Lassiter 07 - Flesh and Bones (11 page)

Objectivity, I thought.

"You may be right," I said. "If it ain't broke, why fix it?"

We were almost back to the house, having made a circle of the tree farm and listened to Guy's soliloquy on the Senegal date palm, thatch palm, queen palm, fishtail palm, and sago palm. While his father had loved the trees, Guy's favorites were the tropical fruits, which he claimed had medicinal properties. The Haitians use the Surinam cherry to soothe a sore throat, he told me. The papaya, or
fruta bomba
, is a digestive aid, and the Jamaicans squeeze the tamarind to cure stomachaches. Guy Bernhardt had a real pharmacy growing out here.

The Jeeps were digging ruts in a dirt perimeter road on the mango fields when a radio on the dashboard crackled with static followed by some rapid-fire Spanish that I didn't catch.

"Go!" Guy shouted to the driver, who blew his horn twice at the accompanying Jeeps.

The driver stomped on the accelerator, and we jolted through muddy potholes off the road and into a row of blooming mango trees. In the Jeep ahead of us, the guard in the passenger seat stood and leveled his shotgun across the top of the open windshield.

Guy spoke excitedly in Spanish into the radio, then turned to me. "You must be psychic, my friend."

"Huh?"

"We got a problem with varmints."

When we rounded a corner, close enough to a tree to rattle the branches and have a couple one-pounders fall into the Jeep, I saw what he meant. A heavy-duty pickup truck with no license plate, its bed filled with mangoes, was racing down the row ahead of us. A shotgun blast reverberated from the Jeep in front of us, and the pickup swerved but stayed on the road. Another shot, and I heard the ping of buckshot off the rear gate of the pickup.

"Son of a bitch! We'll head them off," Guy shouted, and again the driver blew the horn.

The Jeep in front peeled off to the left, the one behind to the right. We gained on the pickup. Guy reached under his seat and came up holding a Glock nine-millimeter handgun. He stood and held the gun in both hands, reminding me of his half sister in the club, though this weapon was bigger and packed more punch. The
pop-pop-pop-pop
was followed by Guy's grunt, then, "Damn! Can't steady it." He braced himself, then fired off several more rounds. Another shotgun blast from the Jeep to the left. The aim must have been high, because in a second, a tree was dripping with eviscerated fruit.

As we approached a T-intersection at the end of the grove, the pickup swung to the right, but one of the Jeeps was headed straight at it. The pickup swerved back to the left, but the third Jeep was coming from that direction. The truck tried to straighten out, slid in the mud, and flew straight across the road and up and over an earthen levee.

We heard the splash as our Jeep skidded to a stop at the base of the levee. Guy was the first one out, and he tromped up the slope, pistol in hand. I followed, and by the time I reached the top, two guards were aiming shotguns at the overturned pickup truck. Three men tumbled out of the cab and stood with their hands over their heads in the shallow water. A thousand pounds of freshly picked mangoes were dribbling into the water and slowly floating down the irrigation channel.

Guy Bernhardt pointed the Glock in the general direction of the mango rustlers. "Bastards! Chickenshit thieving bastards! I ought to kill you."

His face was red, and his little eyes were slits in his porcine face. "You know what I do to shitheads who steal from me! I kill them! Who would even miss you, buried under a jacaranda tree, you jerk-offs!" He aimed at one of the men, who trembled visibly. "What about it, Lassiter?"

"What?"

"You're my lawyer. If you can get Sis off, what about me? If I kill these pukes, do I have a problem?"

"Are you in imminent fear for your life?"

"Hell, no! But they are."

"Then you'd better not shoot them."

"Fucking poachers! And fucking lawyers! Everybody wants something for nothing. But nothing worth having is free. Not water. Not mangoes. Not nothing. I've worked for everything I've got, Lassiter."

He fingered his earring with one hand and held the gun with the other. "You ready, poachers? You ready to die?"

"Guy, I think that's enough venting for today," Schein said placidly. "I believe the gentlemen get the point."

Guy Bernhardt shot Schein an angry look, then swung the gun toward the channel. He emptied the magazine, killing several innocent mangoes as they floated toward Biscayne Bay.

As the echoes died down, my mind wandered. Had Chrissy worked for everything, too? Or had it all come too easily? The career. And now the inheritance. I was still thinking about red-faced Guy and his half sister when I noticed that there was something vaguely familiar about the pickup. Just then the driver, knee-deep in the channel, spoke for the first time.

"Jake,
mi amigo
, am I glad to see you," Roberto Condom said, hands high over his head, blood dripping from his nose.

Step into the lobby of the Fontainebleau, and it's 1959. You can almost hear Bobby Darin singing "Mack the Knife," and you expect to see Sammy Davis, Jr., walking out of the Poodle Lounge, maybe chatting up Frank Sinatra. The architecture—all gilt and marble—is a combination of faux French and Miami Beach kitsch. We've lost a lot of our local landmarks in recent years. Gone is the Coppertone sign on Biscayne Boulevard with the puppy pulling off the little girl's bikini bottom. Gone are Eastern Air Lines, Pan Am, and the
Miami News
. But the Fontainebleau is still here, and I love the place. It has no pretensions about its pretensions and is off limits to the South Beach terminally trendy crowd.

From the lobby, I took the escalator down to the ground floor, strolled past the obligatory sunglasses and sundries stores, and found something new. A spy shop. In the window were voice-activated tape recorders to catch a cheating spouse or business partner, bionic binoculars with earphones, telephone scramblers, bomb suppression blankets, and ninety-thousand-volt stun guns. A nice touch, I thought, but the hotel could do even more. With rampant mayhem against tourists, shouldn't the Fontainebleau offer a modified American plan: breakfast and dinner plus a bulletproof vest and transportation from the airport in a Humvee?

The Season was over, and summer is still an afterthought here, so the pool deck was mostly deserted, except for a few Chileans escaping their cold season. The day was sweltering, but a breeze from the ocean rattled the palm fronds and kept things bearable.

It wasn't hard to find Chrissy. She wore a white one-piece swimsuit cut low in front and high on the sides. She slouched in one of those canvas-backed director's chairs under an umbrella, a queen bee, while the drones buzzed around her. A makeup artist—a pale young woman sans makeup—dusted her forehead. A hair stylist—a skinny guy with unruly shoulder-length curls— used a portable dryer to comb out her hair. A barefoot male assistant in khaki shorts fanned Chrissy with a magazine.

A scrawny young man I took to be the director hovered over her, gesturing with a rolled-up script toward the free-form pool, where a waterfall tumbled over Disneyesque rocks. He looked about twenty-five and was lost inside a huge gray T-shirt that claimed to be the property of the Chicago Bears, though I doubted the guy had ever heard of Mike Ditka, much less sweated through a nutcracker drill.

"Chrissy, you look positively fab," he gushed. "Perfecto! Next, scene three, catching rays in the lagoon."

Okay, so it wasn't
Gone With the Wind
.

Sitting in a matching chair was another model, a dark-haired, deeply tanned young woman in a green bikini. She seemed to be pouting, maybe because Chrissy was getting all the attention, or maybe it was just her normal look. A photographer toted a video camera to the edge of the pool while an assistant took readings with a light meter. Several technicians and production people busied themselves around the pool with lights, reflectors, and assorted accoutrements of their trade. The place hummed with serious activity, Mission Control before a launch. Everyone wore shorts and T-shirts, except this big lug of a lawyer, whose blue oxford-cloth shirt was already beginning to show sweat stains.

I headed toward Chrissy when a young woman with a stopwatch hanging from her neck held up her hand. "Whoa! Crew only."

"I'm with Chrissy," I said.

She looked at me dubiously, but I was saved by my client. "Jake! Over here. We'll just be a minute."

I gave the stopwatch woman my best crooked grin. "Making a commercial is pretty intense, I guess."

"An advertorial, not a commercial." She sounded offended.

"Sorry." I walked past her and into the little circle around Chrissy. My social standing had just improved by several strata.

The director was talking to Chrissy and gesturing with his hands. "It's not merely suntan oil. It's an attitude, a way of life. It makes you glow on the inside, as well as outside."

"Only if you drink it," I said.

Chrissy suppressed a grin. Annoyed, the director looked up then continued talking to this stunning young woman who, at this precise moment, was facing a murder charge but looked ready for a relaxing week in Barbados. "Let them see your
joie de vivre
. Let your beauty radiate outward like the rays of the sun, warming you with its breath, a lover's kiss. The sun gives us hope, renewal . . ."

"Cancer," I added helpfully.

The budding Spielberg turned to me and scowled. "If you're here about the insurance, it's been taken care of."

"The insurance?"

"Yes!" he said petulantly. "The liability policy. Aren't you the hotel risk manager?"

"Is that what I look like?"

Chrissy giggled as the director squinted at me. "No, not really. I'd cast you as a security guard, maybe an ex-boxer with a broken nose and a checkered past."

"I'm a lawyer."

"Maybe in real life, but on the screen, never! Too solid." He smacked me on my right shoulder, the one with the steel pin inside. "Not shifty enough. Too All-American."

"Not even third team," I told him, but he didn't get it.

Chrissy bounded out of the chair, a strand of blond hair curled across her forehead. The hair stylist put his hands on his hips and glared. "Don't blame me if you end up with the Hurricane Andrew look."

"Jake, thanks for coming," Chrissy said, hugging me. "Just wait a minute and we can talk."

A minute.

Maybe it's a modeling term that means "until we lose the daylight." Because it took six hours.

They shot video of the two models in the pool, the waterfall pouring over them. Why the fuss about the hair? Don't ask me; it stayed wet most of the day. They took more footage at the cabana, rubbing lotions on each other's backs while a deeply tanned actor in white slacks and a blue blazer said, "Even our attitude is sunny on a sunny day. Let's see how Chrissy and Sofia enjoy the sun." Then he said something about aloe, vitamin E, and healthy color. I don't think Brando could have done a better job.

The whole crew moved from the pool deck down to the beach, where the photographer took some footage of the models building sand castles, running into the water, frolicking in the miniature surf, snorkeling, knee boarding, Jet Skiing, playing kadima and Frisbee, and smacking a volleyball with two male models who mysteriously showed up, pecs glistening, pearly teeth grinning.

Generic stuff. It could have been one of those beer commercials with such impossibly beautiful people you hope somebody tears an anterior cruciate ligament diving for a ball or a brew. But this wasn't an ad for one of those piss-weak American beers. It was, pardon me, an
advertorial
for Pineapple Pete's suntan oil.

I waited a while, then moseyed over to Coconut Willie's for a Grolsch and a six-dollar burger. I had no choice but to chill while Chrissy earned her five-thousand-dollar daily fee, which was precisely five thousand more than I was making today.

By the time I got back to the beach, they were shooting the last segment, which the stopwatch woman told me was called "hanging out." Indeed, Chrissy and Sofia simply chatted as they strolled leisurely along the waterline. A few octogenarians toddied by, including one gent wearing a yarmulke and baggy boxer trunks that hung to his knees. He stopped and stared at the two women, a cute shot—the contrast of age and youth, and all that artistic stuff—until he ruined it by scratching himself in a place you'd never use suntan oil.

I hoped Don Shula didn't come walking along the beach. Or Joe Paterno. Or my granny.

I was wearing a fluorescent orange thong that was barely large enough to hold a roll of quarters much less . . . well, a linebacker's gear. Chrissy had asked one of the male models for a spare so I could get out of my charcoal pinstripes and black wing tips. Usually, on the beach, I wear cutoff jeans or boxer trunks of the Lloyd Bridges/
Sea Hunt
era. But here I was, awkward, uncomfortable, exposed.

"Who does your casual attire?" the male model had asked, serious as could be. "Calvin would seem right for you, though cut perhaps too small in the shoulders."

"My
attire
is early locker room," I'd told him. "Old jerseys, faded warm-up gear. If I need something new, I call I-8OO-PRO-TEAM."

Now, as Chrissy and I walked down the beach at the end of the day, I said, "I listened to the tapes."

"Do we have to talk about it?" she asked. Her head was down, and she seemed to be watching her toes squishing into the wet sand.

"We do, and then you do. You're going to have to tell the judge and jury."

"It's very hard for me."

"I know, but you have to. It's all we've got."

"It brings back the anger."

"Prior to the hypnosis, did you have any idea?"