by Paul Levine
Steve heard the thwack of racket on ball. He took a closer look, first seeing a flash of movement, then a flash of flesh. Half hidden behind a row of sabal palms was a tennis court, two middle-aged couples playing doubles.
"I think the laundry workers are on strike."
"What are you talking about?"
"The tennis players aren't wearing shirts. Or shorts, for that matter."
Victoria peered between the trees.
A man shouted, "Out? Out, my ass!"
Then a woman's voice, "C'mon, Al. It was out. Forty love."
"They're naked," Victoria whispered, as if the tiki god might be eavesdropping.
"That's what I'm telling you. Junior wants us with our pants down. You, anyway."
"Don't freak out. It's got to be one of those clothing-optional resorts."
"Nothing optional about it," said the young woman behind the rattan counter in the clubhouse. Woven tapa cloths hung on the bamboo walls, and in the corner, a red-and-blue mynah was perched on an artificial tree. "Everyone's in the buff. Members, guests, staff."
The woman had one of those Disney World smiles, as if she'd overdosed on nitrous oxide. Her name tag said "Honey" and hung on a cord that snaked through the cleavage between her oversize, suntanned breasts. In Steve's estimation—based both on firsthand experience and defending Dr. Irwin Rudnick on med mal charges—Honey's grapefruit-shaped boobs had been surgically enhanced. "Once you cross the bridge, it's all nude, all the time," Honey emphasized. "Even the luncheon buffet."
"We're meeting a member," Victoria said, and Steve refrained from making a really bad pun.
"Who would that be?" Honey inquired.
"Junior Griffin."
"Oh, Mr. Grif-fin," Honey purred. "He's a big man around here."
Again, Steve stifled himself.
"I'm an intern," Honey volunteered. "Hotel management at Florida State. Mr. Griffin is my mentor."
"You're in good hands," Victoria said.
"Both of them," Steve remarked. A man can only resist so much temptation.
Honey pointed toward the locker rooms. After they disrobed—Honey confided that Junior-the-Mentor advised her never to say "stripped"—they should follow the Tahiti Trail across Volcano Bridge and the Koi Lagoon. They'd pass the swimming pool and find Junior Griffin on the croquet court.
"Mr. Griffin swings the best mallet at the club," Honey breathed, dreamily.
"Golly, is there anything that man can't do?" Steve said, agreeably.
"When he's got a clean shot, he always scores," Honey said, her eyes aglow.
SOLOMON'S LAWS
8. If a guy who's smart, handsome, and rich invites you and your girlfriend to a nudist club . . . chances are he's got a giant shmeckel.
Thirty-one
SIZE MATTERS
"Do you think I'm flat-chested?" Victoria said.
"Absolutely not. You're well proportioned."
"Is that like saying a plain girl has a good personality?"
"You're tall and sinewy and athletic with boobs that are perfect for the rest of your bod."
"But small."
"Not small, not big. Just the way I like them."
"You're sure?"
"More than a handful is a waste."
"So why were you staring at Honey's humongous bazooms?" she demanded, having trapped him on the road of cross-examination.
"Because looking away would have stamped me as a rookie." Slipping out of the trap.
Naked and self-conscious, they passed a row of stone tikis that Victoria thought resembled the Easter Island gods. The path cut through a stand of mangrove trees, providing cover and a sense of security, for now.
"If a woman's a nudist, she wants you to look," Steve continued. "Proper etiquette requires a gaze. Not a long stare, but a look sufficient to appraise and appreciate."
"Great excuse. You really are a good lawyer." She'd been staring straight ahead, but now glanced at him. "What's with the newspaper?"
"It was in the locker room."
"And why are you holding it over your crotch?"
"No reason. I've been meaning to catch up on world affairs."
"Really?" She grabbed the paper. Diario Las Américas. "What's new in Tegucigalpa?"
A noise startled her. Just off the path, a woodpecker—as naked as they were—hammered at a bottlebrush tree. Victoria tried breathing deeply, inhaling the moist air laden with salt from nearby tidal pools.
She never considered herself an exhibitionist. If anything, she was shy about her body. But this posed a test, like competing for a spot on the law journal. She was determined to overcome her inhibitions, to win whatever was at stake.
I have a good body. And there's nothing wrong with nudity, right?
She was starting to convince herself. What was there to be embarrassed about?
Junior.
Junior would be naked, too. One gorgeous hunk of a man. What would he think of her body?
God, why am I thinking of him?
Victoria tossed the newspaper into a trash receptacle and glanced at Steve, whose right hand covered his groin.
"Now what?" she asked.
"It's shrinking."
"Oh, stop."
"Do you think I'm small?" Remembering Aqua-man in his Speedos. Knowing they were moments from encountering Junior's jumbo Johnson.
"I think you're well proportioned for your body."
Touché.
"I mean it, Vic. Am I a little . . . little?"
"I don't have a sufficient sampling to answer. But yours is fine. It's cute."
"Cute? Cute is for kittens. A man wants to be a monster. A leviathan. A colossus."
"Okay, it's a cute little colossus."
"An oxymoron if ever I heard one."
"It's fine. You also have a great tush. You look terrific in jeans."
"I'd kill for a pair right now," Steve said.
The path ended at a rope bridge suspended over a peaceful lagoon. Lily pads and water flowers on the surface, fat Japanese koi swam below. From unseen speakers, music played. Dark and mysterious, heavy on the drums. Jungle music.
A man and woman, both naked, both in their sixties but fit and tanned, padded across the bridge, headed their way. They would all have to pass sideways.
Okay, good test, Victoria thought. Act normal. Reach a comfort level.
"Hullo there!" the man called out.
"Hi! Hi!" Victoria was too loud.
The woman looked them up and down, and Victoria felt herself reddening. "You two need some sun," the woman advised.
Victoria told herself to keep her eyes above waist level, but maybe Steve was right. If you're going nude, you expect people to look. As they scooted sideways, she let herself check out the man. The rope bridge was swaying back and forth and, omigod, so was the man's oversize scrotum. A low-hanging, loose sack that resembled a burlap bag with a couple onions inside. Victoria turned away so quickly, she could have suffered whiplash.
What am I doing here? This isn't me.
On the other side of the bridge, the path opened onto a wide expanse of grassy lawn. The pool was fifty yards away, and they could hear the yelps and cheers from a water volleyball game. They passed nude couples on chaise lounges, soaking up the afternoon sun.
A panorama of bare butts. A smorgasbord of exposed navels and glistening loins. Breasts heavy and pendulous, perky and firm, round and conical. Nipples puffy and nipples flat, nipples like raisins, nipples like raspberries. Forests of pubic hair, some wild and untamed, others as carefully tended as a putting green. Then the slack penises, draped on thighs like dead squirrels on logs. An array of sleeping male organs, ludicrous in their frailty. Did God play a trick on mankind with those distended pieces of droopy, feeble flesh?
As they approached the pool and refreshment stand, smells of coconut oil mixed with grilling meat from a barbecue pit. An aroma both sensuous and carnivorous.
Then Victoria felt the beginning of a piercing headache. "Maybe this
isn't such a good idea."
"That's what I've been saying. Junior's trying to throw us off. How can we cross-examine him when . . ."
Just then, two petite women in their twenties with taut gymnasts' bodies jogged toward them. Perfect bods, Victoria thought. Slick with oil, defined deltoids, small breasts barely moving with each powerful stride.
Steve, of course, was mesmerized.
"When what?" she said.
"Huh?"
"You were saying something. How can we cross-examine Junior when . . . something. When what?"
Steve turned to watch the women's perfect tight butts disappear into the foliage. Ten million years of evolution, Victoria thought, and men still act as if they had just crawled, web-footed, from the swamp.
"We're fine here, Vic. Just fine."
Several couples played cards at poolside tables. Others waded through the shallow end of the pool toward a waterside bar. People were staring at them, Victoria thought. Staring at her. Appraising her.
This is insane.
"Steve, I'm really not comfortable here."
He was looking around at the nude women sprawled on the chaises. "I'm not shrinking anymore. I might even be growing."
"I just feel so strange."
"We have work to do."
But his voice wasn't in work mode. Deeper now, his mellow mode.
How could he have relaxed just like that? To her, it seemed like a thousand eyes were drilling into her, and she felt herself blushing.
"Thank God my mother can't see me now."
"Princess! There you are."
That voice. It couldn't be.
"Join us for a piña colada, darling. Then for God's sake, get some sun."
In the second row of chaise lounges, reclining like royalty, there she was. The Queen held half a coconut shell festooned with two straws and a little purple umbrella.
Naked! In front of all these strangers.
Just look at her! An all-over tan. Her tucked tummy flat as an ironing board, her siliconed breasts as buoyant as floating beach balls, her skin tighter than the head of a snare drum. The Queen's bare legs, stretched out on the chaise, were slim and evenly bronzed, all the way up to...
Omigod. My mother, my fifty-eight-year-old mother, has shaved her pubic hair into a champagne-colored stripe the width of an emery board. At the spa, they had a name for it. What was it?
"Wake up! Look's who here." The Queen issued commands to the heavyset older man with hairy shoulders on the adjacent chaise. "Grif, wake up and say hello."
Uncle Grif! God, this can't be happening.
Victoria felt her throat constrict. Could she even speak? "Mother, what are you doing here?"
"Oh, don't act so surprised. I was going nude in Monaco when you were still in boarding school."
Landing strip.
That was the name of the neat little swath of pubes. Perfectly groomed in every way, her mother proudly displayed a landing strip, while she still had a jungle, a woolly rain forest.
Hal Griffin awakened and sleepily scratched his private parts. He extended the same hand toward Steve, who tried pounding—rapping knuckles—instead of shaking. "Hey, Solomon, how they hanging?"
When Steve seemed stuck for an answer, Griffin barked out a laugh. "Relax. Enjoy what you got now. As a man gets older, his dick gets smaller."
"But his boat gets bigger," Irene Lord chirped, happily.
Griffin looked tanned and healthy, a streak of reddish scar tissue on his forehead the only evidence of the boat crash. "Welcome to Polynesia, Princess."
Again she fought the urge to cover herself. "We were expecting to see Junior, Uncle Grif."
"And you will, but I have something to say first. Something important."
"They just got here, Grif," Irene said. "Why not talk business later?" She propped herself on one elbow and tucked her legs under her firm butt. "Princess, I hope you don't mind my saying so . . ."
Dear God. I don't have cellulite. Pilates keeps my abs tight. I don't need plastic surgery. What could she possibly say?
"Have you ever thought about a bikini wax, darling?"
Thirty-two
ADIÓS, STEVE
Griffin began giving orders. Telling Irene to take a swim, the lawyers to sit down, and the waitress to bring a round of beachcombers.
Irene sashayed into the shallow end of the pool, giving everyone a chance to admire her newly tucked tush. Steve and Victoria took seats at a bamboo-legged table shaded by a thatched palm umbrella. And the nude waitress jiggled off to get their tall lemonades spiked with rum and triple sec.
"Clive Fowles called me right after you left him," Griffin told them. "All worked up. Afraid he'd given you the wrong idea about Junior."
"Maybe you're the one who gave us the wrong idea," Steve said. "Why didn't you tell us you and Junior fought about Oceania?"
"Ever argue with your father, Solomon?"
"Only for the last thirty years."
"Ever kill him as a result?"
"Not yet."
An unfamiliar sensation, Steve thought, the breeze between his legs. But not unpleasant. These naturists might be onto something. In the pool, two young women—barely old enough to drink—screamed as they sailed down the water slide. Maybe there'd be time for a coed volleyball game before they left.
Griffin turned toward Victoria. "Princess, you don't go along with this nonsense about Junior killing Stubbs, do you?"
"I'm trying to keep an open mind."
That's my partner. She doesn't think Junior did it, but she won't split ranks outside our little family. Lawyers and mobsters follow lessons learned from The Godfather.
"But it makes no sense to me, Uncle Grif," she continued.
So much for the Sonny Corleone rule.
"Because it's bullshit," Griffin said. "Junior had nothing to do with Stubbs' death."
"I'd like you to hear me out," Steve said.
"Hey, guys!"
Coming toward their table was the killer hunk himself. Twirling a croquet mallet, chest out, shoulders back, smiling with those Chiclet teeth. And between his legs...
Oh, shit. The Monster.
Angled out a bit, surrounded by tufts of blond hair, was a happy, confident, hey-look-at-me salami. The son-of-a-bitch could play croquet without a mallet.
"How'd you do, son?" Griffin called out.
"Good enough to win." Junior grinned and swung the wooden mallet by its blue suede handle. "Twentysix to fourteen in the final."
"Attaboy."
"Hi, Tori." Junior leaned over the table and kissed Victoria on the cheek.
Jesus, did his pendulous pendulum just brush her bare shoulder?
"Hey, Junior." She smiled up at him.
"Steve." Junior nodded.
"Nice mallet," Steve replied.
"Son, why don't you swim some laps while I finish up with my lawyers?" Griffin suggested.
"No problem, Dad. I'll do five hundred meters of butterfly."
Junior bounced toward the pool, Victoria staring after him.
Griffin sipped at his lemony drink. "Go ahead, Solomon. Make your pitch."
"To win your case, we need to point the finger at someone else."
"Not at my son, you don't. Jesus, Junior wasn't even on the boat."
"You're sure?"
"I was there, dammit."
"You were up on the bridge. No way you could see what was going on below."
"I'm not buying it, Solomon."
"Junior thought Oceania might bankrupt you," Steve barreled ahead. "If he thought that killing Stubbs would stop the project—"
"Bullshit. I'm the only one mad enough to kill the bastard."
Victoria wrinkled her forehead. "Uncle Grif, I don't understand that."
"What's not to understand?" Steve shot back. "He's sticking up for his kid."
"Listen to me for once, Steve," she ordered. "That's not what I'm talking about. That day on the boat, Uncle Grif, what were you mad at Stubbs about?"
"Like I told you before, he was extorting me for a million bucks."
"No, that was a week earlier. On the boat, you settled everything. You gave Stubbs the hundred thousand from the lobster pot with a promise of more. You told me he accepted it."
There was an unspoken question hanging in the humid air, Steve knew.
"If you'd told the truth, if you'd reached a deal with Stubbs, why were you still mad enough to kill him?"
Doing good, Vic. Steve felt a sense of pride. She was using skills he'd taught her. Always precise with time lines, she'd picked up an inconsistency he had missed. Now he'd just settle back and follow her orders; he'd shut up and listen.
"Were you lying to me before, Uncle Grif? Did you have a fight on the boat over money?"
Griffin waved at Irene, who was hanging on to the side of the pool, doing leg kicks. The reluctant witness buying time. Then he sighed and said: "What I told you was true as far as it went. Stubbs took the hundred thousand. But only after trying to hold me up for more. The dumb shit told me he had a better offer."
"A better offer for what?" Victoria asked.
"Another 'bidder' is what he called it. 'I got another bidder soliciting my services.' Someone promising him a million bucks to write a negative environmental report. To kill Oceania."
"Who?"
"Stubbs wouldn't say, and the more he refused, the madder I got. So, I pulled that old speargun of Junior's out of the lockbox and aimed square at Stubbs' chest."
Victoria's hand flew to her own bare breasts. "Uncle Grif, no."
"Hold on, Princess. I yell at Stubbs he'd better tell me who my enemies are or I'll nail his hide to the bulkhead. He laughs at me. I look down and see there's no spear in the gun. That breaks the tension a bit, and we both calm down. We talk, and I tell him I'll pay him a hundred thousand every year. He chews it over, then says fine, he'll be loyal to me. As if the asshole knows anything about loyalty. Anyway, we got a deal, so I go back up to the bridge and head for Sunset Key to meet you two. Maybe half an hour later, I put her on auto, come down the ladder, and he's got a spear sticking in his chest."
For a moment there was no sound but the joyous chatter of the naked volleyballers.