by Paul Levine
"No apparent motive," Steve corrected him.
"Don't be a dick, Steve," Victoria said.
"It's okay, Tori," Junior interposed. "I know you guys have a job to do." As they started up a maple staircase to the second floor, he said: "If you're interested, I've got a theory about what happened."
"What is it?" Victoria asked. Eager now.
Yeah, Steve thought. Show us something besides your fast-twitch muscle fibers.
"I think Stubbs might have found the speargun and started fooling around with it," Junior said. "It's an old pneumatic model. The Poseidon Mark 3000. Works on air pressure instead of bands. If he tried to jam a shaft down the barrel and did it wrong, the spear could fire."
"Why would Stubbs even handle the gun?" Victoria wanted to know.
Junior shrugged again, his lats joining his delts in a little muscle dance. "Why do kids take their fathers' revolvers out of nightstands?"
"So if Stubbs shot himself, who slugged your father?" Steve asked, before Victoria could slip in another question.
"No one. After Dad found Stubbs, he rushed up the ladder to get back to the bridge. Dad had been drinking—they both had—and he was excited. The ladder's wet from spray. He slips and falls, conking his head."
They stopped in front of a wide set of double doors, Junior fishing for a key from a pocket of his shorts. Junior didn't lock up his spearguns, Steve thought, but he needed a key to get into whatever room he was going to show them.
"I can sell swampland to alligators," Steve said, "but that story stinks like old mackerel. The problem is, you're compounding multiple improbables."
"The hell does that mean?"
"Tell him, Vic."
She nailed Steve with a look that said she didn't like being ordered to perform. Then said: "One of Steve's theories."
"Not just a theory. A law. The Solomonic Law of Compounding Improbables. Vic, you do the honors."
Again, she shot Steve a look. "Stubbs shooting himself," Victoria said, "that's one improbable event. Your dad falling down the ladder and knocking himself out, that's two. A boat without a driver crashing on the exact beach where it was supposed to dock, that's three. There's a multiplier effect. Each improbable event makes the others harder to believe."
"And easier for a jury to convict," Steve said.
"Say a man takes his boat out fishing on Christmas Eve, though he has virtually no history of fishing," Victoria said. "And his pregnant wife disappears the same day. Months later, her body and the baby's body wash up onshore in nearly the same place as the guy went fishing. A place the guy went back to when he claimed he was somewhere else."
"The Scott Peterson case," Junior said, unlocking the doors.
"His defense compounded too many improbables," Victoria said, as they walked into a darkened room that seemed cooler than the rest of the house.
Steve smiled to himself. As much as Victoria complained about his lawyering, she was picking up his techniques.
Why doesn't she realize what a winning team we are?
"Steve's created a mathematical formula around the theory," she continued.
"One of Solomon's Laws," Steve said. "I call it squaring the improbables: 'If you have one chance in three of convincing jurors of an improbable event, you have one chance in nine of convincing them of two, and—' "
"One chance in eighty-one of convincing them of three," Bobby calculated.
"Exactly. In other words, no chance in hell."
Junior flicked on a light switch, and a tiny spotlight in the perimeter of the ceiling came on. They were in a huge, windowless room, bathed in shadows. "What I'm going to show you," Junior said, "only a few people have seen. Stubbs was one of them."
Steve squinted, trying to make out the shape rising from the middle of the room, but could see nothing but shadows. This was all a bit theatrical for his taste. He had the feeling that Junior was putting on a show for them. Or more likely, just for Victoria.
"You have to know something about my background for this to make any sense," Junior said. With the four of them standing in the half-light of the cool room, Junior spent the next few minutes explaining that over the years, with all the time he spent on the water, he'd become a deeply committed environmentalist.
Save the Whales.
Protect the Reefs.
Ban Tuna Nets.
The whole range of do-gooder ocean projects. Junior said he'd given away chunks of money to environmental groups, probably, he thought now, as penance for his father's actions. Hal Griffin, his son admitted, was a one-man tsunami when it came to ecosystems. Blowing opponents out of the water, literally sinking a Greenpeace boat in Sydney Harbor by ramming it with a barge. His old man was a major-league pillager, an All-Pro despoiler, his projects a dishonor roll of moneymaking, havoc-wreaking, eco-disasters. Eroded beaches from shoreline condos in the Philippines, massive fish kills off Jamaica after dredging a marina, a vicious sewage runoff from a gated community in the Caicos Islands.
"Everywhere Dad goes, environmentalists come after him with elephant guns."
But does Dad go after others with spearguns? Steve wondered. Whereas the son, by his own immodest admission, was Sir Galahad of the Deep.
"You've heard of tree huggers," Junior said. "Call me a coral kisser. I've snorkeled the world's best, and they're all living on borrowed time. The coral reefs are the rain forests of the oceans."
"All of which has exactly what to do with Oceania?" Steve asked.
"A couple years ago," Junior continued, "I was arguing with Dad and said something like, 'You won't be happy till you build a resort right on top of a coral reef.' And Dad took it as a challenge. He asked where there's a coral reef at least three nautical miles offshore from an English-speaking country, with a population center of at least three million people nearby."
"Why three miles?" Victoria asked.
"So it's outside territorial waters," Junior said.
"The cannon-shot rule," Bobby said, and they all looked at the smartest boy in the sixth grade. "From pirate days. Four hundred years ago, the farthest a cannon could shoot from shore was three miles. That's where the law comes from."
"Thank you, Mr. History Channel," Steve said, then turned to Junior. "If you're outside the three-mile limit, you can run a casino. That the idea?"
"Exactly. But we'd still be within the two-hundredmile EEZ."
Steve gave him a blank look.
"The Exclusive Economic Zone," Bobby translated, adding sheepishly, "I know most of the federal acronyms. Also most of the personalized license plates banned by the State of Florida."
"Don't start," Steve warned him.
"G-R-8-C-U-M," Bobby said. "I-W-N-T-S-E-X."
"Bobby . . ."
"B-I-G-P-N-S."
"Cool it, kiddo!"
"Because we're in the EEZ," Junior said, "the federal government still has jurisdiction over development. So we need an environmental assessment report to get a federal permit."
"Ben Stubbs of the EPA," Victoria mused.
"Yep. Which is why Dad had to jump through all the hoops. He was cussing all the way, but he did it. And here's the result."
Junior flicked another switch, and the enormous room was bathed in a soft light. "Behold Oceania," he said.
Looming in front of them was a three-dimensional diorama, maybe thirty feet long by seven feet high. From floor to shoulder level was the ocean—or at least a blue Lucite rendition of it, complete with miniature, plasticized fish. Floating on the surface were three donut-shaped buildings, connected by covered passageways. From the bottom of each building, steel cables angled downward and were embedded in the ocean floor. At the side of the center building was a marina with perhaps two hundred miniature boats, little plastic people waving gaily from the decks. Above the hotel, suspended in the air by a wire, was a seaplane, a larger version of what they had flown to Paradise Key.
"The center building is the casino," Junior said.
"Two hundred thirty thousand square feet of slots,
blackjack, craps, roulette, keno, poker rooms. The works. And unlike Atlantic City or Las Vegas, no taxes to pay. Or as Dad likes to say, 'Uncle Sam ain't no relative of mine.' "
"How would you get people out there?" Victoria asked. Ever practical, Steve thought.
"Seaplanes, private boats, hydrofoils leaving the mainland every thirty minutes."
"What about hurricanes?" Steve asked.
"We'd evacuate the hotel, of course," Junior said. "But our construction method is revolutionary. Woven steel cables fasten the buildings to the sea bottom, but they're flexible, so the buildings can rise and fall in high seas. Computer models show we can withstand a Category Four storm."
"What about Category Five?" Steve asked.
"Statistically improbable. Only two have ever hit the United States."
Bobby chimed in: "Camille in sixty-nine. Andrew in ninety-two."
The kid watched the Weather Channel, too. "You're not counting the ones before the Weather Service had a numbering system," Steve said.
"We're confident our hotel can take the worst storm that's statistically likely to hit," Junior said.
The worst storm that's statistically likely to hit.
Not bad, Steve thought, giving Junior bonus points for lawyerlike double-talk. The guy was sharper than he looked, greater than the sum of his pecs and traps.
"You haven't seen the best part," Junior said. "Take a look at Building Three. We call it The Atlantis."
They walked around to the other side of the diorama. The ocean floor sloped upward there, as it neared the largest of the donut-shaped buildings. But it wasn't just a sandy bottom. It was a coral reef in miniature, frozen in plastic, reproduced in startling detail. Staghorn coral, looking like deer antlers; green sea fans waving hello; grooved brain coral, looking like a human cerebrum. A moray eel poked its head out of a skyscraper of pillar coral. Swimming above and through the reef were giant grouper, bright blue angelfish, multihued parrotfish, huge tarpon, sea turtles, and other creatures Steve couldn't name.
"The Atlantis seems submerged." Victoria pointed beneath the building. This donut was more like a floating saucer, with a portion of the building under the surface, portholes beneath the sea.
"My idea." Junior's smile was so wide, his dimples looked like gunshot wounds. "Three hundred hotel rooms underwater. You can watch the fish swim by your window."
And in fact, there were two sharks cruising past a porthole window. Thrill the folks from Omaha without getting their feet wet.
"If you look closely at the passageways connecting the buildings, you'll see the floors are transparent. Stroll from the dining room to the casino and you're walking across the world's largest aquarium."
"Incredible," Victoria murmured. "The hotel is a giant glass-bottom boat."
Junior smiled. "I told Dad that most people will never take the snorkeling or scuba trip. So, if you're going to build a hotel above a reef, why not bring the reef into the hotel? Or damn close, anyway."
"It's really something," Victoria said. Awe in her voice, as if Junior had just shown her the Mona Lisa and said he painted it.
Big deal, Steve thought. The rich kid tells the architects to stick portholes in the hotel rooms. What's he want, the Nobel Prize?
"Here's where Dad surprised me," Junior said. "The construction costs will be astronomical, so at first he balked. A real sense of arrière-pensée."
"I hate it when that happens," Steve said. Thinking:
What the hell did he say: "derriere penises"?
"That means he had doubts," Bobby piped up. "Uncertainty. Reservations."
"But Dad's so smart," Junior continued. "He thought it over and realized that the marketing hook was the reef with underwater hotel rooms right above it. It's the sizzle of the steak. Nothing like it anywhere in the world."
Junior rattled on for a few more minutes about the state-of-the-art desalinization plant, the solar-powered generators, the recycling plant that grinds leftover prime rib into fish food. Steve wasn't giving it his full attention. Instead, he was trying to take the measure of Junior Griffin, prep-school make-out artist turned thick-chested free diver who oozed lethal levels of testosterone from every pore.
"So, what could have been an environmental disaster will be a beacon to the world for safe construction in environmentally sensitive areas," Junior said. "Construction in harmony with nature."
Jeez, he's giving a speech to the Kiwanis.
"You must be so proud," Victoria said in a gushing tone that Steve interpreted to mean, "You are the sexiest and most wonderful man in the universe, and if I can dump my boyfriend, I'd like to have your babies, starting nine months from today."
Steve kept trying to size up the guy, which was hard to do objectively because he was growing so aggravated with Victoria. But it occurred to him that maybe he'd been mistaken about Junior. The guy's save-theplanet shtick seemed sincere. Of course, not having to work for a living gives you free time for wholesome hobbies. Back in college, Steve had joined the ACLU. At the time, he had few political opinions, but he figured that left-leaning coeds were easy to bag.
A stray thought began to gnaw at him, a vague notion that there was something wrong with Mr. Right. What was it?
It only took a moment. It's so obvious, Steve thought, all the while realizing that his powers of reasoning might be tainted by jealousy, envy, and fear.
The son-of-a-bitch is just too good to be true.
Which meant that he was a phony. And with any luck, a murderer, too.
Eleven
THE SECRETS PARENTS KEEP
"Do you remember the time your father took us to that hot dog place on the causeway?" Victoria asked.
"Fun Fair," Junior said.
"You ate ten chili dogs on a dare."
"Twelve. With onions. I got sick in the back of Dad's Bentley."
"And do you remember what we did on your fourteenth birthday?" she prodded.
"Skinny-dipped in the Venetian pool."
"Nope. We carved our initials on a banyan tree."
"Right. Bayfront Park," Junior remembered. "A security guard chased us."
"And we jumped over that concrete wall to hide. . . ."
"But it was a sea wall, and we landed in four feet of water."
Laughter. From two out of three, anyway. Steve's expression was both aggravated and distant, as if fretting about something he could do nothing about, the sliding value of the dollar, maybe. "Could I bring you two back from Memory Lane a second?"
"Sure thing," Junior said.
Do we have to? Victoria thought.
"I never saw anything in the papers about Oceania," Steve began, "never heard anyone in the Keys talking about it."
"Dad didn't want the gambling industry finding out what we were doing until we had the federal permits," Junior explained. "What do you think the lobbyists for Atlantic City and the Gulf casinos would do to stop us?"
"Bribe a congressman or two," Victoria suggested.
"And if that didn't work?"
"Kill Stubbs and frame your father," Steve said. "You're saying a competitor did it."
"Who else would have a better motive?" Junior said.
It had been fifteen minutes since Junior relocked the double doors to the Oceania room. The three adults— if you counted Steve—lay on chaise lounges on an outdoor deck overlooking the cove. A pitcher of margaritas with a platter of tortilla chips and fresh-made guacamole sat on a table in the shade of an umbrella. A man-made waterfall poured over rocks into a small pond stocked with fish and long-necked swans. Bobby was wading in the pond, trying to talk swan language to the big birds.
Junior's cell phone had rung several times, reporters calling. Following their instructions, Junior expressed his father's regret at Stubbs' demise and declined comment on everything else. Helicopters from three Miami TV stations hovered over the island like noisy mosquitoes. One buzzed so low, it stirred the cove into a white froth. The crews got their footage, then powered north again.
Now, as Steve ran through his questions, Victoria sorted out her feelings. She felt slightly decadent, reclining on a wicker chaise lounge, sinking into the cocoa-colored cushions, sipping tequila on a workday afternoon, with two hot guys. One was her lover and potential life mate and the other once seemed destined for that role. Over the years, she had wondered about Junior. What kind of man had he become?
To start with, an awesome hunkalicious man, but he seems so much more than his physicality.
A decent, smart, caring man. All that time and money he spent on worthwhile causes. And look at Oceania, something that could have been an environmental holocaust, but thanks to Junior could become an environmental showplace, a stunning blend of commerce and nature.
So, Steve, what do you think of Junior now?
Sure, Junior had enjoyed a privileged life. But he wasn't the spoiled rich kid Steve had predicted—and spitefully wanted—him to be.
Now, in the shade of an umbrella, the same cocoa print fabric as the chaise cushions, with Junior's coppery-bronzy tan accentuating his bright smile, with his sun-streaked thatch of hair, with his six-pack of abs rigid as body armor and his carved deltoids rippling with each movement of his bare arms, with his strong jaw with that devilish cleft, he was . . .
Oh, hell, just say it, or at least think it.
If I were standing, my knees would have buckled by now.
Not to get overheated about it, but he was the closest thing to a Greek god she'd ever seen. A modern Adonis, who, if she remembered her course at Princeton, Fables and Myths, got it on with Aphrodite, notwithstanding the lady's marriage to somebody-or-other. Was she feeling a little like Aphrodite, the trampy goddess of passion, who also peeled grapes with Ares, Dionysus, and a few other guy-gods Victoria couldn't remember?
Jeez, am I so superficial that his looks, his luscious total maleness, turns me into mush?
No, of course not. It was just a healthy sexual fantasy, right? Like Steve studying the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue more closely than any appellate court decision. She wondered if Steve was picking up her vibes. Could he tell what she was thinking—and feeling—about Junior?