After I innocently reported the whole business to my mother she decided, much to my relief, that there would be no more sleep-overs with my Cuban relatives. She and my Aunt Odalys still do not speak. I am the sole link between their worlds and am never completely at home in either. Aunt Odalys, I suspect, is my only Cuban relative deeply involved in Santería. I love her dearly but do not believe in angry gods or evil spells. All those ceremonies inspire in me is an animal lover’s outrage.
But I was always close to my aunt, who loved telling me stories about my father’s youthful escapades. Later, when I became a reporter and covered my first Santería-related homicide, her knowledge came in handy.
The killer, apparently advised by his Santera, covered himself with oil, chicken feathers, and glitter, the same sparkly stuff we sprinkled on art projects and greeting cards in elementary school. I learned from Aunt Odalys that he had probably been promised that this combination would make him invisible to his enemies, or at least invincible. At any rate, he had marched solemnly off to shoot the rival he believed had placed a hex on him. The trail of glitter and chicken feathers led cops directly from the murder scene to the killer’s apartment in the same neighborhood. They found him still full of glitter, with chicken feathers in his underwear.
“Big Bird, you’re under arrest!” cracked an Anglo cop. I think that was when I began to have serious reservations about Santería and its practitioners.
I related none of this to my aunt now as we sat in her living room and sipped strong Cuban coffee from tiny china cups. I avoided looking at the Nganga, a large iron cauldron dominating one corner of the otherwise cozy room. Ngangas are packed with a variety of objects: railroad spikes, feathers, knives, beads, stones, machetes, prayers, dried leaves, and mirrors mounted on animal horns used to see the future. Certain ceremonies call upon the spirits of the dead to come live in the cauldron.
Ngangas also contain blood and animal and sometimes human remains. Mostly skulls and long bones. Miami police academy classes teach rookies how to recognize skulls used in Santería rituals. Among the telltale clues are candle wax drippings, a packing of dried leaves, and stains from animal blood and rust from the cauldron.
Many of the skulls are purchased from local botánicas and prove to be of African or West Indian origin, intended as anatomical specimens for educational and medical purposes.
But some who practice Santería insist on skulls still containing brains, in order to make the spirits smarter. That creates potential problems. The demand leads to grave robbing, a practice definitely against the law.
Differentiating between Santería-motivated grave robberies and simple cemetery desecrations is simple: Look for the symbolism. Santería beliefs are dominated by the seven African powers. The victim in the first grave robbery that I covered for the News had died at age seventy-seven in 1947. Her grave was the seventh from the cemetery gate. Something to keep in mind when shopping for a cemetery plot.
“I have a problem,” I told my Aunt Odalys.
“A man,” she said, placing her beautifully manicured hand over her heart.
“Sort of,” I began uncertainly.
“His name?”
“I don’t know. The police are looking for him.” Her arched eyebrows lifted dramatically and frown lines marred her perfect brow. I told her about the rapist. She knew about him via Spanish-language radio. I told her about the letters, and the thing I found in my car, and why I had asked about Ochosi.
“Ay, Dios mío. ¡Qué horror! ¡Chica! We must do a divination,” she said gravely, and got to her feet.
I began to feel silly. What was I doing here? Yet this had seemed right; my aunt would know how the man was thinking if he relied on Santería.
We sat opposite each other at her highly polished dining room table. The cowrie shells rattled as she threw them like dice. The shells are asked yes-and-no questions, but only in Spanish, and her muttered Spanish was too fast for me.
She calculated how the cowries fell, open sides up or hidden. Murmuring, she gathered them up and threw them again and again.
“The saints say you are too trusting,” she said, her tone accusing. That didn’t sound like me at all. I wondered if the saints had mixed me up with somebody else but kept my mouth shut. She threw the shells again. They tumbled from her slim, graceful hands gleaming and innocent, the way the surf must have tossed them up onto some sunny beach.
“Danger, mortal danger, muerte,” she whispered, lifting frightened eyes. The shells scattered again, across the table. “This confirms what you say. It is here. Danger from someone you have never met.”
Oy, I thought. At times my landlady, Mrs. Goldstein, is a greater influence on me than my aunt.
“We have to perform a despojo,” my Aunt Odalys said firmly, “to seek the intervention of the deities and the dead.”
“No way,” I said flatly. “No animals, not even a chicken.”
“But I am your madrina, Britt,” she said persuasively, her expression hurt. “I can call on the father of the spirits who live in the cauldron to help you.”
“You’d help me best by telling me what you can about the rapist.”
Based on what I said, my aunt concluded that he had evidently taken his problems with me and my stories to his religious adviser, an apparent practitioner of Palo Mayombe, the most malevolent magic. Obviously a brujería, connected with evil sorcery, had been performed. The ritual with the cow’s tongue, a high-ticket item, probably cost him upwards of $500.
With all that magic in his corner, he probably considered himself powerful and omnipotent.
“Britt,” Aunt Odalys said. “You must let me help you.”
After increasingly shrill negotiations, we settled for a minor ritual of cleansing. She insisted on rubbing some herbs in my hair and made me promise not to wash it for three days.
This day cannot become any more weird, I told myself as she rubbed pungent leaves into my scalp. I wondered what reporters in other major American cities were doing at the same moment.
“You need protection,” my aunt said. “A resguardo, a talisman.”
“No animals involved?”
I got as close to a dirty look as she has ever given me. She moved to a sideboard and proceeded to fill a tiny cloth pouch with pinches of various herbs, a coin, and a bullet.
“Where’d you get that?” It looked like a .38, a hollow-point.
She pursed her lips, regarding me from beneath lowered lashes, as a doctor would a reluctant patient.
“It will protect you.”
“Only if there is a trigger on that little bag,” I said.
“A stranger out there will try to do you harm,” she said, eyes serious. “You must wear this, you must never take it off.”
I sighed. I hate people telling me what I must do.
She closed the pouch and jabbed a safety pin through it. “Do not carry it in your purse. You could lose it. Wear it inside your clothes. Pin it to your pantalones,” she said. “Now.”
At this point, I wasn’t going to argue. I needed all the help I could get. I did as she said, lifting my skirt and pinning it to the elastic at the top of my underpants. What a surprise for Curt, I thought, if he should ever succeed in getting them off.
Aunt Odalys had disappeared into another room, and that worried me. “One more thing,” she said, returning with a necklace of small red and white beads. She placed them over my head, arranging them around my neck.
I was so relieved that she hadn’t come back leading a goat, I did not demur.
“You are a daughter of Chango,” she whispered, “the warrior who controls thunder and lightning. Wear these.” Last time I had a necklace like that, I was five years old and it was confiscated by my mother, who threw it away.
I declined to stay for supper, but hinted I would not be adverse to a Care package. Aunt Odalys filled some Tupperware containers with her wonderful food: the pot-roasted chicken, calabaza fritters
reeking of nutmeg and cinnamon, and mango flan.
She hugged me at the door as I peered up and down the darkening street like a thief. Then, hair smelling like an herb garden, I dashed out, unlocked the T-Bird, and piled in with my booty. The aromas mingled and filled the car.
“Britt.” I jumped, startled. She had followed me out and stood next to my window. Worry creased her face. “Stop at a botánica and buy seven red candles. Burn them for twenty-four hours around a statue of Santa Barbara. Then make an offering of fruit—”
“Eh, if I have time,” I lied. I blew a kiss and escaped. In the rearview mirror I saw her still at the curb, like an apparition in her white dress.
I was not about to start shopping at a botánica. Stores that service Santería practitioners have existed in Miami for decades but have proliferated since the Mariel boatlift. There now seems to be one on every Little Havana street corner, selling potions, herbs, candles, mystical charms, beads, special soaps, statues of the saints and gods, and other mystical paraphernalia.
They are small, dark, and mysterious and accept all major credit cards.
I drove home feeling better, buttressed by food, herbs, and magic. Even so, I checked the rearview mirror frequently and cautiously held my breath as I entered my apartment. Bitsy excitedly danced and wagged her tail; Billy Boots was curled up on a chair. He opened his eyes, stood up, and stretched, motivated not by my arrival but the scent of food. Everything, including my gun, seemed to be as I had left it.
I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. After checking the apartment, I sat down and ate ravenously without even rewarming the food. Then I took Bitsy out but only as far as the street, watching for strangers as I tossed my hair, trying to shake out the herbs. On the way back I saw lights on in the Goldsteins’ apartment and stopped to warn them. I didn’t want to alarm them but I did want them aware, especially since Mrs. Goldstein unlocked my door to take Bitsy out a couple of times a day. I suggested that perhaps we should discontinue the practice for the time being but she would have none of it, insisting that Bitsy needed the exercise. Secretly I was relieved.
I went back inside and called both Lottie and Onnie to let them know I was home. Each had been waiting for my call.
Then I sat down to eat more mango flan and figure out what to do next. The flan was so silky smooth and went down so easily that, as usual when I am nervous, I ate more than I had intended. If a sinister stranger showed up to do me harm, at least I was well fed.
Deciding my next move was easy. I would keep following the Downtown Rapist story. I hoped the next major break would be an arrest but, realistically, that might never happen. All I could do was watch my back and keep doing my job. But I could take action when it came to the Fielding camp. I would confront Martin Mowry directly.
As I got ready for bed, the doorbell rang, jangling my nerves. Throwing on a bathrobe, I carried the gun to my door.
“Sorry to startle you, Britt. I should have called first.”
I quickly slipped the gun behind a sofa cushion and opened the door.
Mr. Goldstein stood on the threshold, carrying his toolbox and looking shy. “The wife thought I should put this up for you.” He shrugged and cocked his head. “It’s not such a bad idea.”
I grinned as he went to work efficiently, drilling small holes, inserting screws, and mounting a mezuzah on my front doorframe.
I kissed his wrinkled cheek as he left, then checked the doors and the windows. I touched the mezuzah, pinned my resguardo to my nightgown, tucked my beads and my gun beneath my pillow, and stared at the dark.
Chapter 14
My dreams that night included spectacular chase scenes in which I seemed to alternate between being the prey and the pursuer. The cast changed constantly, tormenting my subconscious as though trying to tell me something that I could not quite hear in the dense darkness around me.
I woke up feeling like hell and knew what I had to do. I called Curt Norske and invited myself on a sightseeing cruise. Like Lottie had said, I needed a break. I hadn’t felt so beaten up and shell-shocked since the last riot.
This is always my favorite time of year, when temperatures soar and heavy rains fall. Late each afternoon black clouds roil over the peninsula, sweep across the Everglades from the Gulf of Mexico, and drench the city. You can hear the grass grow. During the night huge ripe, rosy mangoes fall from the trees outside my bedroom window, dropping to the ground with soft thuds.
I gather them in the morning, selecting one of the biggest and best to devour with my newspaper, cereal, and Cuban coffee. The rest I deposit at the door of Mrs. Goldstein, who believes in sharing the bounty.
I went through the usual motions but lacked appetite and my usual sense of contentment. All I hungered for was answers.
My first task at the office was to track down Martin Mowry. He was upstate with the candidate, according to the local Fielding for Governor campaign headquarters. I missed him at the hotel where the entourage was staying but caught up with him by phone in LaBelle, where Fielding was about to participate in the annual Swamp Cabbage Festival. His speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post would follow the parade and precede the gospel sing.
I didn’t say it was the press calling, simply announced it was long distance for Mowry. After several minutes, he barked, “Mowry here,” into the phone.
“Good morning,” I said cheerfully. “This is Britt Montero from the Miami News. I understand you’ve been asking questions about me. Is there anything I can fill you in on?”
There was a pause. “Britt Montero,” he repeated. His deep, distinctive voice had the crisp quality of a man accustomed to dispatching and following orders.
“Yes,” I said, “and I’d like to know the reason for your inquiries.”
“You damn well know the reason,” he said. “That pack of lies and accusations you raked up.”
“They were questions, Mr. Mowry. Questions,” I said. “I’m a reporter; that’s what I do. I ask questions, and most still haven’t been answered.”
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” he said arrogantly. “Let me tell you something. You may be unaware that Eric Fielding has been your publisher’s personal lawyer for years. They went through Harvard together and each was the best man at the other’s wedding.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said respectfully. “But that has no bearing on anything we do in the newsroom.”
Or does it? I wondered. Christ! Was that why Fred Douglas told me to back off? Was I jeopardizing my job?
“You’re not doing yourself or your career any good,” Mowry warned. “You don’t seem to realize that you’re about as important to your newspaper as a pimple on an elephant’s ass.”
I swallowed. “But I still want to know—”
He had hung up.
That bastard, I thought, directing my anger at Fielding. Mowry was probably just following orders to try to intimidate me.
If only there was a way, I thought, to get back into the Mary Beth Rafferty story before the election. We had never published the name of the witness, the little boy, Mary Bern’s playmate. Perhaps I could locate him. Or possibly someone involved would go public and demand that Fielding undergo a polygraph. Too bad Mary Beth’s father is dead, I thought. I bet he’d do it in a minute.
Meanwhile, it was my job to keep the Downtown Rapist story alive until his arrest. I wrote a follow-up piece about Marianne Rhodes for the early edition.
Despite her TV debut, Fred Douglas had stuck by our decision not to publish her name. I identified her only as “the dark-haired junior executive.” Bitterly, she told me she had retained an attorney to file a civil suit for damages against her employer for failing to maintain a safe workplace. Sounded right to me. Too much litigation clogs our courts now, but if this was what it took to keep women safe on the job, I was for it.
Deliberately, I again used the line that Dr. Simmons indicated probably infuriated the rapist most, that the crim
es were attempts to prove to himself that he was sexually adequate, which he obviously was not.
I finished the story and took off, leaving a note that I had gone to investigate the crime lab clue found on the letter, the particle of what could be marine paint. I drove to Bayside and parked the T-Bird, leaving my pager locked in the glove box.
The Sea Dancer is white and immaculate, a sixty-four-footer with double decks and stainless steel fittings. The captain welcomed me aboard personally, his gold-flecked eyes as warm as I remembered. I wore white cotton slacks with a peach-colored blouse and sat up near the captain, the wheel, and the public address system.
Biscayne Bay is a live work of art, constantly changing. Today it was smooth and flat, bridges and skyscrapers reflected in its brilliant blue-green surface.
Whether I hit it off with Curt Norske or not, this would be a welcome treat, I thought, settling expectantly into my seat among laughing, chattering tourists. I love to see Miami, and one of the best ways is from the water. The sight always fills me with fantasies about what it had to be like long ago, before the original city skyline gave way to the modern metropolis.
The boat was about three quarters full of noisy summer visitors in shorts and bright cottons, the smart ones protected by hats and sunglasses and swabbing on sunscreen. Some kids sported mouse ears acquired at Disney World during their trip south.
I dreamily scanned the bay’s shimmering surface, its beauty driving away the dark images that had shadowed my thoughts. Waterfront has always been in demand. Tequesta Indians camped on these shores three thousand years ago, and archaeological digs in the South Biscayne Bay area had unearthed ten-thousand-year-old traces of humanity. Ponce de Leon sailed into this bay. Spanish galleons swept by, loaded with treasure, as Seminoles paddled dugout canoes. These waters were home to pirates, pioneers, runaway slaves, and battle-scarred Civil War veterans. What would they think of it today, the busiest cruise-ship port in the world? Today’s news stories, trials, and turmoil, I thought: will any of it matter in a hundred years?
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