“I thought they were dissolved.”
“The club was dissolved. They got evicted from their building and most of them lost their cycles. Three of the top guys went to jail, and I think they’re still there. But the rank and file took off the black leather jackets and put the swastika armbands in the back of their bureau drawers and looked for a new kind of action. You’d be amazed what a difference it makes when you go barefoot instead of wearing stomping boots. While I was hanging around Jennings Park I’m pretty sure I saw a couple of familiar faces. They had designs painted on their cheeks with food coloring and they were handing out flowers. But don’t believe it.”
“Yeah,” Shayne said impatiently.
“Just a small piece of information. If you remember the Angels, they never believed in nonviolence.” He took his shot of whiskey in a gulp. “Call me if you want anything.”
The Jennings Park area of Southwest Miami is a district of cheap luncheonettes and rundown rooming houses. The park itself is a dusty square of broken asphalt, dotted with broken benches. Until the hippies moved in, it was used mainly by old men from nearby rooming houses. Now it was filled with bearded boys and unkempt girls, a few wearing sandals but most barefoot. From behind, and occasionally even from in front, it was hard to tell the males from the females. There were Indian headdresses and Hindu robes.
By the end of the afternoon everybody appeared to be high. One of the contentions in Rourke’s Daily News series was that there was far less marijuana and acid consumed in Jennings Park and the surrounding blocks than the participants wanted people to think. They had quickly become a tourist attraction. By early dusk the sidewalks around the park were jammed with middle-aged people in colorful sports attire, slung with expensive cameras. There was always a heavy concentration of cops.
Shayne circulated, looking at beards. His sleeves were rolled up and he was carrying his jacket over his arm. Whenever someone asked him for money he supplied some, and waited until the conversation was well under way before he brought out his photographs. The usual response was a smile and a sad shake of the head. Whenever he caught a glint of recognition he sauntered on, turning after a moment to watch the person he had been talking to and see what he did.
It was nearly dark. He was in a luncheonette, eating an undercooked and overseasoned burger when a barefoot girl with straight hair, in jeans, short-sleeved jersey and sunglasses, came in from the street and headed straight at him.
“You’re going to buy me a burger,” she said flatly.
“It’s not very good,” Shayne said. “Why not finish mine?”
She gave him a shocked look before deciding that the correct thing would be to accept.
“How about the coffee?” Shayne went on, grinning slightly. “I only had a couple of sips.”
She hesitated, then added sugar and began to drink it, standing up at the counter. Her only concession to the middle-class standards she was running away from was to turn the cup and drink with her left hand, from the opposite rim. Shayne paid the check and they left together.
“You people,” she said. Now that she was outside in the sun, she took off her shades and peered up at him from beneath an untidy fringe of brown hair. “Why don’t you stay in your own part of town? Are we harming anybody?”
“I don’t know. Are you?”
“No! All we want to do is live in our own way. What’s wrong with that? We don’t see the point in surrounding ourselves with vacuum cleaners and color television sets and a new model car every year-”
She was a small girl, coming up only to Shayne’s shoulder, and in her bare feet she seemed even smaller. She threatened him with her pointed breasts; she was one Jennings Park hippy who was obviously not a boy. Shayne thought she was probably a new arrival. She had the fervor of a recent convert. The others Shayne had talked to had thought it was cooler to ignore him. Loving parents had sent her to an orthodontist, and her teeth were good. Her eyes were warm and emotional.
“I don’t know why I bother,” she said. “You don’t care about our motivation. All you want to do is stand there in your white Anglo-Saxon Protestant superiority, and stare at the animals. The only thing I don’t understand is where’s your Polaroid color camera?”
Shayne grinned at her and took out his photographs. “Have you seen this guy around?”
She still hadn’t replaced her sunglasses, and as she glanced at the pictures Shayne caught the flicker. She handed them back carefully.
“Do I look like the type of person who would cooperate with the enemy?”
“What enemy?”
“You cops are the armed defenders of private property and the status quo, and I hope none of my friends saw me eating that burger. You were right,” she added, putting on the glasses, “it was lousy. The same goes for the coffee.”
She turned abruptly and walked toward the park. Shayne watched her, still grinning, then lost interest abruptly and sauntered away in the opposite direction, his jacket over his shoulder. He entered the park at the opposite end. He stopped to watch a chess game being played by two old men. After a few minutes, when nothing happened, he moved on to listen to a dirge being chanted by a group in dirty gray robes. Meanwhile, he was careful not to lose track of the girl. She spoke to several people in various parts of the park, and they looked at the big red-headed detective, a conspicuous figure in that gathering.
A boy self-consciously offered him a flower. Shayne took it and ran the stem into the buttonhole of his jacket, and walked on. The girl moved around a group of dancers, then turned abruptly, crossed the street and started into Coconut Terrace, which dead-ended two blocks from the park.
Rourke had reported several hippy addresses in the second block. At the next corner she looked back to be sure no one was following, and crossed.
Shayne returned to the chess game and waited till one of the old men finally made a move. Then he looked at his watch and went back to his Buick. As he drove off, he tilted the rear-view mirror and picked up two long-haired youths on the sidewalk, watching him go. He made two right-angle turns in quick succession, parked again, and returned by another route.
The hippy houses on Coconut Terrace were easily identified. They were badly rundown, with blistering paint and broken windows. Shayne went into the first and began trying doors. Few were locked. At this hour most of the occupants were out in the park. In one a boy and girl were in bed together. The girl giggled and asked Shayne to come in. The boy growled, “Outside.”
Henry De Rham was in the next room. He looked around as the door opened. He had shaved off his sideburns, but otherwise he had left his beard alone. It wasn’t as well cared for as it had been in the photographs, but it covered his face in the same way. His hair was very fair, his eyebrows almost colorless. Everything was relaxed about him except his eyes, which were small and hard and went with his old environment.
The girl who had accosted Shayne in the luncheonette was sitting across from him at an unpainted table. There was a second woman on a mattress on the floor. She was breast-feeding a baby and didn’t look up. The girl spat an obscenity at Shayne.
“Never mind,” De Rham said quietly in a high nasal voice. “It’s O.K., H. Who cares, really?”
She pushed back her chair. “I think I’ll step out for a minute.”
“Sit down,” De Rham said. “The trouble with clobbering one cop, he comes back an hour later with fifty cops. So why don’t we all relax? The only thing I’ve done lately is leave my wife. Unless I broke a speed limit getting away I haven’t committed any crimes. Who are you?” he said to Shayne.
“Michael Shayne.” There were only two chairs, both of which were occupied, so he perched on the corner of the table and felt for a cigarette. “Do you want to talk about the money in front of witnesses?”