“I’m sorry that I lost sight of right and wrong.”
I seemed to be sorry about a lot of things. I’d let down my partners and my friends and my Granny. That was a nice touch, throwing Granny in there. How about Coach Paterno and Coach Shula?
I’d gotten greedy, too. A lot of greed and sorrow, it seemed to me.
I’d lost sight of ethics. Well, that was certainly believable.
Greed’s the reason I stole the money from the bingo hall.
And killed my buddy and co-conspirator Rick Gondolier.
And tried to bribe Abe Socolow.
“What, nothing else, fellows? Wasn’t I on the grassy knoll in Dallas?”
I kept reading. It looked like something I might have typed. Lots of typos, a few words misspelled.
“If you two think Nicky Florio can get away with this, you’re crazier than he is,” I said. “This confession is worthless. I’ll disown it in a minute. It won’t be admissible. It isn’t worth the paper it’s-”
“Keep reading, shithead,” Tiger said. I did.
Oh. There it was in the last paragraph. The statement wasn’t a confession, at least not one I’d have a chance to repudiate. It was a suicide note.
Chapter 22
Nicky Florio gently swirled the delicate finnish goblet by the stem, smiling to himself as he sniff-sniff-sniffed the crimson liquid. “Full-bodied,” he proclaimed after a moment. “A hint of violets, ginger, and tobacco.” He turned toward me. “Care to sample France’s finest?”
I shook my head, and various hinges and latches groaned where they fastened my neck and shoulder muscles to my bones. “You want to slip me a Mickey, why not just bash me over the head?”
Florio showed his patient, tolerant look. “In due time, if it is your desire. But I think we can be more creative than that, don’t you?”
“You gonna get me drunk and freeze me to death? You have a wine cellar here, too?”
“Not necessary. Just an air-conditioned room to keep the Bordeaux at sixty-eight degrees.” He picked up another goblet. “Chateau Carbonnieux from the Graves area. It’s a Bordeaux 1961.” He gestured toward the table full of bottles. “They all are. The greatest year ever, even finer than 1945.” He poured a glass for me. “Let it sit for a while. It’s not as delicate as the Chateau Cantemerle, which I allow to breathe for a full hour, but no more.”
I stared at the wine, wondering how long Nicky Florio would let me breathe. We were sitting at the knotty- pine picnic table on the porch of the high-stilted cabin. The slough was alive with sounds of birds tuning up their voices and unseen animals rippling the water just before dawn. Was it only two days ago that I sat at this table, eating snook with cabbage palm, boiled corn, and pumpkin pie? Jim Tiger had been the cook, Rick Gondolier a guest. Tiger wasn’t doing any cooking today. Still in his cop’s clothes, he was hauling bottles of wine from a back room as Nicky Florio shouted instructions. A Latour and a Petrus, two Lafite-Rothschilds.
Florio sat across from me at the table in his safari khakis, his dark face brooding at his wine. A cool breeze stirred through the slough, the air ripe with the pungent aroma of fermentation, of growth and death and renewal of life. Tiger silently poured from half a dozen bottles into two sets of glasses.
“Lassiter, do you understand what I’m doing?” Florio asked.
“Sure, you’re showing me just how much savoir-faire you’ve got. You want me to know you’re something I’m not. It all goes back to Gina, doesn’t it?”
“Does it?”
“Look, Nicky, she chose you. She’s your wife. You won. You don’t have to prove anything to me.”
“Quite right, quite right.” The French wine was making him sound like a phony European count. Florio sniffed again, then took a sip from one of the goblets. “Complex and opulent,” he opined, putting the glass down and savoring the taste, his eyes closed. “Tell me, Lassiter, how would you describe the Lynch-Bages?”
I studied the contents of a freshly poured goblet. “Red. It’s definitely red.” I took a dainty sip, then polished it off in a second try. “I don’t knowhow opulent it is, but it tastes damn good.”
“Let’s compare the Mouton, another Pauillac wine.”
Tiger, the homicidal sommelier, poured me a fresh one.
“By the way,” Florio said, “you may want to savor the wine a bit more and not…chug it.”
I stuck my nose into the goblet and sniffed with the earnest diligence of a Labrador retriever. “Rich,” I intoned judiciously. “And, of course, red, still red.”
He nodded. Maybe I was a natural at this. I drank up, finishing it off, letting him frown at my lack of couth.
“Next, perhaps a Chateau Petrus from the Pomerol region.”
I tried it and found a new word. “Fruity,” I told him.
Again, he nodded judiciously. “Spicy and fruity, to be sure.
Today it would go for twenty-five hundred dollars a bottle-if you could find it.”
I nearly squirted him with about a hundred bucks’ of the stuff. When I finished coughing, he was pouring more wine. We sipped along with each other for a while, running through a Lafite, which I agreed was delicate, a powerful Pichon-Lalande, and a sturdy, somewhat acidic Figeac. Over yet another bottle, we debated whether a Montrose was drying from age, but we agreed that some of the wines from Saint-Julien were past their peaks.
And so was I.
In the last sixty hours, I had watched a man decapitated, then helped dispose of the evidence. I got hooked into a bribery scheme and was framed for a million-dollar heist. I had been punched by two cops, one of them apparently honest, which is about the average in these parts. I had been zapped twice by a stun gun and shanghaied aboard an airboat. I’d read my own suicide note, insulted the guy who wanted to kill me, then drunk enough wine to drown a cat. I wanted to ponder the cosmic significance of these events, but at the moment my head was throbbing, my temples were in a vise, and my eyes were pressed shut. Somebody was saying something, but I wasn’t interested.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, shaking me. Apparently, I had found a comfortable spot to sleep, my face resting on the tabletop. I jolted to attention.
“Up and at ’em, Jake. We’ve got business to discuss.”
I pried my eyes open and ran my tongue across my teeth. I don’t care how much the wine cost. My mouth tasted like it had been stuffed with rags soaked in 10W-40 Quaker State. Nicky Florio still had his hand on my shoulder. Jim Tiger stood at the railing, watching us both, a pistol on his hip, the stun gun in his hand. “More vino,” I said. “Bring on the grapes.”
“I didn’t know you had an appreciation of the finer things in life,” Florio said.
“Oh, but I do. Wine, women, and…”
“Song,” Florio helped out.
With that, I broke into “Fight On, State,” giving the arms-up touchdown sign when I got to the part about rolling up the score, fighting on to victory ever-more.
“Have you enjoyed our little tasting?” Nicky Florio asked.
“Sure have. Now where are the women?”
“There are wine experts who would have killed to taste the 1961 French Bordeaux you’ve been guzzling.”
“But not you, Nicky. You wouldn’t kill for wine. Or for a woman, for that matter. You didn’t murder Gondolier because of Gina. If you had, I’d be dead, too. You kill for money. Maybe Gondolier cheated you, or maybe you didn’t want to share the casino with him. Either way, it was just for the dollars. Peter Tupton was going to cost you a bundle, so you aced him. And now, there’s me…”
My little speech had made me thirsty. I picked up a bottle of Chateaux Latour and put it to my lips. Hey, it tasted good this way, too. “Powerful yet still youthful,” I said, licking my lips. “And red. Red as blood.”
“Why do you think I invited you to join me in this special event?” He gestured across the table at the half-
