Again to Carthage Page 5

  And because even now he was a hunter at heart his senses reacted instinctively to the merest flash of potential prey: the neon sideways V of a yellowtail snapper, the mottled hide of a sizable grouper, the distant wiggling feelers of the much-prized spiny bug.

  On his way back to shore, it was many many pairs of just such feelers that caught his instantly rapt attention: a conga line of nose-to-bung lobsters so long it disappeared into the distant haze of the amazingly clear water. He had seen such things on Jacques Cousteau but, in all the years he had plied these waters, never in person.

  Now here was a quandary.

  Cassidy couldn’t resist. He slipped off his nylon running shorts and wrapped them around his hand, swooshed down on the scattering line, grabbed three of the sharp-skinned creatures and wrung their tails off right in the water, then swam back and jogged home with them cradled against his side. He suffered a few inevitable cuts in his hand but the salt water would heal them quickly.

  The house was a 1940s-era whitewashed Spanish Mission style, built around a courtyard gone wild with flowers. The thing Cassidy liked best about it was a little screened-in breakfast nook right off the kitchen out from some French doors that were never closed.

  That’s where Harry Winkler was when Cassidy came in red from heat and exertion to toss the lobster tails into the already overflowing freezer. He then went to the sink to run cold water over his shaggy head. Winkler looked up from the sports section of the Palm Beach Post.

  “You been fishing?”

  “Unintentionally. Ran into a conga line. Ever seen one?”

  “Not in real life. Really? How many?”

  “Couldn’t tell, but a lot. Didn’t have a thing with me, of course. Wrapped my shorts around one hand for all the good it did. But they’re definitely walking out there. Probably means the gray groupers are coming in too. Hell, it’ll be time for the mullet run before you know it.”

  Deprived of seasons, they measured out the year by pelagic fish movements.

  Cassidy plopped down at the little table with a huge glass of orange juice, a banana, his training calendar, and a much-abused composition book. He made a notation on the calendar and began writing in the composition book, peeling the banana with his teeth. The floral tangle all around the outside of the screen was abuzz. After a few minutes he looked up at his redheaded roommate.

  “How’d the Cubs do?”

  “Lost.”

  Cassidy went back to writing, stopped to study a huge bumblebee noisily casing out a blood-colored hibiscus bloom.

  “Hey, Wink.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Let me ask you something.”

  “Okay.”

  “You ever miss horsing around with the guys on the team, Keller and Andy Owens and those guys? Not the games and the hoopla and all, but just hanging around, listening to Mahoney philosophize, that kind of stuff?”

  Winkler’s all-American face clouded in thought. He had been on both the basketball and the track teams at Southeastern, and in track he’d excelled in several events, getting close to seven feet in the high jump and seventeen in the pole vault, running the sprint relays, long-jumping. In the postseason he’d competed in the decathlon and had been nationally ranked. But he made it to the Olympics in team handball, a little-known European indoor game that resembled an unholy cross of basketball and soccer, something he had picked up in the service. He could play anything.

  “Yeah, I guess. Sure,” he said. “Although I obviously get my quota of horseplay chaperoning my own idiots.”

  “I hadn’t thought about that.”

  “But it is the trivial stuff you tend to remember. Like Boyd Welsh in the back of the plane coming back from somewhere talking about blowing up mailboxes when he was a kid. I don’t remember much of it but he had us all in stitches. Said if there was a federal prison for juveniles he’d still be in it. Sloan heard us and came back and put the fear of God in us. We had just lost to Vandy, so you can imagine his state of mind. Come to think of it, that may have been the time we got back to campus and he made us go to the gym and have a practice session at midnight.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about, that kind of stuff.”

  “Well, you know, we do still get little doses of it, like in league basketball and the Sunday volleyball tournaments. And there’s always little stunts like that mile relay you did against those guys.” Winkler thought for a minute, then chuckled.

  “What?”

  “Well, I was thinking about golf, like in the locker room? It’s kind of similar, you know? With the jokes, guys giving other guys shit about some shot or something. But it’s different. I wondered about that until I finally figured out that it’s kind of a watered-down version of the same thing. Except there’s no exclusivity to it, anybody with the cash can join, anybody can rent a cart. That’s what made the difference back then. In school everybody around you was all-conference, all-state, all-something. It was a pretty darned select group. It was something special to be a part of it, and you were always sort of aware of that.”

  Winkler was lost in thought for a moment, staring out at the humming tropical garden as Cassidy scribbled away. Winkler began chuckling again.

  “Cass, who was that football writer guy?”

  “Jenkins?”

  “Naw, the other one …”

  “Gent?”

  “Yeah. He said a golf locker room was a kind of methadone for ex-jocks.”

  7

  The Ferm

  THE LAW FIRM was located in a restored old arcade called the Mews on Royal Poinciana Way. It had once contained apartments for snowbirds who were only partially filthy rich or who still hadn’t figured out they had no chance to break in with Muffie and Brownie and Boopsie and the gang, the Palm Beach regulars.

  Joe Kern’s father had bought it for a song after the hurricanes of ’26 and ’28 killed so many people that no one except bootleggers and land scammers wanted to go to Florida anymore.

  It was Joe’s idea to move his law firm in. That was in the 1950s, when his little outfit had outgrown its rented space on Worth Avenue. The smart money said he was crazy, that their snooty clientele would never go to lawyers doing business out of a Mizneresque barrel-tile-roofed mall.

  In fact, the snoots were charmed down to their Guccis, and the “Kern Ferm” prospered like the kumquat trees and Spanish bayonets in its lush courtyard.

  Cassidy was charmed too, heading up the flagstone walkway to the reception area to get his messages. It was so unlawyerly to be able to pick tropical fruit outside your office door that Cassidy made a point every day of plucking a kumquat from one of the fragrant trees as he went by. He was sucking on one end of the sour little egg when he noticed that Joe Kern’s blinds were open and the man himself, polo-shirted and tan, was hunched over his desk, half-glasses at half-mast, poring over a stack of depositions two feet high.

  Cassidy smiled at the lovely Estelle and poked his head in. Joe looked up over his reading glasses from what appeared to be a three-hundred-page deposition and seemed entirely grateful to be dragged away from whatever chicanery it documented.

  “Having fun yet?” Cassidy asked.

  “Real property thing with Ronnie Sayles, an easement going back to the Conquistadors. It’s holding up the whole Crossman estate. I don’t know what he’s up to but I know I’d like to kill him. Again.”

  “Join the club. Hey, guess what? The lobsters are walking.”

  “If you really want me to guess, you have to insert a pause,” Joe said. “How do you know?”

  “Saw them. Took a mask on my run this morning and swam over about a thousand of them in a conga line.”

  “Wow.”

  “I know. It’s amazing to see.”

  “First time someone told me about that, I thought it was a joke,” Joe said. “I’ll call John and try to get out this weekend. Mullet should be running soon too. Oh, just so you know, Karl’s apparently on the warpath again.”

  “What did I do now?”

  “Beats me. I wish you guys could work this out, though.”

  Cassidy was fairly sure that he and Karl Farkus would not be able to work this out. Karl Farkus hated every membrane in Quenton Cassidy’s body. Cassidy figured it was the price you sometimes had to pay for publicly humiliating a proud and stupid man.

  Farkus’s father, now departed, had been Joe Kern’s first law partner. With a Florida cracker pedigree and a Yale education, Farkus senior bridged the two worlds so perfectly that the success of the firm was virtually assured the moment the two shook hands. The clients poured in. Fellow Yalie Earl E. T. Smith came in. Then they got old man MacArthur’s insurance and corporate work. Farkus senior even brought in some of the Kennedys’ local work. They were golden from the get-go, connected through Joe to Tallahassee and Atlanta, through Karl to New York and Boston, and through both to Miami and points south.

  They started looking for a third partner right away, thinking they would hire a politically connected circuit judge off the bench if they could get one. The rumor was that it was going to be Curtis Chillingworth, a World War II hero and the best legal mind on the bench in south Florida. He had also been a fraternity brother of Joe Kern’s at Southeastern. That was just before a character named Joe Peel hired some West Palm low-lifes to take Chillingworth and his wife Marjorie from their beach home in Manalapan out into the Gulf Stream in the middle of the night, drape them in chains, and toss them overboard. Joe Peel was a crooked city judge and Chillingworth was getting ready to lower the boom on him. Peel eventually got life at Raiford and the firm didn’t get its circuit judge.

  But those were the good old days, and though old man Farkus had been a legend in Palm Beach County legal annals, Farkus fils emerged from a weird and privileged Palm Be
ach upbringing to become merely a balding, sniveling, envious newt.

  Several years before Cassidy and Menduni joined the firm, though, Joe Kern had suffered a minor but troubling stroke. Farkus senior was doddering by then and Karl was given credit for holding the firm together. He was considered golden forever after that.

  “I wish I knew how all this got started with you guys,” Joe said.

  “You know how.”

  “You suppose?”

  “No doubt in my mind,” Cassidy said. “Big Stakes at Twin Lakes.”

  “Yeah? And whose big idea was that?” Joe took off his reading glasses, rocking his chair back.

  “Oh, it was my fault for sure,” Cassidy said. “I didn’t start it, but it was definitely my fault.”

  “And all the publicity?”

  “Not my fault. I have no idea how it got in the papers.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Wiggins found out about it somehow. But, yeah, it was my fault the thing got started.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you notice that from day one Karl never said my name? It was always the runner. It was never Good morning, Quenton. It was How is the runner this morning?”

  “Yeah, I thought maybe it was just good-natured joshing.”

  “Good-natured? Karl?”

  “Point taken.”

  “Then he bugged me for months to play him at tennis. I said, ‘Look, I know you’re good, you’ll kill me. What’s the point?’ But he kept on so I went over to his house one Saturday morning and of course he killed me.”

  “He is pretty good. Playing at the Breakers since he was a kid.”

  “I know, I know. So I thought that would make him happy, that that would be the end of it. But right away he starts in again, saying we should come up with some kind of running challenge. Talking about how in high school the track coach would get him from tennis practice to come over and win the hundred in a dual meet or something.”

  “This I didn’t know,” Joe said.

  “And it probably actually happened once, you know. But he’s all the time saying, ‘You know, Quenton, I wasn’t just a distance runner, I was a sprinter …’”

  “No …”

  “Oh yeah. So at the Christmas party last year he saunters up and we’ve both had a few and he starts in. We need to find some sort of challenge that would level the playing field to make it interesting, he says. We could run a hundred, but that wouldn’t be fair to you. But a distance race wouldn’t be fair to me—you know, giving the devil his due. Then he says, ‘But you know, I have done some 5Ks, Quenton.’”

  “Yeah, that’s Karl.”

  “Joe, I couldn’t resist.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I said, Karl, I got it. We’ll do a mile relay. You get three other guys, gotta be lawyers, gotta be from the county. No ringers. One lap each. Mile relay.”

  Joe arched his eyebrows.

  “Karl’s suspicious. He goes, ‘Who do you get?’ I say: ‘Nobody.’”

  With a thump Joe brought his chair upright, placed his elbows on the open deposition, smudging the right-hand onionskin page. He was rubbing his face with his hands.

  “Jeez,” he said. “He didn’t see this coming?”

  “Joe, honest to God, he was all excited.”

  Joe Kern was still rubbing his eyes, motioning Cassidy out of his office.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “Go. Go now. Maybe we’ll see you out there this weekend. We’re cooking kingfish at my place Saturday night.”

  “Can I bring anything?”

  “A blonde and your ukulele would be nice.”

  Cassidy and Roland were having bagels and coffee at Green’s Pharmacy on County Road.

  “You know, this was supposedly where Burt Reynolds met what’shername,” Roland said.

  “Dinah Shore, Roland. I was the one who told you.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Joe’s a bit older than them but he knows John Casey and some other guys from that era. In those days he was ‘Buddy,’ not Burt. Joe said you could dive up lobsters right out of Lake Worth back then.”

  “Uh-huh. I was walking by, heard you ’fessing up to Joe about the race,” said Roland, trying to keep some lox from sliding off his bagel.

  “He asked. I think he already knew most of it, but he wanted to hear it from me. I think Karl’s starting to get on even his nerves.”

  “You think he’s mad? About the race thing, I mean?”

  “At me? Naw. He knows Karl.”

  “Well, one of you needs to be put out of your misery. Karl’s never going to get over it.”

  “Yeah, I figured that.”

  “And did you also figure what would happen with the race? Did you know all along?”

  “Not really, though after a few weeks I began to get a pretty good idea. Did you know they actually had tryouts?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Oh yeah. He insisted that they have time to train, and he actually got some coach from Lauderdale to help them. I began to think I’d made a serious miscalculation.”

  “How so?”

  “Roland, you get four guys can run a sixty-second quarter mile each, I’m in trouble.”

  “You can’t run a four-minute mile?”

  “Hell no, not off the shelf. It’s not that easy, Roland. It took mankind hundreds of years to do it, don’t forget. It wasn’t until May 5, 1954.”

  “May 6. But the Swedes came pretty close in the forties,” Roland said, nibbling at his bagel.

  “Yeah, but they gave up. Said it was physically impossible. Arne got within a second or so, though.”

  “Yes, but it was Gunder the Wonder who came closest.”

  “What? No way. Andersson was faster … wasn’t he?”

  “Not at all. Hägg clocked 4:01.3. Andersson was three-tenths slower,” Roland said.

  “Roland, the record before Bannister broke it was 4:01.4,” said Cassidy.

  “That is correct. Hägg’s time was rounded upward by the IAAF when it was ratified. At the time they only recognized fifths of a second,” Roland sniffed.

  Cassidy looked over his fork at him with a gimlet eye.

  “How the hell do you remember this kind of stuff?” he said finally.

  “How can you not? I thought this was your event,” Roland said.

  “Okay, okay. Uncle,” Cassidy said.

  “I understand that a four-minute mile is a difficult undertaking, but you most certainly ran faster than that in your youth.”

  “Right. And the operative words there are in my youth.”

  “How fast were you figuring you’d have to go in Karl’s little scenario?”

  “Just enough to win, whatever it was. Karl’s big mistake was insisting that they have time to train. Then he got that injury that delayed it another couple weeks. All that time I’m sneaking out, doing intervals, running the bike path. It was pretty much a crash program but I was going at it hard.”

  “And you really didn’t know?”

  “Well, after a while I started figuring it out. You know Jamie Pressley, the tennis player, at the Randolph firm? He was number two singles at Southeastern our senior year. Anyway, I knew him from the training table and we went through law school together too. He was one of the guys Karl recruited. He went to some of their practices.”

  “You had a spy!”

  “Sort of. Jamie was training with them and saw what was going on, how slow they were going to be. He told them they were going to get creamed. Karl knew we knew each other, so he figured I’d sent Jamie in to psych them out. Jamie thought it was funny as hell.”

  “What did he say about their guys?”

  “These are ex-jocks and in pretty good shape, but no real runners among them. Jamie told me he was about the fastest, and he could only turn about sixty-five seconds or so. Karl was much slower than that. That’s when I knew.”