“Quaere verum,” he instructed me. “And you’re the lad who told me that isn’t the lawyer’s job.”
“It isn’t,” I said. “My job’s to take the facts handed to me and present the best case I can. I’m not supposed to dig for stuff that’ll hurt my client.”
“Like in Philip Corrigan’s grave.”
“Thanks for reminding me. Can you believe that’s coming back to haunt me now?” I mimicked Wilbert Faircloth’s weasel voice: “‘Would grave robbery be ethical to you, Dr. Riggs?’ Jeez, Charlie, I’m in for a public reprimand, maybe even a six-month suspension.”
“Precisely my point. Why go looking for trouble now?”
“Why should now be different? Look, Charlie, I never liked Nicky Florio, and I never trusted him.”
Charlie Riggs harrumphed and rearranged his bulky body in his chair. “You never liked him because he married Star Hampton.” He paused, and a light flickered in his deep brown eyes. “Jake, you’re not seeing her again, are you?”
“Her name’s Gina now.”
“Your answer was not responsive, Counselor. Haven’t you got enough trouble with the Bar as it is? Talk about conflicts of interest.” Charlie stared toward the ocean, screwing his face into thought. The clouds from the west were nearly overhead now, and the temperature was beginning to drop. Intermittent gusts tugged at the cafe’s umbrellas. “I never thought that girl was for you. She combines dependency on a man with an ability to manipulate him. She’s a user, Jake. I know the effect she had on you, and I only hope it’s over. You’ve got this flaw, you know…”
“Only one?”
“Where women are concerned, you’re attracted to the birds with the broken wings. You want to mend them, make them whole. But Star, or Gina, or whoever, is a predator, a hawk, not a hummingbird. Let the Nicky Florios of the world deal with her kind.”
I always listen to Charlie, but sometimes I don’t follow his advice. This time, I kept quiet.
Charlie leaned back in his chair and eyeballed me from under his canvas hat. “You can’t represent Nicky if you’re seeing his wife. You understand that, don’t you?”
I stayed buttoned up. The Fifth Amendment was always dear to me.
“Are you listening, Jake? A meretricious relationship affects your judgment. You should be planning Nicky’s defenses, and instead you sit here implying that maybe this accident was really…”
“Say it, Charlie. That Peter Tupton was aced, offed, zapped, rubbed out.”
I had raised my voice without knowing it, and Charlie’s bushy eyebrows were arched as he appraised me. “You’ve been under a lot of stress, Jake. Maybe you should let one of your partners handle the suit, take some time off. From what you tell me, there’s no indication of a homicide.”
I signaled the waiter for another beer. “Motive, Charlie. It’s what you taught me to focus on. Tupton could cause Nicky a lot of trouble, cost him a lot of money and time fighting lawsuits instead of building his plug-ugly condos. Nicky invites the guy to a party, tries to soften him up, but it doesn’t work…”
Charlie scowled and harrumphed in disbelief. “So he gets Tupton drunk and drops him in a chilly room. Really, Jake, if you’re going to the trouble to kill someone, you’d use a method that’d be sure to be lethal, and you probably wouldn’t do it in your home.”
Just then, Charlie’s beeper went off. He extracted it from his belt and squinted at the digital readout. “State attorney’s number.” Charlie balled up his napkin, stood, and headed inside the restaurant, looking for a pay phone.
While I waited, I mulled it over. The old sawbones was right. If Nicky wanted to kill Tupton, he wouldn’t do it himself, and he wouldn’t use a method that might just give the guy a cold. In this town, there are semi-pros who’ll ace somebody for a new outboard motor or a three-day pass to Disney World. And Florio could afford the best. But then, if everyone who committed a crime was so smart, nobody would ever be caught.
I was still thinking about it when Charlie toddled back to the table, his brow furrowed, one hand absentmindedly stroking a cork attached to his fishing vest by a 3/0 hook. “Abe Socolow,” he announced, gravely, “asked if I’d take an appointment to assist the M.E. in a suspected homicide.”
“So?”
“I told him I have a potential conflict of interest.”
Charlie hadn’t told me, but I knew. The state attorney was looking into the death of one Peter Tupton, a guy who didn’t fall out of a wheel well of a jet but still froze to death in Miami.
“Where’s your conflict?” I asked. “I haven’t retained you as an expert.”
“The conflict is that I’m your friend, but if you don’t have a problem with it, neither does Abe.”
“Why does he want you?”
“Metro Crime Scene tried to lift prints off the corpse with the plate-glass method. See if somebody carried Tupton into the wine cellar. They came up with something on the wrists, but they’re not good enough to match up, though they seem to exclude the paramedics. Socolow wants me to oversee a methyl-methacrylate test.”
Charlie was too modest to say it, but he’s the old coot who invented it. Getting latent prints from the body of a corpse was tricky stuff. Moisture, the breakdown of tissues, and the surface of the skin itself were major problems. Sometimes, prints would show up by rolling a piece of glass across the body, but usually it didn’t work. Charlie came up with the Super Glue method. Convert the glue into fumes and tent the body. The sticky stuff settles on the skin, and voila! if someone manhandled the body, prints appear in the glue as the fumes condense on the skin.
“I don’t mind, Charlie. Take the job.”
“I don’t need the money,” he said.
“C’mon, take it. I’d rather have you on the other side than some yahoo who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Remember, I’m supposed to be seeking the truth.”
“No, you’re not, Jake. You’re supposed to be representing Nicky Florio.”
Chapter 4
“Just what is your net worth, Mr. Florio.” H.T. Patterson asked.
“Objection,” I called out, slapping the table with a palm. “The defendant’s financial resources are irrelevant.”
“Irrelevant!” Patterson boomed, as if there were a judge and jury to appreciate his righteous indignation. “Dare you say irrelevant?”
“I dare. And while I’m at it, I dare say immaterial, inadmissible, and just plain none of your business.”
Patterson feigned outrage and turned to the court reporter. “Has the stenographer recorded every word of this obloquial colloquy? When we bring this before the Court, I shall seek sanctions.”
The reporter, a heavyset young woman, nodded silently. Patterson was decked out in a white linen three- piece suit, which was set off nicely by his cocoa-colored skin. He was short and trim, a native of the Bahamas and a former fundamentalist preacher at the Liberty City Baptist Church. After law school, he continued his Holy Rolling, only in the courtroom.
Five of us sat around the conference table in Patterson’s law office-Nicky and Gina Florio, the court reporter, Patterson, and a big lug who used to wear number 58 in the aqua and orange and was now squeezed into an off- the-rack, 46-long seersucker suit.
Before we started the deposition, I sat in H.T. Patterson’s office as he slid a videotape into a VCR. The television screen flickered to life, a helicopter shot of the Miami skyline. Then the music came up, a strident beat stolen from Miami Vice. Finally, two men appeared on the screen, a beaming interviewer and a super-serious Peter Tupton. They sat in straight-backed chairs on a carpeted riser. Between them was a coffee table on which sat an artificial rhododendron, and behind them a logo, QUE PASA, MIAMI? One of those Sunday morning public-affairs shows you watch when the hangover is so bad you can’t bend over to pick up the remote control.
The tape was marked Plaintiff’s Exhibit Seven, and Patterson intended to introduce it at the trial. Under the
