On a stifling August day of becalmed wind and sweltering humidity, the Coast Guard plucked seven Haitians from a sinking raft in the Gulf Stream, the grand jury indicted three judges for extorting kickbacks from court-appointed lawyers, and the Miami City Commission renamed Twenty-second Avenue General Maximo Gomez Boulevard.
And Peter Tupton froze to death.
Tupton was wearing a European-style bikini swimsuit and a terry cloth beach jacket. Two empty bottles of Roederer Cristal champagne 1982 lay at his feet. His very blue feet. Two thousand six hundred forty-four other bottles-reds and whites, ports and sauternes, champagnes and Chardonnays, Cabernets and cordials-were stacked neatly in their little wooden bins.
A high-tech air-conditioning system kept the wine cellar at an even 56 degrees and 70 percent humidity. Hardly life-threatening, unless you wandered in from the pool deck sopping wet, guzzled two liters of bubbly, and passed out.
Cause of death: exposure due to hypothermia. Which didn’t keep the Miami Journal from seizing on a sexier headline:
ON YEAR’S HOTTEST DAY, ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST FREEZES TO DEATH
The medical examiner reported that Tupton’s blood contained 0.32 percent alcohol. If he’d been driving, he could have been arrested three times. But he’d been swimming, then sipping mimosas on the pool deck. When he stumbled into the wine cellar, he must have kept drinking, this time leaving out the orange juice.
Cheers.
“He was a most disagreeable man,” Gina Florio said, dismissing the notion of the late Peter Tupton with a wave of the hand. It was a practiced gesture, a movement so slight as to suggest the insignificance of the subject. When the hand returned, it settled on my bare chest. I lay on my back in a bed that had a bullet hole in the headboard. The bed had been Exhibit A in a case involving a jealous husband and a. 357 Magnum, and I picked it up cheap at a police auction of old evidence.
I stared at the ceiling fan, listening to its whompety-whomp while Gina traced figure eights with a blood-red fingernail across my pectorals. A crumpled bed sheet covered me from the waist down. Her clothing was simpler; there wasn’t any. She reclined on her side, propped on an elbow, the smooth slope of a bare hip distracting me from the hypnotizing effect of the fan. Outside the jalousie windows, the wind was picking up, the palm fronds swatting the sides of my coral-rock house.
A most disagreeable man. In earlier times, she would have called him a dickbrain.
Or if there were clergy on the premises, simply a birdturd.
But Gina was a sponge that absorbed the particulars of her surroundings, the good, the bad, and the pretentious. Lately, she’d been hanging out with the matrons of the Coral Gables Women’s Club. Finger sandwiches at the Biltmore, charity balls at the Fontainebleau, tennis at the club. Discussions of many disagreeable men. Mostly husbands, I’d bet.
“A swine, really,” Gina said. “A short, bald, lumpy swine who mashed out his cigarettes in my long-stemmed Iittala glasses.”
“Iittala, is it?”
“Don’t mock me, Jake. Finnish, top of the line. Nicky likes the best of everything.”
“That’s why he married you,” I said, without a trace of sarcasm.
“You’re still mocking me, you prick.”
Prick. Now, that was better. You can take the girl out of the chorus line, but…
“Not at all, Gina. You Ye a name brand. Just like Nicky’s Rolex, his Bentley, and…his Iittala.”
“What’s wrong with my name, anyway?”
Defensive now. She could play society wife with the white-shoe crowd at Riviera Country Club, but I’d known her too long.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’ve liked all your names. Each suited the occasion.”
“Even Maureen? Rhymes with latrine.”
“I didn’t know you then. You were Star when I met you.”
She made the little hand-wave again, and her butterscotched hair spilled across my chest, tickling me. Her movements hadn’t always been so subtle. When her name was Star Hampton, she jumped and squealed with the rest of the Dolphin Dolls at the Orange Bowl. She had long legs and a wide smile, but so did the others. What distinguished her was a quick mind and overriding ambition. Which hardly explained why she chose me-a second-string linebacker with a bum knee and slow feet-over a host of suitors that included two first-round draft choices with no-cut contracts and a sports agent who flew his own Lear. Then again, maybe it explained why she left me.
We were together two years, or about half my less-than-illustrious football career, and then she drifted away, leaving her name-and me-behind. When the gods finally determined that my absence from the Dolphins’ roster would affect neither season ticket sales nor the trade deficit with Japan, I enrolled in night law school. By then, Star had sailed to Grand Cayman with a gold-bullion salesman, the first of three or four husbands, depending if you counted a marriage performed by a ship’s captain on the high seas.
I hadn’t heard from her for a few years when she called my secretary, asking to set up an appointment with Mr. Jacob Lassiter, Esq. She wanted her latest marriage annulled after discovering the groom wasn’t an Arab sheikh, just a glib commodities broker from Libya who needed a green card. We became reacquainted, and Gina-though that wasn’t her name yet-kept drifting in and out of my life with the tide.
Sometimes, it was platonic. She’d complain about one man or another. The doctor was selfish; the bodybuilder dull; the TV newsman uncommunicative. I’d listen and give advice. Yeah, me, a guy without a wife, a live-in lover, or a parakeet.
Sometimes, it was romantic. In between her multiple marriages and my semi-relationships, there would be long walks on the beach and warm nights under the paddle fan. One Sunday morning, I was making omelets-onions, capers, and cheese-when she came up behind me and gave me a dandy hug. “If I didn’t like you so much, Jake,” she whispered, “I’d marry you.”
And sometimes, it was business. There were small-claims suits over a botched modeling portfolio, an apartment with a leaking roof, and a dispute with a roommate over who was the recipient of a diamond necklace bequeathed by a grateful thief who had enjoyed their joint company during a rainy Labor Day weekend. And, of course, the name changes. She had been born Maureen Corcoran on a farm somewhere in the Midwest. A mutt name and a mutt place, she said long ago. So she changed her name and place whenever she deemed either unsuitable. She called herself Holly Holiday during one Christmas season, Tanya Galaxy when she became infatuated with an astronaut at Cape Canaveral, and Star Hampton when she dreamed of a Hollywood career.
Finally, she asked me to make it official: Maureen would become Gina.
“It goes well with Florio, don’t you think?” she had asked. “And Nicky likes it.”
Nicky.
What was he doing today? Making money, I supposed. Wondering whether he was going to get sued by the estate of one Peter Tupton. Maybe worrying about his wife, too. Had Gina said she was going to see her lawyer?
Their lawyer, now. I could see Gina cocking her head, asking Nicky if it wouldn’t be sweet to hire Jake Lassiter. You remember Jake, don’t you, darling?
Sure, he remembered.
Before he was filthy rich, Nicky Florio used to hang around the practice field. He was hawking someone else’s condos then, and he’d deliver an autographed football at each closing. If he couldn’t get Griese, Csonka, Kiick, Warfield, or Buoniconti, I’d sign my name. And theirs.
Nicky was a great salesman. He pretended to love football, always looking for the inside dope on the team. Injuries, mostly. How had practice gone? What was Shula’s mood? I’d give him a tip now and then, knowing what he was up to, but I never bet on games. Well, seldom. And I never bet against us.
Nicky probably balked when she mentioned me. I need another lawyer like I need another asshole. Besides, your old boyfriend’s just an ex-jock with a briefcase.
He was right. I don’t look like a lawyer, and I don’t act like a lawyer. I have a bent nose, and I tip the scales at a solid 223. My hair is too long and my tie either too wide or too narrow, too loud or too plain, depending on the fashion of the times. I’ve hit more blocking sleds than law books, and I live by my own rules, which is why I’ll never be president of the Bar Association or Rotary’s Man of the Year. I eat lunch in shirtsleeves at a fish joint on the Miami River, not in a tony club in a skyscraper. I laugh at feeble lawyer jokes:
How can you tell if a lawyer is lying?
His lips are moving.
And I do the best I can to inflict the least harm as I bob and weave through life. Which made me wonder just what the hell I was doing with Gina yet again.
If Nicky had said no, Gina would have waited, then tried again. When the neighbor sued over the property line, Give Jake a chance. I picture Nicky Florio running a hand through his black hair, slicked straight back with polisher. He’d squint, as if in deep thought, his dark eyes hooded. He’d shrug his thick shoulders: Sure, why not, he can’t screw it up too bad. Putting me down, building himself up. Hire the wife’s old boyfriend, something to gloat about at the club, tell the boys how he tacks a bonus onto the bill, like tossing crumbs to a pigeon. To Nicky, I was a worker bee he could lease by the hour. He could buy anything, he was telling me, including Gina.
Well, who’s got her today, Nicky?
Was that it, I wondered, my infantile way of striking back? Hey, Lassiter, old buddy, what are you doing in bed with Maureen, Holly, Star, Gina? Don’t you have enough problems, what with the Florida Bar on your back? What would the ethics committee say about bedding down a client’s wife?
With all the single women available, what are you doing with a married one? South Beach is chock-full of unattached women, leggy models from New York, Paris, and Rome. Downtown is wall-to-wall professionals in their business-lady pumps, charcoal suits, and silk blouses. The gym has an aerobics instructor plus a divorcee or two who brighten up when you do your curls. So what’s with this destructive, nowhere relationship mired in the past?
“Jake, what are you thinking about?” Gina asked.
“Star Hampton,” I answered, truthfully. I rearranged myself on the bed to look straight into her eyes. “Do you remember the time you hit me?”
“Was it only once?”
“Yeah. You were leaving me for some cowboy. A rodeo star named Tex or Slim.”
“It was Jim. Just Jim.”
“No, Jim was the Indy driver.”
“That was James,” she corrected me. “Or was he the tennis pro?”
“You hit me because I didn’t beg you to stay.”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
But I did.
We’d been living together in my apartment on Miami Beach. She stepped out of the shower, her hair smelling like a freshly mowed field. She kissed me, soft and slow, then said she was leaving. I told her I’d miss the wet towels balled up on the bathroom floor. She let fly a roundhouse right, bouncing it off my forehead, cursing as she broke a lacquered nail.
Good kiss, no hit.
She dressed quickly and tossed her belongings into a couple of gym bags. Then she said it to me, a parting line I was to hear time and again. “Maybe I’ll see you later,” she said, heading out the door. “And maybe I won’t.”
“Slugged anybody lately?” I asked.
She laughed. It was the old laugh. Hearty instead of refined. “Gawd, I was so young then. Did you know I turned thirty last April? You think I need a boob job? Am I starting to sag?”
She sat up, stretched her long legs across the bed, and hefted her bare breasts, one at a time, her chin pressed into her chest. The streaked blond hair hung straight over her eyes. Outside, the wind was crackling the palm fronds. Only three o’clock, but it had gotten dark inside the bedroom. I peered out the porthole-sized window. Gray clouds obscured the sun as a summer squall approached from the west.
“Jake! You’re ignoring me.”
So was Nicky, I thought. Maybe that was why she was here. Or was it just for old times’ sake?
“Can we be friends again?” she had asked when she showed up at my office for a lunch appointment.
“Friends?”
“Friends who screw,” she explained.
Which, come to think of it, is what we had been from the beginning. After all these years, I was still dazzled by her beauty, the granite cheekbones, the wide-set deep blue eyes rimmed with black, the body sculpted by daily workouts with a personal trainer. Attention must be paid to such a woman, I thought.
She dropped her breasts, which, as she well knew, sagged not a whit. “Jake?”
“Tell me more about Tupton,” I said.
“Ugh! No more talk about business.”
“I thought that’s what this was about.”
“Come on, Jake. That was an excuse. I missed you.”
She rolled on top of me and grabbed a handful of my sunbleached hair. “You get better-looking every year. I don’t know why I talked Nicky into hiring you. You’re too tall and too tanned and too damn sexy.”
“That’s why you talked him into hiring me. And here I was hoping it was for my legal acumen.”
“It’s for your amorous acumen.” She let go of my hair and began nuzzling my neck.
“Look, Gina, you’re just bored. It’s an occupational hazard of the haut monde wife.”
Her teeth were leaving little marks on my earlobes. She whispered in my ear. “If you think I don’t know what that means, you’re tres tromp e. My second husband took me to Paris. Or was it my third?”
“C’mon, let’s do some work-unless you want me to charge you two hundred fifty dollars an hour for-”
“A bargain at twice the price.”
“Gina. I’m serious.”
“I know you are. You’re suffering from postcoital guilt.”
“Really?”
“I’ve had therapy,” she said proudly. “My next-to-last ex-husband was a big believer in self-growth.”
“C’mon now, tell me more about Tupton.”
She sighed and rolled off me, her hair trailing across my chest. Her back toward me, I admired the twin dimples at the base of her spine. Then she turned to face me, her full lips pouting. “We invited him to the pool party to soften him up. Nicky’s bright idea. Why fight the guy, waste thousands on legal fees-”
“What better use for your money?”
“…when maybe we could reason with him, show him the good life, serve him some grilled pompano-”
“And chilled champagne.”
“Jake, stop it! If you don’t want to fool around anymore, treat me like a client.”
“You want me to pad the bill?”
“No, I want you to screw me.”
“Gina!”
“Okay, okay. Fire away.”
“So you invited Tupton to a pool party.”
“Along with a bunch of stuffed shirts, Friends of the Philharmonic, the opera and ballet groups. I haven’t seen so many bobbed noses and tummy tucks since the Mount Sinai Founders Ball.”
“A society crowd.”
“Business, too. With Nicky, a party can’t just be a party. We had some of the big growers plus a Micanopy chief or two. Nicky always says if you want to do business in the Everglades, you’ve got to make friends with the Indians and the sugar barons. And, of course, we invited Tupton, the turd.”
Dropping all Gables Estates pretenses now. More like Star Hampton, who once shared a two-bedroom Miami Springs apartment with five stewardesses, none of whom could scrub a pot.
“I’ve seen his name in the paper,” I said. “What did they call him, an ‘environmental activist’?”
“A turd!”
“The Journal said he was executive director of the Everglades Society. A pretty nice obituary.”
“A shithead.”
“I assume he wasn’t fond of real estate developers the likes of Nicholas Florio,” I said.
She placed a hand on my stomach. “All Nicky did was send some surveyors onto the Micanopy Reservation. He’s been doing business with the Indians for years.”
“The reservation’s in the Big Cypress Swamp, so Tupton was probably concerned that-
“Who cares! I mean, the Indians have something like seventy thousand acres out there. It’s all mucky. Yuk! Who would want it?”
“Nicky, I guess. He’s probably going to improve the environment by draining the groundwater, chasing out the birds and alligators, and building ticky-tacky condos on rotten pilings.”
“Jake, that’s not fair. He’s got a planned community on the drawing board. Something that would enhance the environment. That’s what the brochures say.”
“Maybe the buildings would even last until the first hurricane.”
“Don’t let your feelings about Nicky interfere with your good judgment, Jake.” She let her fingers do the walking, or maybe it was a slow dance under the sheet, a soft stroking of me farther south. “Anyway, Tupton files a suit against Nicky’s company for not having all the right permits. But Nicky wasn’t dredging or anything, just surveying, for crying out loud! I gotta tell you, Jake, these bird-watchers and gator-loving eco-nuts are real wackos. They’ve protested against the oil companies for making seismic tests and the airboat tours for disturbing the tadpoles. And Tupton, talk about holier than thou, he comes to our house wearing jeans and a chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up, like some urban fucking cowboy. I’ll bet the dipshit makes thirty-five K a year, tops.”
“Made,” I said. “He’s not cashing any more checks. And I remember when you shook your booty for fifteen bucks a game at the Orange Bowl.”
She withdrew her hand and studied me. “You disapprove of me, don’t you, Jake? You never say it, but I disappoint you.”
I listened to fat raindrops plopping against the window. The wind whistled through gaps in the barrel-tile roof. “Nothing and nobody ever turns out the way you think.”
She turned away from me, either to express her displeasure or to show off her profile. “And what did you think, Jake, that I’d be doing brain surgery now? I just count my blessings that I’m not dancing tabletops in one of those dives near the airport.”
In the distance, a police siren sang against the wind. “Maybe I’m just jealous that you’re with Nicky, and this is the way I show it.”
“You? Jealous?” She laughed a throaty laugh, her breasts bouncing. “Since when? You never cared. You never once said you loved me, not even when it was just the two of us. We were close, Jake, or don’t you remember?”
“I remember everything,” I said. “The Germans wore gray. You wore blue, and I missed the boat.”
“The boat?”
“The one to Grand Cayman-others too, I imagine. I never could keep up with you.”
She turned back to me and brought an elbow down into my stomach. Not hard, but not soft either. I let out a whoosh. “Jeez, what’s that for?”
“You jerk! You big, dumb jock jerk! You never asked me to stay. You think I wouldn’t have stayed? You never cared!”
“Who says I didn’t care?”
“Me! I say it. You didn’t care.”
“I cared,” I said softly.
“Then you’re a double dumb jerk for never saying so.”
Gina sat on the edge of the bed, craning her long neck and blowing cigarette smoke into the air. She’d been quitting smoking ever since we met, probably longer. Self-discipline was not her strong suit. It took her another half hour to tell me the rest of the story.
She had put on what she called her sweet face and served Peter Tupton a pitcher of mimosas to loosen him up. Nicky lent him a swimsuit, and before you knew it, there he was frolicking in the pool with a couple of Junior Leaguers from Old Cutler Road.
“Is there a Mrs. Tupton?” I asked. Without a wife and kids, the value of the wrongful-death case would plummet.
“There is, but he didn’t bring her,” Gina told me.
“Why not? Were they separated?” An impending marital split could limit the damages, too.
“Tupton said something about Sunday being her day to spend at Mercy hospital. She’s a volunteer with child cancer patients.”
Oh shit. When the surviving spouse is an angel, tack another digit onto the verdict form.
“Any little Tuptettes?”
“No. They’d been married a couple of years. No kids yet.”
Be thankful for small blessings.
“How’d he get into the wine cellar?”
She exhaled a puff into the draft of the ceiling fan. “Beats me. When he first arrived, Nicky gave him a tour of the house, including the cellar, which isn’t a cellar at all or it’d be under five feet of water. It’s a custom-built room off the kitchen. Lots of insulation, custom wood shelving, a couple thousand bottles. He must have come back into the house from the pool. Maybe the jerkoff wanted to steal a Chateau Petrus 1961. Or maybe he was looking for a place to pee.”
I was trying to figure it out, but it made no sense. There was plenty to drink outside, where it was also warm, and tummy-tucked women in bikinis lounged poolside. “Why would he wander into a freezing room soaking wet, settle down, and drink two bottles of champagne? Did he lock himself in?”
“Impossible,” she answered, tossing me the hand again. “The bolt slides open from the inside. Apparently, he didn’t want to leave.”
Or couldn’t, I thought.
The rain had stopped, and the wind had died. Outside the window, the late-afternoon sun peeked from behind the clouds, slanting shadows of a palm frond across the room. In the chinaberry tree, a mockingbird with white wing patches was yawking and cackling. Mimus polyglottos, Doc Charlie Riggs called him, using the bird’s Latin name. Mimic of many tongues. My mocker is a bachelor. They’re the ones who sing the songs. Maybe that’s what I was doing, too.
“Who was the last person to see Tupton alive?” I asked.
Gina looked around my bedroom for an ashtray. She seemed to consider the question before answering. “Nicky, I think.” She appeared lost in thought. There being neither an ashtray nor Iittala glassware on the premises, Gina dropped the cigarette butt into the mouth of an empty beer bottle. Her eyes brightened. “Sure, they were both sitting in the kiddie pool drinking the mimosas, Nicky trying to charm him. I remember thinking that Nicky must be making progress, maybe getting through to him. Then they walked toward the house together, going into the kitchen. That’s the last I saw him. You’ll have to ask Nicky what happened next.”
I intended to do just that. As Nicky’s lawyer, I had to be ready for anything. I had to “zealously” defend my client. It’s in the Canons of Ethics, you can look it up. Just now, the lawyer inside me-the guy who sees evil and deception, artifice and mendacity-had a lot of questions to ask. And so would the state attorney, I was willing to bet.
The death of Peter Tupton was just a bit too bizarre. Words like “inquest” and “autopsy” and “grand jury” were popping into my head. And motive, too. What was it Doc Riggs always said? When there’s no explanation for the death, always ask, cui bono, who stands to gain.
Hey, Nicky Florio, this may be more trouble for you than just a wrongful-death suit that’s probably insurance-covered anyway. You could be up to your ass in alligators.
Gina was up and getting dressed. She wriggled into her ultra tight jeans and shot me a look. “Jake, why are you smiling?”
“Didn’t know I was.”
“You were. Your blue eyes were crinkling at the corners, and you had that crooked grin you used to sweep me off my feet.”
“So that’s what did it. I thought it was my witty repartee aided by ample quantities of Jack Daniel’s.”
She was looking around the room for her bra. “No. It was your smile. That and shoulders I could lean on.”
“Since then, one’s been separated, the other dislocated, and I’ve torn a rotator cuff.”
She found the bra, red and frilly, in a tangle of bed sheets. “Just now, you were almost laughing. What were you thinking about?”
“The Canons of Ethics. ”
She gave me a shove. “No, really.”
“Okay, then. The Ten Commandments, or at least one of them.”
“Which one?”
“Something about thy client’s wife,” I said.