Men in Miami Hotels Read Online Free PDF Page A

almighty,” in a crumpled way.
    Jackie has started for the stairs at the other end of the gallery, but Oscar stops him. “You know about this?”
    “I hardly know my own name,” Jackie says.
    “What y’all doing over here?” Bates says.
    “Resting up,” says Ella.
    They want to know the whyfors and hows of the killing, the police do, and they aren’t the only ones, it’s a mystery. Cot puts his head on the table, closes his eyes and says no to everything. No I don’t know where he went, no on what he was up to, no on his real name, on his height and weight, on his capacity for love, his great human beauty, no on the shriveling and wasting under way in us all. As children they’d walked around town holding hands; it caused a half scandal among the conchs. Later CJ was captain of the football team, then he began to wear dresses in public. He was a good singer, a performer now of old songs. Cot can see his face, slanted a little sideways, the half-rubbed-out pockmarks on his cheeks like tiny excisions, his blueblack eyes taking everything in. He wipes his cheeks with both hands though there are no tears. Nobody, it appears, knows anything.
    Oscar says Connie was found on the beach near the White Street pier.
    “They’d covered him up with sea grass,” Bates says. “That senator’s homeless daughter spotted him and called us.”
    “Buried?” Jackie says. He gives a shake, writhes in his skin and settles back down. “First Arthur, now Connie.”
    “Arthur?” Oscar says.
    “Natural causes,” Ella says. Dead of a jellyfish sting (or the heart attack that followed), they’d all attended his funeral in the Jewish section of the municipal cemetery.
    The cops look around the place, poking into closets and drawers. They wear white plastic gloves and booties on their feet and they don’t want Cot and the others to go back into the house. Cot knows where he put the emeralds, but he has to wait. Then the cops notice the trapdoor in the ceiling and Cot leads the way up there for Oscar and they look around the attic room that is like the room of a recluse who forgot to move anything in but dust. Through the floorboards they can hear Ella and the other cop talking in CJ’s bedroom. She’s just talking, just yammering. Even at a distance and through flooring it wears him out quick, not for the first time. Sometimes he wants to wring her like a rag. In his city life he walks right by people like her, doesn’t even look at them, or maybe he does, maybe he starts thinking how you can cut loose from the ones you love—how easy it is to do really—and then feel the frayed ends of the rope dangling and flicking and chafing for the rest of your life. Maybe, just catching a glimpse of some neighborhood shouter, he’ll start thinking about her, or about his daddy in Cuba and about all the absent years and who did what to whom and how life just piles on, and how the past is like a bamboo thicket you quit cutting back and just walk around to get to where you’re going— as best you can , he’d say to Solly or Goldberg or Chips or Butler, or to any of them up in Miami, to Spane, to Albertson if he asked, but Big A never does.
    A fter the cops leave Cot goes into the small bedroom where Connie has an upright piano and a bookcase and an armchair beside a bright blue Iranian rug. He liked to sit in the chair and gaze at the rug that he said was his confidential tide pool. Behind the bookcase is a footboard that comes out. The stones aren’t there. His blood races, he wobbles, catches himself. He sees the little island white and green in a pale blue ocean. Sunshine like a spanking. Now another kind of light’s shining on him, like moonlight through a bullet-riddled door. I’m going to get it, he thinks, meaning more than one thing, two things at least, maybe three.
    He gets up and bicycles over to Marcella’s house and sits on her back steps until she comes out. She brings him a cup of coffee. She’s wearing a pale green