Paul Levine: Riptide

“Sounds gruesome,” Jake Lassiter said.

“Nah, except he bled all over, and from the top floor, the water looked like a bowl of punch at the junior prom.”

Lassiter groaned. “Any messages?”

“Lots of calls. Thad the Cad, some crappy problems at the bank. Then a guy from Hawaii, something about his fee for coming to Miami for the windsurfing race. And Mr. Kazdoy. He wants you to go to the theater tonight.”

Thaddeus G. Whitney, general counsel of Great Southern Bank, could wait. The bank’s work was fine if you were the kind of guy who liked sneaking tricky acceleration clauses into mortgages and drafting collateral agreements so abstruse most people would sign them just to avoid reading them. Lassiter wasn’t that kind of guy. He would call Keaka Kealia, the Hawaiian who was arriving Tuesday for the Miami-to-Bimini sailboard race. And Lassiter would show up at Kazdoy’s theater on Miami Beach for a lecture on Russian-American relations, an Eisenstein film, and a cup of borscht with the old man after the show.

First, though, there was work to do, plenty of work for a good lawyer these days. Miami had become a boomtown. The biggest business was importation — an assortment of weeds, powders, and pills — and the town was awash with dirty money. Greedy bankers laundered millions in tens and twenties for one point of the action. Lawyers formed offshore companies to hide drug profits and sometimes wound up offshore themselves, tied to concrete blocks if they were unfortunate enough to be subpoenaed before grand juries. Sleek women sniffed at a tropical high and attached themselves to swarthy men draped with gold.

To Jake Lassiter, all that was another world. He lived in a tiny house built of coral rock on a lot lush with live oak and red mulberry trees between Poinciana and Kumquat streets in Coconut Grove. He was one of the last Miamians without air-conditioning, preferring a half-dozen paddle fans that stirred the soggy air but did not seal him inside. At night he could hear the cries of herons and terns on their way from the Everglades to the beaches, and he could taste the aroma of a dozen mango trees next door.

Lassiter preferred the beach to nightclubs and cutoff jeans to lawyers’ blue suits. He loved Miami for the water and the solitude he found on a nine-foot sailboard on a twenty-knot day, shredding the breaking waves of the Atlantic. Sailing east, hopping the chop, he would watch the sky meet the ocean at the horizon. The world was limitless, possibilities infinite. But jibe and head west, back to shore, and there in the distance were the glass-and-marble towers of downtown. Inside, plush jail cells twelve-by-twelve. The sun glared against the tiny windows, sharp as a dagger in the eye, and Lassiter imagined ten thousand lawyers, bankers, and accountants pushing their papers from one desk to another and back again, a cycle as endless as the orbit of the circling vultures.

Jake Lassiter would rather sail east.

Cindy Clark typed the settlement papers in the San Pedro case and returned to her haiku, trying to work “bloody corpse” into a poetic triplet. Jake Lassiter called the Hawaiian and promised that an appearance fee would be delivered before the race. An unusual request, but for Keaka Kealia, the world’s greatest boardsailor, it was worth it.

From his high-rise perch, phone cradled on shoulder, Jake Lassiter reached for his binoculars. He watched the surf break on the reef at Virginia Beach on nearby Key Biscayne. He envisioned Keaka Kealia, six thousand miles away where Pacific waves slapped the north shore of Maui. Lassiter wished he were there with the sailors and surfers whose lives mocked his own. He envied their endless summer, conjuring images of sails crackling in steady trade winds, warm nights grilling mahimahi on the beach by torchlight, surrounded by women with bronzed bodies and sun-kissed hair.

The call completed, Lassiter dropped the San Pedro file on the floor next to a bulging folder of antitrust pleadings. He sidestepped half a dozen mortgage foreclosures and made his way to the marble windowsill three hundred fifty feet above Biscayne Bay.

“Maui,” Jake Lassiter said wistfully, kicking off his black leather wing tips and squinting into the brightness of the bay.

First Violet Belfrey vowed she wouldn’t spend a dime, wouldn’t even cash in the bonds. But why not go to the bank and find out what gives? The bank vice president fiddled with his mustache and whistled when he saw her, whistled twice when he saw the bonds, grabbing them, instead of her, with clammy hands. He told her to unload them now and talked about interest rates and issue par versus nominal par and a bunch of other things that didn’t make any sense except that she could turn the birds into cash.

“Just a slight discount below face value,” he said, twisting his mustache.

No harm in that, Violet thought, walking out of there with fifty-one thousand seven hundred dollars in cash, the banker following her out the door, extolling the virtues of a tax-exempt municipal bond mutual fund.

“We’re not the Rocker-fellers,” she told him. “The Belfreys always hold our own money, and mine’s going right into the shoe box with Grandma Mabel’s zirconium ring.” Violet neglected to say that tax-free investments were meaningless in a family where no one had ever signed a 1040, and few could have, even if they’d wanted to.

The money all might have gone into the shoe box, too, just as she planned, had the bus not passed Potamkin Lincoln-Mercury on the way back to her place. The midnight blue Town Car, five eagles on the wing.

Violet Belfrey never cared much about jewelry, never had the bucks to care much about it. But a watch, that’s practical, can tell time and show people you’re classy all at once. The gold Rolex from Mayor’s on Miracle Mile, two more eagles aloft.

Gambling was for suckers but a weekend in Nassau with Harry Marlin, her man, well, that was a vacation and a well-deserved one. The blackjack table, another bird uncaged.

It seemed like a lot of money at first, but if you wanted to get your white ass out of town, buy a place in the Carolina mountains, the score would have to be bigger. Hell, only walking around money left, and wouldn’t be any sugar daddy there to sink your teeth into.

Of course Harry was asking questions, wanting to know where she got the money. At first she said her aunt Emma died, and Harry cracked wise about Violet’s family, saying it was even money her aunt was her sister.

“That ain’t funny,” she said.

“Okay, just don’t pull my chain. Your aunt had to leave the house to take a pee, so don’t tell me she saved the money in a cookie jar, or that your uncle Clem struck oil in the pea patch like the Beverly friggin’ Hillbillies.”

He kept pestering, pecking away at her, and finally she told him. Harry listened, eyes wide, and asked her to repeat the part about the combination lock and the file cabinet.

“Gray metal drawers,” she said, “a hollow wood door to the office.”

“Uh-huh,” Harry Marlin nodded, smiling his gold-capped grin. “Security guards, burglar alarm?”

“Nope.”

“Uh-huh,” he repeated.

“Don’t be gittin’ no ideas,” Violet told him. “If those bonds disappear, who’d he suspect? Him and me’s the only ones ever in the office, and ah’ll bet dollars to doughnuts he never told nobody else about ‘em.”

“Maybe, maybe not. What makes you think you’re the first one ever took off her clothes for him?”

She laughed and brushed a fall of platinum hair from her eyes. “He might’ve dipped his wick in Loretta Lynn for all I care, but he’s tighter than my granddaddy’s hatband. He wouldn’t pay for it, I can tell you that.”