Paul Levine - Night vision

"Any men who belong?"

"Hell no!"

"What about you? Ever join, ever use your wife's password, get online?"

Nick Fox stared hard at me. "Whaddaya think, I'm some kind of weirdo? If I want a woman, I don't beat around the bush, no pun intended. I just walk right up and say, 'I'm Nick Fox, and you've got the greatest legs I've ever seen, and I've seen them from here to Hong Kong.' Gets them every time."

"Thanks for the lesson."

"Always the legs, Jake. Never say tits or ass. Always legs."

I considered taking notes but figured I could remember the basics. "Nick, I think I have someone for you. Her name's Bobbie."

"She hot to trot?" Nick Fox asked, deeply earnest.

"Like a Thoroughbred," I said, winking.

I stood up to leave. He stayed in his chair, "Hey, Jake, one piece of advice…"

"Yeah?"

"Like we used to say in-country, keep your ass down."

I looked at him and the politician's smile was gone. "Is that an order, sir?"

He summoned up a patronizing smile to take the edge off. "Just friendly advice, like yelling 'incoming' to your buddies. You stick your ass out in the wind, Jake, maybe it gets greased."

"Or maybe somebody else trips over it, takes a big fall."

I turned smartly on my heel and walked out, ramrod straight, feeling but never seeing his officer's glare.

I stood on the courthouse steps, blinking into the late-afternoon sun. To the west, thunderheads formed over the Everglades. The showers would be late, but just in time for rush hour. Overhead, a dozen black buzzards circled the wedding-cake upper tiers of the courthouse, gliding in the updrafts. The lawyers and the buzzards, birds of a feather, source of a thousand jokes.

They're really turkey vultures, Charlie Riggs informed me one day. Cathartes aura.

I told him not to spoil the fun.

With one eye on the birds overhead, I reached into my suitcoat pocket and pulled out the clipping Cindy had turned up when preparing to defend Nick Fox's libel suit. The article was seven years old, published a week before Fox's first election. I turned to the paragraphs I had circled near the end.

The candidate rarely speaks of his Vietnam service, and then only in modest terms, even when describing the incident for which he was awarded the Silver Star.

"We had a translator, a Vietnamese girl, maybe nineteen or twenty, educated in one of the French convents. We got pinned down in a firefight in a village, lost two men in the first five minutes. It was getting dark. Raining, like always. The girl was supposed to stay with the RTO, the radio operator, but she got separated and the VC grabbed her. I led one platoon in a chase across some dikes through rice paddies. A second platoon was two clicks-two kilometers- north of us. We moved parallel to each other to the east. We caught Charley in the open on the dikes. It was too late to save the girl, but we inflicted heavy casualties."

Okay, so once he flicked on the magnetic tape, out it came, same way every time. Rewind the tape, play it again, Nick. Nothing wrong with that, or was there? I thought of Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed into his story of Korean War heroics. Maybe Nick Fox brainwashed himself, a tidy story of a rainy day in the rice paddies.

I was still thinking about it when one of the big birds suddenly swooped down and landed on the sidewalk next to an overturned garbage can. Spreading its wings a full six feet to ward off competition, it uncovered the remains of a chili dog. I approached to within a dozen feet, and when the bird turned to face me, ugly as death, I backpedaled with a scaredy-cat step of a Francis Macomber. In a moment another bird landed and picked through the rest of the garbage, keeping some distance from the wise guy who thought up the idea.

The black birds ignored me, so I tiptoed toward them. Two sets of wary eyes appraised me. Then I heard myself say in deep senatorial tones, "May it please my fine-feathered foraging friends. My fellow brethren at the bar. Nibblers of equity, scavengers of justice. Are we here to seek truth, or merely to gorge ourselves on the facts? If the truth is that the Fox is loose amongst the chickens…what then?"

"They got a place upstate for guys who talk to birds."

I whirled to see Cindy at the bottom of the steps, head cocked, chewing her gum happily. "Nice place," she said, "clean white sheets and rubber walls."

"I'm glad you're here," I said.

"I'll bet."

"Call Priscilla Fox for me. Mrs. Nicholas Fox. I want to see her as soon as possible."

"Tomorrow morning, the office?"

"No. Tonight. Her place. I need to see the lair of the Fox."

"Sure. But you oughta change first."

"What's wrong with a blue suit?"

"Fine, matches your eyes," she said. "But your loafers. One's black and one's cordovan."

There must be uglier stretches of suburbia than Miami's Bird Road-maybe the outskirts of Calcutta. From Dixie Highway westward toward the Glades, Bird Road is six lanes of potted asphalt flanked by strip shopping centers, miles of wall-to-wall, plug-ugly, flat-roofed stacks of concrete blocks. Plastic pennants and helium balloons proclaim each new project, and with it, yet another gun shop, XXX video, and rental-furniture store. No matter how many vacant storefronts next door, no matter the foreclosures up the street, local bankers awash in doper cash fall all over each other to make lousy loans to shaky speculators. And downtown, the county zoning guys never met a builder they didn't like.

Sign ordinance a problem? Hire the mayor's lawyer. No prob-lema.

Can't meet the parking-space requirement? Paint the lines to a Yugo's dimensions and let 'em park on the median strip. Who's counting anyway?

Concrete, asphalt, noxious fumes, and blaring horns. Bird Road has it all. Everything, it seems, but birds.

The concrete-block-and-stucco house had been turquoise with yellow-trimmed shutters. Now the colors blended into the same off-white. It was two blocks north of Bird, and you could still hear the bleat of traffic, the occasional police siren. Nick Fox had bought the place when he was a cop, and after several lean years in night law school and a civil servant's salary in the state attorney's office, he never had the bucks to move east into the Gables. There was something reassuring about the house, a testament to the fact that Nick Fox might be the last honest public official in the county.

I parked the old convertible in the driveway next to a child's red bicycle. It was growing dark, the humidity hanging heavy in the air. A miniature backboard and basketball rim was propped in the yard, a child-size soccer ball lay against the trunk of a bottle-brush tree. The compressor of the central air conditioner whined from a concrete pit at the side of the house, and a rusty water stain streaked the stucco wall. The garage door was open. Inside sat an eight-year-old Toyota, pleading for a wax job.

There are a hundred thousand houses just like this one in our town. The domestic suburban middle-class cliche. From the outside, familial bliss, folks who can handle a VA mortgage and pay off the credit cards over time, but no frills. Inside, a thousand secrets-fractured marriages, wandering husbands, boozing wives.

The doorbell didn't work, but my fist did. She answered on the third knock. Priscilla Fox was a tidy package in leotard, tights, leg warmers, and a wide belt that didn't hold anything up but accentuated her flat waist. The leotard was low cut in front with a tiger motif that matched her eyes, nut brown with a touch of gold. Her hair was cinnamon, and she hadn't been born that way. The smile was wide and inviting.

"Come in, Mr. Lassiter," she said, leading me through a tiny foyer. In pink sneakers, she moved like a cat. All in all, one of those women who looks better at forty-two than at twenty-one. "You'll have to forgive me. High-impact aerobics after two hours of racquetball. I must look a fright."