“John says they won’t let him coach if they find out about the accident.”
Now Kipper Garth got the picture. “That’s why you want to settle the lawsuit, isn’t it?”
Mrs. Nordstrom said yes, they were worried about publicity. “John says the papers and TV will go crazy with a story like this.”
Kipper thought: John is absolutely right.
“But you’re a victim, Mrs. Nordstrom. You have the right to be compensated for this terrible event in your life. It says so in the Constitution.”
“John says they let cameras in the courtrooms. Is that true?”
“Yes, but let’s not get carried away-”
“If it were your wife, would you want the whole world to see her tits on the six o’clock news?” Her tone was prideful and indignant.
“I’ll speak to the judge, Mrs. Nordstrom. Please don’t be upset. I know you’ve been through hell already.” But Kipper Garth was excited by the idea of TV cameras in the courtroom-it would be better than billboards!
Marie Nordstrom was trying not to cry and doing stolidly. She said, “I blame that damn Reagan. He hadn’t busted up the union, John’d still have his job in the flight tower.”
Kipper Garth said, “Leave it to me and the two of you will be set for life. John won’t need a job.”
Mrs. Nordstrom wistfully gazed at the two sturdy, silicon-enhanced, Lycra-covered cones on her chest. “They say contractures are easy to fix, but I don’t know.”
Kipper Garth circled the coffee table and joined her on the love seat. He put an unpracticed arm around her shoulders. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “they look spectacular.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, “but you just don’t know-how could you?”
Kipper Garth removed the silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and gave it to Mrs. Nordstrom, who sounded like the SS Norway when she blew her nose.
“Know whatI think?” said Kipper Garth. “I think you should letmefeel them.”
Mrs. Nordstrom straightened and gave a stern sniffle.
The lawyer said: “The only way I can begin to understand, the only way I can convey the magnitude of this tragedy to a jury, is if I can experience it myself.”
“Wait a minute-you want to feel my boobs?”
“I’m your lawyer, Mrs. Nordstrom.”
She eyed him doubtfully.
“If it were a burn case, I’d have to see the scar. Dismemberment, paraplegia, same goes.”
“Looking is one thing, Mr. Garth. Touching is something else.”
“With all respect, Mrs. Nordstrom, your husband is going to make a lousy witness in this case. He’s going to come across as a selfish prick. Remember what he said that day in my office? Bocci balls, Mrs. Nordstrom. He said your breasts were as hard as bocci balls. This is not the testimony of a sensitive, caring spouse.”
She said, “You’d be bitter, too, if it was your eye that got poked out.”
“Granted. But let me try to come up with a more gentle description of your condition. Please, Mrs. Nordstrom.”
“All right, but I won’t take my clothes off.”
“Of course not!”
She slid a little closer on the love seat. “Give me your hands,” she said. “There you go.”
“Wow,” said Kipper Garth.
“ What’dItell you?”
“I had no idea.”
“You can let go now,” Mrs. Nordstrom said.
“Just a second.”
But one second turned into ten seconds, and ten seconds turned into thirty, which was plenty of time for John Nordstrom to enter the house and size up the scene. Without a word he loaded up the wicker cesta and hurled a goatskinjai-alai ball at the slimy lawyer who was feeling up his wife. The first shot sailed wide to the left and shattered a jalousie window. The second shot dimpled the arm of the love seat with a flat thunk. It was then that Kipper Garth released his grip on Marie Nordstrom’s astoundingly stalwart breasts and made a vain break for the back door. Whether the lawyer fully comprehended his ethical crisis or fled on sheer animal instinct would never be known. John Nordstrom’s third and final jai-alai shot struck the occipital seam of Kipper Garth’s skull. He was unconscious by the time his silvery head smacked the floor.
“Ha!” Nordstrom exclaimed.
“I take it you got the job,” said his wife.
Willie the cameraman said they had two ways to go: they could crash the place or sneak one in.
Reynaldo Flemm said: “Crash it.”
“Think of the timing,” Willie said. “The timing’s got to be flawless. We’ve never tried anything like this.” Willie was leaning toward trying a hidden camera.
Reynaldo said: “Crash it. There’s no security, it’s a goddamn medical clinic. Who’s gonna stop you, the nurse?”
Willie said he didn’t like the plan; too many holes. “What if the guy makes a run for it? What if he calls the police?”
Reynaldo said: “Where’s he gonna go, Willie? That’s the beauty of this thing. The sonofabitch can’t run away, and he knows it. Not with the tape rolling. They got laws.”
“Jesus,” Willie said, “I don’t like it. We’ve got to have a signal, you and me.”
“Don’t worry,” Reynaldo said, “we’ll have a signal.”
‘.’ But what about the interview?” Willie asked. It was another way of bringing up Christina Marks.
“I wrote my own questions,” Reynaldo said sharply. “Ball busters, too. You just wait.”
“Okay,” Willie said. “I’ll be ready.”
“Seven sharp,” Reynaldo said. “I can’t believe you’re so nervous-this isn’t the Crips and Bloods, man, it’s a candyass doctor. He’ll go to pieces, I guarantee it. True confessions, you just wait.”
“Seven sharp,” Willie said. “See you then.”
After the cameraman had gone, Reynaldo Flemm called the Whispering Palms Spa and Surgery Center to confirm the appointment for Johnny LeTigre. To his surprise, the secretary put him through directly to Dr. Graveline.
“We still on for tomorrow morning?”
“Certainly,” the surgeon said. He sounded distracted, subdued. “Remember: Nothing to eat or drink after midnight.”
“Right.”
“I thought we’d start with the rhinoplasty and go on to the liposuction.”
“Fine by me,” said Reynaldo Flemm. That’s exactly how he had planned it, the nose job first.
“Mr. LeTigre, I had a question regarding the fee… “
“Fifteen thousand is what we agreed on.”
“Correct,” said Rudy Graveline, “but I just wanted to make sure-you said something about cash?”
“Yeah, that’s right. I got cash.”
“And you’ll have it with you tomorrow?”
“You bet.” Reynaldo couldn’t believe this jerk. Probably grosses two million a year, and here he is drooling over a lousy fifteen grand. It was true what they said about doctors being such cheap bastards.
“Anything else I need to remember?”
“Just take plenty of fluids,” Rudy said mechanically, “but nothing after midnight.”
“I’ll be a good boy,” Reynaldo Flemm promised. “See you tomorrow.”
29
The wind kicked up overnight, whistled through the planks of the house, slapped the shutters against the walls. Mick Stranahan climbed naked to the roof and lay down with the shotgun at his right side. The bay was noisy and black, hissing through the pilings beneath the house. Above, the clouds rolled past hi churning gray clots, celestial dust devils tumbling across a low sky. As always, Stranahan lay facing away from the city, where the halogen crime lights stained an otherwise lovely horizon.
On nights such as this, Stranahan regarded the city as a malignancy and its sickly orange aura as a vast misty bubble of pustular gas. The downtown skyline, which had seemed to sprout overnight in a burst of civic priapism, struck Stranahan as a crass but impressive prop, an elaborate movie set. Half the new Miami skyscrapers had been built with coke money and existed largely as an inside joke, a mirage to please the banks and the Internal Revenue Service and the chamber of commerce. Everyone liked to say that the skyline was a monument to local prosperity, but Stranahan recognized it as a tribute to the anonymous genius of Latin American money launderers. In any case, it was nothing he wished to contemplate from the top of his stilt house. Nor was the view south of downtown any kinder, a throbbing congealment from Coconut Grove to the Gables to South Miami and beyond. Looking westward on a clearer evening, Stranahan would have fixed on the newest coastal landmark: a sheer ten-story cliff of refuse known as Mount Trashmore. Having run out of rural locations in which to conceal its waste, Bade County had erected a towering fetid landfill along the shore of Biscayne Bay. Stranahan could not decide which sight was more offensive, the city skyline or the mountain of garbage. The turkey buzzards, equally ambivalent, commuted regularly from one site to the other.