Lassiter 07 - Flesh and Bones by Levine, Paul (best fiction books to read TXT) 📗

sweet mangoes, mild onions—Vidalias, I'd guess—then the strong jalapeño."

"You got it."

"There's another taste I can't quite identify."

"Cilantro."

"Right. And a little olive oil?"

"Very good," Guy said. "You pay attention. That's a fine attribute in a man."

"And a lawyer," Lawrence Schein said.

I nodded and finished eating, damn proud to be a culinary sleuth. Now if I could only figure out these characters.

After the servants cleared the plates, they brought mango sorbet to clear the palate, followed by a small course of barbecued mango chicken, where I easily identified the brown sugar and vinegar but completely missed the chopped chipotle chiles in adobo sauce. Then came the mango-passionfruit crème brûlée, and finally espresso, which, best I could tell, did not have a trace of mango.

Loretta was right. Guy had mangoes on the brain.

And Guy was right about something. I do pay attention. I had been wondering the same thing as sweetly drunk Loretta. Just why was Guy Bernhardt helping a half sister he hadn't even known the first seventeen years of his life? Why help this spoiled, pampered favorite child when anything less than a murder conviction would cut his inheritance in half?

But I didn't agree with Loretta.

Guy Bernhardt wasn't stupid.

So why didn't I think he was giving either?

I was shoulder to shoulder with Dr. Schein in the back of a Jeep Wrangler. Guy Bernhardt sat in the passenger seat, and a uniformed security guard was driving. A second Wrangler was in front of us, and a third one was right behind. A guard with a shotgun sat in each of our two escort Jeeps . . . well, riding shotgun.

We were bouncing through ruts and drainage ditches between rows of gnarly mango trees, and Guy Bernhardt was lecturing on the fertilizers, yields per acre, and every other damned bit of minutia you probably didn't want to know about Mangifera indica, including the fact that the fruit is related to the cashew.

I was inhaling the musky aroma of the field, half listening to Guy, half wondering what the hell was going on with the odd couple of Guy Bernhardt and Larry Schein. I couldn't shake the feeling that Guy was more complicated than a good-ole-boy mango grower and Schein had more secrets than Freud's Wolf Man.

"You have a problem with varmints?" I asked, and Guy seemed puzzled for a moment, then saw I was looking at a 12-gauge mounted between the front seats.

"Oh, that? Yeah, the two-legged kind. It's to protect the water, which is more valuable than the fruit—hell, more valuable than oil. We've got our own well fields out here, and some of the neighboring farmers claim we're sucking their wells dry. Then the state cited us for supposedly lowering Little Bass Lake a foot or so."

We passed under a forty-foot irrigation tower that resembled an oil derrick, and I watched a rainbow form in the parabola of a giant stream of water that shot from the gun assembly at its peak. Mist drifted into the Jeep, cooling us.

"You do any environmental law, Jake?" Guy asked.

Seducing me with the hint of future business.

"Don't know the first thing about it."

"You oughta learn. It's a real lawyers' relief act, all those regulations. They want to fine us ten thousand dollars a day, can you believe that horse crap? I told them it's the drought, go sue God."

"What about your neighbors?"

"Hell, when their wells went dry, I sold them water. Got a special act through the legislature—Pop had some clout up in Tallahassee—so they treated us like a mini-utility. Some of the locals, the lime and avocado growers, didn't like my price and didn't like me, so the bastards complained to the state, to the Department of Environmental Resources Management, to the Army Corps of Engineers, to their congressmen, who wouldn't know a well field from . . ."

"A hole in the ground," I helped out.

"Yeah. So I said, screw you. No more water for you at any price, and we'll pump as much as the Water Management District lets us, and maybe a little more." He laughed, and we crossed a wooden bridge into a different section of the field. "Now we have some hardcases who sneak out here at night and cut our irrigation pipes."

After about fifteen minutes, we turned onto a road of crushed seashells and into the tree farm, where palms of a dozen different varieties were growing from seed. Here, too, irrigation towers shot long graceful arcs into the air, which misted into kaleidoscopes of color.

"Pop loved to grow things," Guy said. "Jake, you ought to come up to Palm Beach sometime, see Pop's work at the house on A1A. Shouldn't he, Larry?"

Next to me, Dr. Schein's ball cap nodded in assent.

"Flowering trees were Pop's favorites. Jacaranda, mahogany, pigeon plum, wild tamarind. Planted some for old man Castleberry, kept planting them after he owned the place. Liked to dig the holes himself, get his hands dirty."

"Like father, like son," Dr. Schein said, taking off his cap and running a hand over his gleaming scalp.

"It's true," Guy said, laughing. "The mango doesn't fall far from the tree."

"I'd like to see the place someday," I allowed.

"Anytime," Guy said, fiddling with his gold earring.

It seemed out of place on him, this husky son of a farmer. I don't wear an earring, carry a purse, or say "ciao," so men with pierced ears seem as out of place to me as a nun shooting the bird.

The Jeeps crossed a narrow irrigation stream where water rippled through a shallow gully. Guy said something in Spanish to the driver, and I turned to Schein. "You're pretty close to the family, aren't you?"

"Oh, I've been making house calls—to all their houses—for twenty years. I'm more of a friend than a doctor."

To Guy Bernhardt, he meant. To Chrissy, he was still a doctor, I figured. And despite Guy's apparent attempts to help Chrissy, I couldn't help but wonder which was stronger, Schein's relationship with his patient or that with his friend.

"I need to ask both of