You're right,' she yelled-over the galloping bass and ear-shredding horns coming out of the speakers. 'You do dance like a gringo.'
Then the music slowed as the DJ spun a Spanish-language ballad which reminded him of Julio Iglesias, like every Latin crooner did. Sandra draped her arms around him and pulled him into her and they began to dance together, close, body to body, eyes locked. He felt the heat of her on his skin as they moved her gracefully, him swaying in lugubrious time.
She held him by the neck and stroked his nape and smiled.
I le held her loosely by the waist, telling his hands to keep off her ass. It would have been the perfect moment for a kiss, but as he started to lean towards her the DJ turned up I he beat and another saldisco classic announced itself with ;i shriek of horns and gate-crashed their moment like a drunken relative desperate for attention.
3°9 You wanna get out of here?' she offered.
'Please,' he said.
Sandra lived in a two-bedroom condo in the pink and blue San Roman building on South West 9th Street. It was the tidiest place Max had ever been in. She paid a cleaner to keep it that way.
They went into her living room, which was painted and carpeted in beige and smelled faindy of incense and peppermint.
The right-hand wall was lined with books; adases and encyclopedias on the top shelf, travel guides, biographies and history books on the next two down, and the rest was given over to fiction. On the other walls were a large map of Cuba and a painting of two women and some kind of upside-down fish, which Max thought so amateurish he assumed it was something she'd done in tenth grade art class.
Sandra went out to the kitchen to make coffee and told him to put on some music.
Max flicked through her albums. There was a lot of Latin music, none of which he knew, and some classical stuff, which he didn't know either, but she had Diana Ross's Chic-produced Diana, plus Bad Girls, Innervisions, Songs in the Key of Life, Let's Get It On, some Bill Withers and Grover Washington records, Barry White's Greatest Hits . . .
She came back in, carrying two white mugs on a tray.
She'd changed into faded jeans and a baggy white T-shirt, which made her skin seem a shade darker.
'Probably not your kind of music, huh?' she said, setting the tray down on a table opposite the couch.
'What do you think I'm into?'
'Gringo music: Springsteen, Zeppelin, the Stones stuff like that?'
'Nah. And don't ever talk to me about Brucey baby. My partner's in love with him, plays that shit all the time.
Drives me nuts. You got any Miles? Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain?
'I forgot. Your jazz genes. No, sorry, I don't. Do you think I should?'
'Everyone who likes music should have at least one Miles Davis album in their collection. Better still, ten,' Max said. 'And, seem' as you're into Grover, you should be lookin' into John Coltrane too. People say Charlie Parker was the corner stone of jazz, but nearly everyone who's ever picked up a sax from '65 onwards sounds more like Trane.'
He carried on looking. He found just what he wanted at the end Al Green's Greatest Hits.
'This OK?' He held up the sleeve.
'The Reverend Al? Sure.'
Max went over and sat next to her on the sofa as 'Let's Stay Together' kicked in. They looked at each other for a moment and there was silence between them, not the kind of uncomfortable, embarrassing void that opens up between people who've run out of ways to hide the fact that they have nothing to say, but a natural pause in dialogue.
Max looked at the painting behind her.
'You do that at school?'
'I wish,' she said, turning around. 'It's El Balcon The lialcony by Amelia Pelaez. She was an avant garde Cuban artist. She was famous in her homeland for murals.'
'Sorry,' Max said, 'I don't know too much about art.'
'It's all right. At least you don't pretend to.'
Max heard a hint of recrimination in her voice and guessed then she'd been lied to by someone close to her, maybe a boyfriend who'd cheated on her or had led her on pretending 10 be something he wasn't in other words, by someone a little like him.
Although they were sitting real close on her couch in the (lead of night, there was an element of the forbidding about
ii her. He decided to hold back, be the passenger, take everything at her pace. He sensed that was the way she wanted things and that was fine by him.
'Do you remember all the cases you worked?' Sandra asked, putting down her cup on the table. Ś 'Sure.' Max nodded.
'Raffaela Smalls?'
ŚYeah.' He sighed. 'That poor poor kid.'
It had been in 1975. A black, twelve-year-old girl, fished out of the Miami River, naked, arms and feet bound, a bag over her head. She'd been raped and then hung.
'Don't tell me you looked all my cases up too? Same way you did my boxin'.'
'Sort of. I remember when it happened,' she said. 'I remembered your name coming up and thinking you were black on account of it.'
'It's a common misconception,' Max said.
'You never gave up on that case, did you?'
'Took two and a half years, yeah.'
'That's unusual in this city, in this state, a white cop being that dedicated to solving a black kid's murder.'
'I was just doin' my job. Me and Joe got handed the case.
Me and Joe solved it. There's criminals, there's crime, and we're cops. We do what we do. That's all there was to it.'
'The family said how nice you were to them, how you promised to catch the guy.'
'They were decent people who'd had a child taken away.
Ain't no black and white in that, Sandra. Just right and wrong. They deserved justice, and they got it.'
'Her uncle did it.'
'Piece of shit called Levi Simmons.'
'He claimed you and your partner roughed him up bad.'
'He also claimed he didn't do it.'
'He looked pretty beat up in his mugshots.'
Max didn't say anything.
312 'Did you rough him up?'
'He tried to make a move,' Max lied. 'We stopped him.'
'Innocent till proven guilty,' Sandra said.
'He was makin' a move,' Max insisted, looking her right in the eye, just as he had Simmons' defence lawyer in court when he'd thrown up the same accusation. 'We did what we had to do in the circumstances.' Max needed a break from examining his career history. 'Can I go and smoke on your balcony?'
'Be my guest.'
She came outside with him. The air was still warm, and a limpid breeze shook the leaves of nearby trees. She didn't have much of a view - more apartment buildings, mostly dark, directly opposite - and then Calle Ocho behind, almost deserted. It was still way quieter than Ocean Drive, where no one ever seemed to sleep if there was an argument to be had or a fight to be fought.