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tourist season was nearly over, and the only people out at the beach midweek were the old and the unemployed. They walked A1A checking the trash for aluminum cans and rattling the coin returns at the pay phones. I supposed it was better than the days when I first started lifeguarding, and the spring-breakers came down from the north and tore up the town. Those were the days before the city commissioners decided, in all their wisdom, that no tourists were better than the drunken, debauching variety. They used the cops to drive away the spring-breakers, and with their business gone, slowly the small mom-and-pop motels closed, nailing plywood over the windows and putting up For Sale signs in the dry, unkempt grass. Corporate America went on a buying spree then, with the beach looking like a ghost town, and now the big chain hotels, franchise restaurants, and chic boutiques were popping up all along the newly redesigned beachfront. The Fort Lauderdale Strip would soon have as much character as any middle-America shopping mall.
    When I was a teenager we used to come down to the Lauderdale Strip and cruise, six or seven kids packed into my brother Pit’s old Ford Galaxy with the surfboard rack on the roof. Pit would oblige us, though he wasn’t really into the hooting and hollering and acting crazy like the rest of us. He’d scrimped and saved to get his car so he could get to the beach to surf after school. That boy just lived to surf, and sometimes, when we were cruising like that, with the bright neon-lit crowds on one side of the street and the glowing, foaming surf on the other. I would watch my brother from the backseat, where I was wedged between pimply-faced boys. He would completely ignore the scantily clad crowds the other kids found so enticing. Instead, Pit’s eyes measured the breaking waves as he surfed down them in his mind, a half smile dancing around his lips. I remembered how I envied him his distance, his independence, and how I wanted to get to the point where I would not be hurt by every teasing remark about my height or the breadth of my shoulders.
    I drove up Seventeenth toward U.S. 1 and passed the Top Ten Club, the flagship of Crystal’s fleet of strip joints. The club was sandwiched between a luxury auto rental store and a mirrored office building. From the outside, the place looked pretty posh with a modem, multilevel design, gold trim, and neon. The grounds were beautifully landscaped to fit right in with the yacht brokerages and the high-end restaurants elsewhere on the street. It was a case of sleaze trying to go classy. An innocent observer would never guess it was a girlie joint, that day and night they had ten women dancing nude. The club motto was “All our girls are tens on top.”

    The Downtowner was the kind of place I knew wouldn’t be around much longer, given the way waterfront property values were mounting along the river, but I hoped it could somehow hold out against the twin demons of taxes and gentrification. Both a bar and a restaurant, the memorabilia that covered the walls was not fake junk collected by a professional decorator, but rather old life preservers with real boat names that the old-timers still remembered, street-name signs from the days when people earned a street instead of buying one, old dinghies and ancient outboards, black-and-white photos and stuffed fish and wild-pig heads with yellowed tusks, all collected during the past fifty years from river folk coming and going through the doors of this place. The dark varnished wood interior had been built by boat builders and still retained that well-fitted feeling in spite of years of abuse. Behind the bartender’s back, plate glass windows ran the length of the bar and provided a view of the constant parade of river traffic, an ever-changing tableau of motor yachts, shrimpers, sailboats, barges, dinghies, and water taxis.
    When I arrived, the place was abuzz with the gossip of the murder or murders, and Jake,