"A den of treachery and mendacity that ah'll clean up," Herbert Solomon announced when his fellow jurists named him Chief Judge of the Circuit.
But what had happened? What did Herbert do then that made him fear Luber now? Reginald Jones was the link between the two men, literally sitting between them in the courtroom. But what did Jones-a baby deputy clerk at the time-have to do with it?
Today, Steve had intended to find out. He had planned to rent a car, drive to Miami, and drop by Jones' office. Pound the table and get some answers. Or not. But after the episode in the hotel room, Steve was not about to leave Victoria alone. And she insisted on interviewing Clive Fowles. Jones would have to wait.
Steve figured that Fowles was a man with conflicts of his own. Torn between his love for Delia Bustamante and a coral reef on one hand and his duty to Hal Griffin on the other. Just who won that tug-of-war, Steve couldn't be sure.
Victoria turned off her cell phone as they approached the causeway to Paradise Key in her metallic silver Mini Cooper. Reporters had been calling since dawn with questions about the snake attack. The car radio was tuned to a talk show hosted by Billy Wahoo, the self-proclaimed "prime minister of the Conch Republic."
"These two Mia-muh lawyers seem mighty accident prone. First Solomon drives off a bridge, then Lord nearly gets bitten by a snake. Those two are the mouthpieces for that carpetbagger Hal Griffin, and trouble follows him like skeeters on a sweathog. You ask me, Solomon and Lord are gonna be up the creek when they get to court."
"This bastard's polluting the jury pool," Steve complained.
"Don't worry. I'll weed out the bad ones on voir dire."
Steve looked over and laughed.
"What?" she asked, without taking her eyes off the road.
"That was terrific. Your confidence. If there's a problem with the venire, you'll fix it. I love that."
"I learned that from you. Don't you know that?"
"Sure I do. I just like to hear you say it."
At mid-morning on this breezy, sunny day, Fowles droned on about his courageous grandfather and Steve pretended he gave a damn. It was a classic lawyer's trick. You don't just come out and ask: "Did you see my client holding a smoking gun over the victim's body?" You buttered up the witness like a toasted bagel until he was convinced the guy with the gun didn't look anything like your client, and even if he did, he was acting in self-defense, and even if he wasn't, the victim was a son-of-a-bitch who deserved to be killed.
You accomplished this by putting on your sincere listener's face and trying not to doze off while the witness rambled from one inane subject to another. His prize-winning butterfly collection. Her mouthwatering s'mores recipe. Or in this case, the heroic exploits of Horace Fowles, Royal Navy submariner in World War II.
Victoria was terrific at the game. Probably because she actually cared about people and didn't have to feign interest in their banal lives. In the car, she had announced she'd take the lead in questioning Fowles, Steve still seeming a bit woozy and all. Her roundabout way of saying she was better at getting people to talk. Steve didn't disagree. They needed to learn just why Fowles, Griffin's trusted boat captain, was conveniently absent when the boss took Stubbs on the fatal cruise. How solid was the Englishman's alibi? Was he really delving into Delia's oysters-garlic and otherwise-when a spear impaled Ben Stubbs?
They had found Fowles in the boathouse on the far side of the island. An open-sided garagelike building that straddled a narrow inlet, the boathouse caught the easterly breeze and was filled with light. In stained coveralls, Fowles wore an eye shield and heavy gloves and aimed a welding torch at what looked like an old rusted torpedo with two seats built into it. The contraption was suspended from an overhead rack by a pair of heavy chains. Sparks flew as Fowles seared the tail assembly with a blue flame.
Catching sight of the visitors, he had turned down the gas and flipped up his eye shield. "Bet you don't know what this is."
Even had he known, Steve would have kept quiet.
Always let the witness have his fun.
"My grandfather's chariot," Fowles said proudly. "Without the warhead."
Chariot? Warhead?
"Wish I had his midget sub," Fowles continued. "But that's at the bottom of a fjord in Norway."
"Has to be a story in that," Victoria said.
And hurry the hell up and tell it, Steve thought.
Fowles offered them each a Guinness Stout from a cooler. Steve accepted; Victoria frowned and declined. Fowles' blond hair was mussed. His sunburned face brighter than usual, probably from the heat of the welding torch. Leaning on a sawhorse, Fowles began telling tales of his grandfather.
Horace Fowles had helped design the Royal Navy chariot, basically a torpedo with a six-hundred-pound warhead on the bow. Two men sat atop the chariot on seats sunk into its hull. Horace was an early charioteer, perhaps the most dangerous job in World War II, other than kamikaze pilot. Wearing a bulky dive suit, Horace would pilot the craft underwater, aim it at a German warship, then hop off, hoping to be picked up by a friendly ship or submarine. Later, he graduated from the chariot to four-man midget submarines called X-craft. He named his Fowles' Folly.
"Bloody floating coffin is what the midget sub was," Fowles told Victoria and Steve. "Or sinking coffin may be more like it. Glands leaking, batteries dying, pumps useless. Grandpop would patch her up with chewing gum and twine. Makes my service in the Falklands seem paler than piss. Not like fighting Nazis in the North Sea."
Fowles finished his story. Horace led the raiding party that went after the biggest prize of the war, the Tirpitz, a Bismarck class battleship. To get into the Norwegian fjord where the German ship was anchored, Horace swam out of the Folly in freezing water and cut through submarine nets with a knife. Sailors on the Tirpitz spotted the X-craft but thought it was a porpoise.
"That's how small she looked when you're on the deck of a fifty-thousand-ton battleship," Fowles explained. "Grandpop gets through and brings up the Folly amidship. Picture it, now: three British lads, looking up at this behemoth, twenty-six hundred German sailors aboard. Enough armaments to blow up all of London. But the big bastard can't fire her guns straight down, so the Krauts are using rifles and pistols and there's my Grandpop in the water, attaching charges to the hull. He gets back in and as they're pulling away, ka-boom, the Tirpitz lifts five feet out of the water. Hauling ass out of the fjord, the Folly gets tangled in the net, and a German cruiser sinks them."
Clive Fowles took a pull on his stout, doubtless picturing the midget sub going to her watery grave. "They gave my Grandpop the Victoria Cross. Posthumously, of course."
He reached inside the top of his coveralls and pulled out a medal dangling from a chain. A cross with a crown and lion and the inscription "For Valour."
"Churchill himself presented the medal to my grandmother." Fowles raised a hand above his head and spread two fingers in the fashion of the wartime prime minister. " 'V for Victory.' That's what Winnie told my grandmom."
"You must be so proud," Victoria said.
"Doubt if anyone in the war showed more guts than my grandpop." Fowles lowered his voice into a deep Churchillian baritone. " 'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.' " He smiled sadly and continued: "That was Horace Fowles. Which makes me a lucky bloke. The man I look up to most is my own flesh and blood."