Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor by Paul Levine Read Free Book Online

was Costa Rican, Miss Earrings
Honduran.
    I shouldn’t have brought Roger to Bay side, a
yuppie hangout with shops, restaurants, and bars strung along
Biscayne Bay downtown. It was a pickup place, and these two
probably assumed we were in the hunt—two decent-looking guys under
forty in suits—when all we wanted was solitude and an early dinner.
Outside the windows, the young male lawyers, accountants, and
bankers headed for the nearby singles bars, suitcoats slung over
shoulders, red suspenders holding up Brooks Brothers suit pants.
They slouched against open-air bars waiting for their frozen
margaritas to ooze out of chrome-plated machines that belong in
Dairy Queens, not taverns. Nearby the young women—mirror images in
business suits or no-nonsense below-the-knee dresses—their mouths
fixed in go-to-hell looks, struggled with the degree of toughness
and cool necessary to beat the men at their own game. Altogether, a
smug clique of well-dressed boys and girls.
    “Carlos had a Cigarette,” Caramel Skin was
saying. “Used to go like a son-of-a-bitch.” Sunavabeach. “Liked the Cigarette more than he liked me. Now he’s at FCI.”
    Salisbury wore a blank look. I said, “Federal
Correctional Institution. Probably used the boat to bring in bags
of the white stuff.”
    “ Sí. Hizo el tonto. He played the fool
for others. And, como sí esto fuera poco , he used to beat
me. Tie me up and spank me with a hairbrush. It was fun at first,
but then …”
    Roger Salisbury was into it now, asking
Caramel Skin whether Carlos the Con used leather or plain old rope.
Scientific study or kinky curiosity, I wondered. Miss Earrings was
telling me that they were fashion models—aren’t they all?—who
really didn’t have work permits. Came here on tourist visas. Which
meant they also were following the scent for the Holy Grail, green
cards. Bagging American husbands would do the trick.
    The earrings dangled near my face. Our knees
touched and her voice dropped to a whisper, a ploy to get me to
lean closer. Do they teach this stuff or is it in their genes? A
long fingernail traced the outline of my right ear. In the right
time and place, it could have been erotic. In a brightly lit
restaurant with my mind on business, it itched.
    “Thick hair, Mister Broad Shoulders,” she
said. Theek and Meester. “Some of the Yankees, their hair is
like, how they say, telaranas ?”
    “Cobwebs,” Caramel Skin said.
    “ Sí , cobwebs. But yours, chico ,
is thick like cáñamo. And rubianco .”
    “Like hemp and almost blond,” Caramel Skin
said, helpfully. Her friend gave a tug on my theek rubianco
cáñamo , which did not help me get a fried plantain into my
mouth. “And ojos azules ,” she said, giggling, looking into
my eyes.
    The women excused themselves to go to the
restroom, probably to divide up the spoils. Caramel Skin would get
the smaller guy with neat, salt-and-pepper hair who was practically
smacking his lips over images of sweet bondage. Earrings was stuck
with Meester Broad Shoulders, who at least had neither
cobwebs nor spiders in his mop but who seemed distracted.
    Salisbury lit a cigarette, dragged deeply,
and sent a swirl of smoke into the overhead fan. Doctors who smoke
puzzle me. You know they know better. Maybe lack of discipline and
self-control. I couldn’t imagine a personal injury lawyer riding a
motorcycle, not after seeing those eight-by-ten glossies taken by
the Highway Patrol. Need a shovel to scrape up body parts.
    I wanted to draw Roger away from his Latin
American fantasy and talk about tomorrow’s testimony. But he was
saying something about a doubleheader that had nothing to do with
Yankee Stadium. I shook my head no, and he gave me that puzzled
look. I’d seen the same expression the first time he walked into my
office about eighteen months earlier.
    * * *
    “You must like representing doctors,” he said
that day, after we exchanged hellos.
    “Yeah, it’s a great honor.”
    He gave me that look