JL04 - Mortal Sin (18 page)

It was a top-down, partly cloudy March day. A trifle too humid, a trifle too warm for this time of year. The weather guys were calling for rain, maybe thunderstorms tonight. I had changed into jeans, deck shoes, and an old aqua-and-orange jersey, number 58, that the Dolphins had forgotten to retire. The ride on Tamiami Trail was smooth and straight. I found the dirt road just west of the Miccosukee Restaurant—fried catfish and frogs’ legs—and turned north. The narrow road bumped and twisted through wet prairie. Occasional cypress strands sprouted out of the saw grass, towering trees dominating the flatlands. I slowed and let two river otters cross the road, then heard a rumble, a mechanical growl somewhere in front of me. I came to a dead stop, and the noise grew louder against the silent landscape.

Then, from around a bend, it bore down on me. At first sight, the truck was all high bumper and huge tires. It braked and kicked up dust as it came to a halt just a few feet from the grill of my old convertible. It was about the size of a cement truck, but where the rotating cylinder would have been was a series of antennae and what looked like satellite dishes. There were two men in the cab, both wearing sunglasses and black baseball caps. They looked at me. I looked at them. Nobody said a word.

The sidewalk wasn’t big enough for both kids, and I was the smaller kid, so I flinched. I backed up and edged onto the gravel berm, trying not to get entangled in vicious mangrove roots. The guy on the passenger side got out, came to the front of the truck, and hand-signaled the driver to turn the wheel a hair to the right to get past me on the narrow road. A slight man in his thirties with narrow shoulders, he wore rubberized boots and white coveralls stained with mud up to the knees. The name “Tucker” was stitched across the chest of his coveralls.

“Don’t see many people out here,” I said pleasantly. “Or trucks like that.”

He mumbled something in agreement.

“What the heck is all that equipment?” I asked, like the good-natured rube I am.

The truck edged by me, threatening my classic canary-yellow paint job, but just missing. On the side of the cab in black letters was the name
ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS, INC
. No address, no phone number, no cute slogan.

Without answering me, the guy in coveralls climbed back into the cab, and the truck rumbled off. I let out the clutch, eased back onto the road, and kept heading north. In ten minutes, I came to a Y and bore to the right, just as I’d been told, and in less than a mile, I ran out of road. I was on a rocky teardrop peninsula. Some bushes, some scraggly pine trees. Wet prairie surrounded me on three sides. A muddy green airboat sat in the shallow water, and a dark-complexioned man in the traditional Micanopy Indian jacket of turquoise, black, red, and half a dozen other colors stood silently on the shore. Maybe five nine, he had a brush cut of thick dark hair, broad shoulders, and short legs. In the Indian jacket, he resembled a colorful fireplug.

I turned off the ignition, put up the top, and locked the doors out of habit, probably thinking an alligator might steal the car. I walked over to the man by the airboat. “Jim Tiger?” I asked him.

He nodded and motioned me in. There were two molded-plastic chairs high on a platform above the flat-bottomed boat. He hit the starter, and the airplane engine coughed to life. The old wooden propeller jerked once, twice, then fired into a whirlwind spin. Tiger didn’t seem talkative, and just as well. Over the roar of the engine, I couldn’t hear a thing. We skimmed along the top of the water, sawing offshoots of grass, flying past pinelands and palms, flushing herons and egrets out of the shallow s. From the position of the sun, we seemed to be heading north, but after two or three sweeping turns, I lost my sense of direction. There was no land, just occasional islands called hammocks, a few cypress domes where wood storks waded, looking for lunch, and the endless river of saw grass.

We think of the Everglades as a vast swamp, but it is actually a shallow river fifty miles wide, flowing southwest for over a hundred miles to the Gulf of Mexico. Two thousand square miles of the Everglades are part of a national park, but that is only a seventh of its total area. Depending on the time of year and the location within the Glades, it can resemble a vast African savanna, dense forests, blue-water bays, rocky beaches, or even the swamp of our imagination.

Time travels slowly in the Glades. The roar of the engine, at first jarring, had a narcotizing effect, the drone making me sleepy after a few minutes. My eyes were growing heavy by the time the engine slowed, the throaty roar diminishing. We swung past a sandy outcropping into deeper water, then headed straight for a hardwood hammock. Frees had been cleared along the shore, and a towering house built of pine stood on stilts where the tree line ended. The rear stilts were on the ground, the front stilts in the water. A porch surrounded the house on three sides, wooden staircases leading from the rear down to the island, and from the front down to a small dock. A gasoline-powered generator sat behind the house, three feet above the ground, on its own stilted platform. In the summer, I imagined, the hammock was partly submerged. The slanted roof of the house was shiny corrugated metal. Drain spouts emptied into a cistern. Two satellite dishes and a microwave antenna were planted on the southwest corner of the roof.

Jim Tiger cut the engine, and we drifted toward the dock, where he hopped out, carrying a bowline. He tied the airboat to a dockside cleat, and I followed him, stretching my legs, before heading up the stairs to the porch, thirty feet above the waterline. On the way up, I caught sight of half a dozen gray-black gators snoozing on the muddy bank below. I hadn’t seen them from the water level, as they blended in with the muck and were partially hidden by the pickerelweed and swamp ferns.

Nicky Florio was sitting in a rocking chair of dark wood, a fishing rod dangling lazily in his hand. He wore chinos and a matching shirt with epaulets and too many pockets. His olive complexion had turned a darker, richer shade from the sun. His black hair was freshly washed, still wet, and combed straight back. Black sunglasses shielded his eyes. On a table of the same dark wood as the chair sat a half-empty champagne glass. A bottle of Perrier-Jouet rested in an ice bucket. Nicky gestured to an adjoining chair. “Welcome to my humble home-away-from-home.”

“Not so humble,” I said, easing into the rocker. The chair was carved from reddish-brown mahogany, with a firm, close grain. The armrests were graceful curves, the legs beveled and smoothly finished. “Not what I pictured when you told me a fishing cabin.” Below us, perched on a fallen branch, a roseate spoonbill fluttered its pink wings and swung its flat bill side to side, sifting through the water. “How’d you ever get the permits to clear the hammock and build in the water?”

“Permits?” The word seemed amusing to him, like “platypus” to a comedian. “This is Injun country, Jake. Seventy thousand acres, and the state and federal government got no rights out here. No Army Corps of Engineers, no Environmental Protection Agency, no Department of Natural Resources. Not even a building inspector to bribe with a case of scotch. You get it, Jake? To a builder, this is heaven on earth.”

Nicky laughed, pleased with himself. Another dark-complexioned man in an Indian jacket appeared from the house. He was carrying a tray that held a chilled mug and a bottle of Grolsch. “You’re welcome to the champagne,” Nicky offered, “but my sources tell me beer’s your drink.”

His sources were right.

In a moment, the same man reappeared carrying a spinning rod.

He handed it to me, then disappeared around the side of the porch.

“What, no one to bait my hook? What kind of host are you?”

Florio used his foot to shove a bucket toward me. I took a look inside, expecting to see shiners or night crawlers, not live finger mullet. “Thought we were fishing for black bass.”

“You kidding? Bass in the Glades been showing up with mercury. Tupton was right, you know. Goddamn garbage plants ruining the environment.”

“Tupton was right?” I asked. I was glad he brought up the name. It saved me the trouble.

“He was right about a lot of things. The phosphorous runoff from the farmlands, the pollution from the sugarcane fields, the scarring of the flats with off-road vehicles.”

I put a mullet on the hook and dropped my line into the water. “Right about everything except your projects.”

“Let’s say he was overzealous when it came to Florio Enterprises. I tried to talk sense to the bastard. I told him we could be allies, I’d fund his favorite causes. Keep the poachers and the three-wheelers out of the Glades.”

“The penny-ante stuff. Meanwhile, developers like you and Gondolier dredge waterways, drain swamps, pave over wetlands, and plan the biggest project the Glades have seen since Tamiami Trail was built sixty years ago.”

He kept his eyes on the water. “Believe me, what we’re going to do will make the Trail seem like…”

“A two-lane road,” I said.

“Exactly.”

Below us, the snouts and humped backs of two manatees appeared above the waterline. Gentle homely mammals related to elephants, this pair probably ran close to a thousand pounds each. I watched the manatees without saying a word, still trying to figure out how to move the conversation in the right direction. Finally, I decided to wade into the murky water. “What’d Tupton find in your den?” I asked.

Florio didn’t blink. “You heard Gondo. The golf course plans.”

“Bullshit. Where was Peter Tupton between six and nine o’clock? He sure wasn’t in the wine cellar, or he would have been found.”

“I give up. You tell me, Counselor.”

I let my line drift with the current. Fishing wasn’t my highest priority just now. “Tupton was with you, probably in the den. Maybe Gondolier was there, too. The two of you were trying to bargain with him, but he wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t take your bribes or your grants, or whatever you called them. But he’d drink your champagne, even though he couldn’t hold it. He passed out, and you carried him into the wine cellar. Maybe you just wanted time to talk it over with Gondolier. Maybe you even made a little joke. ‘Let’s put the bastard on ice for a while.’ Later, the bastard is dead.”

Florio growled and reeled in his line. His bait was gone. “Wild talk like that could upset people.”

“People?”

“Gondolier isn’t as fond of you as I am. Of course, he doesn’t have the common bond we share, right, Jake?”

For a second, I didn’t know what he meant.

Then I did.

“Or does he, Jake? Maybe we both should be pissed at that grease-ball ladies’ man.”

I tried to look confused. It isn’t hard for me. Florio seemed to buy it. He dipped his hand into the bucket of mullet and brought out some fresh bait. “I hired you because of Gina. She’d be very unhappy to hear that you were causing trouble, making crazy accusations you couldn’t prove.”

“Even if I could prove every word, I wouldn’t. I can’t use something I learned while representing you in a way that would harm you.”

“Ethics, Jake?”

“That’s right.”

“Just like with Guillermo Diaz?”

Below us, two pink flamingos were flapping their wings and long-legging it across the top of the water. They came to a stop, folded their legs underneath their bodies, and floated close to some swamp lilies. “Diaz was threatening to kill someone. I thought I could stop him.”

“You found a loophole, right? A technicality. You guys who deal in words, you so-called professionals got an excuse for everything. You understand words but not bricks and mortar. Guys like you and Tupton don’t
build
anything. You
stop
people from building.”

Tupton and me, I thought. A couple of guys who get in the way. And only one of us dead.

“Progress, Jake. People need homes. Florida’s growing like a son of a bitch. We’re the fourth-largest state now. A thousand people a week move here. Do you know what that means to somebody in my business?”

“Heaven on earth,” I said.

“You got it.” His laugh was like a dog’s bark.

Below us, on the muddy bank, one of the alligators, a nine-foot bull, slipped quietly into the water and disappeared under the surface. “It’s a damn shame,” Florio said, “but people get a distorted view of builders from the news media and zealots like Tupton. We’re not predators.” With the tip of his rod, Florio pointed toward the sky where six white birds flew in formation. “The snowy egret. Nearly became extinct because women wanted feathers in their hats a hundred years ago. What kind of bullshit is that? I’m as sensitive to the environment as the next guy, but I’m here to deliver what the country needs and wants.”

“Who decides what the country needs and wants? You?”

“No, the consumer decides. I just fill the need, me and guys just like me. Businessmen. Who’d you rather have doing it? Congress, state agencies, local mayors?” He looked back toward the sky, but the birds were gone. “You think developers are money-hungry sleazebags, don’t you, Jake?”

“Well put,” I agreed.

“Then wake up and smell the money, friend. Who’s been convicted lately? The mayors of Miami Beach and Hialeah, commissioners in Sweetwater, city and county cops, bankers and lawyers and judges you probably have lunch with. Bribery and extortion and what have you. It’s all a game. Money and power. Whoever’s got the biggest dick wins. It’s all around us, Jake. It’s the way of doing business down here. Always has been and always will be.”

All the talk of criminals reminded me of somebody. “I was surprised to see Diaz working for Gondolier,” I said.

“For Gondolier? Diaz works for me.
Everybody
works for me, including that pretty boy Gondolier, though he tends to forget it.”

The manatees cruised back under the house, and Florio dragged his line away from them. Like a lot of people, I figured, he didn’t want to hurt a living creature he could see up close.

“You think it matters to me that you fucked over Diaz?” Florio said. “I couldn’t care less. If anything, it just proved something I suspected.”

My look shot him the question.

“I don’t play by anyone’s rules but my own, and neither do you, Jake.”