by Paul Levine
“So fire me.”
“Not a chance. That fish wrapper you represent would nail me. ‘Slipshod Administrator’ or some other bullshit editorial.”
He looked toward the floor. “Hey, Jake, you know one of your shoes is all wet? What the hell is that, looks like—”
“Truth is, Nick, you’re more of a trial lawyer than an administrator.”
“Damn right, and that’s why the public loves me. I don’t sit up in the office finagling budgets or figuring crime statistics. I do battle in the courtroom, where it’s all on the line.”
“And the television crews have permanent spots in the front row.”
He laughed. “Today I wish they weren’t there. Friggin’ city cops got a confession the old-fashioned way.”
“Forget to Mirandize?”
“Worse. They bring in this yahoo for a double homicide, charged with killing a couple on lovers’ lane out on the causeway. Except they got no weapon, no prints, no witnesses that are still breathing. So they put a colander upside down on the yahoo’s head—”
“A colander?”
“Yeah, like to wash lettuce. Then they put Walkman earphones on him and tape the jack to the photocopy machine. One of them writes on a piece of paper, ‘He Lies,’ and slips it under the lid of the machine. Then they ask the guy if he did the deed. He says no. One cop pushes the button, the light flashes, and out pops a piece of paper…”
“Which says, ‘He Lies.’”
“You got it. Finally they tell him to admit the crime just to see what happens, like an experiment. One cop slips in another piece of paper…”
“‘He Tells the Truth.’”
“Right. Plus they turn on a tape recorder.”
“Judge throw out the confession?”
He picked up his Coke. “Faster’n you could say Earl Warren.”
I laughed, but he didn’t. He was thinking. I tried to pick up the shadow of the thought behind those dark eyes, but it stayed inside. Finally he said, “This club called Compu-Mate?”
“Yeah. You know it?”
“My wife joined when we got separated. I’d call at night, she’d be talking dirty on the computer.”
“She tell you anything else, like who she connected with?”
“Nope. Didn’t interest me.”
“What about Marsha?”
“I never knew she joined. What’s the big deal? Probably something else Prissy got her into.”
“Like women’s awareness?”
“Yeah.”
“And seeing you.”
“Yeah.”
“What else?”
“How should I know? I didn’t see them together, and I didn’t talk a hell of a lot to either one.”
He was getting irritated. It had been at least twenty minutes since anyone told him what a great guy he was. “Did Marsha ask you many personal questions?”
“Some.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“Just the usual life-story bullshit you gotta toss at them to get in their pants. I told her what it was like growing up poor. The high school athlete stuff, going into the service. Told her all my cop stories from when I was a patrolman.”
“What about war stories?”
Maybe it was my imagination, but he seemed to lose a little of the color in his cheeks. “If you mean ‘Nam, I don’t talk about it. Not to her, not to Prissy, and sure as hell not to you.”
“But you won the Silver Star, right?”
“Yeah, right.”
“It’s on your campaign brochures. You talked to the Journal about it as part of a profile before your first election.”
“So?”
“Talk to me.”
He looked at his watch. “All I’m gonna say is what’s in the public record. We had a translator, a Vietnamese girl, maybe nineteen or twenty, educated in one of the French convents. We got pinned down in a firefight in a village. We lost two men in the first five minutes. It was getting dark. Raining, like always. The girl was supposed to stay with the RTO, the radio operator, but she got separated and Mister Charles grabbed her.”
“Mister Charles?”
“Charley, Chuck…”
“VC.”
“Right.”
“Charley backed out of the village and scattered east across some mud dikes through the rice paddies. I led one platoon in a chase. A second platoon was two clicks—two kilometers—north of us. We moved parallel to each other to the east. We caught Charley in the open on the dikes. That’s all.”
“You rescued her?”
He paused and scanned the room. “We recovered her body.”
“And the VC?”
“Killed seven, wounded twelve.”
“And your men?”
“No casualties once we got out of the village.”
There was more to it, I knew. But I didn’t know what. “The other platoon?”
He straightened in the chair as if it were time to leave.
“Casualties?” I asked.
“Three dogwood six.”
“Three dead…”
“Ferguson. It was his platoon.”
“Ferguson.”
“Yeah. And Epstein, the witch doctor, the medic. Plus the RTO, I don’t remember his name. That’s all I’m going to say.”
I wanted to ask more about that day, about Ferguson, whose name popped out of Marsha Diamond’s computer, but I wanted to know more first. I shook my head and tried to shift gears. “You know anything about Compu-Mate?”
“Like what?”
“Any men who belong?”
“Hell no!”
“What about you? Ever join, ever use your wife’s password, get online?”
Nick Fox stared hard at me. “Whaddaya think, I’m some kind of weirdo? If I want a woman, I don’t beat around the bush, no pun intended. I just walk right up and say, ‘I’m Nick Fox, and you’ve got the greatest legs I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen them from here to Hong Kong.’ Gets them every time.”
“Thanks for the lesson.”
“Always the legs, Jake. Never say tits or ass. Always legs.”
I considered taking notes but figured I could remember the basics. “Nick, I think I have someone for you. Her name’s Bobbie.”
“She hot to trot?” Nick Fox asked, deeply earnest.
“Like a Thoroughbred,” I said, winking.
I stood up to leave. He stayed in his chair, “Hey, Jake, one piece of advice…”
“Yeah?”
“Like we used to say in-country, keep your ass down.”
I looked at him and the politician’s smile was gone. “Is that an order, sir?”
He summoned up a patronizing smile to take the edge off. “Just friendly advice, like yelling ‘incoming’ to your buddies. You stick your ass out in the wind, Jake, maybe it gets greased.”
“Or maybe somebody else trips over it, takes a big fall.”
I turned smartly on my heel and walked out, ramrod straight, feeling but never seeing his officer’s glare.
***
I stood on the courthouse steps, blinking into the late-afternoon sun. To the west, thunderheads formed over the Everglades. The showers would be late, but just in time for rush hour. Overhead, a dozen black buzzards circled the wedding-cake upper tiers of the courthouse, gliding in the updrafts. The lawyers and the buzzards, birds of a feather, source of a thousand jokes.
They’re really turkey vultures, Charlie Riggs informed me one day. Cathartes aura.
I told him not to spoil the fun.
With one eye on the birds overhead, I reached into my suitcoat pocket and pulled out the clipping Cindy had turned up when preparing to defend Nick Fox’s libel suit. The article was seven years old, published a week before Fox’s first election. I turned to the paragraphs I had circled near the end.
The candidate rarely speaks of his Vietnam service, and then only in modest terms, even when describing the incident for which he was awarded the Silver Star.
“
We had a translator, a Vietnamese girl, maybe nineteen or twenty, educated in one of the French convents. We got pinned down in a firefight in a village, lost two men in the first five minutes. It was getting dark. Raining, like always. The girl was supposed to stay with the RTO, the radio operator, but she got separated and the VC grabbed her. I led one platoon in a chase across some dikes through rice paddies. A second platoon was two clicks—two kilometers— north of us. We moved parallel to each other to the east. We caught Charley in the open on the dikes. It was too late to save the girl, but we inflicted heavy casualties.”
Okay, so once he flicked on the magnetic tape, out it came, same way every time. Rewind the tape, play it again, Nick. Nothing wrong with that, or was there? I thought of Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed into his story of Korean War heroics. Maybe Nick Fox brainwashed himself, a tidy story of a rainy day in the rice paddies.
I was still thinking about it when one of the big birds suddenly swooped down and landed on the sidewalk next to an overturned garbage can. Spreading its wings a full six feet to ward off competition, it uncovered the remains of a chili dog. I approached to within a dozen feet, and when the bird turned to face me, ugly as death, I backpedaled with a scaredy-cat step of a Francis Macomber. In a moment another bird landed and picked through the rest of the garbage, keeping some distance from the wise guy who thought up the idea.
The black birds ignored me, so I tiptoed toward them. Two sets of wary eyes appraised me. Then I heard myself say in deep senatorial tones, “May it please my fine-feathered foraging friends. My fellow brethren at the bar. Nibblers of equity, scavengers of justice. Are we here to seek truth, or merely to gorge ourselves on the facts? If the truth is that the Fox is loose amongst the chickens…what then?”
“They got a place upstate for guys who talk to birds.”
I whirled to see Cindy at the bottom of the steps, head cocked, chewing her gum happily. “Nice place,” she said, “clean white sheets and rubber walls.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” I said.
“I’ll bet.”
“Call Priscilla Fox for me. Mrs. Nicholas Fox. I want to see her as soon as possible.”
“Tomorrow morning, the office?”
“No. Tonight. Her place. I need to see the lair of the Fox.”
“Sure. But you oughta change first.”
“What’s wrong with a blue suit?”
“Fine, matches your eyes,” she said. “But your loafers. One’s black and one’s cordovan.”
CHAPTER 11
A Woman Without a Man
There must be uglier stretches of suburbia than Miami’s Bird Road—maybe the outskirts of Calcutta. From Dixie Highway westward toward the Glades, Bird Road is six lanes of potted asphalt flanked by strip shopping centers, miles of wall-to-wall, plug-ugly, flat-roofed stacks of concrete blocks. Plastic pennants and helium balloons proclaim each new project, and with it, yet another gun shop, XXX video, and rental-furniture store. No matter how many vacant storefronts next door, no matter the foreclosures up the street, local bankers awash in doper cash fall all over each other to make lousy loans to shaky speculators. And downtown, the county zoning guys never met a builder they didn’t like.
Sign ordinance a problem? Hire the mayor’s lawyer. No prob-lema.
Can’t meet the parking-space requirement? Paint the lines to a Yugo’s dimensions and let ‘em park on the median strip. Who’s counting anyway?
Concrete, asphalt, noxious fumes, and blaring horns. Bird Road has it all. Everything, it seems, but birds.
***
The concrete-block-and-stucco house had been turquoise with yellow-trimmed shutters. Now the colors blended into the same off-white. It was two blocks north of Bird, and you could still hear the bleat of traffic, the occasional police siren. Nick Fox had bought the place when he was a cop, and after several lean years in night law school and a civil servant’s salary in the state attorney’s office, he never had the bucks to move east into the Gables. There was something reassuring about the house, a testament to the fact that Nick Fox might be the last honest public official in the county.
I parked the old convertible in the driveway next to a child’s red bicycle. It was growing dark, the humidity hanging heavy in the air. A miniature backboard and basketball rim was propped in the yard, a child-size soccer ball lay against the trunk of a bottle-brush tree. The compressor of the central air conditioner whined from a concrete pit at the side of the house, and a rusty water stain streaked the stucco wall. The garage door was open. Inside sat an eight-year-old Toyota, pleading for a wax job.
There are a hundred thousand houses just like this one in our town. The domestic suburban middle-class cliché. From the outside, familial bliss, folks who can handle a VA mortgage and pay off the credit cards over time, but no frills. Inside, a thousand secrets—fractured marriages, wandering husbands, boozing wives.
The doorbell didn’t work, but my fist did. She answered on the third knock. Priscilla Fox was a tidy package in leotard, tights, leg warmers, and a wide belt that didn’t hold anything up but accentuated her flat waist. The leotard was low cut in front with a tiger motif that matched her eyes, nut brown with a touch of gold. Her hair was cinnamon, and she hadn’t been born that way. The smile was wide and inviting.
“Come in, Mr. Lassiter,” she said, leading me through a tiny foyer. In pink sneakers, she moved like a cat. All in all, one of those women who looks better at forty-two than at twenty-one. “You’ll have to forgive me. High-impact aerobics after two hours of racquetball. I must look a fright.”
“I’m not scared a bit.”
She turned and winked at me over her shoulder, then showed me into the living room. I eased into a beige sofa that was worn in the seat. I declined coffee but said okay to something cold. She excused herself and came back a moment later with bottled water from Maine and a bowl of grapes. Ten years ago it would have been potato chips with sour-cream dip, and something alcoholic to wash it down. I popped a few green grapes into my mouth, took a swig of the bubbling water, and felt gloriously healthy but in need of something salty and greasy.
Priscilla Fox reached down and peeled the Velcro straps from her sneakers. Maybe it’s old-fashioned, but I’m opposed to sneakers without laces. Digital watches and pocket calculators, too. Gizmos that make life easier and dull our minds. Besides being unable to read or write, today’s kids have trouble telling time, multiplying nine times seven, and tying their shoes.
Freshly un-sneakered, Priscilla Fox gracefully lowered herself into a wing chair and tucked her legs beneath her. She studied me a moment, and I returned the look. Beads of perspiration formed between her breasts, and she shivered in the air-conditioning. She excused herself again and returned this time in red nylon shorts and a tight T-shirt with a drawing I didn’t understand until I read the caption: “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
She opened the conversation. “Nick told me about you, but he neglected to mention how damned attractive you were.”
“Funny, he seemed to forget the same thing about you.”
“Has he ever! Oh well, I don’t sit around waiting for him to come back. I’ve seen too many of my friends do that. A woman turns forty, her husband trades her in for two twenties. Let the prick go and get on with your life. That’s my philosophy.”
“There are other fish in the sea,” I agreed, gesturing at her T-shirt, where a salmon tried to ride a Schwinn.
“You got that right. A woman has to be independent these days. You can’t depend on a man, because a man’s not dependable.”
“Expendable,” I said, “but not dependable.”
“You got that right,” she repeated. “Now, I enjoy a man’s company as much as the next woman. More than most. A bottle of wine, a hot tub. That’s all fine. But in the morning, get the hell out, I’ve got things to do.”
“A modern woman,” I said.
She smiled, straightened her legs, and pointed he
r sweat-socked toes toward the ceiling in what seemed to be a tummy-tightening exercise. “How much you weigh, anyhow?”
“What?”
Now she was twisting her torso, attacking the love-handle zone. “Your weight, honey. What do you tip the scales at? Two hundred, two-oh-five?”
“Two-twenty-five, give or take.”
“Oooh. You carry it real well. All that height helps. Nick goes about two-ten, but he’s a lot shorter than you. Built like a bull and hung like a stallion. Strongest man I ever knew. We could make it standing up, he’d just grab me under the butt, lift me up, I’d wrap my legs around his hips. Never showed any strain, and could hump from here to Sunday. Takes a strong man to do that.”
I didn’t disagree. I just sat there, and she cocked her head, as if waiting for me to flex my biceps or otherwise challenge the Nicholas G. Fox Olympic Stand-Up-Humping Record. I thought about it and felt a twinge between the L3 and L4 vertebrae where I once took a knee from a pulling guard.
“Not that I miss him,” she volunteered. “Except…except the wimps I’ve met lately. Sheesh. Noodle necks and pencil wrists. Half the time they can’t get it up, other half, you wish they hadn’t.”
“You meet these guys on the computer?”
“Oh, that’s why you’re here, right? What some monster did to Marsha. I hope you nail the bastard.”
I nodded gravely and let her think about Marsha. Priscilla Fox’s smile disappeared, and for a moment the pretty face sagged and nearly showed its age.
“The computer club,” I reminded her.
She seemed to shake herself awake. “Forty Something.”
“What?”
“That’s my handle. Forty Something. You’d think it’d scare a lot of guys off, you know, looking for young stuff. But you’d be surprised.”
“You spend a lot of time online?”
“Too much. The computer helps pass the hours when you can’t sleep and the batteries are dead in the vibrator.”
“What about the men? Anyone ever threaten you? Anyone talk about killing a woman?”
