both civil and criminal cases.”
She told me she had started working eleven years ago, right after she graduated from Florida State. Her first job was with a big company, Wackenhut, when n was looking for bilingual women. Then she went with a three- investigator firm in a seedy building with a flashing neon sign and a boss who kept a bottle of bourbon in his desk, just like in the movies. Recently, she opened her own shop, and now she was hustling business from semirespectable lawyers such as myself.
“I thought it would be glamorous,” Lourdes said, “for about twenty minutes. My first job was sorting a guy’s garbage for two months. Every Monday and Thursday at four A.M., I’d be in his driveway, substituting my trash for his.”
“What were you looking for?”
“Proof of assets. He’d gone into bankruptcy to defraud creditors. Buried in the coffee grounds was a magazine for owners of private aircraft. Found a twin-engine Beechcraft under a phony name at Tamiami. Also a property tax bill from North Carolina.
We located a nicely furnished A-frame on the side of a mountain near Boone, plus thirty acres of land just off the Blue Ridge Parkway.”
She smiled and speared a sweet plantain with her fork. “I love the challenge,” she said. “Once I was hired by a gynecologist who knew his partner was stealing but couldn’t prove it and couldn’t figure where the money was going. All he knew was that the books were cooked and his partner was tired all the time. I tailed the guy home from the office. Midnight, sharp, five nights a week, he’d hit the strip joints in Lauderdale, one after another, buying magnums of overpriced champagne, slipping hundred-dollar bills into every G-string in the joint.”
“You’d think a gynecologist would see enough…”
“That’s what I thought, too, but who knows? Anyway, so much for the glamour of my job. After a week chasing the horny doctor, all my clothes smelled like cigarettes, cheap perfume, and stale beer. You’d be surprised how many men offered me money to take off my clothes.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” I said, just as I was expected to do.
She ran a hand through the shag hairdo, then told me a few more war stories. She was a neat package of woman in total control. In the guise of friendly patter, she was letting me have her resume one page at a time. I was supposed to be impressed with her competence, and I was. At the same time, there was that faint air of flirtation, the sidelong look, the smile that slid from friendly to provocative without crossing the border of good taste.
So what was going on here, Jake old buddy? You get a call from a lady PI who wants to have lunch and maybe work for you. She paid attention to the dust on your car, and who knows what else. She knew you used a regular investigator but thought you might switch. Why?
“One time,” Lourdes was saying, “I was hired by an older man whose lover was a young man who taught aerobics.”
“Your client thought his boyfriend found someone younger at the gym.”
“Someone prettier. He was convinced the young guy was making it with a woman in one of his classes. So I signed up. Three classes a day for a month. High impact, low impact, step classes. I was in great shape.”
“You still are,” I heard myself say, then took a last slurp of the guava shake.
“The problem is,” she said, “I always start to empathize with the subject of the investigation. I mean, the instructor had a right to his own life, didn’t he?”
“Did he? I mean, with a woman.”
“Two at a time. They used the back of his van in the parking lot. Right after class and without taking showers. Maybe he needed to prove to himself that he was still a man, even if he was bisexual.”
“Most investigators just gather information. You analyze it.”
“I like to know why people do things. The doctor I told you about was just divorced and had some emotional needs that weren’t being fulfilled, so he took a walk on the wild side. Even the man who went bankrupt was responding to financial pressures he didn’t know how to handle.” She finished the last of the ropa vieja — ”old clothes” in Spanish-took a sip of iced tea, and patted her lips with her napkin. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, because you may think it affects my work. It doesn’t, but the truth is, I feel compassion. I always see the other side.”
“I have no problem with that. It’s called humanity. I wish the state attorney’s office had some.”
She studied me a moment, her eyes dark and knowing. “I think you and I will get along well, Jake Lassiter.” Then she looked away, her fine white skin coloring a bit. “Would you like to see my work?”
I smiled my crooked smile and allowed as how I would. Okay, I admit it. I try to be a modern man, treating women equally in the give-and-take of the business world. But I didn’t feel like punching Lourdes Soto on the shoulder and asking, So whadaya think of the Dolphins’ draft? I try not to regard women as sex objects, but damn it, I can’t forget who they are and what they’ve got, and if one turns out to be beautiful and bright and knows how to laugh, no matter how professional and courteous the conversation, there’s always the question lingering just beneath the surface: Is she finally The One?
Lourdes Soto reached under the table and opened an aluminum case. She pulled out a dozen eight-by-ten black-and-whites and spread them on the table. A middle-aged man, his gut hanging over his swim trunks, had his right hand on the bare breast of a superbly endowed young woman. She wore only black bikini bottoms and sunglasses.
“He’s putting on the Coppertone,” Lourdes said.
“From the looks of her, he’ll use the whole bottle before he gets to her back.’’
“Augmentation mammaplasty. He paid five grand for it. I got the receipts by impersonating a State Farm auditor.’’
“Good work. You shot the photos from above.”
“They were on the beach behind the Palace Hotel in San Juan. From the roof of the hotel, I used a Nikon 8008 with a three-hundred-millimeter autofocus lens at a twenty-two F-stop, two-fifty speed, and your basic Tri-X film.”
“His wife must have loved them.”
“Ordered two dozen different shots, blew them up into posters for the divorce party.”
Lourdes reached into the case again and pulled out a pair of binoculars with a microphone mounted between the barrels. A wire ran from the mike to two earpieces.
“Audio glasses,” she said. “From the top of the hotel, I could hear everything they said at two hundred meters. Got a handle on how much he was spending on the girl, where he was hiding his money, who his shrink was, and wouldn’t his wife just die if she could see him now.”
I shook my head. “Why do you suppose men tell their mistresses so much?”
“Because men are just little boys looking for their mommas.” She cracked a decidedly nonmaternal smile. “Anyway, my client got the kids, the dog, the Dolphins and Heat tickets, the condo in Aspen, plus fifty percent of the business, and permanent alimony.”
“How’d you know he was going to be in San Juan?”
She looked from side to side and leaned closer. The faint perfume was stronger. “I’ll show you,” she whispered. Again, she reached into her case. What other treasures were stored there? She pulled out a fountain pen, removed the cap, and shook out an inch-long capsule.
“A tracking transmitter,” she said. “I had the wife slip it into a pen he always carried with him. The receiver is portable. It’ll track up to sixty-five miles. A great help on surveillance when you take a wrong turn coming through Ponce and into old San Juan. First, I tailed him around Miami for a few weeks. I’d call his secretary and pretend to be a bunch of different people. Used the electronic voice changer to become a man with a southern drawl, that sort of thing. It’s amazing how much secretaries will tell you if they think you’re important business associates.”
I signaled the waiter for two cups of cafe Cubano. “You didn’t track him to Puerto Rico with that.”
She tried not to chuckle. “No, I had some help. The wife put a voice-activated recorder on his private line. He talked in code to his girlfriend, but I knew they were headed to the airport, and I just followed.”
“Illegal as hell…”
“But extremely effective.”
She gathered up the accoutrements of her cloak-and-dagger life. I watched the fine blue veins on the back of her hands. White, tapered fingers with short, clear lacquered nails. She ran a hand through her glossy black hair and
