Mortal Sin jl-4

by Paul Levine

  “I’m more concerned about a recent autopsy,” I said.

  It took Charlie only a second. “Oh my, Mr. Tupton. I nearly forgot. I’ve scoured the M.E.’s report, rechecked the findings. Acidosis due to hypoxemia in peripheral tissues. Ventricular fibrillation. Just as you said, nothing inconsistent with hypothermia.”

  “The prints, Charlie? What about the Super Glue?”

  “Ah yes. The methyl-methacrylate test. A thumb and forefinger of sufficient clarity. Quite a nice double loop on the thumb and a tented arch on the forefinger, as I recall. Have you ever read the definitive text by the Argentinean Juan Vucetich? Dactiloscopia Comparada. Published a hundred years ago, but still valuable in assessing…”

  “Charlie!”

  He cleared his throat. “Sorry for the digression. The prints came from the right wrist of Mr. Tupton. Others on the left wrist were simply not usable.”

  “And?”

  “Well, the ones we’ve got match up quite nicely with that of your client, Nicky Florio.”

  “I see.”

  Charlie was silent a moment. “Do you?”

  “I’m not surprised, that’s all.”

  “Why?” Charlie asked. “It proves nothing. When the paramedics arrived, the body was outside on the patio. Florio gave a statement saying he carried Tupton out there. Obviously, he may have grabbed the man by the wrists to hoist him up and carry him out.”

  “Or he may have dragged him into the wine cellar by the wrists when Tupton was still alive.”

  Charlie scowled at me. “Just whose side are you on, Jake?”

  Again I was silent. At trial, I try not to ask a question when I don’t know the answer. In real life, I don’t like to respond to questions for the same reason.

  An open Jeep with four Hispanic teenagers was crowding me on the left, its radio blaring “ Sopa de Caracol. ” Again, I tapped the horn, which now blared a few notes of the Penn State alma mater.

  The guy riding shotgun in the Jeep, a pimpled bodybuilder in a muscle T-shirt, reached under his seat and came up holding a nine-millimeter handgun. He didn’t point it at me, just sort of waved it in the air with a smirk on his face. What is it our local humorist Dave Barry likes to say? Miami is a place where homicide is a misdemeanor, and motorists use guns instead of turn signals. Something like that. As if to prove the point, the Jeep pulled into the far left lane, cutting off a florist’s delivery truck, then screeched around the corner without flashing a turn signal.

  “I read somewhere that the homicide rate goes up when it gets hotter,” I said.

  “So? What does it mean?”

  “That the heat makes us angrier, I suppose. People lose their temper, that sort of thing.”

  Charlie shook his head. “ Quot homines, tot sententiae. So many men, so many opinions. There are a myriad of variables that could affect the homicide rate. Other factors may coincide with the summer months besides heat. Perhaps unemployment, heavier drinking. Do you follow me?”

  “Like a duck behind its mother.”

  Charlie chewed on his cold pipe. “There’s another study that shows that men’s sperm count goes down during the summer. Would you say the heat causes that?”

  I was getting too smart to jump to conclusions. “No, it probably has something to do with baseball.”

  “Just as likely,” Charlie said with a laugh. “Men who live and work in air-conditioned surroundings also have reduced sperm counts in the summer, so the heat may be irrelevant.”

  Traffic thinned as we neared Sweetwater, a suburb of Nicaraguan emigres on the western fringe of the city. “So what’s my point, Jake?”

  “Same as always, Charlie. Things are seldom what they seem.”

  “Correct! Non semper ea sunt quae videntur.”

  “You took the words right out of my mouth,” I told him.

  A handsome white ibis sat on the hood of a Dodge pickup. We pulled in next to the truck, and the bird flapped its black-tipped wings and took off, but not before leaving behind a memento on the windshield. Next to us, two charter buses from Wachula were disgorging their elderly passengers. I helped Charlie Riggs out of his shoulder harness, and we walked into the bingo hall, a gleaming white building the size of a convention hall.

  Inside, the pot-of-gold and pull-tab video games blinked their red and green lights, dispensing coupons redeemable for cash. No jangle of coins here, but these were slot machines just the same. Slide a twenty-dollar bill into the slot, get twenty plays. If three oranges come up, you win. Three gold bars pay top prize of $5,592. Nearby, in a perimeter room, a game of thirty-number bingo was under way.

  In the main hall, the crowd was still forming for the early-bird game. According to the signs, the games would continue until 4:00 A.M. Some of the old folks were ambling through the cafeteria line, bringing fried chicken and mashed potatoes with iced tea back to their seats. The Wachula retirees-white shoes and bright plaid outfits-were trooping toward the tables. Their voices, chirpy and expectant coming through the door, dropped into respectful murmurs as they entered the main hall, their cathedral of chance and providence.

  In the center of the hall was a small motorboat on a trailer, one of the many prizes of the night. Television monitors blinked out the numbers before they were called. “B, five; O, sixty-four.” The players, women in polyester slacks, men in bowling shirts, turned plastic ink bottles upside down and squooshed the sponge heads on their cards to record a number.

  “Jake, come have a look at this.”

  Charlie was toddling toward a glass showcase behind the motor-boat. Inside the case was what looked like a miniature town. Scale models of a main street of three-story buildings. Shops on the ground floor, offices and apartments above. Beige stucco walls, orange barrel-tile roofs, a faintly Spanish look. A few blocks away, a semicircle of twelve-story condos surrounded by a moat. An elementary school with tiny figures of children and even an Irish setter frolicking in a grassy yard. Gas stations and a bus depot and a familiar fast-food palace with golden arches. A golf course wended its way around bodies of water.

  A tasteful green-on-white sign announced:

  CYPRESS ESTATES

  ANOTHER FLORIO ENTERPRISES COMMUNITY

  Reservation Deposits Now Being Accepted

  It could be anywhere, this generic white-bread community. You could stick it west of Boca Raton near the turnpike or down in Homestead by the old air force base. But it was intended to be built somewhere else entirely. Inside the glass play world were adornments not usually seen in models of dream towns.

  Plexiglas saw grass.

  Miniature wood storks and flamingos and spoonbills, lazing in shallow water.

  Cypress trees draped in cotton, spray-painted to resemble Spanish moss.

  An airboat seemingly skimming across the saw grass.

  A great blue heron-its wings swept high-in the sky above the man-made Glades, suspended in space by a single thread.

  Alligators, green and scaly, in a moat surrounded by a concrete wall.

  A restored Indian village, or at least a designer’s idea of one, with dugout canoes, campfires, and natives dressed in loincloths pointing bow and arrow at a Lilliputian deer.

  Charlie was thumbing through one of the brochures stacked by the display case. He read aloud: “‘Back to nature. Enjoy the beauty of the Everglades as no one ever has.’”

  “Or will again,” I said.

  Charlie tapped his cold pipe against the glass case. “They don’t show you the infrastructure, do they? You don’t see the bulldozers destroying the egrets’ nests. You don’t see the fill turning the water to slime or the sewers or the dredging or the leaks from the gas station’s tanks. You can’t hear the infernal racket of the pile drivers or smell the fumes of the diesel engines. You don’t see the Styrofoam cups or the plastic six-pack holders that strangle the fish and the birds.”

  “Easy, Charlie, you’ll pop a blood vessel.”

  “Surely you don’t approve of this, do you, Jake?”

/>   “No. I just can’t believe it will ever be built. Think of the permits required. County, state, Army Corps of Engineers, Department of Resource Management. Even with all Nicky’s lawyers and lobbyists, I don’t see the project getting the green light. It’ll be just another developer’s pipe dream, a model under glass.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right,” Charlie said, “and if the government can’t stop it, maybe the environmental groups can tie up Florio with a lawsuit. The way the courts work, it’d take years, and by then, he could lose his financing or be focused on other deals. It happens all the time.”

  That sounded familiar. “That’s what Gina said Nicky was worried about, an environmental suit. Nicky must have been infuriated that somebody he considered a pipsqueak could wield such power…”

  “Motive,” Charlie mused. “Would that be sufficient motive to kill a man, to keep him from suing?”

  I didn’t answer. My attention was diverted.

  “Jake?”

  Charlie’s gaze followed mine. On a balcony above us, uniformed employees scanned the floor of the bingo hall. A man and a woman stood at the railing. He was in his thirties with thick sun-bleached hair tied back in a pony tail. He wore one of those shapeless black sport coats with the sleeves pushed up. Thick, veined forearms. Even from here, I could make out a diamond-stud earring sparkling in the glare of the overhead lights.

  Pretty-boy looks with a bonecrusher jawline to keep from being too pretty. He wasn’t smiling, but I imagined perfect pearly whites, one of those guys with a natural ease with women. I’d been around enough to recognize the type, an oily charm, all his brains in his bikini briefs.

  The man said something to the woman, who touched his sleeve and laughed. She said something back to him, and it must have been hilarious, too. If this were the 1940s, you would say they were laughing gaily. I’d been right. The guy had a great grin.

  Their eyes locking on each other, they didn’t look our way. Or any other way. There is the cliche about lovers being alone in a crowd. But like a lot of cliches, it is based on truth. The rest of the world be damned. Sirens could be wailing, the building could be ablaze. No matter.

  I had seen the look in a woman’s eyes before. I had seen the look in this woman’s eyes before.

  Next to me, Charlie was stirring. “Say, Jake, isn’t that Star…?”

  “Gina,” I said.

  “Whatever. Unless my old eyes deceive me, that ponytailed gentleman is not her husband.”

  “Rick Gondolier, and he’s no gentleman,” I said. “He handles Nicky’s gambling business.”

  “Perhaps that’s not all of Nicky’s that he handles. Goodness, boy, do you know your neck and ears have turned quite red? Either you have a touch of dengue fever, or…”

  Gondolier leaned close, and the two of them gently kissed. Not a passionate kiss. Only their lips touched. But the kiss lingered and seemed to reflect a silent affirmation of something more. I am not an expert on body language, but I know a thing or two about kissing. This one spoke of a comfort level between the two, of a naturalness. It clearly said that they were lovers.

  “Jake, you’re not involved with that woman again, are you?”

  That woman sounded like a communicable disease. I didn’t answer him.

  Charlie sighed. “ Amantes sunt amentes. Lovers are such lunatics.”

  They turned around, Gondolier’s hand lightly falling across Gina’s shoulder, guiding her. Then they stepped away from the railing and disappeared.

  “Well, now,” Charlie said, “isn’t that the man you wanted to see, the one in charge of the gambling?”

  “I’ve seen enough,” I said, and started for the exit. I didn’t stop to fill out a raffle ticket or try my luck at the electronic slots.

  Charlie trundled after me, straining to keep up. “A bit huffy, are we?”

  I didn’t say a word.

  “If you ask me-”

  “No one has,” I told him.

  “…Nicky’s the one who should be jealous, not you. What’s the legal term, Jake? You have no standing, isn’t that it? You’re not a party to the transaction.”

  I pushed through the door to the parking lot with Charlie on my heels. I stopped short, turned, and looked down at my old friend. “Charlie, do me a favor. Stick to the fingerprints and the bodily fluids, and the other stuff you know. You’re out of your field now, so please lay off the personal relationships. I’m a big boy, and I can handle myself.”

  Charlie stared at his shoe tops. He looked like an old mutt that had just been kicked. Which only made me feel worse. I knew what I was doing. Angry at Gina, angry at me, angry at the big, wide fickle world, I was taking it out on my dearest friend.

  Damn, I’m stupid sometimes.

  I tossed an arm around his shoulder and rumpled his gray wiry hair. “I’m sorry, Charlie.”

  “Instead of clamming up, why not talk about it?”

  “It’s painful.”

  “All the more reason to speak from your heart of hearts.”

  Around us, more plaid and polyester folks were streaming into the bingo hall. Why does everyone over seventy seem so short? We moved a few paces from the front door and stood on the edge of the parking lot.

  “It hurt when she left the first time,” I said. “And hurt more every time she came back, because she’d always leave again. I was a way station for her, a pit stop on the way to something better. It didn’t matter if she was married at the time. I’d always be there for her.”

  “And now, Jake? What makes it painful to see her with another man? After all, she’s married. What’s another spoon in the soup?”

  “It cheapens what we have. Or had. It reminds me what a fool I was. Or am.”

  The squeal of brakes. I stepped back as an armored truck, a tin can on wheels, pulled up. A set of double doors opened from inside the bingo hall, and a uniformed security guard wheeled a golf cart out and headed toward the truck. Attached to the golf cart was a wagon filled with leather bags three feet high. Two other guards, their guns drawn and pointed at the ground, followed the cart to the truck.

  “What makes you a fool, Jake?”

  “For feeling the way I do about Gina.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The rear door of the truck opened. Inside, a man with a shotgun scanned the parking lot. He looked at Charlie and seemed to decide he didn’t pose a threat. He looked longer at me.

  “Jake, you’re blocking it out, sealing yourself off from your feelings.”

  “Didn’t realize you did psychological counseling, too. You must have had some troubled corpses over at the county morgue.”

  “C’mon, Jake. No wisecracks. How do you feel where Gina is concerned?”

  Analyzing feelings isn’t my strong point. If I kept it up, I’d turn into a quiche-eating, wine-sipping semi-sensitive man of the nineties. “Weak. Wistful. Full of regrets.”

  Now I was looking at one of the security guards. He wore gray pants with a black stripe, a blue uniform shirt with epaulets, and a gold badge. He was chunky, short, and round-faced with a squashed nose. His eyes were hidden under the bill of his cap. In a pudgy hand, he held a. 357 Magnum. It was pointed straight at the ground ever since the money came out of the bingo hall. He looked familiar, but in profile, and in that uniform, it just didn’t compute.

  “Jake,” Charlie said, “are you telling me that you love the girl?”

  “I don’t know, Charlie. Maybe it’s just always wanting what I can’t have. Maybe it’s not knowing what I want. There was a time when I could have had her, but I let her go. I didn’t tell her how I…”

  The guard was staring at me. He had turned and now faced me straight on. Then he smiled. “Ay, Counselor, never expected to see you here. Testing your luck at the tables?”

  No, it couldn’t be. But it was.

  “Hello, Guillermo. I didn’t recognize you. How’d you get a permit to carry the piece?”

  “I got n
o felony convictions that haven’t been overturned on appeal or pardoned. I always get the best lawyers, remember.”

  “Whoever represented you upstate must have known his stuff, or you’d be doing twenty-five years minimum mandatory-at Raiford right now.” Charlie nudged me and cleared his throat. “Doc Riggs, say hello to Guillermo Diaz, a former client.”

  Diaz ignored Charlie and laughed, though nothing seemed particularly funny. “From what I hear, Counselor,” Diaz cackled, “you may do more time in that case than me. I got off clean. Speedy-trial rule.”

  “I didn’t think the dockets were that crowded in Ocala.”

  Diaz laughed again, his belly bouncing. His colleague was tossing the moneybags into the back of the truck. “Didn’t say they were. But what does the state do when its star witness is missing?”

  “Gets a continuance.”

  “Four continuances. You gotta give those shitkickers credit, they kept trying. ‘Yo Honor, we can’t find Mr. Ra-fa-ale Ray-mose anywhere. Jes’ give us another thirty days.’”

  “You do redneck real well,” I allowed.

  “Yeah, well, those country boys continued their asses right into the speedy-trial rule. Case dismissed.” He turned toward Charlie. “Hey, Doc. Some shit-for-brains horse trainer doesn’t knowhow to use a power saw, they charge me with murder.”

  “What happened to the missing witness?” Charlie asked, because I didn’t. But then I already knew.

  Diaz raised the gun and pointed it directly at my head. “Bang, bang,” he said. “And bang.” This was so funny he rumbled up another laugh. “I don’t know. Maybe he committed suicide.”

  The shotgun-toting guard pulled the doors of the truck shut from inside. Diaz lowered his gun and holstered it.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “What’s it look like? Working for Mr. Gondolier. I’m head of security. No more leg breaking. Just making sure there’s no smoking in restricted areas and no wise guys trying to pull a heist.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Ay, why not, Counselor? Don’t you think I can do the job?”

  “Sure you can, Guillermo. A fox can always guard the henhouse.”