JL04 - Mortal Sin (27 page)

C
HARLIE’S OLD DODGE PICKUP HAD MUDDY FENDERS
, a jouncy ride, and squeaky shocks. It hadn’t had a wheel alignment since Zsa Zsa Gabor was an ingénue. The radio was set on a big-band AM station, and the front seat was littered with week-old newspapers and a couple of paperback books. I threw the papers in a trash can, tossed a dog-eared copy of
The Corpse Had a Familiar Face
by Edna Buchanan into the glove compartment, and headed west on Tamiami Trail, playing tug-of-war with the steering wheel, which kept pulling right toward a muddy canal.

I fell in behind an eighteen-wheeler, which soon chugged ahead of me. I let a kid in a Trans Am zoom by me on the two-lane road. Going fifty in Charlie’s truck on a straightaway was exciting enough. It also gave me time to figure what I was going to say to the chief.

The stiff breeze was rattling the thatched fronds of the chickee huts in the Micanopy village. The doll-making and basket-weaving booths were empty. Precious few tourists had paid their five dollars to observe Indian women sew their patchwork quilts or watch a husky young man wrestle a bored gator. It looked as if cobwebs were growing on the eight-passenger airboat—half-hour ride, seven dollars—and the restaurant wasn’t dishing out much Indian fry bread.

Inside the information center, a one-story concrete-block building, I asked a dark-haired, heavyset girl in a turquoise skirt where to find the chief. She smiled, told me I meant the chairman of the tribe, and pointed down the corridor. I followed her directions, knocked on the thin, paneled door, and he coughed me inside.

Henry Osceola sat in his windowless office sucking on a cigarette. The office was decorated in no-frills clutter. Metal filing cabinets, mica desk, the walls bare except for a calendar from a Naples bank and a faded print of a marshy hammock at sunset.

He was a lanky man with a seamed, lived-in face and white hair pulled back in a ponytail. He could have been fifty or seventy or any where in between. He wore a blue knit shirt with a green crocodile on the breast, faded jeans with a beaded belt, and the same high-top basketball shoes favored by a guy with a shaved head in Chicago. His forearms were heavily veined and the color of Nicky Florio’s mahogany furniture. The cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth, and an ashtray on the desk held butts of a dozen more. No filters. He coughed at me a second time, hacked, then used a metal waste can as a spittoon.

Osceola looked at my herringboned self and informed me in a raspy voice that the tribe had all the insurance it was going to need for the next twenty years. I told him I was a lawyer, and he let me know that the airboat passengers all sign waivers, so I could go chase ambulances somewhere else, he had work to do. Then he opened a folder and began going through what looked like a stack of bills. He was writing checks, muttering to himself, oblivious to me. The nails of his thumb and index finger on his right hand were stained a deep yellow.

“I’m here about something else,” I said. “Your dealings with Nicky Florio.”

“You Florio’s lawyer?”

“Yes. No. Well, I was.”

“Not too sure of yourself, are you?” He looked up at me through a haze of cigarette smoke. “I don’t remember you from the negotiations.”

“I wasn’t there. I want to talk to you about the ninety-nine-year lease.”

There was the hint of a smile. “White man want to break treaty?”

I didn’t know what to say.

He barked out a laugh. “That was a joke, Mr. Lawyer. Like the comedians on the cable.” He pointed over his shoulder. “I installed the satellite dish for the village. One hundred twenty-three stations. Soccer games from Hungary. Parliament from London. Nude commercials from Scandinavia. Comedians on the pay channels, but of course we don’t pay. The air is free, and if HBO sued us, we would say that the Great White Father in Washington granted us domain over the land, both to the core of the earth and to the stars in the sky.”

He looked at me but didn’t get a reaction. “That was a joke too. An Indian in an old Western might say, ‘Great White Father.’ So, I am being self-deprecating and sarcastic at the same time. Am I going too fast for you?”

I told him he had a better sense of humor than most CEOs I deal with, so it would take me a while to keep pace.

“Do you watch the comedians?” he asked.

I told him I liked Dennis Miller and Robin Williams, George Carlin and Richard Pryor. He nodded judiciously, as a chief, or tribal chairman, should.

“The African-American ones are my favorites,” he said, after thinking about it. “Pryor especially. He expresses the pain. Eddie Murphy, too, but like a young man, all he thinks about is…”He made a motion of running his right thumb through a circle made of his left thumb and index finger. “Bill Cosby is too soft. No pain. As for his television program…”He shook his head sadly. “You are probably thinking that Native Americans have a natural affinity for African Americans.”

“Certainly, both groups have been victimized.”

“Victimized is such a sugarcoated euphemism for genocide, don’t you think? Did you know that my tribe gave refuge to runaway slaves in the early 1800s?”

I shook my head.

“That, of course, led to attacks by the American troops. Neither the first nor the last.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette, leaving him with a quarter-inch butt that disappeared between his thumb and finger. “What is your interest in the lease?”

“It’s not my interest, really. It’s yours. And your tribe’s. And all the people of Florida.”

He regarded me skeptically.

I regarded me skeptically.

Without taking his eyes from mine, Henry Osceola ground out the butt in the ashtray and pulled a fresh Camel from a pack on the desk. “Are you here on behalf of Mr. Florio?”

“No. He doesn’t know I’m here. He wouldn’t like it if he knew I wanted to help you.”

Osceola ignored a plastic lighter on the desk and reached into his desk drawer for a six-inch-long wooden match. He struck his thumbnail to the phosphorous tip and let the match burn for a moment before lighting his cigarette in the orange flame. Why did I get the feeling he was putting on a show for me?

“Ah,” Henry Osceola said, “a turncoat. Like Kevin Costner in the movie with the wolves, you have abandoned the ways of the white man to help the Native American.”

I couldn’t help feeling that he was mocking me.

“Now what is it you have come to say, that the great white builder of condominiums is not to be trusted?”

“Yes, but more than that. If what I’ve been told is true, the lease is unconscionable. Is there a clause that allows Florio Enterprises to assign the lease without the tribe’s consent?”

Henry Osceola spun around in his chair, bent over, and opened a file drawer in a green metal cabinet. He fiddled around for a moment, then withdrew a blue-backed document. He handed it to me, dropping a thin line of ash on the cover page. I thumbed to the back. Forty-seven pages in total. I went to the front.

Whereas the Micanopy Tribe of Indians is the owner in fee simple of certain realty more particularly described as follows…

I looked at the Terms and Conditions clause. Florio paid a lousy fifty thousand for the option to lease the land. The lease wouldn’t become effective until the option was exercised with a payment of $I million when construction began on Cypress Estates, described in the lease as a “residential-commercial” venture. A separate clause described in general terms the “cultural-tourism” phase of the project, a smokescreen for the casino. No money up front. Just as Florio had told me, a provision giving the tribe 10 percent of Florio Enterprises’ gross receipts.

I skimmed quickly through the rest. The assignability clause would be near the back along with the boilerplate—the choice-of-law, arbitration, and severability provisions—that nobody but a Philadelphia lawyer ever reads. And there it was, on page 45, innocuous as could be.

The Lessee may freely assign all or portions of this Agreement in its discretion, whether to third parties, or to affiliated entities, without the consent of the Lessor.

I pushed the lease back across the desk toward Osceola. “Did you understand this clause?”

He coughed, exhaling a puff of smoke in my direction, looked quickly at the page, and said, “You probably think we Ye just a bunch of dumb Indians. We had a lawyer, you know. A real estate man from Collier County. He read all the fine print. He told us we were getting a good deal because we were in for a percentage of the gross receipts. ‘Stay away from the net,’ he kept saying. ‘If it’s net profits, they’ll load up all their expenses on you, and you’ll never see a dime.’ That’s what we focused on.”

“Well, he lost sight of something else. Florio Enterprises can assign its contract for one dollar to another of Nicky Florio’s companies. Then you’ll get ten percent of whatever that other company decides to pay to Florio Enterprises as a management fee. It doesn’t matter if they’re making a hundred million a year in profit, they can give the management company anything they want.”

Henry Osceola turned toward his waste bucket and hacked up a wad of phlegm.

“What Florio’s paying you is a drop in the bucket,” I said, immediately regretting my choice of words. “This lease is going to make Nicky Florio one of the richest men in the country. See, there’s something Florio didn’t tell you. The so-called cultural-tourism phase isn’t just a museum and Indian village. It’s gambling, and I don’t mean bingo.”

I wanted to let the curiosity build. There is a look a man gets when he knows he’s been taken but doesn’t know quite how. He’s desperate for the knowledge but doesn’t want to show it. I hoped to see that look on Henry Osceola’s face but didn’t get it. He cocked his head and waited. If anything, he looked puzzled by me, not curious at what I was saying.

“Blackjack,” I said.

I let it soak in. He stubbed out his cigarette and didn’t reach for another.

“Craps,” I said. “Poker, keno, slots, roulette.”

I told him everything I knew, leaving out only the decapitation of Rick Gondolier. While I spoke, Henry Osceola didn’t smoke, spit, or talk. His creased face took it all in and didn’t let any of it out. I told him the projections on traffic and population and visitors. I told him how this information probably got Peter Tupton killed. I told him I couldn’t represent the tribe, but I could get him a lawyer to challenge the lease. Get some publicity on how the slick developer cheated the Native Americans. Turn it all around. Invalidate the lease, maybe get the federal government to investigate.

He studied me for a while. Outside the windowless office, a scratchy public-address system was announcing a special cooking demonstration.

Finally, he said, “We know all about the gambling.”

“You do?”

“It was disclosed by Mr. Florio. Not in the documents, of course. They become public records, and we understood the need for confidentiality until the time is right.”

“I don’t understand. Why would you let him do this? You’re being shortchanged, taken advantage of. You’re selling Manhattan Island for twenty-four bucks.”

“The gambling is secondary. Surely you know that.”

“Secondary!” The rest of it, I thought. Just as Gina said. But what was the rest of it? “Secondary to what?”

He leaned back in his chair, his hand automatically reaching for the Camels. The pack was empty. His fingers crushed the paper and tossed it into the stained waste can. “The other contract, of course. As Mr. Florio’s lawyer, you must know…”

My face had given it away.

“You don’t know, do you?”

I could have tried to bluff it—
oh that contract
—but I wouldn’t have known what to say. Maybe I wasn’t a good enough actor to be a lawyer. Maybe I was just a lousy liar. I shook my head. “No, I don’t know, but you could tell me.”

“Your concern for our welfare is heartening,” Henry Osceola said, “though I wonder about your loyalty to your client. Rest assured that we are quite aware of what we have given and what we shall receive in our dealings with Mr. Florio.” He made a point of looking at his watch, an old Timex on an alligator band. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to pay the hills of the froggers and crabbers and other thieves who supply the restaurant, to say nothing of the fuel and electrical bills for the village.” He smiled pleasantly at me. “And at five o’clock, the classics channel is showing
Fort Apache
with John Wayne. I never miss it.”

I didn’t know whether that was a joke, but I know when I’m being asked to leave. As I let the door close behind me, I peeked over my shoulder and took one last look at Henry Osceola.

The smile was gone. With the telephone cradled to his ear, he punched out a number he must have known by heart.

T
HE WIND WHIPPED ALONG TAMIAMI TRAIL, TUGGING AT CHARLIE’S
top-heavy pickup, which shimmied and shook, rattled and rolled. It was cold enough to fire up the heater, but the knob was missing. I twisted the threaded screw and was hit in the face with a blast of fumes that would have shut down Three Mile Island. Ahead of me, a full moon hung over Miami. I headed due east, the saw grass waving in the wind on each side of the road.

I was still thirty miles east of town when I saw the blue light in the rearview mirror. I checked my speedometer. The needle was jumping between 50 and 55. I slowed to make sure the police car meant me. It pulled to within a few feet, and a voice over its loudspeaker politely asked me to please bring my vehicle to a safe stop.

When I pumped the brakes and clunked to a halt on the berm, the same voice told me to please exit my vehicle, step to the rear, and bring my license and registration with me. I got out and did most of what I was told. The police car had its high beams on, and the blue light kept flashing. I squinted at the officer who approached me, one hand on the butt of his still-holstered revolver, just the way they teach them. He was dark-complexioned with long, straight black hair and, like so many cops these days, he had the overblown trapezius muscles that sloped from shoulders to neck and revealed the serious weight lifter.