Miami Blues (18 page)

During his first three days of work at the Omni, the only thing Freddy managed to steal was a package he took out of an unlocked station wagon on Rose Two. Later, when he opened the package in his hotel room, he found two pairs of kid's jeans, size eight, husky. He gave the jeans to one of the Jamaican maids.

His fourth day of work was also frustrating. That night after dinner he took the TransAm and drove around the city, then broke into an appliance store on Twenty-seventh Avenue. The alarm went off the moment he heaved a concrete block through the wire-mesh window of the back door. He reached in and opened the door, and grabbed an RCA color TV set and two electric digital clocks. Forty minutes later, when he cruised slowly by the store, driving in the opposite direction, the alarm bell was still ringing and the cops still had not investigated.

Susan hooked up the TV set to the aerial that was already on the house, and the set worked fine, except for a snowy Channel 2, but neither one of the digital clocks kept accurate time.

The next day was better. Freddy caught two pot peddlers in the Jordan Marsh restroom on the second floor. They were arguing fiercely about money when he came in and didn't even look in his direction until he had them covered with his .38.

"Freeze. Police," Freddy said.

They froze. He took their wallets and six ounces of marijuana in a plastic Baggie. He handcuffed both of them, left wrist and right wrist, around the pipe in the first toilet stall, and left the restroom. He would have left the keys to the handcuffs just out of reach, but he didn't have them. They could explain their situation to whoever it was that rescued them, he supposed, but at least he had plenty of time to get back to his room in the Omni Hotel.

There were $300 in cash, four $50 unsigned travelers' checks, and a gold St. Christopher's medal in the wallets. There were no credit cards, and only one driver's license--a license for Angel Salome. The wallets weren't worth keeping, and neither was the driver's license, but the small medal was a nice gift for Susan. The unsigned travelers' checks were good to have, and it was the first time he had ever seen completely blank checks like that, which a man could sign with any name he wanted.

Susan settled in very quickly to a domestic routine. She cooked ample breakfasts for Freddy, surprising him with Belgian walnut waffles, shirred eggs, and French toast made with sourdough bread. Then, after she dropped him off at the Omni, she shopped at the supermarkets, cleaned house, and planned her dinners. One day she was able to buy Okeechobee catfish, which she fried, together with hush puppies, and she served steak fries and collard greens on the side. Freddy didn't like the catfish because of the bones, but he enjoyed the other meals she prepared. She always topped off the dinners with tart desserts, too, like Granny Smith apple pie, bubbly with butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon. One night she baked a turkey breast and served it with all the trimmings, including a mince pie that she baked from scratch.

She washed and ironed the clothes and sheets, and started a small vegetable garden in the back yard, planting cucumbers, radishes, and a single row of tomato plants along the back fence. She made friends with Mrs. Edna Damrosch, the widow next door, who worked as a saleslady in a Dania antique store on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

On the days Mrs. Damrosch didn't work and when Freddy wasn't home, they visited each other's houses to watch soap operas and to discuss the lives of the characters.

One night Susan cooked fried chicken. She planned to serve cheese grits, Stove-Top dressing, canned peas, and milk gravy with the chicken but discovered she was out of milk. She grabbed her purse and asked Freddy for the car keys. Freddy was watching the news on television and, as usual when he was home, was wearing only jeans. There was a window air conditioner in the bedroom, but none in the living room where the TV had been set up, and the room was always warm and stuffy.

"Where do you want to go?"

"I just want to run down to the Seven-Eleven for some milk."

"Fix iced tea instead."

"I need milk for the gravy."

"I'll go. You'd better stay here and watch what you're cooking."

Freddy, without putting on a shirt or his shoes, picked up his wallet and the keys from the cobbler's bench and drove the six blocks to the nearest 7-Eleven. He went to the dairy case, deliberated for a moment on whether to buy a quart or a halfgallon of milk, and then slid back the glass door. A short stickup man entered the store, held a gun on the manager, and told him in Spanish to give him the money in the register. The stickup man, in his early twenties, was very nervous, and the gun danced in his shaking hand.

The frightened manager, without a word, gave the gunman the $36 in the till. The stickup man put the bills in his pocket and backed toward the glass double doors. He then stuck the pistol in his waistband and took four cartons of cigarettes from a counter display. He noticed Freddy for the first time. Startled, he dropped the cigarettes and reached for his pistol again. Freddy, reacting impulsively, picked up a can of Campbell's pork and beans and threw it at the gunman, who turned sideways, just in time. The can hit the window, narrowly missing the man's left shoulder.

The glass shattered and a triangular sliver of glass gashed the man's throat. It was a shallow cut, but it began to bleed. The man dropped his gun, clutched his neck, and rushed through the double doors. Freddy went after him, but as the man got into the passenger seat of a heavy Chevrolet Impala, the driver drove forward and up over the curb, heading for the doors. By the time Freddy skirted the stacked bread shelves and reached the doorway, so had the car bumper. Both doors crashed down on Freddy as the driver rammed them. The car then backed away and careened into the street. The falling doors slammed Freddy onto the floor and pinned him. The manager lifted off the doors, and Freddy got shakily to his feet. As the manager hurried to the phone, Freddy got into his car and drove home--without the milk.

When he got home, Freddy gave Susan the car keys and wrote out a list of supplies for her to get at Eckerd's drugstore. He turned off the gas under the food in the kitchen before going into the bathroom to check his injuries. His left wrist was sprained badly, but he didn't think it was broken. There might be a hairline fracture, but he didn't think it was any worse than that. There were a dozen cuts on his face, however, and more on his chest where his chest had been scraped by shards of glass. The worst thing was his right eyebrow. The eyebrow, skin and all, was one big flap hanging down over his eye. He would have to sew it back on and hope that it would grow together again. The other cuts in his face were not only deep, they were penetrating punctures, but they wouldn't require stitches. The cuts on his chest were ridged scrapes, but not as deep as the punctures on his face, so he figured they would scab over within a few days.

When Susan got back, he asked her to thread the smallest needle in the packet with black thread. He sewed the eyebrow flap on to his forehead with small stitches. Susan watched the first stitch and then vomited into the toilet bowl.

"That doesn't help me much, you know," he said. "Go into the bedroom and lie down."

The flap, after he had put as many stitches into it as he thought it would hold, was more than a little crooked, and the eyebrow slanted up at a curious angle, but that was about the best he could do. He was in considerable pain, but he felt lucky that he hadn't lost the eye. By midnight, he knew that the entire eye area would be black and blue. His face was swelling already. He dabbed at his face cuts with balls of cotton soaked in peroxide, and when all of the cuts had stopped trickling blood, he plastered them with Band-Aids. Susan had bought the kind that were blue and red and dotted with white stars, and he ended up with fourteen patriotic Band-Aids on his face and neck. He washed his chest with a washrag, and then with peroxide, but decided not to bandage the scrapes.

His sprained wrist was now twice its normal size. He had Susan splint it with tongue depressors and bind it as tightly as she could with strips of adhesive tape. He could move his fingers, but it hurt. He sent her back to Eckerd's to get a canister of plaster of Paris and cut pieces of gauze into eightinch strips while she was gone. When she returned, they mixed the plaster with water, soaked the strips of gauze, and he had her wrap them in overlapping strips around his wrist. The cast, when she finished, was thick and heavy, but when it dried it would immobilize his arm just in case there was a hairline fracture. Freddy took three Bufferin, then ate some fried chicken, although he had no appetite for it.

"Are you going to tell me about it, Junior?"

"About how dumb I was, d'you mean? Sure, I'll tell you about it. I forgot for a minute that Miami, like any other city, is a dangerous place. I didn't take my gun to the store, not even my sap. Not only that, I broke my own rule, and I tried to help someone else instead of looking after my own ass. This straight life we've been leading has given me a misplaced sense of security, that's all. For a moment there, I must've thought that I was some kind of solid citizen. That's all."

"But what _happened_ to you?"

"Two guys in a blue Impala ran over me."

Susan nodded but looked thoughtful. "I thought it must've been something like that."

18

Marie Henderson was active in a Miami NOW chapter and had a subscription to _Ms._ magazine. When Bill Henderson had first told Hoke that his wife was subscribing to _Ms._, Hoke didn't believe him, so Henderson brought one of her copies down to the office and showed him the printed address label. It was made out to Ms. Marie Henderson.

"That's incredible," Hoke had said, shaking his head morosely at the irrefutable evidence.

"Isn't it?" Henderson agreed. "Now you've got some kind of idea of what I have to put up with . . ."

Hoke parked at the curb in front of Henderson's ranch-style house. He didn't see Henderson's car in the carport. He walked reluctantly up the brick walk to knock on the door anyway. Perhaps, he thought, Bill wouldn't be gone very long.

Marie Henderson, a tall bony woman of thirty-eight with brown, frizzy hair, seemed happy enough to see Hoke. She invited him in, pointed toward Henderson's comfortable recliner, and asked him if he would like a drink.

"Sure," Hoke nodded. "Early Times, if you've got it."

"We've got it." She brought a bottle of Early Times and two shot glasses from the bar and put them on the coffee table in front of him. She went into the kitchen and returned with a pitcher of ice and water.

"That's the way Bill drinks it--straight with water back, so I suppose you do, too."

"Yeah. It gives you a little lift this way."

"I'm sure it does." Marie smiled. "You don't look too bad, Hoke. Bill said you looked like death warmed over. The beard could do with some trimming."

"The doctor said to leave it on for a while."

"He didn't tell you not to trim it, did he? You know who you remind me of with that beard? Ray Milland. Did you see that picture when he was sick and in a wheelchair? His daughter was a librarian, and he had her wait on him hand and foot. The way it turned out, he didn't need the wheelchair at all. He was faking it to make a slave out of his daughter. Finally, the girl pushed him over a cliff and got all the money he was hoarding in a cigar box under his bed, or something. Did you see it?"

"No, I didn't see it."

"Well, you didn't miss much. It was on the cable a couple of months ago. If it comes back, I'll call you."

"I don't have cable. I saw Ray Milland in _Love Story_, when he played the father, but I don't remember exactly how he looked."

"He looked good then. That was several years ago. But you look a lot like him now, something about your smile, I think."

"Thanks. When is Bill coming back?"

"He's out bowling. He's not on a regular team, but when Green Lakes Landscaping is short a man, they come by and get Henderson. He's only got a one-thirty average, so they don't come by for him often."

"He did tell me that he was doing some bowling for the exercise."

"Bowling for two hours once or twice a month isn't too much exercise, is it?"

"I guess not. When'll he be home? Maybe I'd better come back later?"

"Stick around. He'll be home soon. Pour yourself another drink."

"How're the kids, Marie?"

"Out, I'm happy to say."

Hoke had two more drinks before Henderson came home, but there was no more conversation because Hoke and Marie had run out of things to talk about.

When Henderson came in, carrying his bowling ball and bowling shoes in a blue nylon bag, Marie got up from her chair and went into the kitchen. Hoke rose quickly. He was a trifle dizzy and feeling the effects of three drinks.

"Did Captain Brownley get a hold of you?" Bill asked as he got a shot glass from the bar.

"No. I've been here for almost an hour."

Bill poured a drink, and tossed it down. "I tried to get you before I left. I let the phone ring about fifteen times, and no one answered. What kind of a hotel is that, anyway?"

"Sometimes Eddie's doing something else, and he isn't on the switchboard. I told Mr. Bennett he needs someone on the desk all the time, but he says the old people don't get that many calls. The Eldorado's probably got the smallest staff of any hotel on the Beach. So what's up, Bill?"

"You're here, so that's why I thought Brownley had called you. Sit down a minute. I'll be right back." Bill left the room and returned a few moments later with a large brown envelope, which he handed to Hoke. Hoke opened the envelope and took out a pair of handcuffs.

"Are those yours?" Bill asked. "There's an _M_ in red fingernail polish on the right cuff--"

"Yeah." Hoke nodded. "They're mine all right. Remember Bambi, the woman in the Grove I was sleeping with about two years back? We were playing a little game one night and--well, anyway, I used her nail polish to mark one cuff. Where'd you get them?"

"Robbery. They've had 'em for a few days. Two guys were cuffed together in the men's john in Jordan Marsh, in the Omni store. They claimed they were cuffed up by some crazy cop who took their money. The Robbery people just figured these two guys were into something kinky and let them go. Then, a couple of days later, one of the detectives in Robbery happened to notice the initial, and remembered the red-liner memo on your lost buzzer and pistol. He sent the cuffs over to Captain Brownley through interoffice mail. So that's that."