Whatever her responses to the big questions, it was hard as hell to get Chrissy to lie about the little ones.
"Have you ever had sex in return for money?"
"Modeling's a form of prostitution."
"Ms. Bernhardt, please answer the question."
"One time on a test shoot, an Italian photographer stripped naked. We were in his hotel room. As he shot me, he jerked off. He was very famous. You would know his name. Well, maybe you wouldn't, but believe me, he was big-time, and all the girls knew he liked to get off during a shoot, but he'd never touch you."
"Ms. Bernhardt, have you ever had sex in return for money?"
"No, but I've been offered. A lot!"
"Please confine your answers to yes or no."
"Sure."
"Have you ever used heroin?"
A pause. "I thought we were done with the drug questions."
"Have you ever used heroin?"
After a moment, "No."
A longer pause from Tony, and I knew he had his control question. He was letting the physiological reactions die before getting to the heart of it. I was thinking about her lie. She had told me she had been a "chipper" in Paris, occasionally smoking a potent combination of heroin and cocaine, but she'd given it up without becoming addicted. Still, the stigma prevented her from admitting it to a total stranger. The sexual improprieties, I guessed, were mere peccadilloes compared to smoking smack.
Tony started up again. "Did your father have sexual relations with you when you were a minor?"
A soft "Yes."
I knew Tony was watching the squiggles. If the reaction to the little lie about not using heroin was greater than the reaction to the question about her father, she was telling the truth. If the reaction to the relevant question was greater, her concern about it meant she was probably lying.
"Did you kill your father?"
"Yes." An obvious answer to a neutral question.
"Did you kill him because he had sex with you as a child?"
"Yes."
"Did you tell Jake Lassiter the truth about everything?"
"Does anybody tell the truth about everything?" she said, and I heard the sound of the tape tearing off skin, then tubes crashing against the terrazzo floor as Chrissy stood and ran for the door.
18
The winds shifted to the southeast, bringing the humid Caribbean air, then died altogether. Days were broiling, nights stifling, and my little house felt like a hamper filled with sweat socks. The temperature soared, thunderheads formed over the Glades, and afternoon squalls rolled in from the west, a hard, pounding rain that did not cool the air. Steam rose from the pavement. Hell on earth.
Summer in South Florida starts early and ends late. This year, a dozen tropical storms and hurricanes chugged through the Atlantic and Caribbean, swirling up clouds, then breaking off to the northwest, skimming the coast, or heading due west across the Yucatan. Each time a storm came within a thousand miles, our breathless TV reporters stirred up memories of Andrew's flattened buildings, scaring the bejesus out of us. Just as gullible as my neighbors, I stood in line at the supermarket for bottled water and flashlight batteries, and because I had read that chick-peas are an excellent source of protein, my cupboard was now chock-full of them.
My little house in the South Grove is made of coral rock two feet thick, and it has withstood every hurricane from 1926 onward. If it is blown down, there won't be anything left standing in Dade County, and don't crack wise by saying that's not such a bad idea.
With the summer, the southeasterly breezes are too light for windsurfing, especially if you weigh more than a ballerina. I carted the board out to Key Biscayne a few times to catch the tail ends of gusty thunderstorms, but I've never been entirely comfortable on the water with a sixteen-foot-high mast that doubles as a lightning rod.
One day in August, the water slate-gray in a pelting rainstorm, I cruised on a broad reach off Virginia Key. I was hooked into the harness, leaning back against the weight of the sail, enjoying the sheer pleasure of speed, tasting the salty spray as the board chop-hopped past the reef. A disk-shaped Atlantic ray swam alongside, looking like some prehistoric beast, its winglike pectoral fins undulating, propelling it just below the waterline. I watched until the ray disappeared in the foam of a roller.
A few years ago, when I missed a jibe and landed ass-over-elbows next to the board, I was trying to waterstart, lying under the sail on my back like a beached turtle, when my arm caught fire. At least that's what it felt like, the spiny tail of a southern stingray wrapping itself around my wrist. The venomous sting left me with a scar that looks like a bracelet melted into my skin.
Then there are the sharks. It's hard to windsurf any distance from shore and not see a few. The Tourist and Convention Authority doesn't advertise it, but schools of tiger sharks, lemon sharks, and many of their cousins feed in schools just a few hundred yards off our beaches. I've enjoyed swimming and boardsailing in the Miami Beach surf for years, and it's still a thrill to paddle over a nurse shark lying motionless on the bottom in five feet of water.
With our sea creatures-barracuda, sharks, morays, jellyfish, Portuguese men-of-war, sea urchins, and stinging corals-it's a wonder more tourists don't end up in the emergency room.
So this day, as the ray squooshed by me and vanished in the vast, deadly sea, I thought about the other dangerous creatures in my life. Guy Bernhardt was paying the bills on time, calling me with pep talks about the case, doing everything except sending me notes with little smiling faces. Dr. Schein answered all my questions as I prepared for trial. He seemed eager to testify to the veracity of Chrissy's repressed memories, as well as the likelihood of her diminished mental state when she pulled the trigger- three times. Chrissy wouldn't talk to me at all, except in the most perfunctory way about the case. The personal relationship was over, tanked by the polygraph exam.
"I've never felt so betrayed," she told me as we sat across from each other in my conference room, separated by a mountain of files and a gulf of wounded feelings. I thought the statement was a bit overdone, especially from someone who claimed she'd been sexually molested by her father. Still, who was I to tell her what she should be feeling?
Tony Cuevas called to say what I already knew. Chrissy had passed the polygraph test. "So her father sexually abused her," I said.
"She thinks he did," Tony said. "She remembers it."
All right, she wasn't lying. But memories can be wrong. I remembered everything Dr. Millie Santiago had told me. Or was it everything?
By day, I prepared for trial-interviewing witnesses; gathering boxes of exhibits; deposing cops, bystanders, paramedics, doctors, nurses, and the assistant medical examiner. By night, I wandered around the Grove, avoiding Cocowalk with its teens and tourists, its guys with boa constrictors around their necks or macaws on their shoulders. In my time, I have gone to great lengths to attract women, but being strangled by a reptile or shit on by a bird is not my idea of foreplay. I'd head to the Taurus, the only bar in the Grove that's older than I am. It's a brew-and-burger place in a quiche-and-cappuccino world, and I like it there. I'd have a couple of drafts, shoot some blow darts on the patio, tell harmless lies to various women, all the time wondering just what the hell was going on. Swimming through the surf of the upcoming murder trial, I had the gnawing feeling that I had yet to see the shark lurking on the ocean floor.
Summer turned to fall, not that you would know it. Tropical depressions still formed in the Atlantic. Our news boys and girls still went agog at the prospect of every gale. The night air in the Grove was heavy with the scents of jasmine and hibiscus. An occasional cold front made its way south, always petering out in northern Florida, but clocking the winds around and reducing our humidity.