Jake Lassiter leaned on the marble-topped sink with its gold-plated faucets and stared into the mirror. Not a healthy look. Dead eyes. A sour expression. Charlie Riggs was right.
Without looking at him, the old attendant handed Lassiter a terry cloth towel. “ Gracias, Pablo,” Lassiter said.
“De nada, Doctor.”
Once, at a partners’ meeting, Lassiter had suggested that partners and associates share the same rest room. “An egalitarian gesture. Lawyers that pee together plead together.”
Marshall Tuttle had tabled the motion, then referred it to the Committee on Facilities, but not before saying, “The officers ought not be displaying their wares to the enlisted men. Loss of stature, you know.”
“Maybe we need officers with bigger stature,” Jake Lassiter had suggested helpfully.
When Lassiter returned to his office, Cindy was missing from her desk, probably riding a chopper with Tubby Tubberville in the Keys. She had taped a pink telephone memo to the top of Lassiter’s leather chair, a place reserved for important messages such as emergency hearings and small-craft advisories:
Mr. K.; Mr. K.;
Bonds away,
Gone with the wind.
“What the hell?” he said to himself, trying to decipher Cindy’s version of Japanese poetry. Bonds, Lassiter thought. He had advised the old man to keep his negotiable paper in a safe-deposit box and to do his monthly clipping in a bank. Probably didn’t listen. Bonds away?
“Oh shit,” he said aloud. Then he headed to the parking garage at the pace the coaches use for the twelve-minute run.
A City of Miami Beach police car was double-parked in front of the South Side Theater, its front wheels over the curb and its tail slanted into Lincoln Road, a cop in a hurry. A van for the forensic team, the crime scene investigators, was parked neatly next to a planter on the pedestrian mall. Lassiter pulled his old convertible into the alley and jammed the rusty front bumper against the wall by the fire door.
The crime scene technicians were just leaving, their photos taken and surroundings dusted for prints. Lassiter climbed the stairs two at a time.
In a corner of the office, Sam Kazdoy was slumped into an old sofa. He looked up as Lassiter stepped through the broken door, but the cherubic smile was missing. “Jacob, there you are. I got tsuris, real trouble here.”
“Hello, Sam. Officer…”
The cop’s name tag said P. Carraway and he had three stripes on his sleeve. Early fifties, maybe older, big with a potbelly, a red face, and a veined nose that was a road map to every after-hours joint in Sunny Isles. A look that said he burned out so long ago he probably couldn’t remember when he liked his job or did it well. He didn’t say hello or offer his beefy hand. His partner, J. Torano on the name tag, looked bored. Late twenties, short but muscular, a bodybuilder maybe, sloping shoulders and huge biceps straining against a tapered, short-sleeve shirt.
Sergeant Carraway spoke first. “You the lawyer we been waiting for?”
“Guilty.”
“Your client here claims somebody stole one to two million in, what’d he say, Georgy boy, bonds?” A nasty, hard-edged voice, the cop watching the lawyer for a reaction. Lassiter kept quiet, still sizing up the players. The younger cop wasn’t paying attention to anybody. Carraway asked again, louder, “Georgy boy, what’d he call ‘em?”
“Called ‘em coupons, and please call me Jorge, like with an H where the J is,” Torano said.
“Coupons. Thank you, Whore-hay,” Carraway said, dragging out his partner’s name.
Samuel Kazdoy looked up and said in a whisper, “Bond coupons.” Then he sank back into the sofa. For the first time that Lassiter could remember, Kazdoy looked every bit his eighty-six years.
“Bond coupons, yesiree!” Sergeant Carraway hooted. The cop wanted to spar with him, Lassiter thought. Shit, might as well lead with your chin.
“What do you mean, claims they were stolen?” Lassiter asked.
The red face smirked. “What I mean, Counselor, is we got no signs of forced entry, this mess on the floor is as phony as a fifty-dollar roofing job, and who the hell keeps that kinda dough in a dump like this? What I’m saying in case you’re a bit slow on the uptake is that maybe there wasn’t a burglary here at all.”
Okay, if that’s his best shot, no blood on the canvas. Just open with a jab now, get the feel of it before getting into any clinches. “I don’t believe you, Carraway. You’re sent to investigate a B and E that doesn’t solve itself in half an hour, so you accuse the victim. No break-in, huh? Sam, was there a show last night?”
“Eisenstein festival,” the old man said softly from the couch. “A twin bill — Ten Days That Shook the World and Alexander Nevsky — a beautiful show, three hundred people.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Carraway said. “He told us that, but from what I hear about his customers, most couldn’t get up the stairs, much less bust down a door.”
Lassiter moved to the middle of the room. “Sergeant, you know what pisses me off? Salesclerks who are rude, TV repairmen who show up three hours late, and policemen too lazy for anything except cadging free drinks and copping cheap feels at topless bars.”
“And you know what pisses me off?” Carraway said, his watery eyes squinting. “Lawyers. All of you, the smart-aleck young ones in the PD’s office and you downtown types with your bayfront views.” He turned to Torano, who was silently doing some slow-motion martial arts exercises by the door. “Yo, Whore-hay, what does a lawyer use for a contraceptive?”
“No se, man.”
“His personality.”
Carraway laughed at his own joke. His partner kept wheeling around, ready to slash an invisible opponent, and Kazdoy stayed on the sofa, apparently oblivious to the byplay. “Whore-hay, you hear the one about the lawyer who stepped in a pile of horseshit?”
“No, digame.”
“He looked down and thought he was melting.”
Carraway was laughing so hard his face turned purple. With any luck, Lassiter thought, he’d have a coronary, and a real cop could be assigned to the case. “If you’re done, Sergeant, maybe we can get down to work. Did you consider the possibility that somebody hides in the rest room, then after everyone’s gone and the place locked up, breaks into the office, takes the coupons, and walks out the fire door downstairs and into the alley?”
“Yeah, I considered it.”
“And?”
“And I don’t have to tell you nothing, smart guy.”
“Carraway, my first impression is that you couldn’t find your dick with both hands, but maybe I’m wrong. Tell me, am I wrong?”
Carraway studied him impassively, tucked his thumbs in his belt, and said, “All right, the show was over at what, eleven o’clock. The break-in didn’t occur until after two o’clock, according to the broken clock. If someone’s in the rest room, they don’t wait that long. They’d be going bananas by then, anyway. If you’d ever done surveillance, you’d know how slow ten minutes goes by, much less three hours. Plus, like I said before, this crowd ain’t exactly a bunch of cat burglars.”
Lassiter thought about it a moment, then turned to his client. “Any new faces last night, Sam?”
“More strangers than fleas on a dog.” It was Violet, coming through the broken door, filing her fingernails, chewing gum, and walking, all at the same time. “I jes’ hadda get outta here, it was givin’ me the heebie-jeebies, even with such handsome officers to keep me company.”
Jorge Torano grinned and flexed his broad shoulders, then resumed his t’ai chi ch’uan, or wing chun do, or whatever the hell it was. Sergeant Carraway tried to peek down Violet’s low-cut blouse. She let him have a quick look, then sashayed to the couch, lowered herself ceremoniously next to the old man, blew on her fingernails, and said, “Last night, had a class here from the university, moviemaking or somethin’. Bunch a guys with earrings and hair down to their ass. Wouldn’t of trusted a one of them. Mr. K. and I left here about eleven and I fixed a late supper at his place and so on and so forth as I told these two gentlemen.”