“I saw her and Dr. Marsh holding hands in the elevator after the verdict. And then she admitted to me that it was a scam.”
“So, really, your only proof of a scam is what you claim you saw in the elevator and what you claim she said to you afterward?”
He felt a pang in his stomach. It was the toughest cross-examination he’d ever faced, and he was staring at the back of his wife’s head. “I guess that’s what it boils down to.”
“That’s my concern,” she said quietly.
“You shouldn’t be concerned.”
“But maybe you should be.”
“Maybe so.”
Finally she rolled over, looked him in the eye, and gently touched his hand. “You and Jessie weren’t having an affair. You didn’t know about the child. You didn’t know about the joint bank account in the Bahamas. You didn’t know that she’d left you all that money in her will. She turns up dead, naked, in our bathtub, and the only evidence that someone else might have killed her is your own self-serving testimony. You claim that she admitted the whole thing was a scam, even though you, as her lawyer, knew nothing about it until after the trial was over. I would never tell you and Rosa how to do your jobs, but I’ve gained enough insights from you over the years to know that it’s looking harder and harder for you to avoid an indictment.”
“Don’t you think I realize that?”
“I’m not saying it to make you mad. My only point is that unless there are twelve Cindy Swytecks sitting on the jury, how do you expect them to believe you? How could anyone believe you, unless they wanted to believe you?”
He brushed her cheek with the back of his hand, but even though she’d been the one to initiate physical contact a minute earlier, she felt somewhat stiff and unreceptive. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Me too.” She rolled over and switched off the lamp. They lay side by side in the darkness. Jack didn’t want to end it on that note, but he couldn’t conjure up the words to make things better.
“Jack?” she said in the darkness.
“Yes?”
“What does it feel like to kill someone?”
He assumed she meant Esteban, not Jessie. Even so, it wasn’t something he liked to talk about, that battle to the death with his wife’s attacker five years earlier. “It feels horrible.”
“They say it’s easier to kill again after you’ve killed once. Do you think that’s true?”
“No.”
“Honestly?”
“If you’re a normal human being with a conscience, taking a human life under any circumstances is never easy.”
“I didn’t ask if it was easy. I asked if you thought it was easier.”
“I don’t think so. Not unless you’re miswired in the first place.”
She didn’t answer right away. It was as if she were evaluating his response. Or perhaps evaluating him.
She reached for the lamp, and with a turn of the switch the room brightened. “Good night, Jack.”
“Good night,” he said, trying not to think too much of her decision to sleep with the light on. And then there was silence.
42
•
Yuri was chasing flies. They were all over Gulfstream Park. Not the kind that race horses swatted away with their tails. These were flies with money to wash.
Yuri loved thoroughbred racing, and in Florida’s winter months the name of the game was Gulfstream Park. The main track was a mile-long oval wrapped around an inviting blue lake that even on blistering-hot days made you feel cooler just to look at it. Gulfstream was a picturesque course with over sixty years of racing tradition, host to premier events like the Breeders Cup and Florida Derby. It sat within fifty miles of at least ten casinos that were more than happy to take back your winnings, everything from bingo with the Seminole Indians to blackjack and slot machines on any number of gaming cruises that left daily from Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami. This was as good as gambling got in Florida, and Yuri was in heaven.
But he hated to be ripped off. Especially by his own flies.
“Pedro, got a minute?”
Pedro was a new guy, early twenties, pretty smart, not nearly as smart as he thought he was. He was standing at the urinal in the men’s room beneath the grandstands. Hundreds of losing tickets littered the bare concrete floor at his feet, but at the moment the two men were alone in the restroom.
He looked at Yuri and said, “You talking to me?”
“Yeah. Come here. I got a big winner for you.”
Pedro flushed the urinal, zipped up, and smiled. It was his job to buy winning tickets, all with dirty money. It was one of the oldest games in the money-laundering world. Take the dirty proceeds from a drug deal, go buy a ticket from a recent winner at the track, cash it in and, voilà, your money’s legit. You had to pay taxes on it, but that was better than having to explain suitcases full of cash to the federal government. Pedro might wash ten thousand dollars a day this way. He was a fly, always hanging around race tracks the way insects of the same name buzzed around a horse’s ass.
“I hit the trifecta in the second race,” said Yuri. “Twenty-two hundred bucks.”
Pedro washed his hands in the basin, speaking to Yuri’s reflection in the mirror. “I’ll give you two thousand for it.”
“You charge commission?”
“Sure. You still come out ahead. You turn that ticket in to the cashier, you end up paying the IRS five, six hundred bucks in income taxes. You sell it to me, you get fast cash for a measly two-hundred-dollar transaction fee.”
“I gotta tell you, Pedro. Every time I’ve done this in the past, it’s been at face value. A twenty-two hundred dollar purse gets me twenty-two hundred bucks from a fly.”
“Must be a long time since you won anything. I been doing it this way for at least two months.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah.”
“Business good?”
“Excellent.”
“What does your boss say about that?”
“Nothing I can tell you.”
“I think he’d be pissed. Because you haven’t been telling him about your ten-percent commission, have you?”
“That’s between me and him. You want to sell your ticket or not?”
Yuri grabbed him by the back of the neck, smashed Pedro’s head into the sink. A crimson rose exploded onto the white basin. Pedro squealed and fell to the ground, his face bloodied, a broken tooth protruding through his upper lip.
“What the… hell?” he said, dazed.
Yuri grabbed him by the hair and looked him straight in the eye. “Two months, huh? That’s a thousand bucks a day for fifty race days you been skimming. You got two days to cough up a fifty-thousand-dollar present to your boss. Or I’ll come find you, and you’ll be spitting up more than just your teeth.”
The bathroom door opened. Two men walked in, then stopped at the sight of blood on the sink and Pedro on the floor.
Yuri walked past them and, on his way out, said, “It’s okay. He slipped.”
The door closed behind him, and Yuri walked calmly into the common area beneath the grandstands. A group of dejected losers watched the replay of the third race on the television sets overhead. Winners were lined up at the cashier window. Dreamers were back in line for the next race, wallets open. Yuri bought himself an ice-cream bar and returned to his box seat near the finish line. It was an open-air seat in the shade, with a prime view of the nine-hundred-and-fifty-two-foot straight-away finish from the final turn.
Vladimir was in the seat next to him. “Flies all under control?”
“Totally.”
“I think I’ll call you the bug zapper.”
“You do and I’ll squash you like a cockroach.”
Horses with shiny brown coats pranced across the track. The big black scoreboard in the infield said it was five minutes until post time.
“I had an interesting meeting last night. A friend of one of my employees from the blood center claims he can hook us up with fifty million dollars in viatical settlements.”