I fibbed. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Tupton. I couldn’t quite hear you. When your husband became inebriated, he would become excited and wouldn’t quite sound like himself, correct?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“And when you spoke to him on the phone on August ninth, you knew he’d been drinking, didn’t you?”
“I thought so, yes.”
Time for a quick change of pace. Keep her off-balance. “Your husband wasn’t the kind of man to snoop through someone else’s desk, was he?”
Whack! Patterson slapped the top of the plaintiff’s table. “Objection! Mischaracterizes the evidence. No one snooped through-”
“Denied,” Judge Boulton declared. “The jury heard your direct exam and can make up its own mind.”
I turned back to the witness, my eyes asking her to answer.
“No,” Mrs. Tupton said. “He wasn’t like that.”
“But he changed when he became inebriated, didn’t he?”
“I suppose we all do, to an extent.”
“He became less inhibited?”
“I guess.”
“Did you ask him what it was he had found in Mr. Florio’s den?”
“Yes.”
I walked back to my table and picked up my trusty yellow notepad. I thumbed past my A”s and O’s diagram of a sprint draw play and found my notes of the direct examination. “But he ‘didn’t say exactly what it was.’ Weren’t those your words?”
“I believe so.”
“Just as a drunk driver doesn’t hear the train whistle or see the Stop sign, he may not have even heard you, correct?”
“Objection! Calls for a conclusion.” Patterson had stayed on his feet. No slipping a fastball by him now.
“Sustained,” the judge said.
“At any rate, it was apparently hard for him to concentrate on your end of the conversation, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know.” Not as good as a yes, but the jury could still get the point.
“And despite your request, he never told you what he allegedly saw.”
“That’s right.”
“And you have no way of knowing what it was, do you?”
“No.”
“It could have been something that had nothing to do with Cypress Estates, something of no concern to the Everglades Society.”
“Well, I doubt that.”
“But you don’t know, do you, ma’am?”
“No.”
“And you have no way of knowing whether he understood what he allegedly saw?”
“He was a very bright man.”
“When he was sober,” I added gratuitously. “How about when he was drunk?”
“He was so seldom…I just don’t know.”
“Did your husband tell you that anyone at the party had forced him to consume alcohol?”
“No, of course not.”
“Did he say anyone treated him badly?”
“No. He said he’d been eating and drinking…”
“So, at a party at which he was drinking champagne and being treated as an honored guest, he exceeded his tolerance for alcohol, and thereafter sneaked into a private room and snooped through a desk…”
I shot a little look at Patterson, needling him.
“…where he found something that excited him,” I continued, “though you have no idea if he understood it, and as you sit here today, you couldn’t begin to describe it, correct?”
“I don’t think he sneaked-”
“No further questions,” I said.
That night in my little coral-rock house in Coconut Grove, I listened to the sounds of the neighborhood possum banging over garbage cans and the occasional whine of a police siren. When Nicky Florio called to reject Patterson’s settlement demand, I asked if he had a counteroffer.
“Yeah, tell him I offer to punch his lights out.”
In the morning, I would inform Patterson that, after due deliberation, we must regretfully decline his thoughtful proposal for settlement.
After grilling some hog snapper over hot coals for my supper, I opened the Florio file and thumbed through a stack of folders until I found what I wanted. In discovery, we had given Patterson a list of the party guests. Like a lot of lawyers, when it came to filing a witness list, Patterson listed everyone who ever passed within ten miles of the locus delicti. He didn’t really intend to call all of them. It’s just a safety net. Rick Gondolier’s name was there, but Patterson had never taken his deposition. When I filed my witness list, I named everyone on Patterson’s list plus some of my own. I had planned to interview Gondolier at the bingo hall but never did it.
I found Gondolier’s number and was ready to call him when my phone rang.
Rick Gondolier.
Funny how things happen that way. Maybe some electromagnetic force in the universe, who knows? Gondolier was in his office at the bingo hall. For some reason, I expected to hear the announcer calling out “B- thirteen” in the background, but it was quiet on the other end.
“I got two subpoenas here,” Rick Gondolier said. “One from you and one from…” He paused, and I heard papers shuffling. “Henry Thackery Patterson.” Calm voice. Deep and resonant. I pictured him. Thick, sun-bleached hair swept back, a hand toying with his little diamond earring. Las Vegas slick.
“You’re a popular guy,” I said. “Patterson is Tupton’s lawyer. He may call you to testify, though I doubt it. He knows he can’t get you to say what he wants.”
“Which is what?”
“That Florio caught Tupton reading an incriminating document in the den and then got him drunk and waltzed him into the cooler. That Nicky either intended to kill him or didn’t care if he died or not. And that maybe you helped him.”
He didn’t take a deep breath or curse or laugh. “Pretty far-fetched, don’t you think so, Mr. Lassiter?”
Unruffled. Maybe that’s the way Gina liked them.
“Yeah. And damn hard to prove. But I may want to put you on the stand, so I have to ask you some questions. Did you see Tupton at the party?”
“Of course. Nicky introduced us out at the pool by the buffet table. Tupton was hitting the mimosas pretty good, trying to be sociable, talking up a storm. Told me how Everglades mosquitoes could kill a horse with enough stings around the eyes. Some anecdotes about how to tell alligator shit from crocodile shit. A real raconteur.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I told him to watch the mimosas, they sneak up on you. He giggled, stumbled around, and grabbed another drink from a tray. Is that useful?”
“Very. What else? I don’t suppose you know anything about a document Tupton saw on Nicky’s desk.”
“Sure I do.”
“What!”
“It was late in the afternoon, but not yet dark. I was talking to Tupton out by the seawall. Like I said, he’d been drinking a lot. His face was flushed and sweaty. Anyway, he excused himself to find a bathroom. I didn’t see him for maybe twenty minutes or so. Then he came back out to the pool-”
“He came back out?”
“Yeah, what of it?”
“Nobody else at the pool saw him once he went into the house.”
“Maybe nobody was looking. He was a pretty nondescript guy. Anyway, he came back out, flapping his jaw about the golf course.”
