JL04 - Mortal Sin (21 page)

The wind went out of me. Maybe it was the accumulation of tension and exhaustion, horror and fear. Maybe it was a lot of things I’d seen and heard and done and had done to me. Maybe it was the image of Rick Gondolier’s floating head disappearing into the mouth of a yellow-eyed dragon.

Peter Tupton was dead, and unless I was wrong, the murderer was sitting three feet away, pouring me booze. I had used perjured testimony to help him win a lousy civil case. I was close to being tossed out of my profession, and I didn’t seem to care. A few hours ago, I nearly pissed my pants when a poker table turned into a butcher’s block. I watched a man decapitated, then helped dispose of the body, then watched as prehistoric beasts disposed of his carcass. And now this…

I fought through the numbness and looked Florio in the eyes. “She told you to kill
me
and to spare Gondolier.”

I sounded lame, feeble.

“That’s what she said, Counselor. What do you think of that?”

Nothing.

Emptiness.

Loss.

“Don’t look so damn sorry for yourself. How long have you known Gina?”

“Forever,” I said.

“And what mistake do people always make with her? I mean, when they see her. All blond, all boobs. What do they think?”

“They think she’s a bimbo. They think she’s stupid.”

“Right. Is she stupid, Jake?”

“No. She has great instincts. She can read people.”

“Damn right! She thought if she told me to kill you, I’d do just the opposite. I’d spare you and kill Gondolier. And she was right. Until I thought it over. Like I said before, Jake, you and I have something in common. We both know Gina, and lucky for you, I know her better than you do. I knew that if I killed you, I’d lose her, because I would have killed a piece of her. You’re part of her history, you’re part of her. Why do you think she broke off with you?”

“I don’t know. It’s happened before.”

“Because she was in conflict. She cared for you. You made her life more difficult, and what does Gina do when life gets difficult?”

“She runs away. Always has.”

“Right. Now Gondolier was another story. She had no feelings for him, so she could screw him without messing up her head, and at the same time, she could hurt me, because he was my partner.”

I took a long hit on the scotch. My eyes watered, and beads of sweat appeared on my forehead. “Why should she want to hurt you?”

“Good question. Why has she fooled around on every man she’s married? I didn’t know, so I asked her to see a shrink. She goes, and after twenty grand or so, the shrink says she has low self-esteem. Doesn’t feel she deserves the big house and the boat and the servants, and a man who adores her. So she tries to sabotage it every time, and she does a damn good job. As for Jake Lassiter, you’re her safe harbor. You don’t try to buy her—you’re just a regular guy from the old days who shared some good times with her. So she starts to develop intimacy with you, which frightens her, and she bolts again.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because I don’t want to lose her. If you’re dead, she’ll mourn for you. She’ll blame me, but even worse, she’ll blame herself, lowering her esteem even more, fulfilling the prophecy—that’s what the shrink called it—that she doesn’t deserve happiness. So she’ll fall into bed with the next guy, or maybe even leave me.”

“And if I’m alive, what then?”

“You tell me, Counselor.”

“Gina will come back to me. She always does.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Right. If you’re happy and healthy and doing your own thing, sooner or later she’ll run back to her safe harbor. On the other hand, after tonight’s little show, you might be inclined to turn the lady down.”

My head was spinning off course. I imagined Nicky Florio asking a psychiatrist whether killing me would be therapeutic for his wife. I imagined a bearded, pipe-smoking shrink in a cardigan telling him to bond with me first, discuss our common ground, then consider whether his desire to kill me stemmed from his unorganized, primitive id or a desire to help his wife.

“So, bottom line, Jake, we’re competitors, enemies where Gina is concerned. She’s my wife, but you knew her first. You’ve got history, but you’re playing on my territory, so I make the rules. Are you with me?”

The gods make their own rules, I thought, the phrase still rattling around in my head. “I’m not sure.”

“Think about it, Jake. What have you learned tonight?”

“A straight beats three of a kind.”

Florio was shaking his head. “You always made her laugh. She told me that. But I don’t think you’re that funny. I think you use the wise-guy stuff to avoid reality, and, Jake, my friend, reality is staring you in the face.”

I sensed Diaz shifting his feet. Maybe he was tired of standing there, or maybe he was getting ready to put bullet holes in the white cotton sofa, a goodly portion of which was covered by me.

“I spent all this time with you,” Florio said, “trying to teach you a lesson. I wanted you to see Gondolier get it. It was important for you to understand your situation, your lack of options. I wanted you to know what happens with just one fuckup.”

I polished off the rest of the scotch. It was suddenly very warm in the house on stilts built without permits. “Message received, loud and clear.”

“Good. Because I want to give you a chance. I’m offering you the benefit of my wisdom and experience, and you sit here and crack wise. Don’t you see what I’m trying to teach—”

“Rule number two,” I said. “Co-opt the enemy. Infiltrate, buy ’em off.”

His smile seemed genuine. “You got it right. I want to keep you where I can see you.”

“Which is where?”

He stood up, swinging a leg over the back of the chair and spinning it away. He walked over to the sofa and looked down at me. “Stand up, Jake.”

Now what?

Diaz moved a little to his left, getting Florio out of his line of sight. Or was it his line of fire?

I stood. I had become so obedient so quickly.

Florio extended a hand. I reached out, tentatively, and he shook it firmly. “Welcome aboard, Jake.” He turned toward Diaz. “Hey, Guillermo, let go of your gun and shake hands with my new partner.”

D
AWN WAS AN ORANGE GLOW TO THE EAST, A CHATTERING OF
birds, a succession of splashes and ripples in the water below. In the distance, I heard what sounded like thunderclaps, but after a moment they seemed to be a series of dull, thudding explosions. The morning light cut across a table in what could have been a bedroom in the southeast corner of the house. But there was no room for a bed. A table took up most of the entire room. It held a larger version of the scale model of Cypress Estates that Charlie and I had seen at the bingo hall. The same shops and apartments, burger palaces and gas stations, the lagoons and wood storks. But other things, too.

The golf course.

Parking garages.

Miniature buses. Dozens of them.

And a huge building on stilts, a cream-colored flying saucer of a building that looked like a domed stadium. Next to it, connected by a shaded catwalk over the water, was a miniature version of the same building.

“Know what you’re looking at, Jake?”

“Looks like a modern sports complex, a football stadium next to a basketball arena. Kind of like the Vet and the Forum, except your stadium is domed.”

“This ain’t Philadelphia, Jake. The small building will be the Living Everglades Museum. The roof is retractable, lets the sun shine in. Rain, too. It’ll have a zoo, a herbarium, a living garden, an aviary, an electronically controlled habitat of every species of life found in the Everglades. We’re going to grow the plants and raise the animals and make it all accessible. I’m the guy who’s going to preserve the Everglades. I was going to make Tupton the executive director of the museum and living habitat. I’d fund everything. Now look at this.” He pointed to a remote section of the model, a hardwood hammock with several airboats pulled up to a dock. Models of dark-skinned men and women sat around campfires near miniature chickee huts. “Our authentic Indian village. No alligator wrestling, no T-shirt stands. The real thing. Indians living and fishing and cooking for everyone to see the old ways.”

He saw the look I was giving him. “You didn’t think this stuff was important to me, did you, Jake? You thought it was all about money. Well, you’re wrong. You and Tupton and all the do-gooders think in clichés and stereotypes. A man’s a developer, he must be a robber baron who doesn’t give a shit about the birds. Damn, it’s not that simple. I grew up hunting in the forest near Ocala. I used to fish for bass in Lake Okeechobee. Don’t you understand I
agreed
with Tupton on the goals? It’s his methods that sucked. Lawsuits against developers, a freeze on building permits in Monroe County. Double the impact fees in Collier County. Lying down in front of the bulldozers for the TV cameras. That’s all crap.”

“I don’t get it. If you were going to do all this, why was Tupton fighting you?”

“He wasn’t, not at first. I needed his support for the project, and in the beginning he was receptive. At least, he said he’d listen.”

“Until he saw the golf course…”

“Fuck the golf course! The golf course is diddly-squat. Until he saw the
casino.
”

Florio pointed to what I thought was the domed stadium. “Look at it, Jake. Forget bingo. Say hello to blackjack, roulette, craps, slots, keno, poker, the whole works. And look what else. Unlike Vegas, it’s got windows, a walkway three hundred sixty degrees around the building and into the museum. Bring the kids for a nature walk. You can look out over the slough, commune with nature, watch snowy egrets soar…”

“Draw to an inside straight,” I said.

“It’s not funny, Jake. I had everything lined up, but Tupton blows it.”

Nicky Florio sat there thinking about it, and I waited for him to tell me the story. It didn’t take long.

“At the party, Tupton wanders into my den and sees the plans for the casino. When he came across the estimates of the number of visitors, he nearly fainted. I had told him we were going to bring gambling to the project, but maybe he didn’t comprehend what that meant. He wanted the museum and the habitat so much, maybe he closed his eyes to the rest. But now he sees the ten-year projections, and they stagger him. Widening Tamiami Trail, two thousand buses a day, Phase Two of the housing plan, high-rise condos, apartments, town houses. It blew his mind, but what could he expect? How did he think I was going to pay for the museum?

“Selling alligator wallets at the souvenir stand,” I suggested.

“We’re talking forty-five million for construction and other capital expenditures, another fifteen in start-up costs, and ten to twelve million in shortfall revenue per year. I couldn’t pay for it with greens fees.”

“So you killed him.”

Florio shook his head. “Wrong! Christ, don’t you know I told you the truth about Tupton? The guy was drunk. He wandered into the wine cellar, popped a few corks, and passed out.”

“We’ve been over this,” I said. “Why didn’t the caterers find his body?”

“Damned if I know. Maybe he wandered off and came back after the caterers left, who knows? Maybe somebody moved him, but it wasn’t me. Jake, I liked the guy, I really did. I tried to tell him we could have it all. In addition to everything else, I promised him fifteen percent of the casino profits for preservation of endangered species. Do you knowhow much money we’re talking about? Shit, they could create
new
species with the cash flow. We’re talking ten million visitors a year.”

“Which is what he objected to.”

Florio nodded. “Not even willing to listen. He was going to run to the papers with news about the casino. It would’ve blown sky-high.”

“Sooner or later, it’ll happen anyway,” I said.

“But I’ll choose when and where. It’s the only way to keep the media from screwing everything up. There was a headline the other day that the Florida Keys coral reef is dying, and who do they blame? Builders, because everyone wants simple answers, and we’re the guys who bulldoze the mangroves, dredge up the sediment. It doesn’t occur to these smart guys that hurricanes, cold fronts, black-band disease, and a bunch of other natural causes can kill the coral. Why the fuck shouldn’t the coral die? Everything in nature dies. Maybe a hundred years from now, another coral reef will form somewhere off Australia, but they don’t consider that. We’re so damned intent on preserving nature that we don’t let nature take its course.”

“You’re saying the alligator kills the wood stork, so why shouldn’t you?”

“I’m saying nature is deadly. In the Glades, some Australian pine trees are so toxic their falling leaves will kill other plants along the canals. That’s Mother Nature, pal. Lightning hits a hammock of slash pines and turns the shrubbery into kindling. But once the shrubs are burned up, the sunlight reaches the ground where the pine seedlings are just taking root.”

“So you’re just another lightning bolt?”

“As usual, Jake, you’re missing my point, which is that developers are easy targets. We’re as despised as…”

“Lawyers.”

“Yeah, almost. We make better villains than the farmers. Why don’t they take on Big Sugar? You knowhow much of the Everglades is planted with cane? I’ll tell you, five hundred thousand acres. You can’t even imagine it until you see the fields. The runoff of phosphorous has done more damage to the ecosystem than all the condos ever built.” Florio stared out into space. “Fucking De La Torre.” He turned to me. “You know him?”

“President of National Sugar, but I always thought his first name was Carlos.”

“The prick fucking owns Tallahassee. Between government price supports and paying slave wages, he’s gotten filthy rich.”

“You sound jealous.”

“Yeah, well, I gotta pay union wages and bid on jobs. But it ain’t all sweet with sugar. The new free-trade treaty with Mexico, the imports from Cuba when Castro falls, the GATT treaty, they all keep De La Torre awake at night. So he wants a sideline, some extra security for the future.”