Free Miami Midnight by Maggie; Davis Page A

Gables” played championship polo for a Palm Beach team, piloted his own Lear jet, and had acquired an Italian-built power cruiser named the Altavida that had won several prizes for advanced design.
    He didn’t, Gaby thought, frowning, have the usual fatuous, self-absorbed look of a playboy. If anything, those handsome features were too somber, too tense. Still, it was hard to picture the same man as wet and rumpled, zipping up his pants and storming out of her house. The way he had four nights ago.
    Forcing that image from her mind, she returned her attention to the article. Before their exile from Cuba in the 1960’s, the Santo Marin family had apparently lived in Miami as much as they had in Havana. James and his sister Pilar had been born in Miami, which made them United States citizens. In fact, he had graduated from the University of Miami.
    Gaby fought down an uneasy feeling. All that money, the family business expanding into an empire, within a comparatively few years? The exiles of the sixties had been desperately poor; Castro hadn’t let them take anything out of the country except the clothes they wore and one change of underwear. The Santo Marins had obviously been part of that elite, ultrawealthy Caribbean community that had once made the circuit of Buenos Aires, Madrid, and Paris, sent their young to European prep schools, shopped London’s Savile Row and French haute couture houses, and contributed championship players to the international polo set. It had been a world vastly different from the one Gaby knew. Señora Estancia Santo Marin, the Times-Journal feature said, was Spanish-born, and the sister, Señorita Pilar Santo Marin, had been educated in convents in Madrid and Havana. They now kept busy with volunteer work for local charities.
    Charity, Gaby reminded herself with a start.
    She’d been so engrossed in the microfilm, she’d forgotten that Jack Carty had told her to call Alicia Fernandez. She looked up at the clock on the wall. The Times-Journal was a morning paper; its deadline for the next day’s editions were at nine-thirty at night, even though the Modern Living section theoretically worked from nine to five. As she rushed back to her desk in the city room, she hoped it wasn’t too late to telephone Mrs. Fernandez.
    The maid who answered the Fernandez phone didn’t speak English well, but eventually, with the help of Gaby’s minimal Spanish, Alicia Fernandez came on the line.
    “Gabrielle?” Her low voice was unfailingly kind. “How good to hear from you, darling. Did you want to speak to Susan?”
    Gaby was at a loss for a moment, then remembered Susan was the old school friend from Ransom Country Day School.
    “Because she’s isn’t here,” Alicia went on. “Susan would adore to hear from you, Gabrielle, but she’s married now—”
    “Not Susan, please,” Gaby interrupted. How did you plunge right in and ask for a lot of information? It was another newspapering skill she hadn’t acquired. “Ah ... Mrs. Fernandez, I’m with the Miami Times-Journal now, I guess you remember,” she said awkwardly. “I hate to bother you this time of night, but I’m on a deadline. I’m doing a story about the Santo Marin family, James Santo Marin, and it’s important.”
    There was a silence, then Gaby heard a sound very much like an excited, suppressed scream. “Fernando!” Alicia cried. “Oh, my dear, have they let him out? Oh God, tell me they have!”
    Gaby held the receiver away from her ear and stared at it, dumbfounded. There seemed to be a commotion on the other end with people calling out to each other. “Mrs. Fernandez, wait,” she said, not sure she could be heard. “I’m calling about the fashion show at the Santo Marin house. You know, when the model fell in the pond.”
    There was another abrupt silence. “My editor,” Gaby plunged on, “thought you might give me some information about the Santo Marins.”
    The dead air at the other end of the line was