•
Dr. Marsh sat in silence in the plush leather passenger seat of his lawyer’s Lexus. They were just a half-block away from Mercy Hospital, an acute-care facility that sat on premier Miami waterfront, the Coconut Grove side of Biscayne Bay. Year after year it was voted “best view from a deathbed” by a local offbeat magazine. Dr. Marsh had missed his morning rounds at the hospital, and they were popping by the parking lot just to pick up his car. But Jessie Merrill was still weighing on his mind.
“Funny thing about that videotape,” said Marsh.
Zamora stopped the car at the traffic light. “How so?”
“I don’t know if Jessie was sleeping with Swyteck or not. But she definitely wasn’t obsessed with him.”
Zamora rolled his cigar between his thumb and index finger. “You’d never guess that from the tape. She screamed his name while having sex with you.”
“These tapes she did were purely shock value. There’s nothing honest about them.”
“I’m not following you.”
Marsh looked out the window, then back. “This was exactly the kind of thing that bitch liked to do. She’d get me all hot and then say something to spoil the mood and set me off.”
“How do you mean?”
“The tapes weren’t the least bit erotic for her. It was all about her warped sense of humor. One time, before I’d decided to get a divorce, she had me on the verge of orgasm and then pretended my wife had just walked into the room. That was her favorite tape of all, watching me fly out of the bed butt-naked. Other times she’d just scream out another man’s name. She used my seventeen-year-old son’s name once, my partner’s another time. But her favorite one was Jack. She knew that one really got me.”
“Why did that name bother you so much?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it possible that you were a little jealous of Jack Swyteck?”
“No.”
“Maybe you had reason to be jealous. Maybe when she screamed his name, it wasn’t just for effect.”
“It was totally for effect. She just wanted to make me crazy.”
“Crazy enough to kill her?”
Their eyes locked. “I told you before, I didn’t kill her.”
“Then the polygraph should be a breeze.”
“I think I’ve changed my mind on that. I don’t want to take a polygraph.”
“Why not?”
“I swear, I had nothing to do with Jessie’s death. I just don’t believe in polygraphs. I think liars can beat them, and I think innocent people who get nervous can fail.”
Zamora twirled his cigar, thinking. “I have a good examiner. Maybe I can get Jancowitz to agree to use him.”
“I really don’t want to take one. I don’t care who’s administering it. Hell, it tests your breathing, your heart rate, your blood pressure. I get so furious whenever anyone asks me about Jessie Merrill, I’m afraid I’ll fail even if I tell the truth.”
“Then you shouldn’t have acted so eager to do it back in Jancowitz’s office.”
“I was bluffing. I figured the more willing I seemed to take one, the less likely he was to push for it.”
“Prosecutors can never get enough. It’s going to be hard to get him to back down.”
“Maybe if the testimony we offer is so good, he’ll do the deal even if we refuse to sit for a polygraph.”
Zamora gave his client a look. “How good?”
“We already have a good base. That joint bank account is pretty damning for Swyteck.”
“Why
did
she put him on that account?”
“Damned if I know.”
“Why weren’t you on it?”
“The money was never intended for me. This was something I was doing for her.”
“Got to keep the high-maintenance other woman happy, eh?”
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to provide for another woman when your wife of twenty-four years is suing for every penny in divorce?”
“I understand.”
“But let’s not lose focus here. We got Jessie Merrill naming Swyteck as her coaccount holder on the one-point-five million dollars, and we got her on tape screaming out his name. That’s a damn good start. The prosecutor says he wants more, so I’ll give him more.”
“He doesn’t just want more.”
“I hear you.”
“I’m serious,” said Zamora. “There is no upside in lying to a grand jury. We need to comb over every word you say. It all has to be true.”
“Sure, I love a true story.”
“Just so the emphasis is more on ‘true,’ less on ‘story.’”
The doctor flashed a wry smile. “That’s what the truth’s all about, isn’t it?”
“What?”
The traffic light turned green. Zamora steered his car toward the hospital entrance. Dr. Marsh looked out the window at the passing palm trees and said, “It’s all just a matter of emphasis.”
•
It was almost midnight as they lay together in Cindy’s old bedroom, their last night at Cindy’s mother’s. A small twenty-five-year-old lamp on the nightstand cast a faint glow across the bedsheets. It was a girl’s lamp with a pink-and-white shade. Jack wondered what had gone through Cindy’s head as a child, as she’d lain in this very room night after night. He wondered what dreams she’d had. Nothing like the nightmares she had as a grown-up, surely. It pained him to think that perhaps Evelyn was right, that he only added to Cindy’s anxieties.
“Are you really okay with this?” he said.
Cindy was on her side, her back to him. He’d told her everything about the will and the child Jessie had given up for adoption. She’d listened without interruption, without much reaction at all.
She sighed and said, “Maybe I’m just getting numb to the world. Nothing shocks me anymore.”
“I know I keep saying this, but it’s so important: Everything that happened between me and Jessie was before you and I ever met.”
“I understand.”
“Don’t go numb on me.”
Jack was right beside her but still looking at the back of her head. She wouldn’t look at him. “What are you going to do about the boy?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Are you going to try to find him?”
“I might have to.”
“Do you want to?”
“It’s all so complicated. I don’t think I’ll know the answer to that question until some of the dust has settled.”
Silence fell between them. Cindy reached for the switch on the lamp, then stopped, as if something had just come to mind. “When did Jessie make her will?”
Jack paused, wondering where this was headed. “About a year ago.”
“That was before she came to you and asked you to be her lawyer, right?”
“Yeah, it’s when she supposedly was diagnosed with ALS.”
“Why do you think she did that?”
“Did what?”
“Wrote her will just then.”
“It was part of the scam. She had to make it believable that she was diagnosed with a terminal disease, so she ran out and made a will.”
“Do you think it’s possible that she really did think she was going to die?”
He thought for a second, almost found himself entertaining the possibility. “No. She told me it was a scam.”
“Did she tell you it was her scam or Dr. Marsh’s scam?”
“It doesn’t matter. They were in it together at the end.”
“If they were in it together, then why wasn’t his name on the joint bank account?”
“Because they were smart. Only the stupidest of coconspirators would put their names together on a joint bank account.”
Silence returned. After a few moments, Cindy reached for the light switch, then stopped herself once again. “In your heart, you truly believe that Jessie ended up dead because she scammed those viatical investors, right?”
“One way or the other, yeah. Either they killed her or she killed herself because they were about to get her good.”
“Down the road, if you have to prove to someone-to a jury, God forbid-that Jessie scammed the investors, how are you going to do it?”
“I saw her and Dr. Marsh holding hands in the elevator after the verdict. And then she admitted to me that it was a scam.”
“So, really, your only proof of a scam is what you claim you saw in the elevator and what you claim she said to you afterward?”
He felt a pang in his stomach. It was the toughest cross-examination he’d ever faced, and he was staring at the back of his wife’s head. “I guess that’s what it boils down to.”
“That’s my concern,” she said quietly.
“You shouldn’t be concerned.”
“But maybe you should be.”
“Maybe so.”
Finally she rolled over, looked him in the eye, and gently touched his hand. “You and Jessie weren’t having an affair. You didn’t know about the child. You didn’t know about the joint bank account in the Bahamas. You didn’t know that she’d left you all that money in her will. She turns up dead, naked, in our bathtub, and the only evidence that someone else might have killed her is your own self-serving testimony. You claim that she admitted the whole thing was a scam, even though you, as her lawyer, knew nothing about it until after the trial was over. I would never tell you and Rosa how to do your jobs, but I’ve gained enough insights from you over the years to know that it’s looking harder and harder for you to avoid an indictment.”
“Don’t you think I realize that?”
“I’m not saying it to make you mad. My only point is that unless there are twelve Cindy Swytecks sitting on the jury, how do you expect them to believe you? How could
anyone
believe you, unless they wanted to believe you?”
He brushed her cheek with the back of his hand, but even though she’d been the one to initiate physical contact a minute earlier, she felt somewhat stiff and unreceptive. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Me too.” She rolled over and switched off the lamp. They lay side by side in the darkness. Jack didn’t want to end it on that note, but he couldn’t conjure up the words to make things better.
“Jack?” she said in the darkness.
“Yes?”
“What does it feel like to kill someone?”
He assumed she meant Esteban, not Jessie. Even so, it wasn’t something he liked to talk about, that battle to the death with his wife’s attacker five years earlier. “It feels horrible.”
“They say it’s easier to kill again after you’ve killed once. Do you think that’s true?”
“No.”
“Honestly?”
“If you’re a normal human being with a conscience, taking a human life under any circumstances is never easy.”
“I didn’t ask if it was easy. I asked if you thought it was easi
er
.”
“I don’t think so. Not unless you’re miswired in the first place.”
She didn’t answer right away. It was as if she were evaluating his response. Or perhaps evaluating him.
She reached for the lamp, and with a turn of the switch the room brightened. “Good night, Jack.”
“Good night,” he said, trying not to think too much of her decision to sleep with the light on. And then there was silence.
•
Yuri was chasing flies. They were all over Gulfstream Park. Not the kind that race horses swatted away with their tails. These were flies with money to wash.
Yuri loved thoroughbred racing, and in Florida’s winter months the name of the game was Gulfstream Park. The main track was a mile-long oval wrapped around an inviting blue lake that even on blistering-hot days made you feel cooler just to look at it. Gulfstream was a picturesque course with over sixty years of racing tradition, host to premier events like the Breeders Cup and Florida Derby. It sat within fifty miles of at least ten casinos that were more than happy to take back your winnings, everything from bingo with the Seminole Indians to blackjack and slot machines on any number of gaming cruises that left daily from Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami. This was as good as gambling got in Florida, and Yuri was in heaven.
But he hated to be ripped off. Especially by his own flies.
“Pedro, got a minute?”
Pedro was a new guy, early twenties, pretty smart, not nearly as smart as he thought he was. He was standing at the urinal in the men’s room beneath the grandstands. Hundreds of losing tickets littered the bare concrete floor at his feet, but at the moment the two men were alone in the restroom.
He looked at Yuri and said, “You talking to me?”
“Yeah. Come here. I got a big winner for you.”
Pedro flushed the urinal, zipped up, and smiled. It was his job to buy winning tickets, all with dirty money. It was one of the oldest games in the money-laundering world. Take the dirty proceeds from a drug deal, go buy a ticket from a recent winner at the track, cash it in and, voilà, your money’s legit. You had to pay taxes on it, but that was better than having to explain suitcases full of cash to the federal government. Pedro might wash ten thousand dollars a day this way. He was a fly, always hanging around race tracks the way insects of the same name buzzed around a horse’s ass.
“I hit the trifecta in the second race,” said Yuri. “Twenty-two hundred bucks.”
Pedro washed his hands in the basin, speaking to Yuri’s reflection in the mirror. “I’ll give you two thousand for it.”
“You charge commission?”
“Sure. You still come out ahead. You turn that ticket in to the cashier, you end up paying the IRS five, six hundred bucks in income taxes. You sell it to me, you get fast cash for a measly two-hundred-dollar transaction fee.”
“I gotta tell you, Pedro. Every time I’ve done this in the past, it’s been at face value. A twenty-two hundred dollar purse gets me twenty-two hundred bucks from a fly.”
“Must be a long time since you won anything. I been doing it this way for at least two months.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah.”
“Business good?”
“Excellent.”
“What does your boss say about that?”
“Nothing I can tell you.”
“I think he’d be pissed. Because you haven’t been telling him about your ten-percent commission, have you?”
“That’s between me and him. You want to sell your ticket or not?”
Yuri grabbed him by the back of the neck, smashed Pedro’s head into the sink. A crimson rose exploded onto the white basin. Pedro squealed and fell to the ground, his face bloodied, a broken tooth protruding through his upper lip.
“What the… hell?” he said, dazed.
Yuri grabbed him by the hair and looked him straight in the eye. “Two months, huh? That’s a thousand bucks a day for fifty race days you been skimming. You got two days to cough up a fifty-thousand-dollar present to your boss. Or I’ll come find you, and you’ll be spitting up more than just your teeth.”
The bathroom door opened. Two men walked in, then stopped at the sight of blood on the sink and Pedro on the floor.
Yuri walked past them and, on his way out, said, “It’s okay. He slipped.”
The door closed behind him, and Yuri walked calmly into the common area beneath the grandstands. A group of dejected losers watched the replay of the third race on the television sets overhead. Winners were lined up at the cashier window. Dreamers were back in line for the next race, wallets open. Yuri bought himself an ice-cream bar and returned to his box seat near the finish line. It was an open-air seat in the shade, with a prime view of the nine-hundred-and-fifty-two-foot straight-away finish from the final turn.
Vladimir was in the seat next to him. “Flies all under control?”
“Totally.”
“I think I’ll call you the bug zapper.”
“You do and I’ll squash you like a cockroach.”
Horses with shiny brown coats pranced across the track. The big black scoreboard in the infield said it was five minutes until post time.
“I had an interesting meeting last night. A friend of one of my employees from the blood center claims he can hook us up with fifty million dollars in viatical settlements.”
“How?”
“He has connections with some AIDS hospices.”
“Fucking AIDS. That’s how we got into the mess we’re in. All those homos were supposed to be dead in two years. Then they get on these drug cocktails, AZT, whatever, and live forever.”
“Well, not forever. We both know that a weak immunity system offers a great many opportunities to expedite the process. How’d your meeting in Paraguay go?”
“I set them straight, but it doesn’t do us any good.”
“What do you mean?”
“Brighton Beach canceled our contract.”
The trumpet blared, calling the horses to the gate. “What?”
“No more money. Not fifty million, not fifty cents.”
“Why?”
“They didn’t give me a reason. I think it’s because of all the attention this West Nile virus is getting from the Centers for Disease Control. They’re probably getting nervous.”
“Why would they be nervous?”
“Because there just aren’t that many cases of West Nile virus in the United States. It could start to look pretty fishy when the authorities figure out that half the reported cases in the United States involved AIDS patients who had viatical settlements.”
“How many of our targets ended up getting West Nile?”
“One woman in Georgia’s dead from it already. Could be a few more to follow.”
“You don’t know how many?”
“Not off the top of my head. You know how Fate works, his little game. Only the ones who chose a slow, painful death would have gotten stuck with West Nile. The others got something quick and painless. Relatively quick and painless.”
“I’m beginning not to trust this Fate. I think I should meet him.”
“I can probably arrange that,” said Yuri. “Someday.”
Vladimir pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, as if to stem a migraine. “I don’t understand this. This was such a perfect plan.”
“It was never perfect. Look at the Jessie Merrill situation. The minute we branch out from AIDS patients who need a little help dying, we get scammed.”
“That’s a whole ‘nother situation.”
“Yeah,” said Yuri. “Whole ‘nother situation.”
The bell rang and horses sprang from the gate. Yuri and Vladimir raised their binoculars and watched through the cloud of dust as the sprinting pack of thoroughbreds rounded the first turn.