Miami Noir (12 page)
“Get me out of here!” His voice more fearful than demanding.
“Nah.”
">“No me jodas!
”
“I’m not fucking with you. Just don’t feel like giving you a lift.”
Victoria raced down the ladder and joined Steve in the cockpit. “Testing, testing,” she said, punching a button on her pocket Dictaphone.
“What are you doing?” Steve said.
“Mr. Cruz!” Victoria called out. “We’ll bring you on board once you answer a few questions.”
Cruz was splashing just off the starboard side. “What fucking questions!”
“Do you admit stealing three million dollars from Teresa Toraño?” Victoria said.
Pink slivers of sky lit up the horizon and seabirds squawked overhead as Steve steered the boat into the channel at Matheson Hammock. He had one hand on the wheel and one draped on Victoria’s shoulder. A shivering Cruz, his arms and legs bound with quarter-inch line, was laced into a fighting chair in the cockpit. His taped confession would be in the hands of the state attorney by noon. The pouch of money lay at his feet, taunting him.
“What are you thinking about?” Victoria asked.
“I was just imagining the look on Teresa’s face when we give her the money.”
“She’ll be delighted. But it was never about the money, Steve.”
“Whadaya mean?”
“When you were a baby lawyer, Teresa believed in you and nobody else did. You needed to prove to her that she was right. And maybe you needed to prove it to yourself too.”
Steve shrugged. “If you say so.”
She wrapped both arms around his neck. “But remember this, Steve. You never have to prove anything to me.” They kissed, at first softly, and then deeper and slower. The kiss lasted a long time, and when they opened their eyes, the sun was peeking above the horizon in the eastern sky.
Victoria folded the contours of her body against him. “What’s that?”
“What?” he asked.
“Pressing against me. You have another pair of handcuffs in your pocket?”
“Nope.”
“Then what…?” She jammed a hand into one of his pockets. “Oh. That.”
Steve smiled. “Like I said, no cuffs.”
“It’s okay, sailor.” She brushed her lips against his cheek. “You won’t need them.”
T
he hurricane brought Woody and Isolde Trimble home on the last flight from San Francisco before the authorities closed the Miami airport.
A Miami neighbor had phoned them at Woody’s mother’s house in Bolinas, north of San Francisco. They’d just pulled into her driveway after ten days of camping in the Trinities. Woody’s mother had recently died, and the camping trip was a vacation after all the sad cleaning and sorting they’d done at her house, preparing it for sale.
From the driveway, they heard telephones ringing in the empty rooms. Isolde ran into the house and answered in the kitchen. It was just after 9 p.m. A woman’s voice, hoarse and dramatic, said, “It’s coming.” Isolde, suspecting a joke, said, “Tell me about it.” Hurricane Ernestine, the woman said. One huge—pardon her French—fucking monster,
coño
, and what are you going to do about your hurricane shutters? It was their neighbor in Miami. She and her husband, the woman said, were leaving tonight, driving up to Disney World. Oh—and that fucking alligator had come back again.
The next morning at the San Francisco airport, the ticket agent warned the Trimbles that the Miami airport would be closing down soon. Their flight might be diverted. Woody told her they’d chance it. The agent asked if they’d ever experienced a hurricane.
Woody glanced at Isolde, who said that she hadn’t. Woody said that he had.
Isolde had a bad feeling about Hurricane Ernestine. Her marriage to Woody was new, but their house in Miami was old. They’d lived in it for five months. They had metal hurricane shutters for only the front and back porch windows. In June, Woody had stored water, hurricane supplies, and plywood sheets in the garage. Now they had to get back in time to cut the plywood sheets to size and bolt them over all the other windows.
Woody remembered his last hurricane, when he was a kid living in Coconut Grove. He remembered their shuttered house, the humidity, the god-awful noise outside; and, next day, the high water mark on the walls downstairs, the thin layer of stinking mud on the floor, and his twelve-year-old younger brother Chip hosing out the television set, singing “I’m All Shook Up.” Aha, umm, ooohhh yeah. Chip said he loved hurricanes.
Woody and Isolde first met at an exhibition of Brazilian art at the Bass Museum on Miami Beach. He was peering at a drawing by Mira Schendel when he noticed a tall, tanned, athletic-looking blond woman with gray eyes leaning toward the same drawing.
Woody knew as soon as he saw her that she was his woman, he was her man. Call it
coupe de foudre
, flash of lightning, pure insanity, Woody didn’t care. He wanted Isolde with a fierceness he’d never felt with any other woman. He looked around for rivals, thinking, Why not throw her over my shoulder and scamper into the night?
Isolde looked at him and saw a man with thinning blond hair, not tall, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles. He radiated confidence, a sense of fun. She heard something in his voice that disarmed her, and she trusted him. He’s an honest man, she thought.
By the time she began to focus on the meaning of Woody’s words, they were drinking Chardonnay in the museum courtyard, and she was wondering, Why is he talking about Byron and
Don Juan?
Is he an English professor?
But before she had a chance to verify this, she’d agreed to join him for sushi at a nearby restaurant. They were walking away from the museum, and he was describing a Thai restaurant in Coconut Grove, where—he mimed pulling something like string out of his mouth—he found the elastic waistband from a pair of women’s underpants in his Pad Thai. “Fruit of the Loom,” he told her. “Size ten.”
Over sushi and warm saki, she learned that Woody had been a graduate student of English, but now was regional manager for Cardiotron, a company that made cardiac CT scanners—very, very expensive machines. He sold them to hospitals and doctors’ groups in Brazil, Argentina, and other countries in South America. He spoke fluent Spanish and Portuguese. He said, “Our scanner gives you a real-time, beating, 3-D rendering of the human heart. Amazing! I love it.” Woody laughed and clinked his glass against Isolde’s. “Can you see it? My business is the human heart.”
Isolde told Woody that she was studying Early Childhood Education at Florida International University. She’d just moved to Miami. Before that, she’d spent seven years, the years since high school, working as crew on big, ocean-going sailing yachts, spending her summers in the Mediterranean, her winters in the Caribbean.
She’d grown up in Colorado, an only child. Both parents were dead. She’d always wanted to be a sailor. She asked Woody, You know that Mediterranean blue? Her favorite color since she was five. She’d wanted to live in that color.
Her favorite song was an oldie version of “Somewhere Beyond the Sea,” sung in French by Charles Trenet, who made love sound dreamy and poetic, but also sexy, in a genial way. When she heard it, she imagined love on a clear day, with no memories.
“So now,” Isolde said, touching the rim of her wine glass to Woody’s, “I’ve told you everything important there is to know about me.”
There was something important Woody didn’t tell Isolde until they were living together in a rented apartment in Coral Gables and were talking about marriage. He’d been married and divorced when he was a graduate student in English at the University of Georgia. Isolde, after a stunned silence, asked if they’d had children. Woody said no.
Isolde packed a suitcase and drove away in her white Volkswagen Jetta. Woody thought he’d lost her for good. She left a message on his office voice mail the next day. She said she felt confused and needed to be alone, so she’d driven to Key West.
She returned in two days. She’d cut her lovely blond hair and wore a Jenny Holzer T-shirt that said:
When someone beats you with a flashlight you make the light shine in all directions
. Woody kissed her, told her how worried he’d been, how he’d missed her.
He said, “Don’t you have anything you regret, too?”
Her face took on a complex, haunted look that frightened Woody. He thought, She wasn’t angry at For the first time, he tried to imagine Isolde’s seven years as a sailor.
* * *
The house was on a half-acre of unincorporated Dade County, west of Red Road, between Coral Gables and South Miami. It was a one-story, two-bedroom, two-bathroom bungalow with a tiled roof. The pool lay just beyond the back porch. A botanist who worked at Fairchild Gardens built the house in the 1930s. He planted gardenia bushes near the house, and lychee, orange, grapefruit, key lime, avocado, and mango trees in the yard. He also planted a calamondin tree from the Philippines, and, from Brazil, a jacaranda tree and a jaboticaba bush, which bore purplish-red, thick-skinned fruit the size of a cherry directly on its trunk and branches.
“I love this,” Isolde said to Woody. They were strolling around the yard. They’d been together a year and were getting married. It was April, the sun was shining, the jacaranda tree was a purple cloud of blossoms, and the real estate agent, who sensed that the house was selling itself, drifted away.
Isolde placed a hand on Woody’s shoulder in a beseeching gesture that startled and moved them both. She looked as if she were going to cry. “Oh, Woody. This is paradise. Can’t I have this? Please?”
Woody had never seen Isolde so unguarded, and he told her of course she could have it, he wanted her to have it. When they embraced, he felt Isolde’s hand move up to the back of his head, support a woman only offers a baby or a lover. Over her shoulder, Woody too had a vision of paradise, with green grass, flowering shrubs, fruit trees, birds arriving and departing, and their real estate agent furtively field-stripping a cigarette.
Everything fell into place. When they visited Woody’s mother in Bolinas, she and Isolde got on right away. “Such a beautiful girl,” Woody’s mother told him.
“What
an interesting life she’s had.” She smiled at Woody. “You’re going to learn a lot from Isolde.” Woody’s mother helped them buy their house. Knowing she didn’t have much time to live, she gave Woody a loan against his inheritance. Isolde came up with some money too, quite a lot of it, money she said her grandmother had left her. So they married and put a hefty down payment on the house.
Isolde loved their house, but the pool gave her the creeps. She’d refused to swim in it long before the alligator arrived. Woody insisted that they couldn’t have afforded the house if not for the corpse that had been found in the pool. News of the corpse had made the house a hard sell, even after the price was slashed. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that Isolde was inspecting the kitchen when the real estate agent told Woody the story in the garage.
The house had been owned by a gay couple. One of them, Howard, wound up dead and floating. The police suspected murder, but nothing could be proved. Isolde didn’t hear about Howard until after she moved in. A retired pediatrician from down the street told her. A pool’s a perfect place for murder, he said. If you’re going to do it, do it in a pool.
Isolde was furious. “You knew about this?” she said to Woody.
“You wanted the house so badly.”
“You never would have told me, would you?”
Woody apologized, saying that he’d been waiting for the right moment.
Soon after they married and moved into their house, Isolde’s mother, Thais McCracken, arrived. She was tall, bulky, gray-haired, silent. She wore bright muumuus and took over the back porch. She spent mornings on a rattan lounge chair studying the
Miami Herald
, drinking coffee, and chain smoking Marlboro Lights, and afternoons watching soap operas, chain smoking Marlboro Lights, and sipping from a tall, never-empty glass of gin and tonic. To Woody, she represented another secret chamber in Isolde’s heart. Mrs. McCracken seemed to regard him with grim amusement. He was delighted to drive her out to the airport to catch her flight back to Boulder.
On the way home, he said to Isolde, “Didn’t you tell me your mother was dead?”
Isolde said that she must have been talking about her stepmother.
In the late afternoon, their flight from San Francisco landed, nearly as scheduled, in Miami. The airport shops and restaurants had closed, and travelers clustered around television sets in the terminal waiting areas, watching an orange circle spin northwest over a map of the Bahamas and the Florida Straits.
Isolde and Woody retrieved their luggage and found a taxi. While they rode south through sunstruck, emptying streets, they held hands and made plans. Woody would put up the hurricane shutters; Isolde would drive to the supermarket and the gas station.
When the taxi turned into their driveway, Isolde gasped. “Oh my God.” Woody saw the doors of his house and garage wide open and his junkie brother Chip and another man putting metal shutters on the front porch windows.
The taxi stopped near the open garage. Woody apologized for his brother, saying that the last he’d heard, Chip was living in a halfway house over on Miami Beach. Isolde said, “He can go back there right now,” but Woody explained that Miami Beach had probably been evacuated.
“I can’t leave my little brother out in a hurricane.”
Isolde said, “Let them go to a public shelter. Please, Woody, tell Chip and his friend to go away. I hate junkies. I’ve told you that before. Send them away. They’ll be all right.”
Woody replied that Chip was his little brother and needed his help.
Isolde said that Woody just didn’t get it. Chip didn’t care about anyone. He cared about drugs. He’d send Woody naked into the hurricane in two seconds if he had to do that to get his hands on drugs. Chip was a junkie, not a brother.
By this time Chip had put down the metal shutter he’d been carrying and was ambling toward the taxi. He was skinny, sallow, balding, twenty-eight, with acne scars on his cheeks. Woody thought he looked like the actor who played Salieri in the film
Amadeus
. Chip wore dark prescription glasses and talked with a lighted cigarette stuck in the right corner of his mouth. In the past, he’d survived on menial jobs and handouts from their mother. Now he walked around to Woody’s side of the taxi and tapped on the window. Woody lowered it.
“Hey, bro,” Chip said, his cigarette bobbing. “Hey, Isolde.”
Woody let the silence hang on them. Finally, he told Chip, “I persuaded them to drop the lawsuit. It’s all coming out of your part of Mom’s estate, that and the value of the other things you sold, so you were only stealing from yourself.”
Right after their mother died, Chip insisted on flying out to Bolinas to “do his part” preparing her house for sale, while Woody went to Brazil on business. Chip sold her Leica cameras, her good rugs, and her silverware for cash to buy drugs. He also sold her sickroom medical equipment—oxygen tanks, hospital bed and bedside table, special toilet seat, even her walker—not knowing that it had been rented. Woody was their mother’s executor, so the medical equipment company had been hounding him for restitution.
“Thanks, bro,” Chip said. “I really mean it. I’m sorry for the trouble.”
Woody asked Chip who the other guy was.
Chip said, “A guy from the shelter. Would you believe he’s an English lord?”
Woody looked more closely at the man. “What are those scars?”
Chip glanced over his shoulder and said they were bullet wounds. Those were just entrance scars. “Wait till you see where they came out. He used to own a bar in Jamaica, shipped a lot of ganja, until some bad guys came into the bar and let loose with a couple of Mac-10s.”
Isolde and Woody stood blinking in the heavy sunshine as the taxi reversed down the drive. Woody asked Chip how he’d gotten into the house; the alarm was on.
Chip said, “I cut the phone wires at the main box and disabled the alarm.”
“You cut my phone wires?”
Chip said the first thing a hurricane did was blow down phone wires, everybody knew that. “And I was in a real sweat to put up your hurricane shutters.” Chip added, “Got your cell phone?”