Charlie Riggs was watching a lithe young woman in black Lycra shorts and a bikini top whirl through a pirouette on her Rollerblades, smack in the middle of Ocean Drive. No drivers yelled. No horns honked. A white stretch limo politely pulled around her. Four bearded guys gunned their black Harleys in an admiring salute as they gave her room. Two Miami Beach cops in khaki shorts weaved in and out of traffic on their bicycles, looking tanned, fit, and friendly, despite the Sig-Sauer nine-millimeters on their hips.
“Fascinating,” Charlie said, as the young woman sped down the center line.
“Her abdominals, or the aerodynamics of the sport?” I asked.
“Dying of hypothermia in Miami in August,” he answered, dipping a piece of pita bread into a bowl of pureed eggplant with garlic. We were sitting at a sidewalk table of the News Cafe, gathering spot for artists, actors, models, and assorted junior-varsity wannabes. A light breeze from the ocean, a few hundred yards to the east, cut the midday heat to manageable levels. To the west, storm clouds gathered over the Everglades. In the summer, lunch is followed by mid afternoon thunderstorms nine days out of ten. I was wearing jeans, running shoes, dark glasses, and a Hawaiian shirt festooned with orchids. Charlie had on baggy pants that he must have worn while painting his house, a green surgical smock, and a fisherman’s vest with various hooks and flies attached. He wore a shapeless canvas hat to keep the sun out of his eyes. To the casual observer, he was either the hippest guy on trendy South Beach or a demented professor.
Charlie took a sip of his lemonade and said, “A few years ago, a body turned up in Bayfront Park. It was July. A lad in his late teens, frozen stiff as a board and banged up a bit. Nobody could figure out what the deuce had happened. We checked the local meat lockers, ice plants, that sort of thing. I did the autopsy. Cause of death was asphyxia. Checked the inventory of his pockets. No wallet, no ID, no nothing except an Eastern Air Lines schedule and a hundred colons in Costa Rican currency. Of course, that solved the mystery.”
“It did?”
“The poor wretch had no visa and no money for a ticket, so he crawled into the wheel well of a jet at the airport in San Jose. There’s space up there that a man-well, not someone your size, but this fellow-could fit into. The wheel well isn’t pressurized, and if the lack of oxygen hadn’t killed him, the temperature would have.”
“The fall probably didn’t do him any good, either,” I speculated.
A group of Hare Krishnas chanted and bangled their way along the sidewalk, sweat glistening on their shaved heads. I took a bite of my cheeseburger. South Beach overflows with chichi cafes where the pasta is al dente and the tuna rare, but I’m still a burger-and-brew guy. I’m as health-conscious as the next guy, as long as the next guy is sitting on a barstool, but there are limits. It doesn’t bother me if someone waxes poetic about the joys of bean sprouts. If a scrawny woman feasts on grapefruit and lettuce, fine. If a guy is a vegetarian jogger, that’s great, too, though most look as if they couldn’t buck a force-three wind. I don’t tell other people how to live, and I appreciate reciprocity.
Once when I was chomping a cheeseburger with a side of fries at an outdoor cafe in Coconut Grove, a fragile-looking guy in a gold velour warmup suit and white bicycling helmet stopped short at my table. “I’d hate to see the inside of your arteries,” he said somberly.
“Fine,” I responded, taking a long swallow of my chocolate shake. “I’ll tear your heart out, and we’ll look at yours.”
He blinked and took a step backward. “Eat yourself to death, if you want. All that animal fat leads to cardiac arrest and the excess protein causes kidney failure.”
“So does a good left hook,” I advised him.
I don’t believe in being judgmental. You eat your tofu, I’ll eat my T-bone. Today, though, it was a rare burger with purple onions, ripe tomato slices, and tangy mustard on a fresh-baked roll. A nice slab of melted Jarlsberg cheese to keep the juices in the meat. With all the pasta and sushi places, it isn’t easy to find a good burger any more, so it’s a real quiniela if the same place also serves Grolsch, the Dutch beer.
“You say Mr. Tupton had been drinking?” Charlie asked.
“Heavily.”
“And the room temperature was in the fifties?”
“Fifty-six, right on the button, and Tupton was soaking wet.”
In the street, several young men carried a banner protesting discrimination against AIDS victims. The Miami Beach bicycle cops patiently directed traffic around the demonstrators. Charlie smoothed his beard with the back of his hand. “That could do it. Once in a while, in the winter down here, with the ambient temperature in the fifties, we’ll see a homeless person die of hypothermia. If there’s been excessive alcohol intake, vasodilation is the killer. The blood vessels dilate, body temperature plummets. All kinds of complications can result, metabolic acidosis, elevations in serum amylase, and pancreatitis.” A shirtless man walked by, a bright green mynah perched on his shoulder. Hardly anyone turned to stare. “How long was Tupton in there?”
“Twelve, fourteen hours. The maid discovered him in the morning. When the paramedics arrived, his body temperature was seventy-seven degrees. No respiration, no heartbeat.”
“Ventricular fibrillation was the likely terminal event. Seems like he died of natural causes, so what’s the problem, Jake?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know. It was just this vague uneasiness. I took a bite of the burger and drained the beer.
“Any surprises in the autopsy?” asked the man who had performed twenty thousand before retiring to a life of fishing and reading medical texts in their original Latin.
“M.F. says no. Nothing unusual in the system other than the elevated blood alcohol. No signs of a struggle, no toxins, no puncture wounds…”
That made us both pause. I can’t read minds, but Charlie Riggs had to be thinking about a twenty-gauge hypodermic track in the buttocks of rich old Philip Corrigan. Dead old Philip Corrigan, but that’s another story.
“The report confirms what you said, Charlie. Ventricular fibrillation caused by hypothermia.”
“So all you’re dealing with is a wrongful-death suit. Just another dispute about money.”
“Right. Social-host liability.”
Charlie seemed to be studying the man-made sand dunes on the beach across Ocean Drive. “Who’s the plaintiff’s lawyer?”
“Henry Thackery Patterson.”
“H.T.’s good, though a trifle flamboyant for my tastes,” Charlie observed.
“He’s already filed a boilerplate complaint. Simple negligence for serving alcohol to an intoxicated guest. I’ll file an answer with the usual affirmative defenses, comparative negligence and assumption of the risk.”
“Blame it on the victim, eh?”
“Sure. The old defense gambit. The plaintiff caused his own harm, so don’t point the finger at the party hosts who had to keep the hors d’oevres moving.”
Charlie shook his head. “Whatever happened to the concept ‘ de mortuis nihil nisi bonum’?”
“Damned if I know.”
“Speak kindly of the dead,” Charlie translated.
“Why? They’re the only ones who can’t sue for slander.”
Charlie tut-tut-tutted and finished cleaning his plate of the eggplant goo with a swipe of his pita. “I still don’t know what’s troubling you. Talk to me, Jake.”
“Too many questions don’t have answers. Didn’t they miss Tupton at the party? Didn’t anybody see him go in there or see his car parked all night in the street in front of the house? How about his clothes, still hanging in a closet in a guest room?”
Charlie wrinkled his forehead. “You’re talking like a prosecutor now. You’ve been retained to defend a simple civil suit. Just do your job.”
Charlie was right. I should file my pleadings, take my depos, make my motions, and eventually settle the case before trial. The usual old soft-shoe. I was trying to treat this like any other case. I really was. But my mind was buzzing with other thoughts. Gina. Nicky. Tupton.
“Is there coverage?” Charlie asked.
“A million in homeowner’s, another five-million umbrella policy.”
“So, you have no downside. Win, you’re a hero. Lose, the insurance company pays. Why go looking for goblins in the night?”
“Hey, you’re the guy who taught me not to accept things at face value. ‘Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream.’ That was you talking, Charlie. And how about this little ditty, ‘Seek the truth,’ or however the hell you say it.”
“Quaere verum,” he instructed me. “And you’re the lad who told me that isn’t the lawyer’s job.”
“It isn’t,” I said. “My job’s to take the facts handed to me and present the best case I can. I’m not supposed to dig for stuff that’ll hurt my client.”
“Like in Philip Corrigan’s grave.”
“Thanks for reminding me. Can you believe that’s coming back to haunt me now?” I mimicked Wilbert Faircloth’s weasel voice: “‘Would grave robbery be ethical to you, Dr. Riggs?’ Jeez, Charlie, I’m in for a public reprimand, maybe even a six-month suspension.”
“Precisely my point. Why go looking for trouble now?”
“Why should now be different? Look, Charlie, I never liked Nicky Florio, and I never trusted him.”
Charlie Riggs harrumphed and rearranged his bulky body in his chair. “You never liked him because he married Star Hampton.” He paused, and a light flickered in his deep brown eyes. “Jake, you’re not seeing her again, are you?”
“Her name’s Gina now.”
“Your answer was not responsive, Counselor. Haven’t you got enough trouble with the Bar as it is? Talk about conflicts of interest.” Charlie stared toward the ocean, screwing his face into thought. The clouds from the west were nearly overhead now, and the temperature was beginning to drop. Intermittent gusts tugged at the cafe’s umbrellas. “I never thought that girl was for you. She combines dependency on a man with an ability to manipulate him. She’s a user, Jake. I know the effect she had on you, and I only hope it’s over. You’ve got this flaw, you know…”
“Only one?”
“Where women are concerned, you’re attracted to the birds with the broken wings. You want to mend them, make them whole. But Star, or Gina, or whoever, is a predator, a hawk, not a hummingbird. Let the Nicky Florios of the world deal with her kind.”
I always listen to Charlie, but sometimes I don’t follow his advice. This time, I kept quiet.
Charlie leaned back in his chair and eyeballed me from under his canvas hat. “You can’t represent Nicky if you’re seeing his wife. You understand that, don’t you?”
I stayed buttoned up. The Fifth Amendment was always dear to me.
“Are you listening, Jake? A meretricious relationship affects your judgment. You should be planning Nicky’s defenses, and instead you sit here implying that maybe this accident was really…”
“Say it, Charlie. That Peter Tupton was aced, offed, zapped, rubbed out.”
I had raised my voice without knowing it, and Charlie’s bushy eyebrows were arched as he appraised me. “You’ve been under a lot of stress, Jake. Maybe you should let one of your partners handle the suit, take some time off. From what you tell me, there’s no indication of a homicide.”
I signaled the waiter for another beer. “Motive, Charlie. It’s what you taught me to focus on. Tupton could cause Nicky a lot of trouble, cost him a lot of money and time fighting lawsuits instead of building his plug-ugly condos. Nicky invites the guy to a party, tries to soften him up, but it doesn’t work…”
Charlie scowled and harrumphed in disbelief. “So he gets Tupton drunk and drops him in a chilly room. Really, Jake, if you’re going to the trouble to kill someone, you’d use a method that’d be sure to be lethal, and you probably wouldn’t do it in your home.”
Just then, Charlie’s beeper went off. He extracted it from his belt and squinted at the digital readout. “State attorney’s number.” Charlie balled up his napkin, stood, and headed inside the restaurant, looking for a pay phone.
While I waited, I mulled it over. The old sawbones was right. If Nicky wanted to kill Tupton, he wouldn’t do it himself, and he wouldn’t use a method that might just give the guy a cold. In this town, there are semi-pros who’ll ace somebody for a new outboard motor or a three-day pass to Disney World. And Florio could afford the best. But then, if everyone who committed a crime was so smart, nobody would ever be caught.
I was still thinking about it when Charlie toddled back to the table, his brow furrowed, one hand absentmindedly stroking a cork attached to his fishing vest by a 3/0 hook. “Abe Socolow,” he announced, gravely, “asked if I’d take an appointment to assist the M.E. in a suspected homicide.”
“So?”
“I told him I have a potential conflict of interest.”
Charlie hadn’t told me, but I knew. The state attorney was looking into the death of one Peter Tupton, a guy who didn’t fall out of a wheel well of a jet but still froze to death in Miami.
“Where’s your conflict?” I asked. “I haven’t retained you as an expert.”
“The conflict is that I’m your friend, but if you don’t have a problem with it, neither does Abe.”
“Why does he want you?”
“Metro Crime Scene tried to lift prints off the corpse with the plate-glass method. See if somebody carried Tupton into the wine cellar. They came up with something on the wrists, but they’re not good enough to match up, though they seem to exclude the paramedics. Socolow wants me to oversee a methyl-methacrylate test.”
Charlie was too modest to say it, but he’s the old coot who invented it. Getting latent prints from the body of a corpse was tricky stuff. Moisture, the breakdown of tissues, and the surface of the skin itself were major problems. Sometimes, prints would show up by rolling a piece of glass across the body, but usually it didn’t work. Charlie came up with the Super Glue method. Convert the glue into fumes and tent the body. The sticky stuff settles on the skin, and voila! if someone manhandled the body, prints appear in the glue as the fumes condense on the skin.
“I don’t mind, Charlie. Take the job.”
“I don’t need the money,” he said.
“C’mon, take it. I’d rather have you on the other side than some yahoo who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Remember, I’m supposed to be seeking the truth.”
“No, you’re not, Jake. You’re supposed to be representing Nicky Florio.”