“I can’t do it today. My shift is about to begin. What about tomorrow?”
“Let’s see… I have classes until one o’clock.”
“Classes?”
“Here at U. Miami. That’s where I am right now.”
“Oh yeah, you mentioned that. Okay, I’ll meet you over there at one-fifteen. Where will you be? My shift starts at four, but that ought to give you enough time…”
Nestor was consciously stringing all this planning out. He had one eye on his watch. He wanted to stay here in this CVS air lock until he knew the others would have to get out of Kermit’s to make the shift. One of them would have to eat his check, probably Hernandez. But it was only for one coffee… and hell, he’d pay him back. The main thing was not to have to sink back into that damned discussion.
The girl continued to chatter on about where they could meet on the campus… and Oh God, she hoped she wasn’t making a terrible mistake, because after all, he was a police officer. It wasn’t like seeing a lawyer, but she couldn’t afford to go see a lawyer… and the words kept popping out of her bundle of nerves, and pretty soon Nestor was only halfway listening. Instead he kept seeing her legs… her legs and her alabaster skin. He barely made the shift on time.
Shortly before 1:00 p.m. the next afternoon, Nestor had just entered the University of Miami campus in his Camaro for his rendezvous, or whatever it was, with Ghislaine Lantier. ::::::¡Santa Barranza!:::::: He had no history of deriving aesthetic pleasure from landscaping and horticulture, but now not even he could fail to notice ::::::This place is a real piece of work!::::::
A lush green lawn covered every inch of the campus and rolled on forever over vast distances, it looked like to Nestor from the driver’s seat of the Camaro. It was all so luxuriously green and uniform, you’d think God must have laid it out like Astroturf. Rank after soldier-like rank of royal palms with smooth palest-gray trunks created super-sized colonnades on either side of pathways in godly allées. They ran through God’s own greensward up to the entrance of every major building. Those grand entryways made the most ordinary white Modern and clay-tile-roof Colonial buildings look magnificent. Yet the allées were merely the most striking part of this arboreal show. There seemed to be hundreds—thousands?—of low shade trees, creating lush green frondose umbrellas fifteen or more feet in diameter… and they were everywhere… they were shades for shady terraces and sun filters for exotic and floriferous beds of tropical flowers. Lush was the word, all right. You would think Coral Gables had an annual rainfall equal of Oregon’s.
It was lunchtime, and students were coming out of the buildings and heading here and going there.
::::::They look like nice kids having a happy time… in their T-shirts and shorts and jeans and flip-flops. They’re smart, them or their parents. They’re on the road to running things. These kids walking around the campus right now—right there—they may not look like much, but they’re all in the game! They’ll end up with the degrees you got to have, the BAs and BSs and all that. Even in the Police Department these days you gotta have a degree from a four-year college if you want to get anywhere. To rise as high as captain, you got to have that degree, and it’s a huge, huge plus in the competition for lieutenant. Without those letters after your name, you can’t even hope to rise any higher than sergeant.::::::
Nestor stepped on the gas, and the Camaro’s souped-up engine made a great thrashing sound protesting the unfairness of life, and sped up San Amaro Drive toward Richter Library, the biggest library on campus, and his appointment, his police inquiry, his whatever, his rendezvous, with Ghislaine.
He might have known Richter would have a colonnade of palms. Thank God. It kept the building, which was wide-spread but only three stories high, from looking like a warehouse. He was ten minutes early. Ghislaine had said she would meet him out front. So he parked immediately at the street end of the colonnade and just watched people walk into and come out of the building. Occasionally an older-looking person showed up. He kept wondering just what this… appointment… was really all about.
Barely a minute before 1:15 a girl comes out of the library—a vision!—wearing only a straw hat with a black ribbon and a brim wide as a parasol, a demure