Miami Beach is a short-lived resting place for Dick and Perry Smith during their flight, its modest beach-hotel leisure set against the possibility of discovery and the exhaustion of a life on the road. The city gives them a few days by the ocean, but not a stable refuge: a newspaper report turns their recent journey through Florida into an unsettling coincidence, and dwindling funds soon send them west again.

The Somerset Hotel

For five days in December 1959, Dick and Perry Smith share a double room at the Somerset Hotel, 335 Ocean Drive, for eighteen dollars a week. The small, pale stucco-and-cement building stands among similar hotels on a melancholy street; its advertised beach facilities amount to two umbrellas on a narrow strip of sand behind it. On Christmas Day, Dick wears bathing trunks, while Perry keeps his injured legs covered, sitting in socks and shoes. Dick exercises near the water to attract the attention of women under the other umbrella; Perry reads the Miami Herald. Their contrasting uses of the beach—Dick performing, Perry absorbed in the paper—briefly make the hotel seem like an ordinary holiday stop, though their circumstances are anything but settled.

A Florida coincidence

The newspaper carries an account of the Florida Walker family murder case: Clifford Walker, his wife, and their two young children were killed at their cattle ranch near Tallahassee on December 19. The report says the victims were not bound or gagged and describes the crime as apparently without motive. Perry reads it aloud and asks where he and Dick were the previous Saturday night. Dick recalls that they had reached Tallahassee exhausted and decided to stay there. Their proximity in time and place gives the article an immediate personal charge, but the passage presents the overlap as a coincidence, not as proof that they committed that crime. Perry speculates that the killer might be someone influenced by news of the Kansas murders; Dick shrugs off the subject and goes down to the water.

The journey resumes

Their arrival in Florida followed a difficult drive: after leaving Kansas, they traveled through Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, where a failed generator forced them to buy a replacement in Shreveport for twenty-two dollars and fifty cents. They later crossed into Florida, took several tourist diversions, and reached Tallahassee before continuing to Miami Beach. The stay ends as quickly as it began. Dick has worked for one day at an auto-service company for sixty-five cents an hour and refuses to continue at that wage. With only twenty-seven dollars remaining from the money raised in Kansas City, the two plan to leave the next day, heading toward Texas and Nevada without a definite destination. Miami Beach thus marks not an escape from flight but one pause within it: the ocean offers a temporary change of scene, while the road remains their only plan.