"What else?"
Cindy followed me into my office. I opened the vertical blinds and stared at Biscayne Bay three hundred feet below. Plump gray thunderheads hung motionless over Miami Beach. In fifteen knots of easterly, the bay crinkles like aluminum foil. Today, not a ripple.
"I have the poop on Compu-Mate," she said with a sly smile. She handed me a folder containing some newspaper clippings and a printout from the secretary of state. "But boss, if you're that horny, I could fix you up."
"What?"
"Rather than get hooked up with some loser…"
"What're you talking about?"
"My girlfriend, Dottie the Disco Queen. She likes big guys who aren't quite with it."
"What about her herpes?"
"No problema. In remission."
"Maybe another time," I said. "Anything else?"
"Mr. Foot-in-the-Mouth called."
"Symington? He hasn't replaced me?"
"No such luck." She handed me a bunch of newspaper stories on computer paper. "A messenger delivered these a few minutes ago."
"I'm worried about Carl Hutchinson, all that invective in his column," Symington Foote said when I returned his call.
"You're just a little gun-shy right now," I told the publisher, reassurance coating my voice like honey.
"But these names he's calling Commissioner Goldberg. She's very popular with the voters. And voters are jurors."
He was right about that. Maria Teresa Gonzalez-Goldberg-born in Cuba, schooled in a convent, married to a Jewish cop, with an adopted black child-was a formidable politician. She had swept into office two years earlier with eighty-six percent of the vote. She then redecorated her office in teak, chrome, leather, and glass to the tune of one-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollars of taxpayers' money. At a time the county couldn't afford to repair backed-up toilets in public housing projects.
"Marie Antoinette," Foote was saying. "He called her Marie Antoinette!"
"Fair comment," I advised.
"Said she ought to redecorate a cell at Marianna Institution for Women."
"Rhetorical hyperbole," I counseled confidently.
"Said the 'crossover candidate' became the 'carnivorous commissioner, feeding on the flesh of the poor.'"
"A bit grisly," I admitted, "but she's a public official."
"Seems I heard that before," Foote said.
I spent the rest of the morning on the newspaper's work. I advised the business manager to accept the advertisement from the airport hotel that promised "freedom fighter" discounts to smugglers aiding the Nicaraguan contras. I told the photo editor that the picture of the model wearing a bra with a built-in holster for a Beretta was not an invasion of privacy and accurately portrayed Florida's new concealed-weapons law. I told the city editor to ignore complaints that property values would be hurt by the local map showing Dade County murders by zip code. Finally, I told the food editor that the grilled alligator recipe omitted cayenne pepper, and then I had lunch.
CHAPTER 6
I wanted to get to Compu-Mate before the afternoon storms. In the summer, the rain begins at 3:17 p.m. or thereabouts, every day. For an hour or so, gully washers and palmetto pounders flood the streets. Drops form inside the canvas top of my old convertible, then plop one by one onto my head.
I aimed north on Okeechobee Road, storm clouds gathering, traffic crawling. Our highways have not caught up with our growth and never will. We built a high-speed rail system too late and too small. We are a great urban sprawl, Miami-Lauderdale-Palm Beach, four million people squeezed between the ocean and the Everglades. We are low on water and electricity, but high on asphalt and cement. Our public officials are beholden to predatory developers who ply them with greenbacks and concoct their own vocabulary.
Creeping overpopulation is "growth."
Building spindly condos on Indian burial grounds is "progress."
Environmentalists are "doomsayers."
So we bulldoze trees, fill swamps, drain the aquifer, and then we build on every square inch, erecting a concrete landscape of fast-food palaces, serve-yourself gas stations, and tawdry shopping centers. Their signs beckon us from the blazing pavement. Pizza parlors, video rentals, gun shops, and a thousand other fringe businesses hoping to hang on for another month's rent.
Compu-Mate was in a renovated warehouse in Hialeah, a city of ticky-tack duplexes and stucco houses with plaster statues of the Virgin Mary planted in front lawns. In the last thirty years, Hialeah has been transformed from a cracker town of Panhandle and Alabama immigrants to a new home for Cuban refugees. Not long ago, a Florida governor named Martinez was forced to suspend an indicted Hialeah mayor named Martinez and replace him with a city councilman named Martinez. None of the men was related. Hispanics now are the majority population group in the cities of Miami and Hialeah and are approaching fifty percent countywide. Within the community, there are old exilados, who dream of returning to a Cuba Libre, Cubanzo rednecks, who drive pickup trucks festooned with American and Cuban flags, and Yubans, Yuppie Cuban professionals downtown. They are, in fact, like every other ethnic group, a diverse lot that has added considerably to the community.
I parked next to an outdoor cafe where men with leathery skin smoked cigars and drank espresso from tiny plastic cups. Next door, three teenagers were making a mess of a transmission, pulled out of a twenty-year-old Chevy propped onto concrete blocks.
I already knew a lot about Compu-Mate. I knew it was the latest way to profit from people's fears of loneliness. Like-minded consenting adults just a whir and buzz away, courtesy of your personal computer. Talk sweet, talk dirty, titillate your partner, and tickle your fancy until you get a phone number and address. Then cross your fingers, take a deep breath, and wait for the truth. The guy who called himself a "Paul Newman look-alike" has the gray hair, all right, but the blue eyes are milky, a paunch hangs over his belt, and he's three months behind on the alimony. "Buxom blonde looking for fun" means overweight and bleached, a manic-depressive.
I had some background on Max and Roberta Blinderman, president and secretary of Compu-Mate, Inc., a Florida for-profit corporation. Previously, they operated a video dating service that went belly up, and before that, a modeling studio that left a trail of unpaid bills and unfinished portfolios. As far as Cindy's research showed, Roberta had no criminal record. Max had been a fair-to-middling jockey twenty years ago, once nearly winning the Flamingo Stakes at Hialeah before getting suspended in a horse-doping scheme. Lately he had pleaded guilty to bouncing some checks, was put on probation, and made restitution. Two other penny-ante cases: a mail-fraud case was nolle-prossed, and a buying-receiving charge was dropped when the state couldn't prove the jewelry was stolen. By local standards, he was clean enough to run for mayor.
The office was no-frills, a Formica counter up front, a green metal desk in back. Next to the desk was a decent-sized, freestanding computer that was probably leased month to month. No waiting room, no sofa, no friendly green plants. A man sat at the desk staring into a video display terminal. A woman stood at the counter licking stamps and pasting them onto envelopes-monthly bills to the customers, I figured.
"I'd like to sign up," I told the woman behind the counter.
"This ain't the army," she said, putting down her envelopes and shoving a form in front of my face.
She was six feet tall and seemed to like it. Her dark eyes were spaced wide and the lashes were long, black as sin, and well tended. The complexion, which had that cocoa-butter, coppery-tanned look with a healthy dose of moisturizers, creams, powders, and blushes, was smoothly sanguine. The black hair was layered and purposely messed, a wild look. Her nose was thin and straight and so perfect it might have cost five grand at a clinic in Bal Harbour. Her body was long and lean with some muscle development in the shoulders and small breasts that were uncaged under a white cotton halter top. The top of a denim skirt was visible below her flat, browned tummy, but her legs were hidden behind the counter.