Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor (16 page)

“I don’t know how to catch those guys,” I
admitted.

Dr. Metcalf smiled faintly. “Don’t feel sorry
for yourself, Mr. Lassiter. The police are always complaining that
serial killers are so difficult to apprehend because there is no
connection between victims and no apparent motives. But they do
leave clues, and usually they are quite careless. Often they
contact the police or stand in the crowd that gathers at the
scene.”

“So they want to be caught?”

“No, a common misconception. Part of the
thrill is outwitting the police and reliving the crime. There was
an ambulance driver who would abduct young women, kill them, call
the police, then race back to the hospital so he would get the call
to pick up the body.”

While I thought that over she smoothed her
skirt in a gesture even my nonpsychoanalytic mind could
understand.

Thank you for the ride and the drink, Mr.
Lassiter,” she said with British formality, and stood up to
leave.

“All my friends call me Jake … Pamela,” I
said.

She rewarded me with a second smile and then
extended a finely tapered white hand. “Good evening, Jake. And good
luck.”

The hand was cool, the shake firm. She didn’t
ask me to share the view from her room, so I headed out the front
where my 442 was parked in a space of honor next to a Rolls. The
hood was still hot, and the gas tank was a nudge lower than an hour
earlier.

I looked hard at the valet.

“Your shocks are a little soft on the turns,”
he said sheepishly.

I gave him five bucks. “You’re telling
me.”

It was one of those muggy June days with
fifteen hours of daylight but hardly any sunshine. A tropical
depression hung over the Gulf of Mexico and raised the blood
pressure of Miami’s frothy weather guys. Come six and eleven, they
show us their color radar and satellite photos, their computerized
maps and digital barometers. They blather about wind speeds and
waterspouts and reveal what we already know: baby, it’s hot
outside.

It wasn’t even eight A.M., but already
my little coral-rock pillbox was stifling. The storm in the Gulf
had sucked all the wind from the Florida Straits. Ten days of rain
and a month of inattention had left my overgrown yard a jungle that
could get me fined if the zoning inspectors weren’t busy collecting
cash from condo builders who pour rotten slabs.

My house sits in the shade of chinaberry and
live-oak trees just off Kumquat in the old part of Coconut Grove.
It was built before air-conditioning and has plenty of cross
ventilation. But when the wind stops blowing, and the heavy gray
sky sags over the bay and the Glades, the old ceiling fans don’t do
the trick. One of these days I’m going to break down and put in
central air. Sure, and maybe get a rooftop dish, a combination fax
and photocopy machine, maybe an outdoor whirlpool and an indoor
sauna.

Adiós
, forty-dollar electricity
bills.

Hola
, the Grove trendy set.

I wore canvas shorts and nothing else and
stood on my rear porch surveying the expanse of my estate—an eighth
of an acre, give or take an inch or two. The neighborhood was
quiet. The one-story stucco number hidden behind the poinciana
trees belonged to Geoffrey Thompson, who wouldn’t be up until noon.
He roamed the city streets each night as a free-lance cameraman,
shooting videos of drug busts, race riots, and fatal car crashes. A
budding entrepreneur, Geoffrey created his own industry when he
learned that none of the local TV stations employed photo teams
between midnight and eight A.M. When he was drunk enough,
Geoffrey would show the outtakes considered too gruesome even for
Miami’s bloodthirsty viewers.

Next door there was no sign of life at
Phoebe’s place, which was exactly what it was called in an ad
in 
Florida Swingers
 magazine. Phoebe had bright
red hair and occasionally counted on her fingers, as she did the
time she appeared at my door and asked if she could borrow
three—no, make it four—condoms. Robert and Robert, who lived
together and owned Robert’s—what else—Art Gallery, were up and
around, hauling out wine bottles and trimming their hibiscus hedge.
A regular slice of Americana, that’s my Mia-muh.

I dropped into the crabgrass and did my
morning push-ups, fifty regular, then twenty one-armed, first
right, then left. I rolled onto my back, brought my knees toward my
face, and worked through a hundred stomach crunches. 
C’mon,
Lassiter
, Coach Sandusky yelled from some faraway
field. 
Get in shape
. The grass tickled my bare back and
the sweat rolled down my chest. Overhead, an unseen laughing gull
mocked me with its raucous call.

The ringing telephone was an excuse to
declare victory in my battle to resurrect semiglories of the past.
It was Granny Lassiter calling to tell me a thirty-pound snook was
swimming figure-eights under an Islamorada bridge, calling my name.
I told her I had a murder to solve but I’d help her eat Mr. Snook
if she could catch him. She wasn’t impressed by my work and allowed
as how she would catch the fish without me, but wanted to be
sporting and land that sucker on eight-pound test line, using live
finger mullet for bait.

Granny wasn’t my grandmother, but there was
some relationship on my father’s side, great-aunt maybe. She raised
me in the very house of Dade County pine and coral rock where I now
lived. When Coconut Grove became too chic, she gave me the house
and headed for the Keys, where she fishes and fusses and makes a
decent home brew, if you’re partial to drinking liquid methane.
She’s the only family I have. My father was a shrimper who was
killed in a barroom brawl in Marathon when I was five years old. He
had handled three bikers with his bare hands before a fourth jammed
a push dagger into his jugular. Today, when I think of him, I
remember his thick wrists and red, rawboned hands. My earliest
memory: dangling from those poleax wrists as he would lift me off
the floor.

My mother I don’t remember at all. All Granny
told me was that she had bleached her hair almost white and, while
waiting tables in Key West, ran off with a curly-haired stranger
headed for the Texas oil fields. So I never called anyone Mom, but
for as long as I can remember there’s always been a Granny. She
taught me how to fish and how to live without doing too much damage
along the way.

When I was fifteen—towheaded and suntanned
and already two hundred pounds—the hormones were pounding in my
ears, and I would shake the little house by jolting the pine-slab
walls I considered a make-believe blocking sled. Granny didn’t
complain; she just hauled me off to the high-school football field,
where a couple of Gainesville-bound seniors whupped me up and down.
The next year, I was whupping ’most everybody else, and the
recruiters came calling from just about every college in the
southeast. I visited a few campuses where the fraternity boys
laughed at my cutoff jeans, dilapidated deck shoes, and rawhide
necklace with the genuine shark’s tooth. I didn’t have much in
common with the players either. They were generally engaged in
drunken wrestling matches followed by pissing contests—distance,
duration, and accuracy.

One day my senior year in high school, Granny
grilled a mess of mangrove snapper with Vidalia onions for a coach
with a Brooklyn accent who kept talking about books and classes. I
wanted to hear about bowl games and cheerleaders, but he was
yammering away in this funny voice about SAT scores and graduation
rates. Granny smiled and served him an extra slab of her key lime
pie, and I went off to Penn State, where I survived frostbite, aced
American Theater 461, and stayed out of jail.

I was a decent enough college player, but the
stopwatch doesn’t lie, and the NFL scouts could take a nap while I
ran the forty. Since then, I’ve come to figure I must have been the
three hundred thirty-seventh best player in the nation my senior
year. This bit of mathematical logic stems from the fact that the
pros drafted three hundred thirty-six players, none of them named
Lassiter. I packed my spikes and gray practice shorts in what was
then a not-yet-antique convertible and drove south. I caught on
with the hometown Dolphins as a free agent, barely surviving each
cut, playing second string, earning my keep by wreaking havoc on
kickoffs, and occasionally starting when the star weakside
linebacker was in drug rehab. When I realized I wasn’t bound for
the Hall of Fame (or even a league pension), I started taking night
law classes. I had seen Gregory Peck playing Atticus Finch and
figured I knew what lawyering was all about. After finally passing
the bar exam the third try—the first time coming two days after
knee surgery and hefty doses of Darvon, the second after generous
rations of Grolsch—I concluded there are no more Atticus Finches.
Today’s lawyers are slaves to computerized time sheets, and, rather
than fighting for justice, spend their days punching voluminous
pleadings out of word processors and sleeping through endless
pretrial depositions. But they seldom stand in front of juries and
plead for 
justice
, which, if it is kin to
the 
law
, is a distant cousin, at best.

I joined the public defender’s office, where
I soon discovered that my clients were not necessarily saintly just
because they were impoverished. Most of them went to prison, got
early release because of overcrowding, and became repeat customers
in the Jake Lassiter legal merry-go-round. Then I joined the
downtown firm of Harman and Fox, where I became another
paper-pushing civil trial lawyer, until Nick Wolf called me back to
the criminal-law jungle, this time representing the state.

* * *

I showered and put on a seersucker suit, but
the sweat continued to flow. I poured some orange juice and grabbed
a fresh mango, green and red on the outside, sweeter than a peach
inside. The neighborhood is overflowing with mangoes and lichee
nuts. Peel the nuts, slice the mango, chop a tart carambola into
star-shaped pieces, and you’ve got a fine breakfast. No
preservatives, no caffeine.

Inside the ancient Oldsmobile, the cracked
leather felt slick and the carpeting smelled of mildew. I put the
top down and pretended that the soggy air cooled me. I headed up
Miami Avenue under an umbrella of red poinciana trees. I passed the
house that once belonged to a client, a doctor who killed, and I
was there when he crumbled under the weight of the guilt and the
shame.

Charlie Riggs had helped me then, had taught
me how to speak for the dead. He had been the county medical
examiner for so long, people swore he began his career digging
musket balls out of bodies at Bull Run. He still reads the first
forensic medicine textbook, 
Questiones medico legates
,
in its original Latin. He can determine the time of death by algor
mortis, livor mortis, and rigor mortis—the temperature, color, and
stiffness of death. When an inexperienced assistant ME found
sunflower seeds in the stomach of a dead banker who died with a
smile on his face, Charlie knew that death was by horribly painful
strychnine poisoning. The smile was 
risus sardonicus
, a
sardonic grin produced by contortions of facial muscles. The
sunflower seeds were the remnants of rat poison, and a sharp-eyed
hardware-store clerk soon identified the grieving widow with the
million-dollar insurance policy as the town’s leading pesticide
purchaser.

Charlie Riggs knows so much about so many
things. I could never figure how a guy who spent his life hollowing
out lifeless shells could understand the living so well. There must
be lots of canoe makers who know everything about in-shoot wounds
and lividity and blood typing. They help the cops figure the when
and how of death, and sometimes, piecing together all their clues,
they even find the murderer, the who. But if you don’t have bullet
fragments and a matching gun, or latent prints and a matching hand,
you’d better know the why to figure the who. That’s why I need you,
Charlie Riggs. You bearded old wizard, I need
you 
again
.

* * *

“Jeez, get a load of that suit,” Cindy said,
fishing a pen out of her rust-colored, hypercurled hair. “Why’s it
all crinkly?”

“It’s cool,” I said.

She shook her head, each concrete curl
staying put. “Co-ol, 
el jefe
, it ain’t. You look like a
Rotarian.”

Cindy had been my secretary in the PD’s
office and came with me downtown. Her shorthand was indecipherable,
her typing haphazard, and her filing disorganized. But she was
smart and loyal and could sweet-talk a judge’s assistant into an
early trial date, and she protected me from the political piranhas
in the law firm. She was also a pal.

Cindy’s desk was covered with unfiled
pleadings and unanswered memos.

“Any messages?” I asked.

She picked up a handful of while-you-were-out
memos. “The newsboys are going bonkers over the Diamond murder. All
the local stations called, plus your pals at
the 
Journal
, a reporter from Reuters, and somebody
from 
Broadcasting
 magazine who wants to know if
there might be terrorist plots against television
personalities.”

I looked at the messages but didn’t plan to
return the calls. What could I say? We had no leads, and if we did,
we wouldn’t put them on the front page. I couldn’t even disclose
why Nick Wolf had appointed me as a special prosecutor. An
overworked office, according to the party line. But Cindy was
right. The news media would hound us until the case was solved. If
it went on too long, they would start wondering about the
competence of the ex-football player, ex-public defender,
ex-a-lot-of-things appointed to handle the case.

We average a murder a day in Dade County, but
few are deemed truly newsworthy. Your average Saturday-night,
liquored-up stabbing over a woman or a card game gets you two
paragraphs inside the local section, just above the ads for the
all-nude body-shampoo parlors in Lauderdale. But this was
different. This was one of their own. And judging from the hype on
the local stations—a freeze-frame close-up of Michelle Diamond with
Verdi’s 
Requiem
 in the background—you’d have
thought we lost Edward R. Murrow instead of a second-rate
interviewer who also read commercials on a
five P.M. fluff show.