Lassiter 07 - Flesh and Bones (19 page)

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Guy said it would be better to keep it quiet for business and personal reasons. Like his wife wouldn't understand him helping his half sister or something."

I looked at my old teammate and let him go.

No. Rusty was too self-absorbed to be anyone's brother. On the team, opinion had been divided. Half the guys disliked him; the other half hated him. Sure, Rusty and I had gotten drunk together and chased women together. We'd celebrated wins and bitched about losses, but we weren't really friends, much less brothers. We had been thrown into the same pit, like foxhole buddies. That war was over. This one was just beginning.

This is how I broke my hand.

The second time.

The first time, I took a wild swing at the head of a big-bellied Notre Dame offensive lineman, a head encased in a helmet. After the third crackback block of a bitterly cold, trash-talking, eye-gouging afternoon, he went for my knees, which were already held together with baling wire and spit. I lost it and launched a roundhouse right he never felt. I wound up with a cast on my hand, a fifteen-yard penalty for unnecessary roughness—a term I find quaintly amusing, given the sport—another fifteen for unsportsmanlike conduct for accusing the referee's mother of unnatural acts, and a seat so far down Joe Paterno's bench my feet were in Wilkes-Barre.

The second time, just an hour after leaving Rusty MacLean on Miami Beach, I was standing at the counter of the Dade County Building and Zoning Department, staring through a Plexiglas window. There are three windows, and if they're not bulletproof they should be, just to protect indolent, slothful clerks from irate, ignored taxpayers.

No one manned or even personed my window. Or the other two.

Three clerks sat at their desks, a dozen feet or so behind their little windows, doing their best to ignore the broad-shouldered taxpayer leaning on the counter who, luckily for them, was not armed. "Hey there," I cooed at the enormous black woman directly in line with my window, the middle of the three.

In her thirties, she was wearing an orange muumuu and had a telephone cradled on her shoulder. At the moment, she was loudly declaring that if Spike didn't get his raggedy-ass, lazy bones out of her house by six o'clock, she would haul his flea-bitten, egg-sucking worthless self halfway across the Everglades and feed him to the gators.

So I turned my attention to the window on the right. A middle-aged Hispanic man sat at his desk, drinking Cuban coffee from a thimble-sized paper cup. He had a beard that needed trimming and wore an off-white guayabera. Maybe there was paperwork on his desk, but I couldn't tell. A carton of pastries took up most of the surface. "
Hola!
" I called out.

"
Estoy en mi hora de descanso
," he said.

"Now? It's ten past nine. You just started work."

He took a bite of a pastelito, and guava filling oozed out onto his beard. "
No hablo inglés
," he said.

"Really? So I'd be wasting my time telling you how much you look like Fidel Castro."

"Fuck you," he said crisply.

I turned to my left and looked through the third window. An Anglo kid of maybe nineteen with an earring and ponytail sat at his desk, feet propped on a stack of cartons. His eyes were closed, a Sony Walkman was plugged into his ears, and his feet kept time with undoubtedly clamorous music.

"Hey, you!" I yelled.

He didn't hear me.

"You!" I tried again. "The brain-dead kid. Wake up!"

Still no luck.

I took heart that the utter indifference of our public servants was dispensed in an ethnically diverse, evenhanded manner. It also was a source of my civic pride that these well-paid, barely worked, juicy-pensioned paper shufflers were entitled to their birthdays off with pay, courtesy of property owners such as my very own taxpaying self.

Still, yearning for some attention, I punched the Plexiglas window. Hard.

A straight right hand.

Which made a hell of a racket.

Causing the Hispanic man to spill his coffee, the black woman to drop her phone, and the Anglo kid to pry open his eyes.

The window didn't crack, but my third metacarpal did.

"Hey, stupid. Destruction of county property is a misdemeanor," the black woman said in a bored tone that made me think she'd said it before. "I'm gonna call a cop."

I was hopping on one foot, squeezing my right hand into my left armpit, trying to strangle the pain. "The only time I was arrested," I said grimacing, "it was a case of mistaken identity."

She gave me a cross-eyed look.

"I didn't know the guy I hit was a cop."

"I don't understand, Carmody," I said, leafing through stacks of zoning permits and building plans. "It's got to be here."

"Don't be stupid," Carmody Jones said.

The huge woman clerk and I had progressed to first names. I called her Carmody and she called me Stupid.

She thumbed through a file of her own. "That farm is in what's called a special taxing district. It's almost like a little city. Like what Disney World did. Constructs its own sewers and roads."

"And buildings," I said, thinking of the giant structure rising along the irrigation ditch. "Just when did Guy Bernhardt get himself a special taxing district?"

"Last November twelfth," she said, pulling out a blue-backed document with a gold seal. "A resolution followed by special ordinance of the county commission. It was unanimous. Recommended by the staff of Building and Zoning, also the Department of Environmental Regulation, the Planning Commission, the South Dade Master Plan Council. A special agenda item at the end of the meeting. No debate, no protesters."

"No publicity," I said, looking at the file. My right hand was tucked into a Baggie filled with ice, courtesy of Carmody. I started reading aloud: "Whereas Bernhardt Farms, Inc., a Florida corporation, intends to pursue the public purpose of furnishing water both for itself and for other users, including Dade County; whereas Bernhardt Farms, Inc., has pledged to undertake this activity on its own without resort to public funds; whereas South Florida suffers the clear and present danger of drought and a falling water table; and whereas Bernhardt Farms, Inc., has pledged to use the latest technology in desalination . . ."

Desalination.

Now there was a new one for me. Confusing as ever. First good old Guy Bernhardt outrages his neighbors by sucking their wells dry. And now he's going to turn salt water into gold.

"Desal," Charlie Riggs said.

"He's going to take salt water from the ocean and make fresh water?" I asked.

"More likely he's going to draw up brackish water from the Floridan Aquifer."

Doc Charlie Riggs knows most of what's worth knowing and a lot that isn't.

"I would agree," said Harrison Baker, fiddling with his mustache. I was in the presence of two old coots, and that didn't include my granny, who was filling mason jars with a clear liquid that surely did not come from the aquifer. We were on the porch of her old house in Islamorada. The sun was setting in the gulf, the palm fronds were slapping the tin roof, and all of us were a tinge overheated from the white lightning, which only stoked the fires of a tropical July day. "Salt water is too expensive to treat," Baker went on, "except when there's no other choice. On desert islands, that sort of thing."

"Then there's the salt byproduct and the question of disposal," Charlie Riggs added.

"Quite right," Baker said, taking a sip of Granny's moonshine. "Produce ten million gallons of water a day and you'll end up with over two million pounds of salt. You can't leave it on the ground or it will pollute the groundwater. You can't put it back in the ocean or it will destroy all life for a hundred miles."

He paused a moment, his eyes tearing, either from the thought of dying coral or the sting of Granny's liquor.

"But with the new technology," Charlie Riggs said, "once you recovered capital costs for construction, you could probably treat brackish water for the same price as fresh groundwater and produce far less brine than with seawater."

Baker nodded. "Reverse osmosis would be best."

Charlie sipped at his mason jar and seemed to agree.

I asked a few questions. I learned that reverse osmosis, like distillation, takes the water out of the salt, whereas electrodialysis and ion exchange take the salt out of the water. To oversimplify it, Charlie said with a look that implied I needed all the simplification I could get, all you need for osmosis is a lot of electricity, some high-pressure pumps, and a filter. And lots and lots of brackish water.

We gel our drinking water. Baker had already told me, from the Biscayne Aquifer, the layer of porous rock that sits just under the ground. Go deeper and you'll run into sediments about seven hundred feet thick. Below that is the Upper Floridan, containing brackish, highly mineralized water not suitable for drinking unless you remove the salt.

"Some cities have done it," Baker said, turning to me, "but no private party ever has, not with a plant like you're describing, not on that scale."

"So what's Guy Bernhardt going to do with all the water he's going to produce?" Charlie Riggs asked.

I knew, of course, but my granny was quicker. "Unless he's a dang fool," she said, "he's gonna sell it."

I didn't tell Chrissy Bernhardt where we were going. I didn't want her to have time to call Dr. Schein, or her brother, or anyone else who might have told her what to do.

Like take a pill raising her blood pressure.

I figured she wouldn't know the other tricks the cons are so good at. Biting the tongue. Sticking a nail in the shoe.

So I wasn't playing straight with her. Because I was afraid she wasn't playing straight with me.

A lawyer needs to know the truth.

No, strike that. I can't speak for my brethren.
I
need to know the truth.

Maybe it's a failing. Maybe I'd be better off not knowing. Maybe I should just take whatever gift horse Schein was riding. But I couldn't. I don't know why, I just couldn't.

With the top down, I aimed the Olds 442 west on the MacArthur Causeway, caught the connector north onto I-95, then swung west again on the Miami Dolphin Expressway. Though I didn't pour the asphalt, I always took a bit of pride in the highway, especially when passing the Orange Bowl, the faded lady on our left.

"Where are we going?" Chrissy asked.

"To see an old friend."

I got off at Le Jeune Road, just east of the airport, and headed north to Okeechobee Road, turning left along the old Miami Canal. West of the canal was Miami Springs. East was Hialeah, once a haven for Georgia crackers and now overwhelmingly Hispanic. I hung a right on Palm Avenue, drove a few blocks into a neighborhood of single-story stucco homes, many with statues of the Virgin Mary planted along with the hibiscus, and pulled up in front of pink house with an orange barrel-tile roof.

"Here?" Chrissy asked.

"Here."

"Your friend has a odd sense of color combinations."

"The house belongs to an ex-cop," I said, as if that explained it.

Tony Cuevas was a lifelong bachelor. He had bought the house when he retired from the Sheriff's Department, and if you asked him the color, he probably wouldn't have a clue.

On the way to the front door, Chrissy stopped and looked at me. "So why are we here?"

She was wearing spandex shorts and a halter top, and when I grabbed her shoulders, her skin was warm from the sun. I pulled her close to me and looked into those green, luminous eyes. "It's important that I treat you like a client, and not like . . ."

"A lover, a woman . . . a person," she helped out.

"Yeah, sort of. If we hadn't gotten involved, this would be easy."

"What, Jake? What would be easy?" Exasperated now.

"In preparing for trial, in planning strategy, lawyers sometimes ask their clients to . . ."

I couldn't say it.

The door opened before we could knock. Tony Cuevas stood there, a little paunchier than when he'd worked Internal Affairs. He still wore the short-sleeved shirt and tie. "Hello, Jake," he said. "You look like shit."

"Thank you, Tony."

He smiled pleasantly at Chrissy. "Hello, Miss Bernhardt. Let me tell you what you need to know about your polygraph exam."

Chrissy sat in a hard wooden chair, her eyes blazing at me. A blood pressure cuff was wrapped around her right arm, pneumograph tubes circling her chest and abdomen. Electrodes were attached to two fingers of her left hand. She sat on an inflatable rubber bladder and leaned back in the chair against another one.

"Just relax," I said.

"Go to hell!" Chrissy responded, and Tony's eyebrows shot up as he watched five pens on the chart scrawl a steep mountain.

"Actually, it is important that we stabilize your blood pressure," Tony said.

"Get him out of here," she commanded.

Him
was me.

I wanted to say something. Something about how I needed to know the truth and how my feelings for her wouldn't change even if she was a cold-blooded murderer. But the words didn't come. Retreating in silence, feeling cowardly and deceptive, I walked into the screened Florida room, where a paddle fan clunked out of plumb over my head.

We are not all smart in all things. Left brain, right brain. A writer of sonnets may not be able to adjust a carburetor. A physicist may be incapable of constructing a simple sentence with subject and verb. I am moderately proficient in a number of fields. I can sense the location of the lurking bonefish. I can lead a hostile, perjurious witness into a humiliating mass of contradictions. I can predict run or pass from whether the offensive tackle leans forward or backward in his three-point stance.