Flight from a Firing Wall

By Baynard Kendrick

A doctor in 1965 Miami is embroiled in international intrigue in this thrilling adventure from the author of the Duncan Maclain Mysteries.

In 1960, Dr. Antonio Carrillo fled Havana for freedom in Miami. Now, five years later, Tony works as a resident internist at the local VA hospital, and one hot summer day, he receives a phone call from a young woman who needs his help. A yacht pulling into Miami’s harbor has rescued an ill man from the water. When Tony sees the patient, he’s shocked to discover it’s his father-in-law.

Ernesto Garcia ran the vicious secret police under Batista and went on to become a commander in Castro’s Rebel Army. He wasn’t a man to be trifled with . . . so what was he doing floating around in the ocean? As Tony investigates, he discovers that Milagros, the wife he thought died in Cuba, is alive. Rescuing her now means returning to his homeland and putting his life on the line. But the good doctor has a few surprises of his own up his sleeve . . .

“Adventure a-plenty.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A thriller that moves at high speed.” —Oakland Tribune 

Baynard Kendrick was a founding member of the Mystery Writers of America, the holder of the organization’s first membership card, and a winner of its Grand Master Award.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Mar 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781504065696

Baynard Kendrick

Baynard Kendrick (1894–1977) was one of the founders of the Mystery Writers of America, later named a Grand Master by the organization. After returning from military service in World War I, Kendrick wrote for pulp magazines such as Black Mask and Dime Detective Magazine under various pseudonyms before creating the Duncan Maclain character for which he is now known. The blind detective appeared in twelve novels, several short stories, and three films. 

Book preview

BOOK I

MIAMI

1

It was one of those Miami melters in July that the local Chamber of Commerce soft-sells by calling midsummer tourist weather. The weather bureau, heavily subsidized by the local press, would be careful to report the temperature between 78° F. and the mid-eighties, but the reports from my sweltering body were different. I knew that if I ever got up nerve enough to take a look at the clinical thermometer clipped like a fountain pen in the inside pocket of my linen jacket I would find that my left breast was running a fever of 104°.

When I swung my 1961 LeSabre into the parking lot next to the bus station on N.E. First Street and climbed out away from the air conditioner, it was like standing on the launching pad during the blast-off of a Titan rocket.

An attendant came up just before I had melted down into a grease ball and asked me if I was going to be long. It was a fair question, but one that for the moment I couldn’t answer since I didn’t know. To play it safe I admitted to an hour, or maybe two, and told him I was going to have lunch at the Columbus Hotel. He tore a ticket into two pieces, gave me half, and stuck the remainder under the windshield wiper, a device that is used by all parking lots throughout the country to easily identify the remains of any car.

He got in, slammed the door, and took off backwards at an easy ninety with the tires screaming almost as loudly as I wanted to. Somehow, he managed to slot it between a DeVille and an Electra and still leave all the paint intact except for a few unimportant excisions made when he opened the door.

I stood there partially paralyzed at such surgical skill, and wishing for the old days when Buicks were Buicks, Cadillacs Caddys, Chevrolets Chevys, Chryslers Chryslers, and Fords just Fords. It made for such simplicity when one had to file an insurance claim. Today you can’t tell back from front nor one from another, and the middles are hidden back of those fancy names picked off some Pullman car.

So close in back of me that I jumped for my life, somebody blew a horn. It woke me rudely from my dream of becoming President of General Motors. I whirled around to find the grille of one of those red foreign two-seaters not an inch from the point of my spine. It wasn’t very large, but it represented plenty of lire in anybody’s money.

When I finally got my sight back from the sunlight on chrome, I could see that back of the pint-size windshield there was a pair of those wrap-around black goggles. If the car had a top, it was down. I stepped up closer and discovered that the goggles were perched on a small straight nose, with a pair of carmine lips underneath.

"¡Lo siento mucho! I am very sorry!" The lips apologized in both Spanish and English which is the safe thing to do in Miami today, since there are more Cubans in Miami—including me, Dr. Antonio Carrillo—than there used to be in Camagüey.

"No ha sido nada. Think nothing of it, in any language, I said beaming with my best bedside gallantry. What’s one humble life like mine when a thousand people are killed by automobiles in this country every holiday?"

Two slim brown hands with polished red nails came up and unwound a gossamer pink scarf that had been hiding a head of wavy hair. She shook the scarf loose and the hair fell into place at the back of her neck, as fine as spun silk and blacker than the goggles. She opened a tiny door, performed a fast contortion feat, and produced a long pair of shapely legs to stand up on. They must have been hers, since she had brought them with her, but I couldn’t see where she had put them away in that car.

Her shapeliness was evident, at least from the waist clear down, for she was wearing a pair of those pink acrobat tights, pre-Minsky, which the present-day shops along Lincoln Road in Miami Beach advertise as stretchers. They fit with all the loose freedom of a pair of surgical rubber gloves, and it must take a pound of K-Y lubricating jelly to get them on. Seems she’d forgotten her socks, for slender toes with polished nails peeped out from a pair of gold-strapped sandals. The upper deck was chastely covered with a sleeveless jacket of gold lamé.

I must have been staring rudely when Hot Rod Harry, the sweaty car smasher, bustled up and put her through the time routine.

How long will you be, miss?

Probably a couple of hours or more. She flashed him a smile that should have started more sweat glands working if he hadn’t already been dehydrated. It failed to excite him any more than I had. Cubans or Americans, he’d probably been smiled at or cussed out by them all. She turned from him and aimed the black goggles full on me. I’m having lunch with Dr. Carrillo here.

Hot Rod gave me a dirty look, like I’d purposely kept something from him. He vaulted handily into her wee one and shot it off backwards to be stored in the trunk of another car.

I lapsed into Spanish and produced some inanity about not remembering where we had met before. She said, sticking to her English, which was perfectly good, We haven’t, except for a short conversation over the telephone. I’m Liliana Medina.. Do you mind if we go somewhere where it is quiet and a little cooler?

I said I didn’t mind, and decided to look at my watch to recover my aplomb. I felt much more at ease when I found it was ten minutes to one. She tucked a hand under my arm and, chummy as a pair of lovebirds, we walked the short distance to the hotel entrance. I had to admire the possessive way she had latched on to me, even though I had never laid eyes on her before.

Our conversation was limited to an extreme.

Two hours before, about eleven o’clock, someone had called me at the Veterans Administration Hospital at Coral Gables, where I had been employed as a resident internist for the past two years. (Let me make it clear that an internist is a specialist in internal medicine and not an intern as so many delight in calling me!) It was a woman, who had said I didn’t know her, but who had been frank enough to admit that she was Señorita Liliana Medina, as if that meant anything to me.

She asked if I could meet her about one o’clock at the entrance to the Columbus Hotel. Why? Well, most important! When I started a bit of natural spade work, instead of wasting time with explanations at the other end of the telephone a record had started to play.

It was just the last few lines from María la O, sung by that wonderful singer Dolores Perez. It worked on me like a shot of adrenalin. María la O, a lyrical farce in two acts by Gustavo Sanchez Galarraga, with music by Ernesto Lecuona, was presented first in the Teatro Pairet de La Habana (Theater of Havana) by Lecuona’s own company.

The operetta takes place in Havana in the year 1800, and concerns the sad love affair of a beautiful mulatto whose name, María la O, gives title to the play. It has become as familiar to generations of Cubans as Franz Lehár’s Merry Widow has to citizens of the USA.

It was not the operetta itself which hooked me, so much as the scene which my unidentified señorita had picked as the winner of the hit parade of the play. That scene, from the year 1800, takes place in the Alameda de Paula, a promenade noted for its beauty besides the wharves of Havana. The ruins of Paul’s ancient church, still by the wharves, are all that remains to remind one of it today.

My own memories of that ancient Iglesia de Paula were slightly more recent than 1800. In fact, they dated back only to the late summer of 1960, when as an active worker in the anti-Castro underground I was warned by my ex-professor at the University of Havana, Dr. Jorge Villaverde, that my wife, Milagros García de Carrillo, and I would live a happier and longer life in the city of Miami.

Together, we might have, except that we had never had a chance to try. Instead, after five lonely work-filled years, I was still vainly trying to ease the aching pain in my heart, and to blot from my mind those poignant memories of the short two years of happiness that I had known in Cuba with Milagros. She was one of those rare Cuban women of Andalusian descent, with the fairest of skin and shining red hair. We had grown up together, and our love along with us, following us through adolescence and emerging full bloom when she worked for my father’s advertising agency, Hatuey Publicidad S.A.

We were married in June 1958, in the church at Matanzas which houses the wonder-working statue of Our Lady of Montserrate and both of us were sure that the miracle She performed that day would last forever. We honeymooned on my cruiser, named for my mother Margaret-A, fishing, lazing and loving in the sun, and exploring the tiny islets in the shallow bays. Only one small shadow marred the sheer perfection of it all. Milagros had married me without her father’s blessing, but we were far too much in love to let the anger of Ernesto García intrude on our consummate happiness. Or could it have been that we were just too dumb?

Ernesto had been a coronel under Batista, with a company of the most vicious secret police that ever spread terror throughout Havana ready to shoot or torture any suspected insurgent on whom Batista might frown. While he had grown slightly splay-footed from trying to work both sides of the street while walking down the middle, no one had ever exceeded his sprightly footwork in reaching the proper sidewalk where the banks were about to open again. My father always claimed to the day he died that with amigos like Ernesto you needed no enemigos to help you on your way.

If he had ever loved anything outside of himself, pesos, politics and power, it was probably Milagros, whose mother had died happily giving birth to their only child while Papa was away, busy with his bullwhip and Beretta getting an honest election for Col. Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar, and giving a brand new life to torn Cuba in 1940. My earnest suegro or father-in-law to be was only a shavetail—a teniente— then; but on our tight little island it is hard to keep a bad man down. When his daughter and I had tried to get away from his loving care in 1960, he had reached the rank of comandante in Fidel’s Rebel Army, the equivalent of a general in the US Army, and had become as Red as the nose on Rudolph the reindeer.

It was not quite dusk when Milagros, enveloped in the flowing black habit of a nun, and I, disguised as a priest and armed with an artistically forged passport, plus a .45 automatic, both under my cassock, got safely past the first checkpoint. We were about to board a freighter bound for parts unknown at the docks near the Antigua Iglesia de Paula, when a jeep closely followed by a truckload of soldiers came steaming down San Pedro. It became quite apparent that someone had blown the whistle on my wife and me.

Milagros’ eyes were sharper than mine. She must have seen a rifle raised, for she quickly stepped in front of me. I still remember the red of her hair as her cowl was pushed back, and the deeper red of the blood spreading slowly against the starched white collar that covered her shoulders. I must have gone a little crazy for the automatic started jumping in my hand and three of Fidel’s musclemen who were closing in went down. Either luck was with me, or unseen friends were helping me. However it happened, I came to on a forty-foot pleasure cruiser headed for Key West with two metralleta bullets from those crummy short Czech machine guns in me. I stayed conscious just long enough to speak to a man in the opposite bunk and discover that he was very dead. In five years’ time I had heard nothing from Milagros, nor about her, yet so strong is that eternal hope that deep inside I refused to believe that God could be so cruel as to take both my wife and my country from me. Anyhow the US Coast Guard has those bullets, but the holes which keep my memory fresh are still very much in me.

This sieve-work in my anatomy had allowed a lot of loving kindness to leak from what had formerly been a trusting young M.D. Scnorita Medina was going to have to come through with a few more hard facts before she could milk a lunch from the likes of me.

With the idea that a little heat treatment might help her to let down another few inches of that silky hair, I stopped outside of the entrance before going into the air-conditioned hotel. Holding both of her arms, I turned her around to face me and tried to read something from looking deep into her eyes. Searching for an expression through those ebony goggles was like trying to read through the deuce of spades.

I said, "Lookit, señorita, chiquita, honey-chile, sweetie-pie, is Liliana Medina really your name?"

She shook herself free from the squeeze I had purposely put on her slender arms. I told you that over the telephone.

Period, I said, "con música de Ernesto Lecuona."

If you weren’t interested why did you come?

"I’ve always been interested in meeting strange women who call me up on the telephone. Particularly Cuban women who like the music of María la O." I turned my wolf glare on full. It happens to me every day. At the first sound of those lines: ‘… that which stirs within me is his son, señor …’ I’m rarin’ to go!

But this one you don’t trust very much? Her lips moved upward in half a smile. Isn’t that so?

Most of them don’t trail me in from Coral Gables following the caduceus on the back of my car.

She said, "It is different, no? Usually the man is trailing me. It was my sister who asked me to do this. She called me this morning from her husband’s yacht, the Kerritack. They have been off the keys on a fishing trip, and expect to dock at the city yacht basin between three and four. She told me where to reach you at the hospital and described you very accurately."

It is indeed most flattering! But why me?

They have a very sick man on board. It is he who hoped you might be persuaded to meet him. Will you?

I might. I lit a cigarette for thinking time. What is his name?

She doesn’t know, or didn’t say. Does it matter since he is ill?

"No importa. Did your sister also ask you to follow me?"

"Yes. I picked you up when you came out of the hospital and watched you get into your car, then trailed you to the parking lot. The doctor’s emblema—how do you say?"

Caduceus.

"Caduceus, sí, it made it very easy. Soledad, my sister, wanted me to make quite sure that you didn’t stop anywhere on your way into town."

Anywhere like what? I asked her sharply.

Any official office. Her red-nailed fingers plucked briefly at her jacket. Like the police, immigration, the Coast Guard—anywhere in the Federal Building. You see, the man they are bringing in, who is so very ill, is a Cuban refugee.

Oh? And he’s the one who doesn’t want to meet any of these nasty American officials?

She nodded.

And with all the doctors in Miami, he picked on me?

I’ve told you everything I know, she said stiffly. Don’t you believe me?

I believed her enough to know that I was hooked. You win, Liliana, I said. Let’s go upstairs and eat on the roof where we can watch all the pretty hospital ships come in. The lunch is on me.

That top-secret Cuban refugee arriving on the Kerritack was something I had to see. His build-up was better fitted to a fugitive from a chain gang who was recovering from a mild case of leprosy.

2

In contrast to the sun outside, the ground floor where we waited for the elevator was dark and cool. The elevator stopped at the lobby floor, one flight up, to let on four earnest young businessmen acceptably clothed in dark-blue suits, white shirts and dark ties. Miami or Havana, you can’t make a success in the commercial world if you are comfortable and cool.

I thought of my father, Roberto Carrillo, in his advertising agency, Hatuey S.A., near the American Club on Paseo del Prado. Before the days of air conditioning the office could hit a 100°, yet the height of discourtesy was to receive a client in your shirtsleeves. I could never remember him without a jacket on.

The elevator stopped at four to admit an elderly couple of the Social Security Set. He was wearing a short-sleeved sports shirt that was a mixture of a Hawaiian sunset and dawn after a bad night on the town. His hair was as white as spray in a storm, but sparks came into his pale blue eyes at the sight of Liliana’s stretchers. Under the pink fluorescent elevator lights, one quick glance might have given the illusion that she was clad in a bikini. His buxom Señora was taking no chances. She turned him around to face the door and moved her ample bulk in the way. With our morals saved, we soared on up to the seventeenth floor.

The dining room was fairly crowded, with several parties waiting. Liliana took over. She turned loose a burst of charm on the hostess, who either knew her better than I did or wanted to tuck those legs away. Or maybe her ship-to-shore sister had already reserved a table. Who was I to say?

Whatever the magic password, while others were still standing we found ourselves sitting face to face in a green leather booth with a picture window beside us overlooking Biscayne Bay.

I ordered daiquiris (which are properly Bacardis—before the name became corrupted along with so many other things in life).

Liliana said, I’m tired of Miami. Tired of changes. She pointed out the window to where a brand new island of fresh white sand was being filled in just south of the MacArthur Causeway. Miami hates anything natural, particularly if it’s water. Soon there will be just solid land between here and the beach and no trace left of Biscayne Bay.

She took off the dark concealing glasses. At sight of the long-lashed luminous eyes, as black as her hair, I recognized her instantly. I had heard her sing at one of the better Cuban restaurants transplanted from Havana, and at one of the newest posh hotels across the bay.

There are no pep pills for nostalgia, I told her. That, not tiredness, is the syndrome of refugees, like you and me.

It was only a half-truth, for I was tired myself. Tired of living with shadows of the past and puling poetry when needed sleep was far away … the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still! I was tired of punk politicos all over the world, who were happily playing Ping-Pong with peoples’ lives to line their own pockets. Dead-dog-tired of a resentment, thicker than tear gas, that rolled around me strangling me more thoroughly every day—a resentment that I knew was a child of my own unhappiness and which I still couldn’t entirely ignore. For the moment it threatened to choke me into sullen silence. I sat there with nothing to say.

The waitress came. We ordered lunch and another round of cocktails. Out on the bay, a sports fisherman creamed by Burlingame Island doing twenty knots in a five-knot zone. A police launch shot out from some hideaway back of Brickell Point and took off after him like a whippet. The skipper must have swallowed his plates at the stop he made off of Bay Front Park when the water cops gave him the horn. This evidence of American law in action gave me a chance to become philosophical and indulge in a bit of corn.

I said, I wonder if anything on earth really changes except people? Old towns vanish and new ones are built, highways take the place of mud trails, land appears where water was before, but Florida is still Florida. Islands are dredged up from the bottom, but the bay is still Biscayne. Take this rum. I held up my glass. It used to be made in Cuba, but now it’s Mex, shipped in kegs to the Bahamas, and then from there to be bottled in the United States, but the cocktails are still daiquiris, and the rum is still Bacardi.

I don’t exactly get your meaning. She studied me with a tiny frown.

Cuba’s still there. Just ninety miles south of Key West across the Straits of Florida—all forty-four thousand square miles of it, still there. Only the people have changed, and then only in their thinking, the ones who are still there, and the ones who have left as we did.

Our second cocktail came. Liliana toyed with her glass, and decided to give me the language test. She broke into a rapid flow of Spanish.

Are you really a Cuban, Dr. Carrillo? You have me puzzled. You look more like an American with those brown eyes and that brown hair, and you certainly talk like one—your slang and no accent at all. Then, when you start soliloquizing … Well, it’s odd. I get the feeling that you’re thinking in Spanish, like a Cuban, even though you are speaking English.

I sipped my drink and gave her a taste of the old Carrillo Castilian pounded in me since birth by the best advertising man Havana ever knew. "I’m a half-breed, chica. I was born in Havana, and my father, Roberto, owned the advertising agency, Hatuey S.A. He came from a long generation of Cubans, but my mother was an American, a Connecticut Yankee, Margaret Adams. She was a well-known singer and musical comedy star, like you, only slightly before your time."

She smiled. I am complimented that you know me, but I can scarcely be called a star.

Nevertheless, many do! Although I graduated in medicine from the University of Havana in 1959, I spent most of my early years with my grandparents in Hartford, Connecticut, and graduated from prep school at Avon Old Farms, not far from that city. I guess I’m what they call completely bilingual. That goes for you, too.

I broke off abruptly. The local disc jockey who was feeding records to the piped-in music had decided the customers were screaming for that recording of María la O. Or had he? Could be I was getting touchy, but it was the same record that had hooked me in a few hours before and I didn’t like the coincidence—if it was one.

Liliana was quick on the uptake. She said, They’re playing that record for me. It has nothing to do with you. She had switched back to English. I have made it sort of a theme song and it has gotten connected with me. They happen to know me here, and at a lot of other places in Miami and at the Beach too.

How did it get connected with me? I wanted to know.

I haven’t the faintest idea, honestly. She shook loose a cigarette and I gave her a light. As I told you, my sister said to play you the last few lines when she called from the yacht on the ship-to-shore phone. I’m curious, naturally. I hoped you might care to explain it to me.

I explained it in a watered down version which I felt was sufficient to take care