Miami Midnight (14 page)

“Why not?”

“Because Santo Marin’s business may look legitimate from the outside, but the big cars, the boat, the lifestyle are a dead giveaway. He’s one
latino
stud who’s too rich and too visible not to have his hands into something. Gaby, are you going to let me say what I’m trying to say?”

He reached across the table to take her hand. “Mouse, darling,” he said huskily, “I want to take care of you. I want to give you the world if I can. I messed up my life once and I hurt you terribly. Please let me make it right.”

She gazed at the man across the table who clutched her hand so tightly. She was startled as a sudden need to love broke through her apprehension. Dodd was safety, comfort,
love
, and always had been. And oh, how much she needed those things at that moment! She wanted to give him all of that, too, in return. Wasn’t this what she’d always dreamed of?

Impulsively, she leaned across the table and managed, in spite of their food and wineglasses, to place a kiss on Dodd’s lips. For a second she thought he was going to jump up and take her in his arms and passionately return the kiss right there in the middle of the restaurant. He didn’t, but his blue eyes were glittering as she sat back in her chair.

“You know what I want to do, don’t you?” he muttered.

“You won’t do it,” she teased. “You’re too Old Miami and proper for that.” She added quickly as he started to get to his feet, “And so am I.”

He sat back down, grinning. “Gaby, I want to announce our engagement right away. But your mother—”

“—can’t do it right now, I know.” Things had suddenly taken a new turn, Gaby realized with a slight rush of alarm. An impulsive kiss was now a commitment. Did she really want to do this? It meant so much to Dodd, to all the Brickells, to have formal engagement announcements, the whole social program of showers and parties and, inevitably, a very large wedding. Why was everything suddenly so real, so imminent?

“I suppose I can announce it myself,” she said uncertainly. “I can give the announcement to the bridal desk at the paper in Mother’s name. You know, ‘Mrs. Paul Aston Collier announces the engagement of her daughter Victoria Gabrielle, et cetera, et cetera.’”

His hand almost crushed hers with happiness. “Then let us give the engagement party. It’s the least the Brickells can do since your mother is hospitalized. God, Mouse,” he said fervently, “one of the first things I want to see you have is a little money. Once we get these damned affairs wound up, get your mother’s power of attorney and sell that mausoleum on Palm Island...” His voice trailed off as he stared at her, “Do you have any idea how incredibly beautiful you are in that suit? I’m glad you spent the money—

In the next instant he knew what he had given away. “Ah, darling, I hope you’re not angry. My father was only trying to help.”

Gaby let him see that it was really a sore spot. “Dodd, no more money through the newspaper, even for clothes. You’ll have to promise me you and your father will stay out of my job.” The words suddenly rang a bell. Gaby shot a glance at her wristwatch. “Oh, Dodd, I have another appointment. I’ve got to run!”

“But you haven’t finished your lunch.” He stood up and threw his napkin down on the table. And about the newspaper job, that’s another thing—”

“Later,” she said hurriedly, “later. I’ve got to go!”

She was halfway across the restaurant before she remembered that now that she was engaged to Dodd she should have kissed him good-bye.

Twenty minutes later, David Fothergill stepped out of a doorway on Eighth Street in Miami’s Little Havana. The big Trinidadian’s first words were, “Miss Collier, I don’t think we want to be doing this.”

Chapter 9

In August’s ninety-five-degree heat Little Havana looked like some flat, dusty suburb of its namesake. Eighth Street,
Calle Ocho
in Spanish, was lined with insurance offices, furniture stores, cut-rate dress shops, a few expensive Spanish-style restaurants, and a lot of open-sided
cafeterías
—coffee stands, not what the word meant in English—that sold Cuban sandwiches and thick, hot black espresso coffee in thimble-size paper cups. Little Havana’s one tiny urban park was filled with elderly exiles, all men, playing endless games of dominos on concrete tables. Eighth Street was quiet, sunbaked, shabby; not at all what one would expect, considering its publicity.

David Fothergill, too, looked quite seedy, Gaby thought. He had the air of someone who did not have a permanent place to sleep. Which was probably the case. David had moved out of Crissette’s apartment several days before.

David also looked unhappy. “Miss Gabrielle, I don’t think you should be doing this. I know you want to get someone to explain to you what the
Santería
at your house meant, maybe even find out who might be doing it. But I think this is dangerous.”

She held her hand up to shade her eyes against the street’s hot glare. “David, I just want to ask some questions. Surely somebody ought to know something. Voodoo—
Santería
—is never done against Anglos. That’s what the police said.”

“I don’t know about that.” His eyes were troubled. “This is very hard for white people who are used to the Christian God to understand. African gods are capricious, they have no ethical systems. What the
Santería
gods do is mysterious, sometimes you would say even cruel.”

Gaby stared at him. David’s lilting calypso accent was still evident, but his tone of voice, his choice of words, especially phrases like “ethical systems,” were not what she expected. Suddenly she knew David Fothergill was much better educated than he wanted the world to know.

He saw her expression and smiled, a trifle ironically. “Sorry, Miss Gabrielle, I think I’m in too much of a hurry to convince you not to do this. Forget the sociological observations. My point is that you may find that what the followers of
Santería
accept and believe in deeply might ... ah, alarm you very much.”

“Good Lord, I already
am
alarmed! Killing Jupiter and putting that
Santería
mess at the back door was meant for me, not the Escuderos, I’m sure of it.” They were standing in burningly hot sunshine, but Gaby couldn’t suppress a slight shiver. “You said to get in touch with you if anything else happened, didn’t you?”

He frowned. “Something else?”

“Someone’s still following me, the same black limousine. Only it doesn’t park in the street across from the newspaper anymore. It starts after me when I take the causeway to go home. Whoever it is, they know I’m aware they’re following me. When I turn into Palm Island they just keep on going. They never follow me all the way to my house.”

“Is it the same car? You’re sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” Another shiver raced through her. “Who could miss a stretch Cadillac with tinted windows? It’s careful to stay some distance behind me. I never get a chance to see the license plates. The other thing,” she said, even more hesitantly, “is still there, in the house.” She felt foolish blurting all this out in broad daylight. She hoped David believed her. “Night before last I heard that thumping or beating like drums again and it woke me up. It was all I could do to keep from running outside.”

He regarded her thoughtfully. Then he took her hand in his own huge one and steered her rapidly along the sidewalk. “Miss Gabrielle, I don’t think visiting a
santera
will find out much for you. You are an outsider, remember. You don’t believe in these things.”

“But David, you said you’d find one!”

“Oh, I have found someone. It is not all that difficult to find a priestess in Miami. But I am think-een,” he said slowly, “if you don’t know what this is all about, maybe the priestess won’t either. Strange business like this just don’t happen to lovely young ladies, who”—he looked pointedly at Gaby’s expensive suit, her newly styled hair—”who live on Palm Island, have rich, important boyfriends, and work for a big newspaper.”

Gaby hurried along, trying to keep up with his long strides. “But somebody came to my house, killed my dog, and frightened my mother so that now she’s in the hospital. I don’t know why that happened, but I want to find out. The police don’t seem to be any help.” Gaby remembered something else. “David, the priestess, she ... this won’t involve killing anything, will it? If somebody’s going to sacrifice a live animal, I don’t think I can take it!”

“No, nothing like that. We come only to ask a few questions.”

But Gaby pulled him to a halt. “Did you ever consider that somebody could be just trying to frighten me? Do you think somebody could rig up a tape machine or something, and put it in the walls at my house to make that sound?”

He was silent for a moment. “No,” he murmured finally, shaking his head, “it is no tape recorder.”

“How can you be sure? Suppose it’s the same people who are following me in the black limousine.”

“Maybe people are following you, that could be. But what we have heard in the house is something else.”

He seemed very sure, and Gaby sighed.

“Well, then,” she said. “Let’s go visit this priestess. My car’s parked—”

“But we are here.”

They had stopped in front of an entrance sandwiched in between an H & R Block tax office with signs in Spanish and a tiny
joyería
, a jewelry store. David guided her through a narrow hallway and up a flight of stairs. At the top was a door to what seemed to be an apartment. David entered without knocking, and Gaby saw they were in a tiny waiting room with several plastic chairs and a coffee table with old magazines scattered on it. It looked like the very shabby office of a dentist.

“Shouldn’t we ring a bell or something?” she whispered. Her nostrils were registering a faintly familiar odor of spices and smoke, and heavy, tropical food.

He pushed her ahead of him. “I think the
iyalocha
is expecting us.

The inner room was blindingly dark after the sunlight of the street. It took Gaby’s eyes several long minutes to adjust. When they did she saw one wall of the room was almost solidly covered with silk flowers, bits of tinsel that winked like mirrors, fishing nets and seashells, and swags of red, green, and purple velvet and satin, some with glittering gold fringe. The wall seemed to be one gigantic, floor-to-ceiling, stupendously gaudy altar.

In front of the wall, on red and blue velvet-draped stands, were brightly painted plaster statues of Catholic saints, big pottery vases and earthenware pots, cheap plastic dolls dressed in gold and satin costumes, and several varieties of knives, including machetes and replicas of two-headed ceremonial axes. On the floor were pottery dishes filled with pastries, and baskets of tropical fruit—pineapples, mangoes, guavas, papayas, red, green, and yellow bananas, and a number of coconuts. Beside the baskets were three huge primitive drums decorated with black symbols. Through the draped satin and velvet, the tinsel, the artificial flowers, and the statues flickered the flames of a hundred candles.

Gaby stood transfixed. That same haunting odor had followed them: heavy sweet perfume of tropical flowers mixed with spices and garlic, cigar smoke, and something that could only be the pungent stink of raw, heady rum.

The room was not only dim but suffocatingly hot. Windowless, and obviously without air-conditioning. The humming dark, the cluttered space, the myriad tiny candle flames, and the heat all made Gaby dizzy. Something in the pit of her stomach, too, responded with an ominous tremor.

“
Iyalocha
,” David said softly behind her.

A small figure that Gaby had taken for another plaster statue, it was so still and unmoving, suddenly nodded its head. An incredibly tiny black woman, wearing a long scarlet dress of magnificent taffeta silk decorated with heavy festoons of lace, and a green satin head kerchief knotted in the front, African style, was the priestess, the
santera
, of the temple. Her face, with a slightly beaked nose, had the blackest eyes Gaby had ever seen.

“Miss Gabrielle, this is the
iyalocha
, Señora Ibi Gobuo.” In the stillness David’s voice seemed unnaturally loud. “You don’t call her
santera
. This priestess is African. You call her what I said,
iyalocha
.”

The little figure in front of them did not move.

“Now,” David said, “we must wait to see if she will speak to us.”

The black eyes under the green satin headcloth unhurriedly looked Gaby over from the top of her hair to her shoes. It was quite an inspection. Gaby felt herself raked with a strange, dark intelligence that measured her looks, the way she was dressed—and much more than that—very thoroughly.

“Come.” The old, strangely disembodied voice was so commanding, Gaby jumped. She moved forward, thinking the priestess was so small she would almost have to crouch down to speak to her.

“
Iyalocha
,” David began, “this—”

An impatient hissing sound cut him off. The
iyalocha
’s old, bony hand, so black it seemed a shadow, extended toward Gaby, index finger pointing.

Watching it, Gaby felt a trickle of perspiration snake down her back. The smoke, the heavy odors of food, the dark and fragrant flowers were having their effect. She could hardly keep her eyes open. She stared at the hand with its pointing finger. Something was flowing from it straight into her. She would swear it.