Miami Midnight (13 page)

“Señora Bachman is very happy you want to interview her,” the interpreter said, leaning over Gaby’s shoulder. “Reporters usually only interview the general.”

Gaby had to admit there was something very impressive about the Bachmans. The general might be a despotic military-political threat in his home country, but he was undeniably a big family man. When his youngest grabbed him around the knees and drooled on his impeccable trouser leg, the general picked up the baby and held him in his arms while he wiped the child’s face with a mauve napkin. The teenage son, leering at Gaby lasciviously, jumped to respectful attention when his father spoke to him. And little Señora Bachman, tightly squeezed into her elegant La Croix pouf, beamed on Gaby as though she were making a lifelong dream come true.

“I’d like to start,” Gaby told the interpreter, “by asking Señora Bachman her favorite places to shop in Miami.”

“Señora Bachman has been to Rive Gauche at Bal Harbour and Martha’s,” the interpreter said promptly. “Señora Bachman also goes up to Worth Avenue in Palm Beach at least once to shop.” Aides had started displaying boxes, packages, and shopping bags with expensive boutique labels.

“Señora Bachman,” the interpreter went on, “is very discriminating. She likes Cardin and Dior.” The aides held up an evening gown and a sweater suit. “Also Lenox china and crystal.” A secretary dove for another box. “And also shoes from Gucci which is in—” The interpreter consulted a card. “The Trump Plaza of the Palm Beaches.”

Speechless, Gaby wrote it all down. From time to time the plump little señora broke in to proudly tell the price of her acquisitions. If the señora was telling the truth, and Gaby had no doubt she was, the cost of her purchases sounded like the national budget.

Gaby had counted at least eight offspring milling around, and she couldn’t help thinking the general’s wife probably deserved a hobby. “The señora’s wearing a Christian La Croix, isn’t she?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” the interpreter said. “Señora Bachman prefers only the best, the most expensive, the most exclusive fashions. She shops with exquisite taste.” She raised her voice because the señora was interrupting, waving her hands and shaking her head violently.

“Señora Bachman wants to say something,” Gaby pointed out.

The señora spoke rapidly, while the interpreter put in a word or two. The general interrupted, obviously displeased. Everyone stopped smiling.

Gaby watched in astonishment as the general launched into a lengthy complaint. He actually stamped up and down the restaurant, shouting. The bodyguards looked uneasy. The plump señora pursed her lips, her back straight, looking stubborn. The interpreter pleaded with them both.

The señora, Gaby saw, was the winner. Everyone started smiling happily again.

The interpreter sighed. “Señora Bachman wants you to know,” she said, “that above everything else...” She looked as though she could hardly bring herself to say it. “The señora’s biggest favorites are K Mart.” She made a little strangling sound. “And Toys-R-Us.”

When Gaby arrived for lunch at the French restaurant at the top of the Brickell Banking Tower, Dodd was already at his table. He stood up to greet her, then froze, surprise clear in his eyes.

“Am I late?” she asked breathlessly. “It looks like I’m going to spend my day in restaurants.” She slid into the chair the maître d’ held for her. “I’ve just come from the wackiest interview at the Fontainebleau, I still don’t believe it. All I can hope is those people don’t manage to overthrow the Argentinian government.”

Dodd stared at her, napkin still clutched in his hands. Finally he signaled the waiter to bring them their menus and sat back down. “Gaby,” he managed, “what have you done to yourself? You look—you look so completely different.” His face showed a stunned admiration. “My God, you’re incredibly lovely.”

Gaby, caught up in the hurry of the Bachman interview that morning, had almost forgotten. The restaurant on the twenty-fourth floor of the Brickell Tower was surrounded by two-way mirror glass. She had only to turn her head to see her reflection: her hair cut considerably shorter, barely shoulder length, sparked with coppery highlights from the rinse she’d let herself be talked into in the Mayfair Mall salon.

“I forgot to tell you.” She couldn’t bring herself to mention the “expense” allotment for the fashion writer. The new coral linen suit, its unstructured jacket worn over a flowered shirt, was pure summertime Miami, tropical, blindingly bright. The lipstick she’d bought to go with the suit had led to all sorts of things: blusher, foundation, dark brown eyeshadow. When Crissette Washington had seen her for the first time in the city room, the photographer had staggered back in exaggerated shock.

“You know,” Gaby said, “I think I’m on a roll. Is that what they call it, a roll?” Dodd’s eyes were fascinated. When he didn’t answer she rushed on. “I think I did something right at this crazy General Bachman interview.”

Jack Carty had actually laughed when she described it to him on the telephone afterward. She still couldn’t believe it. ‘“Write it up just the way you told it to me,” the features editor had said. “It’s good.”

Dodd was watching her intently. “I’m glad you could get something out of those idiots. Don’t give them an inch, they don’t deserve it.” He paused, then went on in a different tone, “I saw your mother this morning.”

Her smile faded. “Yes, I did too, before I went to work.” Gaby took the menu the waiter handed her and bent over it. Visiting Jeannette was becoming more and more difficult. Some of her mother’s famous beauty had revived with her hospital stay. Jeannette was not yet fifty; there still could be many good years ahead. What was worrisome was that her mother merely sat and stared as though preoccupied with other, more pressing thoughts. Not unhappy, but not happy either.

Dodd was gazing absently out the restaurant’s windows to the breathtaking sweep of Miami’s bayfront, the islands of Miami Beach and Key Biscayne beyond. “The hospital can’t hold her much longer without beginning some sort of treatment.”

“My mother’s changed.” Gaby found it hard to describe in what way. “Did they tell you they’d tested her for stroke?”

Dodd scowled. “Damn that criminal nonsense the other night. Subjecting both of you to a dead dog and that mess. I don’t know what in the hell your parents were thinking of to let those Cubans use the garage apartment.”

“But we don’t know that the Escuderos had anything to do with it,” Gaby protested.

“Well, who else? Who would want to lay some damned voodoo spell on you or your mother? Twenty years ago Miami didn’t even know about these things,” he said, disgusted. “But then we hadn’t become an outpost of Latin America, either!”

Gaby remembered the bumper sticker she’d seen that morning. She couldn’t believe Angel and his mother were practicing
Santería.
The Escuderos were so hard-working, so cheerfully determined to make it in a new country. Angel made good grades in high school, Elena was struggling to improve her English. Ugly superstitious practices didn’t fit them at all.

But then what
did
fit anything, she wondered, here in sun-drenched, dream-worldly Miami?

Gaby looked down blindly at her menu. She should tell Dodd that she was being followed, that strange, inexplicable things seemed to be happening to her, but she didn’t know how to begin. It all sounded so crazy. Instead, she tried to defend the Escuderos again.

“My father volunteered the old chauffeur’s apartment. A church group was looking for living space for the Marielito refugees, and no one was using it. The Escuderos had had such a bad time, Dodd. Elena and Angel were practically thrown into a little motorboat in Mariel harbor by Castro’s people during the exodus. They were scared to death they were going to drown before they got to Miami. And then halfway there the man who owned the boat tried to hold them up for more money. Poor Elena, she was a widow with a young boy to look after. She wanted to go to America because some of her relatives had been in the Bay of Pigs invasion and she thought the Castro government held it against her. I just can’t believe they’d do anything to hurt any of us.” Gaby sighed. “They’ve been through such a lot themselves.”

Dodd said nothing, wouldn’t even look at her. They weren’t going to agree on it, Gaby could see. She stared down at her menu again.

“While I was at the hospital,” he said, “I talked to your mother about what she’d said the other night at dinner, about our getting married. I told her that I loved you and wanted to marry you.”

Gaby looked up at him quickly.

“Unfortunately, I don’t think she understood much of what I was trying to tell her.”

“Oh, Dodd.” Gaby’s thoughts were in confusion. Why had he picked now, of all times, to tell her this? “Don’t you think you should have asked me first?”

He sighed with considerable frustration. “Gaby, I don’t seem to be getting through to you lately. You don’t listen to anything I’ve got to say. I’ve been sick with worry this past week thinking about you alone in that house when I have a perfectly good guest room at my condo. Look,” he said, when she opened her mouth in protest, “it’s not like we’re—well, damn, Mouse, you’re not a vulnerable seventeen-year-old this time!”

This time?
Was she seeing doubt, confusion ... guilt, in Dodd Brickell’s eyes?

The big man sitting across the table in his conservative dark blue linen suit and white shirt with surah silk tie was handsome, wealthy, and successful, Gaby told herself. Even though she’d known him all her life, she had to admit Dodd Brickell was the most attractive, solid, desirable man any woman could find. Why was she suddenly so uneasy?

He moved his silverware around, abstracted. “What happened was a long time ago, Gaby, and you were just a kid. That night of the dance, what you were feeling for me was something considerably more than I was feeling for you.” He jerked his head up, “No, God, I don’t mean it that way! But do you know what happens when a man realizes he’s lost control and taken advantage of a very young virg—” He caught himself. “I hoped like hell you’d forget the whole thing. I never intended to touch you, Gaby. I’d had a few drinks. Afterward I couldn’t bear to face myself. I wanted to forget it and I hoped, prayed, you’d do the same. You were only seventeen—”

“Eighteen,” she murmured.

“All right, eighteen. But I was playing my second year of pro ball with the Dolphins. I’d been around. And I was engaged at the time.” His voice faltered. “You couldn’t have known about the engagement. We hadn’t told anybody.”

Gaby stared out the window. Forget about the whole thing? Is that what he’d thought? “No, I didn’t know about the engagement,” she said softly. “That’s true.”

He groaned. “Oh, Mouse, I take responsibility for everything. Look, does it make any sense to you when I say I was a pro star, I had it made, I was set to marry the reigning campus beauty queen...?” He bent his blond head, not able to look at her. “You come down hard at twenty-five when you find out you’re not king of the world, God’s gift to pro ball,” he said bitterly. “When a little thing like a busted bone in your knee brings an end to the glory in a hell of a hurry. That’s when I came back home.”

“Dodd...” Gaby began uncertainly.

“Wait.” The waiter showed Dodd the label of the bottle of Reisling he’d ordered. Dodd impatiently waved him to fill their wineglasses. When the waiter had gone, he said in a calmer voice, “You were in Italy by then, and my football career was behind me. I took my bar exam, joined the family firm, and opted for what the Brickells had been doing since they sold their first piece of Dade County swamp to a Yankee—making money. But when things changed, so did my marriage. It wasn’t the big-time, exciting lifestyle of pro-football Trish had expected, and she told me so.”

Gaby wasn’t going to ask him when things had changed so much that he realized he wanted her. But her heart was pounding. She’d spent years hoping that something like this would happen. That Dodd would finally come to know that she was there, waiting for him.

Now he was saying that he wanted to marry her. He’d even gone to the hospital to tell her mother. She told herself she needed Dodd Brickell terribly. She wasn’t brave, assertive, independent like Crissette. She had to have someone to talk to, to confide in, if only to convince her she wasn’t going crazy. But where to begin?

“Dodd,” she said, “when you were at the U of Miami, did you know James Santo Marin?”

He waited until the waiter had served their lunches. “Didn’t you ask me this before?”

“I just finished a story about—about the Santo Marin family,” she faltered.
Tell him,
a voice deep inside screamed at her. “I—I was just curious.”

He looked puzzled. “Curious?”

“Yes, I was doing a sidebar for a story.”
Help me,
she appealed to him silently.
You’re my friend, you say you love me, help me tell you this.
“I’ve been calling around, talking to people. I need to know more about ... things.”

“Santo Marin?” He took a sip of wine and lifted the glass to the light. “Gaby, do we have to talk about this right now?” When she nodded, miserably, he growled. “Good God. Okay. Ah ... rich, upper-class. Longtime connections in Florida.”

“You know them?”

“The Santo Marins?” He smiled a little sourly. “Well, they aren’t exactly your typical shirtless exiles. The upper-class Spaniards who migrated to the New World kept their grip on their power, their bloodlines, their money, in Cuba just like everywhere else in Latin America. According to Castro, that was the point of the revolution, wasn’t it? To kick out the corrupt upper classes and the Mafia? You,” he said abruptly, “don’t want to know them.”