"What's wrong with 'Roberto'?"
She wrinkled her nose at me. Droll wit is so seldom appreciated. "Anyway, you gotta get moving," Cindy ordered. "You've got Rusty MacLean at three, his place. Then Christina Bernhardt at five, her place."
"Very funny, Cindy."
Chrissy's place was the Women's Detention Center, where she was being held without bond. At least for now.
"Bobby, you look great!"
" No se, Jake. They want to revoke my probation."
"What? Are you looting lobsters again?"
My client gave me his pained look. "Jake, mi amigo, I was setting them free from their traps. Don't you remember our defense?" He let his voice slip into a pretty fair impression of my impassioned closing argument. "Roberto Condom, protector of the environment, friend of flora and fauna, mammal and crustacean alike."
"We might have won," I reminded him, "if the Marine Patrol hadn't found three hundred deceased lobsters iced down in your pickup truck."
Roberto shrugged. That's life. He was in his mid-thirties, toreador thin, with slicked-back black hair, a pencil mustache, and long curving sideburns that resembled the blade of a scythe. He wore a bird's-egg-blue linen shirt with puffy sleeves, and pleated white slacks. Though he looked like a gigolo in a 1940s movie, Roberto Condom was more at home in a swamp than in St. Moritz.
As a thief, Roberto was a specialist, and his especialidad was stealing living things. He never boosted a car, but he had rustled cattle from ranches near Ocala. He never rifled a cash register, but he had once broken into a pet store and stolen every tropical fish in the place. He poached sea turtle eggs, which he could sell for a hundred bucks a pop to botanicas in Little Havana where they were believed to be aphrodisiacs, water spider orchids from Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, and live ostrich chicks from Lion Country Safari. At this very moment, Roberto Condom was wearing hand-sewn ostrich-skin cowboy boots that would run you a thousand bucks, unless you brought your own ostriches to the bootmaker.
Roberto disdained mundane crime, especially drug dealing. Which was how I'd gotten him off when a partner double-crossed him and stuffed condoms-yeah, I know-filled with cocaine inside seven hundred boa constrictors Roberto was smuggling into the country. Before the boas left Bogota, someone had jammed the packets of cocaine inside their rectums, then sewed the orifices shut, a job I have never seen advertised in the "Help Wanted" section. When the constipated and ornery snakes were discovered by Customs, Roberto was charged with drug importation as well as cruelty to animals. Roberto showed up for trial with Bozo, his pet six-foot boa, curled around his neck, pleading that he loved snakes and would never do such a thing. The jury was out only twenty minutes, and Roberto walked. At Christmas, I was rewarded with a snakeskin jacket that looked familiar, but it took me three months to figure out that I hadn't seen Bozo in a while.
"So if it's not lobsters, what?" I asked. "Stone crabs, sponges, starfish, wood storks? You're not stealing live coral from Pennekamp Park, are you?"
"Jake!" Again feigning insult. Then he fingered his necklace of alligator teeth, and I knew.
"Gators. You're poaching in the Everglades."
" Chingate! I'm no poacher. I have a license."
"Which limits you to six gators a season."
"Six," he sniffed. "How can a man make a living? I get two hundred dollars a hide, then some fancy store in Bal Harbour sells one purse for twenty times that."
"Nobody said life is fair."
" Verdad. Even if you shoot a big caiman right in the eye, it'll flop around in your boat for hours. You gotta stick a wire in its spine to kill it, and then you'll be up to your knees in gator shit."
"If that's an invitation to your next hunt, forget it."
"I'm just saying that your everyday working guy like me has it tough."
"Okay, so you're Lunch-Bucket Jose. How many hides they catch you with?"
" Solamente fifty-seven."
"Jeez, a serial poacher."
"Three days' work. This time of year, it should be more like a hundred. I tell you something funny. The water level's been down in the Glades for six months."
" 'Course it has. It's the end of the dry season. Wait a few weeks, and it'll rain every dog day afternoon."
"Yeah, but the dry season hasn't been that dry this year. Something's screwy. The gator holes are parched. Damn few turtles and ducks for them to eat, and fishing's shot to hell. I called the Water Management Office, pretended to be one of those Audubon Society types. They said they'd look into it, but you know how government is."
I filed the information away in one of the dusty recesses of my mind, wondering how we would use it. As usual, my client was a step ahead of me.
"So I'm thinking, Jake, maybe I was doing the gators a favor."
"How, by plugging them through the eye with a three hundred Weatherby?"
"Beats starving to death, verdad? Jeez, I'm just speeding evolution along. Natural selection, survival of the fittest, in a way, I'm a visionary, ahead of my time."
I remembered what Charlie had said about Chrissy's case. "So what do you want, Bobby-probation, community service?"
"Hell, no! I'm a goddamn hero. They should give me a medal."
3
So-Be-Mo," Rusty MacLean said, giving each syllable a little push. "South Beach Models. Catchy, no?"
"Catchy, yes," I agreed.
We were sitting in his office on the third floor of an Ocean Drive Art Deco building. The facade of the 1930s structure had recently been repainted seafoam-green with flamingo-pink racing stripes. The windows were topped by cantilevered shades that looked like eyebrows, and the lobby was framed in keystone and decorated with ornamental friezes that seemed to celebrate leaping sailfish.
Rusty's office walls were decorated with covers of magazines that were not on my regular reading list: Mondo, Grazia, Esprit, Vogue, and Elle. Each cover displayed a beautiful young woman in fancy duds, some of the models displaying enough cleavage to distract a guy who wouldn't know Ralph Lauren from Ralph Cramden.
"The Wall of Fame," Rusty told me. His girls who had made good. I recognized Chrissy Bernhardt's pouting lips on a cover of Marie Claire.
An interior window looked into an adjacent office where one of Rusty's talent scouts, a chain-smoking middle-aged woman with eyeglasses on a chain of imitation pearls, interviewed a mother and her two teenage daughters. All three were dressed identically in tank tops, black miniskirts, knee socks, and high-heeled white sneakers.
"Mom's living through her daughters," Rusty had said when he escorted me to his office past the glass-enclosed room. "They waltz in here on open-audition day, girls who aren't five-six on their tippy-toes, with mashed potatoes where their cheekbones should be. Eileen Ford used to say there's no such thing as a model with a short neck, but nobody gave the word to these moms."
I looked outside through the other window, across Lummus Park to the ocean. The beach was dotted with blue umbrellas, and a mile or so offshore, a cruise ship was making its way through turquoise water with a thousand happy tourists aboard.
"Not a bad view, eh?" Rusty asked. He gestured toward a telescope at the corner of the room, its barrel pointed due east toward the water. "The Tenth Street beach is topless these days. Wanna take a look?"
"Another time, Rusty. I've got to get to the women's jail and-"
"Brazilians," he said.
"What?"
"They started it. Just took off their tops. Didn't wear much of a bottom, either. Then the local girls started doing it. Pretty soon you had a topless beach. Go farther north, up to Haulover, and it's totally nude."
"Rusty, do you think we could talk about Chrissy?"