Intending to put Castiel on his duly elected ass, I set up in the low post and took a bounce pass from Shifty Sullivan-the nickname stemming from criminal court, not the basketball court. My back was to Castiel, and he kept a hip planted on my butt. I pivoted and faked left, but Castiel knew I seldom drove that way. A weakness in my game, the left-handed dribble.
I tossed an elbow into Castiel’s gut, heard him whoomph as I went around him to the right and sank a baby hook from six feet away.
He doubled over, fought for a breath, and could barely get the words out. “Hey, ref. You swallow your whistle?” Pantomiming my elbow toss.
“Crybaby!” I whooped.
It went on that way for the entire game. I hit Castiel hard enough to draw a flagrant foul and barreled into him enough times to draw two charges. I fouled out but still led the scoring with 21 for the Mouthpieces. With greater finesse, the unflappable Castiel led the Avengers to a nine-point win.
He approached me in the locker room, pressing a cold can of Heineken to his forehead where a welt was flaring up. “Buy you dinner, Jake?”
“Why?”
“To find out why you’re so pissed at me.”
“More like disappointed in you.”
“Let’s talk about it, Jake. C’mon, I’ll treat you to martinis and a porterhouse.”
“I’ll go if you answer one question for me, Alex. Were you-?”
“Yes.”
“Why not wait for the question?”
“I know what you’re gonna ask. It’s about Ziegler’s party. And the answer’s yes. I was there the night Krista Larkin disappeared.”
23 Young, Single, and Horny
I don’t usually order shrimp cocktail when they charge by the piece-eight bucks! — but tonight Castiel was paying, and I didn’t give a shit about the cost. We sat on the front patio of Prime One Twelve, a noisy, trendy hangout for NBA players and others with the Am Ex Centurion card. The restaurant is at the foot of Ocean Drive on South Beach, the epicenter of hedonism run amok. We started with the shrimp and martinis-as cold as liquid nitrogen-with steaks to follow.
When we sat down, Castiel had said he would tell me everything he knew about Ziegler and Krista Larkin. That he had nothing to hide. “I should have told you straight off, Jake, but I’m embarrassed about some of the shit from my past.” Well, that made two of us.
“I was at Ziegler’s house,” Castiel said now, “but Krista wasn’t. She never showed up.”
“To be so sure, you must have known her by sight.”
“She was around a lot that summer. Charlie’s flavor of the month. Maybe three months.”
“And this night, who was the lucky girl?”
“Girls, plural. Half a dozen playthings. Porn starlets. Strippers. Strays. All interchangeable, all forgettable.”
“Not to their families.”
“I’m just saying how it was with Ziegler. One second he’s doing a couple actresses in the living room, then three more girls are hopping over the sofa like a hockey team changing lines. The Larkin girl wasn’t one of them.”
“What were you doing there?”
“What do you think? I was young. Single. Horny.”
Castiel sipped his martini and told me his story, while flicking that gold cigarette lighter that had belonged to his father. In the early nineties, when he was a young prosecutor, Castiel met Charlie Ziegler, courtesy of Uncle Max.
Ziegler’s porn business was just taking off. He was renting a waterfront manse on Sunset Island that belonged to a Saudi sheik who came to town to buy diamonds and frolic with young women. Jewelers on Flagler Street provided the gems, Ziegler the women.
“The house was tricked out like a disco,” Castiel said. “A glitter ball, a D.J., a sound system you could hear in Bimini. The place decorated like a bordello. Gold fixtures in the bathrooms, an infinity pool, marble columns with eagles on top, like some Roman emperor lived there.”
“The Fuck Palace.” I’d heard Sonia Majeski use the term.
“Oh, man, The Fuck Palace.” Alex smiled at the memory. “That was the cabana. Silk canopies. Mirrored ceilings and wide-screen porno.”
“Sounds like you knew the place well.”
“Like I said before, I was young and single.”
“And horny,” I reminded him.
“I forgot about your time in the seminary,” he shot back.
I sipped at the second martini, sharp as a dagger in the throat. Next to us, a boisterous table of eight sang “Happy Birthday” in Spanish, then Portuguese, and finally Hebrew. They’d gone through four bottles of Cristal at $450 a whack.
“You know a bunch of the guys who were there that night, right?” I asked.
“Some of them, sure.”
“So subpoena them. Put them under oath and see what they know.”
“You’re talking about important men in this town. They have families now. Hell, some had families then. All of them are gonna have faulty memories.”
“If you don’t want to mess with those guys, I will. I have some names from Sonia Majeski. You must have others. I’ll jump-start your investigation.”
“Fishing expedition is more like it.”
The steaks arrived-porterhouse for me, T-bone for Castiel. Round three of the martinis could not be far behind.
“Jake, there’s no probable cause that a crime has been committed. You’ve got a runaway girl who probably started a new life, that’s all.”
“A runaway girl who’s probably dead is more like it. Last seen headed to your pal’s house.”
“Even if you could place the girl with Ziegler, so what? He liked her. He screwed her now and then. What’s his motive for killing her?”
“Maybe she was going to scream ‘statutory rape.’ Maybe she witnessed something she shouldn’t have. Maybe it was an accident. Booze and drugs and a loaded gun.”
“And maybe you’re gonna score for the wrong team again.”
“Cheap shot, Alex.”
“Maybe it’s a metaphor for your life. Scoring a touchdown for the opposition.”
“Scored a safety,” I corrected him.
Castiel knew just where to insert the needle. A long-ago game against the Jets in the snow and fog. I made a big hit on the kickoff and knocked the ball loose. Bodies were flying. I got there first and scooped it up, but somehow got turned around. Hey, I was playing with a concussion. I ran to the wrong end zone and cleverly spiked the ball. Two points for the Jets, we lose by one, and the headline on Monday said: “Wrong-Way Lassiter Dooms Fins.”
Castiel was getting frustrated with me, and it was mutual. I decided to shake, not stir, him. “Why are you protecting Ziegler?”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Friendship or money?”
He pointed his steak knife at me. “Don’t say anything you can’t back up, friend.”
“You’re letting a pornographer and an old mobster call the shots. What turned you? The pussy in the old days or the campaign cash now?”
“Goddammit!” Castiel shoved his plate aside. “Any other lawyer in town talked to me like that, I’d …”
He let it hang there. Maybe he didn’t know what he would do. He pulled the napkin off his lap and tossed it on the table. He must have lost his appetite.
“If you want to take me on,” he said, “bring it. I’ll unleash the dogs, and it won’t be a fair fight. You ever have a witness who lies, you ever take a fee from the fruits of a crime, I’ll have your ass. I’ve got two dozen investigators and a sitting Grand Jury. You want to fuck with me, Jake, you better bring an army.”
Ray Decker sat at an outdoor table at Prime Italian, directly across the street from its sister restaurant, Prime One Twelve. He’d been munching a loaf of garlic bread, sopping in butter, and watching the State Attorney and the shyster put away steaks and martinis. He owed Lassiter big-time for messing him up and driving off in Ziegler’s Lincoln. He pictured himself coming up behind Lassiter and slamming him face-first into his shrimp cocktail.