It was a vulture’s’s-eye view, looking down at the tops of buildings, Biscayne Bay peeking from behind the modern skyscrapers. Above me, a jumbo jet roared, its gear down, on final approach to the airport. I imagined the passengers, foreheads pressed to windows, expectant with new adventures.
I took two steps along the balcony and heard a cracking under my feet. The old building was nearly as fragile as Nicky Florio’s new condos. Gingerly, I approached the parapet and leaned over.
Whoa. A long way down. But the first few floors would be easy. The balconies jutted out with each succeeding lower floor. I took another crunching step, this time because I was in the deep doo-doo, as George Bush might say, but here, it was literally true. I swung a leg over the rail, and then a second one. I grabbed a gargoyle covered with bird droppings and hung there a moment. Maybe it was the wind, but I thought I heard the gargoyle laugh at me. As my herringbone suit coat flapped in the breeze, I dropped to the balcony below.
And then did it again, and again.
I heard shouts from above.
I shimmied along the wall and jumped through open space-only about four feet-to an adjoining balcony. The next few floors had no balconies, but there were ledges, maybe eighteen inches wide, and the limestone blocks of the building itself were ridged, and if I didn’t look down, I could grab the ledge, put a foot on the ridge, and keep on going, hand over hand.
My hands were calloused from windsurfing and twenty years of bench presses, but they were still getting roughed up. By the time I had gotten halfway down, I had reached another full balcony. I was winded and stopped to rest. I put my hands on my knees and bent over, sucking in air. I was nearly ready to go over the side again when I noticed the floor-to-ceiling double window facing the balcony. Streaked with years of grime, it was latched from the inside by a simple brass hook. I jiggled the window. Once, twice, three times, and the hook fell away.
The windows opened to the outside. I stepped inside and was enveloped in a set of drapes that must have weighed a ton, half of which was dust. I heard someone talking, fought to stifle a sneeze, found the opening between the drapes, and peered out.
A courtroom.
A few street people snoozing in the gallery.
Some exhibits plastered to a blackboard, maps of streets, some plastic overlays.
A lawyer I didn’t recognize standing near the bench, and a middle-aged man in a suit sitting on the witness stand, droning on about the value per square foot of commercial property along Arthur Godfrey Road.
Judge Dixie Lee Boulton on the bench, pretending to pay attention as she read the morning paper, occasionally grimacing at something the witness said, or was that a facial tic?
A condemnation trial, the owners of property trying to get more money from the county than it wanted to pay when it took slivers of their land to widen a street. Even more boring than a slip-and-fall, probably a dead heat with a dog-bite case.
That was it, except for the folks sitting in the jury box, which backed up against the heavy, dusty drapes where I now stood. No way I could get out of here. I turned around, pushed the window open again, and peeked outside.
Whoops.
A uniformed Metro officer stood on the neighboring balcony. He faced the other way, looked up, looked down, then turned my way just as I ducked back inside and closed the window. I found the opening in the drapes again and slid into an empty chair in the back row of the jury box.
“Sorry I’m late,” I whispered to the middle-aged woman next to me. “I’m the new alternate.”
She patted me on the arm. “You didn’t miss a thing.”
I listened attentively to the morning’s testimony, fighting the urge, first, to object to leading questions, and then to doze off. When Judge Boulton called the noon recess, I marched along with the others behind a bailiff who was older than the courthouse. We all piled into an elevator and headed to the Quarterdeck Lounge. Why not? After what I’d been through, I figured the county should buy me lunch.
My mind listed the places I couldn’t go. It was longer than where I could.
I couldn’t go to my office. There’d be two deputies sitting in the reception room. I couldn’t go home. Or to Granny’s or Charlie’s. And I couldn’t drive anywhere because the cops had my car. But I could use the phone.
At the Quarterdeck, I changed a five-dollar bill into a handful of quarters and began making some calls. I started with Cindy, my loyal secretary.
“Jeez, where are you, jefe? Did you kill somebody or what? You wouldn’t believe what’s going on over here.”
I told her I believed it, and tell whoever asked that I was headed to Cancun.
I called Granny in the Keys. She had a retired merchant seaman waiting for her in a skiff, and in a shallow bay thereabouts was a bonefish calling her name, and maybe she was going to get a tattoo later today, and by the way, how come the police called, asking about her ne’er-do-well kin?
I called Charlie, and his recorded voice told me he was dissecting brains over at the morgue, hoping to find some causal link to cerebral hemorrhages.
I called Gina, who yelped, “Omigod, Jake, did you really steal all that money, and even if you didn’t, Nicky is angry as a bull with its balls in a cinch,” an expression I figured she picked up when she was engaged to a rodeo star.
Then I called Nicky Florio, because I didn’t have anybody else to call. I caught him in the trailer at a construction site in Kendall. Ticky-tacky town houses all in a row.
“You set me up, Florio,” I said when he picked up the phone. “Maybe you can’t kill me because of Gina, but you could sure as hell frame me and let Socolow send me away.”
I heard him breathe into the phone. “Who says I can’t kill you?”
And then he was gone.
I walked across the street into the government-center complex. Just another suit hanging around the County Commission Building. Probably only one of a dozen guys who had bribery on his mind that morning. I took the escalator to the Metrorail station, slipped some more quarters into the slot, and headed to the next level. A security guard looked right past me.
A gleaming train was tooting its horn as it pulled in.
Northbound.
It really didn’t make any difference.
I got aboard. Nearly empty. A family of European tourists, Germans maybe, the husband in those open sandals with thin brown socks, a wife and two boys in shorts, Mickey Mouse T-shirts, and instant sunburns. The man had a camera bag slung over a shoulder, his passport sticking halfway out of his pants pocket. If they got out of town with their traveler’s checks, they’d be lucky.
I liked Metrorail, a clean, smooth billion-dollar elevated train that was hurting for business. I rode it now to the northwest, skimming the tops of the trees through Overtown, cutting by the Justice Building, where I imagined a warrant for my arrest was being typed by a bleary-eyed secretary. I stayed on the train all the way to Hialeah and the grand old racetrack, which had come back from near-bankruptcy.
I bought grandstand admission, buried my face in a Racing Form, and bet the number-three horse the first four races, losing eight dollars. I ate a hot dog with chili and sat there in the seedy charm of the place where bougainvillea crept along crumbling balustrades.
There were still a few hundred pink flamingos on the island in the center of the turf. Even though they feed the birds a mixture of rice, shrimp, and dog biscuits, the rascals tend to fly away, preferring the wilds of the Everglades and what’s left of the Keys.
So after a while, the bird handlers began clipping the pink feathers, grounding the flamingos, or at least keeping them on the racetrack grounds. A fancy prison.
It took me half the afternoon and two more nags out of the money to figure out what to do. I rode Metrorail south, getting off this time at the hospital complex. It was a short walk to Bob Hope Road and the morgue.
I went in the back way, pounding on the metal doors until a young assistant medical examiner came by, his gloved hands bloody. I told him I wanted to see Charlie Riggs, and he pointed to the lab. I walked in, adjusting to the smell-part formaldehyde, part rotting tissue-and found Charlie sitting on a high stool, huddled over a counter, using a scalpel to slice tiny slivers of brain tissue and examine them under a microscope. In a rubber bucket next to
