Riptide jl-5

by Paul Levine

  Harry turned around just in time to have a German shepherd stick its nose in his crotch. A woman cop restrained the dog by a leather collar big enough to saddle a thoroughbred. “Whoa, Rex! Sit, boy,” she commanded.

  The security guard started laughing, a hacking cough of a laugh, and spittle dribbled from the corner of his mouth. “Whatcha got in there, boy? That dog trained to sniff for co-cay-un but he wanna do a short-arm inspection on you. You creamin’ in your jeans?”

  Harry’s eyes darted from the guard to the woman cop to Rin Tin Tin, who was one horny canine. “Jock itch,” Harry said. “Had to talcum my privates.”

  The woman cop regarded him suspiciously, but then two more dogs and their handlers were running down the concourse, and she followed them, dragging off Harry’s admirer by a leather leash. Harry decided to get the hell out of there. Who knows, they might seal off the concourse, search everybody.

  The airport’s not safe for your honest business travelers, Harry Marlin thought as he retreated to the entrance. Welcome to friggin’ Miami.

  At about the same time that Harry Marlin was bemoaning the lawlessness that closed down Bahamasair, Jake Lassiter sat at his desk, mourning his friend Berto. He’d had twenty-four hours to play it back, Berto at the beach with Keaka and Lee Hu, Franklin behind the dune with the binoculars.

  Again, phone messages piling up, only one in verse:

  Angry skies,

  A foul wind,

  The banker calls.

  No mistaking that one. Thad Whitney. Half a dozen pink telephone slips. Lassiter buzzed Cindy to tell her he was going over to the bank. Ordinarily she would have hustled him out of there. Not today.

  “You’re not in the right frame of mind to see that twit,” she told him. But Lassiter went anyway, a black tempest of storm clouds brewing in his mind.

  The corner office on the bank tower’s forty-first floor was immaculate — no piles of papers and correspondence, no messy phone messages cluttering the sleek marble desk, no files stacked on the beige carpet. And no smile on the face, much less a pleasant thought behind the bleak visage of Thaddeus G. Whitney, Great Southern Bank’s general counsel. Lassiter looked out the floor-to-ceiling window, warmed by the midday sun. On a clear day you could see across the Gulf Stream to Bimini. Today, it was breezeless and humid, and a haze of auto smog wrapped the high rise in a noxious cocoon.

  An unlit cigarette dangled from Whitney’s mouth, a pitiful attempt to toughen his doughy face. “Jake, where the hell you been? Jesus H. Christ, you won’t believe it.”

  “What’s the problem, Thad?” Lassiter asked listlessly, his mind elsewhere.

  “Problem? Your Commie EEOC is the problem. Some shyster just called me and five minutes later a Miami Herald reporter because a VP in PB terminated an AAT who also happens to be a DBF.”

  “Say what? You’ve got an employment complaint, that’s about as much as I picked up.”

  “Whatsa matter? You play too much football without a helmet? Without my approval, without any oversight by Legal or Personnel, one of our vice presidents in Personal Banking just fired an administrative assistant trainee.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The trainee is a black woman who also happens to sit in a wheelchair.”

  “A disabled black female,” Lassiter said.

  “You got it.”

  Lassiter shook his head. “A potential three-bagger. Race, sex, and handicapped discrimination, all in one case.”

  Whitney ran a hand through his receding hair, his fingers leaving trails through the colorless strands. He lit the cigarette, which, by now, had gone soggy around the filter. “There’s more. She alleges that Phil Bannister, our veep, used to corner her in the hallway by the lunchroom. Small turning radius, she couldn’t wheel herself away.”

  “Keep going,” Lassiter said.

  For the first time Lassiter could remember, Whitney looked embarrassed. “He grabbed her boobs. Every day for a month, she’d get stuck there, he’d grab her boobs.”

  “Sexual harassment, too, a home run. I’ve never had a case with four employment law violations.”

  “To make matters worse, he was groping her during her coffee break.”

  “I don’t see what difference that makes.”

  “She’s one of your Muslims, was headed to the lunchroom to read her Koran. Bannister told her it was against bank policy to pray during working hours.”

  “Apparently it’s okay to cop a feel.”

  Whitney shrugged.

  “Religious discrimination, too,” Lassiter said, “a five-bagger. Legal history in the making. Thad, you’ll be in all the legal journals. Sixty Minutes will knock on your door. Any idea why your sleazy vice president did it?”

  “Bannister’s not real popular with the women,” Whitney said.

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “They usually take an instant dislike to him.”

  “Probably figure it’ll save time.”

  “So he’s got a thing for paraplegics. Doesn’t like women with a moving target. Anyway, when this one wouldn’t put out, he fired her without consulting me. Her lawyer’s a sole practitioner. I need you to tie up the case, get continuances, take interlocutory appeals, paper them to death, whatever it takes.”

  Lassiter shook his head. “Not my style.”

  “What do you suggest?” Whitney asked, his pale eyes narrowing.

  “Settle now. Pay her. Rehire her, give a written apology, fire Bannister, and teach the rest of your officers some simple manners.”

  “Fire Phil? You crazy? He’s my golf partner. And spare me the lecture. Bannister could testify the crip came on to him, he felt sorry for her, goes for a charity fuck, she cries wolf.”

  “You want me to suborn perjury?”

  “I want you to win. That’s what I pay you for.”

  “You pay me for my advice in your office and my skill in the courtroom,” Lassiter said without emotion. “I don’t do your dirty work. I don’t lie to the court or let a client do it.”

  Whitney’s head snapped back as if he had taken a jab to his chin. “Whose side you on?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

  “I’d suggest you do your figuring in a hurry,” Whitney said, exhaling foul smoke through his nose.

  “Look, Thad, I’ve had a rough week. I’m just trying to make it till tomorrow. I have a client who gets ripped off for a million and a half in negotiable paper, and I think his lady friend was in on it. Then my old trial partner gets his neck wrung and strung up like a twelve-point buck.”

  “I heard, actually I read, what’d the paper call him, a ‘socialite’? What a hoot. He’s a socialite like I piss Pouilly-Fuisse.”

  Jake Lassiter decided to let that one pass. He couldn’t expect much compassion from Thad Whitney, a guy whose Lincoln Town Car wore the personalized license plate 4-CLOSE. Lassiter had seen the newspaper story, ten graphs under a two-column head, CUBAN SOCIALITE STRANGLED. Nothing about drugs, but most readers assume it anyway. Funny the way headline writers sum it up for you, a life in a word.

  Thad Whitney was saying something. What was it? And who cared?

  “It is taken care of, right?” Whitney asked.

  “What?”

  “Hey, Jake, anybody home? You with me, fella?”

  “Must have been thinking of something else.”

  “So it’s signed, right?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The deed, for crying out loud! The Cuban’s ranch to the bank, the quitclaim deed you promised me. I trust you got the deed signed before this dastardly crime wiped out one of Miami’s most eminent citizens. I told the Board last week I’d gotten security for the condo loans, they thought I was hot shit, so I owe you one. With him getting snuffed, you and I look like geniuses to get it squared away like that. We’re talking mucho grande bonus for yours truly.”

  The heat rose from inside Lassiter, and he waited a moment, hoping it would pass. He tried to think of so
mething else, something besides moving Whitney’s bland little nose in the general direction of one of his bland little ears or maybe opening the door and tossing him into the lobby of the Legal Department, probably getting cheers all around. Lassiter tried to think of clear skies and steady winds and Lila Summers. It almost worked; he almost let it pass. But not quite.

  “Yeah, he signed the deed, now I wish he hadn’t, wish I hadn’t made a jerkoff like you look good.”

  “Hey, you got some mouth on you.” Whitney got out of his chair and began walking around his office, trying to look tough now, ever the asshole. “You forgetting Great Southern’s good for half a mil a year to Harman and Fox. Your partners would slice you up like snapper fillet if you blew that.”

  “Thad, can you get it through your thick head that Berto was my friend and he’s dead?”

  “My condolences. But he was a turd. You can polish a turd, drive it around in a limo, dress it up in suits and gold chains, but it’s still a turd.”

  Lassiter slowly rose from the chair, his face calm, eyes focused on a distant shore. Whitney saw him coming, got a funny look on his face like he ate something that didn’t agree with him, raised his arms, and stepped backward.

  With arms that had fought off bull-necked tight ends, with wrists strengthened from tugging a boom through thirty-knot winds, Lassiter raised Whitney off the floor by his lapels, not looking into that bland face, and Whitney flushed with fear.

  Then Lassiter shook him, shook him until Whitney’s head flopped forward and back, shook him till his own shoulders ached, shook him for Berto and for Sam and for Jake himself, shook him to purge whatever poison ate away inside him, to become free as the wind.

  Lassiter didn’t hear the door open but there was a gasp and a crash of china as Thad Whitney’s secretary dropped the tray she was carrying, two cups of coffee splotching the beige carpeting, a spot to last the ages, to remind Thad Whitney of the day. Jake Lassiter let go then, Whitney crumpling over his desk like a sack of flour.

  Jake Lassiter loosened his tie, unbuttoned his shirt collar, and calmly walked to the elevator, trying to figure out what the hell to do with the rest of his life.

  CHAPTER 18

  Misty Rain

  Just before sunset, Jake Lassiter headed to his coral rock pillbox between Kumquat Avenue and Poinciana in Coconut Grove. He parked under a chinaberry tree, kicked one of the rally wheels just for the hell of it and slammed the door, hard. The front bumper didn’t fall off, but the grille seemed to frown and from somewhere inside, springs and cylinders and bushings whinnied like an old horse.

  The front door of the house wasn’t locked, just swollen shut from the humidity. Lassiter opened it with a good drive block — head up, shoulders square — and stripped off his suit and black oxfords. He changed into cutoffs and nothing else and, for no good reason, uncoiled the hose, washed down the Olds 442, and worked up a sweat massaging paste wax into the canary-yellow finish. The exertion demanded a two-pack of sixteen-ounce Grolsch with the porcelain stoppers.

  He found three slices of pizza in the refrigerator, the ends curled up like old shoes left in the rain. He dropped the Beach Boys into a tape player almost as old as Brian Wilson and sang along to “Little Surfer Girl,” missing the high notes by twenty yards.

  Thinking of Lila Summers.

  Regressing. A picture from a magazine. A symbol of something, what? Freedom, youth, pleasure.

  Overgrown adolescent jerk, he told himself, reaching for another Dutch brew, crawling into the hammock slung between live oak trees. Falling asleep there in the yard, throwing the porcelain stoppers at a redheaded woodpecker with a machine-gun beak. Missing it, too, by twenty yards.

  No use going to the office this morning. News of l’affaire Whitney had spread — and grown — all over downtown. One version had Lassiter dangling the bank lawyer out the window, a good trick in a sealed-tight skyscraper. No, his partners would swarm over him like mosquitoes on a naked thigh if he went to work.

  Besides, Lila Summers was here. Final warm-ups, the race one day away, and Lila was spinning through a balletlike freestyle exhibition just off the Key Biscayne beach. Jake Lassiter dug his bare feet into the sand and, anonymous behind dark glasses, watched Lila perform. She wore a simple, one-piece white suit cut low in the front and high on the hip. Today, her honeyed hair flew free with the wind.

  As her board reached a patch of smooth water, Lila dropped into a split, legs spread along the length of the board, then slid to her feet and spun a perfect pirouette, releasing the boom for a moment, relying on lightning reflexes to keep her balance. She grabbed the boom again, headed on a beam reach and put one foot under the windward rail, popped it out of the water so the leeward rail sank, then rode the board on its side until she levered it back into the water. Finally she flipped into a handstand, held it for fifteen impossible seconds, and after lowering her feet to the board, somersaulted over the booms and landed gently on her back in the sail. She was poetry and grace and her movements were all in harmony, fluid motions that looked effortless.

  Alongside Lassiter on the beach a television crew was setting up equipment. “Nice trick,” said P. J. Jeter, the ABC announcer.

  “She’s the best that ever was,” Jake Lassiter said. “In the history of the sport, no one has ever done freestyle like that.”

  “Wouldn’t mind getting up close and personal with her,” Jeter said.

  P. J. Jeter, ex-football semigreat, would rather be covering the NFL, but as the junior member of the Wide World of Sports team, he hadn’t gotten past the Texas Prison Rodeo and the Wrist-Wrestling Championships from Petaluma. In a minute he would interview a dude who parceled out smiles as if they were twenty-dollar gold pieces.

  Finally the camera was ready, the microphone checked out. “So how do you like Florida?” P. J. Jeter asked.

  “Flat,” Keaka Kealia said.

  “How’s that?” Jeter asked.

  “Flat land, flat water.”

  “How about the women?”

  “Not flat.”

  “I mean, how about the women windsurfers? Anyone here to compare to your longtime companion, the lovely Lila Summers?”

  “French girl, good form, one German girl, very strong, others, don’t know their names.”

  Oh shit, this is enlightening. “Bet you miss Maui, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  A yes-and-no guy. Might as well interview Marcel Marceau.

  “Your love for your island home is well known. What is it that makes Maui so special?”

  “History. There is much to be learned if you listen to the land and the sea.”

  Bet they talk more than this guy. “I’m sure there is. What lessons would you like to pass on to your fans?”

  “In the Iao Valley there was a great battle two hundred years ago. Chief Kalanikupule ruled Maui but was attacked by much greater forces. Kalanikupule would have been killed, but he created a diversion by sending a warrior in his chieftain’s garb into the valley while he escaped into the mountains.”

  Now what the fuck does that have to do with windsurfing, P. J. Jeter would like to have asked. Guy’s probably stoked out of his mind on Maui Wowie. “Okay, let’s talk about your world speed record…”

  Lassiter listened for a moment, then caught sight of Lila Summers foot-steering toward shore. She called to him, “Take one of Keaka’s boards. He’s busy being a big shot.”

  Jake Lassiter’s brain cells did not have to appoint a committee. If she’d told him to hang by his heels from the hotel balcony, he’d have asked which floor. Keaka Kealia already had rigged four different slalom boards and Lassiter settled for a middle-of-the-road nine footer with a five-point-eight-meter sail. He peeled off a faded Penn State T-shirt, hitched up his trunks, and beach-started by hopping onto the board in the calm water just beyond the shore break. In a minute he was next to Lila Summers, who was appraising his form. The wind was kicking at about eighteen knots and an angry cord of steel-gray clouds hung over th
e horizon.

  “It’ll take me a little while to get used to the equipment,” Lassiter said.

  “Don’t worry, you’re doing great,” she said. The board was custom-made for Keaka’s specifications and Lassiter, taller and heavier, expected it to be sluggish. Instead, the board turned so quickly on his first jibe, he barely had time to flip the sail to get going on the other tack.

  After a few minutes in the swells, Lila yelled above the wind, “I’m tired of shredding back and forth.”

  “Follow me,” Lassiter shouted back. More comfortable now, he raked the boom in tight and trimmed the sail, catching a gust that shot him in front of Lila. She laughed and pursued him down the coastline. The wind was humming now, twenty knots with stronger gusts as the sky darkened and they neared the lighthouse at the tip of the island, the condos and hotels out of sight. Lassiter remembered the strange trio there — Berto, Keaka, and Lee Hu — wondered again what he had barged into. He felt a sharp twinge realizing Berto was gone, then the sting of guilt, because he was enjoying this moment, enjoying the breeze and the water and the company of a young woman, pleasures Berto would never know again. While he was thinking about it, a gust caught him standing up too straight, and a second later, the mast whipped forward, slinging him off the bow. He landed on his back and skipped like a stone another twenty feet.

  “You okay?” Lila yelled as she luffed the sail to slow down and pull alongside.

  Lassiter came up spitting water, his neck hurting, his ego bruised. “Sure, no problem. Just was thinking about something else. Zigged when I should have zagged.”

  “Concentration, it’s the most important thing. Stay there a second.” In a moment, Lila Summers was beside him in the water, their boards floating alongside. She faced him while they both treaded water, the hooks from their harnesses clanging against each other.

  She was close enough to kiss, so he did, her lips salty and yielding. She kissed him back and wrapped her legs around him and his neck stopped hurting, and then the skies opened and a hard rain pelted them, and still they kissed but now the swells tumbled over them, growing with the squall that roared from the northeast.