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stared toward the ocean, screwing his face into thought. The clouds from the west were nearly overhead now, and the temperature was beginning to drop. Intermittent gusts tugged at the cafe’s umbrellas. “I never thought that girl was for you. She combines dependency on a man with an ability to manipulate him. She’s a user, Jake. I know the effect she had on you, and I only hope it’s over. You’ve got this flaw, you know….”
    “Only one?”
    “Where women are concerned, you’re attracted to the birds with the broken wings. You want to mend them, make them whole. But Star, or Gina, or whoever, is a predator, a hawk, not a hummingbird. Let the Nicky Florios of the world deal with her kind.”
    I always listen to Charlie, but sometimes I don’t follow his advice. This time, I kept quiet.
    Charlie leaned back in his chair and eyeballed me from under his canvas hat. “You can’t represent Nicky if you’re seeing his wife. You understand that, don’t you?”
    I stayed buttoned up. The Fifth Amendment was always dear to me.
    “Are you listening, Jake? A meretricious relationship affects your judgment. You should be planning Nicky’s defenses, and instead you sit here implying that maybe this accident was really…”
    “Say it, Charlie. That Peter Tupton was aced, offed, zapped, rubbed out.”
    I had raised my voice without knowing it, and Charlie’s bushy eyebrows were arched as he appraised me. “You’ve been under a lot of stress, Jake. Maybe you should let one of your partners handle the suit, take some time off. From what you tell me, there’s no indication of a homicide.”
    I signaled the waiter for another beer. “Motive, Charlie. It’s what you taught me to focus on. Tupton could cause Nicky a lot of trouble, cost him a lot of money and time fighting lawsuits instead of building his plug-ugly condos. Nicky invites the guy to a party, tries to soften him up, but it doesn’t work….”
    Charlie scowled and harrumphed in disbelief. “So he gets Tupton drunk and drops him in a chilly room. Really, Jake, if you’re going to the trouble to kill someone, you’d use a method that’d be sure to be lethal, and you probably wouldn’t do it in your home.”
    Just then, Charlie’s beeper went off. He extracted it from his belt and squinted at the digital readout. “State attorney’s number.” Charlie balled up his napkin, stood, and headed inside the restaurant, looking for a pay phone.
    While I waited, I mulled it over. The old sawbones was right. If Nicky wanted to kill Tupton, he wouldn’t do it himself, and he wouldn’t use a method that might just give the guy a cold. In this town, there are semi-pros who’ll ace somebody for a new outboard motor or a three-day pass to Disney World. And Florio could afford the best. But then, if everyone who committed a crime was so smart, nobody would ever be caught.
    I was still thinking about it when Charlie toddled back to the table, his brow furrowed, one hand absentmindedly stroking a cork attached to his fishing vest by a 3/0 hook. “Abe Socolow,” he announced, gravely, “asked if I’d take an appointment to assist the M.E. in a suspected homicide.”
    “So?”
    “I told him I have a potential conflict of interest.”
    Charlie hadn’t told me, but I knew. The state attorney was looking into the death of one Peter Tupton, a guy who didn’t fall out of a wheel well of a jet but still froze to death in Miami.
    “Where’s your conflict?” I asked. “I haven’t retained you as an expert.”
    “The conflict is that I’m your friend, but if you don’t have a problem with it, neither does Abe.”
    “Why does he want you?”
    “Metro Crime Scene tried to lift prints off the corpse with the plate-glass method. See if somebody carried Tupton into the wine cellar. They came up with something on the wrists, but they’re not good enough to match up, though they seem to exclude the paramedics. Socolow wants me to oversee a methyl-methacrylate