is: the light and little sounds.”

  “I think I’ve done it,” I say. “On stakeout.” I’m looking at her, recognizing that after—what, three years?—I don’t know her at all. We’re all such strangers.

  Driving home, I tell Alex it’s impossible to say what the burglary was all about. It might be something to do with the Dorsett estate or completely random. I drop him at his house in Palm Grove and tell him I’ll stay in touch with Sharon, in case she notices anything else. And otherwise keep my eyes open.