Chapter 24 - Where the Truth Lies

BEFORE SHE’D DIED, Maureen O’Flaherty had lived in Hollywood, Florida, if one believed the return address on a postcard she’d sent her mother. When I called Mrs. O’Flaherty early that next morning from my hotel room, I’d needed the first line of the address—“7GW c/o Ludlow”—and the street number I’d seen on the postcard, but I’d remembered the street’s name, because at the time, it had amused me: “North Dixie.” Surely an oxymoron to rival “Wayne Newton Special.” Living fifteen miles north of Miami Beach, Maureen would have had an easy commute to the several hotels and nightclubs at which she’d worked as a waitress.

So having been to Manhattan on the West Coast by way of the New York street set Vince had shown me, I was now surveying a Hollywood on the East Coast for whatever remnants I could find of Maureen O’Flaherty.

I located 1350 North Dixie at the corner of McKinley Street, one of many porcelain-white, gray-mortar mid-rise apartment buildings that had been slapped up twenty-five years ago. Its facing was now cracked and spackled by time, heat, and the occasional fusillade of a tropical rainstorm. Just outside its entrance, a man in his early sixties was seated in an aluminum lawn chair with a webbing of interwoven white and teal plastic. He sported a uniform that only partially conceded he was the building’s doorman: dark brown pants with a gold stripe running up each trouser leg, teamed with a yellow T-shirt that said I CAN’T BELIEVE I ATE THE WHOLE THING! His comb-over began virtually at one ear and ended just short of the other to form a shiny helmet over his skull. To make it worse, he’d streaked his hair with blond highlights. I could smell his Hai Karate aftershave from the end of the walk.

Upon my arrival in Miami, I’d rented a cool blue Camaro and driven it to Burn, Baby, Burn, a very trendy boutique that dished up free-spirited outfits that always seemed on the verge of slipping off. I bought myself what was by their standards a conservative number that still looked as if I’d jumped into something comfortable and nearly missed. I could see the doorman perking up as I sashayed toward him.

“Hot out.” I smiled.

“I got cold Budweiser in the fridge in my apartment,” he offered. Jesus. It was eleven-thirty in the morning, he was at least thirty years older than me, I hadn’t said more than two words, and still he was giving it a shot. “My name’s Tony,” he added.

“I could go for one and that’s for sure, but,” I sighed, “can you give me a rain check till later this afternoon? Right now I’m working.” I tilted my hips to one side as if to explain. “I’m Jill. You run this place, right?”

He nodded. “Pretty much.”

I lowered my voice. “You remember a party in Apartment 7GW named Ludlow? Back in the late fifties?”

“I ought to. I talked with him about an hour ago.”

As they say in the sacred liturgy of the Catholic Church: bingo. Forty bucks cash got Tony Gebbia to open up like a blown-glass piñata. All the hours Tony had spent avoiding the tenant’s plumbing problems had gone into his microscopic scrutiny of their lives.

Ludlow in 7G West was Kef Ludlow and—judging by both his appearance and some idle conversation they’d had over the last fifteen years—Tony estimated the man’s age to be about the same as his own. Kef’s occupation had always been a murky issue. The one thing Tony knew for sure was that Ludlow was enslaved to the dog races, attending them five days a week. He’d have gone seven days, but they were closed on Sundays and Mondays, not so the dogs might rest but so that the personnel could.

Sometimes Tony got the impression that Ludlow had something to do with the gambling scene associated with greyhound racing. Tony ventured that he might be a bookie. This, in the family tree of organized crime, seemed very low to the ground. The local betting at the dog tracks in Florida was done on a pari-mutuel basis, with the track and the state deducting their cut, and it was hard to envision any big-time gamblers getting worked up because Bowser in the fifth had just been spayed.

In the late fifties, it seemed as if Ludlow had hit a run of luck, either because he was picking a string of winners or (if he was in fact a bookie) because his customers were not. He’d stopped taking public transportation and had purchased a used Buick LeSabre the size of a small yacht. Ludlow started bringing home fewer groceries and eating out more. The doggie bags he came home with were from places like the Embers and the Lobster Trap, first-class steak-and-seafood joints. One year at Christmas he tipped Tony a twenty-dollar bill.

Sunday through Thursday in this time frame he’d leave the building at eight in the morning. He’d be wearing a straw panama and a lightweight white jacket with blue vertical stripes (Tony said it was made from thin crinkly material, which I took to mean seersucker) over a blue wash-and-wear short-sleeved shirt with white pants and a white belt. Some days Ludlow wore a tie. On these mornings he always sported a pair of prescription sunglasses (at the dog races, he wore only his regular glasses, as he felt that shades limited his powers of observation). He’d usually be whistling; “Lemon Tree” was a recurring favorite. In his hand would be a manila envelope. About a half hour later, still whistling, he’d return to his apartment. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays he’d reappear ten minutes later, having changed into a more casual outfit of polo shirt and navy-blue polyester pants, and he’d be off to the dog races. On Sundays and Mondays, when the track wasn’t open, he’d come back from his errand and stay in his apartment. You could hear his TV through the door; he tended to like wrestling, jai alai, and baseball.

On Fridays and Saturdays he would not go out in the early morning but simply head straight to the greyhound track around eleven, dressed in his more casual outfit.

The lucky streak lasted only so long. By 1960, he’d sold his LeSabre, complaining that it used too much gas for city driving, and instead waited for the Number 24 bus two blocks north on Taft to take him to the races each day. He’d leave only at eleven, no longer at eight, with a brown-bag lunch he’d made the night before. He didn’t whistle much anymore, nor did he eat out. Hamburger Helper started to appear at the top of his grocery bags. He said you didn’t even need the hamburger most of the time, or certainly nowhere near as much as the box suggested; a little Mazola oil and oleomargarine added to the mix would serve you just fine.

Of Ludlow’s family, Tony knew nothing. His mail, when Tony saw it, was very ordinary and usually addressed to “Occupant.” In the glory years, he got TV Guide every week, but later he said that the schedule in the newspaper was just as good. Packages that wouldn’t fit in the mailbox would be under Tony’s supervision, but Tony couldn’t remember anything unusual arriving for Ludlow in all the time he’d been there. Every five years, maybe a box of new checks from Florida First National Bank. Once, a package from Marboro Books had been delivered half-opened and Tony had seen its contents. One volume was called How to Beat the Pari-Mutuel Racket! The other was a photo essay book called The Art of the Nude, with lots of color photos.

After I’d drained Tony Gebbia (a process that made me feel like Dracula at a blood bank) on the topic of Kef Ludlow—who took no vacations, had no visitors, and was a relative stranger to those who lived alongside him on the seventh floor west—I then produced two more twenties and explained to Tony that the focus of my interest was much more in a roommate Ludlow might have had during the late fifties.

Tony’s eyes narrowed a bit. “You mean the redhead?” I nodded and he warmed to the subject. “What a piece of ass she was. When I read she was dead, up in New Jersey, I said, ‘Hey, if nobody else wants the body, I’ll take it.’ ” He smirked at the pithiness of his observation.

I wanted to spit in his face, but I needed to know what he knew. I asked how long she’d lived with Ludlow.

“Not so long and not very often. I don’t think it was a full-time thing. I never knew what their story was. He was, I don’t know, maybe twenty years older than her. He was no ladies’ man, I’ll tell you, even back then. Has a nose like Durante. I think he may have just been putting her up but not getting anything, although he liked us thinking he was. She must have been coming in like at two or three in the morning, ’cause although I saw her leave the building once or twice a week, usually in the late afternoon, I hardly ever saw her getting in. The only times I did were when she came in so late she’d be walking in as I went to meet the garbage pickup. She used to joke about us both wearing uniforms.” He indicated his pants. “Back then I wore the whole thing, shirt, clip-on bow tie, even the jacket, if it wasn’t too hot. She always wore her hotel uniform home ’cause she worked part-time in different hotels and it was easier to keep all her outfits in one place. She’d had the pants altered so they really tucked tight around her ass, then she had the jackets shortened so you could see it, and then she moved the buttons on her jacket and shirt so you could see some of her tits.”

My guess was that Maureen prided herself on her looks and that her work uniforms were standard issue, designed for men. It was likely worth the investment on her part in order to garner sizable gratuities from the Miami Beach fat cats and celebrities she served.

Tony Vermin was still prattling on. “She liked me a lot. We could have had a thing, but our schedules were too different.” Yeah, that was it. Just the scheduling. Otherwise, Tony would have been a shoo-in for getting into Maureen’s tailored pants. Same problem for Tony with Kim Novak. Opposite coasts. Ah, what might have been.

She’d gotten a couple of letters at Ludlow’s address; he knew this because the postman had been confused and had asked Tony if there was an O’Flaherty in 7GW. He admitted to snapping back, “Yeah, but it doesn’t mean Ludlow’s dicking her,” which was probably more of an answer than the U.S. postal worker had required. Not a lot of mail had come to her, though. What letters he’d seen were from New Rochelle, New York.

Sometimes a week or two would go by without him seeing her at all. He’d ask Ludlow about her, and Ludlow always had a similar response. He’d say something along the lines of “I’m a lucky guy, Tony” or “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Answers that told Tony next to nothing but allowed Ludlow to lord it over him for a moment.

When she’d died, The Miami Herald had printed a photo of her in her Versailles uniform, identifying her as Maureen O’Flaherty. Tony said that when he saw it, he thought, “Now I’m never gonna screw her,” and in a dark way, it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard said in conjunction with the poor girl’s death.

Ludlow had apparently taken it very hard. He barely emerged from his apartment for almost a month. Finally, the call of the hounds must have drawn him out of his seclusion. His life evolved into what it was now, a shuttle between Hallandale Beach, where the Hollywood Greyhound Track was located, and McKinley Street. For the months in the summer when the dogs didn’t run, you could still play poker or dominoes there, but Ludlow wasn’t crazy about this, and he was more inclined to restlessly hang around Gulfstream Park, the nearby horse-racing track, where they ran the Founders’ Cup each year. He’d bet only on the daily double and almost never won.

Exactly what he did by way of vocation to meet the cost of his meager lifestyle was as much a mystery fifteen years after Maureen’s death as it had been in the fifties. Maybe he did just well enough with the dogs to keep him in Hamburger Helper for the rest of his life.

I asked Tony if there was somewhere at the greyhound track I could find Ludlow. He said he knew from talking with Ludlow that, just as in horse racing, there was a paddock area where the greyhounds were paraded around before the races started, at two. Ludlow tried never to miss this. He considered himself good at determining from this look-see which dogs were likely to win. “Like I said, you can’t miss him. Nose like Durante. Big black head of hair for a man his age, probably a toup’. All you have to do is ask anyone who works there. They all know him.”

I thanked him for his trouble and slipped him another twenty. He smiled seductively. “How about that Budweiser?” he asked.

I nodded enthusiastically. “I know, that Budweiser is really something, isn’t it?”

* * *

To me it was a pretend racetrack, like one of those children’s play kitchens with miniature boxes of Pillsbury cake mix with which you could make a cupcake in an oven heated by a lightbulb. It had one pair of washrooms, one cocktail lounge, and three ticket windows, like a train station in Utica. There was an undernourished feel about it, but nowhere near as undernourished as the wretched canines who worked there.

The greyhounds were raised to be fast, desperate, thin, and, in particular, famished. This fourth commodity somewhat guaranteed the first three. The only part about starving that was counterproductive was that when they had no food, they had less energy. But that’s where desperate (for the reward of food) kicked in.

I found Ludlow in the paddock, looking over today’s and tomorrow’s contenders. He fit the description Tony had given me, and his identity was verified by a sleepy security guard.

Ludlow was taking lots of notes on a racing form, flipping back a page now and then to cross-reference some bitch’s progeny. Imagine Walter Matthau without the charm and you have Kef Ludlow: a sour-faced man with a shock of black hair of which he was not the original owner, a prominent nose that instantly evoked the Great Schnozzola without the greatness, and beady eyes so rheumy he seemed permanently on the verge of weeping. Or perhaps his eyes weren’t rheumy at all.

He was tall, perhaps over six feet, but his stooped shoulders and receding chest brought him right back down to earth. He didn’t have a potbelly, but his stomach and thighs were those of a slightly stockier person.

He got right in there with the greyhounds as if he were the judge of a dog show at Madison Square Garden. More than once it looked as if he was smelling their breath, in the manner of a mother checking her teenage son for the scent of liquor. He petted them, but there was nothing good-hearted about it. He was appraising them, with all the warmth of a slave trader pinching the breasts of a nubile Nubian girl. Some of those displaying the dogs looked offended by his handling of their charges, but apparently a fixture like Ludlow was given wide latitude in this department.

I trailed him into the enclosed grandstand, which, blessedly, was air-conditioned. The back wall was a hideous pale pink with blue and green vertical stripes that had lost their color over the years in the direct sunlight. Everyone knew Kef, and perhaps for this reason, everyone left him alone. I, luckily, didn’t know him at all, so I plonked myself down next to him. I still was looking pretty smart in my newly purchased outfit, but he appeared to resent the intrusion.

“Mr. Ludlow?” I asked.

He looked down into his racing form. “I have no tips for you, miss. If you want tips, pay for a copy of the Miami Racing Gazette, it’s an eight-page daily, you can get it at the cigarette counter to the right of where you first walk in. It’s a dollar.” He looked at me and his snarl softened a bit, probably because he liked the sight of my nipples through the thin fabric of my outfit as they reacted to the icy air in the grandstand. “I’m sorry,” he added.

“Mr. Ludlow, I’m a journalist.” I took from my purse a small plastic sleeve one-fourth the size of a page in Cosmopolitan. For official inquiries about Vince and Lanny, I had my folded-up letter from Connie Wechsler on Neuman and Newberry stationery, which I kept with me at all times, confirming that a book about the duo had been commissioned by a reputable publisher. But for all other interviews, I used the contents of the plastic sleeve as my “letters of transit,” as this was my temporary visa when venturing unprepared into unknown territories. From the sleeve I withdrew five folded slick magazine pages, each the first page of an interview with or an article I’d written about a famous person, and I’d picked the five for their diversity: Edgar Winter, Viveca Lindfors, Cesar Chavez, Buckminster Fuller, Judy Carne. Somewhere in there, at least one name meant something to most everyone.

Kef looked through the package and said suspiciously, “Miss O’Connor, you know all these famous people, why are you talking to me? I don’t know anybody.”

I put the articles away. “I’m writing a series of pieces for a new magazine coming out here soon called Hooray for Hollywood. Each piece of mine is going to be about some interesting facet of life in this area, past and present. Greyhound racing, politicians who started out here, celebrities who retired here, you get the idea. You’re quite the legend, Mr. Ludlow. I’m told you know more about this track than the people who run it.”

It was a very safe bet on my part to say this. Find me a sports fan who thinks the owners of his team know or care as much about the sport or the team as he does.

Ludlow sniffed. “The people who own this place are running it into the ground. Look around you.” The grandstand was dotted with perhaps thirty people, all but a few well over sixty. “The first race starts in fifteen minutes. Sure, the crowd’ll get bigger but not by much.” He set down his racing form. “So what’s your angle? The cruelty of dog racing? Been done a million times. You’re not going to get anything from me on that topic.”

“No, very much the opposite, Mr. Ludlow. Actually, I think that dog racing is a beautiful thing.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah? How so?”

The thing I’d always loved about the debating team in college was that you had to be prepared on a moment’s notice to argue either the pro or the con of the question, with equal passion and conviction. Your true feelings were completely irrelevant. All that mattered was the argument.

I said to him fervidly, “Mr. Ludlow, the starting point for my article is that a dog race has it over a horse race any day. Horses are beautiful animals, no doubt about that. But sorry, they’re not really smart. We don’t think a cow is smart, right? A horse is just a cow that runs fast and looks pretty.” The idea of containers of homogenized horse milk came to mind and momentarily nauseated me. “But a dog? A dog is a smart animal. A dog knows he’s in a race. A dog has pride, wants to be liked, wants to win. You ever see a horse at the end of a race? If he came in fifth, does he look disgraced? No. But a dog, a dog would know, Mr. Ludlow. A dog would bow his head in shame.” I sat back, pleased with my improv.

Ludlow looked at me in disbelief. “Dogs… dogs are dumb, pathetic animals, Miss O’Connor. Hitler had one, you know. That’s how much these dogs know about character. Give a stray dog a steak, he’ll be your friend for life until you don’t have a steak and somebody else does. These animals are meat whores. And stupid? Greyhounds will chase a metal rabbit that has no scent around the same oval loop five, six times a day for the most useful portion of their lives. The reason they do it is not because they’re hungry for fame, praise, or affection. It’s because they’re hungry for food.” He smiled a dry smile. “But if you think writing the kind of romantic claptrap you’re spouting will help keep this crummy place on its feet a few more years, you go right ahead. You feel free to put your words in my mouth and then quote me. Just get my name right.”

I told him I had it right already and spelled it for him. He seemed pleased. I tried to make him feel as if he were some sort of local legend, like Toots Shor or Jack Dempsey. I laughed at things he said that weren’t intended to be jokes, and when I complimented him on his sense of humor, he said, “Well, you can’t take life too seriously now, can you?” It was said that Charles Dickens would allow no man to be a bore, and I refused to let Kef Ludlow be a crab. Perhaps it had been a while since a girl in her twenties had treated him warmly.

The dogs were funneled into their respective stalls at the starting line by a trainer who had the wisdom to wear leather gloves. The sides of the stalls were high enough that the dogs couldn’t see one another, but they yelped within their abhorrent muzzles, as if challenging one another, or perhaps calling out, “This time can’t we just ignore the rabbit? Can’t we, guys?”

They wore muzzles only to protect their noses and to help officials determine the winner in a photo finish, said the management. Right.

There was a shot, the gates opened, and they were off. A greyhound can see clearly up to a half mile away, but these animals had never been allowed to look that far. They weren’t even allowed to chase cars, many of which they could have caught.

As the dog wearing a red vest bearing the number 5 took the early lead, Ludlow leaned over to me and said, “He’s the favorite but he’s going to fade; watch number three.” Number 3 wore a royal blue vest and was currently running fourth. His name was Proud Fella. As the hounds rounded into the home stretch, the crowd of thirty came to life, or as much as a crowd can come to life when the vast majority had received a senior discount. The greyhound’s pace was approaching thirty-five, maybe forty miles an hour. One of the dogs growled as if to alert the others that this was the finish. Proud Fella surged forward, as predicted, but several of the others surged forward even more. Ludlow had been trying for a quinella, picking Bobby’s Baby and Proud Fella to finish first and second, but since Proud Fella came in fifth, it didn’t matter that Bobby’s Baby won.

Ludlow didn’t seem to mind talking to me while the races transpired. It was as if the real action was before the race, in the calculating of the odds, and at the finish line, where the results of his wager were totaled. Everything in between was merely passing scenery.

After the third race, I treated us to franks and fries as I asked him what had attracted him to the sport in the first place. He didn’t take his eyes off the tote board as he answered, “I’m not attracted to the sport or a sport or any sport. I don’t like sports. I like gambling. That’s what I’m attracted to, the gambling. But dice, roulette, cards, slots, they have no consciousness, they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re just ‘the odds.’ So you can’t blame them. You can only blame yourself. With football, you blame the quarterback or the coach, real people, and when I lose there, it makes me churned up and upset inside. Same thing with baseball, hockey, basketball: Some other guy screwed me over, and I hate that, because that’s the way real life works, every single cruddy day. Even betting on the horses, there’s a jockey. A midget from the Dominican Republic screws up and I get screwed over. Who wouldn’t hate that? But when you lose your money here, with the greyhounds… it’s all the fault of one scrawny mutt.” I laughed at his drollery and he laughed too. “That’s what I love about the greyhounds. No jockeys, no coaches—if you lose, it’s only because of one dumb dog.”

I smiled back warmly and wrote this down as if it were the eleventh commandment. “What a wonderful way to put it,” I cooed, and he glowed as much as a broken lightbulb can.

Ludlow did fairly well that day. He boxed a trifecta and also picked up an exacta in the twelfth, which was the last race of the matinee, as they call it. He also picked the winner in the fourth. On some rather small bets, he was walking away with several hundred dollars. I got the feeling that this was not often the case.

Flush with victory, we retired to the Dog Pound, the track’s murky cocktail lounge. It’s amazing how you can illuminate a maroon bar with only the light from a jukebox, the beer signs, and a gooseneck lamp by the register. Why, if it were any brighter in the place, they’d have had to clean the tables and vacuum the carpet.

We talked at length about the Florida dog-racing scene, the track over at Flagler particularly arousing his ire. It was about as scintillating a topic as you might imagine, but in the light of the shaded candle that I’d lit at our table, I dutifully wrote down some minimal notes in one of the spiral-bound pads I always keep in my bag. I like the kind with the spiral on top so my hand doesn’t rub up against the metal coil by the left margin. I’d gone through about thirty such notebooks thus far on the project.

My note-taking took us through a third drink for him and a switch to 7UP for me after an initial Scotch. I picked up the tab, which he liked a great deal and which I said was the very least I could do in return for all the valuable insights he’d been generous enough to give me. Finally, the moment had come. I asked him for his address so I could mail him a tear sheet of the article. He told me it was 1350 North Dixie Highway, Apartment 7GW.

I let myself enact what I hoped was a sufficiently flabbergasted expression and said in a low, stunned voice, “Why, that’s astounding.”

He looked confused. “Why’s that?”

I shook my head slowly. “Unless I’m mistaken…” I rummaged in my bag for another of my spiral-bound notebooks, which I’d rigged for this moment. It had a hot-pink cover. I flipped to a single page where I’d written down the address I’d gotten over the phone from Maureen’s mother and showed it to him. “Look. It’s the exact same address as yours.” I put the notebook back in my bag. “One of the other pieces I’m doing in my series is about this girl, Maureen O’Flaherty. The one who was found dead in the hotel room of that comedy team…?”

“Collins and Morris,” he said.

“Yes, that’s them. I came across the fact that she lived here in the year or two before she was murdered, and the address her mother gave me is the same as yours. I mean, this must be the most remarkable coincidence I’ve ever—Talk about killing two birds with one stone! I guess—Would you mind, as long as I have you here? I mean, you’ve already told me you’ve lived at the same address for almost twenty years, so you must have known her.”

He had three gimlets in him, and I offered to buy him a fourth. He said yes to this, but once the order was in, he said, “I don’t talk about her.”

I told him I wouldn’t quote him directly in the Hooray for Hollywood article (which was easy to promise, since the magazine didn’t exist) and that he didn’t have to tell me anything he didn’t want to (which I hoped he’d forgotten was already his right as an American citizen). I said I just needed some background on her, as if this would keep him out of it, that it was probably information I could get from someone at the apartment building… At that point, his look changed; he may have decided that it was preferable to tell me his version of the story rather than have Tony the doorman recount what he knew.

(I did know that if Kef Ludlow and Tony ever talked to each other about me, they’d both realize that I’d been completely deceptive with them, but that didn’t concern me, as I had no plan to speak with either ever again.)

The fourth gimlet arrived, and with a sip of it, he told me a small ration of what he knew about Maureen.

He’d met her here, literally, in the Dog Pound Lounge. She’d been working as a cocktail waitress a couple of matinees a week to fill out her afternoons. They would talk. She was new in town, just out of college, had no money, and was holding down several part-time jobs in a number of Miami Beach hotels. It was hard breaking into the hotel scene, especially for a woman, but she’d told the management she was okay with working the graveyard shifts, from eleven P.M. until morning. Sometimes, on a Monday or Tuesday, she’d wait for hours without a single order, and with room service you made decent money only if you got tips; but she considered the wasted time an investment. The management appreciated those who didn’t complain at the start; someone had to work the unprofitable shifts, and since the veterans had families to support, it fell to newcomers to bear the burden. In time, a newcomer would acquire veteran status. It was just a matter of patience.

Maureen was sweet but quite smart; she got her orders right the first time and delivered them efficiently. She looked nice as well, with a warm, natural quality that was different from so many of the bleached-blond waitress-types that applied for such jobs. Her speaking voice was lilting, not Miami-courtesy-of-Brooklyn. She had a college degree. She didn’t chew gum on the job. She was, in fact, a touch of class, and the management knew that such a staff member was an asset to the operation. Big-spending guests will return to a specific hotel for so simple a reason as liking a certain waiter or desk clerk.

Soon the different hotels were assigning her to the guests who needed kid-glove treatment: celebrities, big-time brokers (Florida’s Hollywood was called “the Wall Street of the South”), real estate developers… It would have been an ideal situation for Maureen to land herself a fat-cat husband.

“But she wasn’t in it for that,” asserted Ludlow. “She was real independent, just wanted to make good while she could. When she had a little bundle saved away, she was going to write, and that’s all she was going to do. No day job for her. The biggest problem she had was finding the right living arrangements. See, the hotels were more than happy to put her up for the night when she was working the graveyard shift there. There are always two or three rooms that any first-class Miami hotel prefers not to sell: rooms with a view of a dumpster or ventilator, rooms across from the elevator or directly above the ballroom. They know most paying customers would complain, and it’s not worth the grief to them. So when a room-service valet like Maureen or other staff members were working lousy hours, the management would make one of these unwanted rooms available to them. If between midnight and five A.M. it got to be slow going, Maureen could go to a room and nap, rest her legs, watch TV. If someone ordered something in the middle of the night, the front desk would call her room and she’d be down in the kitchen setting up the cart with linen and silver before the steak and fried eggs even hit the grill. All the hotel asked was that she make her own bed and leave the room the way she found it, so the maids wouldn’t have to make it up all over again the next morning.”

Ludlow ran his finger around the rim of the glass. “So she really only needed somewhere to stay three, maybe four days a week, when either the hotel was all filled up or she wasn’t working the hotels but working afternoons somewhere like here, or when, God forbid, she wanted a day off. Of course, like all women, she needed a place to keep her, you know…”

“Clothes,” I prompted.

“Exactly. So that’s when I suggested that she could rent space from me. See, my apartment is only a one-bedroom, but the couple who lived there before me had a baby. They put up one of those plastic room dividers to section the dining area off from the living room. Made it into a nursery. I told her, ‘Look, put a mattress down on the floor in there and you have your own room, privacy, an address.’ I’m not fancy with the clothes, so she had most of my closet space too.”

I took the check from a bleached-blond, gum-chewing waitress and looked it over. “And you got?”

“I got thirty dollars a week. That meant quite a bit to me. I was able to afford a few extra luxuries with that.”

“And?”

He saw my eyebrows raised with innuendo and had the most interesting reaction: a grace note of anger, which slurred into rakish pride. “Well, it wouldn’t have been that odd if Maureen and I were more than just landlord and tenant. I was in my fairly youthful mid-forties at the time. I may not have been a lifeguard, but I was pretty trim, pretty spry.”

I added a tinge of admiration to my voice. “I can see that even now. And I’ll tell you, if it were me, a woman of my age in a strange city, fresh out of college and on my own for the first time, I’d certainly be grateful to have had someone smarter, hipper, to advise me, someone who knew their way around this town, knew all its high spots and high jinks.” I think that may have been the first time in my life I’d said the words “high jinks,” and for the life of me, I had no idea from where in my memory I’d retrieved them. “I’m sure any woman my age would have been grateful for some intelligent conversations too.”

He nodded. “Oh, we had those. Some nights we’d watch TV together before she went off to work. Make Room for Daddy, with Danny Thomas. We liked that a lot. But like you say, it was mainly talking with each other.”

The waitress returned with my change and stepped away. As I fumbled through the bills, Ludlow said, “No, no, I’ll leave the tip.” He set down a five and snapped his fingers at the waitress. “The tip,” he called to her. “From me.”

I rose from the table. “I’m sure Maureen learned a lot from you.”

“Writing, for example,” he said with some considerable pride, not getting up. “Sure, she had courses at that Hunter College telling her how to be the next Shakespeare or Silas Marner.” I didn’t bother to point out that Silas Marner was not an author. “But she knew nothing about the real world of writing. That’s where I was able to help her.” He smiled. “I’m in the trade, you know. Here, I’ll show you.”

He downed the last of his lollipop-flavored vodka, stood up, and put his hand on the tabletop to steady himself. The four gimlets had obviously accumulated on only one side of his body, causing him to wobble just a little. He led me down an escalator to the entry level. We were in between the afternoon and evening sessions of racing and among the last matinee customers to leave. I followed him to a cigarette stand, where a chunky, sweaty-lipped fellow said, “Yes, Mr. Ludlow, what can I do you for?”

Ludlow pointed to a row of tip sheets that were hanging by clothespins from an overhead line. “Let me have the Gazette, Lester.”

“No, that’s yesterday’s, Mr. Ludlow. It only covers last night and this afternoon.”

Ludlow shook his head at the doubting Thomas. “Let me have it, Lester.”

Lester looked sullen. “Well, if you really want it, I’ll sell it to you for seventy cents. That’s what I have to give the distributor if I don’t send it back.”

Ludlow tossed a dollar at Lester, waited for his change, and walked me over to a shoeshine stand, which, with the cigarette counter, flanked two restroom doors marked BOWSERS and BITCHES. Sitting asleep in one of two shoeshine chairs was a Hispanic man in a colorful open shirt that revealed sleeveless underwear and a potbelly. A diagonal scar across his forehead bisected two furrows in his brow, making it look like Zorro had struck again.

Ludlow lightly slapped the side of the sleeping man’s knee. “Shoeshine, Pancho,” he said. I desperately hoped that Pancho was the man’s real name, but I doubted it was. Pancho got down from his perch and Ludlow replaced him in his seat and motioned for me to sit alongside him. I stepped up into the adjoining chair. The hem of my outfit was high on the thigh, and I was sitting mighty pretty from Pancho’s perspective. If a peep show charged a quarter for this kind of action, Pancho currently owed me six boots shined and we were well on our way to having the suede ones weatherized.

As Pancho rolled up my escort’s trouser cuffs, Ludlow instructed him, “Pancho, roll my cuffs up above my knees, will you?” Pancho smiled back broadly, nodding to himself but not acting upon the request. Ludlow added, “Oh, and use peanut butter on my shoes, okay?”

Pancho said okay with the same broad smile.

Ludlow turned to me. “He doesn’t speak English. So. You’re a journalist, you honor the journalists’ code. Someone tells you something off the record, you can’t reveal it, correct?”

I looked him straight in his watery eyes. “I have never disclosed an anonymous source in my life, Mr. Ludlow. Not ever.” As a matter of fact, none of my sources had ever been anonymous; I’d known each and every one of them, sometimes on a first-name basis. “Just check through those articles I showed you if you doubt me.”

I saw the glint of gimlets in the shallow pools of his eyes. “Can you keep a secret?”

“My lips are sealed,” I replied solemnly. Luckily, I don’t write or type with my lips.

He opened the Gazette to the center of its eight pages (really just two sheets of pink paper folded in half and stapled in the middle). He pointed to a column that had a caricature of a turbaned Hindu above it. “THE SWAMI SPEAKS!” was its breathless banner.

As Pancho switched shoes, Ludlow pointed to the copy below the headline and explained, “The Swami picks the best bets at the dog races around Florida. Has a forty-seven-percent success rate so far this year.”

“Is that good?”

“Ted Williams never batted four-seventy. Read the Swami’s picks for this afternoon.”

I read and saw that Ludlow had bet the Swami’s recommendations to the letter, including winners like Bobby’s Baby and losers like Proud Fella.

“You follow his suggestions meticulously,” I said, trying to find some merit in his servitude.

“Whatever the Swami says to bet, I bet. I never deviate.”

“But doesn’t that take some fun out of it for you?”

He leaned closer to me. “Not a bit. Because the Swami is… me.” He waited for my reaction, and I made sure he got his money’s worth. I was dumbfounded to the point of speechlessness. He nodded slowly, savoring the bombshell he had dropped.

“Uh-huh. I told you I was ‘in the trade.’ ” Pancho was done with Ludlow’s shoes and started retying them. “Now you understand why I had to swear you to secrecy. If the Swami’s identity became common knowledge, there’d be no end to the pressure on me to tailor my predictions so as to influence the odds. Bookies and the management here hate it when possible winners start to show long odds. If the Swami started touting these long shots, the pari-mutuel odds would go down, and the track and the bookies would be out of danger.”

I thought of the paltry number of spectators at this afternoon’s races, standing at the one- and two-dollar betting windows, and had to assume he was aggrandizing the amounts of filthy lucre actually at stake here. “It must be very tempting, Mr. Ludlow,” I said. “I’m sure there are any number of shady operators out there who would pay all sorts of money to have you in their hip pocket.”

He fixed me with a stare and brought his face very close to mine, breathing gimlet breath on me. “I am a man of integrity, Miss O’Connor. I’ve written a column for the Gazette for over twenty years now. It’s never paid very much. Enough to defray some of the costs I incur when I put my own money where my mouth is, to mix a metaphor.” I wasn’t sure exactly what metaphor he’d mixed. No matter. “But it’s been respectable work. The Gazette and other such tout sheets may look cheap, but that’s the intent. They’re actually all owned by the Tate-Donner Syndicate—they control the Miami Sentinel and the Hollywood Financial Weekly. They want the Gazette to look like it’s ‘under the counter.’ That’s its appeal.” He paused melodramatically. “When I die, Miss O’Connor, perhaps you’d be kind enough to let the world know who ‘the Swami’ was?”

The world was probably not as keen to know the identity of a prognosticator of dog races at a fading venue in a suburb of Miami as, say, the identity of Woodward and Bernstein’s Deep Throat, but I nodded solemnly at the immense responsibility I’d been handed.

He got down from the shoeshine chair, handed Pancho the going rate of fifty cents, and then gave him another quarter. “That’s for you,” he said. He opened the exit door for me, and the heat hit us both in the face.

“Give you a lift back to your apartment?” I asked.

He said in a carelessly dashing manner, “Oh, I thought I might dine at the Embers this evening. It’s only a few blocks from there, if you wouldn’t mind…” I said that would be fine. He demurred, “I’d ask you to join me, but I’ll be catching up with many friends, regulars there, whom I’ve not seen for quite some while.” He patted his breast pocket, where he kept his wallet. “This has been an exceptionally good day for me.”

We arrived at the parking lot across the street. An attendant fetched me my cool rental car. Ludlow got in the passenger seat and looked about with the expression of a man eager to be seen in a sporty car being driven by a young woman who is dressed in risqué fashion. I drove slowly, and he liked that.

“Mr. Ludlow, one last question about Maureen O’Flaherty? Why do you think she died?”

Ludlow looked at me with some resentment. He was enjoying his little run of luck today, and this topic was spoiling that. “She died because, if I believe the newspapers, she stopped breathing. I assume she drowned.”

We turned onto I-95 and traveled for half a minute in silence.

“I hate that she died.” I don’t know if he even heard himself speak.

“You miss her company,” I ventured diplomatically.

“I hate that she died because it was so stupid of her. Unless it’s a health problem, it’s stupid to die young. The rest of us who go on living, we’re left to deal with it.”

I reached over and placed my right hand over his left hand. It was cold and small and fixed, like a claw. He seemed to shiver at the warmth of human contact.

“You cared for her, didn’t you?” I asked, and he moved his hand away. “Sorry if I seem too personal, but I just want to know if she had found a friend, a caring friend here before she died. It would make it easier to wrap up the article about her if I could say that someone here in Hollywood still missed her.”

He reached into his side pocket and took out a very long pack of More cigarettes. Their brown paper made them look expensive, but they weren’t. He asked in a sullen voice, “Have you ever been in love with someone who just didn’t love you?”

“Yes,” I answered truthfully.

“Not that they hated you, or didn’t like you. They just didn’t love you and there was no way they could even consider feeling that way.”

I told him I had known both sides of that deal.

“You’re pretty,” he laughed flatly. “I think you’ve spent more time breaking the bad news to others than hearing it yourself.”

He had trouble lighting his cigarette, which kept moving away from the flame of his lighter as if he were performing a carefully rehearsed burlesque routine. He finally gave up trying to be suave and held the cigarette still with his left hand while lighting it with his right. “In the end, the only way most people can deal with that kind of rejection—it’s so much, and so hopeless—is to hate the other person. Out and out hate them. You invent reasons if there are none. Like the way you hate people who belong to country clubs that won’t let you be a member. You hate those elite snobs, right up until the second they ask you to join. That’s why I guess so many divorced couples end up hating each other. It isn’t really that, suddenly, they don’t like this person they’d planned to spend their life with. Each hates the other because the other just doesn’t care about them anymore. Not one bit. You turn right into this circle here.”

I turned into Young Circle, a grand rotary named after the fellow who’d decided there should be a Hollywood on the Atlantic. I slowed down because the engine threatened to drown out Ludlow’s voice, which had grown softer.

“I wasn’t a very happy man before I met her, but I had no way of knowing how unhappy I’d been until I had a little happiness. So now I have to hate her, for showing me that my life could have been different. I hate her because she couldn’t care for me, and because she died. The dying part was just stupid, however it happened.”

“And however it happened… where were you when it did?” I asked bluntly.

The water in his eyes froze over. “The papers didn’t say exactly when she died, but it wouldn’t make any difference. I was here in Hollywood, at the track, in my apartment, at the Embers one night and a lobster place the night before. She died in New Jersey, Miss O’Connor. I’ve never left the state of Florida in my entire life. It didn’t matter where I was.”

We had looped around three-quarters of the grand circle, and Ludlow had me make another right onto Hollywood Boulevard. As directed by Ludlow, I pulled up in front of the Embers. Neon flames flitted back and forth above its name.

He nodded at the building. “If you feed a man on nothing but red beans and rice his entire life, he’ll only complain about the weather. But God forbid you treat him just one time to”—he read from a sign in the window—“ ‘our famous charbroiled strip sirloin steak, done just as you like it, served with shrimp cocktail, baked potato, creamed spinach, choice of soup or salad, coffee, and our famous key lime pie.’ God forbid you then tell him he has to go back to only red beans and rice for as long as he lives. That would be cruel and inhuman punishment.” He opened the car door and readied himself to go inside. “Wonder if any of the gang are still here?” he pondered a bit nervously. I had the feeling “the gang” might never have really considered Ludlow a member.

He reached across to shake my hand. “Thank you for the drinks and the company. It was very interesting to have you to talk to.” He hesitated and then said, “I assume I shouldn’t be looking for any articles about dog-racing from you, Miss O’Connor?”

He smiled a thin smile. I watched him adjust the waistband of his pants and primp up the shoulders of his polo shirt before he entered the restaurant.

I made a right on Twentieth Avenue (where do they ever find these names!) and another on Tyler. I saw a sign for the airports of Miami and Fort Lauderdale and started to turn left, but impulsively hit another hard right and a right again. I pulled over to the curb in front of the Embers. Double-parked, I hopped out of the car and into the steak house.

It was really a glorified coffee shop. An old geezer worked a charcoal grill about the size of a beginner’s jigsaw puzzle. All the other people in the place were geezers and geezettes. Ludlow was seated alone in a booth, trying with no success to get the attention of a waitress in her mid-fifties.

I strode over to him as noisily as I could and waited until the patrons were all eyes. I was easily the youngest in the place and definitely the dressiest (or perhaps undressiest might be more accurate), although in my healthy-looking Moon Drops demi-makeup and Geminesse eyelashes, I certainly didn’t look like a hooker. “I just came back to thank you for the most wonderful time,” I said in as lascivious a tone as I could muster. I bent down to him and kissed him. I didn’t kiss him on the lips (that much of a Samaritan I am not), but by holding his alarmed face in both my hands, I ensured that no one would see that I caught him on the cheek instead. I made a second smacking sound with my lips to account for the lipstick on his cheek and pulled away from him. He was a darker crimson than my particular shade of Helena Rubinstein. “Kef, you are such a man,” I said for public consumption, adding in a low whisper for his ears only, “Let’s see how this plays with the old gang.” I turned on my stacked heels and ambulated my way out of the Embers, with a knowing sway for whosoever had eyes to see.

I’m not all bad, right?

Back at the airport, while settling up the car-rental bill, I went into my purse for my wallet and noticed that the notepad with the hot-pink cover, the one with Maureen’s address in it, was now missing. It was no loss; its lone entry had been the 1350 North Dixie address, entered for the sole purpose of displaying it to Ludlow. But now it was gone.

It might very well have fallen out of my bag in the bar or on the shoeshine stand or when I was doing my little lovey-dovey routine at the Embers.

Or Ludlow could have filched it from me, curious to see what else was written between the covers of my hot-pink book.

There was no way to take back the kiss I’d given him. But I promptly stopped at a Rexall pharmacy, bought a pack of Kleenex and some Albolene cream, and wiped off every trace of my lipstick, replacing it with Blistex, in case my lips might be burned by the harsh Florida sun.