Bum Rap Read online

  The hotel was built in the 1940s and then updated—to put it mildly—about twenty years ago. Its open, high-ceilinged lobby, with ocean breezes swirling through the billowing white linen curtains, is iconic, if not a little clichéd by now. There’s the big white piano in the lobby along with the Rose Bar with its upholstered rose-colored walls. Upstairs are those all-white $1,800-a-night rooms.

  The Rose Bar is a scene and a place to be seen. Tourists flock there for overpriced drinks, hoping to spot Mick Jagger or Rihanna, but settling for Gloria Estefan or Dwyane Wade.

  Tonight, it was hard to pin labels on the people in the bar. A few middle-aged locals celebrating birthdays. Some rockers from the local music scene, some local glitterati B-listers who might have had a season on a reality show, and a guy I pegged as a real estate mogul entertaining a woman thirty years his junior. The best-looking women in the place were a couple of drag queens whose hair and makeup must have taken hours.

  I took a seat at the bar, glanced at the menu of seventeen-dollar drinks, featuring fruit-spiked sparkling wine, and ordered a Jack Daniel’s, straight up.

  It only took a few minutes.

  Two perfumed women, one blonde and one brunette, sandwiched me like a slice of salami between two halves of a fragrant croissant. The blonde wore a silky electric-blue minidress with a plunging neckline, the brunette a blazing red leather miniskirt with a white blouse unbuttoned from here to Hialeah. Both had long, bouncy shampoo commercial hair. They were in their late twenties, I guessed, but in the dim lighting and under all the makeup, it was hard to tell.

  The blonde aimed her décolletage at me, grabbed my left wrist, and looked at my watch. I hoped she liked the knockoff Piguet. “What time you got, mister?”

  I gave her my best crinkly-eyed grin. “What time do you want it to be?”

  She smiled and her eyes danced. “Funny man! I love man with humorous sense.”

  “We’re tourists from Moscow.” The brunette now. Both had Eastern European accents.

  “Out for fun,” the blonde said.

  I pointed at my badge. “I’m from Minnesota myself.”

  “Ooh,” they both oozed, as if this were an exciting development.

  “Do you have Indians in Minnie’s Soda?” The blonde again.

  “You betcha. Got the Chippewa up in Grand Portage and the Ojibwa over at Leech Lake.”

  Their eyes went wide at this news. I’d had a teammate on the Dolphins who was part Chippewa, part Sioux, and I knew quite a bit about our Native Americans, including how to lose my wages at their casinos.

  “What do you do, handsome funny man?” the blonde asked.

  “My game’s insurance.” I pointed to my plastic badge. “Say, do you girls own or rent?”

  “We visit.”

  “’Cause I got a heckuva deal on homeowner’s liability. No charge for a jewelry rider.”

  I was about to begin extolling the virtue of double indemnity life insurance when the brunette started running her fingers through my hair. I had used some of my nephew Kip’s polisher to give my mop a sleeker look and hoped she wasn’t getting greasy fingers.

  “Nice hair, big man,” she purred.

  The blonde slipped a hand inside my Armani jacket and was letting her lacquered fingernails tickle my chest. “Strong man, too.”

  We exchanged names. The brunette was Marina, the blonde Elena. I told them to call me Gus and gave them my best, “Pleased to meetcha.”

  “Gus, do you like caviar?” Elena said.

  “Yah. Haven’t had it since cousin Sven’s wedding over in Hibbing. Gotta say I prefer it to lutefisk. Any fish you gotta soak in lye, Gus J. Gustafson can do without.”

  “We know a place with great caviar,” Marina said, just as I hoped she would.

  “And champagne,” Elena added.

  “Tickles my nose. But heck, ain’t that what life’s all about?”

  My bookend beauties each slung an arm through one of mine. The gesture reminded me of a couple of cops escorting a client toward the slammer. But these two leaned into me so I could feel their breasts against my upper arms. The feeling was not unpleasant. I knew they did not intend to bed me down on fleece pillows. They merely intended to fleece me. Their smiles, their touches, were as smooth as a Ray Allen jump shot from the corner. Giving men hope. That’s what they did for a living. And they were damn good at it.

  “Let’s go, Gus,” Marina said. “Tonight, we show you time of your life.”

  -17-

  The Night Has a Thousand Eyes

  Club Anastasia was just off Washington Avenue between Seventh and Eighth Streets on South Beach. “Off” Washington, because the entrance was in an alley.

  A dark alley with Dumpsters, mud puddles, and a clanging of a Jamaican steel band coming from a nearby apartment building with open windows.

  A red velvet rope in front of a narrow door looked out of place. Like a festive ribbon wrapped around a garbage pail. Standing at the rope was your typical no-neck bouncer in a black suit, white shirt, and black tie. The sign above the door said simply, PRIVATE CLUB. The bouncer eyed Marina and Elena as if they were strangers and said, “Password?”

  Marina muttered something in Russian. The bouncer nodded gravely and opened the velvet rope to paradise.

  “You gals know your way around this burg,” I said as we climbed a scarred wooden staircase to the second floor. Music poured out of an open door at the top of the stairs. Not Russian music. American jazz. I could swear it was “In a Sentimental Mood,” a Duke Ellington composition with John Coltrane on sax. The club might be run by racketeers and mobsters, but their taste in music wasn’t bad.

  Inside it was dark. Marina led us to a sofa behind a translucent curtain that gave the impression of privacy. The sofa was just large enough for three very close friends. We squeezed into it, me in the middle again. A pot of artificial ferns sat on each end of the sofa. I could make out several other mini-sofas, populated by threesomes. Men in the middle, hot women flanking them. More potted plants off to the side.

  I could see the bar through the flimsy curtain. A three-hundred-pound bartender was staring into a mirror behind the bar, talking into a cell phone. A blue neon light above the mirror spelled out “Club Anastasia.”

  “Champagne!” Elena shouted.

  “Perrier-Jouët!” Marina chimed in.

  A cocktail waitress waltzed through the curtains. She wore a French maid’s outfit you might see in a porno film. Black lacy mini with a white apron the size of a napkin and a white rhinestone collar. In five-inch platform heels, she appeared to be the height of an NBA forward. “A magnum?” she suggested helpfully.

  “Da!” my two friends cried in unison.

  “But first, vodka shots?” The waitress, too, had an Eastern European accent. Russia or the Baltic states. They sound alike to me. “Best Russian vodka, not available in stores.”

  “Da!” Elena and Marina agreed.

  The vodka arrived a microsecond later, courtesy of another cocktail waitress in an identical orgy outfit. The idea was to get me drunk quickly. The B-girl scam wasn’t invented by the Russians, but they were pretty good at it.

  The drinks arrived in tumblers, not shot glasses. Icy cold. I tossed mine down. So did my two new best friends. It was cheap vodka, as raw on the throat as a rusty blade. Theirs, I was sure, was one-hundred-proof tap water.

  “Another round!” Marina called out.

  By now, “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” was coming from the speakers. Not the pop version by Bobby Vee. The earlier number with fine trumpet and sax riffs, as well as haunting lyrics:

  “The night has a thousand eyes,

  And it knows a truthful heart from one that lies.”

  By the time the third vodka arrived—or was it the fourth?—I told the ladies I had to pee and carried my drink to a dingy restroom down a dark corridor. I wasn’t lying. I took my time pissing into a urinal filled with ice, melting about a quart of cubes. I washed my hands, splashed cold water o
n my face, and checked the walls and ceilings for cameras, finding none. Then I poured out the tumbler of rotgut vodka and filled it with water.

  By the time I got back to our love sofa, a 1.5-liter bottle that claimed to be Perrier-Jouët was sitting in a champagne bucket roughly the size of an oil drum. The bottle had been opened in my absence and the girls had already poured three flutes of bubbly.

  “Vashe zdorovye!” Marina toasted me.

  “Tvoye zdorovye!” Elena said. “To your health.”

  “And our fun!” I joined in.

  I took a sip. It was the real thing. While I was guzzling, I glanced at Marina, who tossed her drink into the potted ferns with a quick flick of the wrist. Then she leaned in and nuzzled my ear with her lips. As I turned toward her, I could see Elena pour her drink into the plant at her end of the sofa. The girls were working. No time to get tipsy. I’m the mark who is supposed to be blubbering by the time the check comes.

  “Drink!” Elena ordered.

  By now, Marina was running her fingers inside my suit coat, headed southward in the general direction of my crotch. I could feel her breath in my ear as she whispered, “Do you like threesome?”

  “You betcha.”

  “We are fun girls with many tricks.”

  Now she was running her hand over the outside of my pants. I was on assignment with a clearly defined goal, but there is a part of every man that doesn’t necessarily follow instructions. We can’t help it any more than the ape in the zoo. I was becoming aroused. I rationalized this on the grounds that it was in keeping with my horny tourist persona.

  “Oh, big man,” Marina cooed in my ear. I was sure she said this to each and every male of the species who wandered into this den of spiders.

  The women kept pouring, and I had no choice but to keep guzzling as they sluiced their drinks into the plastic ferns. Fortunately, I can hold my booze, but even so, I was beginning to feel a little groggy. One of the cocktail waitresses delivered the second magnum even before we’d finished the first. She also brought a check on a little silver tray.

  “Time to start tab, mister. Need credit card.”

  I had tucked my Gus J. Gustafson badge inside my jacket pocket as we were coming up the rickety stairs. No need to confuse the waitress, especially since my credit card read, “Timothy R. Dugan.” Yeah, this was one of those gray areas in the practice of law. When José Villalobos gave me the Piguet knockoff watch, he also handed me the Timothy Dugan credit card. Not that it was phony . . . strictly speaking. Villalobos had several cards in several different mythical names. But here’s the thing: he always paid the bills.

  It’s just better, he reasoned, not to be paying for the equipment, electricity, and water for his marijuana grow-house in his own name. Okay, maybe his lawyer gave him that advice. So sue me, I think the marijuana laws are bullshit.

  Anyway, Villalobos had placed a restriction on the Timothy Dugan card, just for me. Any charge over $1,000, and he would get an automated text message notifying him. The charge would initially go through, but the alert would give him five minutes to call in and complain that he hadn’t used the card or authorized its use. If he made the fraud alert call, the company would immediately grant him a “charge-back” and notify the merchant that the charge, originally paid, was now being debited against that merchant’s account.

  So I had five minutes from the time my card went through the Anastasia terminal. As the waitress handed me the pen to sign the slip, both Elena and Marina moved into high gear. Marina unzipped my fly and had one hand inside my pants. Oh, what I do for clients! Elena was massaging my neck. It felt good and made me a little sleepy, as was intended.

  I gave the bill a quick glance without studying it. They’d charged for twelve rounds of vodka at ninety-nine dollars a shot, and the first magnum of champagne was a whopping $5,500. Altogether, with 9 percent sales tax the club never paid to the city, county, or state, and a convenient 20 percent service charge, the bill came to $8,627.52. And there was still that second magnum to be billed.

  I signed the slip with a nearly indecipherable “Timothy Dugan.” Neither Elena nor Marina watched me sign. I’m sure they were trained that way: don’t draw attention to the bill itself. While Marina worked a hand under my boxers and onto Mr. Wonderful, Elena was nibbling one earlobe.

  The cocktail waitress took off and handed my card and the charge slip to the bartender, who took less than ten seconds running it through the terminal. Then he smiled, gave a thumbs-up to the waitress, and went about his business.

  Now the clock was really ticking. I had five minutes to work. “You know, I think I had a colleague come here a couple weeks ago,” I said.

  “What?” Elena’s teeth let go of my ear.

  “A friend from Saint Paul. Lester. Was down here for a flood insurance meeting. Told me he went to a Russian place, drank some champagne. Expensive as hell, but said it was worth it. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “He met this girl named Nadia. Dark-haired tall gal with fair skin and blue eyes. Had a helluva night.”

  “Nadia?” Marina’s hand shot out of my pants as if she’d touched an acetylene torch.

  The women exchanged looks. No more stroking, no more nibbling. Everyone was quiet a moment. Just the sound of a jazzy piano and bass coming from the speakers, then a trumpet joining in. It could have been the Miles Davis version of “So What.”

  “I thought you might know this Nadia,” I said. “I figure you girls are all friends.”

  “Why do you want to meet her when you have us?” Marina’s voice overflowed with suspicion.

  “Well, it’s gonna sound crazy, but my friend Lester, the flood insurance guy. He wants to send her a present. Jewelry, I think.”

  “Is bullshit,” Elena said.

  “What do you want?” Marina said.

  I dropped the flat vowels of my Minnesota accent and looked hard at Elena. “I think Nadia’s in trouble and I want to help her.”

  Marina’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Who are you, big bastard?”

  “My name’s Lassiter. I’m the lawyer for the man accused of killing Nicolai Gorev. Lots of people are looking for Nadia and maybe want to hurt her. I need her to tell me the truth about what happened.”

  Marina and Elena looked at each other, and I zipped up my pants. They said something to each other in Russian. Just then, the bartender barged through the curtain, waving a slip of paper in his meaty hand.

  “Card bounced, Mr. Dugan. You got another one?”

  “Is not Dugan!” Marina cried out.

  “Who then?” the bartender asked.

  Elena chattered a few angry sentences in Russian.

  Marina did the same.

  The bartender motioned to one of the waitresses. “Get Alex. Now! Seychas!”

  Alex had to be Nicolai’s brother, the guy who liked to drop women from his helicopter.

  The bartender pointed at me with a fat finger. “You! Up!”

  -18-

  The Pit and the Jeweler

  Everything happened very quickly. Both women leapt off the sofa and moved several feet away. The bouncer from downstairs tore through the curtain. At the same time, a third man emerged from a corridor in the back. Judging from Solomon’s story, the corridor led to the office where Nicolai Gorev had been killed. The office had likely been inherited by his brother Alex, the guy now approaching me with balled fists.

  Alex wore a charcoal silk suit, Italian cut, not the right style for his burly frame. He had dark eyes and a bushy black mustache. His salt-and-pepper hair was receding. I pegged him at about forty. From the body language of the others, Alex was the boss. The new boss.

  “What the hell do you want?” he said.

  A bebop saxophone was playing “Yardbird Suite,” and it was all I could do not to tap my toes. “Just making friendly conversation,” I said.

  “He’s been asking the girls about Nadia,” the bartender said.

  “Why do you care about that shlyu
kha?” Alex demanded.

  “Why do you care that I care?”

  “Who are you? FBI asshole?”

  “No, lawyer asshole. I represent the man wrongfully accused of killing your brother.”

  “Wrongfully?”

  “Your brother pulled a gun, and Nadia shot him in self-defense.”

  “Crap lie! Police found no gun. You know what I’d like to do with you?”

  “Drop me out of a helicopter into a pit six hundred meters deep?”

  That stopped him a second, and all we could hear was Charlie Bird Parker’s saxophone.

  “What do you know about it?” His eyes were wary. I had just gone from a man with too many questions to a man who already knew too much.

  “That you liked to drop Chechens out of your army helicopter.”

  “Screw the Chechens.”

  “And once in a while, drop a woman who was giving your brother a hard time.”

  “Do you know who invented the helicopter, lawyer asshole?”

  The bartender and the bouncer took positions on either side of me. If they grabbed my arms, Alex would have a clean shot at my face or gut.

  “Leonardo da Vinci,” I said.

  “Invented! Not drew picture. Igor Sikorsky. Russian.”

  I decided not to say Sikorsky did the work in the United States and became quite wealthy without employing Bar girls.

  “What’s your point?” I asked.

  “I love helicopters. But I don’t have one to drop you out of.”

  “Pity.”

  “I have boat to drop you in Gulf Stream.”

  I had no smart-ass reply to that.

  “What do you know about that deep pit?” Alex said.

  In reality, nothing. But I’d touched a nerve and wanted to probe like a dentist testing a tender tooth.

  “I know enough,” I lied.

  Alex Gorev moved closer, invading my personal space. “You can tell me now or I can have the shit beat out of you.”

  I remembered something Solomon heard Nicolai Gorev say about that deep pit: “Nadia, you know the place. The jeweler knows the place.”