Flesh and Bones: A Jake Lassiter Novel Page 16

  I have spent too much time in this building, too much time listening to the presumably innocent, hearing fanciful tales of alibis, of being in the wrong car at the wrong time, of guns that fire without triggers being pulled, of lying cops, thieving partners, and cheating wives. My clients are the put upon, the wrongfully accused, victims themselves, and they have an excuse for everything.

  Now I had a client I desperately wanted to believe, wanted to help.

  But did I? Could I?

  19

  I Hate Surprises

  I was doing what I always do the day before trial, trying to figure out what I'd forgotten to do. I thumbed through the pleadings, skimmed the deposition summaries, looked for the tenth time at the state's exhibit list, and sketched out some ideas for my opening statement. I was so lost in the file that I didn't notice Cindy slip into my office until she dropped a three-page faxed document under my nose.

  "Just came in from the state attorney's office," she said.

  I took a look. "What the hell's Abe doing?"

  On cue, the phone rang on the private line. I picked it up, and Abe Socolow barked his name. Life is like that sometimes. But this was no coincidence.

  "Jake, you're gonna get a supplemental witness list, if you haven't already," he said.

  "I'm looking at it right now," I told him. "What bullshit! It's the eve of trial."

  "Only two new names, and I'll make them available for depo during recesses," he said quickly.

  I scanned the document. Two witnesses I'd never heard of, one with a Rome address, the other Hampshire, England. "Who the hell are Luciano Faviola and Martin Kent?"

  "Ex-boyfriends of your client. Four years ago, she ran over Kent in his own Jaguar, or at least tried to. Pulled a gun on him, too, but never fired. Faviola she tried to kill with a handgun two years ago in Italy. Fired twice, missed both times."

  "So what?" I said, angry at Abe, but twice as angry at Chrissy for not telling me. "I punched out a tight end for the Jets. You gonna bring that up, too?"

  "Under the Williams rule, Jake, we've got a pattern of misconduct."

  "The hell you do! This isn't a case where a wife killed five husbands in a row with arsenic in the omelets. This is a bullshit attempt to prejudice the jury with irrelevant facts, if they're facts at all."

  "It's all true. I'll get you the police reports by courier."

  I wanted to say a few choice expletives to my old buddy Abe, but Cindy was signaling me that I was wanted on another line.

  It was Guy Bernhardt. Something had come up. Something important. Could I get there right away?

  I had never been in Guy Bernhardt's den. Oh, I had looked into the den through the jalousie windows. Now I peeked out the window into the rosebushes and Spanish bayonet shrubs where I had once lurked. Sensing Bernhardt's glance, I looked guiltily back at the boar's head mounted on the wall.

  "You like to hunt?" I asked pleasantly.

  "No, that was Pop's hobby. Nailed that one up in the forest north of Sopchoppy. Big bastard had already gutted two hounds." Guy winked at me. "The boar, that is. Not my pop."

  Dr. Lawrence Schein sat on a leather sofa next to me, holding a glass of bourbon, idly swirling the ice cubes around in his glass.

  "Those antlers came off a buck Pop shot up in Montana," Guy said, pointing at the buck on the other wall. "Me, I never cared much for guns or killing living things. I'm a grower. I create life."

  "Like a god," Lawrence Schein said. His loopy smile was the giveaway. He'd been putting away bourbon long before I arrived.

  "You're a man who likes a beer, aren't you?" Guy asked, looking my way.

  "Sometimes two or three," I answered.

  He bent down at the bar, opened a little refrigerator, and pulled out a large green bottle with a porcelain stopper. "Grolsch, right?"

  "How'd you know?"

  He laughed. "I do my research."

  Guy brought my beer and settled down on the sofa with his own bourbon, straight up. No mango daiquiris tonight. Bourbon and beer for the menfolk. He was chewing on a unlit cigar, a fat Bolivar from Havana. I recognized the Belicosos Finos, a 52-gauge number my teammates and I used to smoke Sunday nights after victories. Hell, after losses, too. Overhead, the paddle fan swished through the air. Outside, the trees were bare, stripped of their fruit, and bedding down for the coming winter.

  "Did you two ask me down here to help me pick a jury or just to have a drink?"

  "Neither one, actually," Guy Bernhardt said, fiddling with the stitching on his pale gray guayabera. "Larry wants to share some new evidence with you."

  "New evidence? The night before trial, and you've found some new evidence?"

  "The missing tape," Schein said matter-of-factly.

  "What missing tape?" I asked, louder than I intended.

  "Oh, it wasn't missing, really. I'd turned off the recorder on the last session. But the backup continued rolling."

  "You didn't tell me about a backup."

  He sipped at the bourbon. "No, that would have spoiled the surprise." He giggled. It must have been a four-lap head start with the liquor.

  I hate surprises. There was no sound in the room but the incessant whoosh and whir of the paddle fan. I studied Lawrence Schein. His shaved head was showing black bristles above the ears, and his goatee needed trimming. I was going to have to tell my star witness to clean up his act and lay off the bourbon. But first I had to figure out if he was still my star witness.

  "You want to tell me about it?" I asked finally.

  "Actually," Guy Bernhardt said, "we thought you'd like to hear it. What's the expression, something like a picture is worth a thousand words?"

  "Res ipsa loquitur," I said, thinking of Charlie Riggs. "The thing speaks for itself."

  "Oh, it does," Bernhardt said. "It surely does."

  "I've thought some more about what we discussed yesterday." Chrissy's voice.

  "The need for goals?" Schein. I'd heard all this before.

  "No. What we talked about afterward."

  There was a pause.

  "Oh, that."

  "I've made a decision that you're not going to like," Chrissy said on the tape.

  "Maybe you shouldn't tell me."

  This time, it sounded even more ominous.

  "But I've told you everything else. I can't imagine not telling you first."

  "All right then. But first, let me . . ."

  The sound of papers rustling and a chair squeaking and a click. I'd heard that all before. But then, something new.

  "Is it off?" Chrissy's voice.

  "It's off," Schein said.

  "Well, like I said, I was thinking . . ."

  "Yes?"

  "I've bought a gun."

  "I thought you were just going to visualize it."

  "No. That's not enough. I've got to kill him." "Figuratively? As part of therapy?"

  "C'mon, Larry. That isn't what you meant. It couldn't be."

  "I didn't mean anything. I raised certain hypothetical actions, all intended to be therapeutic."

  "I decided last night. I couldn't sleep. I haven't slept through the night in weeks. I'm having nightmares and migraines."

  "It's all part of the process. The pain is coming out."

  "No, it's not. Maybe it will after . . ."

  "After?"

  "I'm going to kill my father for raping me. I'm going to kill him for ruining my life and for ruining Mom's."

  "What would that solve?"

  "I don't know. But I'm going to do it." A sob and then the sound of her sniffling. "You've shown me what the bastard did to me. Now I know why everything in my life has been so—"

  "You'll be caught."

  "I saw on Oprah, the other day, a woman who shot her husband after he'd beaten her. She got off."

  "I don't know."

  "Oh, Larry, don't look so depressed." A laugh that was mixed with a sob. "That's funny, isn't it? I mean, you're treating me, and I say you're depressed."

  "You
know I can't endorse what you're planning."

  "You can't stop me either."

  "I'm not even sure you're serious. Most people never act on their revenge fantasies."

  "You've helped me so much," she said. "I'll just be so glad when it's over."

  "What, therapy?"

  "No, Larry, when the bastard is dead."

  There was the clink of ice against glass. Guy Bernhardt took a sip of bourbon and waited for me to say something. Larry Schein cupped his glass between his trembling hands. Bernhardt studied me with a wry smile. "What do you think of your precious client now?"

  I couldn't speak. I couldn't move. A dozen cinder blocks sat on each shoulder.

  She'd lied to me.

  How many times had I caught a witness in a lie, then turned to the jury? If she lied about one thing, she's lied about others. How can you trust anything she told you?

  What else had Chrissy lied about? What whispers in my darkened bedroom were part of a grand plan?

  After a moment, I said, "You'll go to jail, Schein. The DPR will pull your license, and you'll go straight to jail."

  Schein laughed nervously. "For what?" I wanted to jam those ice cubes down his throat.

  "Conspiracy to commit murder, obstruction of justice, perjury, and a few other things Socolow will come up with."

  "Let's examine that," Bernhardt said in a condescending tone. It was clear who was calling the shots. "Larry, what about it?"

  "I haven't testified yet, so there's certainly no perjury," he said carefully. "I may have misled you by not producing the tape earlier, but misleading a defense lawyer is hardly obstruction of justice."

  "Hell, no!" Bernhardt barked out a laugh. "It furthers justice."

  "As for the conspiracy," Schein continued, "I never dreamed my patient would act out her fantasy of killing her father, and I certainly didn't encourage it."

  "Fantasy? She said she bought a gun. She said she would kill him."

  "Role playing. Chrissy as avenging angel. That was merely part of the therapy. At least, that's what I considered it. Unfortunately, it would appear that Chrissy played me for the fool. She planned the murder all along."

  "Surprising the shit out of you two, right?"

  "Truly, I'm shocked at the outcome," Schein said in a performance that would have gotten him tossed out of a high school drama class. "I had thought the therapy was coming along so well. Perhaps the estate could sue me for not warning Harry that Chrissy was threatening him. But the law is murky in that area, isn't it, Jake? In a conflict between a therapist's duty to his patient and to third parties, the evidence has to be quite overwhelming to justify a betrayal of a patient's confidence. I believe I'm on firm legal ground both criminally and civilly. The state attorney won't seek to prosecute after convicting your client. They do like to close their files, don't they?" He turned to Guy Bernhardt with a little smile. "And I don't think Guy's going to sue me."

  Bernhardt grinned back and downed his drink.

  "Of course he won't!" I yelled. "He's going to pay you!"

  It was coming into focus now. How could I have been so stupid? All this time it had troubled me that Guy Bernhardt was helping the woman who had killed his father. But of course, he wasn't helping her at all.

  "You planned to kill your father, and you tricked poor Chrissy into doing it," I said.

  "Poor Chrissy?" Guy mused. "Poor little rich girl. Everyone was always so worried about her."

  "Is that what this is about, your jealousy, your hatred of her?"

  "That isn't it at all," Schein said.

  "Shut up, Larry." Bernhardt pointed his cigar at his buddy, and then at me. "Lassiter, you don't have any proof to back up these wild accusations. In fact, the only proof is that my darling half sister shot and killed my father in front of a couple hundred witnesses after being tape-recorded as saying she would do just that."

  "You set her up!" I thundered. "You had this flea bag shrink plant false memories in an emotionally troubled young woman, then you had her do your dirty work. And you set me up, too. You had Rusty MacLean invite me to Paranoia that night. You wanted me there, to see her, maybe even to fall for her. But you wanted something else, too. You wanted me to lose her case."

  Bernhardt allowed himself a little smile. "Do you know what Rusty said about you?"

  "Probably that I was too slow to cover the flanker over the middle and I was dumb enough to fall for that repressed-memory garbage."

  Bernhardt poured himself another bourbon and came back to his chair without offering me a second beer. "Actually, he said you were smarter than you look."

  "No, I'm dumber than dogshit. You suckered me. It's the night before trial and I've got no defenses. Not temporary insanity, not posttraumatic stress disorder, not some blackout. I've got nothing, and even if I wanted to plead Chrissy to manslaughter, Socolow wouldn't take it. Why should he? He's got murder one, so he's not gonna offer a deal. And you figured all that out. Because with a manslaughter conviction, Chrissy could still inherit from her father's estate. But murder's different. It would all go to you, just like you planned all along. You got her to do your dirty work and then tanked her case."

  "To the contrary. On the one hand, I am enraged that Christina killed Pop. On the other hand, I love her as my blood kin and pity her. I am conflicted. I am suffering from . . . what is it, Larry?

  "Cognitive dissonance," Lawrence Schein said.

  "Cognitive bullshit!" I said.

  "Your problems, on the other hand, are more immediate, your options more limited," Bernhardt said. "Especially since Rusty also told us you were an essentially honest lawyer."

  "If that's not an oxymoron," Schein said.

  Bernhardt ignored the doctor and kept going. "When Rusty was a sports agent, he got in a dispute with an athlete over commissions. There was a rough draft of a contract that the athlete had signed by mistake. Rusty wanted to testify it was the operative contract. You tore it up."

  "It would have been a fraud," I said. "I don't lie to the court or let a client do it."

  "How noble," Bernhardt said. "Subsequently, you lost. Without the phony contract, you had no case."

  "Just as you'll lose this one," Schein said. I was beginning to think Bernhardt kept him around as a Greek chorus.

  "Plead her to second degree," Bernhardt said, making it sound like an order. "Twenty years, out in twelve. Of course, she still forfeits her share of the estate."

  "And if I don't?"

  "Socolow gets the tape," Bernhardt said evenly. "Christina will be convicted of first-degree murder, life without parole."

  "You really have no choice," Schein said, his courage bolstered by his bourbon. "Once the tape is played, it's over. I couldn't help you even if I wanted to. God couldn't help you. Just like with Rusty, you've got no case."

  "There's one difference," I said with just enough hostility to make Schein sit up a little straighten "I never loved Rusty."

  20

  Her Lawyer and Her Lover

  A tear streaked down my cheek as I drove north from Bernhardt's farm toward Miami Beach.

  Then another tear.

  I wasn't embarrassed. I wasn't ashamed.

  I am a big tough guy. I have bricklayer's shoulders and an acre of chest. I played the game with the oblong spheroid in knickers and plastic hats at the highest level, even if my talent was less than my desire. When I broke my nose on an opening kickoff—catching an elbow through the face mask—I stuffed cotton in each nostril to stanch the blood and hustled downfield on the punt return team three plays later.

  I am used to physical pain and accept it without complaint.

  Emotional pain is different.

  My father was killed in a barroom brawl when I was ten. He was a shrimper, and I remember his strong, coarse hands and the smell of his clothes, caked with salt and fish guts. We would wrestle in the shallow water of Buttonwood Sound off Key Largo. He could hold a fishing rod in one hand and toss me over his shoulder with the other. I marvele
d at his strength and took comfort in his arms. He was not afraid to show emotion and told me— more than once—that he loved me. I miss him terribly.

  One day, I saw my father sitting alone on the porch of our weather-beaten cracker house with the tin roof. The sun was setting in the gulf, the flat water shimmering orange with bursts of silver. Dad was sipping Granny's moonshine from a mason jar, and at first I thought the alcohol was wringing tears from his eyes. But it wasn't the booze. It was something with Mother, and though it was left unsaid, I knew. A few moments later, the screen door banged open, and my mother darted out of the house and flew off the porch, a blur of bleached-blond hair and a tight sleeveless dress with a pattern of red hibiscus, a look Granny called "all tramped up." A moment later, the old Plymouth kicked up shells in the driveway, then tore down U.S. 1. I crawled onto my father's lap, and he wrapped his arms around me, his chin resting on top of my head, and I heard him sob.

  About a year later, a man in a tavern shoved a knife through my father's heart. Granny never told me, but I always suspected Dad was defending my mother's honor, such as it was. But that could be my imagination. It could have been an argument over a poker debt, a football game, or who had the right to shrimp Card Sound.

  My mother took off for Oklahoma with a roughneck who had wintered in a trailer park near Marathon. His name was Conklin, and though he left without marrying my mother, he was kind enough to leave her something to remember him by: a daughter, Janet. Mom is long dead, Janet is somewhere in drug rehab, and her son, Kip, now bunks with me. Granny also pitches in, figuring if she raised me from a pup, she can do it again.

  I tried to tell Kip about my mother, his grandmother, and even though I sugar-coated it—"a real friendly blonde with a big laugh who loved to play Elvis on the jukebox of the Poachers' Inn and Saloon"-—Kip pegged her. "Sounds like Jessica Lange in Blue Sky," he said.