JL04 - Mortal Sin (26 page)

I took two steps along the balcony and heard a cracking under my feet. The old building was nearly as fragile as Nicky Florio’s new condos. Gingerly, I approached the parapet and leaned over.

Whoa. A long way down. But the first few floors would be easy. The balconies jutted out with each succeeding lower floor. I took another crunching step, this time because I was in the deep doo-doo, as George Bush might say, but here, it was literally true. I swung a leg over the rail, and then a second one. I grabbed a gargoyle covered with bird droppings and hung there a moment. Maybe it was the wind, but I thought I heard the gargoyle laugh at me. As my herringbone suit coat flapped in the breeze, I dropped to the balcony below.

And then did it again, and again.

I heard shouts from above.

I shimmied along the wall and jumped through open space—only about four feet—to an adjoining balcony. The next few floors had no balconies, but there were ledges, maybe eighteen inches wide, and the limestone blocks of the building itself were ridged, and if I didn’t look down, I could grab the ledge, put a foot on the ridge, and keep on going, hand over hand.

My hands were calloused from windsurfing and twenty years of bench presses, but they were still getting roughed up. By the time I had gotten halfway down, I had reached another full balcony. I was winded and stopped to rest. I put my hands on my knees and bent over, sucking in air. I was nearly ready to go over the side again when I noticed the floor-to-ceiling double window facing the balcony. Streaked with years of grime, it was latched from the inside by a simple brass hook. I jiggled the window. Once, twice, three times, and the hook fell away.

The windows opened to the outside. I stepped inside and was enveloped in a set of drapes that must have weighed a ton, half of which was dust. I heard someone talking, fought to stifle a sneeze, found the opening between the drapes, and peered out.

A courtroom.

A few street people snoozing in the gallery.

Some exhibits plastered to a blackboard, maps of streets, some plastic overlays.

A lawyer I didn’t recognize standing near the bench, and a middle-aged man in a suit sitting on the witness stand, droning on about the value per square foot of commercial property along Arthur Godfrey Road.

Judge Dixie Lee Boulton on the bench, pretending to pay attention as she read the morning paper, occasionally grimacing at something the witness said, or was that a facial tic?

A condemnation trial, the owners of property trying to get more money from the county than it wanted to pay when it took slivers of their land to widen a street. Even more boring than a slip-and-fall, probably a dead heat with a dog-bite case.

That was it, except for the folks sitting in the jury box, which backed up against the heavy, dusty drapes where I now stood. No way I could get out of here. I turned around, pushed the window open again, and peeked outside.

Whoops.

A uniformed Metro officer stood on the neighboring balcony. He faced the other way, looked up, looked down, then turned my way just as I ducked back inside and closed the window. I found the opening in the drapes again and slid into an empty chair in the back row of the jury box.

“Sorry I’m late,” I whispered to the middle-aged woman next to me. “I’m the new alternate.”

She patted me on the arm. “You didn’t miss a thing.”

I listened attentively to the morning’s testimony, fighting the urge, first, to object to leading questions, and then to doze off. When Judge Boulton called the noon recess, I marched along with the others behind a bailiff who was older than the courthouse. We all piled into an elevator and headed to the Quarterdeck Lounge. Why not? After what I’d been through, I figured the county should buy me lunch.

My mind listed the places I couldn’t go. It was longer than where I could.

I couldn’t go to my office. There’d be two deputies sitting in the reception room. I couldn’t go home. Or to Granny’s or Charlie’s. And I couldn’t drive anywhere because the cops had my car. But I could use the phone.

At the Quarterdeck, I changed a five-dollar bill into a handful of quarters and began making some calls. I started with Cindy, my loyal secretary.

“Jeez, where are you,
jefe
? Did you kill somebody or what? You wouldn’t believe what’s going on over here.”

I told her I believed it, and tell whoever asked that I was headed to Cancun.

I called Granny in the Keys. She had a retired merchant seaman waiting for her in a skiff, and in a shallow bay thereabouts was a bonefish calling her name, and maybe she was going to get a tattoo later today, and by the way, how come the police called, asking about her ne’er-do-well kin?

I called Charlie, and his recorded voice told me he was dissecting brains over at the morgue, hoping to find some causal link to cerebral hemorrhages.

I called Gina, who yelped, “Omigod, Jake, did you really steal all that money, and even if you didn’t, Nicky is angry as a bull with its balls in a cinch,” an expression I figured she picked up when she was engaged to a rodeo star.

Then I called Nicky Florio, because I didn’t have anybody else to call. I caught him in the trailer at a construction site in Kendall. Ticky-tacky town houses all in a row.

“You set me up, Florio,” I said when he picked up the phone. “Maybe you can’t kill me because of Gina, but you could sure as hell frame me and let Socolow send me away.”

I heard him breathe into the phone. “Who says I can’t kill you?”

And then he was gone.

I walked across the street into the government-center complex. Just another suit hanging around the County Commission Building. Probably only one of a dozen guys who had bribery on his mind that morning. I took the escalator to the Metrorail station, slipped some more quarters into the slot, and headed to the next level. A security guard looked right past me.

A gleaming train was tooting its horn as it pulled in.

Northbound.

It really didn’t make any difference.

I got aboard. Nearly empty. A family of European tourists, Germans maybe, the husband in those open sandals with thin brown socks, a wife and two boys in shorts, Mickey Mouse T-shirts, and instant sunburns. The man had a camera bag slung over a shoulder, his passport sticking halfway out of his pants pocket. If they got out of town with their traveler’s checks, they’d be lucky.

I liked Metrorail, a clean, smooth billion-dollar elevated train that was hurting for business. I rode it now to the northwest, skimming the tops of the trees through Overtown, cutting by the Justice Building, where I imagined a warrant for my arrest was being typed by a bleary-eyed secretary. I stayed on the train all the way to Hialeah and the grand old racetrack, which had come back from near-bankruptcy.

I bought grandstand admission, buried my face in a
Racing Form
, and bet the number-three horse the first four races, losing eight dollars. I ate a hot dog with chili and sat there in the seedy charm of the place where bougainvillea crept along crumbling balustrades.

There were still a few hundred pink flamingos on the island in the center of the turf. Even though they feed the birds a mixture of rice, shrimp, and dog biscuits, the rascals tend to fly away, preferring the wilds of the Everglades and what’s left of the Keys.

So after a while, the bird handlers began clipping the pink feathers, grounding the flamingos, or at least keeping them on the racetrack grounds. A fancy prison.

It took me half the afternoon and two more nags out of the money to figure out what to do. I rode Metrorail south, getting off this time at the hospital complex. It was a short walk to Bob Hope Road and the morgue.

I went in the back way, pounding on the metal doors until a young assistant medical examiner came by, his gloved hands bloody. I told him I wanted to see Charlie Riggs, and he pointed to the lab. I walked in, adjusting to the smell—part formaldehyde, part rotting tissue—and found Charlie sitting on a high stool, huddled over a counter, using a scalpel to slice tiny slivers of brain tissue and examine them under a microscope. In a rubber bucket next to him, a dozen brains, resembling a bushel of cauliflower, waited their turn.

I told him where I’d been and what I’d done, skipping only the part where I hurled chunks onto the big cop’s shoes, and he took the brain he’d been working on and gently placed it back in the bucket. He listened and occasionally asked a question. As we talked, several assistant medical examiners stopped by to pay their respects. Though retired, Charlie was still a legend among canoe makers in the red-brick death house.

A mustachioed man in a lab coat asked Charlie to examine thirty-three stab wounds on a murdered prostitute. We stepped over to a chrome tray that held what had been an overweight woman in her thirties. Her torso and thighs bore multiple puncture wounds. Her arms were sliced where she had tried to defend herself. Chunks of her flesh were missing where the M.K. had taken dissections to follow the track of the blades. No weapon had been found. The young M.K. was confused by the different-shaped tracks and thought there had to be three weapons. That would be unusual and would probably indicate at least two assailants.

After a moment, Charlie said, “Two weapons only. A long-bladed vegetable knife, mistakenly called a butcher’s knife by most policemen. That’d cover the large wounds. The small ones were likely made by an ice pick.” Charlie examined a slide of the wound. “This one from her abdomen is the vegetable knife again. It just went in the same wound twice. The first time, the assailant pushed the blade down, the second time up. That’s what gives it the saber-like appearance, but it’s just a vegetable knife.”

The young doc thanked the old doc, who turned back to me. “What are you going to do now?”

“Bring down Nicky Florio before he brings me down.”

“How?”

We were interrupted by an Oriental woman in a white lab coat with an I.D. badge on a chain around her neck. She held a skull that resembled a coconut bashed by a sledgehammer. “Dr. Ling,” Charlie said, with a slight bow.

“I’m having trouble determining which perforating gunshot wound was the initial one,” she said.

Together, they examined the cracks in the eggshell-like fissures in the skull. From their conversation, I gathered that the victim was struck by two bullets from different guns. The victim was an innocent bystander in a shoot-out with police, and the good folks in the state attorney’s office wanted to know if a cop or a robber pulled the trigger on the fatal shot. “It’s the windowpane effect,” Charlie said. “Imagine that you strike a pane of glass and get a fracture line. Hit the glass again in a different place, and the second fracture will stop where it meets the first fracture.” Charlie traced an index finger over the longer crack. “Here’s your trail of death.”

Dr. Ling expressed her thanks, tucked the skull under her arm, and cheerfully headed back to her lab table.

“Now where were we?” Charlie asked, turning back to me.

“I was about to tell you how I was going to get Florio. First, by lining up some allies. The Micanopy Tribal Council won’t be too pleased with Florio when they learn how he hoodwinked them out of their full ten percent.”

“You’re going to violate your client’s confidence.”

“Hey, I’ve done it before. Besides, we weren’t in an attorney-client relationship at the time. More like murderer and accessory.”

He chewed that over and didn’t seem to disagree. “Okay, so what can the Micanopies do to help?”

“They can get me back to Florio’s house in the Glades. No way I could find it otherwise. I’ll take you along to sift and scrape, and maybe we’ll find some speck of Rick Gondolier that can be used as evidence. Maybe the tribe can give me some manpower, help bring in Tiger and Diaz. If we’ve got the physical evidence, and if Diaz would roll over, I could nail both Tiger and Florio for the murder of Gondolier.”

Charlie was cleaning his fingernails with a scalpel as he thought about it. “Too many ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes.’”

“But that’s not all. There’s something else Florio is up to. He kept pressing me on what Gina had told me about his project in the Glades. Then she asked if Nicky told me about ‘the rest of it.’ There’s something else Florio is hiding, something big.” My eyes roamed around the lab. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s out there somewhere.”

“Then go find it,” Charlie said.

“I intend to, but I don’t mind telling you that I’m more than a little worried.”

“Worried?”

“Okay, scared. I had a nightmare last night that a head rolled across a table into my lap. When I looked down, it was
my
head.”

“The dinosaurs may be back, Jake.”

“Huh?”

“And we may be gone.”

For a moment, I thought Charlie might have sliced too many brains, including his own. He produced a pipe from a pocket in his lab coat and sucked on the cold stem. “An asteroid may have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, but it was an earlier one that led to their emergence.”

“What does that have to do with Nicky Florio and—”

“Hush, now.” Charlie removed his pipe and gestured toward space. “About two hundred million years ago, an asteroid hit a forest in Canada, creating a fireball fourteen hundred miles wide. Billions of tons of soot poured into the atmosphere. Years of darkness followed. The animals starved or froze when the temperatures plunged. Then the enormous amounts of carbon dioxide led to global warming, and in some untold thousands of years, the plants returned and dinosaurs developed. Millions of years go by, and another giant asteroid hits, and again much of life is wiped out, including the dinosaurs.”

“Is there a point to this, Charlie?”

“Same as always. We’re all going to die. Our species will undoubtedly be wiped out when the next huge asteroid hits, if we don’t do it to ourselves first. The end may come next year or a thousand years from now. Our individual lives are puny, meaningless. So do the right thing. Seek the truth,
quaere verum
, and don’t be afraid.”

He gave me the keys to his pickup truck and wished me Godspeed. I told him I’d see him tomorrow, or if not, when the dinosaurs came home.