Cheater's Game

by Paul Levine

  “You’re blowing smoke, Ray, and not from the Cohiba. Why’d you have me take a blood oath to keep you informed of what I find? Why do you even care what the feds are doing?”

  “Simple, Jake. If the Southern District’s G-men are crapping in my backyard, I’d like to know before I step in it.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Bahamas Club

  “Kip’s in trouble,” I told Melissa on the phone, as I exited the expressway onto Second Avenue downtown.

  I was headed to my nephew’s apartment on Brickell Avenue. I had fired up the old Eldo, top down, on this steamy summer day. Sure, I should have put up the canvas and cranked the clunky AC to high, but somehow, I found pleasure in the blast furnace of the sun baking my face. In July, Miami is hell with palm trees, or at the very least, a steamy, sweaty, muggy, and buggy purgatory that lasts until Thanksgiving.

  I told Melissa about my meeting with Pincher and Foyo, and she expressed concern but remained calm, ever the professional diagnostician. “And you have no idea who the men who took Kip from the hospital were?”

  “Federal agents, maybe, but I can’t be sure.”

  “And he’s never told you about any of this?”

  “That’s what’s eating at me. I have clients who can barely read comic books, but they have the good sense to call me when a cop starts asking questions. Kip could be making incriminating statements, getting himself in deeper trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “No idea. There’s a federal investigation. He’s involved, but I don’t know how. Witness. Target. Bystander. Dammit to hell!” I slammed my hand onto the hot steering wheel. “What should I do, Mel?”

  “I have to think about it. I don’t have the framework for this in my background.”

  “Yeah, but you’re smart and intuitive. What’s the first thing that pops into your head?”

  “Your meeting with the state attorney.”

  “Why?”

  “It seems odd for him to be poking around in federal cases.”

  “Completely. It’s on the down-low.”

  “Hmm. . . .” She seemed to be thinking that over.

  Traffic was backed up from the Brickell Avenue bridge, and I was stuck. It’s a drawbridge that might have been handy when steamships chugged up the Miami River and early settlers grew mangoes in what is now downtown. But it’s a civic embarrassment now that traffic is gridlocked a dozen times a day. City and county taxpayers are shelling out more than $2.5 billion in principal and interest to build a ballpark—a gift to the owner of the baseball team no one cares about—but our government dunderheads can’t find a way to drive one mile down Brickell Avenue in less than 20 minutes.

  “I just don’t understand why the state attorney is going out of his way to help you,” she said.

  “Aw, that’s Sugar Ray. A regular Javert at work and a teddy bear after five. We go way back. Adversaries who respect who each other. He also thinks he might have scrambled my brains in the boxing ring, and he’s making amends.”

  A snowy egret landed on the hood of the Eldo, found it too hot, and took flight, its yellow feet waving goodbye.

  “I guess it’s a guy thing,” she said.

  “Wait, I shouldn’t brush you off like that. You’re suspicious. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “It’s not complicated. Can you trust Ray Pincher?”

  “I don’t have a yes or no answer. I genuinely like him, but he can be devious.”

  “With a scientific experiment, I consider all possible conclusions. If Pincher has no skin in the game, why is he taking the risk of spying on a federal investigation?”

  “He says he just wants to know what the feds are doing in his backyard. It could just be the usual rivalry between state and federal prosecutors.” I thought about it a moment. “Unless Ray has a political interest in the case that he’s not telling me about.”

  “In which case he’s giving you information only to make you give him more valuable information.”

  “Okay, Mel, that’s a good read. I’ll watch Ray as closely as when he feints the left jab and sucker punches me with his right.”

  Having a brilliant fiancée had its advantages. If I ever tried a case again, I wouldn’t mind letting her help pick the jury. I told Melissa I’d see her for dinner, then clicked off and resumed broiling. I tried Kip’s cell again. By now, he might have replaced the drowned phone. But the call went straight to voice mail.

  Are you in custody, Kip? Have you been charged with a crime?

  No way he could handle that. He was a rabbit in a world of wolves. Not knowing where he was, fearing the worst, I felt my chest tighten as if someone were cinching it with a leather strap.

  Breathe in, Jake. Deeply. Breathe out. Repeat.

  Melissa taught me the relaxation technique, and now it helped a bit. The drawbridge cranked down. I watched the giant gear slowly churning, feeling like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, stuck in the maw of machinery beyond my control.

  The Caddy’s big engine grumbled in protest as I inched down Brickell’s canyons of luxury condos and office buildings. I am old enough to remember, though barely, when the only skyscraper was the Brickell Townhouse, then an apartment building. Murf the Surf hid the gigantic Star of India sapphire in a ceiling tile there, after the legendary heist from a museum in New York.

  I pulled into the curved driveway of Kip’s high-rise where a spit-and-polish uniformed valet looked at my ancient Caddy as if it might soil the shiny pavers. He shot a sideways glance at the license plate, which read “JUSTICE?” Yeah, it’s a question that has long plagued me. He asked if I wanted him to park it out front, for which there was a twenty-dollar surcharge. I answered in the negative and warned him against drag racing down U.S. 1.

  The Bahamas House occupied a narrow sliver of real estate directly on Biscayne Bay. It was a sleek tower of steel and glass with all the amenities that Miami’s urban affluents, hipsters, trust funders, status seekers, and other members of the elite aspirational class could require.

  The lobby, all granite floor and twenty-foot glass wall, had the requisite coffee shop with artisanal donuts. Plugged into earphones, a few young people labored on laptops, either writing the next great screenplay or posting photos of a cappuccino whose foam resembles Kim Kardashian’s butt. In the corner of the lobby, overlooking the infinity pool, bocce ball court, and cabanas, was a craft cocktail bar where the combination of celery juice and vodka seemed to be popular. A video monitor showed a display of the day’s activities and announcements about the pet-walking service and an admonition against pouring champagne into the hot tub. I didn’t have time for afternoon hot yoga or the evening lecture, “How to Start Up a Start-Up.”

  I took a speedy elevator to the fifty-first floor. No one answered my heavy-fisted knocking. The place was quiet. No neighbors in the corridor, no yellow crime scene tape on the door, no team of federal agents serving a search warrant and tossing the place.

  Kip had not given me a key, which was different than my not having a key. He had asked for my help when he moved in, mostly because I could carry a cocktail table under one arm and a floor lamp in the opposite hand. While he parked a small U-Haul truck, I stopped in the concierge’s office to pick up the keys. I was given three but only turned over two to Kip. What had I been thinking at the time, nearly a year ago? Something I would never say to my nephew.

  Kip, I might only be your uncle and you might be an adult in the eyes of the law, but I’ve been acting in loco parentis so long, I’m not going to cut you loose now.

  Now, I used my purloined key and opened the door. It had been after dark when we’d moved the furniture in, so I was startled by the blast of sunlight and endless horizon that hit me now. The floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked Biscayne Bay, Key Biscayne, and the Atlantic Ocean. In the distance, I saw a shimmering dot that had to be the island of Bimini, maybe 60 miles away across the Gulf Stream.

  The old furniture I’d lugged in last year—a
mix of Ikea and eBay—was gone. Sleek glass, chrome, and white leather now dominated the living room. I roamed the place. The master bedroom had a cavernous walk-in closet. Kip’s casual shirts and pants hung neatly in a corner, leaving enough room for a pick-up basketball game. There was a stack of lightweight cashmere sweaters in a variety of muted colors on one shelf. A second bedroom had been converted into a study with a desk of glass and steel. No laptop, no landline phone. A matching credenza had three drawers, all unlocked.

  The drawers were lined with neat, old-fashioned hanging files. So, some of Uncle Jake did rub off. I had expected that all of Kip’s business materials would be on disk drives, or thumb drives, or hiding in the clouds. But no, here was a folder with a 72-page document:

  “Strategies for Standardized Tests: How to Maximize Your SAT and ACT Scores. By Kip Lassiter.”

  I thumbed through it.

  “Trust your first response.”

  “Don’t skip answers, guess.”

  “Budget your time.”

  All legitimate. Whatever else Kip was involved in—he could be a hired assassin for all I knew—he was certainly a knowledgeable tutor of high school students.

  I found a folder marked “Q.E.D. Reimbursements.” Printed email receipts from various airlines. Five first-class round trips, Miami to Grand Cayman. A dozen trips from Miami to Santa Barbara, California with stops in Dallas. What’s with that? Several more round-trip flights: Miami to Houston, Los Angeles, and Kansas City. All in the last year. No wonder I hadn’t seen much of Kip. I wrote down the dates of each trip.

  It was possible that every trip was strictly legit. Kip could be lecturing to Q.E.D. students around the country. And Grand Cayman could be, as Kip claimed, the site of marketing meetings with Max Ringle. I was pondering these thoughts when I heard someone knocking on the apartment door. “Yo, Kip! Are you in there, dipshit?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Twins and the Big Bully

  I went to the door, stared through the peephole, and looked into the brown eye of some smart-ass with his face pressed close.

  “Open up, Lassiter! I know you’re in there! C’mon, Kip, you crudball!”

  I yanked the door open, and everything happened fast.

  The fat end of a baseball bat jammed through the doorway into my right shoulder, and I staggered back a step. Reflexively, my right hand grabbed the bat halfway down the barrel and pulled hard toward me. Hanging onto the bat and hurtling through the open door was a wiry young man with a dark mop of hair.

  “Hey! What . . .?” His eyes opened in wide confusion.

  I tore the bat loose, and with the guy off balance, threw a short left hook into his solar plexus. He made a whoomphing sound and fell to the floor, his throat gurgling.

  Then, an optical illusion.

  Even though he was on all fours on the verge of soiling the white granite floor, he was also coming through the door again. Same mop of dark hair, same white T-shirt with the logo “Palm Beach Prep Sailing.” He raised his right hand and aimed a black, blunt-nosed Taser at my chest.

  I ducked into a crouch and two electrode darts sailed just over my head, nearly parting my hair. I came at him straight-on, driving the top of my skull under his chin, powering up with my legs, and lifting him off his feet, driving him against the door jamb, his head snapping back into the wood with a clunk before he crumpled to the floor. I turned and headed back into the apartment where the same guy was just getting up.

  What the hell! Was I hallucinating?

  I blinked twice and realized the guy inside the apartment wore green Gucci Flashtrek sneakers with pink crystals on the cross straps. I recognized them from a story on the sports pages. They retail for about sixteen hundred bucks! The guy getting to his feet in the corridor wore gray Nike Lunar sneakers, the ones with the three-dimensional moon rock design that makes it appear you’ve stepped into a bucket of wet cement. I’m no expert, but I’d bet they cost well north of a grand.

  So, there are two guys. Twins! With more money than brains.

  I grabbed the Lunar rock kid by the scruff of his T-shirt and hoisted Gucci kid by his armpit. His slim-cut Robin egg blue pants were wet in the crotch. “What are you two pussies doing here!”

  Lunar’s eyes went wide. “That’s so Neanderthal.”

  “I know the dude!” Gucci cried out. “Kip’s grandfather.”

  “I’m his Uncle, pissboy!”

  Gucci screwed up his mouth. “Your toxic testosterone is creating a hostile environment.”

  I tightened my grip. “You attacked me, kid. I oughta bitch-slap you silly.”

  The twins shrieked in unison, high-pitched screeches like red-tailed hawks.

  “You can’t use that word,” Lunar said.

  “What’s wrong with ‘silly?’” I asked.

  “B-i-t-c-h.” He whispered the letters, as softly as cinnamon wafting onto a latte. “Git woke, dude. It’s an intimidating slur.”

  “Corrosive masculinity,” Gucci agreed.

  “Oh, man up,” I said, and they shrieked again.

  I tossed them both to the floor and kicked the door closed to keep them from crawling away. “What do you want with my nephew?”

  The twins looked at each other, and Lunar said, “We want to know if Kip’s ratting us out.”

  “What’d you do? Knock over a smoothie stand?”

  Again, they locked eyes in some secret twin ritual. Then, Gucci said, “You tell him, Niles.”

  “Niles?” I blurted, speaking to the kid in the moon rock sneakers. “You’re the one dumber than a Pitt nose tackle.”

  “Mocking my intelligence! That’s so cringy.”

  “Just an expression, forget about it.”

  “I’m not saying I’m the smartest guy in school,” Niles confessed.

  “I get that. That’s why you hired Kip to tutor you.”

  He laughed at me, a high-pitched cackle. “Tutor me? That’s why I hired him to take the SAT for me.”

  Oh, shit! There it was. The gut punch. I must have known it was coming, or something like it, but I’d been in denial.

  Niles chattered on about paying $35,000 to Kip, who then double-crossed him. I was only half listening as I considered the spider’s web in which Kip was snared. He’d fallen prey to easy money. Dirty money.

  He might already be indicted! But why hasn’t he called me?

  I had a dozen reasons why this was all my fault. If Kip lacked a moral compass, well, I had been the navigator of his life. What examples did I set? All those years taking him to court, rubbing shoulders with my felonious clients, many of whom walked free or received token punishments. Had I stunted Kip’s ethical growth? Had he concluded that crime does pay? Did he wear thousand-dollar sneakers like these twin dipsticks?

  “You feel me, bro?” Niles said. “Kip took my money and wangboozled me. It was a big rip.”

  “What are you saying? He got a lousy score?”

  “The opposite! He nailed a 1560 and the College Board flagged my file.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Last year, when I took the test, I scored an even 1000, and Kip knew it. Dr. Ringle told him to never go more than 30 percent higher than the student’s prior test.”

  “Everybody knows that,” his twin in the Gucci sneakers added.

  Niles looked helplessly at his brother. “And 30 percent would be what, Teague? Like a 1250?”

  Teague looked puzzled. “More like a 1325, I think.”

  The twins’ math brain cells had apparently been divided in half at birth.

  “A 1560 is asstastic,” Niles said, “not fantastic. Now I gotta take the test again, with like, the Secret Service watching. I’m gonna end up at Lackawanna JUCO in Scranton, Piss-Pot-Pennsylvania instead of U.S.C.”

  “I still don’t get it,” I said. “Why would Kip sabotage you like that?”

  “Yo, Gramps. You don’t know shit about Kip, do you?” Niles said.

  “Because of Shari Ringle,” his twin offere
d.

  “Me and Shari hang out,” Niles said, “and Kip does his creeper thing, trolling her. She’s already at U.S.C. I took a year off to travel the world and shit.”

  “You couldn’t shit at home?” I asked

  “Yadidimean, dude.”

  “What?”

  “You know what I mean, Gramps. Dad wanted me to travel and do cultural shit. Then me and Shari would both be at U.S.C., but she’d be a year ahead . . .”

  “And she’d help Niles pass his courses,” his brother concluded.

  “But instead of scoring what he was supposed to, Kip fojangled me.”

  “But it wasn’t smart,” the brother said. “Not when a whadayacallit’s looking at Ringle’s company.”

  “A what?” I asked.

  “A great jury.”

  “Grand jury?” I offered.

  “Yeah. They’re in season now.”

  “The grand jury’s in session?” I asked.

  “They subpoenaed us, and we figured Kip was talking,” Niles said. “That’s why we chased him down in the Glades yesterday. We didn’t mean to run him into the canal.”

  “You two dickwads did that?”

  “But I called 9-1-1,” Teague said proudly. “I’m like a hero or something.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Visitor

  Melissa Gold . . .

  Melissa had just gotten home from the hospital when there was a knock at the door. She peered out a window and saw Kip standing there. He had a key to the house and he also knew that the door, swollen fat with humidity, was usually unlocked and could be opened with a good shove. His waiting on the front step made him seem like a stranger, not someone who, until recently, lived here.

  She opened the door and saw a black Cadillac Escalade idling in the driveway. A man in a suit and aviator sunglasses stood outside the passenger door. He removed his suit coat and loosened his tie. The day was sweltering. Another man behind the wheel still had his suit coat on. The AC must have been cranked up to frozen beef levels. Kip stood at the doorway in jeans and a T-shirt, holding a small package wrapped in shiny gift paper. She saw that he had two black eyes and scratches across his face.