listening, then turned toward her husband. 'Not like that half sister of yours. Spoiled rotten from day one, just getting by on her long legs and pouty lips. Now look at her.' Loretta Bernhardt sounded downright pleased that her sister-in-law, or maybe her half sister-in-law, was getting her comeuppance. 'And if you ask me-'
'Nobody did, Loretta,' Guy interrupted.
'Your daddy never touched that girl,' she continued, now looking across the table at me. 'Harry was a dear man, never once got out of line with me or anyone else I heard of. That girl's got you all fooled. I'll bet she planned to kill Harry and cooked up all that abuse talk after seeing some TV show.'
'Why?' I asked.
Loretta looked at me. 'Why what?'
The Nicaraguan woman was clearing away the soup bowls, while another served grilled yellowtail snapper covered with mango salsa. At the head of the table, Guy was digging into a platter of fried sweet plantains.
'Why would she want to kill her father?' I asked. 'What was her motive?'
'Money, honey. Ain't it always?'
'What about the estate?' I asked, turning to Guy. 'What did the will provide?'
'Fifty-fifty,' he said. 'Chrissy and I split everything.'
'But if she's convicted of murder, she forfeits the inheritance,' I said, munching a bite of tender white snapper. 'Everything would go to you if she takes the fall.'
'That's why she cooked up that cockamamy story,' Loretta announced triumphantly. 'You're supposed to get her off, and my bleeding-heart husband's helping you, though for the life of me, I don't know why. She killed his father, for goodness' sake. And if she gets away with it, Guy has to share the estate with her. It doesn't seem right.'
'Actually, I don't even have to get her off,' I said. 'If Chrissy is convicted of manslaughter instead of murder, she'll get her share of the estate.'
'Why?' Loretta demanded.
'It's the law,' I said. 'If someone pulls a Menendez, acing his parents to hurry up the inheritance, he'll go directly to jail, without collecting the two hundred bucks.'
'Not in California,' Dr. Schein said. 'At least not without a circus.'
'Send in the clowns,' I said in partial agreement. 'But manslaughter is different than murder. It's almost considered an accident.'
Loretta scrunched up her face in a look of inebriated contemplation. 'So, why help her at all?' She shot a look at her husband. 'What kind of man would be so damned…'
She let it hang there, so I said, 'Giving?'
'More like stupid!' Loretta gave a helpless shrug and looked toward her husband. 'I'm sorry, darlin'. I love you to death. I just don't understand you. If it was me, I'd turn the first spadeful of dirt to bury her.'
Guy placidly sliced his snapper and gave no indication of wanting to engage his wife in conversation. Married men have a surefire way of changing the subject: Simply ignore the wife. After a moment, Guy gestured toward me with his fork. 'The food okay, Jake?'
'Great. The snapper's good, the salsa even better.'
Guy smiled. 'It's my own recipe.'
'Quite a combination: sweet mangoes, mild onions-Vidalias, I'd guess-then the strong jalapeno.'
'You got it.'
'There's another taste I can't quite identify.'
'Cilantro.'
'Right. And a little olive oil?'
'Very good,' Guy said. 'You pay attention. That's a fine attribute in a man.'
'And a lawyer,' Lawrence Schein said.
I nodded and finished eating, damn proud to be a culinary sleuth. Now if I could only figure out these characters.
After the servants cleared the plates, they brought mango sorbet to clear the palate, followed by a small course of barbecued mango chicken, where I easily identified the brown sugar and vinegar but completely missed the chopped chipotle chiles in adobo sauce. Then came the mango-passionfruit creme brulee, and finally espresso, which, best I could tell, did not have a trace of mango.
Loretta was right. Guy had mangoes on the brain.
And Guy was right about something. I do pay attention. I had been wondering the same thing as sweetly drunk Loretta. Just why was Guy Bernhardt helping a half sister he hadn't even known the first seventeen years of his life? Why help this spoiled, pampered favorite child when anything less than a murder conviction would cut his inheritance in half?
But I didn't agree with Loretta.
Guy Bernhardt wasn't stupid.
So why didn't I think he was giving either?
I was shoulder to shoulder with Dr. Schein in the back of a Jeep Wrangler. Guy Bernhardt sat in the passenger seat, and a uniformed security guard was driving. A second Wrangler was in front of us, and a third one was right behind. A guard with a shotgun sat in each of our two escort Jeeps… well, riding shotgun.
We were bouncing through ruts and drainage ditches between rows of gnarly mango trees, and Guy Bernhardt was lecturing on the fertilizers, yields per acre, and every other damned bit of minutia you probably didn't want to know about Mangifera indica, including the fact that the fruit is related to the cashew.
I was inhaling the musky aroma of the field, half listening to Guy, half wondering what the hell was going on with the odd couple of Guy Bernhardt and Larry Schein. I couldn't shake the feeling that Guy was more complicated than a good-ole-boy mango grower and Schein had more secrets than Freud's Wolf Man.
'You have a problem with varmints?' I asked, and Guy seemed puzzled for a moment, then saw I was looking at a 12-gauge mounted between the front seats.
'Oh, that? Yeah, the two-legged kind. It's to protect the water, which is more valuable than the fruit-hell, more valuable than oil. We've got our own well fields out here, and some of the neighboring farmers claim we're sucking their wells dry. Then the state cited us for supposedly lowering Little Bass Lake a foot or so.'
We passed under a forty-foot irrigation tower that resembled an oil derrick, and I watched a rainbow form in the parabola of a giant stream of water that shot from the gun assembly at its peak. Mist drifted into the Jeep, cooling us.
'You do any environmental law, Jake?' Guy asked.
Seducing me with the hint of future business.
'Don't know the first thing about it.'
'You oughta learn. It's a real lawyers' relief act, all those regulations. They want to fine us ten thousand dollars a day, can you believe that horse crap? I told them it's the drought, go sue God.'
'What about your neighbors?'
'Hell, when their wells went dry, I sold them water. Got a special act through the legislature-Pop had some clout up in Tallahassee-so they treated us like a mini-utility. Some of the locals, the lime and avocado growers, didn't like my price and didn't like me, so the bastards complained to the state, to the Department of Environmental Resources Management, to the Army Corps of Engineers, to their congressmen, who wouldn't know a well field from…'
'A hole in the ground,' I helped out.
'Yeah. So I said, screw you. No more water for you at any price, and we'll pump as much as the Water Management District lets us, and maybe a little more.' He laughed, and we crossed a wooden bridge into a different section of the field. 'Now we have some hardcases who sneak out here at night and cut our irrigation pipes.'
After about fifteen minutes, we turned onto a road of crushed seashells and into the tree farm, where palms of a dozen different varieties were growing from seed. Here, too, irrigation towers shot long graceful arcs into the air, which misted into kaleidoscopes of color.
'Pop loved to grow things,' Guy said. 'Jake, you ought to come up to Palm Beach sometime, see Pop's work at the house on A1A. Shouldn't he, Larry?'
Next to me, Dr. Schein's ball cap nodded in assent.
'Flowering trees were Pop's favorites. Jacaranda, mahogany, pigeon plum, wild tamarind. Planted some for
