Miami Noir (25 page)

“Look at this,” Sharon says. “Longline elegance.” She holds up a beige foundation garment—bra to girdle, all in one.

I look away. This business is disgusting sometimes. We settle back to work. Sharon takes a load down and returns, complaining about how hot it’s getting, and Alex kicks up the air-conditioning for her. I lug my first case down and bring back a stronger one to take the books. I poke my head in the kitchen where the old guy is wrapping the barware, and I ask him to save me any cookbooks. He points to a stack. I grab a
Joy of Cooking, Esquire Book of Cocktails,
a few recipe brochures put out by companies. One,
Chafing Dish Cookery,
is ’60s, I’d say, from the illustrations. People collect these, believe it or not.

The sofa is gone and the Kussrows are carting out the dining room table, murmuring to each other as they always do, “Left, a little left. More. Now, right, now.” Guillermo is taking albums out of the stereo cabinet and fitting them into vintage carrying cases he has for them. “Put some tunes on,” I suggest. He pulls out a middle-period Sinatra, and Frank fills the apartment with regret.

Alex sits on the remaining upholstered chair, boxing up ashtrays he’s collected from around the apartment, most of them Wedgwood, and the cigarette lighter/dispenser. “Let me have a few smokes,” I say, and he dumps them beside me. He likes tobacciana, not tobacco. I put them in a sterling case I carry. This is not an affectation, it’s a deterrent; it helps to have to open it and consciously take one out. I’ve got myself down to three cigarettes a day. I can maintain like that forever, but if I try to quit, I’ll swing back with a binge. Better this way.

“There were no other pictures?” I say. Again, casually.

“There were some family photos, but the daughter took those. Not sure why she left that one.”

“She had a daughter?” I don’t know why I’m surprised. A lot of femmes fatales have daughters. Marlene Dietrich did, for instance.

“She came down from Connecticut and handled things. She had dealt with all the business papers before she called me. All clean and organized.”

“Did she die here?” I ask quietly.

He nods.

“How?”

“She didn’t come down one morning to get her paper, so the manager checked. He says he’s always alert to any changes in pattern, with so many older people here. She died sometime the day before—she was dressed but she’d lain down to rest, maybe felt ill. Anyway, peaceful.”

His fair face is flushed. Alex, whose business depends on death, doesn’t like it mentioned. I take my suitcase to the bedroom. Sharon has folded up the coverlet and stripped the pillowcases off the pillows and is stowing them into one of the trash bags she uses for loose linens. The headboard—padded satin—leans against the wall with the bed pulled away from it. When the Kussrows lift off the mattress, we can see, through the box spring, a pair of highheeled pumps. She took them off and died, I think, but I don’t say it.

Sharon adds them to her sack of footwear. “Nearly all the shoes were in shoe bags, dustless, perfect,” she says. “Everything just so.”

I squat down to pull the books out of the bedside tables, since they’ll want to take those soon. I load them into the suitcase. They are mostly current hardcovers, only one or two vintage.

Hank comes back in and edges the vanity out from the wall. “Comes apart,” he says. “Piece of cake.”

Sharon says she’ll have it empty shortly. He stands there for a minute, adjusting his weightlifting belt, then says, “Wife died three years ago.”

Sharon looks up at him.

He tugs his iron-gray forelock. “Got my own hair and”—he clacks—“all my teeth. How’d you like to go to dinner sometime? I’ll buy you a steak.”

Sharon says, “Oh, I don’t think so, Hank.”

“No harm in asking,” he says, and goes out with the bed frame.

There’s a pause. I say: “What is he? Seventy-five?”

Sharon says, “In Miami, once a woman is over fifty, she’s supposed to go out with eighty-year-olds. It’s a tough market.”

I shake my head, but it’s true. She is—in ninth grade in 1962—I figure, fifty-seven. I’m sixty-three and I never looked at her that way. But I haven’t been looking at anyone much of late except pretty gals forever young on paper. Last week I was smitten with an actress from the ’20s and then I realized she would be 105 if she weren’t already dead.

“My ex-husband has a thirty-eight-year-old girlfriend,” she says.

“Does he have all his teeth and hair, though?”

She laughs. “No.”

Mainly to change the subject, I say, “You know, what you said before, that would be a good name for a business:
The Noir Boudoir
That stuff is big on Lincoln Road, things from that period: satin nightgowns and marabou slippers and dresser sets.”

She says, “I do handle some old cosmetics and compacts and so on, which you can’t get so much for on-line. People need to touch them to buy.”

“Cast some glamour on them and you can get more. Anyway, it’s a memorable name.”

“You want it?” she says casually.

“No,” I answer. “Not at all. Your idea.” Punctilious as always, we go back to work.

When I’m done I stop by Alex in the living room, now cleared of furniture other than his chair. I tell him what I think my haul is worth to me and write him a check. He doesn’t dicker; he knows I know he’s seen everything I have. I cart my stuff out and then come back up to do a trip for Sharon, carrying down some garment bags and hat boxes to her car. When I leave, the old guy is filling a carton with partially used cleaning products from under the sink, and Hank and Jeff are moving the dressing table base, murmuring to each other. I ride down after them. It’s hot outside, well up in the eighties. I take a moment to check on the dog, but he looks fine. There’s a bowl of water on the floor of the passenger side in the shade. He’s got short white hair, a barrel chest, and thin bare legs. I put him down for some sad mix of terrier and Chihuahua.

Somewhere, the newspapers that reported on the death of William Dorsett may be intact. Everything is still on paper somewhere, that’s my theory. But not where it’s supposed to be, at the library or the newspaper’s own morgue. Microfilm and scanning keep the text but not the context. The juxtapositions of facing pages, the ads, the color process, the smell of the paper itself, are gone, and with them a lot of the meaning. Still, I put in some time at the library on Wednesday, getting a headache from the smell of the microfiche baking as I read what I can find.

In February 1962, William Dorsett’s horse, Panama Sailor, had been ailing, putting in poor times at practice. On a Saturday at Hialeah Park, Dorsett went to the stables to check whether he’d have to scratch him from a race that afternoon. Or, at least, so he’d said to several people in the clubhouse, where he left the missus in full view of many.

In the stables, running to where they heard sounds of distress, a pair of stable boys found him, bleeding from his stomped-on head and chest, the horse over him, the vet there trying to calm the animal. The vet said he had been treating the horse at Dorsett’s behest, and when the owner came into the stall, it had gone loco. The horse’s right foreleg was badly smashed, and they had to put him down.

Between editions the cops must have sweated the vet, Dr. Lucas M. Pryor, because soon he told a different story.

On Dorsett’s orders he’d been doping the horse. Panama Sailor’s “ailment” was just one more ploy to help the odds. The horse was fit and then some. He was supposed to “recover” and win—but the scheme backfired on Dorsett. This was a crime, but the death itself, Pryor insisted, was accidental.

There it sat till the trial. In the interim the newspapers dug into Mrs. D.’s first husband, also a William, this one called Billy Hogarth. The Hogarths were down for the winter in 1953, from Pittsburgh. Dorsett was from Ligonier, horse country, not right next door to Pittsburgh but both in western Pennsylvania. So Mr. and Mrs. Billy Hogarth could have known Dorsett, but that was unconfirmed. On March 2, 1953, Billy Hogarth, having had some cocktails, was walking back to his hotel, crossing Collins Avenue midblock, when he was struck and killed by a 1950 Studebaker belonging to one Roy Robineau. Robineau got out after he hit Hogarth and readily admitted he was drunk. Being drunk was its own excuse then, not a crime the way it is today. The 1950 Studebaker had the distinctive “bullet nose” front end which hit Billy Hogarth just right—or just wrong. Young Mrs. Hogarth was having her hair done at the hotel salon, in honor of a party they were going to that night.

By the trial’s opening, reporters had gotten Helena’s original name, Helen Immerton. A songbird from Kentucky—some implication of trashiness about Kentucky can be picked up even on microfiche—right across from Cincinnati. She’d sung with a band in Cinci and on live Ohio radio in the ’40s under the name Helena Mar, or possibly Marr—it was printed both ways in different editions. She married Billy Hogarth in 1948 and had a daughter, and all was well till Billy Hogarth intersected with Robineau’s front end. Dorsett married the pretty widow in 1954. She was twenty-six. Thirty-four in 1962 when she was tragically—the papers invariably appended “tragically”—widowed again. Nothing much was said about the daughter. She’d been away at school. Age twelve, but the rich ship them off young, and she was a stepdaughter. One columnist mentioned Roy Robineau not being locatable, rumored to have moved out west.

Between the lines, I imagine how hard the cops worked to find a connection between Dr. Pryor the vet and the lovely Helena Dorsett, whose photos from various social do’s were reproduced: jaunty in sports clothes and shapely, but never vulgarly so, in evening wear. There were frequent references to their house on Leucadendra Drive, which clearly meant something about class and money. Dorsett looked handsome and strong-jawed, like an ad for aristocracy, and Dr. P. had the heavy glasses of the period and a crew cut, and that’s about all you could tell about them from the microfiche. Everyone looked middle-aged in 1962.

The vet never implicated her. She testified that she had no idea of anything untoward in Mr. Dorsett’s horse breeding and racing “hobby.” But some dirt on her husband came out, a complaint the defense had found about a misrepresented horse he sold someone in Ligonier and a settlement, which tended to support the doctor’s story, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been a falling out between them. So Dr. P. got second degree murder. He went away to state prison for fifteen to twenty years—maybe a lot for second degree, but they’d loaded on some other charges about tampering and prescriptions. Took away his vet’s license, of course.

And Helen(a), née Immerton, a.k.a., Mar(r), Hogarth Dorsett, twice widowed, presumably sold the house on Leucadendra Drive, and moved, perhaps straight into the Delphi. Who knows? On her inheritance she lived long and wore fine clothes and tried out drinks from the
Esquire Book of Cocktails
and played cards and did crosswords and died on her satin bedspread at seventy-seven. What’s so tragic about that?

When I get home, I tell myself I need to buckle down to work. In the dining room, which is my workroom (I usually eat in the living room in front of the TV), I have stacked boxes full of papers I’ve picked up: billing records from long-gone businesses and vintage department store ads and menus and greeting cards and falling-apart old children’s books and what have you. Take them apart and shuffle them up and chuck an assortment into a Ziploc and there you go: Ephemera Samplers. Very popular with scrapbookers who come by my booth on Lincoln Road on Sundays. This scrapbooking fad has raised interest in everything with old typeface or illustration. My samplers let me get rid of things of little value, though I find I go too slow because I get interested, wondering when they served broiled grapefruit as an appetizer at the Senator Hotel and setting that menu aside to keep, which is defeating my purpose.

This is tedium without much edge. I’ve got the lovely Helena’s picture on my work table where I can see her. The photo has that strong line between light and shadow they liked in the ’40s. Call it noir or chiaroscuro, it’s dramatic. She seems a hard, lovely woman. But this isn’t getting me anywhere. I assign myself to sit back down and make at least two dozen Ephemera Samplers.

I jump at the phone when it rings.

It’s Alex Sterling, asking if I can come meet him at Café Nublado—right by his house and not that far from mine—to discuss something. “Sounds serious,” I say, and he says it is, and so I allow as how I’ll tear myself away from work and drive down to see him.

Café Nublado is Spanish for coffee with clouds. They do the usual Cuban coffee and guava pastries, but to compete with the high-end espresso chains, the walls are painted with idealized piles of cumulonimbus and the house specialty has a soft puffy topping you have to suck through to get any caffeine.
Whatever happened to Sanka?
I like to grumble, but the girl knows me and gives me a decaf skim Nublado.

Alex Sterling is in one of the big wicker planter’s chairs out back, wearing chinos and a well-cut yellow shirt. I see he’s looking worried, so I forego small talk. “What gives?”

“Somebody has burgled Sharon,” he says. “She called me.”

“Is she all right?”

“She’s upset, naturally. I told her I’d ask you to go there. The police came and took a report, but I thought you might advise her on security. And then…”

I wait. It seems convoluted to meet here, so he must have something in mind.

“Do you think,” he says, “I overlooked something yesterday?”

“At the Delphi?”

“She says the stuff they took was all from there. And I’m wondering if someone knows there was something of great value and got it.”

“But you’d looked it all over—”

“Meticulously. You know me. It all seemed clean and organized. I didn’t find anything hidden. But I didn’t search every square molecule of space.”

“I think you’re as thorough as anyone could be. Did you go through the flour and sugar?”

He grins. “She didn’t have any flour. I doubt she ever baked. And her sugar was lump.”

“Really,” I say, admiringly. “You never see that anymore, lump sugar. But you obviously looked. How ’bout the salt shaker?”