Suitable for Framing Read online

  Condescending at first, they humored her. Eventually patience wore thin, they got tough, played hardball, and threatened to have her house condemned. She didn’t cave; she simply dug in, so they redoubled their efforts. They sweetened the pot, offering $1 million and the lot of her choice, to which they would move her cottage at their expense. She took a broomstick to the lawyer who brought the offer.

  Eventually they came to realize that she was not only serious but as tough as the indestructible Dade County pine her father had used to construct the only home she had known. Bleeding cash, their project stalled. They redesigned the north end of the complex around her property, with the parking garage entrance next to the porch where she loved to sit in the evening, sipping iced tea. She continued to live there, but instead of bay breezes, a steady stream of traffic now flows by her door and the scent of star jasmine has been replaced by exhaust fumes.

  Howie stood on the front porch, speaking through the screen to Margaret Mayberry. She opened the door and handed him a small package. Eagerly he took it, bounded down the stairs, and trotted into the parking garage without a look back. My antenna rose. What was this streetwise little jitterbug from Overtown up to with this octogenarian Miami pioneer? Was he ripping her off? Shaking her down? Intimidating her? I swung the T-Bird into a U-turn and trailed him into the garage. The computerized time clock spit out a cardboard ticket and the mechanical arm lifted. The center’s north side was nearly deserted at that hour, and he was easy to spot once my eyes grew accustomed to the light.

  He had stepped onto an elevator. I parked nearby, punched the button, and the twin elevator promptly arrived. At the lower mall level I leaned out, didn’t see him, and continued on to the upper mall. It wasn’t even Halloween yet, but many stores were already decorated for Christmas. As the door slid open, I glimpsed him stepping into a stairwell, still carrying the package. I called out his name too late.

  I hurried across the mall, pushed the door open, and heard his footsteps on the stairs above. I closed the heavy door behind me, slipped off my shoes, and padded up the stairs after him. He quickly outdistanced me, ascending flight after flight Eventually another door creaked open, then clanged shut. I got there breathing hard. The door was marked NO EXIT. A crumpled fold of cardboard kept it from locking. I hesitated for a moment then cracked it open. Night sky glowed above, scattered stars awash in moonlight. This was the roof of the mall-garage-hotel complex. The top tier of the eight-story parking garage was to the south, empty and vacant. The mall is never that full. Downtown did not rebound the way the developers had hoped. The hotel draws mostly conventions, some South American tourists, and local business meetings and banquets.

  I opened the door wider. No one in sight. I stepped out. The air was cool and the surroundings quiet a silent world above the chaos and crowds below. Lights to the north seemed to be the hotel laundry, which opened out onto the roof. The view was superb. The Julia Tuttle Causeway, a beaded string of glittering lights, stretched across Biscayne Bay to the east. The blue-and-white Bacardi building stood sentinel at the northwest. To the immediate southeast lay my home away from home, the Miami News building. I could see the lights of the fifth-floor newsroom I had just left. Downtown, to the southwest, the Centrust Tower stood bathed in brilliance, gleaming against the night sky. The complex beneath my feet stretched for an entire block and its vast roof seemed to be a connected labyrinth of small stairwells, all sorts of structures, and vents, sheds, and rooms for maintenance of air conditioners and utilities. Most were obviously no longer used, lots of little staircases to nowhere. Bordering this city block in the sky was an eleven-foot fence. The top three feet of wire angled inward. This fence was not designed to keep intruders out; it had been constructed to deter jumpers, people intent on suicide leaps. How many ways can people be protected against themselves? I wondered. Where had Howie gone? I slipped my shoes back on and walked across the roof to a metal door, which I opened. The narrow staircase inside led to a huge, unused, and rusty exhaust fan. I backed out and the door thudded closed behind me. Glancing about, I began to feel uncomfortable at being alone. But I wasn’t, was I? Howie had to be here somewhere.

  A small structure stood in what appeared to be a seldom-used rooftop corner. It had apparently housed an air-conditioning system at one time. The door stood slightly ajar. For a split second I thought I glimpsed a light. Perhaps it was metal reflecting light from the outside. The interior was in total darkness as I pulled open the heavy door and leaned in for a better look.

  An earsplitting cry pierced the dark, and a blade flashed as a shadowy figure lunged toward me.

  “Howie!” I cried out, stumbling backward, heart pounding. Off balance, I fell, sprawling flat on my bottom as my attacker loomed over me.

  Legs apart, he stood poised like a warrior, a spear grasped in his right hand. Moonlight glistened off the blade.

  “Who … Britt? Is that you? What are you doing here?”

  “Howie?” I gasped, heart palpitating. “You scared the hell out of me! What is that thing?”

  His left hand reached out and helped me to my feet. No longer menacing, he looked sheepish and embarrassed. Though my knees were shaky, I sensed that I had scared him as much as he had scared me.

  “Whatcha doing here? Man.” He shook his head. “I don’t believe this, man. I coulda hurt you.”

  He leaned the weapon against the wall.

  “What is that thing?”

  “My protection,” he mumbled, trying to regain his usual attitude. The weapon was a stick about three and a half feet long with a wicked-looking knife taped and wired to the tip. The makeshift spear appeared to be fashioned from a broom handle. I wondered if it was the same one Margaret Mayberry had used on the developers’ lawyer.

  “How the hell you get up here? Whatcha doing here anyway?”

  “Looking for you,” I snapped, brushing off my skirt. “You promised to stay in touch, remember? But you never called, you never wrote.”

  “You followed me,” he said accusingly.

  “You got it Now what are you doing up here?”

  He gazed past me at the purple haze hovering over the neon-lit city. “This is my pad, man. This is where I stay.”

  “You live here?”

  “What’s wrong with that?” he said arrogantly, arms crossed, legs apart. His voice thinned. “You ain’t gonna tell anybody, are you?”

  “I guess I’ve got no reason to, but how do you … how can you…?” At a loss for words, I gestured at the small cubicle behind him.

  “Come on in. I’ll show you.”

  He acted house-proud. As I followed him inside, he snatched up something he didn’t want me to see and shoved it behind a small shelf. An army-surplus sleeping bag lined one wall of the cell-size cubicle. An electrical outlet accommodated a small lamp and a hot plate. A small stock of supplies sat on a makeshift shelf. There was a plastic water jug, instant coffee, and crackers. T-shirts, sweatshirts, and jeans were neatly folded. Socks rolled into little bundles. A milk crate to sit on. A stack of paperbacks, mostly science fiction, and a battered well-used American Heritage Dictionary.

  “Not bad,” I said. “My first apartment was an efficiency.”

  “The price is right.”

  “How long have you been up here?”

  He paused. “’Bout a year and a half. Came here when I was fourteen.”

  “That long! Oh, Howie. You mean you haven’t been going to school? It must get hot as hell up here.”

  “It ain’t too bad. ’Fore that I stayed in a car for a while and in an empty house. Want some coffee?”

  “Sure.” I sat on the milk crate and watched. He filled a small metal pan with water from the jug and set it on the hot plate.

  “It ain’t bad at all.” He measured instant coffee into two plastic mugs. “It’s not the heat, it’s the humility. That door face the bay. When I prop it open there’s always enough breeze to make sleeping tolerable.” He open
ed a jar crammed with paper packets of sugar and powdered cream, probably from the food court in the mall. “Sometimes storms come barreling across the bay shooting big bolts of lightning. Sound like a war in outer space. The rain sprays in on my bedroll. I thought it would be a bitch up here when it was hot, but ain’t nothing. Winter be something else. When I first moved up here it got real cold one night, bad-ass cold. Down to the thirties. Shoulda seen me shivering and shaking up against that wall.”

  “You could freeze up here.” The indignation in my voice reminded me of my mother.

  “Freeze to death in Miami?” He lifted a skeptical eyebrow.

  “Not literally, but we do have one of the highest death rates from hypothermia in the United States. That’s when your body temperature drops enough to kill you.” The burner in the hot plate glowed red in the semidarkness. He had had to unplug the lamp to use it. “Up north, people know enough to seek shelter when it’s cold. But in Florida, homeless people stay out on nights when the temperature drops to the thirties or forties. People can easily die of hypothermia, especially if they’re in poor physical condition.”

  He did not seem alarmed.

  “You like the pink ones, the blue ones, or the real sugar?” He sifted through paper packets, the perfect host.

  “The real stuff,” I said. “I think those others are bad for you.”

  While he was busy with the coffee, I snaked my hand behind the shelf to see what he had stashed there. His secret was odd-shaped and plastic: a battered replica of the U.S.S. Enterprise from the original Star Trek movie. One of the two warp nacelles was broken off.

  I slipped it back into place and focused on the boxy bluish package taken from the old woman. “I saw you with Margaret Mayberry,” I said casually.

  He turned, a steaming cup in his hand.

  “You’re not running some scam on her, are you?”

  “Gimme a little credit.” He shook his head, offended at my foolishness. “No way. She a stand-up old lady. All alone. Like, I help her out sometimes, clean around her yard, fix anything she need around her house. Make sure nobody mess with her. She’s my cover. I used to get hassled by security down in the mall sometime. Now the man stop me, ask what I’m doing here all the time, I say I work for Miss Mayberry. Everybody know her.”

  Tenderly, he placed the bluish box between us, his face eager. Up close, I saw what it was: Tupperware.

  “I don’t ’cept no money from her, but sometimes…” He opened the box with a greedy flourish of anticipation. Half a dozen homemade brownies nestled on napkins inside.

  He passed me one, along with a mug of coffee.

  “Mmmmm.” I savored the first bite.

  “You should try her banana bread,” he said, mouth full. “That’s real bad.”

  It felt cozy up here atop Miami in the evening breeze with steaming coffee and rich chocolate treats. Almost like camping out.

  “What is it with that thing you almost impaled me on?” I said.

  “As you can see”—he gestured with a half-eaten brownie—“I’m not real big. One night some dude grabbed me by my shirt collar, took me by the throat, and pulled a blade on me.” He paused and sighed. “No way to win a knife fight,” he said softly. “Too damn close. It don’t pay. Only place anybody win a knife fight is in a Hollywood movie. Make-believe. So I put together my protection. You do whatcha gotta do.”

  “You’d be better off living with your own folks. What about your mom?”

  “She don’t worry about nothing ’cept where to score ’nother hit of crack. I ain’t seen her in six months.”

  I sighed. “What about your grandparents?”

  “The big dirt sleep. They dead, man.”

  “Your father?”

  “Dead too.” He tossed it out casually, almost too casually. “Got blowed away by a shotgun. I was six years old, sitting on my front steps. Seen the whole thing. Cut right in half. DOA.”

  “Robbery?”

  He shook his head. “They was arguing over drugs.”

  “My dad got shot too.”

  His head came up. “No sh.…”

  I licked the chocolate off my lips. “Yeah, I was three years old. I didn’t see it like you did. He was Cuban, a freedom fighter. Went down there on a mission and got caught. Castro had him executed by a firing squad.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “She’s still pissed off at him for getting killed—and at me too, because I remind her of him. We have a lot in common, Howie.” I glanced at his library. “I love reading too.”

  “You got a good job?” he said curiously, more a question than a statement.

  I nodded. “You still taking cars?”

  He stirred restlessly and looked uncomfortable. “Sometimes I need the bread, but I don’t get greedy. If I need transportation I can borrow a car from here”—his head angled toward the parking garage—“but then I just leave it parked somewhere, I don’t sell it. Sometimes”—he grinned wickedly—“I take one, bring it back, park it on a different level.”

  “I hate parking garages,” I said, thinking of all those times I was sure my car had been stolen, then found it, parked elsewhere. Maybe I wasn’t forgetful after all; maybe it had been stolen.

  “I don’t do too much round here, you know,” he said solemnly, “’cause I live here. Don’t wanna make trouble where you live.”

  “Yeah, the mob has a phrase for it.” He offered another brownie. Tempted, I declined. “You’re so skinny,” I said.

  “You got nothing to worry about.” I took his sidelong glance as a compliment.

  “So where do you get them if you don’t take ’em from here?” I asked, worrying vaguely about the News parking lot just a block and a half away.

  He shrugged. “The church and the hotels across the street. Pick a set of keys off the valet board over there.” He shrugged. “Or go up the boulevard to one of those gas stations by Bay Point.”

  The publisher of the News lives in Bay Point, an affluent, walled-in waterfront community. Private security officers man a guardhouse and screen visitors. Lawns are green and homes lavish, with flower beds and landscaping and cookie-baking mommies who attend garden club meetings. It is Leave It to Beaver land, with children at play on safe, shady streets, while outside the walls, in gritty real life on the boulevard, prostitutes flag down traffic, the homeless hunker in doorways, and crime plagues small businesses.

  “When they go pay for their gas and leave the keys,” Howie was saying. “Tha’s when you jump in and be gone with the car ’fore they turn around. But I quit that game.” He frowned. “Too many people carrying guns these days. Kill you over a car.”

  “You mean the police?”

  “Hell, no, I ain’t worried about no police. They won’t shoot at a kid, tha’s against official procedure. It’s the damn civilians.” He stopped chewing his second brownie to wax indignant. “Too many of ’em got guns! They’ll kill you! Some guy shot at a friend of mine. Damn near smoked ’im. The crazy fool was shooting holes in his own car! Almost killed somebody over a car!”

  “Odd you should say that,” I said mildly, “because that’s what FMJ is doing, shooting people over cars.”

  Howie’s face was half masked in shadow. “He shoots people he don’t have to shoot. He say his gun want to get blood on itself. He cold crazy. He ain’t shooting ’cause of the car, he’s shooting ’cause he likes it; the dude likes hurting people.”

  A sudden shudder tickled my spine. Must have been the caffeine and the chocolate cavorting through my system.

  “You can’t go on living like this, Howie. You’ve got to straighten out your life, get your act together, get back into school and make something of yourself. You’re smart, you’re a survivor. Jesus, Howie, you can be somebody.” I leaned forward. “Do it now. You have your whole life ahead of you.”

  His gaze stayed steady. His expression didn’t change; he didn’t say a word.

  �
��Sure,” I went on, “all this may seem swell now, but you don’t wanna be living up here when you’re twenty or thirty years old. Sooner or later some security or maintenance man is gonna catch on to you, or they’ll do major renovations, a little urban renewal up here on the roof, and knock your house down.”

  He stared at the floor.

  “Maybe things are better with your mom now, and you can live with her.”

  He sighed. “Once a junkie, always a junkie.”

  “You sound like the parent instead of the child.”

  “That’s how it was sometimes.”

  “Is that why you left?”

  “I couldn’t stay because of her boyfriend.”

  “Maybe she isn’t seeing him anymore.”

  “She always seeing somebody.”

  “Maybe you can learn to get along with him.”

  He looked up at me, eyes shiny. “He was the dude I tol’ you about, with the blade.”

  It was my turn to sigh. “But this isn’t it, Howie.” I gestured at his small abode. “This is no place to live.”

  “I thought it wasn’t where you live but how you live.” His voice rose angrily. “I do the best I can.”

  “I know.” I was contrite.

  “It’s better than being locked up.”

  “What makes you think you’d go to jail?” I thought again of Jennifer Carey and her son, hoping that Howie was not the backseat passenger.

  “I was on probation,” he said warily.

  “If it was for auto theft, you won’t go to jail. You have to kill somebody to go to jail these days.”

  He stared between his knees at the floor, arms clutched to his chest as though afraid of letting something escape.