Paul Levine - The Deep Blue Alibi

"Steve, we have to settle this about Junior." Victoria decided to turn the conversation away from Steve's distant relationship with the truth. "Are we on the same page?"

"I hate that expression," Steve said. "I'll bet you learned it in the DA's office. 'Same page. Team player. Push the envelope.' Crock of bureaucratic cliches."

"Excuse me if we're not all rebels like Steve-the-Slasher Solomon."

"I knew you two were fighting," Bobby said.

"We're resolving some professional differences," Victoria told the boy.

"So why couldn't Uncle Steve just say that?"

"Because your uncle thinks the shortest distance between two points is a winding road." Victoria turned to Steve. "I'm taking the lead when we interview Junior. Is that clear?"

"Who's Junior?" Bobby asked.

"Some guy Vic used to French kiss when they both wore braces."

"Sometimes, Stephen, you are really spiteful," she said. Using his full name, trying to clue him in as to just how angry she was. "And for the record, I didn't wear braces." Giving him an exaggerated, toothy smile.

"Junior's a spoiled rich kid," Steve said. "La Gorce Country Club. Daddy's platinum American Express card. Boarding school."

Victoria spoke to Bobby, pretending Steve wasn't even there. "Junior Griffin was the hottest boy at Pinecrest."

"I went to high school with the Marielitos. "

Mr. Macho, as if he'd served with the Magnificent Bastards battalion of the Marines.

"Miami Beach High," she reminded him. "Not exactly Baghdad."

"I had to fight for my lunch money."

"When Junior laughed, he had dimples and the cutest little cleft in his chin," Victoria said with a wicked smile.

"They do that with surgery," Steve said.

She turned toward Bobby but aimed her words like spears at his uncle. "Junior was captain of the swim team and king of the junior prom. My mother called him 'Dreamboat.' "

Steve made a guttural sound, like a man choking.

"He had this kind of Brad Pitt look," she persisted, "blond and rugged."

"Brad Pitt's real name is William Bradley Pitt," Bobby said. He squeezed his eyes shut, and Victoria knew he was unscrambling an anagram from the actor's name. After a moment, he grinned and said, loudly: "PARTLY LIABLE DIMWIT."

She still didn't know how Bobby did it. When she had asked him, all he said was that he saw letters floating above his head and he pulled them out of the air.

"Those high school studs like Junior," Steve said, "twenty years later, they're bald, fat losers."

"You still haven't answered me. Are you going to butt in with Junior like you did with Uncle Grif?"

"You win. Take the lead, Vic. Have a ball."

"Good. We need to be in perfect sync. If there's a criminal case-"

"Oh, there's a criminal case."

"How do you know?"

"Because Willis Rask didn't come here to wish us bon voyage." Steve gestured toward the two-lane blacktop fifty yards from the shoreline. A Monroe County police car pulled to a stop, and Sheriff Willis Rask climbed out and hitched up his belt.

SOLOMON'S LAWS

3. Beware of a sheriff who forgets to load his gun but remembers the words to "Margaritaville."

The sheriff waved and headed their way.

"Let me handle him," Steve said.

Victoria bristled. "There you go again."

"Trust me, Vic. I've known Rask a long time. Hey, Willis, how's the speed-trap business?"

"Hey, Stevie!" Rask shouted back. "Still chasing ambulances?"

If it hadn't been for his uniform, Steve thought, Willis Rask could be mistaken for another forty-fiveyear-old Conch who spent too much time in the sun with too many chilled beverages. He was overweight and had a brush mustache and long sideburns. He wore his graying hair tied back in a ponytail. His shirttail flopped out of his pants, and his Oakley sunglasses, on a chain of tiny seashells, were surely nonregulation. In one buttoned shirt pocket, the round shape of a metal container was visible under the fabric. Unless he'd switched to Altoids, Rask still indulged in chewing tobacco. His sunburned face was usually fixed in a quizzical half smile. The sheriff did not give the overall impression of a spit-and-polish lawman. Spit, maybe. But not polish.

Steve knew the sheriff's story better than most. As a young man, Rask ran a charter fishing boat, back when the main catch in the Keys was "square grouper," large bales of marijuana. Rask off-loaded from mother ships, and got busted on his third run. His lawyer was that silver-tongued windy-spinner, Herbert T. Solomon, Esq., who provided free counsel on the condition that Rask would go to college and stay straight. Herbert did that a lot in the old days. He taught young Steve that a lawyer owed a debt to all of society, not just to paying clients. Steve followed his father's lead, which might explain why he drove a thirty-year-old car and had an office in a second-rate modeling agency with a window overlooking a Dumpster.

Though he couldn't have been older than ten at the time, Steve could still remember his father's closing argument in Rask's trial. Wearing a seersucker suit with suspenders, Herbert glided around the courtroom like a ballroom dancer, smooth-talking the jury, earnestly declaring that his client had performed a public service, not a criminal act. Young, naive Willis Rask had fished that soggy pot out of the Florida Straits to protect the birds and the boats.

"Those bales of devil weed were a hazard to navigation," Herbert proclaimed with a straight face. "Thankfully, Willis was drawn to the area by a flock of terns that hovered overhead, feasting on the seeds. Willis saved untold boats from being sunk and birds from becoming ill. Without this young hero's quick thinking, there'd have been no tern left unstoned."

That made the jurors smile, and they came back in twenty minutes with a not guilty verdict. Willis danced down the stairs, kissed the kapok tree on the courthouse lawn, then hugged his lawyer. He kept his promise, finishing college at Rollins, upstate in Winter Park, then law school at Stetson over in DeLand.

A dozen years later, Rask came up with a novel platform when he ran for sheriff of what locals called the "Conch Republic." He'd clear drunk drivers off the narrow roads and jail husbands who beat their wives. But he wouldn't arrest anyone for possession of small amounts of marijuana. The limited resources available to law enforcement were too precious to waste on victimless crimes. In the permissive Keys-where Jimmy Buffet's "Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw" was an unofficial anthem-it was a brilliant tactic. Rask won in a landslide. Some voters lit up a joint on the way out of the voting booth.

"Glad I caught you." Rask met them at the shoreline. "Yo, Bobby."

"Safety's off on your Glock," Bobby said.

Rask pulled the gun from his holster and checked the lever. "Jeez, you're right. How'd you see that?"

"Bobby notices stuff," Steve said.

"And there's no clip in it," Bobby added.

"No wonder it's so light today." Rask hefted the gun, then turned to Victoria. "And you must be Stevie's partner."

"Victoria Lord," she said.

"My deputies told me Stevie had hooked up with a real looker." Rask winked at her. "And they weren't lying."

"Red light, Sheriff," Victoria said. "That's inappropriate."

Her tone reminded Steve of his fourth-grade teacher, a woman who'd slap his knuckles with a ruler whenever he acted up.

"Whoa, sorry," Rask said. "Got your hands full with this one, huh, Stevie?"

"She keeps her safety off, too, Willis."

"They're fighting, Sheriff," Bobby added.

"Quiet," Steve said, then turned to Rask. "Thought I might see you yesterday at the hospital."