What Steve really wanted to know was who brought down a 160-pound guy with a P-4 Civil Service rating. "The gun that shot Stubbs," he said, "where'd you keep it?"
"In a compartment on the Force Majeure. I shoot lobsters with it."
"It's illegal to spear lobsters," Steve said, contemplating a citizen's arrest.
"In Florida waters, maybe. Not in the Bahamas."
So who speared Stubbs, beach boy? That's illegal just about everywhere.
They walked into an open living room with curved walls two stories high. Windows looked out on the cove, where palm fronds fluttered in the ocean breeze. The place was all handcrafted woods. Maple floors, redwood beams, cherry panels. To Steve, the house resembled the interior of a fine yacht. "Did your father know where you kept the gun?"
Junior shrugged and his deltoids rippled as if shocked with a cattle prod. "The gun was mixed in with some fishing gear. I'm sure he'd seen it, but I doubt Dad would even know how to load the thing."
"But you know how."
"Sure."
"In-ter-esting. Very interesting." Steve was trying to sound profound, but managed to sound like a pompous twit, even to himself.
"What's the big deal?" Junior asked.
The big deal, Steve thought, was that he wanted to place the murder weapon in someone's hand, someone's other than his client's. If that hand belonged to Zorro at Bunny Flagler's costume party, well tough shit.
"Yes, Ste-phen." Victoria made his name sound like a streptococcus. "What is the big deal?"
She was pissed, Steve knew. He'd promised to let her take the lead, had even meant it at the time. But once they got here, once the game began, he just couldn't back off. Hey, you don't pinch hit for Alex Rodriguez.
Bobby piped up: "Uncle Steve wants to pin the murder on the hottest boy at Pinecrest."
"I know, Bobby," Victoria said. "I just wanted to hear Steve say it."
Steve wished that Bobby didn't have the irksome habit of speaking only the truth, a real anomaly in the Solomon household. Turning to Junior, Steve asked: "Where were you when your father and Stubbs took the boat out?"
"Taking a swim."
"By yourself?"
"I'm a big boy, Solomon."
Bobby said: "What Uncle Steve means, do you have an alibi witness?"
Junior laughed. "Only the barracuda who likes to tail me."
"Cool," Bobby said.
"Look, Solomon. I had no motive to kill Stubbs."
"No apparent motive," Steve corrected him.
"Don't be a dick, Steve," Victoria said.
"It's okay, Tori," Junior interposed. "I know you guys have a job to do." As they started up a maple staircase to the second floor, he said: "If you're interested, I've got a theory about what happened."
"What is it?" Victoria asked. Eager now.
Yeah, Steve thought. Show us something besides your fast-twitch muscle fibers.
"I think Stubbs might have found the speargun and started fooling around with it," Junior said. "It's an old pneumatic model. The Poseidon Mark 3000. Works on air pressure instead of bands. If he tried to jam a shaft down the barrel and did it wrong, the spear could fire."
"Why would Stubbs even handle the gun?" Victoria wanted to know.
Junior shrugged again, his lats joining his delts in a little muscle dance. "Why do kids take their fathers' revolvers out of nightstands?"
"So if Stubbs shot himself, who slugged your father?" Steve asked, before Victoria could slip in another question.
"No one. After Dad found Stubbs, he rushed up the ladder to get back to the bridge. Dad had been drinking-they both had-and he was excited. The ladder's wet from spray. He slips and falls, conking his head."
They stopped in front of a wide set of double doors, Junior fishing for a key from a pocket of his shorts. Junior didn't lock up his spearguns, Steve thought, but he needed a key to get into whatever room he was going to show them.
"I can sell swampland to alligators," Steve said, "but that story stinks like old mackerel. The problem is, you're compounding multiple improbables."
"The hell does that mean?"
"Tell him, Vic."
She nailed Steve with a look that said she didn't like being ordered to perform. Then said: "One of Steve's theories."
"Not just a theory. A law. The Solomonic Law of Compounding Improbables. Vic, you do the honors."
Again, she shot Steve a look. "Stubbs shooting himself," Victoria said, "that's one improbable event. Your dad falling down the ladder and knocking himself out, that's two. A boat without a driver crashing on the exact beach where it was supposed to dock, that's three. There's a multiplier effect. Each improbable event makes the others harder to believe."
"And easier for a jury to convict," Steve said.
"Say a man takes his boat out fishing on Christmas Eve, though he has virtually no history of fishing," Victoria said. "And his pregnant wife disappears the same day. Months later, her body and the baby's body wash up onshore in nearly the same place as the guy went fishing. A place the guy went back to when he claimed he was somewhere else."
"The Scott Peterson case," Junior said, unlocking the doors.
"His defense compounded too many improbables," Victoria said, as they walked into a darkened room that seemed cooler than the rest of the house.
Steve smiled to himself. As much as Victoria complained about his lawyering, she was picking up his techniques.
Why doesn't she realize what a winning team we are?
"Steve's created a mathematical formula around the theory," she continued.
"One of Solomon's Laws," Steve said. "I call it squaring the improbables: 'If you have one chance in three of convincing jurors of an improbable event, you have one chance in nine of convincing them of two, and-' "
"One chance in eighty-one of convincing them of three," Bobby calculated.
"Exactly. In other words, no chance in hell."
Junior flicked on a light switch, and a tiny spotlight in the perimeter of the ceiling came on. They were in a huge, windowless room, bathed in shadows. "What I'm going to show you," Junior said, "only a few people have seen. Stubbs was one of them."
Steve squinted, trying to make out the shape rising from the middle of the room, but could see nothing but shadows. This was all a bit theatrical for his taste. He had the feeling that Junior was putting on a show for them. Or more likely, just for Victoria.
"You have to know something about my background for this to make any sense," Junior said. With the four of them standing in the half-light of the cool room, Junior spent the next few minutes explaining that over the years, with all the time he spent on the water, he'd become a deeply committed environmentalist.
Save the Whales.
Protect the Reefs.
Ban Tuna Nets.
The whole range of do-gooder ocean projects. Junior said he'd given away chunks of money to environmental groups, probably, he thought now, as penance for his father's actions. Hal Griffin, his son admitted, was a one-man tsunami when it came to ecosystems. Blowing opponents out of the water, literally sinking a Greenpeace boat in Sydney Harbor by ramming it with a barge. His old man was a major-league pillager, an All-Pro despoiler, his projects a dishonor roll of moneymaking, havoc-wreaking, eco-disasters. Eroded beaches from shoreline condos in the Philippines, massive fish kills off Jamaica after dredging a marina, a vicious sewage runoff from a gated community in the Caicos Islands.
"Everywhere Dad goes, environmentalists come after him with elephant guns."
But does Dad go after others with spearguns? Steve wondered. Whereas the son, by his own immodest admission, was Sir Galahad of the Deep.