I cleared my throat.
Nick Fox kept reading.
Five minutes later he put down the file. By then I was impressed with what an important guy he was, just as I was supposed to be. "Hey, Jake, here's one for you downtown mouthpieces," he said, winking at Rodriguez. "A man asks a lawyer his fee, and the lawyer says a hundred bucks for three questions. 'Isn't that awfully steep?' the man asks. 'Sure is,' the lawyer says, 'now what's your final question?'"
I laughed and stored that away for the next partners' meeting. Rodriguez pointed the black plastic gun at the wall where a color photo showed Vice-President Quayle shaking Nick Fox's hand. "Miami's had the Glock two years already," the detective whined.
The county cops hate it when the city boys get something first. Doesn't matter what. Sharper uniforms, faster cars, or looser women.
"Glock, schlock," Fox said. "Stop worrying about your firepower and solve a few crimes." He swung his chair toward me. "That's all the cops want these days, technology. Computers and helicopters and automatic weapons. I could get a dozen more prosecutors with what they spend for one armored vehicle."
I nodded agreeably, still waiting.
"Of course, you high-rise lawyers don't have those worries, eh, Jake?" Fox asked.
I was used to this. Little darts to remind me I was no longer a player in the criminal-justice game. Two hundred pending criminal cases, a trial every morning, sometimes another in the afternoon. You meet your witnesses five minutes before they testify by shouting their names in the corridor. The pay is lousy, the office drab, but there's a camaraderie among foxhole buddies slogging through the mud. When you leave and your pals and adversaries stay behind, they stick it to you. Hey, nice suit, life's okay downtown, huh? Some of them never leave the grimy catacombs because they can't cut it on the outside. Others, like Nick Fox, could write their own tickets downtown but choose to stay. They feel vaguely superior to those who escape to cushy partnerships in skyscrapers with luncheon clubs and ocean views. They have a right to.
"Right now I've got lots of worries, Nick," I said.
"Hey, Jake," Rodriguez said, "what's the difference between a porcupine and two lawyers in a Porsche?"
"Dunno," I said.
"With a porcupine, the pricks are on the outside."
Having been taught etiquette by Granny Lassiter, I smiled politely.
Rodriguez laughed so hard at his own joke he nearly dropped the gun.
I sat there, still waiting for the warm-up act to end.
Finally Fox stuck a finger in his shirt collar, stretched his brawny neck, smiled his winning smile, and said, "Jake, I thought you'd want to fill me in on your progress."
"What?"
"On the Diamond murder. That's why I asked for you and Hot Rod."
"Forget it," I said. "I'm not reporting to you. Either it's my investigation, or get someone else."
It crossed his face then, a moment of doubt or regret. "Easy, Jake. I'm not trying to interfere-"
"Good. I'll take your statement while I'm here. But you're not getting copies of Rodriguez's reports or any part of the file. Understood?"
He grinned at me as if we shared some secret. Maybe my toughness was just an act and he knew it because he played the same game. "Understood," he said, still smiling.
"I met Marsha through Prissy," Nick Fox told me. "Priscilla, my soon-to-be ex-wife. They belonged to some bullshit women's awareness group."
I nodded and pulled out Rodriguez's inventory of Marsha's apartment. Her bookshelves were a road map to her personal life. Smart Cookies Don't Crumble. How to Love a Difficult Man. Men: An Owner's Manual. Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them. The Secrets Men Keep. The rest of her library was an amalgam of get-in-shape, dress-for-success, and get-rich-quick books with a smattering of soft-core paperbacks on women's sexual fantasies.
Fox turned toward the window. "I came home early one day and there were a bunch of them in the living room. Yackety-yacking, sipping tea and eating, whaddayacallit…pussy food."
"Quiche?" Rodriguez guessed.
"No, that lady-shit…"
"Ladyfingers," I suggested.
"Yeah, picking 'em up real dainty so not to mess up the nail polish, sitting around complaining about men, comparing orgasms, who the fuck knows…"
"Amazing you and Prissy don't see eye to eye on things," I offered. "You're so sensitive to women's concerns."
He hunched his massive shoulders and glared at me. "What the fuck's that supposed to mean?"
I didn't answer, so he continued: "One of the women was this cute, short number I recognized from TV."
"Marsha Diamond," I said.
He nodded. "Prissy introduced us, real sly like she was getting a kick out of it. So we started going out. Prissy knew all about it, told me Marsha was early in her development, but later she'd bust my balls. I said that was okay, I was used to it."
"Was Marsha seeing anyone else?"
"Not that I know of. All she did was work, shop, and screw, and screwing wasn't her favorite."
It had been three days since they'd been together, Fox said. They talked by phone the night before she was killed. It wasn't serious, just a mutually enjoyable physical relationship.
"She called herself my transition woman," Fox said.
"What did you call her?"
"Look, she wasn't that important to me, okay? She was a young one on the make who wanted to play in the majors. She was an okay-looking babe who wore too much makeup and was a halfway decent lay, and I'm real sorry she got aced. All right?"
"What did you talk about?"
"Talk?"
"Yeah. What two people do to communicate thanks to some magical connection between the brain and the mouth."
"I don't know. Her career, my career, whether she wanted a pillow under her ass."
"That's it? Did she want more out of the relationship?"
"Hey, great question, counselor," he said, lacing his voice with sarcasm. "What are you, Dear Abby, or that pygmy…"
"Did she want commitment?" I asked.
"Dr. Ruth," Rodriguez said.
"What do you think, that Marsha was pressuring me to divorce Prissy and marry her, so I got pissed off and killed her? What kind of asshole are you, Lassiter?"
"A duly appointed grand-jury kind," I said.
"Then get the fuck busy investigating and stop bothering me."
If he expected me to get up and leave, he had a long wait. I just sat there looking at him while he went back to work, scanning files, signing papers. Rodriguez continued playing with his guns, pretending to shoot Fox's plaques off the wall, sixteen times without reloading.
"If you don't have time now, Mr. State Attorney, I'll issue a subpoena for you. If you refuse to waive immunity, the papers will love it."
He stopped signing, dropped his pen in disgust, and looked up. "Fire when ready, Jake. Take your best shot."
"You're missing the point, Nick. I'm just gathering data, trying to figure out who Marsha Diamond was."
"Then let me save you some time. She was a ballsy broad who wanted to get ahead in TV land. She wanted to meet the politicos. She wanted tips about corruption probes. She wanted her bottom rubbed by the state attorney. Hey, I knew she was blowing smoke up my ass, but it didn't feel half bad."
"Anything else about the two of you?"
"Nothing much. She said she wanted to spend a weekend with me 'cause we'd never done that, learn all about me."
"You ever do it?"
"It would have been this weekend," he said, lowering his eyes. I watched him a moment and tried to see beyond the press stories, the macho shield he had erected. There was a part of him, I thought, that was touched and angered by her death. Homicide detectives say they can feel it, that there's a difference between a witness who bears guilt and one who feels loss at a death. Though he tried to hide his emotions, Nick Fox, it seemed to me, felt loss all the way.