Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [43]
“Mr. Meadows. Mr. Meadows! Your tea is getting cold!” Who was this harridan? Against his better judgment, Meadows limped to the door. There stood a vision in frizzy curls and pancake makeup. A garish ring of red circled her mouth. One painted eyebrow danced higher than the other. She was barely five feet tall, and nearly as wide. A housecoat of many colors struggled to contain her. Meadows’s head began aching immediately, and Sadie watched him curiously.
“It’s nearly nine o’clock, Mr. Meadows. We breakfast early here at the Buckingham.” She carried a metal tray with steaming tea in a chipped mug, two gnarled pieces of toast and a jelly glass holding an amber fluid that fizzed. He later discovered it was celery soda. Sadie firmly believed there was nothing celery soda and borscht would not cure.
“How did you know my name?” he stammered.
“Izzy, the desk clerk, told me. Everybody knows. It’s not often we get late-night guests at the Buckingham. He says you came in looking as if you had been run over. Poor man. Of course, you can’t believe everything Izzy says. You know how he lies. He claims he was in the ghetto in Warsaw. Ghetto, schmetto. Izzy comes from Newark. So why lie already?”
She winked conspiratorially. With an elephantine pirouette she deposited the tray on the wooden hulk that passed for a dresser.
“You’ve got to watch that Izzy,” said Meadows dryly. His improbable morning caller was like the sight of land to a drowning sailor.
In the night he had stumbled upon the Buckingham, unseeing, uncaring. Pausing only to change his bloody shirt, Meadows had driven as far as the nearest expressway would take him from the airport. He had found himself in the shabby south section of Miami Beach, a refuge for people who were too poor to live on the tawdry strip farther north, and too old to enjoy it.
In the darkness the motel had looked like all the others. The bald and scrawny desk clerk who had awakened to his call—it must have been Izzy—had registered Meadows without comment.
Sunshine revealed the Buckingham to be a paint-peeling monstrosity, an elderly survivor of the Art Deco age. Once it had been white. Now it was flamingo pink, trimmed in turquoise. It was two stories high, built around an internal courtyard. Atop the second story stood a dome of chipped concrete. Sadie confessed that it was the observatory, unused these last fifty years because there was no telescope. When it had been built, the Buckingham had had a sea view. Now, like the telescope and the youth of its denizens, the beach was gone.
Sadie and her friends lived off memories and illegal hot plates that regularly blew the fuses. They dwelt amid a jungle in the courtyard and a parody of art in the hallways. Every few feet there was a niche, and in every niche the crumbling bust of some personage who had obviously been important to the horror’s early owners: Lindbergh, Beethoven, Schiller, FDR, Eisenhower, Groucho Marx(!), Lincoln, Rickenbacker, Babe Ruth, Mae West.
For a day, Meadows did nothing but sleep, eat and wallow in a four-legged porcelain tub. He quickly discovered that the maternal care and breakfast were inventions of Sadie’s. “The management is not responsible for the contents,” Izzy proclaimed. Sadie chirped incessantly; Meadows endured it as a welcome shred of homeliness in universe-turned-alien.
It was too easy, eyes closed, seeking sleep on impertinent springs, to slip back into the nightmare: to confront questions again for which there were no answers.
Was Mono alive? He had to be. If he had moved his car, Mono could not be dead.
And if he was alive, the word must now be out among his friends that it was the gringo patsy who had stabbed him.
Or would Mono be too macho to confess to that? Maybe he could not bear the shame of it. Perhaps he would prefer to recover and to bide his time; to return himself