James Hall - Miami Noir

I listened to the splash of water until Rosario took a breath, let it out. “All right. I’ll talk to you.”

She led me farther into the room, to an overstuffed sofa with wine-colored cushions and a cat curled up on one of them. I saw a woman in the corner. Candles flickered on her pale face, her red lips, her stiff hands. In the next instant I saw a mannequin dressed like a Spanish dancer in a black-lace mantilla.

“Jesus,” I muttered.

Rosario smiled up at me from the sofa. “Her name is Fátima. She’s my gypsy. She isn’t real, in the ordinary sense of the word, but she guides me. Please, have a seat.”

The cat wasn’t real either. It was one of those stuffed things made out of rabbit fur. Rosario set it on the coffee table. At least she didn’t pet it.

“Dr. Zaden came to me and asked what he should do about Carmen Sánchez. I said that he needed to free himself, and if he had to pay, so be it. We did some cleansing rituals, and I gave him some oils for protection.” She lowered her lashes. “I make no claim to perfect vision. I don’t always see the outcome. Tell his wife... Tell her that I am sorry.”

I’m usually pretty good at reading people, but I didn’t know if Rosario Cardona was real or as phony as her friend Fátima. “Did Dr. Zaden ever talk about his next-door neighbor, Ian Morris?”

“Yes. They had some problems. He and I tried to resolve them.” Rosario cocked her head as if puzzled. “Why do you ask?”

“Did Dr. Zaden ever say that Mr. Morris had talked to Carmen Sánchez, or that Mr. Morris knew how to reach her?”

“No. I can’t remember Dr. Zaden saying anything about that. Why?”

“You know Rick Zaden, Dr. Zaden’s son.”

“Yes, of course. I did a reading for him once, but that was before his father became my steady client. I don’t read for people in the same family. There could be conflicts.”

“Did Rick ever mention Carmen Sánchez to you?”

“No. I haven’t seen Rick in a long time.” Rosario Cardona lifted her brows. “These are strange questions. What is it you’re looking for, Sara?”

I had the sensation of walking on a moving sidewalk going the wrong way, losing ground. The sofa faced a long table piled with the implements of a Santera : strands of colored beads, a vase of feathers, a drum. Tall glass candle-holders for San Lazaro, Santa Barbara, San Antonio. I saw a flat can of lighter fluid and a long butane lighter, and I remembered my grandmother dancing around a circle of flames. I’d been in the middle of the circle on my knees.

As the air conditioner cycled on, the wind chimes tinkled softly and the candles flickered at the gypsy’s feet.

I said, “I’d like to know why Dr. Zaden died. I don’t think it’s as simple as it appears.”

She nodded slowly, not that she agreed with me, but that she understood. “Why does it have to be complicated? Most things aren’t. A woman was grieving for her son. She wanted justice. She wanted the blood of the man who killed him—”

“Howard Zaden didn’t kill him,” I said without thinking, then added, “I suppose he told you.”

“Yes. Kathy is responsible. And now she suffers. Carmen Sánchez got her justice. You see? It’s simple. The universe knows what it’s doing.”

I stood up, wanting to get out of there. “Thank you for your time.”

Rosario said, “Please take your money back. I haven’t earned it.”

“Keep it.”

As we walked to the door, she lifted her hand and held it close to my neck, not touching my skin, but I could feel the heat. “You’re very tense. Wait.” She went over to the display case and returned with a small brown glass bottle. “This is lavender oil, very good for tension, for headaches and sleeplessness. Take it with my compliments.”

She held onto my hand and came closer. Her eyes were huge, outlined in black. “I see... I see loss. I see grief.”

“What?”

“Was it a child?”

“Not mine. I never had any children.”

“But I do feel something, Sara. A death. There was a child, and it’s gone. You suffered from this loss.”

I dropped the little bottle into my purse. “That’s news to me.”

“Well, all I can tell you is what I feel. Someone died. A girl, I think. Maybe a young relative? The child of a friend?”

“You’re fishing, Ms. Cardona.”

With a smile, she crossed to the door and opened it. “Goodbye, Sara. If you would ever like me to do a reading for you, please call.”

I held on tightly to the railing on the way down, a habit I’d developed since my fall. Or maybe it was that my legs were trembling. I got halfway and leaned against the wall to catch my breath.

Rosario Cardona talked to a mannequin named Fátima. She had a stuffed cat and she believed in spirits. Bullshit. Total bullshit. So how had she known? When I’d fallen down the stairs chasing the suspect, I’d been two months pregnant and trying to decide what to do about it. I lost the baby. Nobody knew. No one, not even my mother.

The idea that Rosario Cardona knew made me queasy.

She hadn’t known, she’d guessed. She’d read my body language, picked up a clue in my reaction.

Simple.

As simple as the reason for Howard Zaden’s murder. He was dead because Carmen Sánchez had decided on her own to seek justice.

But I had no faith that Bill Nance would see it that way.

It took me the rest of the day to track down the owner of the red Toyota. He was a cook at a Nicaraguan restaurant in East Little Havana. The police had already been there. They had his car. He didn’t know Carmen Sánchez, except from the restaurant. The food was cheap, and she came in a lot. She had given him $50 to use his car for a few hours. She had seemed very nice, but she had murdered a man. Qué barbaridad! The cook didn’t know her, not at all, no. He’d only loaned her his car, and he wanted it back. The police were thieves. He thought that Señora Sánchez had lived in the pink apartments on Southwest 1st Street.

It was a two-story, stucco-over-frame building, twelve studio units built in the 1920s, when Miami was growing past the river. A ranchero tune came through open glass jalousies. I took the concrete steps to a door with a security screen. It wasn’t locked. The dim hallway went straight through, and stairs turned toward the second floor.

I asked an old man coming out of apartment four if a lady named Carmen Sánchez had lived here. In Spanish accented with Portuguese, he told me the police had just left. They had searched an apartment upstairs, the one right over his head, el número diez . Was it true she had killed two people with a machete? Was it true that she herself was dead? Thanks be to God. He’d thought something was funny with her, the way she never spoke to anybody, the things he’d heard through the ceiling. Candomble, Palo Mayombe , who knew what? He’d been afraid to complain. A woman like that. No, he’d never seen anyone come to her apartment.

I thanked him and took the stairs and walked to the middle door on the left side. It was open, leading to a small room with a vinyl tile floor, burglar bars at the windows, a single bed, and a kitchen area to one side. A big woman with her hair in pink rollers was cleaning out the refrigerator.

She saw me and asked if I was a reporter. She had already thrown reporters from four TV stations out of the building. I gave her my card and said I worked for the murdered doctor’s wife, and I had seen the dead bodies.

The woman closed the refrigerator and peeled off her rubber gloves. For the price of a few details about the murder scene, she agreed to talk to me.

She hadn’t seen any American men visiting Señora Sánchez. No men of any kind, or women. And no big yellow trucks had ever parked in the lot. She would have known. She kept her eyes open. Carmen Sánchez was crazy, no doubt about that. Just look. Look at all this.