Paul Levine - Mortal Sin

Next to me was a glass trophy case filled with tarnished silver bowls, dusty plaques, and antique golf clubs. I was aware of men in brightly colored slacks surrounding us. Most were gray-haired businessman types in their fifties. A man in a teal pullover sweater tried to step between us. “What’s the trouble here?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t let this mug play through on fifteen,” I said.

“Shut up, Lassiter!” Gunther’s face was reddening. “I’m a police officer, and if you’ll all kindly back away, I’ll place this man under arrest.”

Gunther took a sideways step as if to reach behind me, but I moved the same direction. Sort of a fox-trot. Then a familiar voice. “I see you have encountered the fugitive,” Nicky Florio said. “Be careful, he’s quite dangerous, Officer.”

This caused a stir in the golf-slacks-and-sweater crowd. A bald man, about sixty, approached Gunther, seemingly to offer help. I’ll bet this was the most excitement they’d had at the club since women were allowed in the Men’s Grill.

“Jake, you look like a Times Square cowboy,” Florio said.

“And you look like a cold-blooded killer.”

“Do I now? Well, I ask you who has been charged with murder? Who is a respected businessman, and who is under indictment?”

I was aware of two dozen eyes staring at me as if I were a cockroach on the pantry floor.

“Officer, I believe the man is quite deranged,” Florio said. “I have testified before the grand jury as to his deeds.” He looked at me with a self-satisfied smirk. Now I saw Gina half a step behind him, biting her lip. I felt my neck redden, embarrassed for her to see me this way, cornered and defenseless. A handsome man with a black mustache-Carlos de La Torre-was gently holding her arm, as if to protect her.

Gunther nodded in their direction. “No problem, Mr. Florio.” He looked back at the posse of duffers. “But one of you gentlemen might just call nine-one-one and ask for some backup.”

Two sweaters disappeared into the crowd. Not much time now. I stepped to my right and banged into the trophy case. Gunther moved toward me, his broad shoulders blocking my path. “Okay, Lassiter, it’s over.” He extended his right hand as if to grab me above the elbow. His left hand still held the handcuffs.

I let my body sag. “You win,” I told him. “I know when I’m beaten.”

Gunther smiled and stepped forward. I pivoted my left hip and threw a jab a tad too high. It bounced off his sloping forehead, but not without snapping his head back. His eyes closed, then opened wide. He roared like a wounded elephant, from anger, not pain, dropped the handcuffs, and charged me. He missed with a looping roundhouse right that I ducked. I feinted with a left, tapped his skull with a glancing right, tried to dig a hook into his kidneys, but he blocked me. As he backed up, I did my best imitation of a place-kicker. My pants rustled as I brought up a black boot aimed at his crotch. But the pants were too tight and the kick too slow. He caught me by the heel of my cowboy boot and slammed me backward into the trophy case. The door shattered, and shards of glass cascaded over me. My feet were slipping, and my right hand reached reflexively toward the wall to gain my balance. Instead, it went into the trophy case. I knocked over a couple of bowls and then felt my hand wrap itself around the wooden shaft of an ancient golf club that might have been a six iron.

I was shoving Gunther away with my left hand, but he was clawing at my face, trying to get both hands around my neck. I bent my knees, got leverage, and pushed him off, at the same time tearing the golf club out of the case.

Gunther stood three feet away, facing me, and I jammed the iron under his nose.

“No!” cried a man in a peach sweater and mauve polyester slacks. “That’s Ben Hogan’s mashie niblick.”

“Gunther, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to knock your teeth from here to Augusta. Now back off!”

I jabbed at his chest with the old iron, and he backed up. So did everybody else. I moved forward three steps, and everyone backed up some more. I kept going, and so did they. This was more like it. Outside, I heard the wail of a police siren. Then another. Damn, no use heading for the front door.

“Jake, it’s useless to run,” Nicky Florio said, his voice soothing. “Turn yourself in. Let them get you some professional help.” Now he was my friend, trying to steer me away from my life of crime and depravity.

I was under the crystal chandelier. I raised Ben Hogan’s old stick over my head and took a giant swipe at it. The crystal broke, bulbs popped, sparks flew, and everyone ducked and scurried out of the way. Gunther covered his head with his hands but came at me anyway. I dropped him with a solid whack to the knee. Not a bad stroke, though I didn’t have enough hip in it. He yelped and fell, cursing at me, clutching his knee, and rolling onto his side. The sirens shrieked closer.

I moved twenty paces toward the service entrance to the kitchen, neither running nor walking, just moving at a good clip. Florio broke from the crowd and followed me. I turned toward him, and he stopped. “You can run, Jake, but you can’t hide,” he said, taunting me in a voice just above a whisper. “If the cops don’t get you, I will. You’d better hope they find you first.”

I left him standing there and pushed through the door where Sam Terilli was waiting. He grabbed me by an arm, guided me past a stove brimming with pots of soup, around the freezers, and then hustled me out the back door. By a smelly Dumpster, two kitchen workers were speaking in Creole and smoking a reefer as big as a cigar. Terilli pushed me into a waiting taxi. I thanked him, and he said don’t mention it, but forget about applying for membership at the club anytime soon.

Charlie Riggs was sitting on a stool at the counter of a Cuban sandwich shop on Calle Ocho. He sipped at a cafe Cubano. A tired waitress with dyed red hair took my order: a beer and a bowl of black bean soup, heavy on the onions. It was just before midnight, or just after, I couldn’t tell which. My shoulders ached from two days of rowing a canoe. My back was stiff, and I pulled my hamstrings while launching the kick toward the balls of the loudmouthed detective. I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in days, or was it weeks, and my head was spinning because I still didn’t know what was going on.

So I told everything I knew to Charlie. He asked me to go over it again, and I did. I showed him the map I had taken from the shiny truck on the woody hammock. He asked me to describe the truck in as much detail as I could, and I did that, too.

What else did Nicky say to De La Torre about lowering the water level? he wanted to know.

Nothing.

What kind of soil tests?

I didn’t know. Nicky hadn’t said.

Hmmm. Charlie ordered another syrupy cafe Cubano and poured enough sugar into it to make Carlos de La Torre even richer. “Anything else? See anything unusual out there?” He cocked his head to the west.

“Nada. ”

“You’re sure?”

“It was the Everglades, Charlie. Peaceful, except when I had to use a pen as a dagger, or I was ducking shotgun pellets. Quiet, except for the birds squawking and an occasional explosion.”

He looked up at me from under bushy eyebrows. “What sort of explosions?”

“I don’t know. The loud kind.”

“Where?”

“Out there somewhere. Who knows where? I heard them first at Nicky’s house the morning after Gondolier was killed. For a while, I thought it was thunder. Then, when I was paddling the canoe, I heard some more.” I watched Charlie digest the information. “Why do you ask?”

Charlie harrumphed and thought it over. I had finished the soup and just realized how hungry I was. When the waitress came by, I ordered a media noche and an order of sweet plantains.