Gagliano,Anthony - Straits of Fortune.wps (12 page)

and opened the door of a small refrigerator behind his desk. I used the break to read a plaque on the wall to my left. Ten years before, while with the Border Patrol over in Texas, he had saved a Mexican from drowning in the Rio Grande. I wondered if that was why he'd gotten transferred. When he turned around, he had two cans of Diet Coke in his hands, one of which he set down in front of me. He opened his and took a long sip, then held the can up before setting it down. "You remember Tab?" he asked. "Sure, but I don't think they make it anymore." "Yeah, they do, but it's hard to find. You can get it in Mexico, though." "You can get anything in Mexico." "Yeah," he said, "especially the clap." We laughed, but then it got quiet all of a sudden, as though a match had been snuffed out, and Cortez and I were just watching one another over the tops of our soda cans. "You used to train my wife," Cortez said. "You're kidding." "No, I'm serious. About a year ago." "Maybe so. I don't remember. In my business people come and go." "Yeah," Cortez said. "That's the way it is around here, too." "What's her name, your wife?" "Susan Andrews. Blond, short hair. Kind of tall. Don't sit there and tell me you don't remember her." "Oh, yeah. Sure I remember her." "I bet you remember her ass, right?" "That, too." "I bet you do. Don't get cute with me, Jackie boy. There's no reason to be. We split up a long time ago." "Sorry to hear it." 100

Cortez leaned forward in his chair and clasped his hands in front of him. He stared down at his mated fingers for so long that I thought he was going to start praying. Then he lifted his head suddenly, his dark eyes beaming with suspicion. "Tell me the truth," he said in a soft voice. "Were you doing her?" "What makes you think I was?" "Why wouldn't you?" I thought for a moment. "She was married to a cop. How stupid do you think I am?" "Considering your current location," Cortez said, looking around, "pretty stupid." "Thanks." "Don't mention it." He lit another cigarette. "By the way, while I have you here, Jack, let me ask you a personal question. What were you doing in the water this morning, and why would somebody shoot at you? You know who it was?" "No idea," I said. "So let me get this straight. Some guy just pulls up out of nowhere and decides to take a few shots at you. Is that right?" "I don't see any other explanation," I said. "I do," Cortez answered. "Let's say the personal-training gig isn't bringing in the megabucks you had been hoping for. So you find yourself a partner with a nice fast boat and you go and get yourself a bunch of Haitians or Cubans, take their money, and dump them somewhere. Nice money in smuggling. If they had a better dental plan, I'd get into the business myself." "You think I'm a smuggler?" "I think you're a fucking liar. That's what I think. I think your partner decided to go solo, keep the cash for himself. So you go overboard like the sack of shit you are, and he 101

takes a few potshots at your head, only we show up and he's got to boogey. Is that it?" "If that's the case," I said, "where are the people we smug- gled? Oh, wait, I got it now. Me and my partner forgot we were both citizens, and so we were taking turns smuggling each other into Miami. This morning was my turn. Yeah, that's it. You know, Cortez, Susan told me you were crazy. I'm just glad to see now she was wrong." "She told you I was crazy?" Cortez asked. "Let's just say that she mentioned you were the jealous type." "You telling me she didn't come on to you?" "Not to my face, no." "What the hell does that mean, `not to my face'? What are you, some kind of fucking leprechaun or something?" I looked at him for a moment, confused. It had been a long time since anybody had called me a leprechaun. "I think I need to talk to a lawyer," I said. "What were you doing in the water?" "Taking a swim. I'm a personal trainer. I have to stay in shape." "What about the guy with the rifle and the speedboat? We're supposed to forget about that? Just fish you out of the drink and let you go on your way?" "Sometimes you just have to let bygones be bygones," I told him. "Besides, this is Miami--people get shot every day. Maybe he thought I was somebody else." He smiled thinly, picked up the old-fashioned black phone, and placed it in front of me like an offering. "Dial away, scumbag." I dialed a number and listened as it rang. Cortez watched me, grinning. "Which lawyer you calling?" he asked. "If I were you, his last name would be Dershowitz." 102

"Can't afford him," I said. "I'm calling your ex-wife." Cortez blinked, and then his eyes widened. He smiled broadly as he took a long drag on his cigarette. Then he ex- haled. "This is going to be better than I thought," he said. "Won't that bitch be surprised?" Susan Andrews, formerly Susan Cortez, had been a hard- working, highly underpaid prosecutor when she was referred to me by Judge Dryer, a client of mine, who, sad to say, got sent to jail for taking bribes over on Miami Beach. Susan and Ruben--Inspector Cortez--were divorcing, and I was the centerpiece of her personal renaissance, her transforma- tion from unhappy and unappreciated wife to unattached single. It seems she had caught Ruben coming out of the Stardust Motel on Biscayne Boulevard with her best friend, a rather curvaceous fellow attorney, at which time Susan had decided not only to get rid of Ruben but to hire herself a personal trainer and to get back into shape. I had trained her five days a week, which is a lot of time to spend with a woman who's going through a divorce and who therefore tends to see her husband's philandering face superimposed over that of any male foolish enough to get within range. But for fifty bucks an hour, a man has to be willing to walk through a minefield now and then and trust that his charm will allow him to live long enough to make a profit. But I liked Susan. She was mean and crazy and gave off the kind of chronic bad vibes that lead to the whimsical pur- chase of handguns, but still, I liked her. She made it clear that she hated men and was indulging me only because of my expertise and Judge Dryer's recommendation. I, in turn, had made it clear that I didn't give a shit about her personal problems and was only in it for the money, which, of course, as a lawyer, she seemed to appreciate, at least from the standpoint of a fellow professional. For the better part of six months, I ran with Susan, I biked 103

with Susan, and I showed Susan how to lift weights. But what she liked most was putting on the eight-ounce gloves and going a few rounds with me in a park near her new crib in the Grove. Basically, what she liked to do was beat the shit out of me three times a week, weather permitting. Forgetting her violent frame of mind, I had insisted that she wear head- gear and padding while I, being Jack Vaughn, "The Motiva- tor" (that's what it says on my business card), wore only a smile. By the end of the second week, Susan had fractured two of my ribs and loosened an incisor with a roundhouse kick. Seems she had forgotten to mention the brown belt in tae kwon do. After the tooth incident, I wised up and started dressing a little more like the Michelin Man. I even wore a steel cup inside my jockstrap--an accessory I hadn't needed with any of my other clients, not even the Sheik. Not being too bright, I made the mistake of introducing Susan to Vivian so as to dispel the notion I sensed percolat- ing in the latter's jealous mind that there was anything going on between Susan and me. Vivian had started showing up at the park where Susan and I had our kickboxing sessions, and while I always pretended not to have seen her, I thought it would be a good idea to make a preemptive move before the jealousy got ugly. I made arrangements for us to meet at a bar around the corner from Susan's office. We met during a happy hour, which failed to live up to its name. Susan brought along a nice-looking fellow named Jason, a nonen- tity in a business suit who seemed surprised to be alive. It didn't take long before I realized I'd made a fatal mistake. Susan and Vivian had liked one another about as much as the FBI likes the Mafia, maybe less so. They had nothing in common except their anatomy and the fact that each in her own way was beautiful. We were sitting at a small table with a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth and a candle as 104

a centerpiece. I remember this aspect of the decor not be- cause I'm romantic but because of the way their eyes glared in the flickering light. Almost immediately it became clear that they were looking for something to get nasty about, and needless to say they soon found a suitable subject: Chilean wine. I became the mediator while Jason did his imitation of the Invisible Man. I was so anxious to get out of the place that I paid the bill five minutes before the food appeared from the kitchen. After that delightful evening, things begin to sour between Susan and me, and she cut her sessions from five to three, then to two, on down until it became every now and then. She let me know that she was dating Jason and had gotten into tennis. The training sessions became increasingly un- pleasant and the cup protecting my balls increasingly neces- sary. I might be slow, but no one ever called me stupid, so I knew it had something to do with Vivian. Maybe in some strange female way, she felt betrayed by the fact that I had a beautiful girlfriend, though I had spoken of her often enough--especially in the beginning when I was trying to convince my new emotionally labile client that she was relatively safe with me. Under those circumstances, even if Vivian hadn't existed, I would have invented her for business purposes alone. Call it Machiavellian if you will; I call it public relations. It had been a way of neutering myself without having to undergo the actual surgery, and it had worked, too--at least until the two women sat down and went to war over the seemingly insane subject of Chilean wine. Then, as frequently happens in my business, Susan disap- peared from my calendar altogether, became a name con- signed to the papery wings of my dog-eared Rolodex. The last time I heard from her, she had left her old job and joined a law firm and was now defending the same money-launder- 105

ing drug dealers she'd previously been charged with putting in jail. As it turns out, the dealers had a lot more money, and, in the charade that is the war on drugs, no one at her old place of employment thought the worse of her for defect- ing. Inspector Ruben was now nothing more than a foolish face, fading fast in life's rearview mirror. Jason had faded, too. She had a new man now, and things were, as they say, getting serious. There was no time for Jack, and I was made to understand that I, too, was part of the past. So long and thanks for the push-ups. Now here I was, sitting across from her ex-husband, call- ing her at the office of one of Miami's biggest law firms, Bal- thazar, Epstein and Blake, with the offhanded hope that she might be of a mind to help me out. The receptionist passed me along to a secretary who passed me along to an assistant who put me on hold for so long my ear began to ache from the pressure of the receiver against it. All the while Cortez sat looking at me with a demented grin on his face, like an alligator that happened to close its jaws just as an unlucky sparrow flew by. I was nothing to him but a small snack sent by the devil to help ease him through the endless boredom of his day. Finally Susan came to the phone. Her voice was brisk, demanding, the voice of a woman with very little time to spare. There was a long pause when she realized that it was her old friend and former personal trainer calling her, a puzzled silence that told me she was surprised, though not particularly pleased, to hear from me. I got right into it, what had happened and where I was. She let me talk. The silence deepened when she found out I was sitting across from her ex-husband. After a moment she told me to put Cortez on the line. The inspector grinned when I handed him the phone. His first words were, "Hey, babe," and I knew immediately that 106

they were the wrong words to use with the new and improved Susan Andrews. His grin vanished, and he shifted uneasily in his chair, as though a splinter had found its way into his ass. His face grew tighter and less self-assured by degrees, until it became a mask first of doubt, then of quiet anger. I couldn't hear her words, but I could guess their tone: cold and professional, filled with a steady refusal of all intimacy. I studied his face as he listened. I saw confidence replaced first by disbelief, then by acceptance. Cortez was nothing to her now, just the voice of a minor official with very few cards to play. At the end of their conversation, he handed the phone back to me. I hadn't liked what I'd heard him say. Susan's version wasn't any better. I was going to be stuck at Krome for a while. "Listen to me, Jack," she said. "They're going to hold you there at Krome over the weekend. Then they'll transfer you down to federal court. They want to charge you with smug- gling illegal aliens. The charge is bullshit and won't hold, but Ruben has to cover his ass on this one. Even so, under normal circumstances I could get you out on bail, but not till they send you downtown for arraignment. They're not in any hurry to do that. I can make a few calls, but it will be Monday at the earliest. That means you have to sit tight and wait." "I can't stay here that long," I said. "You don't have a choice. I can't do any better than Monday, and even that soon will require some maneuvering. By the way, do you have any idea how much I charge?" "I guess food stamps are out of the question, but don't worry. I've come into a little money." "Good," she said. "Because I bill at three hundred an hour. Listen, Jack, I have to go now. Can you behave yourself for a few days?" "I doubt it. There's a lot of shit happening." 107

"I'll see you on Monday morning." I didn't say anything. My mind was on other matters. "I said I'll see you on Monday," Susan said. "All right," I said. "Monday." Susan hung up. I handed the phone to Cortez, who spoke into it for a moment before realizing she was gone. He looked disappointed, then set the phone back in its cradle. "I guess you're going to be here for a while," he said. "So it would seem." "I see the bitch still holds a grudge," he said. "What do you expect? You were screwing her friend. Women tend to take things like that personally." "You're right. I was an asshole. I'll admit that." He stared down at the desk for a moment, as though seeking either his own reflection in the scorched mahogany or else some revelation that eluded him. He shook his head and looked up at me. "Her voice--did you notice it? I don't know. I mean, it didn't sound quite right. Like there was something under it. You know what I mean? You used to be a cop, right? Up in New York. You tell me." "She wasn't to glad to hear from either of us. That's for sure," I told him. "That's not what I'm talking about. It was something else." "I know. I caught it, too. Sounded like stress to me. Of course, she's a lawyer. That could be it." "What could be more stressful than a hundred and fifty cases at a time as a prosecutor, and that on thirty-two five a year?" "Divorce." "She's past that now. I'm not even a blip on the radar screen anymore. You heard how she talked. I guess I knew it was over, but you never know how over it is until you hear it 108