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a look over his shoulder. “I’m warning you,
Baroso. You’ve got to make good to me.”
    Patterson took his client by the arm and
hustled him into the corridor, leaving just Blinky and me, unless
you count the portraits of long-deceased judges with fine crops of
chin whiskers.
    “ He’s full of shit,” Blinky
said. “Don’t worry about anything, Jake.”
    “ Me? Why should I
worry. You’re the
one he’s threatening.”
    “ He’s a con man. I ought to
know. I taught him the trade.”
    I packed my trial bag, and Blinky started
down the aisle without waiting for me. “Well, I guess that’s it,
Jake,” he called back to me. “Thanks for a great job.”
    “ There’s one more thing,” I
said.
    Blinky stopped by the door, poking his head
back at me, resembling a rabbit sniffing the air for danger.
“What’s that, Jake?”
    “ There’s the matter of the
fee.”
     
     
     
    Chapter 4
     
    Sweets and
Poisons
     
    We were fishing in the saltwater flats off
Key Largo, baking in the heat of a cloudless, still June morning.
More accurately, Granny Lassiter was fishing, Doc Charlie Riggs was
reminiscing, a skinny, towheaded kid whose name I didn’t catch was
pouting, and I was poling the skiff through the shallow water,
simultaneously working up a sweat, a headache, and a sunburn.
    “ Jake, you look a tad green
around the gills,” Granny said. “You’re not coming down with the
grippe, are you?”
    I grunted a negative response, and Granny
announced, “Boy always took ill at the worst times. Made me miss a
billfish tournament once when he caught the flu.”
    “ I was only eight, Granny.
I didn’t do it on purpose.”
    Charlie Riggs cleared his throat. “Have I
told you two about the case of the poisoned nasal spray?”
    “ Not recently,” I
said.
    “ Oh hush up, Jake,” Granny
admonished me. “I’d rather listen to Doc’s yarns than hear about
criminals you’ve helped keep on the streets.”
    Ouch. Why’s everyone on my case these days?
Now there were two of us pouting.
    Charlie gnawed on a cold meerschaum pipe,
waiting for a break in the Lassiter family banter. He had been
county coroner for twenty-five years, and in retirement, his
interests had expanded from corpses to virtually every bit of
knowledge worth knowing and a lot that wasn’t. Doc Riggs was a
short, bandy legged, bushy-bearded cherub with bright brown eyes
behind eyeglasses that were slightly cockeyed, probably because one
of the hinges was held together with a bent fishhook where a screw
had long since dropped out. Charlie was wearing green work pants
cut off at the knees, an army camouflage T-shirt, and a Florida
Marlins cap. His nose was smeared with gooey, white sun block.
    “ C’mon, Charlie, I was only
kidding. What’s your story about?’’
    Charlie shot me a look over
his shoulder. “The moral might have been summed up by Horace when
he wrote ‘ Ira furor brevis
est .’”
    “ Horace had such a way with
words,” I agreed.
    ‘ Anger is brief madness,’
“Charlie translated. “Two biologists at a research laboratory were
bitter rivals, and when one received a government grant and the
other did not, professional jealousy erupted into—”
    “ Poisoned nasal spray?” I
asked, digging the pole into the shallow water, and pushing us
silently across the flats.
    “ Precisely. One biologist
injected beta-propiolactone into the spray the other used for his
sinusitis. The drug is quite useful in sterilizing body parts prior
to transplant, but I wouldn’t recommend ingesting it. We ran a
day’s worth of tests on the stuff before we could even identify it
over at the old morgue. You remember that place, Jake?”
    “ Sure. That’s before the
county built you the Taj Mahal on Bob Hope Road.” It was true.
Those unfortunate victims of shoot-outs and knife fights—most of
whom had lived in squalor—spent a few posthumous days in a splendid
brick building with the ambience of a decent hotel. “The nasal
spray,