Mortal Sin

by Paul Levine

  And then he was gone.

  I walked across the street into the government-center complex. Just another suit hanging around the County Commission Building. Probably only one of a dozen guys who had bribery on his mind that morning. I took the escalator to the Metrorail station, slipped some more quarters into the slot, and headed to the next level. A security guard looked right past me.

  A gleaming train was tooting its horn as it pulled in.

  Northbound.

  It really didn’t make any difference.

  I got aboard. Nearly empty. A family of European tourists, Germans maybe, the husband in those open sandals with thin brown socks, a wife and two boys in shorts, Mickey Mouse T-shirts, and instant sunburns. The man had a camera bag slung over a shoulder, his passport sticking halfway out of his pants pocket. If they got out of town with their traveler’s checks, they’d be lucky.

  I liked Metrorail, a clean, smooth billion-dollar elevated train that was hurting for business. I rode it now to the northwest, skimming the tops of the trees through Overtown, cutting by the Justice Building, where I imagined a warrant for my arrest was being typed by a bleary-eyed secretary. I stayed on the train all the way to Hialeah and the grand old racetrack, which had come back from near-bankruptcy.

  I bought grandstand admission, buried my face in a Racing Form, and bet the number-three horse the first four races, losing eight dollars. I ate a hot dog with chili and sat there in the seedy charm of the place where bougainvillea crept along crumbling balustrades.

  There were still a few hundred pink flamingos on the island in the center of the turf. Even though they feed the birds a mixture of rice, shrimp, and dog biscuits, the rascals tend to fly away, preferring the wilds of the Everglades and what’s left of the Keys.

  So after a while, the bird handlers began clipping the pink feathers, grounding the flamingos, or at least keeping them on the racetrack grounds. A fancy prison.

  It took me half the afternoon and two more nags out of the money to figure out what to do. I rode Metrorail south, getting off this time at the hospital complex. It was a short walk to Bob Hope Road and the morgue.

  I went in the back way, pounding on the metal doors until a young assistant medical examiner came by, his gloved hands bloody. I told him I wanted to see Charlie Riggs, and he pointed to the lab. I walked in, adjusting to the smell—part formaldehyde, part rotting tissue—and found Charlie sitting on a high stool, huddled over a counter, using a scalpel to slice tiny slivers of brain tissue and examine them under a microscope. In a rubber bucket next to him, a dozen brains, resembling a bushel of cauliflower, waited their turn.

  I told him where I’d been and what I’d done, skipping only the part where I hurled chunks onto the big cop’s shoes, and he took the brain he’d been working on and gently placed it back in the bucket. He listened and occasionally asked a question. As we talked, several assistant medical examiners stopped by to pay their respects. Though retired, Charlie was still a legend among canoe makers in the red-brick death house.

  A mustachioed man in a lab coat asked Charlie to examine thirty-three stab wounds on a murdered prostitute. We stepped over to a chrome tray that held what had been an overweight woman in her thirties. Her torso and thighs bore multiple puncture wounds. Her arms were sliced where she had tried to defend herself. Chunks of her flesh were missing where the M.K. had taken dissections to follow the track of the blades. No weapon had been found. The young M.K. was confused by the different-shaped tracks and thought there had to be three weapons. That would be unusual and would probably indicate at least two assailants.

  After a moment, Charlie said, “Two weapons only. A long-bladed vegetable knife, mistakenly called a butcher’s knife by most policemen. That’d cover the large wounds. The small ones were likely made by an ice pick.” Charlie examined a slide of the wound. “This one from her abdomen is the vegetable knife again. It just went in the same wound twice. The first time, the assailant pushed the blade down, the second time up. That’s what gives it the saber-like appearance, but it’s just a vegetable knife.”

  The young doc thanked the old doc, who turned back to me. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Bring down Nicky Florio before he brings me down.”

  “How?”

  We were interrupted by an Oriental woman in a white lab coat with an I.D. badge on a chain around her neck. She held a skull that resembled a coconut bashed by a sledgehammer. “Dr. Ling,” Charlie said, with a slight bow.

  “I’m having trouble determining which perforating gunshot wound was the initial one,” she said.

  Together, they examined the cracks in the eggshell-like fissures in the skull. From their conversation, I gathered that the victim was struck by two bullets from different guns. The victim was an innocent bystander in a shoot-out with police, and the good folks in the state attorney’s office wanted to know if a cop or a robber pulled the trigger on the fatal shot. “It’s the windowpane effect,” Charlie said. “Imagine that you strike a pane of glass and get a fracture line. Hit the glass again in a different place, and the second fracture will stop where it meets the first fracture.” Charlie traced an index finger over the longer crack. “Here’s your trail of death.”

  Dr. Ling expressed her thanks, tucked the skull under her arm, and cheerfully headed back to her lab table.

  “Now where were we?” Charlie asked, turning back to me.

  “I was about to tell you how I was going to get Florio. First, by lining up some allies. The Micanopy Tribal Council won’t be too pleased with Florio when they learn how he hoodwinked them out of their full ten percent.”

  “You’re going to violate your client’s confidence.”

  “Hey, I’ve done it before. Besides, we weren’t in an attorney-client relationship at the time. More like murderer and accessory.”

  He chewed that over and didn’t seem to disagree. “Okay, so what can the Micanopies do to help?”

  “They can get me back to Florio’s house in the Glades. No way I could find it otherwise. I’ll take you along to sift and scrape, and maybe we’ll find some speck of Rick Gondolier that can be used as evidence. Maybe the tribe can give me some manpower, help bring in Tiger and Diaz. If we’ve got the physical evidence, and if Diaz would roll over, I could nail both Tiger and Florio for the murder of Gondolier.”

  Charlie was cleaning his fingernails with a scalpel as he thought about it. “Too many ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes.’”

  “But that’s not all. There’s something else Florio is up to. He kept pressing me on what Gina had told me about his project in the Glades. Then she asked if Nicky told me about ‘the rest of it.’ There’s something else Florio is hiding, something big.” My eyes roamed around the lab. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s out there somewhere.”

  “Then go find it,” Charlie said.

  “I intend to, but I don’t mind telling you that I’m more than a little worried.”

  “Worried?”

  “Okay, scared. I had a nightmare last night that a head rolled across a table into my lap. When I looked down, it was my head.”

  “The dinosaurs may be back, Jake.”

  “Huh?”

  “And we may be gone.”

  For a moment, I thought Charlie might have sliced too many brains, including his own. He produced a pipe from a pocket in his lab coat and sucked on the cold stem. “An asteroid may have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, but it was an earlier one that led to their emergence.”

  “What does that have to do with Nicky Florio and—”

  “Hush, now.” Charlie removed his pipe and gestured toward space. “About two hundred million years ago, an asteroid hit a forest in Canada, creating a fireball fourteen hundred miles wide. Billions of tons of soot poured into the atmosphere. Years of darkness followed. The animals starved or froze when the temperatures plunged. Then the enormous amounts of carbon dioxide led to global warming, and in some untold thousands of years, the plants returned and
dinosaurs developed. Millions of years go by, and another giant asteroid hits, and again much of life is wiped out, including the dinosaurs.”

  “Is there a point to this, Charlie?”

  “Same as always. We’re all going to die. Our species will undoubtedly be wiped out when the next huge asteroid hits, if we don’t do it to ourselves first. The end may come next year or a thousand years from now. Our individual lives are puny, meaningless. So do the right thing. Seek the truth, quaere verum, and don’t be afraid.”

  He gave me the keys to his pickup truck and wished me Godspeed. I told him I’d see him tomorrow, or if not, when the dinosaurs came home.

  Chapter 20

  * * *

  A Drop in the Bucket

  CHARLIE’S OLD DODGE PICKUP HAD MUDDY FENDERS, a jouncy ride, and squeaky shocks. It hadn’t had a wheel alignment since Zsa Zsa Gabor was an ingénue. The radio was set on a big-band AM station, and the front seat was littered with week-old newspapers and a couple of paperback books. I threw the papers in a trash can, tossed a dog-eared copy of The Corpse Had a Familiar Face by Edna Buchanan into the glove compartment, and headed west on Tamiami Trail, playing tug-of-war with the steering wheel, which kept pulling right toward a muddy canal.

  I fell in behind an eighteen-wheeler, which soon chugged ahead of me. I let a kid in a Trans Am zoom by me on the two-lane road. Going fifty in Charlie’s truck on a straightaway was exciting enough. It also gave me time to figure what I was going to say to the chief.

  The stiff breeze was rattling the thatched fronds of the chickee huts in the Micanopy village. The doll-making and basket-weaving booths were empty. Precious few tourists had paid their five dollars to observe Indian women sew their patchwork quilts or watch a husky young man wrestle a bored gator. It looked as if cobwebs were growing on the eight-passenger airboat—half-hour ride, seven dollars—and the restaurant wasn’t dishing out much Indian fry bread.

  Inside the information center, a one-story concrete-block building, I asked a dark-haired, heavyset girl in a turquoise skirt where to find the chief. She smiled, told me I meant the chairman of the tribe, and pointed down the corridor. I followed her directions, knocked on the thin, paneled door, and he coughed me inside.

  Henry Osceola sat in his windowless office sucking on a cigarette. The office was decorated in no-frills clutter. Metal filing cabinets, mica desk, the walls bare except for a calendar from a Naples bank and a faded print of a marshy hammock at sunset.

  He was a lanky man with a seamed, lived-in face and white hair pulled back in a ponytail. He could have been fifty or seventy or any where in between. He wore a blue knit shirt with a green crocodile on the breast, faded jeans with a beaded belt, and the same high-top basketball shoes favored by a guy with a shaved head in Chicago. His forearms were heavily veined and the color of Nicky Florio’s mahogany furniture. The cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth, and an ashtray on the desk held butts of a dozen more. No filters. He coughed at me a second time, hacked, then used a metal waste can as a spittoon.

  Osceola looked at my herringboned self and informed me in a raspy voice that the tribe had all the insurance it was going to need for the next twenty years. I told him I was a lawyer, and he let me know that the airboat passengers all sign waivers, so I could go chase ambulances somewhere else, he had work to do. Then he opened a folder and began going through what looked like a stack of bills. He was writing checks, muttering to himself, oblivious to me. The nails of his thumb and index finger on his right hand were stained a deep yellow.

  “I’m here about something else,” I said. “Your dealings with Nicky Florio.”

  “You Florio’s lawyer?”

  “Yes. No. Well, I was.”

  “Not too sure of yourself, are you?” He looked up at me through a haze of cigarette smoke. “I don’t remember you from the negotiations.”

  “I wasn’t there. I want to talk to you about the ninety-nine-year lease.”

  There was the hint of a smile. “White man want to break treaty?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  He barked out a laugh. “That was a joke, Mr. Lawyer. Like the comedians on the cable.” He pointed over his shoulder. “I installed the satellite dish for the village. One hundred twenty-three stations. Soccer games from Hungary. Parliament from London. Nude commercials from Scandinavia. Comedians on the pay channels, but of course we don’t pay. The air is free, and if HBO sued us, we would say that the Great White Father in Washington granted us domain over the land, both to the core of the earth and to the stars in the sky.”

  He looked at me but didn’t get a reaction. “That was a joke too. An Indian in an old Western might say, ‘Great White Father.’ So, I am being self-deprecating and sarcastic at the same time. Am I going too fast for you?”

  I told him he had a better sense of humor than most CEOs I deal with, so it would take me a while to keep pace.

  “Do you watch the comedians?” he asked.

  I told him I liked Dennis Miller and Robin Williams, George Carlin and Richard Pryor. He nodded judiciously, as a chief, or tribal chairman, should.

  “The African-American ones are my favorites,” he said, after thinking about it. “Pryor especially. He expresses the pain. Eddie Murphy, too, but like a young man, all he thinks about is…”He made a motion of running his right thumb through a circle made of his left thumb and index finger. “Bill Cosby is too soft. No pain. As for his television program…”He shook his head sadly. “You are probably thinking that Native Americans have a natural affinity for African Americans.”

  “Certainly, both groups have been victimized.”

  “Victimized is such a sugarcoated euphemism for genocide, don’t you think? Did you know that my tribe gave refuge to runaway slaves in the early 1800s?”

  I shook my head.

  “That, of course, led to attacks by the American troops. Neither the first nor the last.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette, leaving him with a quarter-inch butt that disappeared between his thumb and finger. “What is your interest in the lease?”

  “It’s not my interest, really. It’s yours. And your tribe’s. And all the people of Florida.”

  He regarded me skeptically.

  I regarded me skeptically.

  Without taking his eyes from mine, Henry Osceola ground out the butt in the ashtray and pulled a fresh Camel from a pack on the desk. “Are you here on behalf of Mr. Florio?”

  “No. He doesn’t know I’m here. He wouldn’t like it if he knew I wanted to help you.”

  Osceola ignored a plastic lighter on the desk and reached into his desk drawer for a six-inch-long wooden match. He struck his thumbnail to the phosphorous tip and let the match burn for a moment before lighting his cigarette in the orange flame. Why did I get the feeling he was putting on a show for me?

  “Ah,” Henry Osceola said, “a turncoat. Like Kevin Costner in the movie with the wolves, you have abandoned the ways of the white man to help the Native American.”

  I couldn’t help feeling that he was mocking me.

  “Now what is it you have come to say, that the great white builder of condominiums is not to be trusted?”

  “Yes, but more than that. If what I’ve been told is true, the lease is unconscionable. Is there a clause that allows Florio Enterprises to assign the lease without the tribe’s consent?”

  Henry Osceola spun around in his chair, bent over, and opened a file drawer in a green metal cabinet. He fiddled around for a moment, then withdrew a blue-backed document. He handed it to me, dropping a thin line of ash on the cover page. I thumbed to the back. Forty-seven pages in total. I went to the front.

  Whereas the Micanopy Tribe of Indians is the owner in fee simple of certain realty more particularly described as follows…

  I looked at the Terms and Conditions clause. Florio paid a lousy fifty thousand for the option to lease the land. The lease wouldn’t become effective until the option was exercised with a payment of $I million when const
ruction began on Cypress Estates, described in the lease as a “residential-commercial” venture. A separate clause described in general terms the “cultural-tourism” phase of the project, a smokescreen for the casino. No money up front. Just as Florio had told me, a provision giving the tribe 10 percent of Florio Enterprises’ gross receipts.

  I skimmed quickly through the rest. The assignability clause would be near the back along with the boilerplate—the choice-of-law, arbitration, and severability provisions—that nobody but a Philadelphia lawyer ever reads. And there it was, on page 45, innocuous as could be.

  The Lessee may freely assign all or portions of this Agreement in its discretion, whether to third parties, or to affiliated entities, without the consent of the Lessor.

  I pushed the lease back across the desk toward Osceola. “Did you understand this clause?”

  He coughed, exhaling a puff of smoke in my direction, looked quickly at the page, and said, “You probably think we Ye just a bunch of dumb Indians. We had a lawyer, you know. A real estate man from Collier County. He read all the fine print. He told us we were getting a good deal because we were in for a percentage of the gross receipts. ‘Stay away from the net,’ he kept saying. ‘If it’s net profits, they’ll load up all their expenses on you, and you’ll never see a dime.’ That’s what we focused on.”

  “Well, he lost sight of something else. Florio Enterprises can assign its contract for one dollar to another of Nicky Florio’s companies. Then you’ll get ten percent of whatever that other company decides to pay to Florio Enterprises as a management fee. It doesn’t matter if they’re making a hundred million a year in profit, they can give the management company anything they want.”

  Henry Osceola turned toward his waste bucket and hacked up a wad of phlegm.

  “What Florio’s paying you is a drop in the bucket,” I said, immediately regretting my choice of words. “This lease is going to make Nicky Florio one of the richest men in the country. See, there’s something Florio didn’t tell you. The so-called cultural-tourism phase isn’t just a museum and Indian village. It’s gambling, and I don’t mean bingo.”