She regarded me skeptically. "Is there a woman behind this?"

"Whadaya mean?" Even the dimmest witness knows how to avoid a question by asking one of his own.

"Men generally don't do any self-examining unless they get criticized by someone else first. As far as I know, the only people whose opinions matter to you are Charlie and me, and we both love you no matter what you do. So I figure there's gotta be a woman."

"Now you're playing psychologist." Another delaying tactic, shifting the focus to the questioner.

"Okay, if you don't want to talk about it . . ." She let it hang and returned to her cooking. When the fillets were golden brown, she removed them from the pan, strained the oil, added some flour, lime juice, tomato sauce, garlic, pepper, thyme, and a pinch of pepper and salt for the sauce. Outside the window, lightning flashed across the Gulf, and the rain slanted in silver sheets along the beach. "Well, at least, I hope that sleazebag paid you a bundle."

"You know my rule, Granny. Get paid up front."

"Did you?"

I ignored the question and kept going. "Because if you don't and you lose, you never see the money. The client says, 'What good did you do? I could have been convicted without a lawyer.'

And if you win, he says, 'What'd I need you for? I was innocent.

"So did you get paid up front?"

"Not exactly," I admitted.

"Afterward?"

"Sort of."

"I hope you didn't take a check from that bum. He writes checks on banks that closed in twenty-nine."

"Not a check, either."

"Cash? Did you check to see if all the serial numbers were the same?"

"Not cash, either."

"What then?"

"Stock."

"Huh?"

"Blinky gave me a hundred shares in Rocky Mountain Treasures, Inc. It's incorporated in Colorado, licensed to do business in Florida."

Granny was looking at me as if she'd raised a fool. "What makes me think this so-called corporation is not one of the Fortune 500?" she asked.

"Probably because Blinky is the incorporator, the president, and the sole director."

"And he gave you the stock instead of a fee."

"He's tapped out. Look, Granny, I know what you're thinking, but there's one person in the world Blinky wouldn't stiff, and that's me. Now, it may turn out that company doesn't make any money and the stock could be worthless. I know that. But, for once, it's a legitimate enterprise."

"What's this Rocky Mountain corporation do?"

"Sort of geological research," I mumbled.

"What's that, mining?"

"Not exactly."

"C'mon, Jake."

"They look for things."

"What sort of things?"

"Buried treasure," I said, staring out the window at the rippling Gulf, slate gray in the storm.

"Oh Lordy, Jake. Get me a mason jar. I need a drink."

"Look, lots of lawyers take stock in lieu of fees: Imagine if I'd represented Microsoft ten years ago."

"Microsoft didn't try to sell chunks of a condemned condo as pieces of the Berlin Wall, did it?"

I had forgotten about that scheme. Just then, somebody behind me said, "Gregory Peck would have taken vegetables, instead of worthless pieces of paper."

I turned around. Kip was barefoot and wore torn jeans and a faded T-shirt.

"Vegetables?" I asked him.

"In To Kill a Mockingbird, he takes collard greens as his attorney's fee when a client can't pay. At least you can eat them."

"Thanks for the advice, kid. Why don't you see if Judgment at Nuremberg is on? It'll keep you busy for three and a half hours."

The kid pouted and backed out of the kitchen. In a moment, I heard him clicking through the channels in the other room. Now Granny was scowling at me. "Jake, I want you to be nice to Kippers."

"Okay, okay."

"And I want you to represent him."

"He needs a lawyer? What happened, did they fail to deliver his TV Guide?"

"It's a little problem in Juvenile Court. I'd rather let Kippers tell you about it."

"Let him hire Gregory Peck. He works cheap."

"Jake!"

I stuck an index finger into the sizzling lime-tomato concoction and burned myself. "Holy blazes," I said, repeating a phrase I'd learned from Granny in my youth. I sucked on my finger and turned the heat down on the burner. After a moment, I said, "Okay, I'll get the little brat off, even if he poisoned the nasal spray of the entire PTA."

Granny gave me a smile. She still had all her own teeth, despite fifty years of opening beer bottles without an opener. Then she took a wooden spoon that was older than me and started stirring the sauce. "Good. You've got to promise me you'll treat him like family."

"Like family? Why?"

"Because he's your nephew," Granny Lassiter said, never looking up from the simmering sauce.

Chapter 5.

One of Us Was Dead.

I thought I heard a faint knock in the engine of my canary yellow Olds 442. Like its owner, the convertible is beginning to show its age, which is only natural, since it is vintage 1968. The Olds doesn't have a tape deck, a CD player, a cellular phone, or a fax machine. It does have a radio, but no FM band. Three hundred fifty cubic inches under the hood, a four-barrel carburetor, a black canvas top, and a five-speed stick, it is-again, like its owner-a throwback.

On this warm, humid Monday morning, my ancient but amiable chariot, its top down, was growling north on Useless 1, the old highway that runs from Maine to Key West. The radio was tuned to a sports talk show at the low end of the dial, but every time a cloud passed over, the speaker crackled with static, and Fidel Castro or one of his cousins came on the air yelling about the imperialistas. It made me miss the latest report on which Dolphin free agents signed multiyear, mega-bucks contracts, and which University of Miami players had failed their drug tests.

In the black leather bucket seat next to me was this lemon-haired, string bean of a kid who Granny had informed me was my kin, to use her word. I studied him. He had blue eyes with long, pale lashes, fair skin with a faint blue vein showing just over the left temple. His straight, lank hair fell into his eyes. He would be considered cute, and when he filled out and reached his mid-teens, the girls would probably consider him a stud or a fox, or whatever the word of the day might be.

Granny said he was my half sister's son.

Which was double news to me. I didn't know I had a sister, whole or fractioned, and obviously, I didn't know about a son. It all had to do with my no-account mother-Granny's phrase again-who ran off to Oklahoma with a man she didn't marry, a man who left after fathering a daughter, Janet by name.

My mother had spent her last half-dozen years in an alcoholic fog, living alone in a third-floor walk-up apartment in Tulsa. Although the roughneck was long since gone, dear old Mom never came back to Florida, which is a euphemistic way of saying, she never saw me after dropping me off at Granny's on her way out of state and out of mind. Still, she always sent a card at Christmas and on my birthday, sometimes with a few dollars or a shirt that was hopelessly small.

I know a psychologist would say I'm into heavy denial, but I don't remember missing her, and when she died in my junior year in high school, it didn't mean that much. I still had Granny, and now apparently, so did Kip, son of unknown, unmarried, half sister Janet, who was in drug rehab in Houston or Phoenix or Albuquerque, those cities tending to merge in Granny's mind.

"How come you're not in school?" I asked Kip, as we roared north, passing a Winnebago with mushy tires on the two-lane road lined with conch shell stands and ticky-tack motels.

"It's summer vacation," he answered, giving me a pitying look.

"Right. I knew that."

We both studied the double white line a moment, and he said, "You ever see Fast Times at Ridgemont High?"

"Must have missed it."

"It was so cool. Sean Penn is this dweeb named Spicoli, who orders pizza delivered to his homeroom."

"Cool," I agreed.

I stayed quiet a while, sneaking peeks at the kid's profile as the wind blasted his hair back off his face. Okay, maybe there was some resemblance. He would be more finely chiseled than his roughly hewn uncle, and just now he seemed so fragile that something within me, something buried in the genetic material we shared, made me want to protect him. Trouble was, I had precious little experience with children, and I didn't know where to begin.

"I did see Blackboard Jungle," I said, "but that was before your time."

"Yeah, it's been on the classics channel. Sidney Poitier and Vic Morrow were totally awesome, and the music over the credits was way cool."

"Way cool," I agreed again.

I gunned the convertible around a rental Ford Taurus whose occupants had slowed to stare at an osprey nest lodged on top of a telephone pole. "The song you liked was 'Rock Around the Clock' by Bill Haley and His Comets."

Granny had asked me to teach the kid some things. I wasn't sure what I could do, unless he wanted to know some of the history of rock and roll, or maybe how to get by an offensive tackle with the swim move. In the meantime, there was work to do.

"Kip, I have to ask you some questions to get ready for the hearing tomorrow."

"Yeah."

"Why'd you do it?"

"Who said I did? There's a presumption of innocence, and if the state can't prove its case, the judge has to dismiss it, just like Paul Winfield did when Harrison Ford was charged with murder in Presumed Innocent."

Most clients who try to teach me the law are jailhouse lawyers. Now I had a kid with a J.D. from HBO. "Listen up, Kip. I'm your lawyer, so you tell me the truth without being a smartass. Got it?"

"Are you a good lawyer or a goofball like Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinnie?"

To our left, the sun was setting over a swampy field of saw grass. Three web-footed terns dipped and cawed, scanning the shallow water for dinner. I gunned the Olds to pass a Jeep hauling a Boston Whaler on a shimmying trailer and said, "Granny gave me the A-form, so I know what the cops say you did. I'm assuming you spray-painted the wall since you were caught with blue paint on your pants, and there's a witness who saw you chuck the can through a display window. If that's not enough, you admitted everything to the cop who came to the scene."

"He didn't read me my rights. Not even like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 3, when he knocks the bad guy unconscious, then says, 'You have the right to remain silent.'

"But they'll testify they did. They always do. Besides, the physical evidence and the eyewitness are enough to convict, even without the confession. So, bottom line, little guy, tell me what was going through that mind of yours."

"What's the big deal? Timothy Hutton did the same thing in Turk 182 as a protest. That's where I got the idea."

I hit the brakes and the old car groaned and whinnied as we stopped on the edge of a ditch filled with water, weeds, and probably alligators. We were just south of the Card Sound Bridge, and the traffic was slowing down to watch a flock, or is it a gaggle, of herons heading for the water.

Turning to the kid who allegedly shared my blood, I said, "I don't care about movies, okay, and I want you to stop showing off. I know you're bright. I know you wrap yourself in the movies because you don't have a real family, and you've been bounced around so much, you don't have any real friends, either. But I'm here for you. Do you understand what I'm saying?

"You're my lawyer."

"I'm your friend and . . ." I took a deep breath as an eighteen-wheeler roared by, kicking up dust. "I'm family, too.''

He looked at me skeptically.

"Look, Kip, neither one of us knows exactly what to do. You don't know how to be a nephew, and I don't know how to be an uncle. So, we'll learn together. When the hearing's over, I'll take you back to Granny's if they don't send you off to Raiford."

He gave me a funny look, like I'd hurt his feelings, but he wasn't going to let it show.

"I'll come down and visit you," I added quickly, "and you can come to Miami and visit me. I'll try to do the uncle things like buying you ice cream, taking you fishing-"

"Or to the movies."

"Right. And you'll do the nephew things like ..." What the hell were nephew things? "Like cutting the grass, changing the oil in the Olds, and waxing down the sailboards."

"You'll have to show me how," he said happily, seeming to welcome the opportunity to work up a sweat.

"It's a deal," I responded, and we exchanged high fives.

"Can we go to the movies tonight?" he asked.