Lassiter

keep me out.

Now I backpedaled down the court, intent on keeping Castiel from scoring, or knocking him on his ass if I couldn’t.

“You’re not fast enough to cover me, Jake,” he taunted, dribbling high, as if daring me to steal the ball.

“We talking basketball here, Alex?”

Top of the key. Castiel faked the jumper. I left my feet, and he streaked around me. Ed Shohat, a white-collar defense lawyer, tried to plug the lane, but Castiel let fly a teardrop floater. Swish.

Loping back down the court, Castiel laughed and talked trash. “A step too slow, Jake. You’re a step too slow.”

I know, I know. Story of my life.

Castiel was captain of the Avengers, the highly disciplined prosecutors’ team. I was the leading scorer of the Mouthpieces, a rowdy group of criminal defense lawyers.

I liked playing against Castiel’s team. Sure, the prosecutors threw some elbows, but they never whined over lousy calls. The worst were the personal injury lawyers, the Contingency Cats, who always faked injuries and threatened to file lawsuits. The Downtown Defenders-insurance company lawyers-tampered with the clock, refused to stop play when an opponent was hurt, and handpicked friends as referees.

Intending to put Castiel on his duly elected ass, I set up in the low post and took a bounce pass from Shifty Sullivan-the nickname stemming from criminal court, not the basketball court. My back was to Castiel, and he kept a hip planted on my butt. I pivoted and faked left, but Castiel knew I seldom drove that way. A weakness in my game, the left-handed dribble.

I tossed an elbow into Castiel’s gut, heard him whoomph as I went around him to the right and sank a baby hook from six feet away.

He doubled over, fought for a breath, and could barely get the words out. “Hey, ref. You swallow your whistle?” Pantomiming my elbow toss.

“Crybaby!” I whooped.

It went on that way for the entire game. I hit Castiel hard enough to draw a flagrant foul and barreled into him enough times to draw two charges. I fouled out but still led the scoring with 21 for the Mouthpieces. With greater finesse, the unflappable Castiel led the Avengers to a nine-point win.

He approached me in the locker room, pressing a cold can of Heineken to his forehead where a welt was flaring up. “Buy you dinner, Jake?”

“Why?”

“To find out why you’re so pissed at me.”

“More like disappointed in you.”

“Let’s talk about it, Jake. C’mon, I’ll treat you to martinis and a porterhouse.”

“I’ll go if you answer one question for me, Alex. Were you-?”

“Yes.”

“Why not wait for the question?”

“I know what you’re gonna ask. It’s about Ziegler’s party. And the answer’s yes. I was there the night Krista Larkin disappeared.”

23 Young, Single, and Horny

I don’t usually order shrimp cocktail when they charge by the piece-eight bucks! — but tonight Castiel was paying, and I didn’t give a shit about the cost. We sat on the front patio of Prime One Twelve, a noisy, trendy hangout for NBA players and others with the Am Ex Centurion card. The restaurant is at the foot of Ocean Drive on South Beach, the epicenter of hedonism run amok. We started with the shrimp and martinis-as cold as liquid nitrogen-with steaks to follow.

When we sat down, Castiel had said he would tell me everything he knew about Ziegler and Krista Larkin. That he had nothing to hide. “I should have told you straight off, Jake, but I’m embarrassed about some of the shit from my past.” Well, that made two of us.

“I was at Ziegler’s house,” Castiel said now, “but Krista wasn’t. She never showed up.”

“To be so sure, you must have known her by sight.”

“She was around a lot that summer. Charlie’s flavor of the month. Maybe three months.”

“And this night, who was the lucky girl?”

“Girls, plural. Half a dozen playthings. Porn starlets. Strippers. Strays. All interchangeable, all forgettable.”

“Not to their families.”

“I’m just saying how it was with Ziegler. One second he’s doing a couple actresses in the living room, then three more girls are hopping over the sofa like a hockey team changing lines. The Larkin girl wasn’t one of them.”

“What were you doing there?”

“What do you think? I was young. Single. Horny.”

Castiel sipped his martini and told me his story, while flicking that gold cigarette lighter that had belonged to his father. In the early nineties, when he was a young prosecutor, Castiel met Charlie Ziegler, courtesy of Uncle Max.

Ziegler’s porn business was just taking off. He was renting a waterfront manse on Sunset Island that belonged to a Saudi sheik who came to town to buy diamonds and frolic with young women. Jewelers on Flagler Street provided the gems, Ziegler the women.

“The house was tricked out like a disco,” Castiel said. “A glitter ball, a D.J., a sound system you could hear in Bimini. The place decorated like a bordello. Gold fixtures in the bathrooms, an infinity pool, marble columns with eagles on top, like some Roman emperor lived there.”

“The Fuck Palace.” I’d heard Sonia Majeski use the term.

“Oh, man, The Fuck Palace.” Alex smiled at the memory. “That was the cabana. Silk canopies. Mirrored ceilings and wide-screen porno.”

“Sounds like you knew the place well.”

“Like I said before, I was young and single.”

“And horny,” I reminded him.

“I forgot about your time in the seminary,” he shot back.

I sipped at the second martini, sharp as a dagger in the throat. Next to us, a boisterous table of eight sang “Happy Birthday” in Spanish, then Portuguese, and finally Hebrew. They’d gone through four bottles of Cristal at $450 a whack.

“You know a bunch of the guys who were there that night, right?” I asked.

“Some of them, sure.”

“So subpoena them. Put them under oath and see what they know.”

“You’re talking about important men in this town. They have families now. Hell, some had families then. All of them are gonna have faulty memories.”

“If you don’t want to mess with those guys, I will. I have some names from Sonia Majeski. You must have others. I’ll jump-start your investigation.”

“Fishing expedition is more like it.”

The steaks arrived-porterhouse for me, T-bone for Castiel. Round three of the martinis could not be far behind.

“Jake, there’s no probable cause that a crime has been committed. You’ve got a runaway girl who probably started a new life, that’s all.”

“A runaway girl who’s probably dead is more like it. Last seen headed to your pal’s house.”

“Even if you could place the girl with Ziegler, so what? He liked her. He screwed her now and then. What’s his motive for killing her?”

“Maybe she was going to scream ‘statutory rape.’ Maybe she witnessed something she shouldn’t have.