by Paul Levine
I called Symington Foote at home, got him out of the pool where he was doing his laps. His phone was in his cabana on a waterfront pool deck. I pictured him dripping onto the turquoise tile.
“I never know the identity of confidential sources,” he said formally. “House rules. The publisher doesn’t interfere with the newsroom.”
“Are any of your investigative reporters working on projects involving the sheriff’s department?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What about the state attorney’s office?”
In the background I heard a powerboat going too fast in the channel behind Foote’s home. The speed-crazy weekenders are slaughtering our manatees, those big, slow, lumpy mammals of our waterways. After a moment Foote answered. “Henry Townsend’s been looking into Nick Fox for more than a year, but you know that.”
“I thought that was over when we lost the libel suit.”
“Townsend’s still poking around, trying to turn up something we can go with, somebody on the record who knows the story behind the campaign financing.”
“Who’s his source?”
“Don’t know.”
“Can you have him at your house in an hour?”
“I can, but he won’t tell—”
I had hung up. I stripped off yesterday’s sweaty shorts and headed for the shower. I turned it up hot, lathered my old battered body, which didn’t feel that bad after all. I smeared shaving cream on my face and chopped off the stubble. I washed my hair and combed it straight back and left it wet. Then I put on white jeans, white sneakers, white socks, and a white polo shirt. I looked in the mirror. A spanking-clean, overgrown, blue-eyed angel. Good. I could grow horns later.
The Olds purred on the way to Gables Estates, the ritzy waterfront enclave south of Coconut Grove. A canopy of banyan trees cooled Old Cutler Road and the breeze dried my hair. In the yards of Miami’s privileged, the petals of red hibiscus flowers were opening for the day. Timed sprinklers watered sprawling lawns despite almost daily thunderstorms. On Symington Foote’s handsome grounds, a gardener fertilized lush beds of impatiens as delicate hummingbirds flitted around the flowers of cape honeysuckle bushes. The flagstone path to the house was bordered by white gardenias, their rich fragrance filling the morning air.
It was a glorious Saturday, the day before a game, and I was getting ready. Life is war, Nick Fox had told me. Now all I needed were the weapons.
***
They sat under a lime-green umbrella on an immense patio behind Foote’s gleaming postmodern house. The house was a series of stark white boxes of different sizes connected at odd angles by concrete passageways painted highway-marker orange. It was the creation of a trendy Argentine architect who won several awards given by people who live in SoHo lofts. Foote once confided that he hated the place, especially the fact that you couldn’t get to the downstairs bathroom without either going up one set of stairs and down another or walking outside and coming in another door. When he complained, the architect told him he was missing the point of our disjointed, fragmented lives. The point, Foote replied, was that he had to roam his property just to take a piss.
Henry Townsend was thirty-five and rangy, with a hawk’s nose and a mortician’s smile. His eyes were dark and knowing, his hair parted in the middle. He wore running shoes, khaki pants, and a T-shirt that said, “Reporters Do It with Any Type.” He sat, drinking a margarita in the boss’s polyurethane-lacquered deck chair, as if he owned the place.
Symington Foote wore gold boxer-style swim trunks and a matching terrycloth jacket with pockets. His white hair was wet and his forehead speckled from too much sun.
We exchanged pleasantries and I asked Townsend whether he was looking into the activities of our esteemed state attorney.
“I don’t talk about investigative pieces,” he said, with journalistic self-righteousness.
Symington Foote cleared his throat. “Hank, treat Jake as you would your publisher.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” Townsend replied, then sipped at his green drink.
Reporters are like that. Professional cynics who play pinochle in the courthouse press room and crack wise in the middle of rape trials and executions. A bunch of gunslingers who love spitting tobacco in the boss’s eye. Get fired, just pack up the portable—computer, these days—and mosey on to the next town.
“Think of this as prepublication libel review,” I told Townsend.
“Fine. When I’ve got a first draft, I’ll call you.”
“Maybe if you had last time, I could’ve swung a defense verdict.”
His tongue was flicking the salt off the rim of the glass. “The editors chopped the story to shit.”
Reporters are like that, too. Every fuck-up is blamed on the editors.
“As I recall the discovery,” I said, “the editing took out the most serious allegations. The paper would have been hit harder if they’d printed your stuff. What was it, alleged ties between Fox and major drug dealers?”
“Drug money financed his campaigns. We only published the details of technical campaign law violations, and we substantiated them. Plus there was one unattributed reference to a cash contribution that was drug-related. I couldn’t get the source to come forward, so we got nailed.”
“Who was the source?”
He dismissed me with the wave of a hand. “Forget it. I gave my pledge of confidentiality.”
I was ready to give him my pledge of a broken face, but I decided to stick with the nice-guy routine. “What else did the source tell you?”
Townsend looked toward Foote, who nodded. “Lots that I couldn’t use without backup documents or a second source. Dynamite stuff. I needed corroboration up the kazoo and didn’t have anything. If I had, the headline would have said, ‘State Attorney Tool of Medellín Drug Cartel.’”
“An attention grabber,” I conceded. “What’s behind it?”
Townsend must have felt he’d already made his point about keeping secrets. Now, he was practically squirming to tell what he knew. “It goes like this. A thousand years ago, Fox was a low-level heroin courier in Vietnam. He comes home and makes some interesting connections as a street cop. By the time he runs for state attorney, he’s an ass-kissing buddy of the first-team All-Pro Colombia cocaine kingpins. Lehder, Ochoa, Escobar—you name ‘em, he played footsie with ‘em. They finance his campaign, plus deliver cash to him on the side. We’re talking a few million, walking-around money for them, but a fortune for a guy on the public payroll. He’s a good soldier. He keeps the little house and plays the role of the hardworking civil servant. He bides his time. They give him inside information on rival drug dealers so he can make some cases, get his picture taken standing on a boatload of contraband.”
“Phony hero,” I said, stirring up memories.
“Yeah. It’s part of a long-range plan. Build Fox up. Along the way he has to return some favors. If someone close to the cartel gets busted, he’ll give them something that can tank the case. Maybe the identity of an informant who then meets with an unfortunate accident, that sort of thing. Mostly, he trades in information. He keeps in touch with the feds. Anything he learns from Customs, Strike Force, or DEA, he delivers to the cartel. You can’t buy information like that.”
“Sure you can.”
“Right. Well, anyway, the long-range plan was to keep Fox in the public eye, win some cases as the crusading, drug-busting prosecutor, get him elected governor. Then, who knows, president someday.”
“The Manchurian Candidate,” I said, remembering my earliest thoughts about Nick.
“Yeah, bizarre, isn’t it? Create an image exactly opposite of reality.”
“Truth and illusion. Distinguishing the two is your job, Townsend, and mine.”
“Well, I was still working on my source, trying to get him to go on the record. He claimed to have documents, cables in code, bank accounts in the Caymans and Panama in Nick’s name.”
It was all starting to fit together. “When’s
the last time you talked to the source?”
“A week ago. Said he would think about it. Then…”
“Then what?”
“I can’t say.”
“I can. Then he got shot, right? Somebody took him out. Does your pledge of confidentiality survive his death?”
He looked a question at the publisher, didn’t get an answer, and said, “Even if your supposition is correct, I could not confirm—”
While he was busy not confirming, I came out of my chair and grabbed him by his T-shirt. I yanked him to his feet and drew his face close to mine.
“Jake!” Symington Foote was profoundly unhappy with his legal representation. “I hardly think this is necessary…”
I ignored him and tightened my grip on Townsend. “Tell me his name! Tell me, you sanctimonious son of a bitch or I’ll give you a headline: ‘Reporter Drowns in Publisher’s Pool.’”
His eyes showed fear, but he shook his head. I dragged him across the patio toward the deep end of Foote’s splendid twenty-five-meter pool. Foote let out a yelp. I hoisted Townsend over a shoulder, then dangled him by the ankles, dunking his head. He thrashed around and I hauled him up, sputtering, and he called me several names they don’t print in a family newspaper. I lowered him again.
“Now see here, Jake,” Foote was saying from behind me.
I saw very clearly. I saw my six-figure retainer slipping away and didn’t care.
I let Townsend stay under long enough to consider a career change, then pulled him out, choking and gagging. I dropped him into a chaise lounge, where he burped up a couple of jiggers of chlorinated water, and then I asked again. “Who is he?”
He hawked and coughed and wheezed and finally said, “You know. You already know, you bastard.”
I knew I knew. I had to hear the name. “Say it!”
“Alejandro Rodriguez.”
“Why did he talk to you? What was his motive?”
He drank in some air. “I don’t know. That’s not my department.”
“Then how do you know Rodriguez was telling the truth?”
The sound was half gag, half laugh. “We never know that. We just print what people tell us. It’s not our job to tell the public what to believe. We just give them choices.”
***
Sunday. A breeze from the east tickled the leaves of the live-oak trees. Just a breath of air, but it makes a difference. I called the weekend crew at the state attorney’s office every hour like a guy on house arrest. I thought a lot about Nick Fox. I needed to trip him up, to bait him and trap him. I couldn’t call Metro because there was no telling who was loyal to him, and the feds would take too long. I thought of the logistics and came up with a plan. But it would take two of us, and one had to be somebody Fox wouldn’t recognize. That left out Charlie Riggs, the only person I trusted completely other than my granny. So where did that leave me?
I lay in the hammock again and thought about Marsha Diamond. TV Gal, I’ve let you down. Been too wrapped up in saving my own semiprecious hide. I walked into the house, pulled out three cardboard boxes, my copies of the Diamond file. I reread the printouts. Bobbie Blinderman had chatted with Marsha, pitching crude woo, but got shot down. A short time later, Marsha gets strangled. I read the rest of them—Oral Robert, Bush Whacker, and the other cheap-thrill hackers.
I found the photos Dr. Whitson had taken of the scene. There was Marsha, head jammed into the monitor. There were scenes of the room. There were the close-ups of the body, and the shots of Pam and me, Charlie demonstrating the fallacy of the crescentic fingernail abrasion. There were a variety of shots of the room itself, Nick Fox pacing in the background.
I spread all the photos on the floor, moving some empty pizza cartons out of the way. I tried different arrangements. All body shots here, all room shots there. I arranged them by field of view. Long shots here, close-ups there.
Then here.
Then there.
And there it was. Where it had been all along.
CHAPTER 41
Kiss Me Quick Before I Die
The grand jury would convene at nine a.m. Monday, take up old business, and approve a report on the sorry state of the county’s juvenile detention facilities. The jurors would break at noon and reconvene at 1:30 to hear new cases including In re Alejandro Rodriguez. Which would soon become State of Florida v. Jacob Lassiter.
At 7:30 p.m. Sunday I called Fox’s office and left a new message with the weekend crew: Leaving for Rio on nine o’clock flight. Five minutes later, my phone rang.
I picked it up and said, “Hello, Nick, what took you so long?”
“I’m glad you’re there, asshole. I want to talk to you. Maybe we can work something out.”
“Wonderful. Great, Nick,” I slavered, gratitude and humility coating my voice like honey.
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
“I won’t be here,” I said.
“What?”
“I’m going fishing.”
“Are you nuts?”
“Snook are running, or at least swimming.”
“Don’t jerk me off, Lassiter. The grand jury’s going to hear—”
“Nighttime bridge fishing, good for the soul. I’ll be on the MacArthur Causeway just east of the tender’s shack. I’ll have an extra spinning rod.”
Then I hung up and didn’t answer the phone when it rang ten seconds later. Twenty minutes later, I was putting my gear in the trunk when it rang again. I went inside, lifted the receiver, and listened.
“Hello, Jake, is that you, darling?”
The crisp British accent that first sucked me in.
“It’s me, darling,” I said.
“Oh Jake, I wanted to say good-bye.”
“Good-bye?”
“I just finished my last lecture and I’m booked on the red-eye to Heathrow.”
Whoa. Too much was happening too fast. I couldn’t deal with both of them at once.
“Can’t you stay a little longer?”
“Would that I could. We could spend some time together, perhaps rekindle that spark.” Her voice tinkled with promises. “But my work calls.”
“Wait. Where are you?”
“On Miami Beach, at Mount Briar Hospital.”
“Great. On your way to the airport you can stop and say a proper good-bye. I’ll be on the causeway. Fishing.”
“Fishing?”
Why didn’t anyone believe me?
I told her where and said nine-thirty, and she’d still have time to catch the flight.
And then I went to find some bait.
***
The moon was three-quarters full and rising over the ocean. Silky moonbeams flashed across the surface of the bay and bounced off the steel and concrete of the bridge. I had watched the late summer sun set, dangling over the Everglades, the sky tinged vermilion from the foul breath of our two million cars, most of which seemed to be passing on the bridge just now. Carbon monoxide hung heavy and low, the air was soggy with heat and moisture, and I wondered why anyone would fish here. It was like jogging in the Lincoln Tunnel.
I wore jeans and a sleeveless vest. On the vest was a lamb’s-wool patch festooned with flies. Streamers and poppers and super bugs and flipping shrimp, and my all-time favorite, the cockroach. I held a stout rod with a heavy butt and an open-face spinning reel, and if Nick Fox wanted to fish, I had another one, too.
Four lanes of traffic rattled the bridge, cars heading from downtown Miami to South Beach and back again. I stood on the catwalk near the tender’s shack, just off the steel grating of the drawbridge itself. The metal hummed and sang with each passing tire. Kids on bicycles rode along the catwalk, and a collection of old coots sat in lawn chairs, digging bait out of tin cans and dropping their lines into the water. Near the lower portions of the bridge, weekend shrimpers shone their flashlights toward the bottom and swung fine-meshed, long-handled nets into the water. Two swarthy men in T-shirts angled their casts near the shrimpers. Fish are attracted to shrimp, a
nd fishermen aren’t far behind. Ten feet from me, a guy who needed a shave and a bath dangled a pole over the side. He had already borrowed some pinfish for bait and was now asking if I had any mullet. When he came close, the smell of cheap wine overpowered the tang of the bait. Despite the heat he wore a heavy plaid work shirt and a cap with earflaps pulled down.
“Tank you kindly, guv’nor,” he said.
At five before nine Nick Fox’s impressive bulk appeared over the rise of the bridge. He was backlit by the powerful vapor lamps on the eastern tower. He wore a light gray suit and was alone. He arrived a moment later, sweating and furious.
“You’re a first-class number-one asshole, Lassiter.”
“Good evening to you, too,” I said.
“I parked at the marina and walked a mile in this heat, a man could have a heart attack.”
“Most men would take their suit coats off.”
“There are voters who use this bridge,” he said. “They expect me in a suit.”
“Image,” I said.
“Don’t knock it. It may not get the job done, but it makes it possible to get the job done.”
“What’s the job, Nick? Besides getting elected?”
“Law and order. Sending away your basic shitheads. Making streets safe for little old ladies and children coming home from school. Locking up your burglars and your strong-arm robbers.”
“And your drug barons,” I said. “Let’s not forget about them.”
He studied me. “We didn’t come here to talk about my work. What the fuck’s going on?”
I baited my hook, raised the rod, flicked my wrist, and watched the twenty-pound test line drop toward the water in a poor imitation of a cast. “Told you. Wanted to fish. When the tide starts in, I think my luck’s going to change.”
He studied my outfit. “What the hell are those flies for? You can’t use ‘em up here, you’ll give an earring to some asshole in a Benz convertible.”
“Flies are just for decoration. Like your medals.”