Christina sagged back on the bed and closed her eyes.
“And?”
“And he offered me fifteen grand, plus six weeks in Hawaii.”
“I see,” Christina said thinly.
“Anyway, he said I should call you right away and smooth out the details.”
“Such as?”
“Reservations,” said Maggie Gonzalez. “Maui would be my first choice.”
10
One of the wondrous things about Florida, Rudy Graveline thought as he chewed on a jumbo shrimp, was the climate of unabashed corruption: There was absolutely no trouble from which money could not extricate you.
Rudy had learned this lesson years earlier when the state medical board had first tried to take away his license. For the board it had been a long sticky process, reviewing the complaints of disfigured patients, comparing the “before” and “after” photographs, sifting through the minutiae of thirteen separate malpractice suits. Since the medical board was made up mostly of other doctors, Rudy Graveline had fully expected exoneration—physicians stick together like shit on a shoe.
But the grossness of Rudy’s surgical mistakes was so astounding that even his peers could not ignore it; they recommended that he be suspended from the practice of medicine forever. Rudy hired a Tallahassee lawyer and pushed the case to a state administrative hearing. The hearing officer acting as judge was not a doctor himself, but some schlump civil servant knocking down twenty-eight thousand a year, tops. At the end of the third day of testimony—some of it so ghastly that Rudy’s own attorney became nauseated—Rudy noticed the hearing officer getting into a decrepit old Ford Fairmont to go home to his wife and four kids. This gave Rudy an idea. On the fourth day, he made a phone call. On the fifth day, a brand new Volvo station wagon with cruise control was delivered to the home of the hearing officer. On the sixth day, Dr. Rudy Graveline was cleared of all charges against him.
The board immediately reinstated Rudy’s license and sealed all the records from the public and the press—thus honoring the long-held philosophy of Florida’s medical establishment that the last persons who need to know about a doctor’s incompetence are the patients.
Safe from the sanctions and scrutiny of his own profession, Dr. Rudy Graveline viewed all outside threats as problems that could be handled politically; that is, with bribery. Which is why he was having a long lunch with Dade County Commissioner Roberto Pepsical, who was chatting about the next election.
“Shrimp good, no?” said Roberto, who pocketed one in each cheek.
“Excellent,” Rudy agreed. He pushed the cocktail platter aside and dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin. “Bobby, I’d like to give each of you twenty-five.”
“Grand?” Roberto Pepsical flashed a mouthful of pink-flecked teeth. “Twenty-five grand, are you serious?”
The man was a hog: a florid, jowly, pug-nosed, rheumy-eyed hog. A cosmetic surgeon’s nightmare. Rudy Graveline couldn’t bear to watch him eat. “Not so loud,” he said to the commissioner. “I know what the campaign law says, but there are ways to duck it.”
“Great!” said Roberto. He had an account in the Caymans; all the commissioners did, except for Lillian Atwater, who was trying out a phony blind trust in the Dominican Republic.
Rudy said, “First I’ve got to ask a favor.”
“Shoot.”
The doctor leaned forward, trying to ignore Roberto’s hot gumbo breath. “The vote on Old Cypress Towers,” Rudy said, “the rezoning thing.”
Roberto Pepsical lunged for a crab leg and cracked it open with his front teeth. “Nooooo problem,” he said.
Old Cypress Towers was one of Dr. Rudy Graveline’s many real estate projects and tax shelters: a thirty-three story luxury apartment building with a nightclub and health spa planned for the top floor. Only trouble was, the land currently was zoned for low-density public use—parks, schools, ball fields, shit like that. Rudy needed five votes on the county commission to turn it around.
“No sweat,” Roberto reiterated. “I’ll talk to the others.”
The “others” were the four commissioners who always got pieced out in Roberto Pepsical’s crooked deals. The way the system was set up, each of the nine commissioners had his own crooked deals and his own set of locked votes. That way the tally always came out 5-4, but with different players on each side. The idea was to confuse the hell out of the newspaper reporters, who were always trying to figure out who on the commission was honest and who wasn’t.