Men in Miami Hotels (6 page)

“I was all night over at the Cord house.”

“At the courthouse? Nobody here saw you.”

“Cord. Marcella’s mother’s house.”

“You heard she kicked Ordell out.”

“Yes, I did. Have you seen him?”

The deputy leans to the side. It looks like he’s favoring a bad leg. “He might not be in at all today. No—there he is now. I misread the evidence.”

Ordell, slumped, his tobacco-brown hair slicked to one side, carrying his briefcase in his arms like a true love, slopes in the door.

“Man,” says the deputy, Bobby Briggs, “he’s cleaned out.”

Ordell acknowledges Cot with his eyes—soft brown, sampling despair—and shuffles down the hall into his office, Cot following.

“Get you some coffee?” Cot says.

“That might wake me up. I don’t want that.”

“I’m sorry for your trouble.”

“Well, you know what she’s like. Did you see her?”

“I stayed over at her mother’s place last night. She seemed a little winded.”

“Her mother?”

“Marcella too.”

“I can’t stand the house—our house—without her in it. I get spooked. I took the dog and the cat, and we’re staying at La Concha.”

“D’jou get a room where you can watch her house?”

“Of course.”

“D’jou see anything?”

“She was shooting that damn pellet gun, I know that. I should of had her arrested.”

“You find out anything yet about CJ?”

Ordell raises his head like a man raising his face out of a bowl of soup and stares at the ceiling, squinting as if the answer is written up there. “I don’t think it’s local.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I thought it might be one of CJ’s acquaintances. Somebody with a grievance. But it’s not.”

“How do you know?”

“The way he was killed.”

Cot just looks at him. Out in the street someone shouts, happy to be at US 1 Mile Zero.

“He was shot,” Ordell says.

“I thought . . .”

“It was a pro job.”

Cot feels a chill down his back. That’s what he’s been afraid of. He turns away to the window. Down in the street a hen followed by six buff-colored biddies moves along. A shirtless man, a fat man, waves them by like a traffic cop. Cot thinks of his father, leaning over his writing board in Havana. A picture of his apartment shows tall peeling walls, rattan rugs, hardly any furniture. Cot wishes he was there, in Havana, walking down a shuttered street, eating a chicken empanada. No, that’s not right—he wishes he was in Miami, sitting on a bench in Flamingo Park watching the tennis players. But not—

“What should I do about Marcella?” Ordell says.

“Nothing much you
can
do,” Cot says still looking out the window.
Go over to Solly’s for banana pudding—that was something to do in Miami.
“I’ve never been able to head her off.”

“You don’t have to,” Ordell says bitterly. “You always know she’ll come back to you.”

Cot turns around. “No, Buck, I don’t know that. Nobody can know something like that about Marcella.”

He leaves and heads down the stairs. Outside the day is big with itself, full spring in the Keys, trumpet trees yellowly flowering, poincianas ruffling their red spangles, the island plump with life. Sam Butler, the mayor, passes on his scooter, on his way, Cot knows, to get a drink at Passerine Dooly’s house, his true love—both drink and Passerine. What is
he
going to do? Maybe it would be best to go back to Miami—draw off the stalkers. They
are
stalkers—right? But what could he do in Miami? And how do they know he’d taken the stones in the first place?
Do
they know that? Had CJ—well, it could be anything. Maybe Jimmy, maybe sensors in the ground, maybe a damn force field thrown around the whole of Florida Bay. A springing misery shivers and clips him as it passes.

H
e catches a ride on the tourist train back to his mother’s house. Buzzy Staples, the guide and driver, is talking to the tourists about sponge fishing when he lets him off, making that sloppy profession seem like a tale of romance and plunder.

Jackie says his mother is over at the botanical garden by Higgs Beach, conducting a class in exterminating vermin. “You never know what she’s going to be up to,” he says when Cot gives him a look.

He phones Spane, but Spane isn’t answering. He starts over to the garden on his bike, but halfway there he thinks he had better go to Miami and pedals out to the airport and buys a ticket. The plane is scheduled to leave at three. He goes over to the garden looking for his mother, but she’s gone. He sits under a little spicewood tree and stares at the ocean. A flat pale blue expanse that looks gelatinous in the heavy morning light. He again calls Spane who isn’t picking up and leaves a message saying he’s got the stones. He’s ice cold the whole time he’s speaking, a voice not very deep inside saying
fool fool
. “I’m going up to the island to return them,” he says. He’s making mistake after mistake, first on the list—after taking the stones, after getting Albertson’s operative locked up, after running around here like he knew what he was doing, after putting his mother at risk, and Marcella too and who knows who else—making such a call, even if it’s on an unregistered phone (they don’t let you off just because you put the money back in the bank); sticking his head in a noose. But it’s like he doesn’t care—or not that exactly: it’s as if he’s only half awake, only half there. Essentials decoalesce, drift away like scents into the trees. Yes, that’s it. His mind seems half gone, private areas looted, policies and imprimaturs faded, old sureties hollowed out, schemes disassembled.
Do you know me?
is a question he could ask himself.

A man in long white shorts is throwing a rubber ball into the shallows for his dog. The dog, a sleek black retriever who knows his business, brings it back every time.
He
’
s
a retriever who’s gone off. He wants to put money on something, jai alai maybe, preferably on Zabala and his partner Bidarte, but it’s too early in the day. Feelings, like quivering animals, range in his body, nameless feelings on strange errands.

In a minute the phone rings. It’s Spane. “You have trouble,” Spane says.

“I know that.”

“You don’t have the stones.”

“I know that too.”

“The Big says he’ll give you forty-eight hours to find them and put them in his hand.”

“I’m on it right now. Mikey?”

“What?”

“Thanks.”

There’s a silence on the line. Through this silence Cot can feel Spane, solid as coral rock, feel him leaning toward him, the shadow of his presence reaching for him, the blank malfeasance, substance without form, no mercy involved. And Spane can hear him breathing into the line, breath traveling through the air 150 miles over water and stubby islands, faint as whispers, signaling to him, even a sigh expressive of everything a life is, sum and parts, and it’s as if he can lift the life out of the substrate it inhabits and hold it in his hand and pick at and ponder it and toss it aside when he’s done. There’s been a wariness between them for a while now, a displacement, a shift, but this changes nothing really.

“Don’t call me again,” Spane says.

Cot sits in the shade looking out at the ocean, a bleak expression on his face like that of a man marooned on an island nobody will discover for years.

3

H
e caught up with Ordell at Sammy’s Lunch, but Ordell told him there were no new developments in the case.

“Not even whispers?”

“It’s a complete mystery.”

An orange cat sat up in a lime tree staring at some little black-faced birds flickering around in the top of a nearby manila palm. The birds didn’t seem to mind. Ordell’s dark thick hair like the mournful pelt of a just-extinguished species, strands of gray setting tiny trails in it, shifted as he turned to look from the patio they sat on at four hugely fat old men in ponytails passing on their Harleys.

“How about footprints and DNA and your CIs—all that,” Cot said, tapping Ordell lightly on the knuckles. “How about spoor and signs?”

“None such.”

“How about known criminals.”

“You’re the best known we got.”

“Come on.”

“We’ll catch them.”

“Them?”

“Whoever it is. You talked to Marcie?”

“Yeah.”

“Does she say anything about me?”

“Not really.”

“What does she say?”

“She thinks the world of you.”

“I got to elevate myself out of this.”

“Okay.”

Ordell squeezed a few drops from a greenish wedge of lemon onto his fingertips and patted them on his tongue. “You remember when people in Bahama Village used to raise goats?”

“They say before the big hurricane in the thirties it was a real agricultural paradise down here.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

Cot knew that Ordell was slightly homosexual, Marcella knew and others did too, but no one mentioned this to Ordell. Ordell, as far as anyone was aware, never mentioned it to himself. After lunch they walked back to the courthouse together. Cot’s phone rang. It was Marcella. “How’s he doing?” she asked when he told her who he was with.

“Maybe you ought to come see for yourself.”

“Don’t be mean.”

“He’s suffering.”

“That her?” Ordell said.

“She’s beside herself.”

Ordell made little grabbing motions for Cot to give him the phone, which he did.

“Honey,” Ordell said first thing, “I will do anything. Honey . . . ,” then he listened. Then he said, “But, honey . . .” then silence, then, “But . . .” silence “ . . . but . . .” silence . . . “But goddamn it, Marcie, I didn’t . . . but . . . but . . .” and then he snapped the phone shut and put it into his pocket. He stood in the street looking straight at the sun. The light sparkled on the lenses of his dark glasses. “God almighty,” he said, “Goddamn almighty.”

C
ot pedaled out to the airport and cashed in his ticket. He thought about taking the flight anyway, taking the one he’d paid for and then another, a string of them, until he wound up, dusty and dazed, sitting at a rickety table in a river café in some Kinshasa of distance, drinking a cup of bitterroot tea and calling himself Frederick Boykins. He reached for his phone, but he hadn’t gotten it back from Ordell. He had already talked to Dover, who told him he hadn’t seen Connie that night. Told him nobody he knew had seen him. Cot wanted to ask him the same set of questions again. Not because he didn’t believe Dover, but because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. I could walk up and down the streets knocking on people’s doors. Dial the phone book. He pedaled back to town and stopped at a few bars and knockout joints but no one had seen CJ that night. “I saw a pompadour of yellow feathers off in the distance,” Randy Bunker said, “but I didn’t see who was under it.”

“Where was this?” Cot said.

“Over on Olivia. I caught sight of somebody in the cemetery, flitting among the graves.”

Just hearing this little bit made Cot’s heart beat faster.

“I’m so sorry,” Randy said. He worked under the stage name Impressionella, a rangy fellow from Stakelight, Arkansas, sans, so he said, his sack of troubles now. In KW many made such a claim, tiny dabs of shame gleaming like melted sugar in the corners of their eyes.

He walked down Fleming, going slowly, planning to arrive at his mother’s and rest a while, but just past the library somebody stepped out from behind a big orangely flowering bougainvillea and popped him in the head. He went down on his face into a jasmine bush. When he came to an older couple was standing over him. “We thought you were dead,” the man said, a thin prospector-type holding a large yellow hat.

“Do you know me?” Cot said.

“How could we know you?” said the woman, slim too, a little too much sucked out of her to really wear the slimness well. “We’re visitors.”

“Do you know yourself?” the man said. He was old. Dark grape-wine stains of age, or eternal night, on the hand that gripped the big hat.

“That’s a good question,” Cot said.

“Were you on your way to the library?” the woman said.

“I wouldn’t doubt it.”

“We thought so,” the man said.

“We thought you slipped and hit your head,” the woman said.

“I did.”

He was sure it was last night’s stalker, Lewis his name was, Bert, a worker for Albertson, an auxiliary, a friendly person generally. He lived in a hotel on Washington Ave. out at the beach. Bert. Damn. But if he hit him that meant he didn’t have a gun. Or did it? Albertson had probably pulled him off the job. But Bert still had a little personal business with him. Well, you could go on and on figuring things out. Cot preferred revelation, as he often said, over deduction, but you couldn’t always count on it to show up when you needed it. Clouds, puffed and richly white, had a permanent look about them, high in the center of the sky. He was always falling for something that looked permanent. His head hurt. He went into the library, cruised briefly through the stacks, and checked out a volume of Korean poetry. After all this time his card was still good. He loved how they trusted him in here, were willing, despite everything, to let him walk out with a book, their only copy of poems by Ko Un and Ku Sang, as if they had faith in him. Maybe they’d testify as character witnesses at his next hearing. Down at the laundromat Billy Gomes, a guy he knew, was entertaining some tourists with stories about free diving in the Tortugas, a place Cot felt sure he’d never visited. Cot wondered if anyone ever dreamed when they were knocked out. Last night he had dreamed of jealousy and ordinance. Of Marcella revising her opinion of him downward, of his pulling a trick gun, a gun made of horehound candy, and of being forced by elemental but crazed powers to eat it. Everything in the dream had been a bad sign. He pulled Billy off to the side. Billy was sipping pineapple juice out of a green coconut. “What you got?” he said.

“I need you to help get my mother out of town.”

Billy’s eyes shipped fear like a summons. It was amazing how that went—eyes instantly alerting the universe to a change in mode. “OK,” he said.

“I mean I need you to make a suggestion or two.”

“I don’t know if I can ever do that.”

It was as if they had been talking an hour, fruitlessly. Maybe the head blow had done more damage than he thought. Wright Sunderson pedaled by on his bike, pulling his little cart filled with flowers he’d gathered in people’s yards for sale to the tourists. Down the street a large man in a faded orange shirt crossed and climbed the steps to the old Stampen house, now empty so long it looked abandoned. Maybe the house had finally been sold. The man—that was what was sticking to his mind—looked like Bert. “Come on,” he said and started off down the street. He wanted to pull his gun but thought better of it. Billy came along behind, apologizing to the tourists as he left—the tourists, decked in tourism finery, looked relieved he was going—and caught up with Cot in front of the Big Wreck Hotel. He and Marcella had tried when they were thirteen to get a room there but the management—Cooper Nutall, an extremely short man in a blond Elvis haircut—had called their parents.

“What is it?” Billy said, loping along. He was wearing white calypso pants, a striped blue-and-white shirt, and a gray weathered sailor cap.

“This guy sucker punched me.”

“Just now?”

“Almost.”

Cot sent Billy around behind the Stampen house—tall, weathered to a tallowy gray, two-storied with double galleries, rusted weather vanes depicting ships under full sail and lightning rods like spearheads on top—and he ran up the front steps and into the front hall. There he stopped and listened. Nothing but the creaks and frets of an old empty house. Here he had played poker with the Stampen twins when he was eight, on rainy days up on the second-floor gallery, once losing his favorite Aloha shirt to Benny. The twins were gone now, one dead of a blood disease, the other, a drunkard he’d heard, just hanging on, in Panama City or someplace, selling used boats. He held himself carefully and loosely quiet. He could hear breeze fiddling with the roof tiles, the shake and swish of palm fronds. “Bert,” he called.

“You want me?” Billy called from out the back door.

“Bert.”

“I’m out here,” Billy called.

Cot heard a noise, maybe footsteps going down the back outside stairs. He ran through the house to the back side door, opened it—no one there. Maybe a slight agitation in the molecules. Not six feet away a gray-and-white cat gazed at him from a closed window in the house next door. “What now?” he mouthed to the cat who just stared.

He went back into the house and out through the big back double doors. Billy was sitting in an old rocking chair next to the swimming pool that was covered with brown stained canvas. “D’jou want me?” he said.

“Did you see him?”

“Who?”

“Big guy in an orange shirt.”

“Nobody came by here. Were you calling me?”

“Your name Bert?”

“I thought you were playing with me.”

They walked back through the house, out the side yard and down the lane that ran through the middle of the block. At the street entrance there was no sign of the operative in either direction. Cot was holding himself back for some reason, trying not to let himself think about anything, a practice he couldn’t sustain for long. The lane sheltered a bower-like entrance to his mother’s backyard. He let himself think about this; no good thoughts. He began sprinting. He dived through the big mass of bougainvillea behind the Colfield place and through the slat gate into his mother’s shady backyard. No Bert there either. Jackie was putting mackerel fillets in an old metal drum smoker. She was over at the garden teaching her class in sortilege, he said.

“Anybody come around here?” Cot said.

“Oscar Moreno dropped by to talk to Mrs. Sims.” Oscar was one of his mother’s lawyers.

“That it?”

“Yep. Except for the figments and cordial apparitions.”

Cot felt faint—and depressed, as if the blow had knocked happiness out of him. Billy trailed in through the back gate. He was carrying a clutch of green coconuts. “D’jou catch him?” he said.

“Catch who?” Jackie said.

“This misanthrope been running around.”

“Back here?”

“Over at the Stampen place.”

“They were camping on the back porch last week.”

“Like us.”

“Poachers.”

“I got to get my bike,” Cot said.

When he got back to the library he thought the bike was stolen but the man behind the counter, a skinny man who, Cot knew, liked to stand late at night under streetlights smoking thin aromatic cigars, said they brought it in and put it in the office. When he went to get it the head librarian, a woman with too much emotion for a librarian it had always seemed to him, scolded him and told him to stop leaving his bike unlocked at their door. Cot didn’t try to explain anything to her. He had generally quit that by the time he was ten. “I feel a headache coming on,” he said to nobody in particular as he pushed the bike down the ramp behind the library. Across the street workmen in do-rags were just finishing removing the last remains of the Crawford house. He had known the house all his life and now he couldn’t recall what it looked like. Only an expanse of raked coral dirt containing traces, like an empty gold mine, of what had once been an arena of desire and mortification. He walked over and spoke to Bucky Winters who was pulling a big rake across the surface. Bucky had a small Wake-up Andy doll stuffed in his back pocket. “I found it mashed against the fence over yonder,” he said when Cot asked him about it. “Last significations of habitation.”

“The Crawfords still in town?”

“Naw. They left right after the fire. Moved to Titusville.”

“Fire did this?”

“Drunkenness and bad behavior did this.”

“I got you.” Despair and shame—terror at the bone—there was a list.

“You want this doll?”

“You don’t?”

“It just made me feel bad to see it lying there.”

Cot took the limp, goggle-eyed doll from him. He placed it in the basket on the back of his bike. Up ahead, just ducking around the corner by the Simeon Bros. grocery, he saw the flicker of an orange shirt. “I’ll catch you later.”

He couldn’t however catch up with whoever it was, with Bert. Southard was as empty as the morning after a parade. Tatters and bits of what looked like flags fluttered in the poinciana trees—as if there
had
been a parade. Then Marcella came backing her Rover over the hill. She cranked the big car into a parking space, honked, and waited. “How about a snack?” she said when he pulled up beside her.

“I got to get Mama out of town.”

“I know.”

“That’s what you always say.”

“That man who you stripped and sent to jail got out this morning.”

“I’m just waking up from where he conked me on the head.”

She grimaced—from concern or disgust it was hard to tell. “Where’d you get the doll?”

He told her.

“Entices us into a life of nostalgia and other misrepresentations,” she said.

“Not me. I’m strictly a present-moment kind of guy.”

“Are you going to get in the car?”

He loaded his bike in back and got in beside her. The leaves of a big kapok tree above their heads rattled and seemed about to break into speech—muddled and distraught speech, he thought.

“Ordell said you got a phone call from Miami. It sounded, so he said, like someone named Crotch.”

“Crodge.”