“What golf course?”
“At Cypress Estates. A championship course.”
“I didn’t know there was one. I didn’t see it in the model.”
“’Course not. It was under wraps. We knew there’d be a blowup from the Everglades Society. Not that there’s anything wrong with it. It’ll be a real showpiece, completely in sync with nature. Nothing else like it in history. The water hazards will be the natural slough, the roughs will be saw grass. Ponds and streams everywhere. Every imaginable bird would inhabit the place. ‘Course, we’d have to regulate the water levels. Can you imagine the development potential for the town houses and condos if we got a PGA event out there on national TV?”
“How did Tupton know about it?”
“He’d found the architect’s drawings on Nicky’s desk. The schematics, the cost estimates, impact studies, and he was running off at the mouth, going ape shit.”
“What’d he say?”
“The usual environmental crap about the dredging and the filling, the canals and locks disturbing the natural water flow, the effect of the pesticides and the fertilizers. I made a joke about a golfer reaching for his lost Titleist in a gator hole, and he went bananas. Whining about gators swallowing golf balls and shitting tees, that kind of thing.”
“That’s all he found, a document about the golf course?”
“Yeah, that’s all he was carrying on about.”
“Anybody else overhear this?”
“I don’t know. When he got started, I sort of steered him back along the seawall toward the bay. Like I said, we’re not publicizing the golf course. We don’t plan to announce it until all the financing is in place and we’re ready to go.”
Something wasn’t ringing true, but what?
“Why didn’t Nicky mention this to me?”
“Guess ‘cause I didn’t mention it to him.”
“Tupton dies at the house, your partner gets sued, and you don’t mention this conversation?”
“Yeah, it didn’t seem important. Is it?”
Later, sometime after midnight, I was lying in the hammock between my live oak trees, listening to the warble of a mockingbird calling its mate, or at least looking for a one-night stand. I wondered what Clarence Darrow would do. He once said there was no such thing as justice, in or out of court. That didn’t help any, so I had a beer. A sixteen-ounce Grolsch with the porcelain stopper. That didn’t help either, so I had another.
I thought of Melinda Tupton, a good woman by any standard. I thought of Gina and tried to pretend I didn’t miss her. What was the hold she had on me?
I thought of Rick Gondolier. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw Hulk Hogan. What kind of guy sleeps with his partner’s wife?
Probably the same kind of guy who sleeps with his client’s wife.
And I thought of Nicky Florio. He clams up, but his partner talks. What could be so secret about the golf course? And what was so terrible about it? If they’re going to bulldoze the marshy hammocks and mangroves for the condos and the shops, what difference does a golf course make?
Not much, except as a symbol of man’s callousness. Destroying nature for a manicured playground of the rich.
A nightmare. That’s what Tupton told his wife about it. Worse than anything I had imagined.
It didn’t fit. Way too strong. He already knew about the proposed development. It was a whole town, for crying out loud.
The condos, the shops, the town, it’s all a cover.
But the town can’t be a cover for a golf course. Maybe for something else, but not that. Sorry, Gondo, but I think you’re making it up. Maybe there was a golf course planned, but in my heart, I know that’s not what Tupton saw. But is that my job? Don’t I have to present the evidence as it rolls in the door?
And what a piece of evidence. Two pieces, really. First, Gondolier told Tupton to watch how much he drank, and Tupton ignored the advice. Talk about a plaintiff’s comparative negligence. Second, Gondolier witnessed Tupton’s drunken overreaction to the golf-course plans. No wonder the guy ended up unconscious in the wine cellar. He was out of control.
Hey, Gondo, you’re a real gamesaver. That phone call to me. How timely. Wonder who called you earlier in the evening. Nicky probably figured I wouldn’t use evidence if I thought it was phony, so the two of you cooked up this little charade.
I had another beer and began thinking abstract thoughts, something that’s not my strong point. Words like ethics and perjury and conflicts of interest fluttered across the beer-soaked landscape of my mind. I like to win, but I like to win fair and square. A lawyer isn’t supposed to use perjured testimony. You can look it up. But who made me a mind reader? I could put Rick Gondolier on the stand, and if the jury didn’t believe him, we would lose.
Justice would be done. Fake that, Clarence Darrow.
But the jury might believe him. And we would win. But then, we deserved to, because if the jury believed him, we must be right. Isn’t that the way the system works, or is that circular reasoning?
I needed another beer to answer the question. I crawled out of the hammock to get one, then slipped a Jimmy Buffet disc into the machine. I sang along, not more than half an octave off-key, and twanged an imaginary guitar, and by the time Jimmy got to “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw?” a quiniela I found to be physically improbable, I was drifting off toward a restless sleep.
Chapter 9
Granny Lassiter was chopping florida lobster with a sawtooth diver’s knife and tossing the white morsels into a frying pan with slices of onion and green pepper. The cooking oil sizzled and popped, and her small kitchen was redolent with piquant aromas. I was barefoot because it’s against the law, or ought to be, to wear shoes south of Key Largo. The rest of me was covered by denim cutoffs and a faded Penn State T-shirt. My job was to whack a coconut in two with a machete and grate the meat. Charlie Riggs’s job was to sip Granny’s home brew and kibitz.
Granny wasn’t my grandmother, but there was some relationship, maybe a great-aunt on my father’s side. Everyone in the Keys called her Granny Lassiter, and most of the natives drank her moonshine. She raised me after my father was killed and my mother ran off. Granny was a small, wiry woman with high cheekbones and a pugnacious chin, and her black hair was streaked with white. Today she wore canvas shorts with button pockets and a tank top from a Key West oyster bar that advised its patrons to “Eat ’em raw.” Under the tank top, it was just Granny. No bra and, sure as heck, no silken camisole. She lived just outside Islamorada in a four-room wooden house with a front porch and a rocking chair and a kitchen window that caught the breezes from the Gulf of Mexico.
Granny poured some sherry into the frying pan with the lobster, then took a swig from the bottle. I shredded the coconut into the sizzling mixture. Charlie was into one of his soliloquies, rambling on about determining time of death based on the amount of maggot growth in the corpse. It was one of his favorite mealtime topics.
When the lobster was golden brown, Granny added tomato paste, curry powder, and turmeric, then put the whole shebang into a casserole that she slid into the oven. Then she ordered me to cook some wild rice, so she could sit down with Charlie at the kitchen table to have a drink and rest her dogs, which is what Granny called her feet. I followed her instructions, boiling the rice, all the time inhaling the pungent fragrance of the spices and the cooking lobster.
“Speared those suckers myself,” Granny said, gesturing toward the oven or maybe toward the Gulf. “Don’t have time to trap ’em.”
“Marine Patrol could confiscate your boat,” I told her. “Lobster poaching’s a crime.”
“So’s larceny,” she said, “but that don’t stop you shysters.”
