Riptide

by Paul Levine

  Berto smiled and regained his composure. “Jake, this is Lee Hu, sweetest tiger lily in the land, and I think you know Keaka Kealia.”

  “Hello, Lee Hu. Berto, I didn’t know you and Keaka were acquainted.”

  “Just met,” Berto said. “Thought I might open a ski shop out west, have windsurfing equipment for summer business. Who better to talk to than the best, right, Keaka?”

  Berto’s head swiveled to Keaka Kealia, looking for help, but the Hawaiian was silent. Lee Hu looked down at her tiny feet, and Lassiter looked too: nails painted glossy red, her toes positively edible. Her halter top was plastered against her small body by the November easterly. Long black hair fell in bangs in the front and straight to her shoulders in back, where the wind tossed it leeward. The total impression, Lassiter thought, was one of childlike sensuality.

  “Great, Berto,” Lassiter said. “You came to the right place for advice.” He didn’t believe a word of it and couldn’t figure out what Berto was doing with Keaka Kealia. Real estate developer turned doper going into the windsurfing business. What a crock.

  Then Berto flashed his old smile and said, “Funny we don’t see each other for years, then twice in two days, our paths cross. Must be the stars, verdad? By the way, I stopped by your office this morning and signed those papers, the deeds to the bank. Cindy’s got them. Glad to get it over with.”

  “Sorry I missed you,” Lassiter said, aware Berto had changed the subject. A diversionary tactic, and any lawyer worth his wing tips would not be thrown off the track. Why had Keaka sailed a mile down the beach to discuss the latest in equipment? Why did he try to keep his rig from view? What was Berto’s sudden interest in the sport, and where the hell was the DEA agent?

  Lassiter would have loved to grill these two under oath, but he didn’t have a subpoena in his surfing trunks. After quick good-byes, he left them there and jogged back over the dunes to retrieve his rig. Nearing a roped-off area, he was careful to avoid the sea grass, which was more than a guy with binoculars was doing. Tourists were always tromping around where they didn’t belong. Lassiter wished he was wearing his favorite T-shirt, the one with the slogan “Welcome to Florida, Now Go Home.”

  “Hey, you’re not supposed to be in there, beach erosion,” Lassiter called out. The guy lowered the binoculars and scowled. There was something familiar about him. Sports coat. Short blond hair going gray. Sure. “You’re the DEA guy. Franklin, right?”

  “Get the fuck outta here,” the man said, lifting the binoculars again, aiming toward the beach where Keaka, Berto, and Lee Hu still huddled.

  “Okay, just glad to see my tax dollars at work. Shame the federal government cut your funds for charm school.”

  “… the fuck out ‘fore I bust you for obstruction.”

  “You too?” Lassiter asked. “I know a Beach cop would love to nail me for a B and E. Maybe my picture will be in the post office next week.”

  The man’s sports coat swung open, revealing a shoulder holster filled with a .38. “Maybe so, you don’t watch out the company you keep.”

  “Berto’s not a hard guy, just someone who took a wrong turn.”

  The man laughed. “Who the fuck’s talking about him?”

  CHAPTER 12

  Back to School

  Only in Miami, Jake Lassiter thought, reading the morning paper while sipping guava juice in the tiny kitchen of his coral rock house.

  Only in Miami was the theft of $1,640,712.50 in negotiable securities considered small potatoes. That was the total Cindy came up with after putting the old man’s records into the calculator, and where did that get you? It got you on page 7-B of The Miami Herald, only four paragraphs plus a thumbnail photo of Sam Kazdoy, a shot taken sometime after his bar mitzvah but before he lost his hair.

  Jake Lassiter had been hoping for more. A lot of publicity and the burglars, if they were still in town, would have to wonder. Is it safe to leave through the airport or would bags be searched? Are banks on the lookout? Is the FBI involved? But four paragraphs told the world that nobody gave a shit about a B and E, not in a town where there’s more than one homicide a day, 365 days a year, and without a good angle, a murder gets five measly paragraphs and a one-column headline body found, next to ads for lingerie models and body shampoo massage parlors in North Miami Beach.

  The burglary was lost in the day’s crime news, heavy even by Miami standards. One hundred grams of cocaine is hardly worth mentioning and it wouldn’t have been, except a federal juror stole it while deliberating the fate of an accused drug dealer. The evidence was being passed around the table when it disappeared, probably crammed into a juror’s Jockeys for a late-night toot. It was the first time anyone could remember a jury being read its Miranda rights.

  Then there was the middle-aged Cuban driver who rammed his Marriott catering truck into the nose gear of a Cubana Airlines jet at MIA. A million dollars’ damage to the plane, and a great shot of the driver shouting “Cuba Libre” on the front page. Yes, Lassiter admitted, it was too heavy a news day to pay much attention to a burglary.

  The newspaper devoted a portion of its Local page to yet another mystery at the Miami police station, thirty-eight bales of marijuana missing from a padlocked bin in the property room. Two weeks earlier the police lost seven hundred abandoned bicycles that were to be auctioned off for charity when a wise guy took them from an unguarded lot. Then, $150,000 in cash was stolen from the police safe, evidence in a drug case.

  Of course the newsboys were going bonkers with the missing marijuana, the papers and the TV stations yukking it up. And why not, more crimes are committed in the Miami police station than on the streets of most cities. Still, the Kazdoy burglary might have gotten some notoriety had a major-league drug dealer not been machine-gunned at high noon in Little Havana by assassins firing MAC-10s. For the third time in a month, a copy editor tried to slip the phrase “MAC Attack” into a headline and for the third time an assistant city editor killed it.

  After reading the morning paper, Lassiter still didn’t have a lead. Maybe he should confront Violet, one-on-one. Put some pressure on her, more than Sergeant Carraway would do. Except first he had to file three mortgage foreclosures and review title documents to a dozen real estate transactions.

  * * *

  Cindy was missing from the cubicle where she usually perched, cursing at her word processor. Wrong day of the week for riding the chopper in the Keys. Lassiter opened the door to his office and found her doing a pirouette, modeling a bikini for Tubby Tubberville, who overflowed the high-backed chair and whose black motorcycle boots were propped on the oak credenza. Tubby had a round face, a neck that no collar could contain, and powerful arms that ended in thick, stumpy hands. He wore grease-spotted jeans, a T-shirt advertising a Key West oyster bar — “Eat ‘em raw” — and a sleeveless leather vest with slots for shotgun shells.

  “Make yourself comfortable, Tubby.” Lassiter slipped a managing partner memo — scolding secretaries for using the Xerox machine to photocopy their private parts — under Tubby’s boots.

  “Thanks, don’t mind if I do.”

  “Hey, Cindy,” Lassiter said, “how about typing the complaint in the First Savings mortgage foreclosure?”

  “Sure, boss, but whadaya think?” Cindy spun three hundred sixty degrees, arching her back to show off her tight bottom in a black-and-yellow cheetah print, the fabric little more than a Band-Aid covering her crotch, a strap as thin as a shoestring between her cheeks, the top a shred of spandex over small breasts.

  “I think you’re going to catch cold. Now, you two mind if I sit down and bill some time?”

  “Ay, bro, don’t give me no bull,” Tubby said, riffling Lassiter’s documents. “All you got here are papers from a bank that don’t make no sense, three windsurf magazines with pictures of beach bunnies with some radical deltoids, and a note about a reunion of your old college team.”

  “Thanks, Tubby. Maybe you could also return my calls and answer the mail while you’re
here.”

  “For what you’re paid, why not? To you high-rise types, talking on the phone is work. You guys got it good. Private clubs, fancy lunches, pheasant under glass.”

  “I just eat the glass. Thanks for stopping by and brightening my day.”

  Tubby lifted his bulk from the swivel chair with unusual grace for a man whose 260 pounds bulged around a five-foot-nine-inch frame. “Don’t mention it. But I gotta go work on the Harley and I hate being downtown anyway. Anybody left here who speaks English?”

  “Before you go, Tub, let me ask you something. You remember when I was in the PD’s office?”

  “How could I fergit? You got me off that trumped-up charge. I mean, give me a break, aggravated assault for shoving a guy in a shitkicker bar.”

  “As I recall, you had a pool cue in one hand and a broken Budweiser bottle in the other.”

  Tubby shrugged. “House rules. No guns.”

  “Anyway, you remember my trial partner, Berto Zaldivar?”

  “Ay. Handsome devil. Combed that black hair straight back like some gigolo. The two of you were defending poor wretches what couldn’t afford real lawyers.”

  “We were both starry-eyed in those days. It took me a while to figure out that a three-time armed robber wasn’t a saint just because he was indigent. It didn’t take Berto as long.”

  “What about him, bro?”

  “You still have friends in the business?”

  “What business is that, bro?”

  “C’mon, Tubby. Importation.”

  The big man looked around, as if somebody might be eavesdropping. “I hang loose in a bar in the Keys where half the Bubbas are smugglers and the other half narcs. As long as the fishing boats keep unloading that square grouper, the Keys ain’t gonna have no recession.”

  “Keep your ears open for me about Berto, okay, but be discreet.”

  “Ain’t I always?” Tubby whispered. He slapped Cindy playfully on the bottom and headed out the door.

  * * *

  An hour later, as Lassiter was putting the finishing touches on a motion to foreclose the mortgage of a laid-off airline mechanic, the intercom buzzed. “Don’t forget,” Cindy said.

  “Forget what?”

  “Your meeting with Charlie Riggs at the med school.”

  “Shit, I forgot. Searching for truth and justice really drains the brain cells.”

  “Another thing, boss.”

  “Yeah?”

  Wind dies at sundown,

  Dinner date,

  Beach Bunny at eight.

  “Thanks, Cindy, but Keaka’s going to be there, too.” “No sweat, su majestad. Just flash those baby blues and talk some legal mumbo jumbo. He’ll be dead meat.”

  * * *

  It’s not far from downtown to the medical complex near the Orange Bowl. Unless the East-West Expressway — renamed the Dolphin Expressway, no thanks to me — was battened down. Which it was. A dozen Metro police cars were angled across the roadway, lights blazing, cops with drawn guns approaching an overturned trailer truck. Tiptoeing, watching where they stepped as thousands of Florida lobsters spilled out of the rear door of the refrigerated truck and scuttled across the road, sensing the water of a muddy canal nearby.

  Not an everyday traffic accident, especially since Alejandro “Monkey” Morales, ex-shrimper and current thief, was pinned inside the cab of the stolen truck. Morales had long ago figured out that grabbing a truck with three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of shellfish was more profitable than holding up a bank. And wasn’t a federal crime. As the kidnapped crustaceans disappeared into the bushes, Lassiter pulled his old convertible onto the berm and made it to the exit ramp, ignoring the occasional crunching sound under his tires.

  The traffic on Flagler Street was at a standstill and Lassiter took a shortcut on Seventh Street, lately rechristened Luis Sabines Way by the city commission, always anxious to pick up a few votes in Little Havana. Municipal debates over street names take almost as much time as haranguing Fidel Castro and soliciting campaign contributions from builders of homes that turn into shrapnel in a stiff wind.

  The drawbridge was up on Twelfth Avenue, newly renamed Ronald Reagan Boulevard, mainly because the former president once ate a media noche at La Esquina de Tejas during a campaign swing. The restaurant, at the intersection of the Gipper’s boulevard and First Street, had erected a little presidential memorial that looked like a religious display.

  Lassiter stayed on Luis Sabines Way, heading too far west, and nearly got lost because the signs on Twenty-second Avenue had been changed to General Maximo Gomez Boulevard. He didn’t know Maximo and figured Reagan didn’t either, since he couldn’t remember half his Cabinet members. Lassiter swung left on the generalissimo’s boulevard and again on Eighth Street or, if you prefer, Calle Ocho, to head east again. A tired Chevy with no shocks or maybe three bodies in the trunk was double-parked in front of Tony Perez Bail Bonds, Fianzas, according to the neon sign. A parade of homemade floats inched along the other two lanes, celebrating Independence Day on an obscure Caribbean island that, in fact, was ruled by a malevolent despot.

  So Lassiter waited, top down, figuring he could miss Charlie Riggs’s lecture on the body temperature of stiffs and still have time to talk to him about Sam’s missing bonds. Doc Riggs hadn’t spent a lifetime sifting scientific evidence of crime without solving a few puzzles.

  The sun shone brightly, and the breeze from the bay crackled the American and Cuban flags in front of a Toyota dealership at the corner. Lassiter’s mind wandered. He thought of open seas and riding a board through ocean swells. An image of Lila Summers appeared on a beach of cocoa sand. The reverie was interrupted by a steel band clanging by on the left, trying to give Lassiter a headache and succeeding. In front of him, three men, who believed their bare chests made Little Havana even lovelier, sat on the hood of the Chevy, arguing with Tony the Bondsman, who apparently demanded more than a jalopy as collateral. Finally, Lassiter gave the Chevy a love tap with his front bumper, and a wiry fellow on the driver’s side stuck an Uzi out the window. Nice move, Lassiter thought. An automatic weapon is better than the traditional bird for getting your attention. Lassiter decided not to lay on the horn. Not the one installed by GM, and not even the one that played “Fight on, State.”

  Finally, the Chevy moved, and so did he, rolling through a yellow light at Seventeenth Avenue, now dubbed Teddy Roosevelt Boulevard. Traffic congealed again a block away, alongside turquoise-and-yellow apartment buildings, gussied up with curlicues and bric-a-brac, window air conditioners coughing and dripping. A heavy woman in a rocking chair with a black shawl around her shoulders stared at him through the narrow metal railing of a second-floor balcony. Back on Ronald Reagan Boulevard, Lassiter turned left, crossed the bridge over the Miami River, and headed past Cedars of Lebanon, the various cancer and eye centers, and into the medical school parking garage.

  * * *

  Charlie Riggs was shouting at his class. “Inshoot wounds are always smaller than outshoot wounds, true or false?”

  “True,” said an Asian woman with enormous round eyeglasses. “The entry wound is always smaller.”

  “False!” Charlie Riggs bellowed. “One of a number of myths you must forget if you are to learn. Suicides have been called murders by untrained coroners who believed a larger hole in the chest meant the deceased necessarily was shot in the back. Innocent men have gone to prison because of incompetent autopsies.”

  A hush fell over the room. Riggs paused, then started up again. “Inshoot wounds are always circular. Another myth! It depends on the angle of entry. The bullet always follows a straight path inside the body. False! A bullet can ricochet off the organs. How about this one: The powder burn helps determine the distance of the gun from the body.”

  “That’s true, Dr. Riggs,” the woman tried again.

  Charlie Riggs peered up into the sloping, theater-sized classroom. “True once, obsolete now. With a smokeless propellant, it’s useless. And another
one: A good M.E. can tell the caliber of a gun by measuring the inshoot wound.”

  This time, the class was silent. They learned slowly, but they learned.

  “Maybe on TV,” he continued, “but I can’t do it, and I was studying holes in people when most of you were in knickers. When a bullet enters the body, the skin stretches, then contracts. The hole may be smaller than the bullet by the time you measure the opening.”

  This went on for a while, Charlie Riggs prancing about the small stage on his bowed legs, unlocking secrets learned in twenty thousand autopsies in a cold, tiled room smelling of rotting flesh and formaldehyde. Then he tugged off his glasses and propped them on top of his unkempt hair. He leaned back against a high laboratory stool, scratched his bushy beard, and told about the Expressway Body, found a few pieces at a time along 1-95. Everybody had wondered about the green paint on the femur. Not Charlie. He knew that store-bought hacksaw blades typically are splashed with green paint. When a suspect was picked up, Charlie wandered around the man’s garage, pulled a new hacksaw off the wall, and tested the paint. Eureka, a conviction for Murder One.

  “But you have to be able to distinguish murder from accidental death,” Charlie told them. “A man comes home from work, finds the house locked and his wife stone-dead on the kitchen floor, her throat slashed. The house shows no sign of forced entry. Nothing missing. No sign of a weapon. A hamburger was burned to a crisp in a pan on the stove. A broken plate lay on the floor, an empty gin bottle on the kitchen table, blood everywhere. What happened?”

  “Suicide,” a young man in a lab coat said from the front row.

  “No note, no weapon, no history of despondency. Don’t jump to conclusions. What do you do first?”