True Detective

moronic smile and kept clipping the hedge as he did.

'I'm with the Miami Herald,' I said. 'I was wondering when Mayor Cermak is expected.'

'He come pretty soon,' the man said. Cuban?

'How soon?'

'Tonight sometime.' He kept clipping.

'Is anybody home?'

'They not down here.'

Who?'

'The family. They in Chicago.'

'Okay. Thanks.'

He smiled some more, and then started looking at what he was doing.

I went back to the Ford. So much for Cermak's own security: that guy would've told John Wilkes Booth where Lincoln was sitting. On the other hand. Cermak would undoubtedly have a fleet of bodyguards with him. and security would be stepped up once he moved in.

Next stop was Coral Gables, which joined Miami on the west and, while not as overtly wealthy as Miami Beach, was a well-to-do little community. Some overly zealous city planner had put in a cream-color stucco archway you drove under as you 'entered,' limited the buildings to a mock-Spanish design, stuck matching awnings on everything, and tinted the sidewalks coral. The Miami Biltmore Hotel loomed above this contrived, palm-bordered landscape, a sprawling hacienda gone out of control, with a central tower adjoining an assortment of wings to face in a gently curving C the putting greens that were its lawn.

The attendant who took my car didn't seem to believe I could be staying at a place this grand; neither could I.I hauled my shabby suitcase across a lobby of potted palms and overstuffed furniture and potted, overstuffed politicos, who were scattered about the lobby in groups of three to six, smoking cigars, laughing, talking loud, having the grand sort of time the victors have when they've been dividing up the spoils.

FDR's right-hand man. Jim Farley- who was to be his postmaster general, and was currently his patronage chief- was not among the Demos loitering about the Biltmore lobby. But his presence was felt: between puffs of cigar and dirty stories were speculations about who would get what, and it was Farley these men were in Miami to see. It was Farley who was Cermak's target.

I had a reservation, and a bellboy took me up to a room with a double-bed and a view of the golf course. It was two in the afternoon; I called the desk and asked for a wake-up call in two hours. I went to sleep immediately, and when the phone rang, I jumped awake. But I felt rested.

I shaved and threw water on my face and got back into the white suit: I had a Panama and sunglasses, too. I looked like a few thousand other people in Miami. I left my suitcase in my suite, but took the two guns with me, my automatic in my shoulder holster (it didn't bulge much under the coat) and the.38 in my belt, where its short barrel nudged my lower belly.

The train station was in downtown Miami, on First off Flagler, near the majestic Dade County Courthouse, a big Gothic wedding cake of a building whose layers rose twenty-eight stories. The Florida East Coast Railway Station, on the other hand, was a long, low-slung mustard-color wood-and-brick affair with an arched overhanging roof from which a large sign said MIAMI, in case you forgot what town you were in: a dinosaur of a building left over from pre-boom Miami, a frontier-style station where you might expect to catch a stagecoach instead of a train. I left the Ford in the parking lot in back and wandered inside, where I bought a Miami Daily News at the newsstand, and found a place on the end of one of the slatted high-backed benches where I could get a view of all doors, and could sit and pretend to read while I watched and waited.

It was five, and Cermak was due in at six. The place was pretty empty when I first got there, but began to fill up quickly with others who. like me. were meeting folks arriving on the Royal Poinciana. which was what the Dixie Flyer out of Chicago turned into at Jacksonville.

I saw several pretty young women- white teeth flashing in tanned faces, tanned legs flashing under colorful print dresses- and exchanged flirty smiles with those who weren't arm in arm with a sweetheart, and a few who were, when the sweetheart wasn't looking. It occurred to me that this wouldn't be a bad town to get laid in. Unfortunately, every time I saw a blonde, it reminded me of my quarry; and every time I saw a dark-haired girl- particularly one with short dark hair- I thought of Mary Ann Beame.

That blond killer hadn't been the only thing my mind had turned over and over, obsessively, on the train ride to Miami. Mary Ann Beame was dancing around my brain like Isadora Duncan; she'd really done a job on me. I hadn't been with that many women. I was no virgin, of course- but I thought the same of her. And it disturbed me. I thought maybe I was in love with her. I also thought she was using me. like an actor in a play she was directing in the little theater of her mind. I never wanted to see her again; I wished I was with her now.

Why not pick up a Florida filly for the night? I didn't owe Mary Ann Beame anything; she was just a client. So she'd given me her virginity; so what? It was just another retainer, wasn't it?

Well, I wasn't in Miami for the sunshine. I was here on a thousand-dollar retainer, which wasn't exactly anybody's cherry, but it was nothing you'd want to lose easily, either. And my night was already planned for me: I'd have to stick by His Honor, when he showed up, possibly through the night. That's why I'd grabbed the two hours sleep at the Biltmore; that's why I had a Thermos of hot coffee waiting in the Ford.

Pretending to read the front page of the News for an hour led to my actually reading most of it, in bits and pieces. There was news of Chicago; it had been two days since I had left, after all, the snow just starting. The storm had paralyzed the city, but fifteen thousand of the unemployed had been hired to dig out Cook County, and efforts to provide relief housing for the down-and-outers in the parks and Hooverville residents had been stepped up. So there were no more deaths by freezing, though some emergency snow-shovelers got hit by streetcars or had heart attacks. That was as far as the News article went. No doubt some of the Chicago papers were cheeky enough to point out that Mayor Cermak left for Florida just after the storm hit: even in the year of the fair, that couldn't go unreported.

General Dawes was on the front page, too. He was in Washington, D.C., subpoenaed by the Senate Stock Exchange Committee to testify' about his role in connection with Samuel Insull. Insull was the utilities tycoon who during the twenties headed companies worth some $4 billion and had a personal fortune around SI50 million. There was a new board game I had played with Janey a few times: Monopoly. Insull had turned the business of electricity