Flesh and Bones: A Jake Lassiter Novel Page 2

  "Socolow's been wrong before. Besides, Ms. Christina Bernhardt asked me to represent her."

  "What'd you do, slip your card into her bra when she was passed out?"

  "Wasn't wearing a bra, Charlie. Panties, either."

  "Good heavens!"

  "It's a model thing. Interferes with the smooth flow of fabric on skin."

  Charlie Riggs looked at me skeptically. "Just when did you become an expert on models?"

  "Rusty MacLean taught me a few things. Actually, he's the one who retained me. He's her agent, promises to pay the tab."

  "Better get a hefty retainer from that weasel," Charlie advised, "or you'll never see a dollar."

  "Hey, Rusty's an old friend. He introduced me to every after-hours watering hole in the AFC East and many of the women therein."

  "Even in Buffalo?"

  "Especially in Buffalo. What else is there to do?"

  Charlie harrumphed his displeasure. "I never trusted a receiver who didn't like going over the middle."

  Like coaches and generals, Doc Charlie Riggs had remarkable tolerance for other people's pain.

  "Charlie, believe me, no one likes going over the middle. It's a concussion zone."

  It's true, of course. No one wants to run full speed into Dick Butkus, Jack Lambert, or even little old me, Jake Lassiter, linebacker with a tender heart and a forearm smash like a crowbar to the throat.

  "It's not just that he short-armed it," Charlie said. "It's that he never gave a hundred percent. With you, Jake, it was different. You had no business being out there. You just gave it everything and overachieved."

  "It was either that or drive a beer truck," I said. In those days, I hadn't thought about law school, still confining myself to honest work. But Charlie Riggs was right about one thing. Rusty had talent he never used.

  Rusty MacLean was a natural. A four-sport star at a Chicago high school, he was an All-American at Notre Dame and a first-round draft choice with the Dolphins. I was a solid, if unspectacular, linebacker at Coral Shores High School in the Florida Keys, a walk-on at Penn State, and a free agent with the Dolphins. I hung on as a pro because of a willingness to punish myself—and occasionally an opponent—on kickoff teams. I played linebacker only when injuries to the starters were so severe that Don Shula thought about calling Julio Iglesias to fill in.

  Rusty could do anything—pole-vault, high-jump, play tennis with either hand. The first time he touched a golf club, he shot a 79. But he hated practice and loved parties. Blown knee ligaments ended his career when he didn't have the discipline to suffer through a year of painful rehabilitation. My career ended differently. I fought back after knee surgery, numerous fractures, and separated shoulders, but was simply beaten out by better, younger players. I enrolled in night law school because it left days free for windsurfing.

  Charlie grumbled something else about my old teammate, then went back to the autopsy report, pausing once to tap tobacco into his pipe and then light it. I stood up and paced, stopping in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the bay, Key Biscayne, and the ocean beyond. From the thirty-second floor, I could make out tiny triangles of colorful sails on the waters just off Virginia Key. Windsurfers luxuriating in a fifteen-knot easterly. Beats murder and mayhem any day.

  "What about it, Charlie? Will you testify that the heart attack was an intervening cause?"

  "But it wasn't!" he thundered. "The shooting was the proximate cause of the coronary."

  "Not so fast," I cautioned. "At his age, with the condition of his arteries, Harry Bernhardt could have had a coronary at any time, right?"

  "But he didn't have it any time. He went into cardiac arrest three and a half hours after your client—if that's what she is— plugged him, her own father, for God's sake."

  "How about just helping me out at the bond hearing, Charlie? Maybe give a little song-and-dance to get her out of the can."

  Charlie raised his bushy eyebrows at me. "Are you suborning perjury?"

  "No, I was just saying—"

  "That I lie at the bond hearing, as if that would be a lesser evil than at the trial." His look was a dagger. "Jake, an oath is an oath."

  I remembered what a writer once said about another lawyer, the disgraced and now deceased Roy Cohn: "He only lies under oath." Well, why not? That's when it counts.

  "Veritas simplex oratio est," Charlie said. "The language of truth is simple. But lies, prevarications, calumnies, they'll catch you in their web."

  I hate arguing with Charlie Riggs because he's always right, and he keeps me semihonest with his damned Yankee rectitude. "The grand jury meets tomorrow," I said. "I was hoping to talk Abe Socolow into a plea to a lesser—"

  "Jake, how long have you known Abe?"

  "Since he was prosecuting shoplifters and I was a rookie learning how to obfuscate the facts, confuse the jury, and obstruct justice."

  "You mean when you were in the PD's office."

  "That's what I said."

  "So you've known Abe your entire career."

  "Such as it is."

  Doc Riggs cocked his head to one side and gave me his disappointed-mentor look.

  "Okay, Charlie, I know what you're saying. Abe's a hard ass, and I should know it. I just thought we had a special case here. A woman with no prior record who's no threat to the community . . ."

  "Right. She's got no other fathers to kill."

  "Charlie, all those years working for the state have warped your sense of fairness. You've become a real shill for the prosecution."

  "A shill?" He growled and jabbed his pipe at me. "I'm just objective, and you're not."

  "Of course not!" Now it was my turn to raise my voice. "I'm Christina Bernhardt's lawyer, her shield against the powerful forces of the state or anyone else who would do her harm."

  "So what is it you want? Probation, counseling, community service?"

  My shrug asked, Why not?

  "Face it, Jake. You've got yourself a murder trial, and a loser at that."

  "Don't underestimate me, Charlie."

  "I never have. I just think that sometimes you don't know when you're in the concussion zone."

  I was chomping a cheeseburger at my desk when Cindy, my secretary, walked in, made a face, and twirled a finger through her burnt-orange curls. "If the nitrites and benzopyrene don't give you cancer, the pesticides and heavy metals will."

  "What?" A drop of grease splattered a slip-and-fall file that was open in front of me.

  "That disgusting fat-laden animal flesh you're eating will kill you. The excess protein will cause kidney failure, and the antibiotics actually lower your resistance to infection."

  "Bon appétit," I said, hoisting my dripping burger toward her.

  "Do you know that the production of animal foods consumes twenty percent of our energy supply? Do you know that seventy-five percent of our water is devoted to raising animals for food?"

  "And worth every drop." I belched. "Where do you get these numbers, anyway?"

  "The Vegan Society," she said, plopping down in one of the two matching client chairs, the oak armrests stained by years of sweaty palms.

  Oh, the vegans. No animal products whatsoever, including dairy, eggs, and honey. I pictured a bunch of skinny busybodies, eating their tofu and raising hell with your basic steak-and-lobster guys such as my very own carnivorous self.

  "What do you have for me?" I asked.

  She consulted her pad. "Roberto Condom is in the waiting room," she said, stifling a laugh. "With all the legal work you do for him, you'd think he'd ask for a name change, too."

  "What's wrong with 'Roberto'?"

  She wrinkled her nose at me. Droll wit is so seldom appreciated. "Anyway, you gotta get moving," Cindy ordered. "You've got Rusty MacLean at three, his place. Then Christina Bernhardt at five, her place."

  "Very funny, Cindy."

  Chrissy's place was the Women's Detention Center, where she was being held without bond. At least for now.

  "B
obby, you look great!"

  "No sé, Jake. They want to revoke my probation."

  "What? Are you looting lobsters again?"

  My client gave me his pained look. "Jake, mi amigo, I was setting them free from their traps. Don't you remember our defense?" He let his voice slip into a pretty fair impression of my impassioned closing argument. "Roberto Condom, protector of the environment, friend of flora and fauna, mammal and crustacean alike."

  "We might have won," I reminded him, "if the Marine Patrol hadn't found three hundred deceased lobsters iced down in your pickup truck."

  Roberto shrugged. That's life. He was in his mid-thirties, toreador thin, with slicked-back black hair, a pencil mustache, and long curving sideburns that resembled the blade of a scythe. He wore a bird's-egg-blue linen shirt with puffy sleeves, and pleated white slacks. Though he looked like a gigolo in a 1940s movie, Roberto Condom was more at home in a swamp than in St. Moritz.

  As a thief, Roberto was a specialist, and his especialidad was stealing living things. He never boosted a car, but he had rustled cattle from ranches near Ocala. He never rifled a cash register, but he had once broken into a pet store and stolen every tropical fish in the place. He poached sea turtle eggs, which he could sell for a hundred bucks a pop to botánicas in Little Havana where they were believed to be aphrodisiacs, water spider orchids from Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, and live ostrich chicks from Lion Country Safari. At this very moment, Roberto Condom was wearing hand-sewn ostrich-skin cowboy boots that would run you a thousand bucks, unless you brought your own ostriches to the bootmaker.

  Roberto disdained mundane crime, especially drug dealing. Which was how I'd gotten him off when a partner double-crossed him and stuffed condoms—yeah, I know—filled with cocaine inside seven hundred boa constrictors Roberto was smuggling into the country. Before the boas left Bogotá, someone had jammed the packets of cocaine inside their rectums, then sewed the orifices shut, a job I have never seen advertised in the "Help Wanted" section. When the constipated and ornery snakes were discovered by Customs, Roberto was charged with drug importation as well as cruelty to animals. Roberto showed up for trial with Bozo, his pet six-foot boa, curled around his neck, pleading that he loved snakes and would never do such a thing. The jury was out only twenty minutes, and Roberto walked. At Christmas, I was rewarded with a snakeskin jacket that looked familiar, but it took me three months to figure out that I hadn't seen Bozo in a while.

  "So if it's not lobsters, what?" I asked. "Stone crabs, sponges, starfish, wood storks? You're not stealing live coral from Pennekamp Park, are you?"

  "Jake!" Again feigning insult. Then he fingered his necklace of alligator teeth, and I knew.

  "Gators. You're poaching in the Everglades."

  "Chíngate! I'm no poacher. I have a license."

  "Which limits you to six gators a season."

  "Six," he sniffed. "How can a man make a living? I get two hundred dollars a hide, then some fancy store in Bal Harbour sells one purse for twenty times that."

  "Nobody said life is fair."

  "Verdad. Even if you shoot a big caimán right in the eye, it'll flop around in your boat for hours. You gotta stick a wire in its spine to kill it, and then you'll be up to your knees in gator shit."

  "If that's an invitation to your next hunt, forget it."

  "I'm just saying that your everyday working guy like me has it tough."

  "Okay, so you're Lunch-Bucket Jose. How many hides they catch you with?"

  "Solamente fifty-seven."

  "Jeez, a serial poacher."

  "Three days' work. This time of year, it should be more like a hundred. I tell you something funny. The water level's been down in the Glades for six months."

  " 'Course it has. It's the end of the dry season. Wait a few weeks, and it'll rain every dog day afternoon."

  "Yeah, but the dry season hasn't been that dry this year. Something's screwy. The gator holes are parched. Damn few turtles and ducks for them to eat, and fishing's shot to hell. I called the Water Management Office, pretended to be one of those Audubon Society types. They said they'd look into it, but you know how government is."

  I filed the information away in one of the dusty recesses of my mind, wondering how we would use it. As usual, my client was a step ahead of me.

  "So I'm thinking, Jake, maybe I was doing the gators a favor."

  "How, by plugging them through the eye with a three hundred Weatherby?"

  "Beats starving to death, verdad? Jeez, I'm just speeding evolution along. Natural selection, survival of the fittest, in a way, I'm a visionary, ahead of my time."

  I remembered what Charlie had said about Chrissy's case. "So what do you want, Bobby—probation, community service?"

  "Hell, no! I'm a goddamn hero. They should give me a medal."

  3

  Cheekbones and Chic Bones

  So-Be-Mo," Rusty MacLean said, giving each syllable a little push. "South Beach Models. Catchy, no?"

  "Catchy, yes," I agreed.

  We were sitting in his office on the third floor of an Ocean Drive Art Deco building. The facade of the 1930s structure had recently been repainted seafoam-green with flamingo-pink racing stripes. The windows were topped by cantilevered shades that looked like eyebrows, and the lobby was framed in keystone and decorated with ornamental friezes that seemed to celebrate leaping sailfish.

  Rusty's office walls were decorated with covers of magazines that were not on my regular reading list: Mondo, Grazia, Esprit, Vogue, and Elle. Each cover displayed a beautiful young woman in fancy duds, some of the models displaying enough cleavage to distract a guy who wouldn't know Ralph Lauren from Ralph Cramden.

  "The Wall of Fame," Rusty told me. His girls who had made good. I recognized Chrissy Bernhardt's pouting lips on a cover of Marie Claire.

  An interior window looked into an adjacent office where one of Rusty's talent scouts, a chain-smoking middle-aged woman with eyeglasses on a chain of imitation pearls, interviewed a mother and her two teenage daughters. All three were dressed identically in tank tops, black miniskirts, knee socks, and high-heeled white sneakers.

  "Mom's living through her daughters," Rusty had said when he escorted me to his office past the glass-enclosed room. "They waltz in here on open-audition day, girls who aren't five-six on their tippy-toes, with mashed potatoes where their cheekbones should be. Eileen Ford used to say there's no such thing as a model with a short neck, but nobody gave the word to these moms."

  I looked outside through the other window, across Lummus Park to the ocean. The beach was dotted with blue umbrellas, and a mile or so offshore, a cruise ship was making its way through turquoise water with a thousand happy tourists aboard.

  "Not a bad view, eh?" Rusty asked. He gestured toward a telescope at the corner of the room, its barrel pointed due east toward the water. "The Tenth Street beach is topless these days. Wanna take a look?"

  "Another time, Rusty. I've got to get to the women's jail and—"

  "Brazilians," he said.

  "What?"

  "They started it. Just took off their tops. Didn't wear much of a bottom, either. Then the local girls started doing it. Pretty soon you had a topless beach. Go farther north, up to Haulover, and it's totally nude."

  "Rusty, do you think we could talk about Chrissy?"

  He shrugged and pulled a large scrapbook from a shelf. "She walked in here with a first-rate book about a year ago. I knew right off she was a winner, a real gravy train for an agent. Maybe not what the French call the top du top des top models, but in the upper echelon. Hard worker who paid her dues in Italy, France, New York, the usual stops. Started doing real well about the time tits came back in."

  "I never knew they were out."

  "She had the raw material. You ever hear the expression 'cheekbones and chic bones'?"

  "Don't think anyone at the Quarterdeck Saloon ever says that," I admitted.

  "Well, Chrissy has it. Straight, thin nose, full lips, flawless complexi
on, long legs, and those shoulders. You gotta have shoulders to work the runway or the clothes look like shit. She's got an expressive face and great hair and can be ultrasleek and sophisticated or a California beach girl, whatever the client wants. Her body's perfect, everything in proportion, but a lot of girls have that. There's something else that's hard to define, a kind of spark that ignites in front of the camera, an energy that makes you watch. The best models are full of life, even when they're perfectly still. They're not passive unless the shot calls for it. You understand, Jake?"

  "Not a word of it."

  He was thumbing through the pages of her book, Chrissy in a swimsuit and high heels, in a striped silk blouse and miniskirt, in an ankle-length dress from a magazine ad. Then a couple of moody black-and-white shots taken in the woods. Sunlight filtered through leafy branches and Chrissy lay nude on her back on a fallen tree, her knee coyly raised to shield her groin, both hands hovering over, but not quite covering, her breasts.

  "She had a reputation in Europe as pretty wild, but in this business, that's par for the course. She could party all night and still make an eight A.M. call. Took the work seriously. Used to give hell to the crews. The lighting, the makeup, the clothes. Everything had to be right and never was. In France, her nickname was Casse-Couille, 'Ballbreaker.' "

  Rusty ran a hand through his long hair, giving his ponytail a little pat. "When she got back here, I landed one national commercial for her. Iced tea. She was in a white tennis outfit, and by the time she gulped down the tea, every man in America wanted to fuck her, marry her, or adopt her. Maybe a hundred fifty grand in residuals. Did some international spots, Latin America, a couple in the Far East, and a lot of fashion, five thousand a day for catalog work, some very classy editorial, too. The only negative, she wouldn't fuck me."

  "Talented and smart, too," I said.

  "Yeah, now that you mention it, she's pretty sharp. More than most mowdells. You know what they call a model with half a brain?"

  "I have a feeling I'm going to find out."

  "Gifted."