JL04 - Mortal Sin (5 page)

“The report confirms what you said, Charlie. Ventricular fibrillation caused by hypothermia.”

“So all you’re dealing with is a wrongful-death suit. Just another dispute about money.”

“Right. Social-host liability.”

Charlie seemed to be studying the man-made sand dunes on the beach across Ocean Drive. “Who’s the plaintiff’s lawyer?”

“Henry Thackery Patterson.”

“H.T.’s good, though a trifle flamboyant for my tastes,” Charlie observed.

“He’s already filed a boilerplate complaint. Simple negligence for serving alcohol to an intoxicated guest. I’ll file an answer with the usual affirmative defenses, comparative negligence and assumption of the risk.”

“Blame it on the victim, eh?”

“Sure. The old defense gambit. The plaintiff caused his own harm, so don’t point the finger at the party hosts who had to keep the hors d’oevres moving.”

Charlie shook his head. “Whatever happened to the concept ‘
de mortuis nihil nisi bonum’?”

“Damned if I know.”

“Speak kindly of the dead,” Charlie translated.

“Why? They’re the only ones who can’t sue for slander.”

Charlie tut-tut-tutted and finished cleaning his plate of the eggplant goo with a swipe of his pita. “I still don’t know what’s troubling you. Talk to me, Jake.”

“Too many questions don’t have answers. Didn’t they miss Tupton at the party? Didn’t anybody see him go in there or see his car parked all night in the street in front of the house? How about his clothes, still hanging in a closet in a guest room?”

Charlie wrinkled his forehead. “You’re talking like a prosecutor now. You’ve been retained to defend a simple civil suit. Just do your job.”

Charlie was right. I should file my pleadings, take my depos, make my motions, and eventually settle the case before trial. The usual old soft-shoe. I was trying to treat this like any other case. I really was. But my mind was buzzing with other thoughts. Gina. Nicky. Tupton.

“Is there coverage?” Charlie asked.

“A million in homeowner’s, another five-million umbrella policy.”

“So, you have no downside. Win, you’re a hero. Lose, the insurance company pays. Why go looking for goblins in the night?”

“Hey, you’re the guy who taught me not to accept things at face value. ‘Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream.’ That was you talking, Charlie. And how about this little ditty, ‘Seek the truth,’ or however the hell you say it.”

“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.”

“J
UST 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,
QUÉ 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 rules of discovery, I could see it first.

“What’s the relevance of this?” I asked, as the interviewer was telling us Tupton’s background.

“Two weeks before his tragic death, Peter Tupton gave this interview. I hanks to the wonders of modern technology, we can show the jury that this was a
man.
Yea, more than a man, a towering figure of vision, courage, and honor.”

“I’d like to listen to your client before you canonize him,” I said.

I watched for a few minutes. The towering figure appeared to be a short, overweight man in his late thirties with receding pale hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and thin, grim lips. He wore a safari jacket over a blue chambray shirt. The pants were khaki, and when he crossed his legs, I could see one hiking boot stained with mud. I quickly learned that Tupton had studied petroleum engineering at a university out West, that his first job had been with an oil company, and after an explosion and fire on an offshore rig, he had been so shocked by the ecological destruction that he had quit. Tupton didn’t say anything about the men who had been killed, but the loss of fish and birds really seemed to frost his buns. He went back to school, picked up a master’s degree, and became involved in environmental protection, first with the government, later with the Everglades Society.

The interviewer asked about the history of the Everglades, and Tupton used its Indian name,
Pa-hay-okee
, grassy water, a reference to the tooth-edged saw grass in the shallow, vast stream. He talked about the diversity of the Glades, the shallow sloughs and gator holes, shell-filled beaches and tangled mangroves. He decried development, claiming it had caused the drought, turning parts of the Glades into a prairie. He talked about the ecosystems, pine rock-lands, mangrove swamps, hardwood hammocks, bay heads, and cypress heads. He bemoaned the sugarcane fields, sucking up nutrients from the saw-grass peat that accumulated over thousands of years. He criticized the man-made irrigation channels that artificially restrict the natural cycle of dry winters and flooded summers.

On the screen, a file videotape showed a variety of animals in their natural habitat, and Tupton gave a voice-over narration in a calm, measured voice. He described the endangered species in the Glades, and we looked at crocodiles and turtles, manatees and panthers, a bald eagle, a wood stork, a pair of snail kites, and a peregrine falcon.

“We must keep ever vigilant,” Peter Tupton said. He radiated sincerity, seriousness of purpose. “When there are threats to the environment, we must respond with protests, lawsuits, political pressure, every tool at our disposal.”

The interviewer asked, “Aren’t people much more aware of the environment these days?”

Tupton nodded. “Twenty-five years ago, some so-called regional planners proposed building a huge jetport in the Big Cypress Swamp smack in the Glades. They publicly announced that entire cities would be built around the jetport, as if that was something to be proud of. Before anyone knew what was going on, they dredged and even built a trial runway. That’s how close it came before the public rose up and shut it all down. Now there’s a local developer who wants to build a town out there.”

Next to me H.T. Patterson chuckled. I listened some more.

In the space of thirty minutes, interspersed with public-service spots and commercials for every Jim Nabors record ever made, Tupton told everything I wanted to know about the Everglades, and then some. I concluded that the judge would allow the tape into evidence and that the jury would like Peter Tupton.

Maybe not
like
so much as respect. Patterson knew what he was doing. Wrongful-death cases with a surviving widow involve two kinds of plaintiffs. The regular guy—
No, ladies and gentlemen of the
jury, this was not a special man. This was not an extraordinary man. ‘This man was not an Eagle Scout or a high public official. He packed bags at the Piggly Wiggly, but he was someone special to his wife, because this was the one man in the world who had fallen in love with her, who had spent his life with her, who had shared her joys and her sorrows all these many years…