by Paul Levine
"You got checks to sign," Cece Santiago announced as Steve came in the door.
Cece was in her customary position, grinding out bench presses in front of the desk she seldom used. Wearing her uniform, Lycra shorts and a muscle tee, with the requisite three studs through one eyebrow.
"What checks?" Steve asked.
"Court reporter. Credit cards. My salary."
"Didn't I just pay you?"
She eased the bar into the brackets and sat up. "Two months ago. For services two months before that. You owe me like a gazillion dollars."
"You get me an appointment with Reginald Jones?"
"No can do. His assistant says he's in conference all day."
"What about tomorrow?"
"County Commission meeting."
"Thursday, then?"
"Public hearings on a new courthouse in Sweet-water."
"He's scared."
"He's busy." Cece lay back on the bench and began her stomach crunches.
"They're in it together. My father. Pinky. Reggie."
"In what, jefe?"
"I don't know. Something bad."
"Malo? Not your father."
"I wouldn't have thought so. But I'm starting to think that our parents—the people we've known the longest—are the people we know the least, Cece."
"When that stinky old car of yours went off the bridge, just how hard did you hit your head?"
"Don't you start with me."
"You want to lose your papi, too?"
"What do you mean, 'too'?"
"Victoria. Chasing her away. Stupid. Muy stupido, jefe."
That afternoon, Steve sat in the chief clerk's waiting room, reading a stimulating article, "Managing Cubicle Space in the 21st Century Office," in a magazine called Municipal Administrator. The walls were covered with plaques from the Rotary and the Kiwanis and photos of a beaming Reginald Jones with numerous politicos, all wearing their pasted-on, ribbon-cutting, power-brokering smiles. Governor Jeb Bush here, Senator Connie Mack there. Local movers-and-shakers, too. Jones was an African-American man who seemed fond of Italian suits and silk jacquard ties, with kerchiefs in his coat pocket that matched his shirts. The word "dapper" came to mind.
Jones had manned the clerk's desk in Judge Solomon's courtroom all those years ago. Pinky Luber had captained the prosecution table, long before he became a fixer and a perjurious witness. Now Herbert Solomon was covertly calling Jones and mad as hell about Steve finding out about it. Just what was going on with these three, the Bermuda Triangle of the courthouse?
Steve had already downed two cups of motor oil from the coffee machine in the corridor. He'd checked his cell phone for messages from Victoria. Nada. He was camped out with no appointment, but he'd been rehearsing what he would say to Reginald Jones, should he ever get the honor of seeing him. Steve might start off with the bluff:
"I know all about you and Pinky and my old man."
Or maybe the good son approach:
"You can trust me, Reggie. I'm just trying to help out my dad."
Or even a threat:
"You wanna talk to me or the Grand Jury?"
But so far, there'd been no chance to talk to anyone. Mr. Jones was in conference, according to the receptionist charged with keeping vagrants, terrorists, and wayward lawyers out of the chief clerk's inner sanctum.
After what seemed like long enough for most statutes of limitations to expire, an attractive woman in a beige business suit appeared and asked Steve to follow her. They were buzzed into a corridor teeming with deputy clerks parked in front of computers, doing whatever it is that runs the local justice system. At the end of the corridor, the woman dropped him off at a corner conference room with an easterly view. Walking in, Steve could see Biscayne Bay, with Fisher Island and Miami Beach in the background. He could also see two turkey buzzards. One buzzard was perched on the railing outside the window, one was inside, sitting at the conference table. The one inside had a round pink face, a shiny pink head, and a diamond pinky ring.
"Pinky, what the hell you doing here?"
"Same thing I've done for years," Luber said. "Helping my friends."
Outside the window, the buzzard flapped its wings and took off. Steve took a seat. "Where's Reggie Jones?"
"Forget him. He's got nothing for you. But I do." Pinky leaned across the table. "I got a name. Conchy Conklin."
"Who's he?"
"Conklin was in Alabama Jack's the other night, drinking his ass off, throwing hundred-dollar bills around."
"So what?"
"Did I mention he was bowlegged from riding a red Harley he'd parked outside?"
"Keep talking."
"He's flapping his gums about the easiest ten grand he ever made. Messing up some guy in an old Caddy."
"Conchy Conklin," Steve muttered to himself. Trying to find something in the name to spark a memory. Coming up empty.
"Unless his parents were morons, which I don't rule out," Luber said, "I figure 'Conchy' is a nickname."
"Anything else?"
"Yeah. He was bragging about how quick his hands are."
"Quick hands? I don't get it."
"Says he catches snakes barehanded, sells them to reptile farms. Claimed he caught a whole nest of coral snakes on Crab Key last week."
"The son-of-a-bitch." If it was true, Conklin was the guy who ran him off the bridge and planted the snake in Victoria's hotel room. "What else? What about a description?"
"Thirties. Beard. Sunburned. Like he does outdoor work, not a sunbather. He's not a regular at Alabama Jack's. Left the impression he lives farther south in the Keys."
"How do you know all this?"
"Like I told you before, I grease the skids, kid."
"So who hired this Conklin?"
"I give you the moon, you want the stars, too? That's all I know."
Steve would call Sheriff Rask, give him the information, see what he could come up with. "Pinky, why you telling me this?"
"Because I remember you when you were a snotnosed kid. Before you became a snot-nosed lawyer. And I like your old man."
"What do you want in return?"
"What do you think?"
"I'm not dropping Dad's case. I'm gonna get his license back."
Pinky sighed. "Herb thinks you're a helluva fine lawyer."
"No he doesn't."
"Maybe he doesn't say it. But he admires you. Your damn stubbornness probably reminds him of himself. Problem is, you're too close to this one. You got your feelings all wound up in it." Pinky showed a grin that crinkled his cheeks and slitted his eyes. "Just like Hal Griffin's case."
"For a guy barred from every courthouse in the state, you seem to know a lot."
"I know Griffin fired you. And you deserved it. You looked at Griffin's case through your dick, and all you could see was that playboy son. Nothing fouls up the brain cells like a woman."
"How do you know . . . ?" But then it came to him. There could only be one way. "Dammit, Dad's been talking to you."
"Aw, lay off Herb. He loves you more than you deserve." Luber pulled out a Cuban cigar, the Robusto, and licked the tip with a pink tongue. "What makes you think that waterlogged beach boy is a killer?"
"Go ask my father." Sounding pissy. Feeling confused. His father leaking info about Griffin's case. Reggie Jones refusing to see him but getting Luber to toss him a bone. Just what the hell was going on?
"I know your theory," Luber said. "The son's afraid his rich old man's gonna lose the family fortune if Oceania sinks. That's a negative motive. Damn tough to convey to a jury. Someone with no criminal record offing a guy to prevent a potential future event that might or might not take place. Too iffy. Jurors like evidence they can lay their hands on."
"So who do you think killed Ben Stubbs?"
"Damned if I know. Did you follow the green path, like I told you?"
"I tried. The forty thousand in Stubbs' hotel room is still unaccounted for."
"If you ask me, boychik, whoever
paid Stubbs that dough is the same shitbird who hired Conklin to run you off the road and scare the panties off your lady. And whoever that is had a positive motive, not a negative one."
"Someone who would make a ton of money if Oceania sank," Steve said.
"That's what I'm saying."
"So if I find who hired Conklin, I'll find who murdered Stubbs."
"I'd bet on it."
"And you don't want anything in return for this information?"
Pinky grinned, pushed his chair back. "Sure I do, kid. When the time comes, I want you to do the smart thing."
Thirty-five
"A PUPPET, A PAUPER,
A PIRATE . . ."
"Do you know how much money your crazy client cost me!" Leicester Robinson thundered. "Millions!"
"You're assuming Hal Griffin is guilty," Victoria said.
"Who else could have done it? I have no problem with Griffin bribing that paper-shuffler Stubbs. It's done every day. But kill him? What in Hades was Griffin thinking?"
"Who said anything about bribes?" Fishing to see what he knew.
"This is the Keys," Robinson said. "You can't take a piss in Tavernier without rattling the plumbing in Marathon."
Victoria had watched Robinson on the security video at Griffin's home. Along with Delia Bustamante, Clive Fowles, and Junior Griffin, he was aboard the Force Majeure just before it left for Key West. Technically that made Robinson a suspect in Stubbs' murder. But, like the others, he was seen leaving the boat before it churned away from the dock.
In his mid-forties, Robinson wore workingman's heavy boots with grease-stained shorts and a flowery aloha shirt. An African-American with the reddish-brown complexion of polished mahogany, he had a neatly trimmed mustache and salt-and-pepper hair twisted into short dreadlocks. As he spoke, he jabbed his thick fingers in the air, as if providing punctuation marks.
"Didn't matter to me if Oceania ever made money. I had cost plus thirty percent on the barge work." He gestured toward a pegboard with schematic drawings of a craft that looked something like an oil tanker. "Now what do I have? With all the money I sunk into the plans, all the work I turned down, I'll be lucky to stay out of bankruptcy."
He shrugged his broad shoulders as if to say: "What can a man do?"
They were in the warehouse office of Robinson Barge & Tow Co., hard by the Key West docks. A long, low building of corrugated steel, the place had a slick, metallic smell, the cluttered interior filled with machinery Victoria could not identify. The warehouse was also littered with hundreds of small items like a curio shop. Antique naval artifacts, sculptures, artworks. Along one wall, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. On another, a vintage map of the Caribbean, with Cuba far larger than in reality, larger even than in Fidel Castro's dreams. Alongside, an oil painting of an enormous pink house with turrets and towers. Behind Robinson's desk hung a collection of rusty muskets, cutlasses, and broadswords.
In the middle of the warehouse, an ancient dugout canoe sat on sawhorses. It looked Native American and seemed to be undergoing restoration. Scattered on the concrete floor, an eclectic collection of maritime items: the glass housing of a lighthouse, a barnacle-encrusted anchor that looked hundreds of years old, open buckets of resin, a binnacle containing a vintage compass, and a rotted-out dinghy that might have been used by Captain Ahab. Victoria hoped that Robinson's barges and tugboats were more modern than the relics he seemed to collect.
"Before you settled on a cost-plus contract, you asked Griffin for a piece of the project."
"A man can ask, can't he?"
"I just wonder if that's customary in your business."
"I had a line of credit for barge construction at Southern Shipyards. No money up front. I could have done the work and waited for profits from the hotel and casino. But Griffin said he wasn't giving away shit. Didn't matter to me. I was going to make money either way. But now . . ." He waved a meaty hand toward the barge schematics on the pegboard. "I can burn those."
Victoria glanced at the bookshelves. Biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams. Books on pirates and colonialism in the Caribbean. Some fiction, too. Kafka, Dickens, Hugo. Even a few volumes of English poetry. The burly barge operator seemed to have a fondness for Tennyson.
She remembered Junior saying that Robinson had a bachelor's degree in English and a master's in history from Amherst. The most literate man with work-hardened hands in the Keys. Maybe the most literate person, judging from the end-of-the-road burnouts you run into down here.
"Did you see anything unusual on the boat that day?" she asked.
"Griffin and Stubbs were arguing. Hadn't seen that before."
"Arguing about what?"
"Couldn't tell you. They were in the salon. I only saw it through the glass. But Griffin shoved a finger in Stubbs' chest. Pushed him a bit, the way bullies do."
"That's it? A little shove with a finger?"
Robinson let out a derisive laugh. "Man does that to me, he'll be eating through a straw."
"What about Clive Fowles? Ever see him argue with Stubbs?"
"No."
"What about with Griffin?"
"Fowles wouldn't have the balls. Oh, I heard him tell Griffin maybe they should just do a tour business to the reef. Forget about the floating hotel and casino. Of course, Griffin didn't listen. You want my opinion, Fowles thought too small and Griffin too big."
"Why would Hal Griffin kill Ben Stubbs?"
"No good reason I can think of."
"And yet, you seem to think he did."
"Two men were alone on a boat at sea. One ends up dead."
A concise summation of the state's case, she thought. "There could have been a stowaway."
"Not unless Griffin put him ashore on the way down the coast. Like that book by Conrad."
"The Secret Sharer." Victoria smiled to herself. Yes, this was one literate barge operator. She'd mentioned the book to Steve, but he hadn't heard of it. Now, if Jimmy Buffet were the author and the book described island hopping and rum guzzling, Steve would be able to quote entire passages.
"You know the story, then?" Robinson seemed pleased. The usual visitors to Robinson Barge & Tow probably didn't study English at Ivy League universities, Victoria figured.
"A captain hides a stowaway who's accused of murder," she said. "The captain somehow identifies with the stowaway and risks his ship to get the man to safety."
"It's about the duality of good and evil in all of us," Robinson explained. "Maybe your client's a bit like that."
"Hal Griffin is not a murderer."
"Whoever did it, I'd like to wring his neck." Robinson made a twisting motion with those powerful hands. "You know my history at all, Ms. Lord?"
"I know your family's been in Key West for generations."
Robinson barked out a laugh. "That doesn't begin to describe it. There were black Robinsons here long before Thomas Jefferson started playing footsie with Sally Hemmings. I can track my ancestors back to a slave ship attacked by Sir Henry Morgan. He sunk the ship and grabbed the strongest slaves to join his crew. My great-granddaddy times ten or so became his first mate."
"Rescued by pirates," Victoria said. "Ironic."
"Morgan would have run you through with a sword if you called him a 'pirate.' He preferred 'privateer.' Had a license from England to plunder Spanish ships and settlements."
"A license to steal." Victoria laughed. "That's what Delia Bustamante called the EPA permit to build Oceania."
Robinson allowed himself a pinched smile. "Maybe there's a parallel. Maybe those who can remember the past are privileged to repeat it."
Remodeling the Santayana line. Leicester Robinson, Victoria thought, may actually have read all those books on his shelves. But surely he didn't go around quoting Conrad and Santayana in his daily work. What was such a man really like?
"You have a fascinating background, Mr. Robinson." Her way of saying: "Tell me more."
"My family's been wealthy and poor, owned c
astles on some islands and been jailed on others. Sort of like that Sinatra song. " 'I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate . . .' "
" 'A poet, a pawn and a king,' " she finished the lyric.
Robinson smiled. "Exactly, all of them. More than a hundred years ago, there were Robinsons in Key West with their own salvage sloops. Licensed by the federal government. A cargo ship gets torn up on the reef, the salvors would race out there. The Robinsons had the fastest sloops, so they'd beat their competitors to the reef. Once you staked your claim, you got forty percent of what you salvaged."
"Just like contingency fee lawyers," Victoria said.
"With even worse morals. Some salvors set false lights, actually lured ships onto the reefs."
"The Robinsons do that sort of thing?"
He smiled and got up from his desk. "Let me show you something, Ms. Lord."
He put on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and led her to a framed document on the wall. Handwritten in fancy script was a salvor's license signed by a federal judge and dated October 1889.
She read the stilted legal language aloud: "Know all men by these presents that Walter J. Robinson, owner and master, is hereby licensed to employ his Sloop Satisfaction in the business of wrecking and salving along the coast of Florida."
"My great-great-grandfather. Do you know why he named his ship Satisfaction? That was Sir Henry Morgan's warship. The one that rescued the first Robinson and led to generations of black pirates, leading straight to Walter J. Robinson. So you ask whether my great-great-granddaddy was a tough customer? Let's just say he kept up with the competition. People said he'd save bales of cotton and let stranded sailors drown. A cutthroat business, it was."
"A cutthroat era."
"Aren't they all?"
Victoria wished Steve were here. He would have insights into Robinson she lacked. The man seemed disarmingly open with her. She knew he was trying to create an impression. Friendly and transparent. Was it an act? One of Steve's lessons involved witnesses too eager to talk:
"If they're filling all that dead air, it's because they want to control the conversation."
Robinson went on for a while, tracing his family history. Walter Robinson ran the town's cockfights and owned a brothel and a saloon that catered to both blacks and whites. He also built the grandest house in Key West. There it was, the oil painting on the wall. In the Queen Anne style, with a double veranda, balustraded railings, and a widow's walk, the pink house had been an extravagant showplace overlooking the ocean. There were conflicting stories of how the house was destroyed, Robinson said. His father told him it was demolished in a hurricane. But he'd later heard that his grandfather, Walter's grandson, having lost the family businesses, torched the property for the insurance. After that, it was downhill for the Robinsons. Leicester's father crewed on a shrimp boat and scraped up enough money to buy a leaky tugboat.
