I jump at the phone when it rings.
It’s Alex Sterling, asking if I can come meet him at Café Nublado — right by his house and not that far from mine — to discuss something. “Sounds serious,” I say, and he says it is, and so I allow as how I’ll tear myself away from work and drive down to see him.
Café Nublado is Spanish for coffee with clouds. They do the usual Cuban coffee and guava pastries, but to compete with the high-end espresso chains, the walls are painted with idealized piles of cumulonimbus and the house specialty has a soft puffy topping you have to suck through to get any caffeine. Whatever happened to Sanka? I like to grumble, but the girl knows me and gives me a decaf skim Nublado.
Alex Sterling is in one of the big wicker planter’s chairs out back, wearing chinos and a well-cut yellow shirt. I see he’s looking worried, so I forego small talk. “What gives?”
“Somebody has burgled Sharon,” he says. “She called me.”
“Is she all right?”
“She’s upset, naturally. I told her I’d ask you to go there. The police came and took a report, but I thought you might advise her on security. And then...”
I wait. It seems convoluted to meet here, so he must have something in mind.
“Do you think,” he says, “I overlooked something yesterday?”
“At the Delphi?”
“She says the stuff they took was all from there. And I’m wondering if someone knows there was something of great value and got it.”
“But you’d looked it all over—”
“Meticulously. You know me. It all seemed clean and organized. I didn’t find anything hidden. But I didn’t search every square molecule of space.”
“I think you’re as thorough as anyone could be. Did you go through the flour and sugar?”
He grins. “She didn’t have any flour. I doubt she ever baked. And her sugar was lump.”
“Really,” I say, admiringly. “You never see that anymore, lump sugar. But you obviously looked. How ’bout the salt shaker?”
He shakes his head. “What would be in there?”
“Diamonds?”
“You’re teasing me, Ray.”
“Somewhat,” I say. “Anyway, everything Sharon had was from the bedroom. And you’d been through that.”
“Yes, and then Sharon handled it all, and she says she didn’t find anything concealed. Did you?”
“Well, I haven’t gone through every page of every book. She could have used a thousand-dollar bill as a bookmark. I’ll be sure to check.”
“If I overlooked something, you know,” he shrugs, “that’s the way it is. What I don’t like is the idea that it could be one of the people who was there yesterday, who spotted something and then burgled Sharon to get it.”
“Wouldn’t be me. I was in the bedroom alone enough, I could have taken anything then.”
“I know,” he says. “And you were a policeman.” Alex always says policeman, as in, Say hi to the nice policeman. “Couldn’t you maybe figure out what it was and who took it? If it was someone on our team?”
“Tall order.” I finish my Nublado. I want a cigarette but I had one an hour ago.
“Yes,” he says. “But you could try, Ray, couldn’t you?”
“Well, let’s go see,” I say.
He pulls out his cell phone and calls her to tell her we’re on our way
So I drive us over to Sharon’s place, also not far from Café Nublado. We people with a taste for old things are clustered in the neighborhoods of Miami’s Upper Eastside, where the houses were built in the ’30s of cinderblock and stucco, in styles they’re now calling Mediterranean Revival and Masonry Vernacular. I’m in Belle Meade, Sharon in Bayside, which is an historic district. Alex used to live there, but recently he cashed in and moved into a fixer-upper in Palm Grove, west of Biscayne Boulevard, for a long time the western frontier on realtors’ maps. Lately, people good at restoration like Alex — that is to say, the gay guys — have hopped the line in search of fun and profit there.
On the way he tells me he keeps nothing of value in his house. He has safe deposit boxes at several banks. He adds that Mrs. Dorsett’s daughter made it clear that her mother’s real jewelry had been in her safe deposit box. All that remained was costume, and even that the daughter had gone through carefully. I ask what the daughter was like.
“Like a respectable woman from Connecticut,” he says. “She was organized and I think she knew the status of her mother’s estate in advance. No nonsense. I just don’t see what it could be,” he muses.
Sharon is out the back door to meet us as we pull up. Unadorned, wearing a white T-shirt and leggings, with her hair pulled back, she is a smaller woman than I’d thought. Perhaps she puffs herself up and puts on beads when she’s working with us guys to hold her own.
She shows us where they came in. They simply bashed in window glass by the back door to the Florida room, reached in, and twisted the lock — no deadbolt. The alarm went off, of course, as soon as the door opened, but — as I’m telling her — there’s a limit to alarm systems.
“The noise is useless. Neighbors won’t stir to take a look. The important factor is the signal through your phone line to the alarm company, who then call your house in case you set it off yourself and can give them the secret code to revoke the alarm. If you don’t answer, then they call the cops. And then the cops have to get here, so altogether your thief has a good ten to fifteen minutes. A real pro will take out your phone line, do a thorough job. What you have here is someone looking to smash and grab and run, usually kids wanting something to hock for drugs.”
“Right,” says Sharon. “But if so, why didn’t they take the portable TV right here in the Florida room, six feet from the door?”
She leads us through folding doors to her dining room and down a hall to the back bedroom she runs her business from. He definitely went out of his way to get to this room.
“Forgive the mess in here,” she says.
Of course, it looks far better than my place on a good day. Garments fill a chrome clothing rack, each hanger tagged with notes. Along the opposite wall, a long table holds a computer, scanner, postal scale, packing materials, and a piece of blue velvet with a desk lamp aimed at it, set up for photographing smaller objects. The open trash bags piled on and around an old couch under the windows are the only disorderly note. Heavy shades darken the room. I look behind them — jalousie windows, old thick glass, hard to break.
“Did you have your digital camera here?” says Alex.
“I’d been using it to shoot clothes outside, in sunlight — I hang them from my grapefruit tree. Afterward, I put it in the bedroom. It’s still there.”
“So what did they take?” I ask. Like Sharon, I say “they,” even though I’m assuming it’s a “he.” It helps to keep it less vivid, I figure.
“I’ve been making a list. The police want one and my insurance will too, but I don’t think it’s going to be enough for my deductible.” She picks up a pad. “Shoes, clothes, linens.”
“Which?” asks Alex.
“Not the nicest ones, really.” She opens the closet’s pocket door and reveals shoe racks. “I’d put the best away in here. I guess they never opened this. So they just got a couple of pairs of day shoes, some blouses that were here on the arm of the couch — things I was setting aside to take to the women’s shelter. The women always need clothes, especially for job interviews, work. Well, they took that whole pile. Oddly, they took the satin pillowcases but not the bedspread. I think some of the makeup and perfume is gone. They spilled some powder, see?”