Lassiter 03 - False Dawn by Paul Levine

black hair and flawless porcelain skin. It is a stunning combination you find in some of the Cuban women who trace their ancestors to northern Spain. The contrast makes the black velvet eyes even darker, the ivory skin even whiter. She had a prominent, forceful nose that went well with her strong cheekbones. She wore her hair in a short shag, and her makeup was understated, her lips brushed with just a hint of rosy gloss. Pearl earrings gleamed pure white against her dark hair. A trace of perfume, not too sweet, wafted my way. She wore a white knit dress with a fitted waist and padded shoulders. Her body was small and well-proportioned, the outline of her breasts visible beneath the knit dress.
    “It’s easier for women to get witnesses to talk,” she continued. “Men especially. They always want to help a lady. One way or another.”
    She laughed and dug into her
ropa vieja
, the stringy Cuban beef in a piquant tomato sauce. She was right. Who needs another lumpy, middle-aged guy in a four-door Ford, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts waiting for the motel room door to open. If you were lucky, he got the 35-millimeter Canon up and focused before the businessman and his secretary were back on the expressway headed downtown.
    “Tell me about your work,” I said.
    “The usual. Asset reconstruction, missing persons, surveillance, witness interviews, sworn statements in both civil and criminal cases.”
    She told me she had started working eleven years ago, right after she graduated from Florida State. Her first job was with a big company, Wackenhut, when n was looking for bilingual women. Then she went with a three-investigator firm in a seedy building with a flashing neon sign and a boss who kept a bottle of bourbon in his desk, just like in the movies. Recently, she opened her own shop, and now she was hustling business from semirespectable lawyers such as myself.
    “I thought it would be glamorous,” Lourdes said, “for about twenty minutes. My first job was sorting a guy’s garbage for two months. Every Monday and Thursday at four A.M. , I’d be in his driveway, substituting my trash for his.”
    “What were you looking for?”
    “Proof of assets. He’d gone into bankruptcy to defraud creditors. Buried in the coffee grounds was a magazine for owners of private aircraft. Found a twin-engine Beechcraft under a phony name at Tamiami. Also a property tax bill from North Carolina.
    We located a nicely furnished A-frame on the side of a mountain near Boone, plus thirty acres of land just off the Blue Ridge Parkway.”
    She smiled and speared a sweet plantain with her fork. “I love the challenge,” she said. “Once I was hired by a gynecologist who knew his partner was stealing but couldn’t prove it and couldn’t figure where the money was going. All he knew was that the books were cooked and his partner was tired all the time. I tailed the guy home from the office. Midnight, sharp, five nights a week, he’d hit the strip joints in Lauderdale, one after another, buying magnums of overpriced champagne, slipping hundred-dollar bills into every G-string in the joint.”
    “You’d think a gynecologist would see enough …”
    “That’s what I thought, too, but who knows? Anyway, so much for the glamour of my job. After a week chasing the horny doctor, all my clothes smelled like cigarettes, cheap perfume, and stale beer. You’d be surprised how many men offered me money to take off my clothes.”
    “No, I wouldn’t,” I said, just as I was expected to do.
    She ran a hand through the shag hairdo, then told me a few more war stories. She was a neat package of woman in total control. In the guise of friendly patter, she was letting me have her resume one page at a time. I was supposed to be impressed with her competence, and I was. At the same time, there was that faint air of flirtation, the sidelong look, the smile that slid from friendly to provocative without crossing the border of good taste.
    So what