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.
The Journal played it straight. The Diamond death shared page one of the local section with an expose that revealed that a sizable percentage of our taxicabs are repainted stolen cars.
“Anything else?” I asked Cindy.
“Yeah. The managing partner wants to know why you let yourself get appointed to be Nick Wolf’s flunky.”
“The old man have something against fulfilling my civic duty?”
“No, something against a case that pays only a third of your normal hourly rate. He wants a written response, with copies to the New Business Committee, the Senior Council, and the Allocation Committee.”
“What else?”
Cindy followed me into my office. I opened the vertical blinds and stared at Biscayne Bay three hundred feet below. Plump gray thunderheads hung motionless over Miami Beach. In fifteen knots of easterly, the bay crinkles like aluminum foil. Today, not a ripple.
“I have the poop on Compu-Mate,” she said with a sly smile. She handed me a folder containing some newspaper clippings and a printout from the secretary of state. “But boss, if you’re that horny, I could fix you up.”
“What?”
“Rather than get hooked up with some loser…”
“What’re you talking about?”
“My girlfriend, Dottie the Disco Queen. She likes big guys who aren’t quite with it.”
“What about her herpes?”
“No problema. In remission.”
“Maybe another time,” I said. “Anything else?”
“Mr. Foot-in-the-Mouth called.”
“Symington? He hasn’t replaced me?”
“No such luck.” She handed me a bunch of newspaper stories on computer paper. “A messenger delivered these a few minutes ago.”
“I’m worried about Carl Hutchinson, all that invective in his column,” Symington Foote said when I returned his call.
“You’re just a little gun-shy right now,” I told the publisher, reassurance coating my voice like honey.
“But these names he’s calling Commissioner Goldberg. She’s very popular with the voters. And voters are jurors.”
He was right about that. Maria Teresa Gonzalez-Goldberg-born in Cuba, schooled in a convent, married to a Jewish cop with an adopted black child-was a formidable politician. She had swept into office two years earlier with eighty-six percent of the vote. She then redecorated her office in teak, chrome, leather, and glass to the tune of one hundred fifty thousand dollars of taxpayers’ money. At a time the county couldn’t afford to repair backed-up toilets in public housing projects.
“Marie Antoinette,” Foote was saying. “He called her Marie Antoinette!”
“Fair comment,” I advised.
“Said she ought to redecorate a cell at Marianna Institution for Women.”
“Rhetorical hyperbole,” I counseled confidently.
“Said the ‘crossover candidate’ became the ‘carnivorous commissioner, feeding on the flesh of the poor.’”
“A bit grisly,” I admitted, “but she’s a public official.”
“Seems I heard that before,” Foote said.
I spent the rest of the morning on the newspaper’s work. I advised the business manager to accept the advertisement from the airport hotel that promised “freedom fighter' discounts to smugglers aiding the Nicaraguan contras. I told the photo editor that the picture of the model wearing a bra with a built-in holster for a Beretta was not an invasion of privacy and accurately portrayed Florida’s new concealed-weapons law. I told the city editor to ignore complaints that property values would be hurt by the local map showing Dade County murders by zip code. Finally, I told the food editor that the grilled alligator recipe omitted cayenne pepper, and then I had lunch.
CHAPTER 6
The Lady and the Jockey
I wanted to get to Compu-Mate before the afternoon storms. In the summer, the rain begins at 3:17 P.M. or thereabouts, every day. For an hour or so, gully washers and palmetto pounders flood the streets. Drops form inside the canvas top of my old convertible, then plop one by one onto my head.
I aimed north on Okeechobee Road, storm clouds gathering, traffic crawling. Our highways have not caught up with our growth and never will. We built a high-speed rail system too late and too small. We are a great urban sprawl, Miami-Lauderdale-Palm Beach, four million people squeezed between the ocean and the Everglades. We are low on water and electricity, but high on asphalt and cement. Our public officials are beholden to predatory developers who ply them with greenbacks and concoct their own vocabulary.
Creeping overpopulation is “growth.”
Building spindly condos on Indian burial grounds is “progress.”
Environmentalists are “doomsayers.”
