The Deep Blue Alibi Read Online Free PDF Page B

on Bobby,” Victoria said, “let you boys play.”
    “He’s asleep,” Herbert said. “Tuckered out from poling the skiff all day.”
    “I’ll go inside, just the same,” she said.
    “Coward,” Steve told her as she headed through a door into the rear cabin.
    “There’s rum on the counter, soda in the fridge,” Herbert called after her, gesturing with his glass, sprigs of mint peeking over the rim. Deep into his evening mojitos. He turned back to Steve and scowled. “You best cut your own weeds, son, and stay out of mah tater patch.”
    Even when reaming him out, the old man’s voice maintained the mellifluous flow of molasses oozing over ice cream. Savannah born and raised, Herbert still spoke the honeyed patois of his youth.
    As a boy hanging out in the courthouse, Steve heard his father call a witness “So gosh-darned crooked, he could stand in the shadow of a corkscrew and nevuh see the sun. So slippery, gittin’ ahold of him is like grabbing an eel in an oil slick. So low a critter, ah had to drain the swamp just to find him.”
    Herbert could, as they used to say, talk a cat out of a tree. Even though four years at the University of Virginia followed by law school at Duke had polished his diction, Herbert had quickly figured out that playing the Southern gentleman with a tart tongue had its advantages in court. All these years later, whatever regional expressions Herbert still employed came not so much from his youth but from impersonating characters straight out of Mark Twain.
    Now, standing on the rear deck of his sagging and splintered houseboat, Herbert T. Solomon, recovering lawyer —rekoven loy-yuh— was giving his son a piece of his mind.
    “Who told you to petition the Bar on mah behalf?”
    “How’d you know?”
    “You think ah’m a senile old Cracker?” Ole Cracka.
    “Jews can’t be Crackers, Dad. Unless they’re matzohs. ”
    “Now, ah was just a jackleg country lawyer, but ah know when ah’m being poleaxed.”
    “Maybe jurors fell for that muskrat-in-a-tub-of-lard shtick, but I don’t. So cut the crap, or I’ll tell everyone about your Phi Beta Kappa key.”
    “Don’t change the subject. Ah got friends in Tallahassee who say you been poking around in mah business.”
    “All right, so I filed papers to get your license back.”
    “Don’t want it back.”
    “We could practice law together.”
    “Got a good life here.”
    “You know what the headline on your obituary will be? ‘Disgraced Ex-Judge Kicks Bucket.’ ”
    “So what? Ah’m not gonna be around to read it.”
    “Well, I will.”
    “So ah should do this for you ? Why don’t you just practice law with your beautiful lady and lemme alone?”
    “Vic wants to split up, go solo.”
    Dammit. Steve hadn’t planned on revealing that. But now that he had, maybe he could get some sympathy.
    “She’ll do better without you,” Herbert fired back. “If you’re not careful, she’ll kick you out of bed, too.”
    “If the Herald interviews me for that obit, I’m gonna say how supportive you always were.”
    “Aw, don’t be such a pussy. Ah remember when those Cuban kids kicked the living piss out of you in the ninth grade.”
    “Do you remember my coming back with a baseball bat? Breaking some ribs?”
    Herbert drained his mojito. “I recollect going to see Rocky Pomerance at the police station, bailing you out. And you say I didn’t support you?”
    His father’s support, Steve recalled, was equally divided between lackadaisical indifference and caustic criticism. Still, as a child, he had idolized the headline-grabbing lawyer, the respected judge. Part of his own psychology, Steve knew, was the childhood fear that he could never measure up to the standards Herbert T. Solomon had set. Then, when his father was implicated by a dirty lawyer in a zoning scandal, everything fell apart. Now Steve couldn’t understand why his father wouldn’t let him paste it all back together.
    “I’m not dropping the case,