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  Nadia.

  The passport.

  The guns. Two of them!

  The safe.

  Nadia firing in self-defense.

  He could not resist the powerful human impulse to talk, to explain, to profess his honesty and innocence. When you call 9-1-1 and the cops find you in a locked room with a dead man and a gun in your hand, who has the self-discipline to clam up? Of all his many talents, staying quiet was not one of them.

  Solomon felt new empathy for his blabbermouth clients, the ones who always make everything worse by talking to the investigating officers instead of calling him.

  Here’s the problem. Once you tell Story A to the cops, you’re stuck with it. Flip to Story B at trial, and the prosecutor will impeach your sorry ass in front of judge and jury. “Were you lying then or are you lying now?”

  That timeless ditty is the courtroom equivalent of “Have you stopped beating your wife?”

  So once he told the cops Story A, he repeated it to Victoria and then to Lassiter. Not that it was a complete fabrication.

  Nadia had talked about wire fraud and racketeering, just like he’d said. Gorev had spoken ominously of dropping her into a deep pit and had mysteriously mentioned the jeweler, wearing a wire, and Aeroflot 100. And, yes, Nadia had opened the safe and taken off with its contents.

  There was just that other little thing he couldn’t bring himself to say to the cops, his lover, or his lawyer. Really, just an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny little detail.

  I’m the one who killed Nicolai Gorev.

  -11-

  A Damn Fool or a Damn Murderer

  Granny, I may have caught a rare bird,” I said.

  “A three-legged egret?” Granny Lassiter said.

  “An innocent client.”

  “Hallelujah!”

  We were in the kitchen of my coral rock house in Coconut Grove. The aroma of fresh-baked cornbread rose in waves from the oven. Granny was sizzling butter in an iron skillet on the gas range, and I was working the chicken-fried steak assembly line. I had just dropped a slab of meat into a bowl of flour, turning it over to coat both sides. Then I dipped the meat into a bowl of milk and eggs, letting the steak swim a bit. Finally, I put it back into the flour.

  That’s how you bread steak, and I’d been doing it since I was twelve years old, with Granny Lassiter barking instructions. Then. And now.

  “Not too wet, Jake!” Granny scowled while she waited for my prep work. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

  Granny had been old for about thirty years, but her appearance hadn’t changed in all that time. Still had black hair with a white streak down the middle, but if you ever called her “Skunky,” she’d brain you with a rolling pin. A short woman, she wore baggy shorts and a T-shirt with an outline of the map of Florida and the saying “Tourists! Go the Hell Home.”

  Granny was not really my grandmother. Probably a great-aunt, but who knows? We’d never really talked about the Lassiter lineage of Florida Keys trailer trash. She raised me after my father was killed in a bar fight outside Islamorada and my mother took off with a roughneck from Louisiana or Oklahoma or some such place. That star-crossed couple had a daughter—my half sister, Janet, who at age seventeen gave birth to my nephew, Kip, father unknown.

  Now Granny helps me raise Kip, while Janet lives in tents and roams the countryside in search of department stores with lax security guards. I’d call her a gypsy, but that would be an insult to the Romani people. Let’s just say she’s a serial shoplifter and drug abuser with the parenting skills of a wilted rhododendron.

  I dropped three pieces of meat into the iron skillet where the butter sizzled and puffs of fragrant smoke rose above the stove. “I think your fire is too hot,” I said.

  “Ah been making chicken-fried steak since you were still peeing your pants, so hush up.”

  I did as instructed and watched Granny poke at the burning meat with a wooden spatula. Without comment, she turned down the heat on the range. Ha!

  “So, if you’ve got an innocent client,” she said, “you can quit all your bellyaching. ‘Oh, poor me. Ah’m so tired of all these scumbags and their dirty money.’ ”

  “Actually, I never said that, Granny.”

  “What, then?”

  “Said I always wanted a cause that was just, a client I liked, and a check that didn’t bounce.”

  She harrumphed. “You were lucky to get one out of three, and that’s if the check cleared.”

  “This time maybe I hit the trifecta.”

  “So you must like Solomon?”

  “He’s a total pain in the ass. But so was I when I was his age.”

  “I ain’t seen much change.”

  “Solomon is smart and ballsy, and he’ll learn to turn down the volume.”

  “Unless you mess up and he goes to Raiford.”

  “There’s always that chance. It’s a helluva lot tougher to defend an innocent client. More pressure to win.”

  “Now, don’t that take all? You don’t like ’em guilty, and you’re a nervous Nellie when they’re innocent.” She flipped the steaks with her spatula. “Maybe you should go coach football at that pantywaist school in Vermont. But don’t expect me to come along and shovel snow from the porch.”

  “With a guilty client, you just wash your hands and walk away. But an innocent client. That’s a different—”

  “Kettle of snapper,” she helped out.

  “If I lose, it’s my fault.”

  Granny poked at the edges of the meat, which had turned golden brown, then took the steaks from the frying pan and dropped them onto a plate lined with paper towels. That left the pan with a half-inch-thick layer of grease, the secret of Granny’s famous cardiac arrest gravy. The Lassiters will never be mistaken for vegans or health nuts. Granny sprinkled flour into the grease and whisked the goo into a paste. The secret to chicken-fried gravy is a mixture that’s neither too greasy nor too pasty.

  While Granny was fiddling with the ingredients, adding a pinch more flour, then some milk, I told her some more about my meeting with Solomon and Lord. Yeah, technically, I was violating principles of attorney–client, but I’d long ago deputized Granny, and it’s really to the client’s advantage. Like a good juror, she’s got common sense, so I run cases by her, including the various accounts of my clients.

  “Men are such damn fools, ain’t they?” Granny said when I had finished.

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Well, first you got them male tourists, spending thousands on pissy champagne and then not even getting their peckers wet. Why not just hire one of them ladies of the night?”

  “That’s the brilliance of the Bar girl business, Granny. A lot of men would never hire a hooker. But if they think they’re charming this exotic beauty out of her thong, well, that’s different. And if it costs ten times more than your Collins Avenue professional, well, it must be worth it to their egos. Problem is, the men get so drunk, they’re pretty much useless, and apparently the women have no plans to go through with it, anyway.”

  “Hussies,” Granny said. “As for stupid men, you’ve also got your client. If his story is true, he’s a damn fool. If it’s false, he’s a damn murderer.”

  “We’re going for the damn fool defense.”

  “Tell me more about Solomon’s law partner.”

  “Victoria Lord. Like I said, very classy, very pretty, very smart. We’ll make a good team.”

  Granny gave me a look.

  “In court, I mean.”

  “Don’t you be sniffing after a client’s woman,” she warned.

  “Ah, jeez, Granny. Give me some credit.”

  “You think I don’t remember that Gina Florio. And her mobster husband you were representing.”

  “That was different. I knew Gina before Nicky Florio did.”

  “So what?”

  “Under the law, I was grandfathered in.”

  “Hogwash! It nearly got you killed.”

  “With Victor
ia and me, it’s all business.” No way would I confess to Granny that a part of me was jealous that my client had landed such a woman.

  “Seems to me you got yourself an interesting conflict,” Granny said.

  “You mean a conflict of interest?”

  “If Solomon goes to prison, you got a clean shot at this gal, who sounds a damn sight more suitable than your usual trashy girlfriends.”

  “Ancient history, Granny. I’ve evolved.”

  “About damn time.”

  Granny was right. In my younger days, my sly grin and my bucket of blarney unbuttoned the blouses of numerous barmaids, wannabe actresses, and aspiring models just off the bus from Apalachicola. My emotional maturity was nil. Nothing mattered outside the scope of my own pleasure. But now, after so many wastrel years, I was not in a relationship and I sensed what I had missed . . . the mutual commitment, the total involvement with the needs of the other person. As I am pushing middle age—oh hell, I’m in it—the smile has gone all crinkly-eyed, the hair is flecked with gray, and I am left with the empty feeling that I may have lost out. Do I even deserve a woman like Victoria Lord? A smart, capable, accomplished woman who still manages the seductive purr of a she-lion.

  “Any other advice, Granny?”

  “Nothing you haven’t figured out. You gotta find that missing Russian gal of ill repute.”

  “Top priority. She never went back to the house where she lived with the other B-girls. They told the cops they don’t know where she is, and my investigator can’t get near them.”

  “So get off your lazy butt and do your own legwork,” Granny said. “Just like the old days.”

  I’d already sent Sam Pressler, my investigator, to Anastasia, but he couldn’t get past the thug in a black suit at the velvet rope. “Private club,” the guy had said. Meaning you had to come in with one of the girls who secretly worked there. Pressler was a retired cop who wore perma-press short-sleeved white shirts and baggy pants. He had as much chance of being picked up by a Bar girl as I did of becoming Miss Universe. Before leaving, Pressler did a “trash pull” from the Dumpster behind the joint, looking for any leads, but came up empty, except for his own stained trousers and a stink he carried into my office.

  I’d also spent twenty seconds researching Aeroflot Flight 100 because of what Gorev had said to Nadia, moments before he was killed:

  “Did they ask you about Aeroflot 100?”

  “They ask nothing. I say nothing. I know nothing.”

  Aeroflot 100 was a daily nonstop flight from Moscow to New York. Leaves at 10:15 a.m., Moscow time, gets into JFK just before noon, eastern time. I figured that was Nadia’s route to the US but didn’t know what it had to do with any criminal investigation.

  “I have an idea for getting inside the club without too much muss and fuss,” I told Granny.

  “Don’t be busting no heads. The state Bar’s warned you about that.”

  Granny was right. I’ve been given “private reprimands,” a kind of double-secret probation, which is better than having the Florida Supreme Court deliver a “public reprimand” while you stand, head bowed, in front of the bench in Tallahassee.

  I’m embarrassed about some of the things I’ve done in the practice of law. Realizing that, I’ve probably been too hard on Solomon. He’s still young, and if he’s not spending life in prison, he’ll mature, just as I have. So who am I to preach about rectitude? When I was a young lawyer, I was always being held in contempt. In one of my first trials, a judge warned me:

  “Keep going, Mr. Lassiter, and I’ll send you to a place you’ve never been.”

  “Already been to jail, Your Honor.”

  “Not talking about jail. I’m gonna send you to law school!”

  These days, I try to act with integrity, but I’m a trial lawyer, damn it. In the legal system, not everything is black-and-white. I make my living in the gray.

  There’s an inherent conflict in trial lawyers’ jobs. The Ethical Rules state: “As an advocate, the lawyer zealously asserts the client’s position under the rules of the adversary system.”

  Zealously!

  But where do you draw the line between zealousness and chicanery? Go ask some law professor. All I know, when you have an innocent client, it’s easier to slide into that gray area without falling into the quicksand of self-loathing. So I was prepared to chop-block the state, to hit the prosecutor once from the blind side and twice upside the head in pursuit of Solomon’s acquittal.

  I was thinking these thoughts when I heard metal cleats clacking against the Mexican tile floor of the living room, and my nephew Kip came clomping into the kitchen.

  “Not chicken-fried steak again.” Whining. I’ve warned him about that. Lassiter men don’t whine.

  “Hush up, wash up, and clean up that mud you drug in,” Granny ordered.

  Kip was in eleventh grade now and working his tail off to make the football team at Biscayne-Tuttle, a private school on the shores of Biscayne Bay. Unlike his block-of-granite uncle, Kip was gangly and loose-limbed. He had decent speed but only average athletic skills, and currently he was a third-team cornerback.

  “How’d practice go, champ?” I asked.

  “Two pass breakups and a couple tackles.”

  “Good job.”

  “Plus I got torched on three long passes.”

  “It happens. Always clear your mind after a bad play. Learn from your mistakes, but don’t dwell on them.”

  “I know, Uncle Jake. You’ve told me a zillion times.”

  “Hurry up now,” Granny said. “Dinner will get cold.”

  “We expecting company?” Kip asked.

  “No, why?” I said.

  “’Cause there’s a guy on the porch. Sitting in the rocker.”

  “A guy?”

  “A soldier,” Kip said. “Three stripes. That’s a sergeant, isn’t it?”

  -12-

  Reporting for Duty

  I opened the front door and stepped onto the porch, scattering several green lizards. It was a hot, moist night with the scent of jasmine in the air. The jacaranda tree in the driveway was shedding the last of its purple flowers, succumbing to the summer heat.

  And there was Manuel Dominguez sitting in Granny’s rocking chair on the porch. Buzz cut, square jaw, just the beginning of a double chin. He wore a US Army dress blue uniform. A brass disk with crossed rifles on his collar identified him as a member of the infantry. Gold-braided chevrons on each shoulder marked him as a sergeant. Four gold overseas service bars on his right sleeve indicated he’d served in several combat zones. A fruit salad of colorful ribbons was pinned to his chest. If I had to guess, I’d say they were for various acts of distinguished service and valor. Perhaps in Desert Storm or Afghanistan or maybe the Battle of Gettysburg, for all I knew.

  Because none of it was real.

  Manuel Dominguez wasn’t really a sergeant. Had never been in the Boy Scouts, much less the army.

  He was a former client. A small-time grifter and con man I’d walked out of the courthouse a couple of times and left behind once or twice, too. But his crimes were always nonviolent and his sentences always short. Most recently, I’d gotten him probation for a lottery scam called advance fee fraud.

  “Hey, Manuel,” I said. “What’s the charge this time?”

  “Nada, jefe.”

  “So why you here? You want some chicken-fried steak?”

  “Already ate.”

  “Lemme guess, The Forge.”

  He snapped off a crisp salute. “Scallops ceviche, the bone-in porterhouse with a side of Parmesan truffle fries. Rose Marie went for the caviar and Dover sole. We split a butterscotch soufflé for dessert.”

  “You get the Johnnie Walker sauce with that?”

  “Is there any other way to go?”

  “And who paid?”

  “An orthodontist from Topeka. Here on a convention. I limped in, using my cane. And of course Rose Marie had her pregnancy pack under her dress. Looks about eight months
, I’d say. The orthodontist sent us a bottle of Cristal, then came over to the table to shake my hand and give me the ‘thanks for your service’ speech. I told him how I dismantled IEDs in Iraq, and about the one I didn’t quite dismantle. Of course, he insisted on paying the dinner tab. Then his wife took a selfie with us to show the folks back home.”

  “No photos, Manuel. I’ve told you about creating evidence.”

  “Hey, what’s the harm?”

  “Actually, wearing those medals is a federal crime.”

  “Tell that to John Wayne. I got a standing ovation when I limped out of there.”

  Dominguez was basically a professional moocher, running his hungry soldier scam all over town. Tuesday night was The Forge, Thursday was Joe’s Stone Crab during the season, and Katsuya for sushi during the summer. I couldn’t remember the rest of his schedule.

  “And how is the lovely Rose Marie?” I asked.

  “Great. Due any year now.”

  “So if you haven’t been busted, why the hell are you lurking on my porch?”

  He wrinkled his forehead and scrunched up his mouth. Looked embarrassed, if that’s possible for a career con artist. “When I was on probation, I had to take some classes.”

  “If you took cooking, you wouldn’t have to prey on unsuspecting orthodontists.”

  “Actually, I studied for the PI exam. Passed and got my license.”

  “Congratulations. I guess they did away with the good character requirement.”

  “I used an alias, but I got the badge just the same. I’m a private dick now.”

  “So you lied to get some semihonest work. I’m proud of you.”

  “Well here’s the thing, Jake. I got a client who knows me and you are tight.”

  “Thick as thieves,” I agreed. “You’re my favorite lowlife. So who’s your client?”

  “Call him Mr. X.”

  “Okay, that’s creative.”

  “Mr. X hires me to find this Russian girl. Natasha . . . something.”

  “Nadia Delova.”

  “That’s her.”

  Now we were getting somewhere, I thought. You pick up leads anywhere you can, even from a phony sergeant. “Why’s Mr. X want to find her?”