queens, fairies, dopers, junkies.”
“ Your Honor,” I leapt in. “I’m sure there’s an explanation.” I looked at Kip, who rewarded me with a maniacal grin.
“ DeNiro in Taxi Driver,” he said.
“ Of course it is!” I shouted triumphantly to the judge, as if Kip had just revealed a major discovery in theoretical physics.
“ Skunk pussies?” the judge said, shaking his head.
Thankfully, Kip didn’t elaborate. The judge asked if I had anything more to present before he announced his ruling. I declined, and Kip started to say something. I tried to clamp my hand over his mouth, but he wriggled away from me. “Just one thing, Judge. My lawyer’s my uncle. He’s my uncle Jake.”
“ What movie’s that from?” T. Bone Coleridge asked, wearily.
“ None,” I admitted. “It’s true. Sylvester Houston Conklin is my nephew, my half sister’s son.”
“ Why’nt you say so, first thing, Jake?” the judge demanded. “Hell’s bells, where’s that low-rent shrink of yours?”
“ Right here,” Dr. Kornblum called out from the gallery, knowing when his number had been called.
“ Did Ah hear you say something about this boy needing a strong male figure, someone to look up to?”
“ Exactly, in lieu of a father, he needs…”
I knew where this was going, and so did Kip. He was grinning, but I wasn’t.
“ Your Honor,” I said, “if you’re thinking that I-”
“ Don’t tell me what Ah’m thinking. Ah’ll tell you, Jake. It’s like this. It’s either Youth Hall or your house. You heard it yourself, from your very own witness. Ah’m remanding the boy to your custody. You’re blood kin, after all. You’ll file monthly reports, and if there’s any problem, you’ll both be back in here.” T. Bone cleared his throat, the sound of a shovel digging into gravel, and turned to the young miscreant. “How ‘bout it, son? You want to bunk with your uncle Jake?”
“ Sure, Judge,” Kip responded. “It’s like living at the Bates Motel.”
“ Then it’s a done deal. Now, we’ve got to find a way to keep you out of trouble. You got any hobbies, besides all that movie watchin’?”
Kip shook his head
“ Well, how would you like to play some Pee Wee League football? Your uncle can show you a thing or two.”
No again.
“ What do you want to do, son?”
“ Make movies,” Kip said.
T. Bone thought about it a second, then turned to me. “Buy the boy one of those video cameras, and turn him loose. In my day, a boy was rotten, we locked him up and strapped him. Now, we try to let him express himself. Who knows, maybe this’ll work. Strappin’ never did. Maybe the rapscallion will turn out to be one of your Hollywood moguls.”
The judge gave himself a satisfied look. Then he banged his gavel, declared a recess and bolted through the rear door to his chambers, blue and orange robes flapping behind him.
Now what? I hadn’t gotten the hang of being an uncle, and I was going to be a father. I looked down at Kip, confused and embarrassed. He had heard me try to weasel out of taking responsibility for him. He was biting his lip.
“ Kip. It’s not that I don’t want you around. It’s just that-”
“ It’s okay, Uncle Jake. Never apologize and never explain. It’s a sign of weakness.”
I didn’t ask, but he told me anyway.
“ John Wayne,” Kip said, taking my hand and lacing his fingers through mine.
Chapter 8
After court, or apres cour, as one of my worldly partners insists on saying, I was back in the office, not answering my mail, when Abe Socolow called on my direct line. He barked out his usual greeting, which consisted of my last name in an accusing tone, then told me to get my ass over to Blinky Baroso’s apartment. I told him I’d do better than that: I’d bring all of me.
So I abandoned my stacks of opposing lawyers’ testy correspondence that begged for even more obnoxious responses. It is a game we play, scrivening abusive letters, insulting the other’s client in increasingly harsh terms until one or the other files suit. Once, in a petty dispute over a property line, H. T. Patterson wrote a twelve-page letter, accusing my client of everything from deceit, deception, and duplicity to being on the grassy knoll in Dallas. Pressed for time, I responded simply, “Fuck you; strong reply to follow.” As Goethe said, or was it Shula, “When ideas fail, words come in very handy.”
Before leaving, I checked on Kip who was installed in the conference room, a splendid place of dark wood, tinted glass and marble, all paid for by grateful, or at least, intimidated clients. Word had gotten back to me that the lad had been videotaping all the female employees in the office, telling them he was the casting director for Porky’s IV. No one seemed to mind until he asked the receptionist to take off her blouse for her audition. So I grounded him for the day, which he didn’t seem to mind, inasmuch as television came with the punishment.
My secretary, Cindy, and two young female paralegals were making a fuss over my ward, who sat in one of the leather swivel chairs, sneakers propped on the marble slab of a conference table, watching a black-and-white movie on the TV tastefully recessed into a teak wall unit. The women were feeding him doughnuts and sodas from the office kitchen and cooing about his blond hair and blue eyes.
“ This nephew of yours is the sweetest little thing,” said Cindy, who, like her boss, will do anything to avoid sitting at her desk. “He’s going to be a real lady killer.”
“ James Cagney, 1933,” the kid said, his mouth covered with powdered sugar.
“ Huh?” Cindy looked confused. It was not an entirely unfamiliar expression. She’d been my secretary back in the P.D.’s office and was a tad unconventional for a downtown law firm with offices thirty-two stories above Biscayne Bay. She wore miniskirts and orange lipstick and had three-inch fingernails painted different colors with sparkles embedded in the polish. Her typing sounded like a chef chopping vegetables at a Japanese steak house.
“ Look, Cindy, I gotta go. If it’s not too much trouble, how ‘bout typing some pleadings this afternoon? I’ll be back later for Little Lord Fauntleroy.”
“ Freddie Bartholomew,” Kip said, without taking his eyes from the set. “Ricky Schroder in the TV remake.”
The Olds was right where I left it, which is always a fifty-fifty proposition in a county where a hundred cars are stolen each day. Some are stripped for parts, some are taken by freighter for sale in the islands, and some turn up, repainted, as local taxicabs. I had parked next to a powder blue SL 300, the Mercedes convertible. My lead gas-guzzling monster made the little German car look feminine and petite.
I eased out of the parking garage and onto Biscayne Boulevard. It’s our showcase downtown street, running along the bay. There’s a wide median with towering palm trees where hookers, muggers, and transvestites gather, though they’re generally shooed out of there just before the Orange Bowl Parade. The boulevard intersects with Flagler Street, which runs due west past the county courthouse and provides an entertaining walk among street peddlers, panhandlers, and tourists chattering in a dozen languages, none of them English.
Today, I had a short drive north past Bayfront Park, where the multimillion-dollar Claude and Mildred Pepper Fountain sits idle and dry because the city can’t pay for the electricity to run it. Just past the park is Bayside, an outdoor mall of T-shirt shops and rum-punch booths. On the west side of the boulevard used to be the Coppertone
