Night vision

CHAPTER 5

It was one of those muggy June days with fifteen hours of daylight but hardly any sunshine. A tropical depression hung over the Gulf of Mexico and raised the blood pressure of Miami's frothy weather guys. Come six and eleven, they show us their color radar and satellite photos, their computerized maps and digital barometers. They blather about wind speeds and waterspouts and reveal what we already know: baby, it's hot outside.

It wasn't even eight a.m., but already my little coral-rock pillbox was stifling. The storm in the Gulf had sucked all the wind from the Florida Straits. Ten days of rain and a month of inattention had left my overgrown yard a jungle that could get me fined if the zoning inspectors weren't busy collecting cash from condo builders who pour rotten slabs.

My house sits in the shade of chinaberry and live-oak trees just off Kumquat in the old part of Coconut Grove. It was built before air-conditioning and has plenty of cross ventilation. But when the wind stops blowing, and the heavy gray sky sags over the bay and the Glades, the old ceiling fans don't do the trick. One of these days I'm going to break down and put in central air. Sure, and maybe get a rooftop dish, a combination fax and photocopy machine, maybe an outdoor whirlpool and an indoor sauna.

Adio s, forty-dollar electricity bills.

Hola, the Grove trendy set.

I wore canvas shorts and nothing else and stood on my rear porch surveying the expanse of my estate-an eighth of an acre, give or take an inch or two. The neighborhood was quiet. The one-story stucco number hidden behind the Poinciana trees belonged to Geoffrey Thompson, who wouldn't be up until noon. He roamed the city streets each night as a free-lance cameraman, shooting videos of drug busts, race riots, and fatal car crashes. A budding entrepreneur, Geoffrey created his own industry when he learned that none of the local TV stations employed photo teams between midnight and eight a.m. When he was drunk enough, Geoffrey would show the outtakes considered too gruesome even for Miami's bloodthirsty viewers.

Next door there was no sign of life at Phoebe's place, which was exactly what it was called in an ad in Florida Swingers magazine. Phoebe had bright red hair and occasionally counted on her fingers, as she did the time she appeared at my door and asked if she could borrow three-no, make it four-condoms. Robert and Robert, who lived together and owned Robert's-what else-Art Gallery, were up and around, hauling out wine bottles and trimming their hibiscus hedge. A regular slice of Americana, that's my Mia-muh.

I dropped into the crabgrass and did my morning push-ups, fifty regular, then twenty one-armed, first right, then left. I rolled onto my back, brought my knees toward my face, and worked through a hundred stomach crunches. C'mon, Lassiter, Coach Sandusky yelled from some faraway field. Get in shape. The grass tickled my bare back and the sweat rolled down my chest. Overhead, an unseen laughing gull mocked me with its raucous call.

The ringing telephone was an excuse to declare victory in my battle to resurrect semi-glories of the past. It was Granny Lassiter calling to tell me a thirty-pound snook was swimming figure-eights under an Islamorada bridge, calling my name. I told her I had a murder to solve but I'd help her eat Mr. Snook if she could catch him.

She wasn't impressed by my work and allowed as how she would catch the fish without me, but wanted to be sporting and land that sucker on eight-pound test line, using live finger mullet for bait.

Granny wasn't my grandmother, but there was some relationship on my father's side, great-aunt maybe. She raised me in the very house of Dade County pine and coral rock where I now lived. When Coconut Grove became too chic, she gave me the house and headed for the Keys, where she fishes and fusses and makes a decent home brew, if you're partial to drinking liquid methane. She's the only family I have. My father was a shrimper who was killed in a barroom brawl in Marathon when I was five years old. He had handled three bikers with his bare hands before a fourth jammed a push dagger into his jugular. Today, when I think of him, I remember his thick wrists and red, rawboned hands. My earliest memory: dangling from those poleax wrists as he would lift me off the floor.

My mother I don't remember at all. All Granny told me was that she had bleached her hair almost white and, while waiting tables in Key West, ran off with a curly-haired stranger headed for the Texas oil fields. So I never called anyone Mom, but for as long as I can remember there's always been a Granny. She taught me how to fish and how to live without doing too much damage along the way.

When I was fifteen-towheaded and suntanned and already two hundred pounds-the hormones were pounding in my ears, and I would shake the little house by jolting the pine-slab walls I considered a make-believe blocking sled. Granny didn't complain; she just hauled me off to the high-school football field, where a couple of Gainesville-bound seniors whupped me up and down. The next year, I was whupping 'most everybody else, and the recruiters came calling from just about every college in the southeast. I visited a few campuses where the fraternity boys laughed at my cutoff jeans, dilapidated deck shoes, and rawhide necklace with the genuine shark's tooth. I didn't have much in common with the players either. They were generally engaged in drunken wrestling matches followed by pissing contests-distance, duration, and accuracy.

One day my senior year in high school, Granny grilled a mess of mangrove snapper with Vidalia onions for a coach with a Brooklyn accent who kept talking about books and classes. I wanted to hear about bowl games and cheerleaders, but he was yammering away in this funny voice about SAT scores and graduation rates. Granny smiled and served him an extra slab of her key lime pie, and I went off to Penn State, where I survived frostbite, aced American Theater 461, and stayed out of jail.

I was a decent enough college player, but the stopwatch doesn't lie, and the NFL scouts could take a nap while I ran the forty. Since then, I've come to figure I must have been the three hundred thirty-seventh best player in the nation my senior year. This bit of mathematical logic stems from the fact that the pros drafted three hundred thirty-six players, none of them named Lassiter. I packed my spikes and gray practice shorts in what was then a not-yet-antique convertible and drove south. I caught on with the hometown Dolphins as a free agent, barely surviving each cut, playing second string, earning my keep by wreaking havoc on kickoffs, and occasionally starting when the star weakside linebacker was in drug rehab. When I realized I wasn't bound for the Hall of Fame (or even a league pension), I started taking night law classes. I had seen Gregory Peck playing Atticus Finch and figured I knew what lawyering was all about. After finally passing the bar exam the third try-the first time coming two days after knee surgery and hefty doses of Darvon, the second after generous rations of Grolsch-I concluded there are no more Atticus Finches. Today's lawyers are slaves to computerized time sheets and, rather than fighting for justice, spend their days punching voluminous pleadings out of word processors and sleeping through endless pretrial depositions. But they seldom stand in front of juries and plead for justice, which, if it is kin to the law, is a distant cousin, at best.

I joined the public defender's office, where I soon discovered that my clients were not necessarily saintly just because they were impoverished. Most of them went to prison, got early release because of overcrowding, and became repeat customers in the Jake Lassiter legal merry-go-round. Then I joined the downtown firm of Harman and Fox, where I became another paper-pushing civil trial lawyer, until Nick Fox called me back to the criminal-law jungle, this time representing the state.

I showered and put on a seersucker suit, but the sweat continued to flow. I poured some orange juice and grabbed a fresh mango, green and red on the outside, sweeter than a peach inside. The neighborhood is overflowing with mangoes and lichee nuts. Peel the nuts, slice the mango, chop a tart carambola into star-shaped pieces, and you've got a fine breakfast. No preservatives, no caffeine.

Inside the ancient Oldsmobile, the cracked leather felt slick and the carpeting smelled of mildew. I put the top down and pretended that the soggy air cooled me. I headed up Miami Avenue under an umbrella of red Poinciana trees. I passed the house that once belonged to a client, a doctor who killed, and I was there when he crumbled under the weight of the guilt and the shame.

Charlie Riggs had helped me then, had taught me how to speak for the dead. He had been the county medical examiner for so long, people swore he began his career digging musket balls out of bodies at Bull Run. He still reads the first forensic medicine textbook, Questiones medico legales, in its original Latin. He can determine the time of death by algor mortis, livor mortis, and rigor mortis-the temperature, color, and stiffness of death. When an inexperienced assistant ME found sunflower seeds in the stomach of a dead banker who died with a smile on his face, Charlie knew that death was by horribly painful strychnine poisoning. The smile was risus sardonicus, a sardonic grin produced by contortions of facial muscles. The sunflower seeds were the remnants of rat poison, and a sharp-eyed hardware-store clerk soon identified the grieving widow with the million-dollar insurance policy as the town's leading pesticide purchaser.

Charlie Riggs knows so much about so many things. I could never figure how a guy who spent his life hollowing out lifeless shells could understand the living so well. There must be lots of canoe makers who know everything about in-shoot wounds and lividity and blood typing. They help the cops figure the when and how of death, and sometimes, piecing together all their clues, they even find the murderer, the who. But if you don't have bullet fragments and a matching gun, or latent prints and a matching hand, you'd better know the why to figure the who. That's why I need you, Charlie Riggs. You bearded old wizard, I need you again.

"Jeez, get a load of that suit," Cindy said, fishing a pen out of her rust-colored, hyper-curled hair. "Why's it all crinkly?"

"It's cool," I said.

She shook her head, each concrete curl staying put. "Co-ol, el jefe, it ain't. You look like a Rotarian."

Cindy had been my secretary in the PD's office and came with me downtown. Her shorthand was indecipherable, her typing haphazard, and her filing disorganized. But she was smart and loyal and could sweet-talk a judge's assistant into an early trial date, and she protected me from the political piranhas in the law firm. She was also a pal.

Cindy's desk was covered with unfiled pleadings and unanswered memos.

"Any messages?" I asked.

She picked up a handful of while-you-were-out memos. "The newsboys are going bonkers over the Diamond murder. All the local stations called, plus your pals at the Journal, a reporter from Reuters, and somebody from Broadcasting magazine who wants to know if there might be terrorist plots against television personalities."

I looked at the messages but didn't plan to return the calls. What could I say? We had no leads, and if we did, we wouldn't put them on the front page. I couldn't even disclose why Nick Fox had appointed me as a special prosecutor. An overworked office, according to the party line. But Cindy was right. The news media would hound us until the case was solved. If it went on too long, they would start wondering about the competence of the ex-football player, ex-public defender, ex-a-lot-of-things appointed to handle the case.

We average a murder a day in Dade County, but few are deemed truly newsworthy. Your average Saturday-night, liquored-up stabbing over a woman or a card game gets you two paragraphs inside the local section, just above the ads for the all-nude body-shampoo parlors in Lauderdale. But this was different. This was one of their own. And judging from the hype on the local stations-a freeze-frame close-up of Marsha Diamond with Verdi's Requiem in the background-you'd have thought we lost Edward R. Murrow instead of a second-rate interviewer who also read commercials on a five p.m. fluff show.

The Journal played it straight. The Diamond death shared page one of the local section with an expose that revealed that a sizable percentage of our taxicabs are repainted stolen cars.

"Anything else?" I asked Cindy.

"Yeah. The managing partner wants to know why you let yourself get appointed to be Nick Fox's flunky."

"The old man have something against fulfilling my civic duty?"

"No, something against a case that pays only a third of your normal hourly rate. He wants a written response, with copies to the New Business Committee, the Senior Council, and the Allocation Committee."

"What else?"

Cindy followed me into my office. I opened the vertical blinds and stared at Biscayne Bay three hundred feet below. Plump gray thunderheads hung motionless over Miami Beach. In fifteen knots of easterly, the bay crinkles like aluminum foil. Today, not a ripple.

"I have the poop on Compu-Mate," she said with a sly smile. She handed me a folder containing some newspaper clippings and a printout from the secretary of state. "But boss, if you're that horny, I could fix you up."

"What?"

"Rather than get hooked up with some loser…"

"What're you talking about?"

"My girlfriend, Dottie the Disco Queen. She likes big guys who aren't quite with it."

"What about her herpes?"

"No problema. In remission."

"Maybe another time," I said. "Anything else?"

"Mr. Foot-in-the-Mouth called."

"Symington? He hasn't replaced me?"

"No such luck." She handed me a bunch of newspaper stories on computer paper. "A messenger delivered these a few minutes ago."

"I'm worried about Carl Hutchinson, all that invective in his column," Symington Foote said when I returned his call.

"You're just a little gun-shy right now," I told the publisher, reassurance coating my voice like honey.

"But these names he's calling Commissioner Goldberg. She's very popular with the voters. And voters are jurors."

He was right about that. Maria Teresa Gonzalez-Goldberg-born in Cuba, schooled in a convent, married to a Jewish cop, with an adopted black child-was a formidable politician. She had swept into office two years earlier with eighty-six percent of the vote. She then redecorated her office in teak, chrome, leather, and glass to the tune of one-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollars of taxpayers' money. At a time the county couldn't afford to repair backed-up toilets in public housing projects.

"Marie Antoinette," Foote was saying. "He called her Marie Antoinette!"

"Fair comment," I advised.

"Said she ought to redecorate a cell at Marianna Institution for Women."

"Rhetorical hyperbole," I counseled confidently.

"Said the 'crossover candidate' became the 'carnivorous commissioner, feeding on the flesh of the poor.'"

"A bit grisly," I admitted, "but she's a public official."

"Seems I heard that before," Foote said.

I spent the rest of the morning on the newspaper's work. I advised the business manager to accept the advertisement from the airport hotel that promised "freedom fighter" discounts to smugglers aiding the Nicaraguan contras. I told the photo editor that the picture of the model wearing a bra with a built-in holster for a Beretta was not an invasion of privacy and accurately portrayed Florida's new concealed-weapons law. I told the city editor to ignore complaints that property values would be hurt by the local map showing Dade County murders by zip code. Finally, I told the food editor that the grilled alligator recipe omitted cayenne pepper, and then I had lunch.