Miami Noir (24 page)
O
n a warm Tuesday morning in late October, the tail end of the hurricane season, I sit in my car outside the Delphi and pretend I’m on stakeout: a honed tedium. Eight years retired, but you never stop being a cop. I sip coffee and look at the grand old apartment building, long ago converted to condos, recently rehabbed. The pressure-cleaned Sphinxes at the entrance cast sharp Sphinxy shadows, and fresh green awnings ripple up the front in the eastern ocean light as they must have in the Delphi’s heyday. I think of all the stories the place could tell.
At least it’s survived. On the next block I can see some foundation work and the signage for a new tower touting luxury living:
Buy your piece of sky.
The boom has reached this area north of downtown Miami. Deco buildings less cared for than the Delphi get condemned, knocked down, and replaced by glass towers that can’t emulate their cool lines and glamour.
I’m parked behind Alex Sterling’s white SUV, which was here when I arrived. Alex is young, gay, smart, a North Carolina boy with excellent manners and a work ethic. In three years he has built up quite a business: Sterling Estate Clearance. Old people die alone here in Miami and their children, living far away, often estranged or resentful, come in to take what they want, and then Alex appraises, bids for, and disposes of the rest. With his respectful tone and open face, his name that rings true, they trust him. As do I, as much as I trust anyone.
Right now, I know, he is inside going through the late Mrs. Dorsett’s pockets. Alex deals in fine china and what we call “smalls”: jewelry, silver, personal doodads which he sells at high-end shows around the southeast. He tells me that he learned the hard way that people hide their smalls, so now he combs through a place before we see it: He’s found mine-cut diamonds in a denture case and a Rolex under the insole of a running shoe. To the finder go the spoils.
Which might be the motto for our team. When Alex has identified what he’ll take, he brings us in for our specialities—depending on what the estate offers—and we give him a price for what we want.
Hank Kussrow & Son, Jeff, double-park beside me in their furniture truck. Jeff Kussrow is the one with the knowledge about furniture, his dad the muscle. Hank’s up in his seventies but still a big guy with thick gray hair. I’ve seen many a sideboard go downstairs on his back. He had a moving business, but his son was more into refinishing than lugging, Hank says, and persuaded him that’s where the money is. We get out and make idle conversation about the weather and what Alex has told us so far: The estate is small but choice.
I hear from a block away a chug and backfire. “The old guy,” says Hank, with a grin. The old guy’s van comes into view with his little white dog barking out the passenger window. Others of us may be variously old, but none as decrepit as him. Alex calls him Cash, which may be his name or the way he operates. He helps Alex, and then at the end Alex lets him take all the dreck. He sells the least likely things—rusty tools, old pots and pans, broken cameras—at the flea market in Fort Lauderdale, passing them on to other old guys like himself. He gets out, leaving the van running; it can take him a good six or seven tries to restart it.
In his usual faded tropical shirt and disreputable shorts, longish white hair under a baseball cap, feet sockless in sneakers, he comes over just as Guillermo Reyes pulls up in his peach-colored panel truck inscribed,
The Gizmo Man.
Guillermo fixes clocks and radios and toasters. His shop on the beach sells a lot of mid-century kitchen stuff, from jelly glasses to Streamline Moderne blenders. Guillermo is a year or two older than me, in good shape, small, bald, and dapper. “Nice place,” he says, as he joins us.
“We did a condo here last month,” says Hank.
I say, “I wasn’t called for that one.” Guillermo shakes his head—him neither.
“Mostly crap,” says Jeff. “The family took everything. All that was left was the bedroom set.”
“Alex said it was good to get us in with the building,” says the old guy, his voice frayed and shy. “And look, already they’ve called us for another.”
Sharon Lawler parks across the street. She waves, but doesn’t get out. Sharon, as we all know, runs hot and must blast her air-conditioning. She drives a wagon like mine but with purple-tinted windows to prevent fading of the vintage clothes she sells on eBay.
These are my fellow members of the species Magpie. We are smalltime antique dealers, which is to say we are collectors who sell to support our habit. We glean old things and send some on their journey up in price, which lets us make a buck and keep the treasures we cannot bear to part with. We’d be mere hoarders if we didn’t sell.
Me? I’m Ray Strout. Old, but not that old: sixty-three, retired cop, good pension, bad arteries, but I keep going. I’m into paper ephemera. Books, magazines, letters, photos, bills, matchbooks—anything like that interests me. There’s history in paper. The card for a boxing match, a punched train ticket, the menu of a dinner in honor of a later-indicted honcho—these fascinate me. I take apart vintage magazines for the ads, back them with cardboard, wrap them in plastic, and sell them on Lincoln Road on Sundays in the season. One old
House Beautiful
from the ’40s can yield two dozen sales at ten to fifteen bucks each.
Alex comes out and waves and hops in with the Kussrows, who drive around the left side of the building, past the bougainvillea-draped stucco wall that hides the service entrance. We parade behind. Back here the balconies look out on Biscayne Bay. I gaze up at the building: twelve stories of curves and niches to break up the wind and survive a hurricane. When the glass towers collapse, the Delphi will weather on.
The truck backs up against the loading dock, while the rest of us park in its shade. I get out one of the old suitcases I use for hauling off my finds. My stuff, thank God, is light. The old guy leaves the dog in the van with the windows rolled down. From the back he takes out the first of many much-used liquor-store cartons in which he’ll pack up smalls for Alex.
There’s not enough room in the freight elevator for all of us at once, so Alex takes me, Guillermo, and Sharon up first. Guillermo has his satchel full of flannel sheets—he likes to swaddle his gizmos lovingly. Sharon—her hair tinted the color of Cherry Coke and her chest draped with lots of amber beads—carries her capacious purse. Most clothes she’ll take right on their hangers.
Alex sends the freight elevator back down, and we follow him along the eighth floor hallway which smells of last night’s dinners—you’ll never catch me living in a condo—to Mrs. Dorsett’s place. Alex unlocks the door and we’re in 8-G.
“Nice,” says the Gizmo Man. He’s looking at the Grundig Majestic stereo hi-fi/radio in its Moderne cabinet.
But I echo, “Nice.” The living room is ’50s Louis Quinze, with pale blue sofa and chairs grouped around a coffee table. Alex shows us an elaborate silver lighter/cigarette dispenser: You lift the top and cigarettes rise like petals of a flower. Alex has marked it and the crystal ashtray with his red stickies: He’s into tobacciana. Sheers cover the French doors to the balcony so the bay is just a pale blue suggestion out beyond there. There’s a small kitchen to our left off the living room and, opening from both it and the living room, a dining area where the hutch flutters with Alex’s stickers. To the right there’s a hall, down which Alex leads us. He opens the bedroom door with a flourish.
Light slants through actual Venetian blinds, striping the pure Deco circle of the mirrored dressing table. The slipper chair. The ivory satin-padded curving headboard of the bed. Sherry breathes, “My God, the noir boudoir,” and so it is.
“Great, isn’t it?” says Alex.
The Kussrows come in behind him with the old guy peeking between their shoulders.
“A veritable time capsule,” says Alex. “Listen, there’s a lot in here for Sherry and Ray. You folks,” he says to the Kussrows, “do the big pieces in the living room first. Cash, I need you to pack up all the stuff from the hutch and then Hank and Jeff can get the dining room set. We’ll get the furniture from in here last.”
Sharon dives into the closet while I move around, scan ning for what I’ll take. Books fill the lower shelves of both bedside tables. In a nook between bedroom and bath there’s a lady’s bill-paying desk. I glance at a picture on top of it in an etched Lucite frame. Alex hasn’t marked it, so maybe the frame doesn’t interest him, but I’ll have to check. Lucite has value these days. I can always use frames and I like the picture. I assume it’s the dead lady in her youth: white skin, full lips, beautiful curve of nostril and brow, the eyes pale under curved eyelashes. She’s a babe. Her hair lifts from a side part and cascades. She’s vaguely familiar, like a minor movie star.
I get a queen-sized sheet from the linen closet and spread it out to protect the bedspread; the satin looks glamorous with the matching pillowcases propped against the headboard. I open my suitcase on top of the sheet and lay the picture down next to it. I check the bedside table drawers. Spot a great little notepad holder, embossed leather. Mechanical pencil. Several matchboxes from restaurants. A double set of playing cards for bridge, shagreen boxed. I’m making a mental tally of what I’ll offer Alex. I put things in my case but it stays open for his inspection. I toss a hankie over to the other side of the bed, for Sharon’s pile.
Guillermo comes in to get the bedside clock radio: ’60s tortoise plastic.
“Hubba hubba,” he says, looking at the picture. “Nice frame too.”
Sharon comes out of the closet with an armful of suits and asks, “That her?” and looks and says, “Oh.” She lays the suits down on her side of the bed. “Alex,” she calls, “what did you say her name was?”
“Dorsett,” he says, coming in. “Helena Dorsett.”
“The lovely Helena Dorsett,” says Sharon. “What do you know. I didn’t see an obit.”
I ask, “Was she an actress?”
“Fehmme fatale,” says Sharon, enjoying the effect. I notice that the oters have come to the door to see what’s going on.
“Well, tell us,” Alex says.
“She was a singer, for a while, I believe,” says Sharon, “but then she married. Twice. It was when the second husband got killed that she became notorious.”
“Both husbands?” I ask.
Sharon nods. “I was in the ninth grade, so it was 1962. They lived in the Gables. They were society people. Dorsett—husband number two—was trampled to death by a horse he owned, in the stables at Hialeah. And then it came out that her first was run down when he was crossing Collins, a few years before.”
“A theme,” I say. “Death by transportation.” They nod at me. They know I was a cop up north. Mine was a small dying New Jersey city, troubled, but not a patch on what Miami has to offer.
“Well, the first was just an accident, as far as I recall. But in the second husband’s case, they found he had been murdered. Not by her. She was nowhere near the stables.”
“Stable boy?” says Guillermo. “Jockey?”
“Another horse owner?” I say.
“No,” she says. “The vet.”
“Aah,” I say. “Did something to the horse?”
“It had to do with drugging the horse, yes. This was so long ago, I’m surprised I remember it at all. I know I read a lot of stories about her in the newspaper. They as good as implied that she caused it or it was done because of her.”
“Was she tried?” I ask.
“No. But she was smeared in all the papers. You know how it is when there’s a good-looking woman. It has to be her fault, right?”
Guillermo and I look at each other and laugh.
“You guys,” Sharon says.
“What about the vet?” I say.
“That was one reason there was so much coverage of the trial—everyone was waiting for him to implicate her, but he maintained it was an accident. I remember lots of reporting about her crowd, her house in the Gables, and then they went back into her past, because I saw this same picture and I think it’s from when she was younger and singing.”
“Well, everyone,” says Alex, “however much this adds to the price of anything, we still need to pack up.” Which is his polite way of getting us back to work. The others back out, and Guillermo takes the clock radio and goes.
I point at the picture. “You want it?” I ask Alex casually, meaning may I have it. I keep my tone cool, because if I express desire he’ll think it’s worth something and keep it.
Alex hesitates, but then says, “Hey, it’s yours.”
I wrap a towel from the linen closet around the picture and put it in my case.
Sharon says, “Her clothes, I’ll tell you, are first rate. All these St. John suits cost something, and they’re well cared for.” She lays more on her side of the bed. I cart my case over by the desk and seat myself to go through it. With her story in mind, I take a little extra care. She’s kept things tidy, and, as Sharon says, she liked quality. The desktop blotter holder is pale blue leather and a matching stationery case holds Crane’s paper for notes and thank-yous. In the top drawer I find various business cards, but no address book. I’m always careful not to take financial info the estate might need, but I don’t see any of it. In a folder labeled
Auto
there are expired insurance cards for a series of midsize sedans, and a prior driver’s license from the ’80s, but not the current one, if she was still driving.
Helena Dorsett, d.o.b. April 17, 1928
. A handsome older lady with gray hair—you can see the bone structure from the early portrait—and then my mind makes a shift and I recognize her. “Hey,” I say, surprised. “I met her.”
“Where?” calls Sharon. I hear her opening dresser drawers, her beads clicking. I lean back in the desk chair and I can see her bending over the bottom drawer. Her hair has fallen around her face and I try to picture what she looked like in ninth grade: a kid with a flip. In 1962 I was in the navy and skinny as a rail.
“On Lincoln Road a few times on Sunday mornings. She’d be well dressed, as you say, in a suit. And pleasant. She bought some crossword puzzle books I had, and then she’d ask for them each time she saw me. Said she liked to do them before she went to sleep. A well-preserved old lady, I’d have said. A femme fatale? You never know.”
