"Griffin and Stubbs were arguing. Hadn't seen that before."
"Arguing about what?"
"Couldn't tell you. They were in the salon. I only saw it through the glass. But Griffin shoved a finger in Stubbs' chest. Pushed him a bit, the way bullies do."
"That's it? A little shove with a finger?"
Robinson let out a derisive laugh. "Man does that to me, he'll be eating through a straw."
"What about Clive Fowles? Ever see him argue with Stubbs?"
"No."
"What about with Griffin?"
"Fowles wouldn't have the balls. Oh, I heard him tell Griffin maybe they should just do a tour business to the reef. Forget about the floating hotel and casino. Of course, Griffin didn't listen. You want my opinion, Fowles thought too small and Griffin too big."
"Why would Hal Griffin kill Ben Stubbs?"
"No good reason I can think of."
"And yet, you seem to think he did."
"Two men were alone on a boat at sea. One ends up dead."
A concise summation of the state's case, she thought. "There could have been a stowaway."
"Not unless Griffin put him ashore on the way down the coast. Like that book by Conrad."
"The Secret Sharer." Victoria smiled to herself. Yes, this was one literate barge operator. She'd mentioned the book to Steve, but he hadn't heard of it. Now, if Jimmy Buffet were the author and the book described island hopping and rum guzzling, Steve would be able to quote entire passages.
"You know the story, then?" Robinson seemed pleased. The usual visitors to Robinson Barge amp; Tow probably didn't study English at Ivy League universities, Victoria figured.
"A captain hides a stowaway who's accused of murder," she said. "The captain somehow identifies with the stowaway and risks his ship to get the man to safety."
"It's about the duality of good and evil in all of us," Robinson explained. "Maybe your client's a bit like that."
"Hal Griffin is not a murderer."
"Whoever did it, I'd like to wring his neck." Robinson made a twisting motion with those powerful hands. "You know my history at all, Ms. Lord?"
"I know your family's been in Key West for generations."
Robinson barked out a laugh. "That doesn't begin to describe it. There were black Robinsons here long before Thomas Jefferson started playing footsie with Sally Hemmings. I can track my ancestors back to a slave ship attacked by Sir Henry Morgan. He sunk the ship and grabbed the strongest slaves to join his crew. My great-granddaddy times ten or so became his first mate."
"Rescued by pirates," Victoria said. "Ironic."
"Morgan would have run you through with a sword if you called him a 'pirate.' He preferred 'privateer.' Had a license from England to plunder Spanish ships and settlements."
"A license to steal." Victoria laughed. "That's what Delia Bustamante called the EPA permit to build Oceania."
Robinson allowed himself a pinched smile. "Maybe there's a parallel. Maybe those who can remember the past are privileged to repeat it."
Remodeling the Santayana line. Leicester Robinson, Victoria thought, may actually have read all those books on his shelves. But surely he didn't go around quoting Conrad and Santayana in his daily work. What was such a man really like?
"You have a fascinating background, Mr. Robinson." Her way of saying: "Tell me more."
"My family's been wealthy and poor, owned castles on some islands and been jailed on others. Sort of like that Sinatra song. " 'I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate. .' "
" 'A poet, a pawn and a king,' " she finished the lyric.
Robinson smiled. "Exactly, all of them. More than a hundred years ago, there were Robinsons in Key West with their own salvage sloops. Licensed by the federal government. A cargo ship gets torn up on the reef, the salvors would race out there. The Robinsons had the fastest sloops, so they'd beat their competitors to the reef. Once you staked your claim, you got forty percent of what you salvaged."
"Just like contingency fee lawyers," Victoria said.
"With even worse morals. Some salvors set false lights, actually lured ships onto the reefs."
"The Robinsons do that sort of thing?"
He smiled and got up from his desk. "Let me show you something, Ms. Lord."
He put on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and led her to a framed document on the wall. Handwritten in fancy script was a salvor's license signed by a federal judge and dated October 1889.
She read the stilted legal language aloud: "Know all men by these presents that Walter J. Robinson, owner and master, is hereby licensed to employ his Sloop Satisfaction in the business of wrecking and salving along the coast of Florida."
"My great-great-grandfather. Do you know why he named his ship Satisfaction? That was Sir Henry Morgan's warship. The one that rescued the first Robinson and led to generations of black pirates, leading straight to Walter J. Robinson. So you ask whether my great-great-granddaddy was a tough customer? Let's just say he kept up with the competition. People said he'd save bales of cotton and let stranded sailors drown. A cutthroat business, it was."
"A cutthroat era."
"Aren't they all?"
Victoria wished Steve were here. He would have insights into Robinson she lacked. The man seemed disarmingly open with her. She knew he was trying to create an impression. Friendly and transparent. Was it an act? One of Steve's lessons involved witnesses too eager to talk:
"If they're filling all that dead air, it's because they want to control the conversation."
Robinson went on for a while, tracing his family history. Walter Robinson ran the town's cockfights and owned a brothel and a saloon that catered to both blacks and whites. He also built the grandest house in Key West. There it was, the oil painting on the wall. In the Queen Anne style, with a double veranda, balustraded railings, and a widow's walk, the pink house had been an extravagant showplace overlooking the ocean. There were conflicting stories of how the house was destroyed, Robinson said. His father told him it was demolished in a hurricane. But he'd later heard that his grandfather, Walter's grandson, having lost the family businesses, torched the property for the insurance. After that, it was downhill for the Robinsons. Leicester's father crewed on a shrimp boat and scraped up enough money to buy a leaky tugboat.
Leicester went off to college in New England, intending to teach history, but returned home to rescue the business when his father died.
The powerful gravitational pull of family.
Her own. Steve's. Maybe Junior Griffin feared the loss of the family fortune, and maybe Leicester Robinson was obsessed with restoring his. But even if that was true, she still had no idea who murdered Ben Stubbs. And as for Leicester Robinson, no idea if he was a poet or a pirate.
Thirty-six
Steve lay in wait like an assassin. . if assassins surveilled their prey from the front seat of the ultramini Smart car.
He scanned the grassy terrain through binoculars. There was his target, in houndstooth slacks, a black polo shirt, and black leather gloves. Steve could pick him off easily with a scoped M-16. Or pop him in the head with a nine iron. Or just call him on his pager. Reginald Jones was driving a golf cart. Next to him, riding shotgun, some fat-assed business type. The fat guy looked familiar, but Steve couldn't quite place him.
Earlier that morning, while spooning papaya pulp into the blender with yogurt to make Bobby's smoothie, Steve had scanned the Herald's sports section. The Marlins had been rained out, a seventh-grade soccer coach was caught selling steroids, and there was a charity golf tournament at Doral. Athletes, semi-celebrities, and local politicos would be teeing up. Including Reginald Jones, Chief Clerk of the Circuit Court.