by Paul Levine
“ Not recently,” I said.
“ Oh hush up, Jake,” Granny admonished me. “I’d rather listen to Doc’s yarns than hear about criminals you’ve helped keep on the streets.”
Ouch. Why’s everyone on my case these days? Now there were two of us pouting.
Charlie gnawed on a cold meerschaum pipe, waiting for a break in the Lassiter family banter. He had been county coroner for twenty-five years, and in retirement, his interests had expanded from corpses to virtually every bit of knowledge worth knowing and a lot that wasn’t. Doc Riggs was a short, bandy legged, bushy-bearded cherub with bright brown eyes behind eyeglasses that were slightly cockeyed, probably because one of the hinges was held together with a bent fishhook where a screw had long since dropped out. Charlie was wearing green work pants cut off at the knees, an army camouflage T-shirt, and a Florida Marlins cap. His nose was smeared with gooey, white sun block.
“ C’mon, Charlie, I was only kidding. What’s your story about?’’
Charlie shot me a look over his shoulder. “The moral might have been summed up by Horace when he wrote ‘ Ira furor brevis est.’”
“ Horace had such a way with words,” I agreed.
‘ Anger is brief madness,’ “Charlie translated. “Two biologists at a research laboratory were bitter rivals, and when one received a government grant and the other did not, professional jealousy erupted into-”
“ Poisoned nasal spray?” I asked, digging the pole into the shallow water, and pushing us silently across the flats.
“ Precisely. One biologist injected beta-propiolactone into the spray the other used for his sinusitis. The drug is quite useful in sterilizing body parts prior to transplant, but I wouldn’t recommend ingesting it. We ran a day’s worth of tests on the stuff before we could even identify it over at the old morgue. You remember that place, Jake?”
“ Sure. That’s before the county built you the Taj Mahal on Bob Hope Road.” It was true. Those unfortunate victims of shoot-outs and knife fights-most of whom had lived in squalor-spent a few posthumous days in a splendid brick building with the ambience of a decent hotel. “The nasal spray, Charlie. Did it kill the rival?”
“ Dei gratia, by the grace of God, no. The chemical in the nasal spray changed the properties of the beta-propiolactone. Stung like the devil but didn’t cause permanent damage. The assailant, it turns out, had suffered a mental breakdown, and was given a suspended sentence with intensive psychiatric therapy.”
“ I like that story, Doc,” Granny said. “For once, nobody got killed, and justice was done.”
“ He must have made it up,” I suggested.
Doc Riggs harrumphed at me, baited a hook for himself, and launched into a lengthy and graphic description of determining time of death by the extent of larvae growth in the corpse. The story seemed to make Granny hungry, because she grabbed a strand of Jamaican jerk chicken from a waterproof bag.
I didn’t spend as much time with Granny as I used to, and now I studied her a moment. She was a tough old bird in khaki shorts, an “Eat ‘em Raw” T-shirt from a Key West oyster bar, and a canvas hat. Her legs and bare feet were tanned the color of mahogany bark and were just as soft. As she listened to Doc Riggs spin his tales, Granny watched the water, squinting into the morning sun, occasionally giving me directions by pointing her fishing rod in a direction her instincts or her failing eyesight dictated. She let fly a cast, grimaced, and allowed the line to drift in the placid water. “You gotta lay the hay down where the goats can git it. Jake, you see the tails of any bonefish a-wiggling?”
“ Only thing I see are snails dancing across my eyelids,” I said.
“ Too much of Granny’s moonshine last night,” Doc Riggs told me, as if I didn’t know. “We’re all liable to be blind by tonight.”
Granny Lassiter wasn’t even my grandmother, but there was some relationship on my father’s side. Great-aunt or distant cousin or something. She raised me after my father, a Key West shrimper, was killed in a barroom brawl, and my mother ran off to Oklahoma with a roughneck. I called her Granny, and so did everybody else. Well, nearly everybody else. There was the sailor in the bar who called her Skunky, a reference to the white streak that creases her jet-black hair. He only called her that once, a whack across the ankle from a four-foot tarpon gaff ending the nickname then and there.
Charlie was going on about how posthumous stench attracts blowflies. It’s just like an engraved invitation to colonize a cadaver, I think he said. Granny was still chewing the jerk chicken, washing it down with beer from the cooler. I kept poling, watching for fish, occasionally looking at the towheaded kid Granny had brought along. She was always feeding stray cats and little boys.
“ How about you, son,” I asked. “You try any of Granny’s white lightning last night?”
“ I’m not your son,” the kid said, matter-of-factly and accurately.
“ And we’re both thankful for that,” I responded. I am generally able to hold my own in repartee with eleven-year-olds, though I don’t have much practice.
“ Kip drank his weight in Granny’s mango milk shakes,” Charlie said. “Gave him an orange mustache.”
Kip. That’s right. I’d heard Granny call out “Kippers” a couple of times, but I thought she was looking for some salted herring.
“ Mangifera indica, such a delectable fruit,” Charlie was saying. “Though it tastes like a cross between a peach and a pineapple, the mango actually is related to the cashew nut, and heaven help me, poison ivy. Isn’t that strange, the relationship between a sweet and a poison?”
“ Reminds me of the women Jake’s been sniffing around all these years,” Granny said. “Except for that one who became the lawyer, they were a bunch of Jezebels in miniskirts.”
“ Non semper ea sunt quae videntur,” Charlie said. “Things are not always what they seem.”
Charlie went on like that for a while, waxing philosophical about plants, animals, and the human condition. I watched the kid, who was still pouting.
“ Kip,” I called out in my let’s-be-pals voice, “how ‘bout some fishing? Want to chase the wily bonefish with a fly rod?”
“ I hate fishing,” the kid said.
“ Fair enough,” I responded. “How ‘bout a swim? I could toss you overboard and chum for sharks.”
“ Jake!” Granny warned me.
“ Just like Lifeboat,” Kip said, nonchalantly.
I stopped poling. “Huh?”
Kip looked at me with the air of superiority kids use when dealing with an adult who’s never learned their games. “The movie. After a shipwreck, there isn’t room for everyone. Some are thrown overboard so others can live.”
“ Sounds like plea bargaining in a case with multiple defendants,” I said.
“ It was filmed during World War Two,” Kip continued, “a parable for what was going on in Europe.”
“ A parable,” I repeated, impressed.
“ Yes, that means you can take it literally or-”
“ I know what it means, kid.”
“ Jake, don’t stifle Kippers,” Granny ordered, keeping her eyes on the water. “Movies are very important to him.”
I turned back to the precocious pouter. “I’ll bet you even know who directed this Lifeboat.”
The towheaded kid gave me another look of youthful disdain. “ Everybody knows Hitchcock was the director.”
Granny dropped a cast near some green floating gunk.
“‘ Bout all Kippers does is sit home watching movies on the cable. Makes me want to take the twelve-gauge and blast a hole in that damn satellite dish.” She turned and peered at me from under the canvas hat. “I was hoping maybe you could get the lad more interested in the outdoors.”
“ I could use him to pull weeds in my backyard,” I offered, generously.
Granny reeled in a stringy mess of seaweed and cleaned off her line. “That’s not what I had in mind. Maybe you could toss the football with him. I told Kippers you used to pla
y for the Dolphins.”
“ I looked you up in my card book,” the kid said.
I grunted an acknowledgment. Little boys are always impressed by athletes, even second-stringers.
“ Your rookie card is only worth twenty-five cents.’’
“ You don’t say.’’
“ That’s the minimum,” he reminded me.
“ Sounds like a good investment,” Charlie chimed in, though nobody asked him to. Then Charlie launched into a soliloquy on the depressed international art market, mainly due to economic woes in Japan, when the kid interrupted him: “Most football movies are yucky.”
“ Yucky?” I asked him.
“ The Longest Yard was okay. I mean, Burt Reynolds was pretty good. He played at Florida State, you know…”
I knew.
“ Then he did Semi-Tough where he played a running back. Boy, what a stinker. In Everybody’s All-American, I thought Dennis Quaid’s legs were too skinny to be a real football player.” So did I.
“ Now, North Dallas Forty was pretty decent, though a little dark,” Kip said. He gave the appearance of furrowing his brow in serious contemplation, but with his long blond bangs, it was hard to tell. “I give it three stars.” The kid studied me a moment, shading his eyes from the sun. “You know, you look a little like Nick Nolte.”
“ Thanks.”
“ But he’s more handsome.”
My head was throbbing again. “Hey, Granny,” I called out. “Did you pack a real lunch, or do we have to start eating the passengers?”
“ Just like Soylent Green,” Kip said, showing off some more.
“ Granny, how do you turn off Siskel and Ebert here?”
“ Edward G. Robinson’s last movie,” the kid concluded, finally cracking a smile.
***
We were back at Granny’s place on the Gulf of Mexico side of Islamorada. I had lived there, too, in the old Cracker house of cedar planks and tin roof, eaves spouts that collected rainwater in barrels and a sturdy wooden porch with a swing, awning, and rocking chair. Charlie was snoozing in the rocker, the kid was watching TV in the Florida room, and I was keeping Granny company in the kitchen. She was squeezing lime juice over a mess of mullet we had caught when the bonefish proved too elusive.
“ So what’s bothering you, Jake? You’ve had a burr under your saddle ever since you got down here.”
“ Nothin’.”
“ Uh-huh.”
Outside, plump gray clouds were building over the Gulf. The temperature was dropping, and the air smelled of rain.
“ Granny, do you think I’m a silver-tongued shyster?”
“ You’re not silver-tongued,” she answered, proving that sarcasm runs in the family. Granny dipped the mullet fillets in flour and poured some oil into a frying pan. She was from the old school, and broiled fish just didn’t have enough taste for her. “You got that burned-out feeling again?” she asked.
“ Not exactly.” I picked up a Key lime and sucked on it, bringing tears to my eyes. “You remember Blinky Baroso?”
“ Fat fellow who sells stuff he don’t own.”
“ That’s him.”
“ Now, he’s silver-tongued.”
“ Yeah, well anyway, I just walked him in a fraud case, and now, it’s one of those times of self-examination.”
The wind had picked up, and fronds from a coconut palm were slapping against the side of the house. Heavy raindrops began pinging off the roof. I used to fall asleep to that noise, just down the hall and to the right.
“ You didn’t cheat, did you?” Granny asked.
I shook my head. “I just did my job.”
“ Then, what’s the problem? You’re a lawyer, a hired gun. You can’t be judge and jury, too.”
“ I know. I keep telling myself that, but it sounds like a rationalization for what I’m doing, which, let’s face it, has no social utility.”
She dropped a chubby white fillet into the sizzling oil. “Social utility? Are you the same Jacob Lassiter who used to cut school to go frogging in the ‘Glades? Are you the same boy who’d rather hit a blocking sled than study for finals?”
“ C’mon, Granny, I’ve grown up.”
She regarded me skeptically. “Is there a woman behind this?”
“ Whadaya mean?” Even the dimmest witness knows how to avoid a question by asking one of his own.
“ Men generally don’t do any self-examining unless they get criticized by someone else first. As far as I know, the only people whose opinions matter to you are Charlie and me, and we both love you no matter what you do. So I figure there’s gotta be a woman.”
“ Now you’re playing psychologist.” Another delaying tactic, shifting the focus to the questioner.
“ Okay, if you don’t want to talk about it…” She let it hang and returned to her cooking. When the fillets were golden brown, she removed them from the pan, strained the oil, added some flour, lime juice, tomato sauce, garlic, pepper, thyme, and a pinch of pepper and salt for the sauce. Outside the window, lightning flashed across the Gulf, and the rain slanted in silver sheets along the beach. “Well, at least, I hope that sleazebag paid you a bundle.”
“ You know my rule, Granny. Get paid up front.”
“ Did you?”
I ignored the question and kept going. “Because if you don’t and you lose, you never see the money. The client says, ‘What good did you do? I could have been convicted without a lawyer.’
And if you win, he says, ‘What’d I need you for? I was innocent.
“ So did you get paid up front?”
“ Not exactly,” I admitted.
“ Afterward?”
“ Sort of.”
“ I hope you didn’t take a check from that bum. He writes checks on banks that closed in twenty-nine.”
“ Not a check, either.”
“ Cash? Did you check to see if all the serial numbers were the same?”
“ Not cash, either.”
“ What then?”
“ Stock.”
“ Huh?”
“ Blinky gave me a hundred shares in Rocky Mountain Treasures, Inc. It’s incorporated in Colorado, licensed to do business in Florida.”
Granny was looking at me as if she’d raised a fool. “What makes me think this so-called corporation is not one of the Fortune 500?” she asked.
“ Probably because Blinky is the incorporator, the president, and the sole director.”
“ And he gave you the stock instead of a fee.”
“ He’s tapped out. Look, Granny, I know what you’re thinking, but there’s one person in the world Blinky wouldn’t stiff, and that’s me. Now, it may turn out that company doesn’t make any money and the stock could be worthless. I know that. But, for once, it’s a legitimate enterprise.”
“ What’s this Rocky Mountain corporation do?”
“ Sort of geological research,” I mumbled.
“ What’s that, mining?”
“ Not exactly.”
“ C’mon, Jake.”
“ They look for things.”
“ What sort of things?”
“ Buried treasure,” I said, staring out the window at the rippling Gulf, slate gray in the storm.
“ Oh Lordy, Jake. Get me a mason jar. I need a drink.”
“ Look, lots of lawyers take stock in lieu of fees: Imagine if I’d represented Microsoft ten years ago.”
“ Microsoft didn’t try to sell chunks of a condemned condo as pieces of the Berlin Wall, did it?”
I had forgotten about that scheme. Just then, somebody behind me said, “Gregory Peck would have taken vegetables, instead of worthless pieces of paper.”
I turned around. Kip was barefoot and wore torn jeans and a faded T-shirt.
“ Vegetables?” I asked him.
“ In To Kill a Mockingbird, he takes collard greens as his attorney’s fee when a client can’t pay. At least you can eat them.”
“ Thanks for the advice, kid. Why don’t you
see if Judgment at Nuremberg is on? It’ll keep you busy for three and a half hours.”
The kid pouted and backed out of the kitchen. In a moment, I heard him clicking through the channels in the other room. Now Granny was scowling at me. “Jake, I want you to be nice to Kippers.”
“ Okay, okay.”
“ And I want you to represent him.”
“ He needs a lawyer? What happened, did they fail to deliver his TV Guide?”
“ It’s a little problem in Juvenile Court. I’d rather let Kippers tell you about it.”
“ Let him hire Gregory Peck. He works cheap.”
“ Jake!”
I stuck an index finger into the sizzling lime-tomato concoction and burned myself. “Holy blazes,” I said, repeating a phrase I’d learned from Granny in my youth. I sucked on my finger and turned the heat down on the burner. After a moment, I said, “Okay, I’ll get the little brat off, even if he poisoned the nasal spray of the entire PTA.”
Granny gave me a smile. She still had all her own teeth, despite fifty years of opening beer bottles without an opener. Then she took a wooden spoon that was older than me and started stirring the sauce. “Good. You’ve got to promise me you’ll treat him like family.”
“ Like family? Why?”
“ Because he’s your nephew,” Granny Lassiter said, never looking up from the simmering sauce.
Chapter 5
ONE OF US WAS DEAD
I thought I heard a faint knock in the engine of my canary yellow Olds 442. Like its owner, the convertible is beginning to show its age, which is only natural, since it is vintage 1968. The Olds doesn’t have a tape deck, a CD player, a cellular phone, or a fax machine. It does have a radio, but no FM band. Three hundred fifty cubic inches under the hood, a four-barrel carburetor, a black canvas top, and a five-speed stick, it is-again, like its owner-a throwback.
On this warm, humid Monday morning, my ancient but amiable chariot, its top down, was growling north on Useless 1, the old highway that runs from Maine to Key West. The radio was tuned to a sports talk show at the low end of the dial, but every time a cloud passed over, the speaker crackled with static, and Fidel Castro or one of his cousins came on the air yelling about the imperialistas. It made me miss the latest report on which Dolphin free agents signed multiyear, mega-bucks contracts, and which University of Miami players had failed their drug tests.