State vs Lassiter Read online

  STATE vs. LASSITER

  A Jake Lassiter Novel

  Paul Levine

  Contents

  STATE vs. LASSITER

  “BUM RAP” SNEAK PREVIEW

  “SOLOMON vs. LORD” SNEAK PREVIEW

  ALSO AVAILABLE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  “There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.”

  —Ambrose Bierce

  "Have you a criminal lawyer in this burg?"

  "We think so but we haven't been able to prove it on him yet."

  —Carl Sandburg

  1

  Beach Bum

  I woke up spitting sand. Someone was kicking me in the ribs.

  “You alive, pal?”

  I lifted my head and shielded my eyes against the molten fireball rising from the ocean. Squinting into the sun, I saw a tanned young guy standing over me. Khaki shorts, white shirt with epaulets and a badge. His utility belt held a crackling radio. Beach Patrol. Glorified lifeguards with Tasers.

  The guy dug a sneaker into my gut. “C’mon, get up.”

  “Knock it off or I’ll break your leg.” I licked my parched lips and tasted blood.

  What the hell happened last night?

  I’d been with Pamela. My lover and, conveniently enough, my banker at Great Southern. It should have been a night of drinks, dinner, and sex. We’d done the drinking, but then came the accusations and denials. A shadowy memory crept up, like fog over the shoreline.

  “What are you hiding, Pam?”

  “Screw you, Jake! You’re not gonna pin this on me.”

  “You’re the one moving the money.”

  “Bastard!”

  I remembered her raking me across the cheek with a handful of manicured nails. Now, touching my face, I felt tracks of dried blood. Then what happened? How’d I get here, face down on the beach? Hadn’t I rented a suite at the Fontainebleau? Until the blow-up, weren’t Pam and I celebrating the best fiscal report in the history of the Law Offices of Jacob Lassiter. Esq.? Weren’t we in love? At least, I thought we were.

  “Unless you fell out of a boat, you’re breaking the law.” Mr. Beach Patrol again. “City Code section three-seventy-two, subsection B-1. No overnight camping on the beach.”

  I let my head fall back to the sand. “Camping? Does it look like I’m toasting marshmallows?”

  Sea birds pecked at the wet sand near my head. Breakfast time. I felt chilled. The incoming tide splashed my bare left foot. There was a brown suede shoe on my right foot. No sign of the left shoe. I wore taupe dress slacks and an unbuttoned blue silk shirt. My belt was missing. Had I been stripping for a nighttime swim when I passed out?

  “On your feet, pal. Last time I’m gonna tell you.” He nudged me again with a sneaker.

  “Go pound sand.” I laughed at my little joke and hacked up what tasted like the syrupy remnants of several margaritas.

  “I’m responsible for Tenth Street Beach, and I’m giving you a direct order.”

  Tenth Street?

  Meaning I’d walked 30 blocks from the Fontainebleau before taking a snooze at the high tide line.

  “Lemme alone,” I said.

  “You want to get run-over? A half-track will be clearing seaweed in about five minutes.”

  He drew his foot back to kick me again. I grabbed his other ankle and jerked hard. He tumbled backward, arms wheeling, fell to the ground.

  I got to one knee, but my head was filled with bowling balls, and I never made it to my feet. Flat on his back, Mr. Beach Patrol snaked the Taser from its holster and nailed me. I spasmed and toppled sideways, a buffalo hit by lightning. The pain rattled my teeth, and my brain blazed with a light brighter than the rising sun.

  ***

  Ten minutes later, I was handcuffed and sitting cross-legged on the beach when a cop tricycle – okay, a three-wheel all-terrain vehicle pulled up – spraying me with sand. The Beach Patrol biker, an older guy with sergeant stripes, whispered to the young guy who’d microwaved me.

  I couldn’t make out much. The words “Lassiter” and “cops” and “Fontainebleau” were being tossed around.

  “You guys want to give me a ticket and get this over with?” I said.

  They kept whispering.

  “How ‘bout cutting me a break and go piss on some tourists with jellyfish stings?”

  The young guy let out a long, low whistle, then glanced at me. The sergeant clapped him on the back and said, “Well done,” as if he’d just busted John Dillinger or maybe cleaned all the bird poop from the beach.

  “Mr. Lassiter, this is more serious than a ticket,” the sergeant said.

  “C’mon, I was just sleeping off some tequila.”

  “Somebody back at the Fontainebleau wants to talk to you.”

  “Who?”

  “Detective Barrios, you know him?”

  “Yeah. Why’s he want to see me?”

  The sergeant and his pals exchanged get-a-load-of-this-guy looks. “Why do you think, Mr. Lassiter?”

  “Not a clue.”

  George Barrios was chief of Miami Beach Homicide.

  What the hell could he want with me?

  2

  The Sorrento Penthouse

  Two Miami Beach cops escorted me into the penthouse suite. Pamela Baylins lay on the floor, her eyes open and protruding, her legs splayed from beneath her black sequined mini, the same dress she wore to dinner last night. A tall, strong woman in life, she suddenly looked small and frail. A discarded and broken doll.

  I felt the rush of my heart, blood pounding through my veins. I felt as if I were falling down a mine shaft, narrow and deep. My knees buckled, and a uniformed cop propped me up by grabbing the handcuffs behind my back. I gasped, tried to say something – I’m not sure what – but my throat was filled with cotton. I tore against the handcuffs. Again, I don’t know why, the movement was involuntary. Like a rodeo bull cinched with a leather strap, I felt as if my torso was constricted, taking my breath away. Shock mixed with sorrow and my vision blurred with tears.

  I’d been at murder scenes and I’d watched autopsies performed. But none involved someone I loved. Now, I was as motionless as a man stuck in a nightmare.

  “You wanna sit down, Mr. Lassiter?” one of the cops said.

  “Let him stand,” said another.

  I scanned the cops’ hard, cold faces, then looked back at Pamela. Pink spots dotted her cheeks and her eyelids. Her tongue jutted out the side of her mouth, and bloody mucus dangled from both nostrils. A man’s black leather belt was cinched around her neck.

  Instinctively, I lifted my cuffed hands and felt for my own belt, even though I already knew the answer. The cops watched as I found nothing but empty loops.

  I’d defended enough murder trials to know where this was going. I tried to put off all notions of grief and loss in order to concentrate. I needed to clear my mind and take it all in. If I didn’t, I could do a lifetime of mourning in a prison cell.

  We were in the living room of the suite. There were no overturned chairs or broken glassware. The welcome basket of fruit and wine was still wrapped in plastic on a cocktail table. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the Atlantic. Blue skies and sun-dappled turquoise waters outside. Blood and ugliness inside.

  Pamela’s long, frosted hair was tangled beneath her head. Hair that she used to toss with a feminine shake of the head. First the big laugh, then the shake, her hair flying as if riding in a convertible down Collins Avenue on a Spring day.

  In life, Pamela’s features were in constant motion. Woman of a thousand smiles. Eyes that brightened when she spoke. A rare bird who could talk business or baseball or sex and could play at all three.

  I
was vaguely aware of movement around me. The quiet, hushed efficiency of a crime scene. Techs combed the carpet. A photographer clicked off dozens of shots. A young Hispanic man in a polo shirt with the logo of the Medical Examiner’s office peered into Pamela’s eyes. Looking for a cloudy film. A preliminary method of establishing time of death. Jamming a thermometer into her liver for a more precise determination would wait until the body was back at the morgue.

  Uniformed cops roamed the two-story suite, whistling at the extravagance of the place. We were on the main level. Three thousand square feet, wide open from the fully equipped kitchen – as if anyone came here to cook – to the oceanfront windows.

  “Got a swimming pool on the patio,” one cop was saying.

  “You mean a Jacuzzi,” another said.

  “Yeah, that, too. But a real pool.”

  A crime scene tech trotted down the stairs from the bedroom level. Pamela and I had planned to spend the night in the master bedroom upstairs. Drinking champagne and making love and getting silly over the whole damn luxuriousness of the place. Now, she was dead, and cops were watching me with cynical eyes, judging the sincerity of my grief and confusion.

  Did I go pale? Did my face register shock or horror or grief?

  Or guilt?

  I couldn’t tell. I just stood there. Numb and dumb. Gaping. Aching. Stunned into an empty silence. A creeping sense of self-loathing and regret. If we hadn’t argued, if I hadn’t left the suite, this never could have happened.

  A plainclothes detective whispered something to the photographer who then aimed the camera at my face and snapped off half a dozen pictures. He asked me to turn so he could catch my profile. A better angle for the scratches on my cheek.

  I did as I was told.

  A female tech in cargo pants and a CMB cop t-shirt knelt in front of me and turned my cuffs inside out, collecting sand in a plastic bag. Another tech in surgical gloves, armed with cotton swabs, said, “Would you please open wide, sir?” She swiped the inside of my gums.

  The man in the M.E. polo shirt was scraping residue from under Pamela’s fingernails. I caught sight of myself in a wall mirror, saw the dried blood on my face where she had scraped me, knew just how the test would turn out. My DNA would be found under Pamela’s nails.

  “Want to talk about it, Jake?”

  I turned and saw George Barrios. He was close to 60, with a shiny bald head and burly forearms tanned the color of polished chestnuts. He’d been with the Sheriff’s Department back in the cocaine cowboy days of the 1980's. Marielitos with machine guns. Colombians chopping up enemies with machetes. Bodies stacked in a Burger King truck when the old morgue ran out of space.

  Barrios was closing out his career as chief homicide detective of Miami Beach. When there’s a killing at the Fontainebleau – the victim a prominent young downtown banker like Pamela – well, you call in Barrios. I’d cross-examined him a number of times over the years and never caught him in a lie. He was tenacious and patient and thorough. His eyes had a concerned look, as if he’d like to help me. Oh, Barrios was damn good at cop work.

  “I didn’t do it, George.”

  “Didn’t ask if you did. The suite is registered to you. Just wanted you to I.D. her, give us any leads to find the killer.”

  Right, I thought. And Javert just wanted to find who stole the loaf of bread.

  “Pamela Baylins,” I said. “But you already know that.”

  “Want to tell me what happened?”

  My head throbbed. Pamela was dead.

  Pamela.

  Two nights ago, we’d romped the night away in her condo, then talked about a Fall cruise through the Greek islands. It had been her idea, and I’d said yes. We’d already taken a Spring trip I’d planned. A baseball tour along the East Coast, catching games in Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, and New York. Pamela didn’t like baseball, but went in all the way, buying Orioles and Nationals jerseys, before deciding that the red and white Phillies uniform complemented her complexion. By the time we hit Yankee Stadium, she was spitting sunflower seeds like a veteran catcher in the bullpen.

  Then last night…

  The weekend was to be a romantic getaway without even leaving town. A client I’d once walked on a marijuana possession-with-intent-to-distribute charge worked in P.R. for the Fontainebleau and got us the Sorrento Penthouse gratis. We’d had dinner at Prime 112, the steakhouse favored by NBA teams and hotshot lawyers. In between the first martini and the $30 shrimp cocktail, I’d gotten a call from Barry Samchick, my accountant. He’d been doing my tax returns for 11 years but had never before called on a Saturday night.

  “Your trust accounts are screwed up, Jake.”

  I felt a burning ingot the pit of my gut. It’s news every lawyer dreads. Trust accounts hold customers’ money…excuse me, clients’ money. The Florida Bar will punch your ticket for messing around with dough that doesn’t belong to you, even if you’ve just “borrowed” it for a few days to pay your secretary or your bookie.

  “Screwed up how, Barry? You saying money’s missing?”

  “Just the opposite. One account has too much. Carlos Castillo’s. Not a lot, but everything’s got to balance to the penny.”

  I was breathing easier. “Zero it out and transfer the excess to my operating account.”

  “That’s what I thought until I looked at the other accounts.”

  “Shit. They’re out of balance, too?”

  “No, but when I downloaded the backup documents from Great Southern Bank, I saw lots of electronic transfers back-and-forth to banks in the Caymans. Do you maintain accounts there?”

  “Who do you think I am, Mitt Romney? Of course not.”

  “The amounts shipped out and sent back were identical. They all balanced, except for the one where too much money came back in.”

  It had made no sense. I was the only one with the password for electronic transfers. The only other person who even dealt with my trust accounts was my personal banker. Personal with a capital “P.” As in Pamela. The woman I had been wining dining, and banging. And maybe even adoring. The woman now dead on the floor.

  “Would you like a glass of water?” Barrios asked.

  I nodded.

  “Uncuff him,” Barrios ordered a uniformed cop.

  When my hands were free, I massaged my wrists and drained the glass of water Barrios handed me. “Am I under arrest?”

  “Like my marital life, it’s complicated, Jake. Beach Patrol might book you for resisting arrest. But for the homicide, no.”

  “Not yet,” I thought, trying to read his mind.

  “So I can leave?”

  “Why not help yourself out first and talk about what happened here?”

  Screw that. He hadn’t answered my question. If the law were a frozen pond, Barrios stood on a thin patch of ice. If I’d been under arrest, he would have read my rights before interrogating me. But he had skated past the question, implying I could leave, but maybe I should just stick around and chat a while to help myself out.

  I always tell my clients to clam up. There’s a poster on my office wall that reproduces a couple lines from Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American.”

  “I never like giving information to the police. It saves them trouble.”

  Cops are not your friends, I tell my clients. They are trained to trap you, so don’t answer their questions, no matter how politely they ask. Anything you say can and will be used against you. Here’s a wrinkle in the law that’s reason enough to keep your mouth shut. Incriminating statements are admissible. But anything helpful you tell the cops is hearsay and won’t be repeated in court.

  Then there’s the problem of the blabbermouth client. Sometimes an innocent client will often stretch the truth or tell innocuous lies to make the story better. In court, the prosecutor will haul out the sledgehammer.

  “If the defendant lied about what color Jockeys he was wearing, how can you trust him about anything?”

  So, after due consideration, desp
ite knowing all this from more than 20 years dealing with cops and prosecutors, I turned to the veteran homicide detective and said, “Sure, George. What do you want to know?”

  3

  The Nine Steps of Convicting Yourself

  Detective Barrios escorted me onto a balcony the size of a basketball court. The balcony overlooked the Atlantic on one side and the Intracoastal on the other. Sixteen hours earlier, Pamela and I had kissed at the railing, the ocean breeze warm and salty.

  Barrios and I hadn’t even sat down when the door opened and a woman in a short turquoise tennis dress and matching headband joined us. Emilia Vazquez was Chief of Major Crimes in the State Attorney’s office. Probably the best prosecutor between Miami and Orlando. Tall and leggy, she had a sculpted jawline that looked damn good in profile in front of the jury box. I’d tried several cases against her, winning a couple and losing several more. I’d also played tennis against her and had never won a set. A decade ago, I’d also dated her for several months. It ended without shouts or tears; it just ended. Today, I figured she got a call while rushing the net down at Flamingo Park, at 13th and Michigan, ruining her Sunday morning doubles match.

  “Emilia, I’m glad to see you,” I said.

  “Are you?” She tucked a stray strand of hair under the headband and studied me through dark eyes, as hard as obsidian.

  “I want you to find whoever did this.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  I didn’t like the way she said it. Her tone wasn’t sarcastic so much as flat and mechanical.

  “She had a guy stalking her. An ex-boyfriend.”

  “Crowder. We know all about him and we’re checking him out.”

  “Well, that’s a start.”

  “Now, let’s see how much you can help us, Jake.”

  Emilia tried to maneuver me into a seat at a glass breakfast table, so that I would be looking into the morning sun. I stutter-stepped and settled into a chair looking south along the beach with a slice of the Intracoastal on the far side of Collins Avenue. Barrios sat directly across from me, which meant he would start the interrogation. Emilia sat at a 90-degree angle to my right so that my eyes would have to swing back and forth, never being able to see them both simultaneously.