Paul Levine - Flesh and bones

We were sitting at opposite ends of a table of Dade County pine on the patio of a ranch house at Bernhardt Farms near Homestead, thirty miles south of Miami. A cedar overhang kept us in the shade and paddle fans waved at the soggy air. Sitting between us on one side of the table was Guy's wife, Loretta, a woman in her mid-thirties with dyed red hair and some extra weight around the hips. Across from her sat Dr. Lawrence Schein, who wore a Florida Marlins ball cap, khaki shorts, and a matching shirt with epaulets. Loretta had already consumed three mango daiquiris, thick as milk shakes, which left a creamy mustache on her upper lip.

"Guy's a nutcase when it comes to mangoes," Loretta said, a trace of Georgia in her voice. "He's got 'em on the brain."

"Pop grew them even before he had the Castleberry money," Guy said. "I use the same fertilizer mix he formulated thirty years ago. If it ain't broke, why fix it? Mangoes are in my blood, that's all."

"Sure, darlin'," she cooed. "And thank God I love them, too." She turned to me and winked. "Guy won't admit it, but he divorced Mary Ann because she wouldn't eat mangoes."

"She was allergic," Guy said, finishing his gazpacho.

"Could have been psychosomatic," Dr. Schein said. "If Guy and Mary Ann were having other problems, the mangoes began to represent Guy."

"Oh, fiddle!" Loretta nearly shouted. "No more headshrinking talk, Larry."

"Think about it," the doctor continued, a little smile forming. "Were not the mangoes the fruit of Guy's labor, both figuratively and literally? So Mary Ann rejected him by refusing to eat his mangoes."

"That ain't all she refused to eat, if Guy's telling the truth," Loretta said, with another wink and a laugh, followed by a burp.

"Mangoes would make her break out in a rash," Guy said. "Stomach cramps, headaches. Didn't have anything to do with me."

Loretta leaned back in her chair. "Seven years we've been married and I've never had a headache, have I, honey?"

"No, Loretta. You're a real trouper."

"My mama raised me that way. I don't cause a man any trouble." She shot me a look to make sure I was listening, then turned toward her husband. "Not like that half sister of yours. Spoiled rotten from day one, just getting by on her long legs and pouty lips. Now look at her." Loretta Bernhardt sounded downright pleased that her sister-in-law, or maybe her half sister-in-law, was getting her comeuppance. "And if you ask me-"

"Nobody did, Loretta," Guy interrupted.

"Your daddy never touched that girl," she continued, now looking across the table at me. "Harry was a dear man, never once got out of line with me or anyone else I heard of. That girl's got you all fooled. I'll bet she planned to kill Harry and cooked up all that abuse talk after seeing some TV show."

"Why?" I asked.

Loretta looked at me. "Why what?"

The Nicaraguan woman was clearing away the soup bowls, while another served grilled yellowtail snapper covered with mango salsa. At the head of the table, Guy was digging into a platter of fried sweet plantains.

"Why would she want to kill her father?" I asked. "What was her motive?"

"Money, honey. Ain't it always?"

"What about the estate?" I asked, turning to Guy. "What did the will provide?"

"Fifty-fifty," he said. "Chrissy and I split everything."

"But if she's convicted of murder, she forfeits the inheritance," I said, munching a bite of tender white snapper. "Everything would go to you if she takes the fall."

"That's why she cooked up that cockamamy story," Loretta announced triumphantly. "You're supposed to get her off, and my bleeding-heart husband's helping you, though for the life of me, I don't know why. She killed his father, for goodness' sake. And if she gets away with it, Guy has to share the estate with her. It doesn't seem right."

"Actually, I don't even have to get her off," I said. "If Chrissy is convicted of manslaughter instead of murder, she'll get her share of the estate."

"Why?" Loretta demanded.

"It's the law," I said. "If someone pulls a Menendez, acing his parents to hurry up the inheritance, he'll go directly to jail, without collecting the two hundred bucks."

"Not in California," Dr. Schein said. "At least not without a circus."

"Send in the clowns," I said in partial agreement. "But manslaughter is different than murder. It's almost considered an accident."

Loretta scrunched up her face in a look of inebriated contemplation. "So, why help her at all?" She shot a look at her husband. "What kind of man would be so damned…"

She let it hang there, so I said, "Giving?"

"More like stupid!" Loretta gave a helpless shrug and looked toward her husband. "I'm sorry, darlin'. I love you to death. I just don't understand you. If it was me, I'd turn the first spadeful of dirt to bury her."

Guy placidly sliced his snapper and gave no indication of wanting to engage his wife in conversation. Married men have a surefire way of changing the subject: Simply ignore the wife. After a moment, Guy gestured toward me with his fork. "The food okay, Jake?"

"Great. The snapper's good, the salsa even better."

Guy smiled. "It's my own recipe."

"Quite a combination: sweet mangoes, mild onions-Vidalias, I'd guess-then the strong jalapeno."

"You got it."

"There's another taste I can't quite identify."

"Cilantro."

"Right. And a little olive oil?"

"Very good," Guy said. "You pay attention. That's a fine attribute in a man."

"And a lawyer," Lawrence Schein said.

I nodded and finished eating, damn proud to be a culinary sleuth. Now if I could only figure out these characters.

After the servants cleared the plates, they brought mango sorbet to clear the palate, followed by a small course of barbecued mango chicken, where I easily identified the brown sugar and vinegar but completely missed the chopped chipotle chiles in adobo sauce. Then came the mango-passionfruit creme brulee, and finally espresso, which, best I could tell, did not have a trace of mango.

Loretta was right. Guy had mangoes on the brain.

And Guy was right about something. I do pay attention. I had been wondering the same thing as sweetly drunk Loretta. Just why was Guy Bernhardt helping a half sister he hadn't even known the first seventeen years of his life? Why help this spoiled, pampered favorite child when anything less than a murder conviction would cut his inheritance in half?

But I didn't agree with Loretta.

Guy Bernhardt wasn't stupid.

So why didn't I think he was giving either?

I was shoulder to shoulder with Dr. Schein in the back of a Jeep Wrangler. Guy Bernhardt sat in the passenger seat, and a uniformed security guard was driving. A second Wrangler was in front of us, and a third one was right behind. A guard with a shotgun sat in each of our two escort Jeeps… well, riding shotgun.

We were bouncing through ruts and drainage ditches between rows of gnarly mango trees, and Guy Bernhardt was lecturing on the fertilizers, yields per acre, and every other damned bit of minutia you probably didn't want to know about Mangifera indica, including the fact that the fruit is related to the cashew.

I was inhaling the musky aroma of the field, half listening to Guy, half wondering what the hell was going on with the odd couple of Guy Bernhardt and Larry Schein. I couldn't shake the feeling that Guy was more complicated than a good-ole-boy mango grower and Schein had more secrets than Freud's Wolf Man.

"You have a problem with varmints?" I asked, and Guy seemed puzzled for a moment, then saw I was looking at a 12-gauge mounted between the front seats.

"Oh, that? Yeah, the two-legged kind. It's to protect the water, which is more valuable than the fruit-hell, more valuable than oil. We've got our own well fields out here, and some of the neighboring farmers claim we're sucking their wells dry. Then the state cited us for supposedly lowering Little Bass Lake a foot or so."