by Paul Levine
Chapter 17
* * *
Shades of Gray
“HE GAVE YOU A MILLION DOLLARS?” CHARLIE RlGGS ASKED, his bushy eyebrows arched in disbelief.
“Cash. In fifties.”
“Goodness gracious!” Charlie’s hand trembled and he slurped conch chowder through his mustache. “And where have you stashed the loot?”
When he gets excited, Charlie tends to talk like a B movie. “I stashed it in an old Dolphins’ equipment bag that I liberated from the locker room about a thousand years ago. The bag is sitting in the trunk of my antique Oldsmobile about thirty yards yonder.”
Charlie shot a glance into the parking lot and back to me again. When he tries to act inconspicuous, Charlie looks like a man trying to act inconspicuous. Beneath the bushy beard, his face was beginning to color. Either he was holding his breath or they put too much Tabasco in the chowder. We were sitting on the front porch of Tugboat Willie’s, a ramshackle fish joint behind the Marine Stadium on the Rickenbacker Causeway. With the February boat show on Miami Beach and the art show in Coconut Grove, it was just about the only place you could eat outdoors that wasn’t mobbed with tourists in Bermuda shorts and Hooters’ tank tops. “More than a mouthful,” according to the slogan on the back.
Charlie looked from side to side, then lowered his voice. “You should sequester the, ah-chem, cookies in your safe-deposit box.”
“Huh?”
“A million cookies.”
“Oh, I get it. You afraid I’ll eat them?”
“No, lose them.”
“Can’t put them in the box,” I said. “My safe-deposit box is about as thick as a goal-line stripe. You knowhow much room a million in cash takes?”
Charlie made a shushing sound with a finger to his lips.
“To give you an idea, my old equipment bag used to hold all the shoulder pads for the offensive line, and it’s jammed full. We’re talking twenty thousand fifty-dollar bills.”
“Okay, okay,” Charlie whispered hoarsely, glancing nervously at two boaters at the next table. The men were chomping dolphin sandwiches—fried fillets with mayo and onions on white bread—oblivious to our discussion, though Charlie doubtless imagined them fugitives from Interpol.
I was scooping smoked fish spread onto saltines and nursing a beer. “Sometimes in the movies, a guy opens a briefcase, one of those three-inch Samsonites, and there’s supposed to be a couple million bucks inside. No way.”
A pouting waiter in a Florida State T-shirt, a kid with a ponytail and one earring, brought Charlie’s yellowtail snapper, broiled well done, and dropped a plate of stone crabs in front of me. Maybe I’m just getting old, but the young today seem to slouch and sulk more than we did.
When the waiter retreated to the kitchen, Charlie whispered, “You’ve got to go to Abe Socolow at once. lake the money to him.”
“That’s exactly what Nicky Florio wants me to do.”
“You know what I mean. Tell Socolow everything. Testify in front of the grand jury.”
“What for?”
“To indict Nicky Florio, of course.”
“For what, or did I just say that?”
“Jake, what’s wrong with you? For murder and attempted bribery.”
Charlie’s fish was getting cold. A breeze was blowing from the bay, and the palm fronds clattered against each other. At least we weren’t getting a whiff of the sewage plant from nearby Virginia Key. “As for murder,” I said, “Socolow’s got no jurisdiction. It didn’t happen in Dade County. Hell, it didn’t happen in any county. It’s Micanopy territory.”
“The locus delicti,’” Charlie muttered.
“The tribal police have investigatory powers, and the federal courts have ultimate jurisdiction if there’s a case. But there’s a big problem, Charlie. No body.”
“No corpus delicti,” Charlie said.
“Now I could go under oath and tell Abe I witnessed this murder, and then helped dispose of the body….”
“Accessory post facto.”
“But there are three witnesses who’ll claim I’m lying or hallucinating….”
“Ah, the dramatis personae.”
“Charlie, do you think you could stop that?”
“Deo volente, God willing.”
“Even if the feds can find the place, and some sophisticated canoe maker like you can find a splotch of blood or a tooth at the bottom of the slough, my word won’t be good enough.”
“Why not?”
I dived into the stone crabs. The claws hadn’t been thoroughly cracked, and I was using a cocktail fork like an ice pick to dig out the meat. “For the same reason I can’t blow the whistle on the bribery. The million bucks came from Rick Gondolier’s safe. He skimmed it from the bingo hall. At least that’s what Florio says. Now I show up, blabbing that Florio’s trying to bribe Abe Socolow, but if Abe is dirty, he’s already in Florio’s pocket, and he’ll tip Florio that I’ve pulled a double-cross. If Abe’s honest and looks into my charges, Florio will claim that Gondolier and I stole the money, then had a falling-out, after which I killed him, and to save my own hide I—”
“Tried to frame Florio,” Charlie said. He stabbed a fried plantain with his fork and toyed with it. “So just give the money back to Florio. Just say no.”
“I can’t do that, either.”
Charlie raised the plantain to his mouth and stopped just short. He was going to lose weight if this kept up much longer.
I gave a helpless shrug. “Nicky told me he still reserved his first option.”
Charlie’s look asked the question.
“To kill me. He’d justify it to Gina. ‘Hey, I gave the guy a chance, and he screwed up.’”
“So what are you going to do?”
I polished off the beer and signaled the waiter for one of its cousins. The kid looked right through me, his optic nerve apparently not connected to his brain.
“The bull rush,” I told Charlie.
“Bull…”
“No spin moves, no snatch and go, just a frontal assault. Hit ’em high, take a shot, hit ’em again. Somebody falls on his ass.”
“Jake, speak English, please.”
“You’re one to talk. Ouch!” My cocktail fork had slipped, and I pierced my thumb on a jagged piece of shell. I sucked a pinprick of blood from the meaty tissue just below my thumbnail. An infinitesimal spot of red, but it made me think of Rick Gondolier, his neck spurting blood, his life gone in seconds.
“What I’m going to do, Charlie, is real simple. I’m going to do my job. I’m going to bribe Abe Socolow.”
In law school, they teach us ethics.
They teach us not to steal from our clients and not to lie to the court. They teach us not to suborn perjury and not to obstruct justice. They teach us to put the client’s interest ahead of our own. They teach us right from wrong, black from white. But they don’t teach us shades of gray.
A long time ago, Charlie Riggs told me there was only so much to be learned from books. Doctus cum libro, he called it, numbered rules and tidy paragraphs intended to guide our conduct. But life is messy. B doesn’t always follow A. The system doesn’t work if you make up the rules as you go along, and the rules work only if the players follow them.
The books don’t describe the icicle shivers down the spine when a man with a machete stands within arm’s reach, measuring the distance with hard eyes. The books don’t describe the taste of bile and the clenching fear. The books don’t prepare you for life, or death.
In the end, we march along a path drawn by our own moral compass. The sum total of our life experiences guides us in a way our conscious minds could never decipher. We make choices without realizing why and trigger events we never foresee. And always we rationalize who we are and why we act the way we do.
Our instinct for self-preservation is accompanied by a hearty dose of self-delusion. Nicky Florio is a lover of nature and a creator of jobs, not a robber baron and a killer. Abe Socolow is a dedicated prosecutor
, not just another hack politician on the take. And I am a hardworking professional who dedicates himself to the diaphanous concept of justice, not a shyster who illegally wiretaps, sleeps with another man’s wife, helps cover up a murder, and bribes public officials.
Knowledge of self is acquired through a shattered mirror. But we can always close our eyes.
My friends know the doorbell doesn’t work. Hasn’t for years. Someone who tries the knob will think the door is locked. It doesn’t budge. But friends know the door is humidity-swollen, and one good whack with a shoulder will squeak it open. So I keep it unlocked.
The little house is two stories, made of coral rock, and sits on a Coconut Grove lot ninety-five feet wide. There are Poinciana and chinaberry trees in front and a rope hammock strung between live oaks in the weedy backyard. Inside are several ceiling fans, stacks of newspapers and windsurfing magazines, a bowl of star fruit on the kitchen counter, last night’s spaghetti in the fridge, a coffee table made of a sailboard propped on concrete blocks, and other designer touches that never won an award in Architectural Digest.
It was a fine late afternoon in March. I was wearing cutoff jeans with stringy holes and nothing else when somebody knocked on the door. It was a dainty knock.
A process server would bang harder.
A former teammate would simply barge in.
Charlie would mutter ancient Roman sayings as he tried to sweet-talk the door.
And Granny would curse up a blue streak.
At first, I didn’t know whose fist belonged to the delicate knock.
I must have forgotten, must have banished memories of afternoon visits.
I yanked the door open.
“I had to see you,” Gina said.
She was wearing a pink leotard, white high-top sneakers with pink laces, white tights, and pink wristbands. The manicured nails were perfect and pink. Her long blond hair was pulled back from her forehead by a pink sweatband. She looked like strawberry-swirl ice cream in a sugar cone. Her face was flushed, and a fine line of perspiration trickled down her neck. What was it someone said? Men sweat, women get dewy.
“I just came from the gym. I must look like an old Sweathog.”
Sure. And Venus de Milo is an old chunk of rock.
I stood there, staring dumbly at her.
“May I come in?” She brush-kissed me and slid inside, her steamy fragrance bringing back memories, and not of jogging or aerobics.
“I had to see you,” she repeated, in case I missed it the first time.
She didn’t sit down. She wandered around what passes for a living room, running a finger over furniture the Salvation Army couldn’t give away, avoiding a barbell loaded with 315 pounds of steel plates, tapping her fingers on the keys of an old manual typewriter. Finally, she turned to me. “Where’s Rick?” she asked.
“Rick? Rick Gondolier? You came to ask me about him?”
I didn’t like my tone. Whiny, petulant. How could she still affect me like this?
“Do you know where he is? Nobody has heard from him.”
“You mean he hasn’t called you. Why don’t you ask your husband about good old Rick?” Whiny had become mean.
“I did.”
I just looked at her.
“He said, ‘Ask Jake.’”
“So here you are.”
“Well?”
“Your husband is a dangerous man, but you probably know that.”
“I think he’s gone off the deep end. This new project in the Everglades, the…”
“The casino.”
She stopped wandering and looked at me. “He told you about that?”
“Right down to the last crap table and the charter buses from Punta Gorda.”
“And the rest of it?”
“The rest?”
“Besides the gambling.”
“The town, of course. The expanded condos, the golf course, the complete resort.”
“Anything else?”
I tried to read the look on her face. “The museum,” I said. “Nicky told me about the museum and the living habitat.”
She stayed quiet. A thought was bouncing back and forth behind her black-rimmed blue eyes.
“What else is there, Gina?”
She wasn’t talking. Whatever she was thinking, whatever else Nicky was up to, was locked inside. She came to me, looked up from under her dark lashes, closed her eyes, parted her pouty lips, and said, “There’s this, just like always.”
Then she kissed me with open, salty lips. I knew it was intended as a distraction. So it shouldn’t have worked. I should have pressed her, cross-examined her, used all my skills to figure it out.
But just then, our tongues were dancing soft and slow, and while part of me wanted to toss her out the front door, if I could get it open, the rest of me, the part descended from the primordial soup, wanted something else entirely. I dipped a hand under her thighs and scooped her into my arms. She put her arms around my neck and giggled girlishly, then nuzzled my neck, as I carried her up the stairs.
“I should shower,” she said, but I shook my head. I wanted her overheated, flushed, and pungent. In the bedroom, she took off her sneakers and peeled down her socks. She stripped off the pink leotard and white tights, without any help from me. She fell backward into the bed and waved me aboard. I dropped my cutoffs to the floor and did a perfect swan dive that ended with my head between her breasts.
“Nicky knows about us,” she breathed into my ear.
I knew that.
“I promised I wouldn’t see you anymore.”
I knew that, too. Nicky had told me.
“He’d kill you….”
I figured that out all by myself.
A new lover is anticipation tinged with tension. The promise of unknown thrills, the possibility of disappointment. A familiar but occasional lover is comfort enhanced by exhilaration. And now it was intensified, the thrill heightened by the risk, the risk as real as a razor-sharp blade. We carried into bed the past and our own lost innocence. Together, apart, together again. Physical pleasure plus a depth of feeling that can never exist in a one-night stand. We carried, too, the present, a high-wire balancing act, the sense that this time could be the last, the next breath the final one.
After a while, there was no sense of time or place. Just an awareness of rhythmic movement, a dizzying trail of lips and fingers, breasts and loins, electric sensations, gentle pulsations, and firm pressures of two lovers who know themselves and each other. The pace increased, breaths chugging faster. Our bodies joined in a fury of urgency, conscious thoughts lost in the roar of each other’s engine, a syncopated meshing of gears, turning faster, thrusting deeper, clenching harder. In one explosive moment, the vise of her legs tightened, and she bit down hard on my lower lip, and her body and mine flowed into one.
I lay there on top of her, a drop of blood falling from my lip onto her breast. I kissed the spot, salty and sweet from the sweat and blood.
“My legs are shaking, Jake. I couldn’t stand up if I had to.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Does that mean I can stay?”
“As long as you want, or until you have to make dinner for your husband, whichever comes first.”
“I don’t make him dinner. That’s what servants are for.”
Ah, how quickly they learn. “But Nicky will want his lovely wife at the table.”
She squiggled out from under me and gave me a shove. “Jerk! You can’t let it be, can you? I’m here with you in the afterglow of the deepest emotional experience I’ve maybe ever had, and you take a cheap shot like that.”
I rolled onto my back and locked my hands behind my head. Above me, the paddle fan whompety-whomped through its turns. I tried to keep my eye on one of the blades. It made me think of a machete. “Just thought it might be nice to welcome you back to the planet Earth after the talk about staying.”
She propped herself up on an elbow and looked me in the eyes. “You mean you don’
t want me?”
“In a court of law, my actions would give rise to a contrary inference. A pretty big rise, as it were.”
“I mean it, Jake. If I left Nicky, would you want me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like permanently.”
“Gina, with you, nothing is ‘like permanently.’”
“Except you, Jake.”
“If I’m so permanent, why do you keep leaving?”
“I told you before. Because you never asked me to stay.”
“Look, Gina, it’s a little late in the game for soap-opera dialogue. ‘All this time it was you, Jake.’ Too many years, too many Rick Gondoliers. It’s too late to turn back the clock.”
She ran a pink fingernail over my chest. “I didn’t come here to ask about Rick. I came to see if you still cared.”
“Why do you need reassurance? You know I do.”
“Do you love me?”
The paddle fan kept making its circles. The fingernail kept making its figure eights. My mouth kept closed.
“Jake?”
I was sucking my swollen lower lip. “What difference does it make?”
“You do love me. Why can’t you say it?”
“Okay, let’s say, hypothetically, I loved you as much as Tristan loved Iseult.”
“Who?”
“From mythology…”
“Naturally. Love is pure myth to the blockhead, Jake Lassiter.”
“Tristan was a great knight whose job was to fetch the beautiful Iseult from Ireland and bring her back to King Mark in Cornwall who wanted to marry her. On the ship, Tristan and Iseult unwittingly drank a love potion and fell hopelessly in love.”
“Same thing used to happen to me with Chardonnay.”
“Hush now and listen. Tristan becomes a knight at the Round Table and has a passionate affair with Iseult, who now is married to the king.”
“Sounds like us. Are you making this up?”
“No, when I wasn’t banging heads on the practice field, I took Mythology 101 in college. One day Tristan is wounded by a poison spear. Iseult has great healing powers, so he sends for her. He desperately tries to hang on, and she sets sail to reach him. But he is falsely told that she is not aboard the ship, and, alas, he gives up hope and dies before she reaches him.”
