Men in Miami Hotels by Charlie Smith Page B

honey . . .” then silence, then, “But . . .” silence “ . . . but . . .” silence . . . “But goddamn it, Marcie, I didn’t . . . but . . . but . . .” and then he snapped the phone shut and put it into his pocket. He stood in the street looking straight at the sun. The light sparkled on the lenses of his dark glasses. “God almighty,” he said, “Goddamn almighty.”
    C ot pedaled out to the airport and cashed in his ticket. He thought about taking the flight anyway, taking the one he’d paid for and then another, a string of them, until he wound up, dusty and dazed, sitting at a rickety table in a river café in some Kinshasa of distance, drinking a cup of bitterroot tea and calling himself Frederick Boykins. He reached for his phone, but he hadn’t gotten it back from Ordell. He had already talked to Dover, who told him he hadn’t seen Connie that night. Told him nobody he knew had seen him. Cot wanted to ask him the same set of questions again. Not because he didn’t believe Dover, but because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. I could walk up and down the streets knocking on people’s doors. Dial the phone book. He pedaled back to town and stopped at a few bars and knockout joints but no one had seen CJ that night. “I saw a pompadour of yellow feathers off in the distance,” Randy Bunker said, “but I didn’t see who was under it.”
    “Where was this?” Cot said.
    “Over on Olivia. I caught sight of somebody in the cemetery, flitting among the graves.”
    Just hearing this little bit made Cot’s heart beat faster.
    “I’m so sorry,” Randy said. He worked under the stage name Impressionella, a rangy fellow from Stakelight, Arkansas, sans, so he said, his sack of troubles now. In KW many made such a claim, tiny dabs of shame gleaming like melted sugar in the corners of their eyes.
    He walked down Fleming, going slowly, planning to arrive at his mother’s and rest a while, but just past the library somebody stepped out from behind a big orangely flowering bougainvillea and popped him in the head. He went down on his face into a jasmine bush. When he came to an older couple was standing over him. “We thought you were dead,” the man said, a thin prospector-type holding a large yellow hat.
    “Do you know me?” Cot said.
    “How could we know you?” said the woman, slim too, a little too much sucked out of her to really wear the slimness well. “We’re visitors.”
    “Do you know yourself?” the man said. He was old. Dark grape-wine stains of age, or eternal night, on the hand that gripped the big hat.
    “That’s a good question,” Cot said.
    “Were you on your way to the library?” the woman said.
    “I wouldn’t doubt it.”
    “We thought so,” the man said.
    “We thought you slipped and hit your head,” the woman said.
    “I did.”
    He was sure it was last night’s stalker, Lewis his name was, Bert, a worker for Albertson, an auxiliary, a friendly person generally. He lived in a hotel on Washington Ave. out at the beach. Bert. Damn. But if he hit him that meant he didn’t have a gun. Or did it? Albertson had probably pulled him off the job. But Bert still had a little personal business with him. Well, you could go on and on figuring things out. Cot preferred revelation, as he often said, over deduction, but you couldn’t always count on it to show up when you needed it. Clouds, puffed and richly white, had a permanent look about them, high in the center of the sky. He was always falling for something that looked permanent. His head hurt. He went into the library, cruised briefly through the stacks, and checked out a volume of Korean poetry. After all this time his card was still good. He loved how they trusted him in here, were willing, despite everything, to let him walk out with a book, their only copy of poems by Ko Un and Ku Sang, as if they had faith in him. Maybe they’d testify as character witnesses at his next hearing. Down at the