The Deep Blue Alibi Read Online Free PDF

more authority. At first. Then, when she got in trouble, he’d be right there to rescue her. She’d see how foolish she’d been to even think about splitting up the firm.
    “I can trust you on this?” Victoria Lord asked. “You’ll respect my wishes?”
    “Would I lie to you?” Steve Solomon said.

Five
     
    RECOVERING LAWYER
     
    When they reached Sugarloaf Key, Steve hung a right onto Old State Road, and after another two miles, he brought the Eldo to a stop under a gumbo-limbo tree. The past few minutes, he’d been thinking of something other than his relationship with the brainy and leggy woman in the passenger seat.
    “When are you going to tell your father about the Bar petition?” Victoria asked, getting out of the car.
    Jeez, reading my mind.
    He’d filed a lawsuit to get back his father’s license to practice law but neglected to mention it to his old man. “Not till I have some good news to report.”
    They walked on a path of crushed shells toward the waterline at Pirates Cove. Victoria’s leather-soled slides were, well, sliding on the moist shells, and she shortened her stride. “I wonder if that’s the right way to do it. Keeping it secret, I mean.”
    Her roundabout, feminine way, Steve knew, of saying, “You’re really messing up here.”
    “Trust me, Vic. I know how to handle my old man.”
    Steve knew his father desperately missed being a lawyer. Not just any lawyer, but Herbert T. Solomon, Esq., a Southern-born, silver-tongued, spellbinding stem-winder of a lawyer. And then a respected Miami judge. Before his fall.
    Now Herbert spent his days fishing, usually alone. But today he’d been taking care of his grandson. On the trip down the Overseas Highway the day before, Steve and Victoria had dropped off twelve-year-old Bobby Solomon. Bobby lived with Steve instead of his own mother, Steve’s drug-addled and larcenous sister, Janice, who recently claimed to be growing organic vegetables in the North Carolina mountains. Steve made a mental note to check if the government’s food pyramid listed marijuana under vegetables.
    As they approached the houseboat, Steve could hear the wind chimes—beer cans dangling on fishing line— on the rear deck. The old wreck—the boat, not his father—was tied to a splintered wooden dock by corded lines thickened with green seaweed. Herbert Solomon owned five acres of scrubby property off Old State Road, but docking the boat there was still illegal, even under the Keys’ notoriously lax zoning. Even in the dark, the boat clearly listed to starboard. From inside came the sounds of calypso, Harry Belafonte singing, “Man Smart (Woman Smarter).”
    “I’m wondering if you should be the one to handle your father’s case,” Victoria volunteered.
    “Who’d be better?”
    “Someone who can be objective.”
    “I don’t plan to be objective. I’m a warrior, a gladiator.”
    “You know what I mean. You have to separate the truth from fiction. When your father was disbarred—”
    “He resigned. There’s a difference.”
    Christmas lights were strung on the overhang of the houseboat, even though it was May, and even though the Solomons were descended from the tribes of Israel. Splotches of green paint haphazardly covered divots of wood rot in the stern deck.
    Steve could see movement on the rear porch, his father getting up from a wooden rocker, a drink in his hand. Herbert’s shimmering white hair was swept straight back and flipped up at his shoulders. His skin, remarkably unlined for a man of sixty-six, was sunbaked, and his dark eyes were bright and combative.
    “Hey, Dad,” Steve said.
    “Don’t ‘Hey, Dad’ me, you sneaky son-of-a-bitch.”
    “What’d I do now?” Steve stepped aboard, thinking he’d been asking that question a lot lately.
    “Victoria,” Herbert said. “How do you put up with this gallynipper?”
    “Sometimes, I wonder,” she replied.
    “You could do a helluva lot better than him.”
    “Maybe I’ll go check