He had shocked the hell out of the Miami Tribune’s gossip columnist when he surfaced in her office looking for information on tonight’s goings-on up the coast. A classical dessert concert at the Greenaway had struck him as the most promising for Leonardo Pascarelli’s goddaughter and a flute-player-turned-publicist.
He had not explained his interest. Helen Samuel, a million-year-old chain-smoking Trib fixture, had winked at him and said, “You don’t have to explain, Tabak. I’ll find out on my own.”
She would, too, which was something Jeremiah refused to think about on the trip north, 95 clogged with tourists and locals enjoying the balmy winter Wednesday evening.
He had his windows rolled down. Orchestral music floated across the manicured lawn of a pink stucco mansion designed by society architect Addison Mizner in 1920 and now the posh Greenaway Club. The soft chords mingled with the sounds of crickets, ocean, and wind, creating a sense of luxury and relaxation that he resisted. This was not the Florida Jeremiah knew. His Florida was the Everglades outpost where he’d grown up with his widowed father, and it was the diverse, pulsing, sometimes violent, sometimes sublime streets of Miami. There were days when he wondered if south Florida should have been declared a national park a hundred years ago, its land left to the birds, the alligators, the panthers, the hurricanes. The bugs.
He had tried parking inside the tall wrought-iron fence. No dice. No ticket, no membership, no tuxedo, no proper press pass. Ugly truck. So, now he was parked outside the fence, enveloped with the smells of salt off the ocean, the palms and banyans and live oak, some particularly sweet, fragrant flower.
If not for Mollie Lavender, he’d be off stalking the criminal and the corrupt or at least home with a beer and a good ball game on the tube.
A dessert concert. Hell, he’d rather watch his turtle eat lettuce.
Which led him back to the main reason he’d told his twenty-year-old flute player he was unethical and not a man she should have trusted. He’d have told her anything she needed to believe in order to go back to her life of classical music and concerts. She couldn’t get sucked into his world of crime, corruption, despair, and violence. He knew it, even if she didn’t, at least not consciously, not then, at twenty, on her first ordinary spring break. He remembered watching her while she was asleep in her hotel bed and knowing he had only to ask her to stay and she would.
But he hadn’t, and she’d returned to Boston, where she belonged.
It hadn’t been an amicable parting. He’d let her believe he had deliberately used her to get his first front-page story. It was on drug use and drug dealing among college students on spring break, and it had helped launch his career as an investigative reporter. He had fallen for Mollie accidentally, unintentionally, without motive, while covering the story, not as a way into it. Acting on a tip about where the dealers were selling their stuff, he’d spread his blanket next to hers. At first he hadn’t realized she was a college student. Her poise, her intelligence, her sense of humor, and her self-awareness distinguished her from the loud, fun-loving students who’d flocked to the beaches. Lunch led to dinner, and next thing, they were in bed together.
He’d told her he was a reporter, although not any details of the story he was working on. By its conclusion, he’d realized that the drug use and dealing had occurred right in front of her, and she’d been oblivious, not because she was naive, but because she was so intensely focused. Music was her life. Nothing else could get in. He had, for that week. She’d responded hungrily, gobbling up everything she could about him, the passion of sudden romance, the excitement and energy of everything they’d been together for those seven memorable days. But when they ended and she had to go back to her conservatory in Boston, Jeremiah felt an obligation to make sure she did.
Now she’d moved to south Florida, and Croc thought she was a jewel thief.
“It’s a strange world,” Jeremiah muttered, and climbed out of his truck, restless and not at ease with what he was doing.
He stood on the smooth, unpocked sidewalk, debating his next move. Knee-high impatiens in a half-dozen colors and squat, well-trimmed palms softened the imposing austerity of the iron fence. Inside the fence, strategically placed ground lights illuminated the sprawling lawn with its impeccable landscaping, and royal palms lined the long driveway to the main entrance. He supposed he could find a way inside if he put his mind to it. He received invitations and complimentary tickets to benefits, parties, and every manner of south Florida do on a regular basis. Unless it was a command appearance, he tossed them. He didn’t like parties. He didn’t like small talk. He didn’t like the encroachment of celebrity status onto his role as a serious journalist.