Queen of the Underworld (16 page)

“I’ve read all the clips about you from Norbright’s series. I felt this immediate affinity with you. I wish the ‘Queen of the Underworld’ series could have been mine, but I was in high school at the time of your trial. I didn’t even know I wanted to be a journalist back then.”

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do back then, either, except get out of that dump. Then Prince Charming drove up in his Thunderbird and asked me how much for the ripest peach on the place. I started looking him out a good one, but he said, ‘No, I mean you.’ ”

I was disarmed by her unself-conscious switch back into country-girl speech: “looking him out a good one.”

“And you said, ‘That one’s not for sale.’ And he said, ‘Will you give it to me, then?’ ”

“Who’s telling this story?”

“I’m just quoting from the clips. But readers would be interested in what your life is like now, Mrs.—Ginevra.”

“That’s a crock, if you’ll pardon me. My life now is I’m a married woman who likes to sleep. When I can’t sleep, my husband makes up this potion. It’s so fast you can feel yourself going out while you’re drinking it. Then he worries I’m becoming an addict and hides the ingredients. Edwin’s a genius in his field, but not so smart when it comes to hiding things.” She gave me a challenging, almost flirtatious look. “End of story.”

“Then it
wasn’t
a deliberate overdose?”

“How’re we doing here, girls?” The nurse was back. “Good news, Ginevra, hon. Your hubby’s on the way back from North Shore and the ER doc’s agreed to sign you out. You’ll be more comfy in your own bed at home, what with this madhouse.” To me she said, “If you wouldn’t mind staying with her just a teeny bit longer?”

“I’ll be glad to.”

“Then I’ll get back to the
real
emergencies.”

“Yes, get your starched ass out of here,” Ginevra’s contemptuous contralto dispensed with the retreating nurse. “You’d better get going, too . . . Emma. The one thing my husband loathes more than a reporter is a reporter from the
Miami Star.
”

“I’d like to stay a little longer. Unless you mind, of course.”

“Edwin can be very harsh when he’s antagonized,” she warned, but I caught a flicker of satisfaction that I wanted to stay.

Even without peeking under the diamond-studded lid of my foolish graduation watch, I knew I had missed my deadline. But I was determined not to let this fortuitous meeting come to nothing. Though I had failed to get a substantial sidebar for tomorrow’s edition, I had to do something to impress her before
he
returned, something to make her remember me and be willing to see me again.

Good old Tess came to my aid. “Maybe we’ll meet at Michel’s on Miracle Mile one of these days,” I said. “My aunt Tess says she sees you there sometimes. As soon as I can save up some money, I want to have my hair done properly.”

“Which one is your aunt Tess?”

“She’s a platinum blonde, up in her forties now.” (Sorry, Tess!) “Still beautiful, though she doesn’t think so anymore.”

“The one still wearing her hair like Jean Harlow. Sometimes wears a nurse’s uniform?”

“That’s Tess. She’s assistant to a dental surgeon in Coral Gables.”

“She always gives me a friendly smile.” The wistfulness in her voice gave me a further inspiration, which I held out like a carrot.

“Tess has often wanted to speak to you, but like you, she was the subject of some, er, negative publicity a while back. She knows the value of having a place to go where people respect your privacy.”

“What kind of negative publicity?”

(Sorry again, Tess, but this is urgent.) “She had a big society divorce here in Miami, and, well, there was another prominent man implicated and he committed suicide. And all of it was in the
Star.
”

Ginevra’s eyebrows just perceptibly arched up.

A second carrot came to hand. “Tess went to Edith Vine’s academy, too. Before your time, of course. She taught there for a while until she married.”

“I still dream about Miss Edith. I’m sorry she passed away before I got a chance to tell her my side of the story.”

But you can still tell
me,
I thought. I must start laying the groundwork of trust. “She told my aunt Tess you were one of the best pupils she ever had. She said her debutantes would have sold their souls to have your natural grace and beauty.” Of course I left out Edith Vine’s “white trash” epithet. “She said you could captivate a whole room when you recited ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci.’ ” I likewise edited out Miss Edith’s final summation of her star pupil: “And all that, just to prepare someone for running a whorehouse.”

Did I imagine it, or did Ginevra’s languor shift a degree toward expectation?

“Next time I see your aunt,” she murmured, “maybe I’ll say hello.”

“Tess would like that,” I said.

“Now do yourself a favor. Get lost before my husband comes.”

She shut her eyes and slid down on the gurney. I took it I had been dismissed and was steeling myself to make the humiliating phone call to Vince that I had no further story for him beyond the overdose, which she claimed was accidental, and that she was being released from the hospital any minute now in the care of Dr. Brown.

“ ‘O
what . . .
’ ” she suddenly began.

I was about to reply “I’m still here,” but she continued to declaim with closed eyes.

“ ‘. . . can ail thee . . . Knight at arms . . . alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the lake . . . and no birds sing . . .’ ”

The words rolled forth from her lips. “ ‘. . . O what can ail thee, Knight at arms . . . so haggard, and so woebegone . . . the squirrel’s granary is full . . . the harvest done.’ ”

On she went in her somnolent contralto, like a music box whose top has been lifted.

“ ‘ “I met a lady in the meads, full beautiful . . . a faery’s child . . . her hair was long, her foot was light . . . and her eyes were wild . . .” ’ ”

I hadn’t heard a poem being recited since back in eighth grade at St. Clothilde’s, when Sister Patrick would entertain us with her sinister rendering of “My Last Duchess.” But even she had been reading from a book.

It was utterly spellbinding to be standing in the midst of all the commotion of the emergency room, hearing this beautifully enunciated English poem pour out of the recumbent figure on the gurney with her eyes fast closed. How thankful I was that I’d headed straight for the hospital after the tornado. In a way, I realized, this amazing scene had been my creation.

“ ‘ “I set her on my pacing steed . . . and nothing else saw all day long . . . for sidelong would she bend . . . and sing a faery’s song—” ’ ”

I was so wrapped in my bubble of enthrallment that it took me a moment to realize the bubble had burst. Gone were the enchanted knight and his wild lady. Ginevra’s voice had been cut off midsentence and she was warily gazing up at a scowling dark-haired man in a foreign-cut suit looming over me. Beside him stood the nurse.

“How have we met?” he icily inquired of me.

“Well, we haven’t, exactly,” I said, “but—”

“She said she
knew
you, Doctor,” insisted the nurse. “Otherwise I
never
would have—”

He ignored the nurse and continued his interrogation of me. “Perhaps you’ll be good enough to explain just what you are doing here.” He was not unattractive, a sort of Orson Welles type, if Welles had been humorless and skinny as a scarecrow and had spoken with a prickly Scottish burr, but I was glad
I
wasn’t going home with him. Had Ginevra actually fallen in love with him or had she shrewdly chosen someone who would fiercely protect her from her former notoriety?

Having been warned of his loathing for reporters, especially from the
Star,
I said I had been visiting someone in the hospital and on the way out had recognized Mrs. Brown lying on the gurney outside the ER. “Your wife and my aunt go to the same hairdresser, and when I heard the nurse here saying there was nobody to help keep her awake, of course I volunteered.”

“But you said you
knew
Dr. Brown,” the nurse practically shrieked.

“You
asked
me did I know him and I saw you were in such a terrible hurry to get away that I thought it would be best for Mrs. Brown if I just said yes.”

If looks could kill, I would have been a corpse crumpled at her feet. My excuse, however, seemed to convince the formidable doctor, who actually went so far as to grudgingly thank me before turning his attention to his wife.

“Come, love, let’s get you home,” he said in an entirely different tone. “I’ve already signed you out.”

“Thanks for your company.” I realized she was addressing me. “Please give my regards to your aunt.”

I heard her explaining to her husband as I walked away, “She was making me recite poetry so I wouldn’t fall asleep.”

“Oh, good, Emma, there you are!”

Alex de Costa was advancing toward me at an alarming speed. I put a finger to my lips to shush him. I needed to remain incognito to the press-hating Dr. Brown if I was to follow up on a future meeting. She had left the door open for it. Though knowing my name, she had referred to me simply as “she” to her husband.

10.

Diver Gets
Bends in
Rescue Try

By Emma Gant
Star
Staff Writer

A 22-year-old Metro police rescue diver was rushed to a decompression chamber in Key West Wednesday afternoon after he passed out in his search for another diver believed to have drowned.

Metro police said Luke Kessell suffered the bends, a temporary paralysis of the nervous system, when he came up too fast from 80 feet of water in a rock pit at SW 80th Ave. and 57th St.

Kessel was searching for the body of Allan Riding, 24, of 505 NE 15th St., a skin diver.

His mother, Mrs. Ruth Riding, of the same address, told police her son had been practicing endurance underwater swimming with a snorkel tube and mask.

The search for Riding was suspended when Kessell became ill. He was taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital in a semiconscious condition and placed in an iron lung before being flown to the special chamber aboard a salvage ship in Key West.

Former Palm Island
Madam Takes Overdose

Mrs. Edwin Brown, of 286 Crandon Dr., Key Biscayne, formerly Ginevra Snow, the madam who turned prosecutor’s witness in the 1953 “Queen of the Underworld” prostitution trial in the Dade County Court of Crimes, was treated for an overdose of a sleeping drug at Jackson Memorial Hospital on Wednesday night and later released into the care of her husband, Dr. Edwin Brown.

Buy of the Week:
Swagger Look
On a Budget

Look like Garbo on a budget? That swagger look, characterized by the casually belted trench coat and the nonchalant slouch hat popularized back in the 1930s by movie stars like Garbo and Dietrich, is back in fashion again. And the look is not limited to high-fashion bank accounts. White trench coat worn by our model is $25. Matching rainproof swagger hat is $15. Where to buy: Call FR 9-0000 after 9:30 a.m. today. Or after 24 hours write to the
Miami Star
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Star
Staff Photo by Jake Rance

“Muy guapa,”
pronounced Alex de Costa, running his fingertips along the bottom of my one-column photo in the
Miami Star
spread out on the table of our booth. We had just finished breakfast at Howard Johnson’s and he was admiring Jake Rance’s image of me in the raincoat and rain hat. “The swagger lady smiles without pity at the world beneath her feet.”

It was eight forty-five on the morning of my twenty-second birthday, or, more accurately, the first day of my twenty-third year. It was the morning after the tornado.

TORNADIC WINDS INJURE 100,
HOMES, BUSINESSES BLASTED

was the banner, with Dave Bisbee and Vince Gallo sharing the byline for the lead story beneath it:

NORTHEAST SECTOR
HARDEST HIT;
TERRIFIED, HURT
JAM HOSPITALS

“I was smiling with loathing at the crouching photographer at my feet. He made me take my hair down because he said my face looked fat,” I told Alex.

“He has captured your
aplomo,
whatever he said.”

“
Aplomo
is the last thing I was feeling.”

“
No importa,
it is there in the picture. Amazing girl, your first week on the job and you have three appearances in today’s
Star.
”

I chose not to disillusion him by confiding my darker view. Let Alex de Costa continue to champion my progress. I could use an in-house champion.

Behind my moat of reserve, however, I was festering over what he called my “three appearances” in today’s
Star.
Each of them, to me, exemplified a particular kind of failure. The diver story, buried low on an inside page to leave room for all the tornado coverage, showcased my lack of timeliness. The tiny overdose item, called in to Vince by me and printed without a byline, fell mortifyingly short of my original plan. And the “swagger” photo, which, I had to admit, made me look exactly the way I wished to impress others, was hateful because it made me the creation of Jake Rance. Usurpation lurked everywhere, whether in the form of a late-breaking tornado, a contemptuous photographer, or a deadline (plus a husband who hated reporters) arriving too soon.

“How I would love to have a print of that picture,” said Alex.

“I’ll see if I can get you one.” Though I didn’t relish asking Jake Rance for a print; he’d smugly assume I wanted it for myself.

“Enrique Ocampo believes the uprooted palm could be saved, but Luís says the machine to lift it back into place would wreck the pool area. It will have to be chopped up in pieces and hauled away. Magnificent old tree, it’s like giving orders to chop up a friend. And this afternoon, I must drive to Palm Beach, to ask Abuelito for another loan to pay my bridge debt, which means staying over for dinner at the Bath and Tennis Club so he can lecture me on all the ways I’ve failed him. I’d much prefer taking you out for your birthday. How late may I call you when I get back, Emma?”