In the story, this is where I pause and give the jurors my steady gaze. “Yes,” the snake says, “but when I promised, you knew I was a snake.”
Now I looked uneasily at my reptilian client.
“ C’mon, Jake, don’t you believe me?”
“ I believe you,” I said, wanting it to be true. “So what did Hornback have on you? What was he going to tell Socolow?”
“ It was a bluff. He was selling shares for me, so he just assumed it was a scam. Hell, why wouldn’t he? Anyway, he threatened to squeal, but he had nothing.”
“ You know what I do with squealers?” Kip said, a malicious grin on his sweet young face.
“ Huh?” Blinky seemed startled.
Kip curled his upper lip into a sneer. “I let ‘em have it in the belly so they can roll around for a long time thinking it over.”
“ What the fuck?”
“ Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death,’ Kip explained, “and don’t say ‘fuck.’”
Chapter 10
When corpses are found out of doors undergoing putrefaction,” Doc Charlie Riggs said, sitting erect on the witness stand, “it’s quite common to find insect infestation.
“ But in a funeral home?” I asked.
Doc Riggs leaned toward the jury box. “Should never happen. Never.”
“ So in this case, Dr. Riggs, at an open-casket memorial service
…” I paused for effect just the way they do on TV.
“ Where mourners saw worms crawling out of the eyes of the late Peter Cooper-”
“ Maggots,” Charlie corrected me. “Pupa, too. Some intact, some broken, indicating hatched flies.”
“ Yes, indeed. Maggots. From these maggots crawling out of the eyes of the late Peter Cooper, are you able to form an expert opinion as to the degree of care exercised by the Eternal Rest Funeral Home?”
At the plaintiffs table, from which I had recently risen, my client, Mrs. Brenda Cooper, was sobbing at just the proper decibel level. I always tell my clients that sniffles and whimpers are okay. Wails and shrieks are not, unless I want the jury distracted from the testimony, in which case, caterwauling to the heavens is permitted.
“ Prima facie negligence, no doubt about it,” Doc Riggs announced with authority.
“ On what do you base your conclusion?”
That’s the lawyer’s way of asking “why,” but a lawyer will never use one word when seven will do. Charlie Riggs stroked his beard and looked directly at the jury. “Not just from the maggots, alone. No sir. Maggots can emerge from blowfly eggs just a few hours after death. That wouldn’t be enough to assign negligence to the funeral home. But as I said before, there were pupa shells, and it should take at least a week for the maggots to go through the stages of larval growth to produce newly hatched blowflies. So obviously, there was complete inattention to Mr. Cooper’s body.”
As if on cue, Brenda Cooper’s sobs grew louder.
Charlie didn’t miss a beat. “The eggs would have been clearly visible in his eyes and the corners of his mouth. They sort of look like grated cheese, so I don’t know how the attendants missed them.”
In the jury box, a woman nervously cleared her throat.
“ As I say,” Charlie continued, “ prima facie negligence.”
I sat down and let Charlie take care of himself on cross-examination. No one could do it any better.
I was sipping a Cuban coffee in the Gaslight Lounge down the street from the county courthouse, and Charlie was slurping a double order of rice pudding with cinnamon, having already polished off a three-egg western omelet. Testifying about putrefied corpses always made him hungry.
“ What’s bothering you?” he asked.
“ Besides being a murder suspect, not much, unless you count having my name linked to one of Blinky Baroso’s schemes, and being forced to revisit my past courtesy of his sister.”
“ Josefina,” Charlie said. “A splendid young woman, though a tad tightly wound, I always thought.”
“ She says I had a dysfunctional upbringing, what with you and Granny as my role models.”
“ Do you believe it?”
“ I don’t know, Charlie. Granny always told me to choose right over wrong, and you taught me how to tell one from the other. If I’ve failed, it’s not Granny’s fault or yours.”
“ For what it’s worth, we don’t think you’ve failed. As for your other problems, I don’t believe for one minute that you killed Kyle Hornback, and neither does Abe Socolow. He’s just trying to pressure you into bringing Baroso in.”
“ Yeah, maybe, but it’s no fun.” I looked at my watch. “I gotta go. While you were mesmerizing the jury, Blinky left a message with Cindy that he had something that would blow the Hornback case wide open.”
Charlie used his napkin to pry a grain of rice from his beard. “Do you believe him?”
“ What a strange question. Why else would he-”
“ Your client is a con man, is he not?”
“ Yeah. To the world in general.”
“ Mundus vult decipi. The world wants to be deceived. But what about you, Jake?”
I put the top down on the old convertible and swung onto I-9S from the downtown ramp. I passed over the poinciana trees on South Miami Avenue, then swung off the Twenty-fifth Road exit to the Rickenbacker Causeway. Blinky had told me to meet him on Virginia Key, a secluded beach near the Seaquarium on the way to Key Biscayne.
Virginia Key is really just a spit of sand with some pine trees for shade. Because the beach faces due east and there’s a reef about a mile offshore to cut down the rollers, it’s a great place for windsurfing. To the north is Fisher Island, million-dollar condos surrounded by a moat to keep out the riffraff. Nearby is Government Cut where the cruise ships head toward open water. To the east is the Gulf Stream, Bimini, and the wide expanse of the Atlantic. To the south is Bear Cut, an open channel through the causeway, and to the west is the city sewage plant. That’s right. The city fathers chose an island of unspoiled beauty on which to lace the salt-laden wind with the trenchant scent of human waste. In a way I can’t fully explain, Virginia Key seems a metaphor for Miami.
There was a rusted-out Jeep Cherokee up to its hubcaps in the sand. Nearby, an Isuzu Trooper with roof racks and a fine collection of custom-made sailboards was being unloaded by two lean, muscular guys in their twenties. On the water, half a dozen boardsailors were jumping the chop, headed on a broad reach in about eighteen knots of northeasterly breeze. Perfect lines of waves were breaking on the reef, what surfers call “corduroy to the horizon.”
I spotted Blinky’s green Range Rover parked in the shade about fifty yards from the beach. Long needles, green and fragrant, floated into my convertible from the candles of a slash pine tree.
I got out of the car, leaned on the fender and watched the boardsailors. Even from here, I could hear the sails crackling in the wind. Blinky wasn’t around.
I waited five, maybe six, minutes.
Still no Blinky.
Maybe he was collecting pinecones or trying to sell stock in a gold mine to some beach bums.
I looked back at the water, relaxing.
Not thinking anything was wrong.
Why should I?
The ringing phone jarred me. It sounded so out of place here that for a moment I didn’t know what it was. It was coming from Blinky’s Range Rover. I hustled over and found the driver’s door unlocked. Inside, on the passenger’s side of the front seat, a cellular phone was ringing, its LCD display reading “CALL” with a blinking insistence.
But I was looking at something else.
A deep black-red stain on the upholstery on the driver’s side.
About the size of a salad plate. Still wet.
A spiderweb crack in the front windshield.
But no Blinky.
And still the phone rang and blinked at me. I picked it up and groped for the right button. “Hello,” I said, my voice strained.