VI
Coral Gables is the Dead End district of Orchid City, a shack town that has grown up around the harbour where an industry of sponge and fish docks, turtle crawls and markets plus a number of shady characters flourish. The water-front is dominated by Delmonico’s bar, the toughest joint on the coast, where three or four fights a night is the normal routine, and where the women are more often tougher than the men.
Monte Verde Avenue lies at the back of Coral Gables: a broad, characterless road lined on either side by cabin-like houses, all more or less conforming to the same pattern. As a district it is perhaps one step above Coral Gables, but that isn’t saying a great deal. Most of the cabin-like houses are occupied by professional gamblers, light ladies, flashy-looking toughs who lounge on the water-front during the day and mind their own business after dark, and the betting boys and their dolls. The only two-storeyed house in the road is owned by Joe Betillo, mortician and embalmer, coffin maker, abortionist and fixer of knife and bullet wounds.
I drove the Buick along the road until I came to Eudora Drew’s cabin on the right and about three-quarters of the way down. It was a white and blue five-room wood cabin with a garden that consisted of a lawn big enough to play halma on and two tired-looking hydrangea plants in pots either side of the front door.
I stepped over the low wooden gate and rapped with the little brass knocker that hadn’t been cleaned in months.
There was about a ten second delay: no more, and then the door jerked open. A solid young woman in grey-green slacks and a white silk blouse, her dark hair piled to the top of her head, looked me over with suspicious and slightly bloodshot eyes. She wasn’t what you’d call a beauty, but there was an animal something about her that would make any man look at her twice, and some even three times.
Before I could open my mouth:
“Spare your breath if you’re selling anything,” she said in a voice a little more musical than a tin can being thrown downstairs, but not much. “I never buy at the door.”
“You should have that put on the gate,” I said cheerfully, “look at the time it would save. Are you Miss Drew?”
“What’s it to you who I am?”