Miami Midnight

Maggie Davis

Prologue

A full subtropical moon rose over the neon glitter of Miami Beach and the dark waters of Biscayne Bay, catching in its silver light the sleek white shape of a power cruiser anchored just offshore. The night was sweltering, the bay’s surface unruffled by even the smallest breath of a sultry breeze, but on the yacht’s decks noisy party-goers gyrated to earsplitting Latin salsa music. On the shore a slender woman in a glimmering white satin evening dress stood under a thick canopy of banyan and palm trees. She tried to shut out the noise as she bent over a row of guttering candles set on a stone slab.

The body under the woman’s hands twitched at the touch of the point of a knife.

“Lady of lightning and thunder, come to me.” Her red-painted mouth twisted cruelly. “Hear what I ask for! Give me what I desire!”

A sudden wind whistled in the sabal palms and the woman bowed low, her long dark hair falling forward. With a quick movement she moved a small statue into the ring of lighted candles. The brightly painted plaster image was that of a woman draped in medieval robes of red and white, holding a sword in one hand, the other hand resting on a miniature crenellated tower. Fingers trembling, the woman caressed the statue’s expressionless face and the painted folds of its gown. “I give you this blood, oh, dark lady,” she whispered hoarsely. “I sacrifice for you, Chango—now give me my revenge!”

At that moment someone dove, or fell, from the anchored yacht into the bay. There was a sudden silence. The blaring music died, followed seconds later by piercing shrieks. Voices shouted confused orders in English and Spanish, mixed with drunken bursts of laughter.

The woman under the trees paused and shut her eyes, her concentration broken. Then she shook herself slightly and bent to the warm, fettered flesh under her hands.

“Come, Lady Santa Barbara!” She spoke loudly over the raucous voices drifting shoreward. “Goddess of the fire and the lightning, who is also Chango, come to me!”

The knife blade poised over the body on the stone slab.

Someone was coming down the path from the house. Under the thick cover of jungle canopy, the footsteps were muffled but determined. A man called out.

“Chango, Chango, hear me!” the woman pleaded hurriedly. “I give you this life, and blood! Now give me what I desire!”

A life preserver had been thrown to the people frolicking in the water. From the deck a more sober voice urged everybody to cool it or someone would call the police.

The man coming down the path shouted impatiently. At the sound of his voice the woman in the gleaming white gown shuddered. Quickly, she raised a bare arm high. The knife fell. The flesh on the stone slab quivered once, then was still.

The man burst through the trees. He was tall, wearing only swim trunks, impressively virile in his near-nakedness. An opened bottle of champagne dangled from one hand. If he was as drunk as the rest of the guests aboard the cruiser, he didn’t show it. “Where the hell have you—” he began.

He took in the woman’s blood-spattered dress and the knife, and he froze. The expression on his handsome face changed from disbelieving shock to slit-eyed fury as his gaze swept the stone altar, the small plaster statue within the ring of candles, and the torn, bleeding body next to it.

“Jesus!” The exclamation ripped from him. “What have you done?”

The woman turned. As if in a trance, she wiped her bloody fingers against the satin dress.

Behind them on the yacht, half hidden by the shoreline trees, the swimmers were being pulled from the water. Someone hailed the shore, yelling for the lone person in the water to hurry up, for God’s sake.

The tall man took a deep breath. “Damn you.” The words came out heavily. “I could kill you for this!”

The woman’s gaze dropped to the bright streams of red blood trickling over the stone and into the sand at her feet, and she smiled.

“You promised me,” he ground out. “You promised me no more of this damned, murderous—filth!”

For the first time she looked directly at the man. “It’s too late.” Her tone was indifferent. “Don’t shout. You can do nothing about it.”

With an abrupt movement he stepped forward, raising his hand. The woman held her ground, the curious smile still on her lips. “No matter what you do,” she murmured, “I have made my gift of blood. And Chango has accepted.
Está terminado.
”

He stood frozen with anger, his black eyes glittering. “We left all this shit behind, remember? Doesn’t that mean anything? Damn you! You promised!”

He stepped toward her again, almost menacingly, but she raised one slender hand imperiously. He stopped. “Whatever you say, whatever you do”—the note of triumph in her voice warned him—”it changes nothing.”

She lifted her chin, giving him the full force of her dark luminous gaze. The tall man stepped back, unwillingly.

Her dreamy smile grew.
“Está terminado,”
she told him. “You can do nothing. The spell is finished.”

He visto vivir un hombre

Con el punal al costado.

I’ve seen a man who lives

With a dagger at his side.

JOSÉ MARTÍ

Chapter 1

The annual champagne brunch and charity fashion show of the Coral Gables Hispanic Cultural Society was going smoothly until the redheaded model lost her balance. She teetered wildly on the makeshift runway that spanned the lily pond, then fell into the water with a resounding splash.

For a long moment, no one moved or made a sound. Then a concerted gasp rose from the fashionable crowd at the lunch tables.

Gabrielle Collier was still struggling with the lead for her story, and had just written: “Dark colors definitely usher in the fall season for fashion-conscious Floridians.” As she bent over her yellow legal pad and scratched out the word “usher” and substituted “bring,” the model in the lily pond got to her knees, slipped on the algae-covered bottom, and sat back down again.

The crowd suddenly came alive. A loud, dismayed scream reverberated in all four corners of the vast blue-and-white striped tent that covered the back garden of one of Miami’s most elegant estates.

Gaby looked up, confused. She was aware, as the new fashion reporter for the
Miami Times-Journal,
that her writing was “inept,” a description her boss, the features editor, used almost daily. But shrieks of horror? she thought. When she’d hardly gotten the words down on the page?

The
Times-Journal
photographer had shot out of her chair at the first splash. Now Crissette Washington waded into the lily pond in her French jeans and strappy gold sandals, the
szznick-szznick
of the black woman’s camera going almost nonstop. The
Miami Herald
photographer, Gaby saw, was not far behind.

The redhead model, apparently too dazed to scream, was now sitting in four or five inches of water with fragments of torn green plants floating around her. Chic, alarmed society women were rushing down through the garden terraces to see what had happened. A group of busboys ran past, bumping the press table. Gaby clutched at her notes.

Across the way the fashion editor of the
Herald
shouted to her, “Is that the Galanos suit she’s wearing? Or is it the Ted Lapidus?”

Gaby couldn’t answer. She still didn’t know one designer from another without a program. She thought it was the Ted Lapidus, but the suit might have been a Galanos for all she could tell. She shrugged, and the
Herald
’s fashion editor gave her a look of ill-concealed disdain before she turned away.

Gaby stared down at the metal surface of the umbrella table, feeling slightly sick. The
Herald
and
Times-Journal
were competitors. Their employees were not expected to be friendly. On the other hand, Gaby suspected she’d just messed things up again. She wiped away a drop of sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. It was relentlessly hot under the acre of blue-and-white striped canvas, despite the luxurious portable air conditioners. After five years in Europe, she still hadn’t readjusted to Miami’s blistering heat, even though she’d been born and raised in south Florida.

Gaby glanced at her pad. Perhaps, she thought, she should throw away what she had written and start another lead to her story. But she was practically certain you couldn’t open a fashion story with, “When the model wearing Neiman-Marcus’s Lapidus suit missed her footing and fell into the lily pond...”

She looked back down toward the runway. The other models had come to a stop on the steps leading up to it. A woman in a large black hat, the fashion show’s director, hurried up to the microphone. Whatever she tried to say was lost in the clamor of almost a hundred of Miami’s Latin social elite crowding around her.

Beyond them, on the little wooden platform erected in a grove of coconut palm trees, the salsa band struck up a frantic rendition of “Guantanamera,” effectively drowning out all conversation.

Gaby gazed past the fashion show’s temporary stage to Biscayne Bay, its aquamarine water glittering through a curtain of live oaks and palms. Their hosts’ yacht, a magnificent white power cruiser designed on space age lines, lay at anchor offshore. The Hispanic Cultural Society’s brunch and fashion show was one of the most prestigious social events of Miami’s summer season, a major story for the Miami
Times-Journal
’s Modern Living section and Gaby’s first big assignment after only three weeks on the job. Unfortunately, no one had told her what to do if one of the models fell off the runway and landed in a lily pond.

The salsa band ripped through the endless verses of “Guantanamera” but curiously enough, Gaby saw, with the exception of the photographers still snapping the floundering model in the pool, no one seemed to be doing anything. The fashion director from Neiman-Marcus’s Bal Harbour store was still trying to announce a short delay, but her words were lost in the uproar.

Crissette Washington climbed out of the pond and flopped down in the chair next to Gaby. “I should have seen that coming,” she said breathlessly. “That chick was wired, flying so high when she came out on that runway, she needed an air traffic controller!”

Gaby watched the sodden model try to get to her feet again. The girl’s wide green eyes were rather glassy. “Isn’t anybody”—she had to shout to make herself heard—”going to do anything?”

Crissette leaned close to Gaby’s ear. “There’s only about four inches of water in there. She isn’t going to drown.” The photographer paused, lifted a foot, and watched water drain from her high-heeled gold sandal. “Anyway, honey, that’s men’s work. They’re all waiting for some
latino
male authority figure to come pull her out.”

As if on cue, three men in pastel business suits hurried down the garden terraces from the main house. The band promptly struck up a Julio Iglesias tune, and the Neiman-Marcus show director reappeared at a run carrying a tablecloth.

Gaby bent toward the photographer. “Crissette, what’s ‘wired’?” she shouted.

Crissette gave her an incredulous look. “Lord, Gabrielle, you’ve been in Europe too long.” She abruptly lifted her Nikon and focused it on the men arriving at the pool. “Wired, snowed. What you get when you use nose candy.” Crissette looked away from the viewfinder long enough to see if Gaby understood. “
Cocaine,
Gabrielle,
cocaine
.”