Miami Midnight (10 page)

“Yes. No? They’ve been watching me. Either that, or I’m losing my mind! Can’t we—”

“Gabrielle, are you trying to drive me nuts?” Crissette freed herself. “You’re working too hard, baby, but you just can’t freak out like this.”

David Fothergill put himself between them. “Easy, love.” He took advantage of the moment to open the Fiero’s passenger door and shove Gaby into the back seat. Then he jumped into the front himself and slammed the door.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” Crissette shouted. “David, you get out of there!”

He stuck his head out of the window, smiling angelically. “Dah-leen, I got to get my clothes and things from your house, don’t I now? Let’s take lovely Miss Collier home first.”

Gaby leaned over David’s shoulder to the front window. “Crissette,
please
!”

“I’m going to kill you, David,” the photographer said between her teeth. But she went around to the driver’s side and got in.

The Fiero sped down Biscayne Avenue to the causeway with Crissette at the wheel, flying through a number of traffic lights just turning red. Gaby huddled in the back seat, hardly noticing. She knew she’d just made a fool of herself in the newspaper parking lot, but at this point it didn’t seem to matter.

“Anything’s possible, love,” David was saying. “Now, Miss Gabrielle say she sees two men in a garden making a drug deal—”

Crissette cut him off. “The whole thing’s in Gabrielle’s head. It was a fashion show, man, a
fashion show
. Drug pushers are not going to be making deals in the woods while the biggest
latino
society bash of the summer is going on, with photographers and reporters crawling all over the place. Gabrielle’s got a case of culture shock from being in Europe too long.”

He shook his head. “Love, in Miami drug dealing is all over, you can find it anywhere.”

“Listen, you don’t know how strung out this girl is.” Crissette looked at Gaby in the rearview mirror. “She comes back home and finds out her family’s money’s all gone, her mother has a terminal drinking problem, and she has to find work quick to keep them off welfare. Gabrielle is a nice chick, but she hasn’t got any self-confidence. She’s seeing things.”

“I’m not neurotic,” Gaby said listlessly.

“I didn’t say that, did I?” The other woman stared hard at her in the mirror. “What you saw at the Santo Marin place was a Cuban and a Colombian doing something you didn’t understand. But Gabrielle, in a newspaper job you see a lot of strange things. You can’t let your imagination run away with you. If you do, you’re in big trouble.”

“But they
did
look like they were involved in some sort of a deal.” Gaby was tempted to go ahead and blurt out everything. But, she reminded herself, David was there.

“Forget the whole thing, will you?” Crissette sped through another red light near the port of Miami. “Just go home and get a good night’s sleep.”

Gaby sank back into the seat. She was turning over in her mind the idea of telling Crissette about James Santo Marin’s visit. How he had arrived in a huge power cruiser in the midst of a thunderstorm to threaten her. And then started to make love to her, yet stopped. She bit her lip. Not a wise move. Crissette already thought she was pretty strung out.

“Gabrielle, honey,” Crissette went on more gently, “you shouldn’t let Jack Carty and the newsroom staff bug you. They do it to everybody.” She turned onto the old Palm Island bridge with its concrete balustrades and 1920’s-style globe lampposts. “How’s your mother? Things any better?”

James Santo Marin had warned her that she hadn’t seen anything that afternoon in Coral Gables. On the other hand, why would he come to her house in the middle of a raging storm just to tell her that, unless she had seen something important? Was it James Santo Marin in the big Cadillac? Gaby knew he was dangerous. Could he be unbalanced? Oh God, a drug user himself? She closed her eyes for a moment. “My mother’s not much better. If you mean the drinking.”

The Fiero turned into Royal Palm Way, tires screeching, and stopped abruptly at the Collier front door in a shower of crushed shell.

“Lord, what a beautiful house.” Crissette leaned out the car window to look at the shadowy Moorish-Spanish outlines of the old mansion. In the moonlight, the towers, tangled bougainvillea vines clinging to the stucco, and myriad wrought-iron balconies were mysterious. “Even if it does look like the Munsters live here.” She turned to Gabrielle in the back seat. “Let David see you to the door, hon.”

David didn’t move. “I been think-een, love, maybe you should ask our Miss Gabrielle why someone could be following her. Those two men in the garden could have been dealing drugs, yes. It’s possible.”

Crissette glared at him. “Will you stay out of this?”

But David Fothergill’s expression said that he, at least, took Gaby seriously. “If things keep happening,” he told her, “you keep track. Like, if anybody bothers you, Miss Gabrielle, you let me know.”

He got out of the car and helped her from the backseat. “You don’t have to see me to the door,” she said. “I’ll be all right. And thanks for the ride.”

They waited as she walked the few feet to the front door. Just before the entranceway she ducked under the overgrown hibiscus bushes. As she did, she almost stumbled over something lying on the path.

She bent, peering in the moonlight, trying to see what it was. “Jupiter? What are you doing here?”

The old Labrador lay stretched out on the path, his body flattened, legs extended in a curious attitude.

She supposed she already knew Jupiter was dead before she touched him. His fur felt dusty, lifeless. Gaby fell to one knee with a muffled cry. There was a cord around the dog’s neck, twisted tightly.

She lurched back to her feet. Instead of turning back to the car where Crissette and David were still waiting, she ran up the front steps and pushed at the door so she could reach into the hall and turn on the outside light. She had to look at Jupiter. He couldn’t be dead. Not with a twisted cord around his neck. There was some mistake.

The door wouldn’t yield. Something inside was holding it shut. Numbly, she bent to look through the letter slot. A body was lying on the floor just beyond.

Her mother, she realized, peering through the slit into murky dimness. Something had happened to her mother too.

Chapter 7

Gaby sat on the living room couch beside Crissette, listening to Detective Sergeant Antonio Lopez tell Dodd Brickell what the police had found. It was the third or fourth time Detective Lopez had gone through his summary, once to Gaby and Crissette and at least once over the telephone to headquarters, and Gaby’s head was pounding. She really wanted to ask Crissette about David Fothergill, but when she turned to the photographer, Crissette gave her a warning look and shook her head no.

Gaby sighed. She supposed Crissette was right. It was no time to discuss David, not with the police around. Crissette had hustled the big Trinidadian out of the house before the patrol car arrived, and Gaby wondered if David was lurking around somewhere on Palm Island. And whether some of the more security-conscious residents, seeing a gigantic man in muddy clothes and a hard hat who obviously didn’t belong there, would call the police. She choked back an unhappy urge to giggle. All the police, the squad car with two uniformed policemen and another car that had brought two plainclothes detectives from the robbery detail, were right there, in the Collier house. They probably couldn’t answer another call in the neighborhood if they wanted to.

Crissette heard the muffled sound. “Let me get you a drink,” she whispered. “You look like you need it.”

Gaby shook her head.
Drink
was a dirty word in the Collier household. To find a bottle of booze they’d have to ask her mother. And Jeannette was in no condition to tell them anything.

“God,” Crissette muttered under her breath, “I wish this was over.” Across the room a policeman and the Brickell family doctor, whom Dodd had called, were leaning over Jeannette Collier. She was propped upright in one of the
sala
’s faded armchairs. “Let them take her to the hospital,” Crissette said to Gaby. “Just tell them.”

“She doesn’t want to go.” Gaby was so tired she was light-headed. Fright, revulsion, the awful excitement of the police searching her house for intruders, had drained her. “You heard what the doctor said. He can’t forcibly admit her. Maybe,” she added, not really caring anymore, “Dodd can reason with Mother.”

Jeannette, they’d discovered, was not injured in any way, only drunk enough to pass out in the front hall by the door. According to the police, her mother might have heard a disturbance outside and gone to see what it was. Now, conscious but hardly sober, Jeannette was making life miserable for anybody who tried to persuade her to go to the hospital, even overnight for observation.

Dodd was waiting, Gaby knew, to tell her that this was their chance, at last, to get her mother hospitalized for an evaluation and possibly treatment. Gaby supposed it was, but at that moment it was wildly unreal to be sitting in the living room at well past midnight, surrounded by uniformed policemen, detectives, the ambulance crew, the Brickell family doctor, listening to Detective Lopez explain to Dodd what the police believed had happened. From what she gathered, it was all being blamed on the Escuderos, Elena and her son Angel.

The night was still sweltering. Detective Lopez, in a rumpled business suit, was perspiring slightly. He’d learned, early on, that the call to investigate a suspected breaking-and-entering involved two employees of Miami’s second largest newspaper—one of whom was the daughter of the once very well-known Paul Collier—and an angry family friend who had just driven up to find out what in the hell was going on.

Detective Lopez had instantly recognized the family friend as an influential Miami lawyer and businessman, the son of a former city councilman, a partner in one of the city’s most prestigious law firms, and a descendant of a Florida pioneer family that had virtually founded Old Miami society. Dodson Brickell III also had an honorary VIP police pass. And he was, he told Detective Lopez immediately, shocked, angry, and disturbed about the effect of the night’s events on Mrs. Collier and her daughter. Especially the business about the dead dog.

“We run into this every once in a while,” the detective explained. “Last year we had a regular epidemic. It turned out to be some sort of fight between rival priestesses.”

He looked across the brightly lit
sala
to where his partner, Detective Andriado, was kneeling beside the living room coffee table, putting chicken feathers taken from the Colliers’ back door into small plastic sandwich bags. The alleged victim, Mrs. Jeannette Collier, was sitting up in the armchair as the doctor checked her blood pressure again.

“Usually,” Detective Lopez went on, “the complaints are about the goats and chickens and stuff used in the—ah, the rituals. The Department of Health forwards them to the Miami P.D., and then we go in and clean out the premises where the alleged problem exists.”

Dodd only stared at him. The detective continued, a little uncomfortably. “Officially the city’s attitude is that
Santería
, voodoo,
shango,
whatever these people want to practice is harmless, just so long as it doesn’t create a health hazard.”

“You call this harmless?” Dodd was incredulous. “Women scared out of their wits, the house smeared with blood and garbage, a family pet strangled?”

“Allegedly strangled,” the detective corrected him. “Mrs. Collier’s not able to state that she heard or saw anything. The dog wasn’t a nuisance, there’ve been no complaints from the neighbors, so we can probably rule out that someone would want to do away with it.”

Gaby watched the second detective stack his sandwich bags in an ordinary brown paper grocery bag. There had been chicken feathers and blood smeared all over the sun porch door, but the police had found no evidence of forced entry. No one had come inside the house and nothing, as far as anyone knew, was missing. Her mother was not hurt, only embarrassingly drunk.

“Nobody around here would kill an old dog,” Dodd said. “People know the Colliers. They don’t have any enemies.” He gazed around the room. “What the hell else did you find?”

Detective Lopez indicated the sun porch. “You can look outside if you want to. They killed the chicken, spattered the blood and feathers out there.”

Gaby wrapped her arms around her body and shivered. It had been hours since she’d had anything to eat and she was exhausted. She was still worried about David Fothergill. When the police had arrived, they’d asked for her identification and Crissette’s, even their
Times-Journal
employee passes and their driver’s licenses, almost before they did anything else. If David had been there they would have arrested him, surely, as an illegal alien.

She could hear Detective Lopez on the sun porch explaining that the black chicken feathers and blood were being taken downtown to Miami police laboratories to be tested, but there was no reason to believe it was other than what it appeared to be—animal blood, not human. And they were certain now Mrs. Collier’s collapse was due to alcohol intoxication, not foul play.

Gaby wanted to put her hands over her ears. She knew what was coming next. Detective Lopez was going to tell Dodd that Jupiter’s death and the bloody mess at the back door probably somehow involved the Escuderos living in the garage apartment.