by Paul Levine
"Go ask my father." Sounding pissy. Feeling confused. His father leaking info about Griffin's case. Reggie Jones refusing to see him but getting Luber to toss him a bone. Just what the hell was going on?
"I know your theory," Luber said. "The son's afraid his rich old man's gonna lose the family fortune if Oceania sinks. That's a negative motive. Damn tough to convey to a jury. Someone with no criminal record offing a guy to prevent a potential future event that might or might not take place. Too iffy. Jurors like evidence they can lay their hands on."
"So who do you think killed Ben Stubbs?"
"Damned if I know. Did you follow the green path, like I told you?"
"I tried. The forty thousand in Stubbs' hotel room is still unaccounted for."
"If you ask me, boychik, whoever paid Stubbs that dough is the same shitbird who hired Conklin to run you off the road and scare the panties off your lady. And whoever that is had a positive motive, not a negative one."
"Someone who would make a ton of money if Oceania sank," Steve said.
"That's what I'm saying."
"So if I find who hired Conklin, I'll find who murdered Stubbs."
"I'd bet on it."
"And you don't want anything in return for this information?"
Pinky grinned, pushed his chair back. "Sure I do, kid. When the time comes, I want you to do the smart thing."
Thirty-five
"A PUPPET, A PAUPER, A PIRATE. ."
"Do you know how much money your crazy client cost me!" Leicester Robinson thundered. "Millions!"
"You're assuming Hal Griffin is guilty," Victoria said.
"Who else could have done it? I have no problem with Griffin bribing that paper-shuffler Stubbs. It's done every day. But kill him? What in Hades was Griffin thinking?"
"Who said anything about bribes?" Fishing to see what he knew.
"This is the Keys," Robinson said. "You can't take a piss in Tavernier without rattling the plumbing in Marathon."
Victoria had watched Robinson on the security video at Griffin's home. Along with Delia Bustamante, Clive Fowles, and Junior Griffin, he was aboard the Force Majeure just before it left for Key West. Technically that made Robinson a suspect in Stubbs' murder. But, like the others, he was seen leaving the boat before it churned away from the dock.
In his mid-forties, Robinson wore workingman's heavy boots with grease-stained shorts and a flowery aloha shirt. An African-American with the reddish-brown complexion of polished mahogany, he had a neatly trimmed mustache and salt-and-pepper hair twisted into short dreadlocks. As he spoke, he jabbed his thick fingers in the air, as if providing punctuation marks.
"Didn't matter to me if Oceania ever made money. I had cost plus thirty percent on the barge work." He gestured toward a pegboard with schematic drawings of a craft that looked something like an oil tanker. "Now what do I have? With all the money I sunk into the plans, all the work I turned down, I'll be lucky to stay out of bankruptcy."
He shrugged his broad shoulders as if to say: "What can a man do?"
They were in the warehouse office of Robinson Barge amp; Tow Co., hard by the Key West docks. A long, low building of corrugated steel, the place had a slick, metallic smell, the cluttered interior filled with machinery Victoria could not identify. The warehouse was also littered with hundreds of small items like a curio shop. Antique naval artifacts, sculptures, artworks. Along one wall, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. On another, a vintage map of the Caribbean, with Cuba far larger than in reality, larger even than in Fidel Castro's dreams. Alongside, an oil painting of an enormous pink house with turrets and towers. Behind Robinson's desk hung a collection of rusty muskets, cutlasses, and broadswords.
In the middle of the warehouse, an ancient dugout canoe sat on sawhorses. It looked Native American and seemed to be undergoing restoration. Scattered on the concrete floor, an eclectic collection of maritime items: the glass housing of a lighthouse, a barnacle-encrusted anchor that looked hundreds of years old, open buckets of resin, a binnacle containing a vintage compass, and a rotted-out dinghy that might have been used by Captain Ahab. Victoria hoped that Robinson's barges and tugboats were more modern than the relics he seemed to collect.
"Before you settled on a cost-plus contract, you asked Griffin for a piece of the project."
"A man can ask, can't he?"
"I just wonder if that's customary in your business."
"I had a line of credit for barge construction at Southern Shipyards. No money up front. I could have done the work and waited for profits from the hotel and casino. But Griffin said he wasn't giving away shit. Didn't matter to me. I was going to make money either way. But now. ." He waved a meaty hand toward the barge schematics on the pegboard. "I can burn those."
Victoria glanced at the bookshelves. Biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams. Books on pirates and colonialism in the Caribbean. Some fiction, too. Kafka, Dickens, Hugo. Even a few volumes of English poetry. The burly barge operator seemed to have a fondness for Tennyson.
She remembered Junior saying that Robinson had a bachelor's degree in English and a master's in history from Amherst. The most literate man with work-hardened hands in the Keys. Maybe the most literate person, judging from the end-of-the-road burnouts you run into down here.
"Did you see anything unusual on the boat that day?" she asked.
"Griffin and Stubbs were arguing. Hadn't seen that before."
"Arguing about what?"
"Couldn't tell you. They were in the salon. I only saw it through the glass. But Griffin shoved a finger in Stubbs' chest. Pushed him a bit, the way bullies do."
"That's it? A little shove with a finger?"
Robinson let out a derisive laugh. "Man does that to me, he'll be eating through a straw."
"What about Clive Fowles? Ever see him argue with Stubbs?"
"No."
"What about with Griffin?"
"Fowles wouldn't have the balls. Oh, I heard him tell Griffin maybe they should just do a tour business to the reef. Forget about the floating hotel and casino. Of course, Griffin didn't listen. You want my opinion, Fowles thought too small and Griffin too big."
"Why would Hal Griffin kill Ben Stubbs?"
"No good reason I can think of."
"And yet, you seem to think he did."
"Two men were alone on a boat at sea. One ends up dead."
A concise summation of the state's case, she thought. "There could have been a stowaway."
"Not unless Griffin put him ashore on the way down the coast. Like that book by Conrad."
"The Secret Sharer." Victoria smiled to herself. Yes, this was one literate barge operator. She'd mentioned the book to Steve, but he hadn't heard of it. Now, if Jimmy Buffet were the author and the book described island hopping and rum guzzling, Steve would be able to quote entire passages.
"You know the story, then?" Robinson seemed pleased. The usual visitors to Robinson Barge amp; Tow probably didn't study English at Ivy League universities, Victoria figured.
"A captain hides a stowaway who's accused of murder," she said. "The captain somehow identifies with the stowaway and risks his ship to get the man to safety."
"It's about the duality of good and evil in all of us," Robinson explained. "Maybe your client's a bit like that."
"Hal Griffin is not a murderer."
"Whoever did it, I'd like to wring his neck." Robinson made a twisting motion with those powerful hands. "You know my history at all, Ms. Lord?"
"I know your family's been in Key West for generations."
Robinson barked out a laugh. "That doesn't begin to describe it. There were black Robinsons here long before Thomas Jefferson started playing footsie with Sally Hemmings. I can track my ancestors back to a slave ship attacked by Sir Henry Morgan. He sunk the ship and grabbed the strongest slaves to join his crew. My great-granddaddy times ten or so became his first mate."
"Rescued by pirates," Victoria said. "Ironic."
"Morgan
would have run you through with a sword if you called him a 'pirate.' He preferred 'privateer.' Had a license from England to plunder Spanish ships and settlements."
"A license to steal." Victoria laughed. "That's what Delia Bustamante called the EPA permit to build Oceania."
Robinson allowed himself a pinched smile. "Maybe there's a parallel. Maybe those who can remember the past are privileged to repeat it."
Remodeling the Santayana line. Leicester Robinson, Victoria thought, may actually have read all those books on his shelves. But surely he didn't go around quoting Conrad and Santayana in his daily work. What was such a man really like?
"You have a fascinating background, Mr. Robinson." Her way of saying: "Tell me more."
"My family's been wealthy and poor, owned castles on some islands and been jailed on others. Sort of like that Sinatra song. " 'I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate. .' "
" 'A poet, a pawn and a king,' " she finished the lyric.
Robinson smiled. "Exactly, all of them. More than a hundred years ago, there were Robinsons in Key West with their own salvage sloops. Licensed by the federal government. A cargo ship gets torn up on the reef, the salvors would race out there. The Robinsons had the fastest sloops, so they'd beat their competitors to the reef. Once you staked your claim, you got forty percent of what you salvaged."
"Just like contingency fee lawyers," Victoria said.
"With even worse morals. Some salvors set false lights, actually lured ships onto the reefs."
"The Robinsons do that sort of thing?"
He smiled and got up from his desk. "Let me show you something, Ms. Lord."
He put on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and led her to a framed document on the wall. Handwritten in fancy script was a salvor's license signed by a federal judge and dated October 1889.
She read the stilted legal language aloud: "Know all men by these presents that Walter J. Robinson, owner and master, is hereby licensed to employ his Sloop Satisfaction in the business of wrecking and salving along the coast of Florida."
"My great-great-grandfather. Do you know why he named his ship Satisfaction? That was Sir Henry Morgan's warship. The one that rescued the first Robinson and led to generations of black pirates, leading straight to Walter J. Robinson. So you ask whether my great-great-granddaddy was a tough customer? Let's just say he kept up with the competition. People said he'd save bales of cotton and let stranded sailors drown. A cutthroat business, it was."
"A cutthroat era."
"Aren't they all?"
Victoria wished Steve were here. He would have insights into Robinson she lacked. The man seemed disarmingly open with her. She knew he was trying to create an impression. Friendly and transparent. Was it an act? One of Steve's lessons involved witnesses too eager to talk:
"If they're filling all that dead air, it's because they want to control the conversation."
Robinson went on for a while, tracing his family history. Walter Robinson ran the town's cockfights and owned a brothel and a saloon that catered to both blacks and whites. He also built the grandest house in Key West. There it was, the oil painting on the wall. In the Queen Anne style, with a double veranda, balustraded railings, and a widow's walk, the pink house had been an extravagant showplace overlooking the ocean. There were conflicting stories of how the house was destroyed, Robinson said. His father told him it was demolished in a hurricane. But he'd later heard that his grandfather, Walter's grandson, having lost the family businesses, torched the property for the insurance. After that, it was downhill for the Robinsons. Leicester's father crewed on a shrimp boat and scraped up enough money to buy a leaky tugboat.
Leicester went off to college in New England, intending to teach history, but returned home to rescue the business when his father died.
The powerful gravitational pull of family.
Her own. Steve's. Maybe Junior Griffin feared the loss of the family fortune, and maybe Leicester Robinson was obsessed with restoring his. But even if that was true, she still had no idea who murdered Ben Stubbs. And as for Leicester Robinson, no idea if he was a poet or a pirate.
Thirty-six
MAXIMUM HERB
Steve lay in wait like an assassin. . if assassins surveilled their prey from the front seat of the ultramini Smart car.
He scanned the grassy terrain through binoculars. There was his target, in houndstooth slacks, a black polo shirt, and black leather gloves. Steve could pick him off easily with a scoped M-16. Or pop him in the head with a nine iron. Or just call him on his pager. Reginald Jones was driving a golf cart. Next to him, riding shotgun, some fat-assed business type. The fat guy looked familiar, but Steve couldn't quite place him.
Earlier that morning, while spooning papaya pulp into the blender with yogurt to make Bobby's smoothie, Steve had scanned the Herald's sports section. The Marlins had been rained out, a seventh-grade soccer coach was caught selling steroids, and there was a charity golf tournament at Doral. Athletes, semi-celebrities, and local politicos would be teeing up. Including Reginald Jones, Chief Clerk of the Circuit Court.
Before setting out for the Doral, Steve's phone rang, Willis Rask calling. The sheriff had run the name "Conchy Conklin" through the computer.
"Full name's Chester Lee Conklin," Rask said. "Got the nickname because he's dumb as a conch shell. And that's his friends talking. Guy's got a record. Couple B-and-E's. Couple DUI's. On probation for an ag assault in a bar. Settled an argument with a broken beer bottle."
"If he's on probation, you gotta know where he is," Steve said.
"We would, except he missed his last two appointments. Probation officer went out to the trailer he was renting in Tavernier. No sign of him. Neighbors say they haven't seen him or his Harley in a month."
Rask said he'd start the paperwork for the probation violation, see if they could find Conklin, bring him in.
Now, with the midday sun high in the sky, the air was muggy with fat, puffy clouds building over the Everglades. Steve was slick with sweat, partly from the humidity, partly from the tension. His car was tucked into a strand of sabal palms along the narrow fairway of the eighteenth hole of the Doral Gold Course. While stalking Jones, he'd cruised past other foursomes, waving as if he were the head groundskeeper in a vehicle only slightly larger than their own carts.
Jones and his partner both put their tee shots in the middle of the narrow fairway. The eighteenth hole was just a shade under four hundred yards and straight, but with an island green totally surrounded by water. Jones' second shot was a beauty, hitting twenty feet from the pin and dying there, like a quail felled by a hunter. The son-of-a-gun must have been sneaking out of the courthouse early to practice. His chunky partner plopped three shots into the drink and cursed loud enough for Steve to hear every syllable from his camouflaged position.
The two golfers climbed back in their cart and headed for the green. Steve tore out of the palms after them. The men were nearing the bridge to the green when Steve beeped the horn and overtook them.
"What the hell!" Jones jerked the golf cart to the right and skidded off the path, heading straight for the water hazard.
An image came to Steve, his beloved Caddy crashing through the guardrail and plunging nose-down to the bottom of Spanish Harbor Channel. The golf cart slid sideways in the moist grass and splashed to a stop in the shallow water.
"The fuck! The fuck!" Jones stepped out of the cart and sank up to his knees in mud. Not looking quite as dapper as he did in the framed photos in his office.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Jones," Steve told him. "But it's the only way I could get to see you."
Jones waded to the shore, his shoes sucking at the mud. His passenger, the heavyset man, waddled toward Steve, brandishing a sand wedge. "You crazy bastard. I'm gonna scramble your brains-"
"Hold on, Jack." Jones held up a calming hand then turned to Steve. "You're Herb Solomon's son, aren't you?"
"Guilty as charged."
"I know you!" The heavyset man wagged the sa
nd wedge in Steve's face. "You're that ambulance-chasing shyster."
"Before you call anyone a shyster, I'd like to see your scorecard," Steve shot back.
"What are you implying?"
"If you put in for any of the prizes, I'm calling the cops."
"Mr. Solomon," Jones interrupted, "say hello to Police Chief Jack McAllister."
All things considered, Steve thought the chief clerk and the police chief were downright hospitable, as soon as he offered to buy them new shoes. After Jones two-putted for a par and the sheriff gave himself a five despite at least nine strokes, not including penalties, Steve sat at the bar in the Nineteenth Hole with the chief clerk.
"Your father was a mentor to me," Jones declared.
"He was always terrific with other people's kids," Steve conceded.
They drank beer and munched burgers. Steve was paying for lunch, too. He was happy he didn't have to pick up their greens fees.
"I was going to community college part-time when I started clerking for your father. The judge talked me into getting my bachelor's then helped me get a scholarship at FIU for my master's. Government administration. All the while telling me I could be whatever I wanted if I applied myself."
"Funny, he used to tell me I'd never be half the lawyer he was."
Jones chuckled. "Half of Herb Solomon is still a helluva lawyer."
When they'd run out of small talk, Steve said: "I need to know what my father was involved in when Pinky Luber ran Capital Crimes."
"Judge Solomon was involved in the pursuit of justice."
"Aren't we all?"
"All I'll say is this: You keep this up about Herb's Bar license, you're gonna open a can of worms. Just let it go."
"Not until I know what's in that can."
Jones sipped at his beer, glanced out the window to where other golfers were finishing up. "You remember the early eighties, after the Mariel boatlift?"
"I was still a kid. But I remember the Pacino movie Scarface."
"Well, that wasn't far off. Cocaine cowboys. Shantytown under the expressway filled with Castro's mental patients and criminals. Machine-gun shootouts at the Dadeland Mall. Highest murder rate in the country. Tourism down, businesses leaving."