Miami Midnight

by Davis, Maggie;

  “And write a sidebar,” Jack said. He was searching through the printout of her story. “Something about the—what? The Santo Marin family,” he said, finding the page. “Didn’t we do a feature on them once?” The question was rhetorical; Gaby was too new to know. “Well, look it up,” he told her, “and give me a couple of hundred words.”

  Gaby was still staring at the photo she held in her hand. The last thing she wanted was more of James Santo Marin. Now she’d just had him assigned as part of her story.

  “How’d it happen?” Jack asked.

  She gave him an unfocused look. She’d been asking herself that same question for days. She had no answer to the way she’d behaved that night, except that the storm and her fright had sent her into a wildly abnormal state of mind. Right there in the photograph, just beyond the man and the woman in the lily pond, were two stocky men in mirror sunglasses. If anything put James Santo Marin in perspective, it was the reminder of his sinister friends, the drug-dealing Colombians.

  “It’s not in your copy,” Jack said. He was looking at her with leaden patience. When Gaby only stared at him, he said, “The copy. If you don’t mind, Gabrielle, how the hell did they get in the pond?”

  “Oh, the pond.” She hated it when Jack treated her like a moron. She had worked in a literate, demanding job abroad for almost five years; she couldn’t help it if she didn’t know much about newspapering. “The model fell off the runway.” Should she tell him what Crissette had said? That the model was high on something? “The model fell off this temporary runway they built for the fashion show and he—” She faltered when she saw Jack Carty was looking at her directly for a change. In fact, staring at her with exceptionally cold blue eyes. “H-he came to get her out,” she stammered.

  “He who?” he demanded stonily. “Has he got a name?”

  “Y-yes, you just said it.” She picked up a page of her story. And cringed. James Santo Marin wasn’t identified anywhere.

  “Make sure you put it in, Gaby, in the sidebar. You do know,” he said carefully, “what a sidebar is, don’t you?”

  She looked away. She was such a wimp, she thought, letting Jack Carty browbeat her when they had these terrible story conferences. Somehow, someday, if she lasted long enough in this newspaper job, she was going to build up enough confidence to—

  “A sidebar,” he said, “is a little box with words, sentences in it. It goes on the side of the story, sometimes in the middle of the columns, but always in its little box. And it usually elaborates on some aspect of the copy.”

  “A little box,” Gaby said. “Yes, I’ve seen them.”

  He took the picture out of her hands. “Go down to the morgue and look up the Santo Marin family. Go back three or four years if you have to, look up everything that mentions them. Then call the chairman of whatever it is—”

  ‘The Coral Gables Hispanic Cultural Society,” she said helpfully.

  “—and ask them what Santo Marin’s been doing lately, business connections, awards, all the social stuff.”

  “Suppose there’s something...” She felt foolish, but she was remembering the reason James Santo Marin had come to her house. It was better to bring it up now. “Something that he—that the Santo Marins don’t want printed,” she ended lamely.

  The features editor sighed. “Gaby, write a background for a sidebar. Just do it! Wait,” he said when she started to get up, “there’s more.” He shuffled through the papers on his desk, found an envelope, and handed it to her, then bent his head. Not looking up, he said, “You’ve been issued a check for special expenses.”

  She gaped at him. “A check for expenses?”

  ‘The consensus of management is that the fashion reporter has certain expenses, an image to maintain, since you ... uh, represent the paper. So we have a new policy,” he ended gruffly. “You get a clothes allowance.”

  A clothes allowance? Nervously, she ripped open the envelope, certain something was wrong. She stared at the piece of green paper with its official-looking numbers. The Times-Journal check was for five hundred dollars.

  Bright color rose in Gaby’s throat and flamed in her face all the way to her forehead. She sat quite still, knowing there was no need to ask for an explanation. Dodd Brickell and his father and their good friend Gardner Hedison, the Times-Journal publisher, had decided to be helpful again.

  Gaby wondered if anyone had ever died of terminal shame and embarrassment. She also wondered what Jack Carty would do if his untalented, inexperienced fashion writer put her head down on his desk and burst into humiliated tears.

  “The fashion slot probably needed it anyway,” Jack said. He was studiously ignoring her, examining the backs of his blunt, freckled hands with elaborate interest. “Especially since you’re picking up a following.”

  Gaby didn’t know what he was talking about. Then she saw the editor lift his head and look pointedly across the newsroom to the elaborate bouquet sitting on top of one of the Modern Living section’s file cabinets.

  She’d forgotten the flowers. Four dozen extravagant long-stemmed red roses, more exotic in Miami at that time of year than orchids. There had been no card, and she had assumed it had fallen off somewhere when they were being delivered. Fashion writers were always receiving promotional gifts. The week before, a Hialeah shopping mall had sent her a basket of fruit with an invitation to something called a Midsummer Mexican Fiesta. The city room had eaten the fruit. It had been her most popular moment so far.

  Now, because somebody had delivered a lot of roses, probably by mistake, Jack Carty thought she had a readership. Her “following,” as he called it.

  Would it be wise to deny it? Gaby gnawed at her bottom lip. To try to set him right?

  “Sidebar,” Jack reminded her. “I need a sidebar, Gabrielle. And hopefully sometime this year.”

  “Yes, yes.” She jumped up hastily. “I’m on my way.”

  She had only gone a few steps when she heard him call out across the city room, “Not the Dade County Morgue, Gabrielle. The newspaper morgue. Down on the third floor.”

  The whole city room staff kept their heads down. But they were grinning.

  The newspaper morgue, where clippings and microfilm records of Times-Journal back issues were kept, was a windowless, frigidly air-conditioned room that somewhat resembled the actual Dade County morgue downtown. It was made even more morguelike by bleak fluorescent lighting and a grim-faced middle-aged woman who greeted Gaby as though news of her incompetence had already filtered down.

  “Photographic is looking for you,” she said as Gaby signed in to use the files. “Want me to call Crissette Washington back and tell her you’re down here?”

  Crissette, Gaby remembered, had offered to give her a ride home because her mother’s aged Cadillac was in the shop again. She told the morgue supervisor she’d appreciate the call, and went into the file room.

  There were two systems in the Times-Journal’s morgue. Old metal bins held file folders of clippings of the newspaper’s earlier issues. The daily editions since 1979 were on microfilm. Researching James Santo Marin wasn’t going to be easy, she thought, sighing. She didn’t even know what year to begin with. It would probably help to know how long the Santo Marin family had been in Miami.

  The first wave of Cuban exiles had arrived in the States in the 1960’s. But Gaby remembered someone telling her the Santo Marin export-import company had had a Miami branch office long before that. Still, looking for a story through back editions of the Times-Journal was a lot better than the daily struggles with her writing. At least researching was something she knew.

  Gaby began with the current week’s editions, but after a half hour of monotonous sliding of microfilmed pages through the viewer she began to lose the edge of her concentration. Then the front page of the Modern Living section came up with the story she was looking for. It was four years old, she saw, checking the dateline, and the headline was something of a surprise. “Miami Roots Still Here For Cuba’s Santo Mari
ns.”

  “Goody,” Gaby murmured.

  Center page was a photograph of all three Santo Marins in the spectacular white living room of their just-completed palatial art deco estate in Coral Gables four years ago. The original photograph was in color; the microfilm reproduction was more muddy than usual. But James Santo Marin was certainly recognizable, tense and smolderingly good-looking in a dark business suit, standing behind the white sofa where his sister and mother were seated.

  Gaby examined the women. Señora Estancia Santo Marin with her dark hair and exquisite Castilian features looked beautiful and young enough to be her son’s sister. The sister herself, identified in the cut line below the photo as Pilar Antonia Santo Marin had, in spite of her lovely face, the pale, overshadowed air of one who had lived all her life in the brilliance of her mother’s beauty.

  She could relate to that, Gaby thought. Pilar Santo Marin was pretty, but not pretty enough. And had lived all her young life with the spotlight on her glamorous mama.

  Gaby sat back in her chair and studied them thoughtfully. The two women were sleek, perfectly coiffed, with great lidded dark eyes, the very picture of upper-class latinas. Behind them, James Santo Marin looked down his nose at the camera with the scowling, impatient expression of someone too busy to be having his picture taken.

  According to the Times-Journal article, the Santo Marins had been rich in Cuba, but they’d grown even richer in the States. James Santo Marin had taken over the family business on the death of his uncle and was a millionaire several times over. He had been named Young Hispanic Businessman of the Year, and served on numerous Miami area banking boards. The mansion he’d built on the shore of Biscayne Bay had been designed by a famous Argentinian architect.

  The so-called “Prince of Coral Gables” played championship polo for a Palm Beach team, piloted his own Lear jet, and had acquired an Italian-built power cruiser named the Altavida that had won several prizes for advanced design.

  He didn’t, Gaby thought, frowning, have the usual fatuous, self-absorbed look of a playboy. If anything, those handsome features were too somber, too tense. Still, it was hard to picture the same man as wet and rumpled, zipping up his pants and storming out of her house. The way he had four nights ago.

  Forcing that image from her mind, she returned her attention to the article. Before their exile from Cuba in the 1960’s, the Santo Marin family had apparently lived in Miami as much as they had in Havana. James and his sister Pilar had been born in Miami, which made them United States citizens. In fact, he had graduated from the University of Miami.

  Gaby fought down an uneasy feeling. All that money, the family business expanding into an empire, within a comparatively few years? The exiles of the sixties had been desperately poor; Castro hadn’t let them take anything out of the country except the clothes they wore and one change of underwear. The Santo Marins had obviously been part of that elite, ultrawealthy Caribbean community that had once made the circuit of Buenos Aires, Madrid, and Paris, sent their young to European prep schools, shopped London’s Savile Row and French haute couture houses, and contributed championship players to the international polo set. It had been a world vastly different from the one Gaby knew. Señora Estancia Santo Marin, the Times-Journal feature said, was Spanish-born, and the sister, Señorita Pilar Santo Marin, had been educated in convents in Madrid and Havana. They now kept busy with volunteer work for local charities.

  Charity, Gaby reminded herself with a start.

  She’d been so engrossed in the microfilm, she’d forgotten that Jack Carty had told her to call Alicia Fernandez. She looked up at the clock on the wall. The Times-Journal was a morning paper; its deadline for the next day’s editions were at nine-thirty at night, even though the Modern Living section theoretically worked from nine to five. As she rushed back to her desk in the city room, she hoped it wasn’t too late to telephone Mrs. Fernandez.

  The maid who answered the Fernandez phone didn’t speak English well, but eventually, with the help of Gaby’s minimal Spanish, Alicia Fernandez came on the line.

  “Gabrielle?” Her low voice was unfailingly kind. “How good to hear from you, darling. Did you want to speak to Susan?”

  Gaby was at a loss for a moment, then remembered Susan was the old school friend from Ransom Country Day School.

  “Because she’s isn’t here,” Alicia went on. “Susan would adore to hear from you, Gabrielle, but she’s married now—”

  “Not Susan, please,” Gaby interrupted. How did you plunge right in and ask for a lot of information? It was another newspapering skill she hadn’t acquired. “Ah ... Mrs. Fernandez, I’m with the Miami Times-Journal now, I guess you remember,” she said awkwardly. “I hate to bother you this time of night, but I’m on a deadline. I’m doing a story about the Santo Marin family, James Santo Marin, and it’s important.”

  There was a silence, then Gaby heard a sound very much like an excited, suppressed scream. “Fernando!” Alicia cried. “Oh, my dear, have they let him out? Oh God, tell me they have!”

  Gaby held the receiver away from her ear and stared at it, dumbfounded. There seemed to be a commotion on the other end with people calling out to each other. “Mrs. Fernandez, wait,” she said, not sure she could be heard. “I’m calling about the fashion show at the Santo Marin house. You know, when the model fell in the pond.”

  There was another abrupt silence. “My editor,” Gaby plunged on, “thought you might give me some information about the Santo Marins.”

  The dead air at the other end of the line was profound.

  “Mrs. Fernandez?” Gaby asked.

  After a long moment Alicia Fernandez said in a low, obviously strained voice, “Gabrielle, do you want to know about Jimmy Santo Marin? Is that what you’re calling about?”

  Who else could she have been calling about? “Well, yes. I have some material in front of me from a feature we did a few years ago that gives some—”

  “Wait.” Alicia had obviously left the telephone. When the line was picked up again she said with the same tense, almost labored politeness, “Yes, Gabrielle, what was it you wanted to know?”

  In a few words Gaby explained what she needed.

  “I’ll tell you what I can,” Alicia said with the same measured tenseness. “They’re such private people, especially Estancia. She’s Spanish-born, altaclase. There’s still that Castilian wall of reserva, especially since what happened last year. That poor, foolish girl Pilar.” Alicia hesitated. “They’ve had their problems, Gabrielle, I guess I can tell you that. In spite of all the money it’s been a struggle. The daughter had a terrible experience. Her engagement to one of the Dodges from Palm Beach was called off. He jilted her because I think his family wasn’t happy with—with Latins. Estancia took it particularly hard.”

  “Oh,” Gaby said, not knowing what else to say.

  “Yes, but, Gabrielle,” the other woman went on quickly, “people don’t realize what something like that means to a girl from Pilar’s background, to be dumped by a man. Even in these days.”

  Gaby crossed out what she had written. A broken engagement, even with a Palm Beach socialite, probably didn’t go into the sidebar Jack Carty wanted. “Mrs. Fernandez, actually what I need is something about James Santo Marin. We’re using a photograph of him from the fashion show, when he pulled the model out of the pond. For instance, what do people in Miami’s Latin community think of him, his leadership now, his ... uh, position socially?” Gaby was having difficulty even talking about James Santo Marin. She was strangely breathless again. “I heard they—why do they call him the Prince of Coral Gables?”

  “Oh, Jimmy,” Alicia’s voice altered, “Don’t call him the prince thing, Gabrielle, he hates it. As for leadership in the Latin community...” She hesitated again. “Of course Jimmy’s been fantastically successful, but then he’s something of a genius with all those businesses and the bank. But I couldn’t say that he’s a community leader actually, so much as, well, the community is ... t
hat is, many people are sort of—protective. No, I’m sure I don’t mean ‘protective’ exactly. Gabrielle. It’s so hard to talk about the Latin community in Miami when there are so many different parts of it. And really, I can’t speak for any of them!”

  “Well, how does the community,” Gaby asked, anxious about getting any information for the sidebar, “feel about James Santo Marin?”

  There was another silence. “Well, he’s—popular. I guess James Santo Marin is very popular. You could call it that.”

  Sort of popular but sort of protected. Gaby was following something that eluded her. As did, actually, the whole subject of James Santo Marin. It was crazy. “You said his leadership—”

  “Gabrielle,” Alicia interrupted, “you’re not going to print any of this, are you? Estancia Santo Marin would strangle me! Besides, I’m not saying the right things. Oh, darling, you picked the wrong person to call. Look, honey, contact the Santo Marins. If they want to talk to you, they’ll tell you everything you have to know!”

  The click on the other end said the conversation was over.

  Gaby sat looking at the microfilm machine without really seeing it. Protective? Popular? The words didn’t make any sense. Not when applied to what she already knew about James Santo Marin. Not the personality that went with that tense, arrogant scowl, that electric machismo in an Armani suit, handmade shoes, silk tie, and custom-made shirt.

  Gaby suddenly thought it sounded like her father. Another spoiled, sexy, beautiful man. But for Paul Collier there had never been enough money, not in the whole world, not the way he spent it. Maybe, Gaby thought, there hadn’t been enough for James Santo Marin, either.

  Somehow he had gotten very, very rich.

  She lifted the telephone directory from its rack and found only two listings under that name. One was in Hialeah, the other on Eighth Street in the heart of Miami’s Little Havana. Nothing in Coral Gables. She felt a rush of relief. Undoubtedly the Santo Marins had an unlisted telephone number.