Paul Levine - Night vision

I thought about Alex Rodriguez. I remembered the phone message. Got story for your friends at the paper, on the record this time.

This time.

Last time was Compu-Mate.

Or was it? What was it Nick Fox said yesterday? The folks at the Journal were mighty friendly since he leaked the story on Compu-Mate. I had always assumed Rodriguez was the source. If he wasn't, when did Nick talk to the paper and why?

I called Symington Foote at home, got him out of the pool where he was doing his laps. His phone was in his cabana on a waterfront pool deck. I pictured him dripping onto the turquoise tile.

"I never know the identity of confidential sources," he said formally. "House rules. The publisher doesn't interfere with the newsroom."

"Are any of your investigative reporters working on projects involving the sheriff's department?"

"I don't think so."

"What about the state attorney's office?"

In the background I heard a powerboat going too fast in the channel behind Foote's home. The speed-crazy weekenders are slaughtering our manatees, those big, slow, lumpy mammals of our waterways. After a moment Foote answered. "Henry Townsend's been looking into Nick Fox for more than a year, but you know that."

"I thought that was over when we lost the libel suit."

"Townsend's still poking around, trying to turn up something we can go with, somebody on the record who knows the story behind the campaign financing."

"Who's his source?"

"Don't know."

"Can you have him at your house in an hour?"

"I can, but he won't tell-"

I had hung up. I stripped off yesterday's sweaty shorts and headed for the shower. I turned it up hot, lathered my old battered body, which didn't feel that bad after all. I smeared shaving cream on my face and chopped off the stubble. I washed my hair and combed it straight back and left it wet. Then I put on white jeans, white sneakers, white socks, and a white polo shirt. I looked in the mirror. A spanking-clean, overgrown, blue-eyed angel. Good. I could grow horns later.

The Olds purred on the way to Gables Estates, the ritzy waterfront enclave south of Coconut Grove. A canopy of banyan trees cooled Old Cutler Road and the breeze dried my hair. In the yards of Miami's privileged, the petals of red hibiscus flowers were opening for the day. Timed sprinklers watered sprawling lawns despite almost daily thunderstorms. On Symington Foote's handsome grounds, a gardener fertilized lush beds of impatiens as delicate hummingbirds flitted around the flowers of cape honeysuckle bushes. The flagstone path to the house was bordered by white gardenias, their rich fragrance filling the morning air.

It was a glorious Saturday, the day before a game, and I was getting ready. Life is war, Nick Fox had told me. Now all I needed were the weapons.

They sat under a lime-green umbrella on an immense patio behind Foote's gleaming postmodern house. The house was a series of stark white boxes of different sizes connected at odd angles by concrete passageways painted highway-marker orange. It was the creation of a trendy Argentine architect who won several awards given by people who live in SoHo lofts. Foote once confided that he hated the place, especially the fact that you couldn't get to the downstairs bathroom without either going up one set of stairs and down another or walking outside and coming in another door. When he complained, the architect told him he was missing the point of our disjointed, fragmented lives. The point, Foote replied, was that he had to roam his property just to take a piss.

Henry Townsend was thirty-five and rangy, with a hawk's nose and a mortician's smile. His eyes were dark and knowing, his hair parted in the middle. He wore running shoes, khaki pants, and a T-shirt that said, "Reporters Do It with Any Type." He sat, drinking a margarita in the boss's polyurethane-lacquered deck chair, as if he owned the place.

Symington Foote wore gold boxer-style swim trunks and a matching terrycloth jacket with pockets. His white hair was wet and his forehead speckled from too much sun.

We exchanged pleasantries and I asked Townsend whether he was looking into the activities of our esteemed state attorney.

"I don't talk about investigative pieces," he said, with journalistic self-righteousness.

Symington Foote cleared his throat. "Hank, treat Jake as you would your publisher."

"That's what I'm doing," Townsend replied, then sipped at his green drink.

Reporters are like that. Professional cynics who play pinochle in the courthouse press room and crack wise in the middle of rape trials and executions. A bunch of gunslingers who love spitting tobacco in the boss's eye. Get fired, just pack up the portable-computer, these days-and mosey on to the next town.

"Think of this as prepublication libel review," I told Townsend.

"Fine. When I've got a first draft, I'll call you."

"Maybe if you had last time, I could've swung a defense verdict."

His tongue was flicking the salt off the rim of the glass. "The editors chopped the story to shit."

Reporters are like that, too. Every fuck-up is blamed on the editors.

"As I recall the discovery," I said, "the editing took out the most serious allegations. The paper would have been hit harder if they'd printed your stuff. What was it, alleged ties between Fox and major drug dealers?"

"Drug money financed his campaigns. We only published the details of technical campaign law violations, and we substantiated them. Plus there was one unattributed reference to a cash contribution that was drug-related. I couldn't get the source to come forward, so we got nailed."

"Who was the source?"

He dismissed me with the wave of a hand. "Forget it. I gave my pledge of confidentiality."

I was ready to give him my pledge of a broken face, but I decided to stick with the nice-guy routine. "What else did the source tell you?"

Townsend looked toward Foote, who nodded. "Lots that I couldn't use without backup documents or a second source. Dynamite stuff. I needed corroboration up the kazoo and didn't have anything. If I had, the headline would have said, 'State Attorney Tool of Medellin Drug Cartel.'"

"An attention grabber," I conceded. "What's behind it?"

Townsend must have felt he'd already made his point about keeping secrets. Now, he was practically squirming to tell what he knew. "It goes like this. A thousand years ago, Fox was a low-level heroin courier in Vietnam. He comes home and makes some interesting connections as a street cop. By the time he runs for state attorney, he's an ass-kissing buddy of the first-team All-Pro Colombia cocaine kingpins. Lehder, Ochoa, Escobar-you name 'em, he played footsie with 'em. They finance his campaign, plus deliver cash to him on the side. We're talking a few million, walking-around money for them, but a fortune for a guy on the public payroll. He's a good soldier. He keeps the little house and plays the role of the hardworking civil servant. He bides his time. They give him inside information on rival drug dealers so he can make some cases, get his picture taken standing on a boatload of contraband."

"Phony hero," I said, stirring up memories.

"Yeah. It's part of a long-range plan. Build Fox up. Along the way he has to return some favors. If someone close to the cartel gets busted, he'll give them something that can tank the case. Maybe the identity of an informant who then meets with an unfortunate accident, that sort of thing. Mostly, he trades in information. He keeps in touch with the feds. Anything he learns from Customs, Strike Force, or DEA, he delivers to the cartel. You can't buy information like that."

"Sure you can."

"Right. Well, anyway, the long-range plan was to keep Fox in the public eye, win some cases as the crusading, drug-busting prosecutor, get him elected governor. Then, who knows, president someday."