Paul Levine: Mortal Sin

On a stifling August day of becalmed wind and sweltering humidity, the Coast Guard plucked seven Haitians from a sinking raft in the Gulf Stream, the grand jury indicted three judges for extorting kickbacks from court-appointed lawyers, and the Miami City Commission renamed Twenty-second Avenue General Maximo Gomez Boulevard.

And Peter Tupton froze to death.

Tupton was wearing a European-style bikini swimsuit and a terry cloth beach jacket. Two empty bottles of Roederer Cristal champagne 1982 lay at his feet. His very blue feet. Two thousand six hundred forty-four other bottles-reds and whites, ports and sauternes, champagnes and Chardonnays, Cabernets and cordials-were stacked neatly in their little wooden bins.

A high-tech air-conditioning system kept the wine cellar at an even 56 degrees and 70 percent humidity. Hardly life-threatening, unless you wandered in from the pool deck sopping wet, guzzled two liters of bubbly, and passed out.

Cause of death: exposure due to hypothermia. Which didn’t keep the Miami Journal from seizing on a sexier headline:

ON YEAR’S HOTTEST DAY, ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST FREEZES TO DEATH

The medical examiner reported that Tupton’s blood contained 0.32 percent alcohol. If he’d been driving, he could have been arrested three times. But he’d been swimming, then sipping mimosas on the pool deck. When he stumbled into the wine cellar, he must have kept drinking, this time leaving out the orange juice.

Cheers.

“He was a most disagreeable man,” Gina Florio said, dismissing the notion of the late Peter Tupton with a wave of the hand. It was a practiced gesture, a movement so slight as to suggest the insignificance of the subject. When the hand returned, it settled on my bare chest. I lay on my back in a bed that had a bullet hole in the headboard. The bed had been Exhibit A in a case involving a jealous husband and a. 357 Magnum, and I picked it up cheap at a police auction of old evidence.

I stared at the ceiling fan, listening to its whompety-whomp while Gina traced figure eights with a blood-red fingernail across my pectorals. A crumpled bed sheet covered me from the waist down. Her clothing was simpler; there wasn’t any. She reclined on her side, propped on an elbow, the smooth slope of a bare hip distracting me from the hypnotizing effect of the fan. Outside the jalousie windows, the wind was picking up, the palm fronds swatting the sides of my coral-rock house.

A most disagreeable man. In earlier times, she would have called him a dickbrain.

Or if there were clergy on the premises, simply a birdturd.

But Gina was a sponge that absorbed the particulars of her surroundings, the good, the bad, and the pretentious. Lately, she’d been hanging out with the matrons of the Coral Gables Women’s Club. Finger sandwiches at the Biltmore, charity balls at the Fontainebleau, tennis at the club. Discussions of many disagreeable men. Mostly husbands, I’d bet.

“A swine, really,” Gina said. “A short, bald, lumpy swine who mashed out his cigarettes in my long-stemmed Iittala glasses.”

“Iittala, is it?”

“Don’t mock me, Jake. Finnish, top of the line. Nicky likes the best of everything.”

“That’s why he married you,” I said, without a trace of sarcasm.

“You’re still mocking me, you prick.”

Prick. Now, that was better. You can take the girl out of the chorus line, but…

“Not at all, Gina. You Ye a name brand. Just like Nicky’s Rolex, his Bentley, and…his Iittala.”

“What’s wrong with my name, anyway?”

Defensive now. She could play society wife with the white-shoe crowd at Riviera Country Club, but I’d known her too long.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ve liked all your names. Each suited the occasion.”

“Even Maureen? Rhymes with latrine.”

“I didn’t know you then. You were Star when I met you.”

She made the little hand-wave again, and her butterscotched hair spilled across my chest, tickling me. Her movements hadn’t always been so subtle. When her name was Star Hampton, she jumped and squealed with the rest of the Dolphin Dolls at the Orange Bowl. She had long legs and a wide smile, but so did the others. What distinguished her was a quick mind and overriding ambition. Which hardly explained why she chose me-a second-string linebacker with a bum knee and slow feet-over a host of suitors that included two first-round draft choices with no-cut contracts and a sports agent who flew his own Lear. Then again, maybe it explained why she left me.

We were together two years, or about half my less-than-illustrious football career, and then she drifted away, leaving her name-and me-behind. When the gods finally determined that my absence from the Dolphins’ roster would affect neither season ticket sales nor the trade deficit with Japan, I enrolled in night law school. By then, Star had sailed to Grand Cayman with a gold-bullion salesman, the first of three or four husbands, depending if you counted a marriage performed by a ship’s captain on the high seas.

I hadn’t heard from her for a few years when she called my secretary, asking to set up an appointment with Mr. Jacob Lassiter, Esq. She wanted her latest marriage annulled after discovering the groom wasn’t an Arab sheikh, just a glib commodities broker from Libya who needed a green card. We became reacquainted, and Gina-though that wasn’t her name yet-kept drifting in and out of my life with the tide.

Sometimes, it was platonic. She’d complain about one man or another. The doctor was selfish; the bodybuilder dull; the TV newsman uncommunicative. I’d listen and give advice. Yeah, me, a guy without a wife, a live-in lover, or a parakeet.

Sometimes, it was romantic. In between her multiple marriages and my semi-relationships, there would be long walks on the beach and warm nights under the paddle fan. One Sunday morning, I was making omelets-onions, capers, and cheese-when she came up behind me and gave me a dandy hug. “If I didn’t like you so much, Jake,” she whispered, “I’d marry you.”

And sometimes, it was business. There were small-claims suits over a botched modeling portfolio, an apartment with a leaking roof, and a dispute with a roommate over who was the recipient of a diamond necklace bequeathed by a grateful thief who had enjoyed their joint company during a rainy Labor Day weekend. And, of course, the name changes. She had been born Maureen Corcoran on a farm somewhere in the Midwest. A mutt name and a mutt place, she said long ago. So she changed her name and place whenever she deemed either unsuitable. She called herself Holly Holiday during one Christmas season, Tanya Galaxy when she became infatuated with an astronaut at Cape Canaveral, and Star Hampton when she dreamed of a Hollywood career.

Finally, she asked me to make it official: Maureen would become Gina.

“It goes well with Florio, don’t you think?” she had asked. “And Nicky likes it.”

Nicky.

What was he doing today? Making money, I supposed. Wondering whether he was going to get sued by the estate of one Peter Tupton. Maybe worrying about his wife, too. Had Gina said she was going to see her lawyer?

Their lawyer, now. I could see Gina cocking her head, asking Nicky if it wouldn’t be sweet to hire Jake Lassiter. You remember Jake, don’t you, darling?

Sure, he remembered.

Before he was filthy rich, Nicky Florio used to hang around the practice field. He was hawking someone else’s condos then, and he’d deliver an autographed football at each closing. If he couldn’t get Griese, Csonka, Kiick, Warfield, or Buoniconti, I’d sign my name. And theirs.

Nicky was a great salesman. He pretended to love football, always looking for the inside dope on the team. Injuries, mostly. How had practice gone? What was Shula’s mood? I’d give him a tip now and then, knowing what he was up to, but I never bet on games. Well, seldom. And I never bet against us.