Miami Midnight

by Davis, Maggie;

  “I’m going to miss Miami,” Crissette said, sighing. Below them on Sunday’s pier sailing yachts and streamlined power boats were unloading fabulously dressed, gloriously tanned passengers. “A lot of people don’t dig all this glitz-by-the-sea, the latinos, the sunburn, the tourist hype, the crazy lifestyles, but I’m a native, honey, this is my territory.” She took a large gulp of her tequila sunrise. “Frankly, I think this is the best place on earth. I hate to leave, even for a couple of years.”

  They watched a sleek Cigarette power cruiser tie up to the dock, driven by an especially good-looking, bare-chested young man in French jeans. The racy boat, the handsome young man made the same thoughts cross their minds.

  “I can’t believe,” Crissette said, watching the figure below jump out of the Cigarette’s cockpit to secure a line to the dock, “that it was that Santo Marin guy’s sister all the time. That she put all that voodoo stuff at your house that night and scared us half to death. Did you ever find out if the chick was a real nut case? I mean, did they ever have her committed?”

  “Oh, she’s still around.” Gaby found the right neutral tone. “They don’t commit people for practicing Santería, I suppose.”

  Actually, Gaby knew Pilar Santo Marin was more than just “around” Miami these days. Last week’s Times-Journal society pages had reported that the young Coral Gables socialite had returned from an art seminar in Paris and was looking forward to beginning her new position as events coordinator for the Luis Gutman Art Galleries in Bal Harbour. It didn’t exactly sound, Gaby had thought wryly, as though James Santo Marin’s sister was keeping up her voodoo. But one never could tell.

  The society pages had also run a photograph of James in a magnificent Armani tuxedo escorting his sister and the exquisite daughter of the French consul to a chamber music concert. The caption said Miami’s unofficial “Prince of Coral Gables” had just won the annual Catalina-San Diego powerboat run in his advanced design yacht, the Altavida.

  Gaby remembered the yacht. She’d seen a part of it—James’s stateroom, draped in red silk Santería streamers dedicated to Chango—that few knew about. At least in that way.

  “Hey,” Crissette said softly, “don’t look like that, honey. Nothing’s that bad.”

  Gaby couldn’t smile, and was surprised at the depths of her pain. “The strange thing is that right up until the time James—I mean, her family—caught up with her, no one really knew who was doing the Santería. The priestess, Ibi Gobuo, kept saying something about a crazy girl, sort of an amateur witch, but she didn’t know, either.” Gaby paused as the waiter served their salads. “The Santería people didn’t take her seriously. But there was something there, Crissette, even though I can’t really describe it. David felt it. I had these truly awful nightmares. There was even a sort of odor. It used to be in the house at night, late, when it was quiet. It always reminded me of green islands in the sea, flowers and smoke. Even food cooking.” Her tight smile returned. “The only one who ever thought it smelled bad was Dodd.”

  Crissette was still watching her thoughtfully. “You haven’t set a wedding date yet, have you? Are you happy, Gabrielle? I mean, are things going to work out for you?”

  A chilly gust of storm wind swept across the terrace, the threatening clouds suddenly much darker. Sunday’s waiters and busboys began turning chairs against the tables, anticipating a retreat inside.

  Gaby couldn’t answer questions about her happiness. That subject, too, was painful. “Well, everything’s worked out, hasn’t it?” she murmured. “Nothing really bad happened to any of us, after all. David got beaten up by the Colombians, but then when you saw him like that you realized how much he meant to you, remember?”

  Crissette put down her fork. “Girl, are you kidding? You were hassled by some fruitcake chick with a hate thing against non-latinos who followed you in a big black limousine and did Santería against you—”

  “But that put my mother in the hospital.” Gaby had thought it all out, determinedly. “Jeannette probably wouldn’t have gone for treatment of her alcoholism if not for that incident. I think having all those things happen to me lit a fire under me for the first time in my life. I just tore into my job and look how its turning out.”

  “Honey, are you trying to make a case for all these disasters?”

  “And if I hadn’t been kidnapped,” Gaby continued, “David wouldn’t have been caught by the police and deported. And you probably wouldn’t be going to Trinidad to get married.”

  Crissette stared at her. “Gabrielle, what about your poor dog that got killed? What about practically being raped by a Colombian drug dealer and having to shish-kebab his private parts? Were those fun things, too?”

  “Well, of course Jack Carty thinks it’s the biggest joke of the year,” she admitted, “that I tried to turn Tomás Ochoa into a soprano, but I really wouldn’t have cared if I had.” She paused, sadly remembering the family’s faithful guardian. “As for poor old Jupiter, Dodd was right. He was getting so old we probably would have had to put him to sleep sometime this fall. I’m glad I didn’t have to face that.”

  “I see you got everything figured out,” Crissette said with some irony. “I guess that’s one way of dealing with it. But Gabrielle, are you going to marry old Dodson Brickell”—she dragged the words out—”the Third, or are you going to get things settled with the guy you’re really in love with?”

  Gaby didn’t look up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Crissette made a derisive noise. “Listen, girl, when are you going to go after what you want? And stop standing around just waiting for things to happen?”

  “Good heavens, I don’t do that!” She faltered, unable to meet her friend’s eyes. “Besides, it won’t work. I—I hardly know him. We’re worlds apart.”

  Gaby looked down at her half-eaten salad. She’d had weeks to think about a relationship based on physical desire—and she was sure it was no more than that between James Santo Marin and herself. She’d told herself over and over again they had nothing in common: a too-beautiful, fiery-tempered playboy virtually worshipped as a god by a large part of the population in Little Havana, with all the entanglements of his Latin background; and she, Gabrielle Collier, a not-very-assertive, financially strapped remnant of a once-prominent Old Miami family who’d had to steel herself to meet the challenge of even a minor newspaper job. If anything, she thought, sighing, James had too much pride. And she didn’t have nearly enough.

  She just wished she could get over the strange, terrible ache of missing him, because it was ridiculous. All the times they’d been together, they’d hardly had what anyone would call a conversation. They’d made love. They’d argued.

  They had nothing going for them, she told herself for the hundredth time. They were totally incompatible. She just had to stop going over it in her mind, and forget it.

  “Did you ever want to get to know him, Gabrielle?” Crissette asked. “Or did you sort of subconsciously think it was better just knowing him as, you know, a latino, something different, a real big turn-on, an experience, but not really a permanent part of your life?”

  Gaby hadn’t been listening. Now she only blinked. “Crissette, you know?”

  “What? That he’s the guy who tried to throw David down a flight of stairs on Calle Ocho because he thought David was getting you into some kind of weird trouble? And that half the women from here to Jacksonville would die just to ride in his Lamborghini? Like rich? Gorgeous? Lemme see, looks like Lorenzo Lamas and Rob Lowe rolled up into one sexy hunk?”

  “Stop.” Gaby put her hands over her ears. “It really isn’t funny.”

  “I didn’t say it was. Not when his little sister wanted to get you killed. That’s not cool. But you can’t blame him for that.”

  “I don’t blame him.” Her voice was low, desolate. “You don’t understand, Crissette. He blames me.”

  The diners were gone from the windy terrace and the busboys were stripping the tables o
f their linen. The oncoming storm rattled the ratlines of the sailing vessels docked below them on Sunday’s pier. Most of their owners were at the bar, settling down for an afternoon’s drinking.

  “And you’re going to accept that?” Crissette was annoyed with her and showed it. “I mean, this guy’s been humiliated, his whole ethnic background’s just screwed him up, not to mention his kid sister. And this dude is American. He was born here! Also, he thinks he put you at risk with the drug dealers, doesn’t he?”

  Gaby was gazing far away at the storm clouds between Sunday’s and the mirrored, glittering skyline of Miami. “It really doesn’t make sense, does it?” she murmured. “I suppose so much happened so quickly I just couldn’t get it all straightened out.” She hadn’t thought of the iyalocha for weeks, but for some odd reason now she was remembering Ibi Gobuo’s plots about the lightning god, Chango, and the goddess of love, Oshun. “But you’re right, Crissette,” she said. “I do sort of wait and let things happen. That’s not a very good way to live.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.” Crissette shook her head. “Gabrielle, I know a lot of what happened to you was classified, the feds were into it and covering their tracks so as not to blow a lot of their drug operation covers, but I picked up some things around the newsroom. It’s a great place for gossip. This Santo Marin guy came out into the swamps to get you, didn’t he, in a sort of commando raid? Look,” she said urgently, “I know you’re basically a sort of retiring, non-ego-driven person, but doesn’t that suggest something to you? Just a little teeny bit?”

  Gaby had been avoiding those particular conclusions. James seemed to be quite satisfied with what he was doing now, she told herself. Racing his boat in California. Taking the French consul’s daughter to a concert in Miami.

  “Gabrielle, I hate to leave you like this.” Crissette took her arm to stop her even though it had begun to rain. “What are you going to do? Honey, you gotta realize—”

  Gaby gently freed her arm. “I do, I really do, Crissette. I’m working on a lot of decisions. The best way I can.”

  She didn’t want to say anything to Crissette to take the edge off her joy over her marriage to David. But until that moment, in spite of their friendship, Gaby hadn’t known the extent of her envy.

  “Actually,” she said lightly, “I think it was easier stabbing a drug dealer. Then I didn’t have to think about anything. I just did it.”

  The wind increased as Gaby looped through downtown Miami and took MacArthur Causeway out to Palm Island. She switched on the radio for a weather report, but could only get bulletins about low pressure areas across southern Florida with little chance of hurricane development, so she turned it off.

  When she pulled up to the front door, however, the driveway was already thickly littered with wind-torn leaves. A bucket left behind by Harrison Tigertail’s roofers had been pushed out onto the grass by the gusts. Gaby stood back for a moment to look at the replaced roof, its barrel tiles glowing brownish pink in the murky light.

  Harrison was the key to so much that had happened, she thought. In a very direct way she owed him her life. No one but a Miccosukee Seminole could have guided Castaneda and James into the everglades so skillfully to look for the Colombians’ drug base and rescue her.

  It was common knowledge in south Florida that the Seminoles knew most of what went on in the everglades. In the sixties, when the Cuban exiles were being trained for the Bay of Pigs at a secret base in the swamps, the Miccosukees not only knew they were there, they tracked the exiles’ every movement. But because the Seminoles regarded it as basically the white man’s business, they said nothing. This time Harrison’s tribe had helped. Otherwise, Gaby knew, she’d never have been rescued.

  Gaby walked through the sala grande, the terrazzo floors echoing to the click of her heels, and closed and locked the louvered windows on the sun porch and checked the door. The big house had a spare, cool feel to it now that the furniture was gone.

  Upstairs, she took one last look at her mother’s bedroom, the banks of mirrors, faded coral wallpaper, the vast walk-in closet that had once held hundreds of Jeannette’s fabulous gowns.

  As she closed the windows and drew the blinds, Gaby was still surprised that Jeannette had accepted the idea of a condominium apartment in Surfside so easily. Only time would tell if it would really stick.

  Her own bedroom wasn’t quite empty since the movers hadn’t taken her bed, a folding chair she intended to leave behind, and her suitcase. She rolled up the sheets tidily, then realizing the laundry hamper was gone, left the linens in the middle of the mattress. A check of the bathroom reminded her that a small box and some equipment from the drugstore were in the bedroom wastebasket. She picked it up to carry it downstairs to the kitchen garbage.

  At the top of the stairs, on the gallery that ran around three sides of the sala, Gaby stopped, savoring the stillness of the vast room below. Closed up, the air was already growing warm and slightly stuffy.

  Did she feel sad? she asked herself. Sentimental? The house was full of memories. She remembered her grandfather sitting in his wing chair by the hooded baronial fireplace, sipping his four o’clock Scotch and water. She’d been allowed to watch Paul and Jeannette’s elaborate, exciting parties from the darkened second-floor gallery. Now the framed photographs of Arthur Godfrey, Jackie Gleason, and the Miami Beach celebrities of the past, taken down for storage, left ghostly, empty rectangles on the plaster walls.

  Standing there, it was also impossible for Gaby not to remember the strange, haunted nights following the Santería, the nightmares and the dreams. But whatever had been there once, it was gone now.

  The sound of a car in the driveway broke her reverie. She picked up her handful of trash and ran downstairs, stopping in the kitchen to toss the empty box into the last container of garbage.

  She stepped out the front door just as Dodd got out of his Porsche. He watched as she put the key in the front door and locked it for the last time.

  “Mouse—” He seemed to remember suddenly she detested the old nickname. “Gaby, you don’t have to do this, you know.”

  She held out the key and, reluctantly, he took it from her. “You haven’t thought this over.” He followed her down the driveway to her mother’s car. “All these weeks, and now you change your mind. A telephone call, for God’s sake, this afternoon. Left on my answering machine.”

  “I didn’t want to call you at the office,” she said.

  “That’s crazy. You just didn’t want to talk to me. Look, I haven’t mentioned this to my family. There’s still time—”

  “I think you’d better.” She opened the trunk of her mother’s old Cadillac and put her suitcase inside with the others. “At least we don’t have an engagement party to cancel again. And I haven’t picked up your ring at the jewelers. You’ll have that back.”

  “This is just nerves,” he said, frustrated. “They tell me that’s normal with these things. You’re just feeling a little—”

  “Dodd,” she interrupted, turning to face him, “do you think I’m a coward?”

  “Coward?” He looked momentarily disconcerted. “On the contrary, I think you have the normal good manners of someone raised in your circumstances. You do need someone to look after you, though, someone to love and provide for you. That doesn’t necessarily mean—”

  She turned away. ‘It would be a mistake,” she said shortly. “I’m sorry, but it would.”

  He followed her around to the driver’s side. “Gaby, believe me, it wasn’t the house. Is that what’s bothering you? This place was just the last property on the island to complete the parcel. I was going to explain it to you later.”

  She kept her back to him. “Dodd, don’t you know you always wait too long to explain things?” She took a deep breath. Although she’d thought this over on her drive home from Sunday’s and knew all of it was true, it was still hard to say. “I waited years for you to explain why you never called me, spoke to me after we made love
that time. I waited and waited for you to explain to me why you got married. I even waited in Florence for four years for you to tell me you’d gotten divorced. I know it was stupid of me not to realize you weren’t going to tell me you were going to make a big profit on my mother’s house, either.”

  “Now, whoa there, I told you it was nothing illegal! For God’s sake, we were going to get married!”

  “It’s my fault.” She turned now to face him squarely. “I was waiting all this time for you to do something about loving me. I never stopped to think about doing something about it myself.”

  “Doing what?” he cried, exasperated.

  “It just happened again. Something else has been decided for me. It’s sort of crazy.” She hesitated. “But you don’t believe in anything like that, do you?”

  “How can I tell what I believe in if I don’t understand what you’re talking about?”

  She wanted to make this easier for him. After all, it was hardly fair to blame Dodd for her own illusions. “You won’t miss my loving you, Dodd, you never have. You’ll find someone else.”

  “Dammit, you haven’t given me one good reason for any of this. Not yesterday. Not this morning when I tried to talk to you. Not now!”

  “Oh, Dodd,” she said softly, “you were always someone I wanted to run to. Maybe you were the safe, caring lover I never found.” She got in the car and swung the door shut. “But I think I discovered that loving someone is really very, very different. Not safe, not predictable at all.”

  He looked not only angry but baffled. “Gaby, don’t just give me the key to the house and walk away! Dammit, where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  She started the engine. It really wasn’t necessary to answer Dodd anymore. She was going somewhere to keep an appointment that would take all the courage she ever possessed.

  She hoped it would work, she thought as she backed the car around Dodd’s Porsche and out of the drive. After all, she’d been pretty brave with the Colombians.