JL04 - Mortal Sin (7 page)

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Tupton must have told his wife,” Nicky said.

“Told her what?”

“But there’s nothing in writing.”

“Told her what?” I repeated.

“I could say
he
solicited a bribe, and I turned him down. Who would know?”

“I would,” I said.

His look was razor-sharp. “Don’t start playing Boy Scout with me over a harmless little talk I had with that self-important sack of shit. I know about you. I know all about you.”

Gina cleared her throat. “If you boys are going to play, I think I’ll go take a pee. Excuse me…powder my nose.” She wriggled back into her shoes—one or two wriggles more than seemed necessary—stood up, and left the conference room.

Nicky Florio and I just sat there staring at each other. What had he meant?
All
about me. Professional, personal, or both? The grievance proceeding, or Gina, or a guy I once decked in a bar? I didn’t know. All right, so maybe I’m the bull in the china shop when it comes to tact and subtlety, but basically, I like to think I’m considered almost respectable by my peers. Unfortunately, there are no sophisticated electronic devices to measure character, and all of us see ourselves differently than those around us. Our reputation is created out of earshot.

I try to go through each day wreaking as little havoc as possible. I am unfailingly polite to bone-weary waitresses who deliver my potatoes fried instead of mashed. I never park in the handicapped space or toss gum wrappers on the sidewalk. I don’t shoot little furry animals or curse at telephone solicitors. I help old ladies across the street, feed stray cats, and recycle beer bottles. For the past several years, I worked the cafeteria line at a homeless shelter on Thanksgiving, scooping out the gravy to haggard men and women, thanking the powers of the universe for the cosmic luck that gave me a sound body and semi-sound mind.

In the practice of law, a sea inhabited by sharks and other carnivores, my ethics are simple. I won’t lie to a judge, steal from a client, or bribe a cop. Until recently, I wouldn’t sleep with a client’s wife, but since I knew Gina before she married Nicky, I figured I was grandfathered in, if I figured anything at all.

Other than that, I believe in drawing blood from the opposition, but not by going for the knees. Hit ’em straight on, jawbone-to-jawbone. Which is why I didn’t like the slippery scruples of Nicky Florio, who sat there glaring at me with his dark, piercing eyes.

“Okay,” I said. “Forget about my principles. I sometimes do. Think about this. Maybe Tupton was wired when you talked.”

“That’d be illegal, wouldn’t it?”

Now it was getting too close to home. “Not if it was part of a law-enforcement investigation. Or maybe he did an affidavit after the conversation or told it to the newspapers. Maybe the grand jury is looking into it.”

“Abe Socolow runs the grand jury, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah, he’s the prosecutor in charge of corruption probes.”

“He was at the party. He’s all right.”

“He’s better than all right. Abe’s tough and honest, and he could eat your canapés all night and subpoena you the next morning.”

Florio smiled. “Don’t worry. He’s on our team.”

“What does that mean?”

“He’s running for state attorney, right? I’m helping him out with his finances.”

“Look, Nicky, I’ve known Abe since he was prosecuting DUIs and I was defending shoplifters. You can’t buy him. Now, what the hell was going on between you and Tupton?”

If Nicky had to think about the answer, he was a quick study. “It was no big deal. I offered him stock in Micanopy Management Company at a special rate, that’s all.”

“A special rate?”

“Yeah, like for free.”

“You didn’t!”

“The company’s a gold mine. We’ve got the management contract for the Micanopy bingo hall. You ever see the place?”

I shook my head.

“Out on the fringe of the Glades. You could play the Super Bowl in there, and it’s a real cash machine. Gondolier does a great job. We bring in the retirees by the busload from all over. St. Pete, Naples, Lehigh Acres, Cape Coral, Sunrise Lakes, Bonita Springs. Jeez, we gotta have a cardiologist on the premises, we get a couple tickers stopping during the hundred-grand game on Saturday nights. Now we’ve got the video pull-tab games, French bingo, do-it-yourself bingo.”

“What’s it got to do with Tupton?”

“Nothing, until, as a friendly gesture, I offered him the stock, that’s all. Plus a seat on the board. He could pick up some spare change in director’s fees.”

“This is bullshit, and you know it. You were trying to bribe him.”

“Hold on, Jake. He wasn’t a public official. There was nothing illegal about it. Okay, so I wanted some cooperation. But I never said he had to do anything for me in return. That’s not a bribe, right?”

“Right, there’s no bribe unless there’s a quid pro quo.” I haven’t hung around Doc Riggs all these years without learning something.

Florio smiled, thinking about it. I wouldn’t want him smiling at me like that. “‘Course, if he took the quid and didn’t give me the quo, I’d have killed the son of a bitch.”

“But Tupton didn’t take it, did he?”

“No, he refused.”

“So how come the son of a bitch is dead?” I asked.

I
AIMED THE OLD CONVERTIBLE WEST ON TAMIAMI TRAIL BUT NEVER
got out of third gear. From Brickell Avenue westward, the Trail cuts a straight, if congested, path through Little Havana. Once out of the city, the road splits the Everglades heading straight toward Naples on the west coast. Eventually, it bends to the north and hits Tampa.

Tamiami, Tampa to Miami, get it?

My old beauty, a canary-yellow 1968 Olds 442, growled and groaned, anxious for wide-open spaces. But now, as the afternoon sun glared down, Charlie Riggs and I were stuck somewhere between Thirteenth and Twenty-second avenues. At least that’s what they used to be called. Thirteenth is now Luis Medina Muñoz Marin Avenue, and Twenty-second is General Máximo Gómez Boulevard. If that’s not confusing enough, Tamiami Trail is better known as Calle Ocho, since it is really Eighth Street, in case you’re counting.

Salsa music poured from open storefronts, the neighborhood a potpourri of cultural confusion. The sign above a medical clinic:
VENAS VARICOSAS
. A furniture store:
GARANTIZAMOS LOS PRECIOS MAS BAJOS
. A nightclub:
EXÓTICO, ARDIENTE, ESPECTACULAR
. Delivery vans blocked the right-hand lane. Shoppers and tourists and kids in souped-up Chevys crept along, engines heating up, radiators threatening to blow. Yesterday, on the TV news, one of the weather guys with the pasted-on smile tried to fry an egg on the sidewalk. He got some sizzle, but the yolk was still runny.

In front of us, a Metro bus downshifted and braked, belching black smoke. “Damn, Charlie, is it getting hotter every summer or is it just me?”

“The greenhouse effect’s a fact, my boy, and it feeds on itself. As the atmospheric temperature rises, more carbon dioxide is released from the forests and grasslands. So, global warming stimulates more global warming.”

“Then we’re cooking ourselves to death,” I said, inhaling a dose of bus exhaust. On the back of the bus, a billboard extolled the virtues of Rolling Hills Estates, a Florio Enterprises community. Nicky Florio’s smiling face looked down at me through the fumes.

“Actually, global warming will usher in a new ice age,” Charlie corrected me.

“I don’t get it,” I said, and not for the first time. “Global warming will melt the glaciers.”

Charlie wagged his head from side to side. “Just the opposite. The Arctic doesn’t get much snow because it’s too cold and too dry, but global warming will cause a major increase in polar temperatures and humidity. That’ll increase snowfall by perhaps forty percent, and the polar ice cap will reach Long Island.”

Dandy, I thought. When it gets too hot, the earth freezes over. Makes sense, though. A perfect incongruous symmetry. If life is filled with ironies, why shouldn’t nature be? Hard work leads to coronaries, love to heartbreak of another kind, life to death. As night follows day, sorrow follows joy. The affluent, many of whom labored mightily to get there, spawn indolent children. The kid from the ghetto gets an Ivy League scholarship, then is cut down in a gang fight at home. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the meek shall inherit the shit.

A police siren wailed at the intersection of Tamiami and LeJeune Road, and we came to a halt again. “I remember one hot August day,” Charlie said, gesturing toward the street with his pipe, “a fellow went to a convenience store not far from here to buy one of those South American sodas. Pony Malta.”

“Bebida de campeones,”
I said.

“So they call it, but no champions could survive this bottle. The man fell into a coma after swigging half the drink. Brain-dead in an hour. They took him off life support, and I did the autopsy.”

A van swerved in front of us from the left lane, and I laid on the horn. It played my favorite tune, “Fight On, State.”

“A simple overdose,” Charlie said. “The drink was fifty percent pure
cocaina.
Somewhere between Bogota and Miami, the bad guys got their cartons mixed up. The contraband went to the convenience store, and the soda went to a smugglers’ warehouse.”

“I’m more concerned about a recent autopsy,” I said.

It took Charlie only a second. “Oh my, Mr. Tupton. I nearly forgot. I’ve scoured the M.E.’s report, rechecked the findings. Acidosis due to hypoxemia in peripheral tissues. Ventricular fibrillation. Just as you said, nothing inconsistent with hypothermia.”

“The prints, Charlie? What about the Super Glue?”

“Ah yes. The methyl-methacrylate test. A thumb and forefinger of sufficient clarity. Quite a nice double loop on the thumb and a tented arch on the forefinger, as I recall. Have you ever read the definitive text by the Argentinean Juan Vucetich?
Dactiloscopia Comparada.
Published a hundred years ago, but still valuable in assessing…”

“Charlie!”

He cleared his throat. “Sorry for the digression. The prints came from the right wrist of Mr. Tupton. Others on the left wrist were simply not usable.”

“And?”

“Well, the ones we’ve got match up quite nicely with that of your client, Nicky Florio.”

“I see.”

Charlie was silent a moment. “Do you?”

“I’m not surprised, that’s all.”

“Why?” Charlie asked. “It proves nothing. When the paramedics arrived, the body was outside on the patio. Florio gave a statement saying he carried Tupton out there. Obviously, he may have grabbed the man by the wrists to hoist him up and carry him out.”

“Or he may have dragged him into the wine cellar by the wrists when Tupton was still alive.”

Charlie scowled at me. “Just whose side are you on, Jake?”

Again I was silent. At trial, I try not to ask a question when I don’t know the answer. In real life, I don’t like to respond to questions for the same reason.

An open Jeep with four Hispanic teenagers was crowding me on the left, its radio blaring “
Sopa de Caracol.
” Again, I tapped the horn, which now blared a few notes of the Penn State alma mater.

The guy riding shotgun in the Jeep, a pimpled bodybuilder in a muscle T-shirt, reached under his seat and came up holding a nine-millimeter handgun. He didn’t point it at me, just sort of waved it in the air with a smirk on his face. What is it our local humorist Dave Barry likes to say?
Miami is a place where homicide is a misdemeanor, and motorists use guns instead of turn signals.
Something like that. As if to prove the point, the Jeep pulled into the far left lane, cutting off a florist’s delivery truck, then screeched around the corner without flashing a turn signal.

“I read somewhere that the homicide rate goes up when it gets hotter,” I said.

“So? What does it mean?”

“That the heat makes us angrier, I suppose. People lose their temper, that sort of thing.”

Charlie shook his head. “
Quot homines, tot sententiae.
So many men, so many opinions. There are a myriad of variables that could affect the homicide rate. Other factors may coincide with the summer months besides heat. Perhaps unemployment, heavier drinking. Do you follow me?”

“Like a duck behind its mother.”

Charlie chewed on his cold pipe. “There’s another study that shows that men’s sperm count goes down during the summer. Would you say the heat causes that?”

I was getting too smart to jump to conclusions. “No, it probably has something to do with baseball.”

“Just as likely,” Charlie said with a laugh. “Men who live and work in air-conditioned surroundings also have reduced sperm counts in the summer, so the heat may be irrelevant.”

Traffic thinned as we neared Sweetwater, a suburb of Nicaraguan émigrés on the western fringe of the city. “So what’s my point, Jake?”

“Same as always, Charlie. Things are seldom what they seem.”

“Correct! Non semper ea sunt quae videntur.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” I told him.

A handsome white ibis sat on the hood of a Dodge pickup. We pulled in next to the truck, and the bird flapped its black-tipped wings and took off, but not before leaving behind a memento on the windshield. Next to us, two charter buses from Wachula were disgorging their elderly passengers. I helped Charlie Riggs out of his shoulder harness, and we walked into the bingo hall, a gleaming white building the size of a convention hall.

Inside, the pot-of-gold and pull-tab video games blinked their red and green lights, dispensing coupons redeemable for cash. No jangle of coins here, but these were slot machines just the same. Slide a twenty-dollar bill into the slot, get twenty plays. If three oranges come up, you win. Three gold bars pay top prize of $5,592. Nearby, in a perimeter room, a game of thirty-number bingo was under way.

In the main hall, the crowd was still forming for the early-bird game. According to the signs, the games would continue until 4:00
A.M.
Some of the old folks were ambling through the cafeteria line, bringing fried chicken and mashed potatoes with iced tea back to their seats. The Wachula retirees—white shoes and bright plaid outfits—were trooping toward the tables. Their voices, chirpy and expectant coming through the door, dropped into respectful murmurs as they entered the main hall, their cathedral of chance and providence.