Paul Levine - Riptide

“Before you go, Tub, let me ask you something. You remember when I was in the PD’s office?”

“How could I fergit? You got me off that trumped-up charge. I mean, give me a break, aggravated assault for shoving a guy in a shitkicker bar.”

“As I recall, you had a pool cue in one hand and a broken Budweiser bottle in the other.”

Tubby shrugged. “House rules. No guns.”

“Anyway, you remember my trial partner, Berto Zaldivar?”

“Ay. Handsome devil. Combed that black hair straight back like some gigolo. The two of you were defending poor wretches what couldn’t afford real lawyers.”

“We were both starry-eyed in those days. It took me a while to figure out that a three-time armed robber wasn’t a saint just because he was indigent. It didn’t take Berto as long.”

“What about him, bro?”

“You still have friends in the business?”

“What business is that, bro?”

“C’mon, Tubby. Importation.”

The big man looked around, as if somebody might be eavesdropping. “I hang loose in a bar in the Keys where half the Bubbas are smugglers and the other half narcs. As long as the fishing boats keep unloading that square grouper, the Keys ain’t gonna have no recession.”

“Keep your ears open for me about Berto, okay, but be discreet.”

“Ain’t I always?” Tubby whispered. He slapped Cindy playfully on the bottom and headed out the door.

An hour later, as Lassiter was putting the finishing touches on a motion to foreclose the mortgage of a laid-off airline mechanic, the intercom buzzed. “Don’t forget,” Cindy said.

“Forget what?”

“Your meeting with Charlie Riggs at the med school.”

“Shit, I forgot. Searching for truth and justice really drains the brain cells.”

“Another thing, boss.”

“Yeah?”

Wind dies at sundown,

Dinner date,

Beach Bunny at eight.

“Thanks, Cindy, but Keaka’s going to be there, too.” “No sweat, su majestad. Just flash those baby blues and talk some legal mumbo jumbo. He’ll be dead meat.”

It’s not far from downtown to the medical complex near the Orange Bowl. Unless the East-West Expressway — renamed the Dolphin Expressway, no thanks to me — was battened down. Which it was. A dozen Metro police cars were angled across the roadway, lights blazing, cops with drawn guns approaching an overturned trailer truck. Tiptoeing, watching where they stepped as thousands of Florida lobsters spilled out of the rear door of the refrigerated truck and scuttled across the road, sensing the water of a muddy canal nearby.

Not an everyday traffic accident, especially since Alejandro “Monkey” Morales, ex-shrimper and current thief, was pinned inside the cab of the stolen truck. Morales had long ago figured out that grabbing a truck with three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of shellfish was more profitable than holding up a bank. And wasn’t a federal crime. As the kidnapped crustaceans disappeared into the bushes, Lassiter pulled his old convertible onto the berm and made it to the exit ramp, ignoring the occasional crunching sound under his tires.

The traffic on Flagler Street was at a standstill and Lassiter took a shortcut on Seventh Street, lately rechristened Luis Sabines Way by the city commission, always anxious to pick up a few votes in Little Havana. Municipal debates over street names take almost as much time as haranguing Fidel Castro and soliciting campaign contributions from builders of homes that turn into shrapnel in a stiff wind.

The drawbridge was up on Twelfth Avenue, newly renamed Ronald Reagan Boulevard, mainly because the former president once ate a media noche at La Esquina de Tejas during a campaign swing. The restaurant, at the intersection of the Gipper’s boulevard and First Street, had erected a little presidential memorial that looked like a religious display.

Lassiter stayed on Luis Sabines Way, heading too far west, and nearly got lost because the signs on Twenty-second Avenue had been changed to General Maximo Gomez Boulevard. He didn’t know Maximo and figured Reagan didn’t either, since he couldn’t remember half his Cabinet members. Lassiter swung left on the generalissimo’s boulevard and again on Eighth Street or, if you prefer, Calle Ocho, to head east again. A tired Chevy with no shocks or maybe three bodies in the trunk was double-parked in front of Tony Perez Bail Bonds, Fianzas, according to the neon sign. A parade of homemade floats inched along the other two lanes, celebrating Independence Day on an obscure Caribbean island that, in fact, was ruled by a malevolent despot.

So Lassiter waited, top down, figuring he could miss Charlie Riggs’s lecture on the body temperature of stiffs and still have time to talk to him about Sam’s missing bonds. Doc Riggs hadn’t spent a lifetime sifting scientific evidence of crime without solving a few puzzles.

The sun shone brightly, and the breeze from the bay crackled the American and Cuban flags in front of a Toyota dealership at the corner. Lassiter’s mind wandered. He thought of open seas and riding a board through ocean swells. An image of Lila Summers appeared on a beach of cocoa sand. The reverie was interrupted by a steel band clanging by on the left, trying to give Lassiter a headache and succeeding. In front of him, three men, who believed their bare chests made Little Havana even lovelier, sat on the hood of the Chevy, arguing with Tony the Bondsman, who apparently demanded more than a jalopy as collateral. Finally, Lassiter gave the Chevy a love tap with his front bumper, and a wiry fellow on the driver’s side stuck an Uzi out the window. Nice move, Lassiter thought. An automatic weapon is better than the traditional bird for getting your attention. Lassiter decided not to lay on the horn. Not the one installed by GM, and not even the one that played “Fight on, State.”

Finally, the Chevy moved, and so did he, rolling through a yellow light at Seventeenth Avenue, now dubbed Teddy Roosevelt Boulevard. Traffic congealed again a block away, alongside turquoise-and-yellow apartment buildings, gussied up with curlicues and bric-a-brac, window air conditioners coughing and dripping. A heavy woman in a rocking chair with a black shawl around her shoulders stared at him through the narrow metal railing of a second-floor balcony. Back on Ronald Reagan Boulevard, Lassiter turned left, crossed the bridge over the Miami River, and headed past Cedars of Lebanon, the various cancer and eye centers, and into the medical school parking garage.

Charlie Riggs was shouting at his class. “Inshoot wounds are always smaller than outshoot wounds, true or false?”

“True,” said an Asian woman with enormous round eyeglasses. “The entry wound is always smaller.”

“False!” Charlie Riggs bellowed. “One of a number of myths you must forget if you are to learn. Suicides have been called murders by untrained coroners who believed a larger hole in the chest meant the deceased necessarily was shot in the back. Innocent men have gone to prison because of incompetent autopsies.”

A hush fell over the room. Riggs paused, then started up again. “Inshoot wounds are always circular. Another myth! It depends on the angle of entry. The bullet always follows a straight path inside the body. False! A bullet can ricochet off the organs. How about this one: The powder burn helps determine the distance of the gun from the body.”

“That’s true, Dr. Riggs,” the woman tried again.

Charlie Riggs peered up into the sloping, theater-sized classroom. “True once, obsolete now. With a smokeless propellant, it’s useless. And another one: A good M.E. can tell the caliber of a gun by measuring the inshoot wound.”

This time, the class was silent. They learned slowly, but they learned.