Free Blood Relations by Barbara Parker Page B

look, though the architecture was a few decades off.
    Caitlin pressed the buzzer outside his door on the first floor. A business card was taped under the peephole: Martin Cassie, Tropic Realty and Investments.
    In the still air, she took off her cap and fanned her face.
    A muffled salsa tune came from upstairs. The tiled hall ran straight back through the building, opening up to flowering shrubs and a fountain. A plump gray cat in the next doorway got up, stretched, then came to see who she was.
    Frank Tolin had persuaded Marty to let Caitlin do the resort brochure. Frank was a lawyer downtown, and the two men had some business dealings together. If Marty didn’t pay Caitlin, Frank would handle it. But then she would have to listen to Frank tell her how much he had done for her, and wasn’t she lucky?
    Rumbling with purrs, the cat wound itself around Caitlin’s ankles. She bent over to scratch under its chin.
    “Hello, kitty-cat.”
    She and Frank had an off-on relationship. Currently on, she thought. In the middle of the Miami Vice craze, she had come down to see what was going on, liked the sunshine, and stayed. No, not entirely true. She had been fired from a Vogue shoot for showing up stoned and had no money to get back to New York. Frank had let her stay at his place in Coconut Grove till she found an apartment.
    They had been together-off and on-ever since. Nobody was talking about marriage. Frank had been married and divorced twice already, and Caitlin liked to come and go as she pleased.
    She pressed her ear to the door of Marty’s apartment.
    “Damn.” She rang once more, then gave up. He could be anywhere.
    At a pay phone a couple of blocks away she left her number at his office and on his beeper. She carried a beeper herself; Marty couldn’t say he wasn’t able to reach her. She checked a few of the sidewalk restaurants and two real estate offices. No one had seen Marty Cassie.
    Unwrapping a deli sandwich as she walked, Caitlin headed north toward Lincoln Road. Tommy Chang had an extra key to her studio; he would have taken the cart and equipment up there by now. She owed him a hundred dollars. That and processing the film they had shot would just about clear out her account-unless she put off paying the rent on the studio for another week or so. Or borrowed the money from Frank. At least she didn’t have to worry about her apartment. Frank owned the building and wouldn’t let her pay.
    Stopping at a crosswalk in a crowd of pedestrians, Caitlin waited for the light to change. In the middle of the next block she spotted the Apocalypse, looking pretty tame in broad daylight, Just another white concrete front with an awning over the door, except this building used to be synagogue, which might have amused her under other circumstances. It had curves like Mosaic tablets at the roof-two curves and a dome with silver paint. She supposed the congregation had died off or had moved a few miles north, or off the Beach entirely. A year ago, sure of herself, Caitlin had lain in wait with her camera until a family of Hasidic Jews had wandered by, father in black suit and hat, mother in calico dress and head scarf following behind with the children. Caitlin had clicked happily away, and when she got the photos back, they were one cliche after another.
    The traffic light changed. Caitlin didn’t move, only gazed through her sunglasses across the intersection.
    The prospect of having to talk to Sam Hagen was going through her mind. Having to sit across a desk from him, being interrogated, as Sullivan had been interrogated.
    That Sam had not already contacted her might mean he wasn’t going to. But if he did, what then?
    Why had she been at the Apocalypse that night? Well, taking freelance society photographs for a local magazine. And why had she not confronted those men, pulled her friend to safety, screamed for help?
    Because in the dark I couldn’t see; then it was too late.
    And because, if you really want to know,