Paul Levine - Riptide

“Zoll vaksen tsibiliss in zein pupik!”

“Huh?”

“Whoever did it, onions should grow in his navel.” A shudder went through Samuel Kazdoy’s body and he sagged on his desk, folded over at the middle as if his stomach ached. For a moment Violet felt his pain. Samuel Kazdoy had been nice to her, and now he was hurting. That was bad. But from the look on his face, there must have been a fortune there, and that was good. She couldn’t wait to see Harry and help with the counting, but first there was work to do.

“What are we gonna do, Mr. K.?” she asked.

Samuel Kazdoy’s eyes were misty and his skin was gray. “Jacob… I need Jacob. Hand me the phone.”

Bent over the sink in the partners’ rest room, Jake Lassiter closed his eyes and tossed cold water onto his face. The sign on the door did not say MEN, just PARTNERS. No women had yet gained entry into what Marshall Tuttle called The Brotherhood. The uniformed rest room attendant, a Cuban man in his seventies who pretended not to understand English, stood at a discreet distance with the practiced look of one paid not to observe.

Lassiter was letting the adrenaline ebb, sharing the sergeant’s grief. Claude Ferguson was striking out at the system, not at Jake Lassiter. It was a system that had buried him in endless delay, had tied him up in mind-numbing depositions and repetitive hearings, had pried into his personal life, picking at his wound, treating his loss with impersonal cruelty.

Men had killed his wife, men who went to work each day in suits and ties and met in quiet rooms where they calmly decided to place poisons on pharmacy shelves. These men, Lassiter knew, paid his salary, and the thought made him ill. Even now, in a hundred conference rooms, the bozos in research or marketing or risk management are figuring the cost-benefit analysis of selling death with a jingle and a rhyme, and if a few million-dollar settlements threaten to dent the quarterly report, not to worry, the excess liability coverage will pick up the tab. Earnings up, bonuses all around. The Glory of the Bottom Line.

But are you any better than they are, he asked, another splash of water hitting the face. What are you anyway, besides a moderately skilled practitioner of the fast shuffle and the soft shoe? Liability, now you see it, now you don’t. Comparative negligence, assumption of the risk, or that all-time favorite, statute of limitations. Sure, you caught us, but you caught us too late! His job was to excuse, to deny, and to obfuscate. There you are, Jake Lassiter thought. Former second-string linebacker, current All-Pro obfuscator ready to roll up the score with a verdict here, a summary judgment there.

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.”