Miami, It's Murder (16 page)

I swore them to secrecy, then unloaded, telling them about what I'd found in my car. “No problem,” I quickly assured them, trying to sound confident. “People who actually mean to do you harm never call or write warnings first.”

“Unless they're your deranged ex-husband or lover,” Onnie commented.

“Yeah, then all bets are off,” Lottie said.

They were right. Restraining orders and warnings from police are minor inconveniences to former loved ones in hot pursuit of uncool things—like murder and revenge. We'd seen enough of them to know that when your ass is on the line, don't rely on the cops to save it. The truth is that we are all responsible for rescuing ourselves and maybe our helpless neighbors. The cavalry arrives just in the nick of time only in old movies. John Wayne is dead. The world can be mean, especially as seen from the police beat.

“That's not all,” I told them.

“What else?” demanded Lottie, sipping her herbal tea.

“You won't believe this,” I said.

Onnie's chin was in her hand and she was frowning. Lottie's eyes were bright and alert.

I told them about Ron Sadler thinking I was about to go to work for Fielding.

Lottie gave a low whistle. “Hell-all-Friday, Britt. Congratulations! You're as popular these days as crotch rot in July.”

I nodded miserably. “It's like everything's coming down at once.”

“If Fielding's bodyguard don't get you,” Onnie said, “the Downtown Rapist will.”

“Maybe they'll get each other by mistake,” Lottie said.

Naturally she urged me to come crash with her for a while. Onnie said the same thing, adding that Darryl, her little boy, would love it. I wanted to see him, too, but declined. No way would I risk leading the rapist to my friends. There was one other important reason.

“Nobody is going to make me leave my place,” I told them. Admittedly, it's not much, just a rented one-bedroom apartment with a refrigerator that groans in the night and a neighbor who believes he can play the bagpipes when he's drunk, but it is mine. “I refuse to let some piece of scum force me out of my home!”

“Why should you be different, Britt?” Lottie hooted. “Hundreds of thousands of other Cubans let themselves be forced from their homes by a piece of scum with a beard and dirty fatigues.”

I stuck out my lower lip and put on a determined face. “Maybe that's one reason I'm determined not to let it happen to me.” Then I remembered the rapist's penicillin-resistant gonorrhea and pondered packing a bag.

We set up a system where I would check in with one or the other at specified times. If I failed and they couldn't reach me, they would come running.

I returned to my desk feeling somewhat better. Wariness comes easy to me because of my job and the intimate knowledge it brings of all the bad things that can happen. Most people, especially newcomers and senior citizens, are seduced by South Florida's warmth and beauty, tempted to relax and daydream in the sun's sultry embrace—a sometimes fatal mistake. I warn them to watch their step and keep in mind that Miami is like a jungle full of dangerous and wild animals that may attack at any time. I try to follow my own advice and remain reasonably alert and aware. Knowledge is power. The more I know, the better.

I called Aunt Odalys to ask if I could drop by. Delighted, she immediately forgot the telenovela she was watching on Univision and poised to start cooking. I don't need food, I told her, I need your expertise. She was thrilled.

Her small well-kept house in Little Havana radiated the heavenly scent of
polio asado
: pot-roasted chicken with garlic, Spanish olive oil, onions, lime juice, white wine, and oregano. Beautiful pink and red hibiscus, huge blossoms with innocent wide-open faces and golden centers, bloomed outside her front door. A not-so-innocent face stood just inside. The crude clay image wore a grimace, with cowrie-shell eyes, nose, and mouth. Eleggua: the trickster god who controls doors, crossroads, and gateways and funnels communication between Santería priests and the Orishas, the deities. He guards the door, keeping away the unwanted. During raids on the homes of criminals, cops have found their own pictures or business cards tucked beneath an image of Eleggua. Under this one I would not have been surprised to find a picture of my mother.

My Aunt Odalys was dressed simply, all in white, as usual. Slightly shorter than I, she is about five feet three but carries herself with a graceful dignity that makes her seem taller. My father's younger sister is still beautiful in her fifties, olive-skinned and green-eyed with high cheekbones that give her face a faintly feline look. She hugged me warmly, murmuring words of endearment and kissing my cheek, huge eyes glowing with affection. At one time after my father's death, this aunt wanted to raise me.

One night when I was five and staying with Aunt Odalys, I remember being taken from my bed, dressed in white, and carried to another place. First I was curious, then frightened. I remember drums beating, bells, chanting, and the cries of dying animals, strangers surrounding me, a headless red rooster fluttering in a corner, perfumed water, herbs and something else warm and sticky smeared on my forehead, and a necklace of red and white beads draped around my neck.

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.