Lassiter 03 - False Dawn (3 page)

“No.”

“Money?”

“No.”

“Anything?”

“No.”

This wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe I wasn’t any good at reaching out. Maybe he thought I was there only because his mother asked me to be. Or maybe it was just hard for him to accept friendship, especially friendship sparked by obligation. My attempts at gratitude had always been awkward, his responses perfunctory.

“Francisco, you’re making this difficult for me. I owe you. You haven’t forgotten, have you?”

He dismissed the notion with a shrug. “It has been many years.”

“Some things don’t go away, even when you want them to.
Particularly
when you want them to. I still dream about it, nightmares really.”

“Dreams are dreams,” he said. “Life is life.”

I wanted to reach out to him, give him a brotherly hug, but I didn’t. He wouldn’t have wanted me to. Or was that just my excuse? Maybe
I’d
been stiff-arming him because he reminded me of that night and my eternal obligation. “It’s our secret, Francisco, something only the two of us share.”

He finished his beer. His expression hadn’t changed. “
Dos minutos
. That’s all it was out of your life and mine.”

“That’s a lot,” I said, “if it lets someone keep on living.”

“You think about it too much.”

“Don’t you … don’t you ever wake up, remembering?”

“My nightmares are different,” Francisco Crespo said.

We finished our beer and polished off a couple of Cuban sandwiches with black bean soup on the side. I promised to stay in touch the same way Hollywood producers promise to call for lunch. He gave me his phone number, and I tucked it in my pocket, then taped it on the refrigerator door. When I finally tried to reach him, the phone had been disconnected. I could have called his mother. I could have tracked him down. I could have done a lot of things. But I didn’t. Then came the call from the county jail; Crespo was booked on a second-degree murder charge.

I
left my Olds 442 convertible, vintage 1968, in the parking lot, and walked along the river, a narrow, oil-slicked snake of a waterway that runs from just north of the airport to Biscayne Bay near the downtown commercial district. Half a mile away, the air horn on the Flagler Street drawbridge was tooting the alarm, the tender preparing to raise the span. I remembered a humid night on the MacArthur Causeway, the dark vision of death haunting me still. I shook off the cobwebs and stared at a Panamanian freighter loaded with bicycles and truck tires heading toward the bay. The bikes—nearly all stolen—would be headed for Haiti, where a battered old Schwinn can bring fifty bucks. Freighters routinely use the river to haul illicit cargo, but that’s nothing new. During Prohibition, rumrunners from the Bahamas found their way up the Miami River with their contraband.

A few years ago, the city
padres
decided to clean up the polluted channel and decrepit surroundings where even the hookers can’t be trusted: they’re transvestites. The city planned a Riverfest extravaganza, which was going fine until a sewer line broke, spoiling the fun because it’s tough to enjoy your lobster and
paella
when the afternoon breeze is ripe with the stench of raw sewage. Now, rustbuckets from a dozen Central American countries were tied up, their crews idling on the shore or heading to roughneck bars along Flagler Street. The ships are essential to Miami’s commerce, hauling drugs and illegal aliens in, carting stolen cars and bicycles out.

I stopped at an outdoor fish market, bought a pint of cold conch salad, spicy with peppers and onions, and admired the fresh stone crab claws. The stoners were arranged in iced boxes, according to size—medium, large, and jumbo. In a triumph of marketing, even the smallest claw was labeled “medium.” Apparently, “small” claws would have as much consumer appeal as “petite” condoms.

My canary yellow convertible was still there when I walked back to the warehouse, beating the odds in a county where a hundred cars are stolen every day. I haven’t gone for any of the new devices so popular hereabouts: the LoJack transmitter to help the cops find your missing car; the Hook Crook Cane to lock the steering wheel; the electronic starter disabler and computer chip car key. If somebody really wants your car, they’re going to get it, and love her as I do, the old 442 is still just a chunk of metal.

The radio was untouched, too, probably because it’s older than most car thieves. It has no CD, no tape deck, not even an FM band. It does pick up Radio Havana, though, plus a big band station near the top of the AM dial. Some Filipino seamen were in the lot, but no one showed any interest in my antique, except a white ibis who was probably lost. The snowy bird was pecking at my tires with its long orange beak. Maybe I’d run over a juicy grasshopper.

I got in the car and drove five minutes to the Gaslight Lounge downtown. Once inside, I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, then made my way to the bar. The conch salad had made me thirsty; the case of
State
v.
Crespo
required an expert consultation. I had come to the right place for both.

The Gaslight is fine for a beer and a bacon cheeseburger, onion rings on the side. The red imitation-leather banquettes and matching bar stools are right out of the Fifties, and so is the clientele. Usually I drink Grolsch. For my money, the Dutch brewmasters are the best. But everyone has his own tastes, and if the yuppies want to buy watery Mexican beer because the longnecked bottles are trendy, let them. If they impress each other with a pricey Swedish vodka that is indistinguishable from half a dozen other brands, that’s fine, too. I stay out of the Misty Fern, and they stay out of the Gaslight, a place with no hanging plants, no pickled-wood latticework, and no nachos with salsa. Just a long, scarred teak bar with a brass foot rail, smoked mirrors, and barely enough light to read your check without striking a match.

For some reason, I didn’t feel like a beer, so I pointed to a bottle on the mirrored shelf, and Mickey Cumello poured two and a half ounces of Plymouth gin into a mixing glass without using the jigger to measure. Why should he? Does Pavarotti need sheet music?

Usually, I only drink gin after being drop-kicked by a judge, a jury, or a lady friend. Come to think of it, I’ve had more than my share of martinis lately.

Mickey gently dropped in four ice cubes—the large square ones, so they won’t melt the instant they hit the alcohol—and dribbled a splash or two of dry vermouth into the mixture. He stirred with a glass swizzle, but not out of fear of bruising the gin. Drinks don’t bruise; only drinkers do, but shaking clouds a martini. Finally, he strained the drink into a chilled glass, sliced a sliver of lemon peel, and lit a match. He squeezed the rind above the burning match until oil dropped into the flame, shooting off little sparks, which settled into the martini, giving it a hint of burnt lemon.

Mickey Cumello is a bartender from the old school. No ponytail, earring, or track shoes. His gray hair was combed straight back, revealing a handsome widow’s peak. He always wore a short-sleeve white shirt, charcoal gray pants, and polished black leather shoes, and he never spoke unless spoken to. In the dim light, he looked forty-five and had for twenty years.

I sipped at the cool poison and let it slide down the throat. “Mickey, you know every client I ever had is a liar.”

He hunched his bushy eyebrows but didn’t say a thing. Maybe he felt the same way about his customers. “They either lie to the jury or to me, or both,” I continued.

Mickey allowed me a small smile while he polished an old-fashioned glass that was dry and spotless.

“But they always swear they weren’t there, or the other guy started it, or the full moon made them do it.”

A man in a dark suit sat down a polite three bar stools away and, without being asked, Mickey hit a long-handled tap and drew a glass of Canadian ale. Just as silently, he resumed his position in front of me.

“But until now, I never had a client claim he iced a guy when it’s clear somebody else did it. Now why would he do that?”

Mickey wiped his hands on the towel and neatly folded it on a drying rack. “That’s easy, Jake. To protect someone else.”

“Right, but why?”

A swarthy man in a white guayabera slid onto the bar stool next to me. Mickey turned his body to shield our conversation. Is there such a thing as the bartender-client privilege?

“Because whatever he’s involved in, Jake, is a lot bigger than he is.”

My look told him to continue. He said, “And whatever a judge could do to him …”

“Twenty-five years to life.”

“… is nothing compared to what’ll happen if he spills what he knows. So, not to tell you your business, but if I were you, I wouldn’t be so anxious to hear this guy’s story.”

I drained the rest of the martini, tasting the sharpness of the gin against the smokiness of the burnt lemon. “Since when are you concerned about the health of my clients?”

Mickey Cumello shook his head. “Not his health, Jake. Yours.”

T
he psychologist said I stood too close to the jury during opening statement. My client said I was too loud. The judge said I was argumentative. And Marvin the Maven wasn’t talking to me.

Everyone’s a critic.

“Be aware of horizontal space zones,” Dr. Lester (Call Me Les) Weiner warned. “You’re using social zones when the courtroom demands public zones.”

I used to know a thing or two about end zones, but this was new to me.

Dr. Weiner toyed with the top button on his black Italian silk shirt. He wore no tie, and the sleeves were pushed up on his baggy sportcoat, a look favored by
Miami Vice
wannabes. The pleated pants were also black and had room for another Les inside. His dark hair was moussed and slicked straight back, and he studied me from behind dark-tinted aviator glasses. The general impression was Darth Vader with a Ph.D. “Jake, you’re still a stranger to the jury, so keep a horizontal zone of at least eight feet. By closing argument, if you establish rapport, you may move up to the rail.”

Marvin the Maven sat in the front row of the gallery pretending not to listen. Even at age seventy-six, there was nothing wrong with his hearing. He had said barely a word since learning I’d hired a psychologist to help with jury selection and trial tactics. For years, Marvin had the job, his only degree a lifetime of experience selling shoes, his expert’s fee a cup of tea and a bagel with a
schmear
. Now, feeling abandoned, he threatened to spend the rest of the week watching the ticker at the Miami Beach Merrill Lynch office, tracking the path of his fifty shares of AT&T.

I was sitting at the defense table, half listening to the witness, half listening to Dr. Weiner, who kept reminding me of my many deficiencies. “Your directional gestures are also too strong. And your height power is menacing this early in the trial, especially when you encroach on the neutral zone.”

Five-yard penalty, I figured.

“Did you notice the jurors crossing their arms and turning to the side as you violated their space bubble?” he asked.

“I thought it might have been the anchovies on the Caesar salad,” I said.

The psychologist crossed
his
arms, and I wondered if it was something I said. Dr. Lester Weiner was deeply tanned, excessively self-confident, and for three hundred dollars an hour could tell you whether a woman will vote for the plaintiff by examining her makeup. A few blocks from the courthouse at Miami Marina, he kept a thirty-eight-foot Bertram—the
Pleasure Principle
—docked at what he called his Freudian slip.

“Perhaps a woman lawyer could approach the rail during opening statement,” Dr. Weiner whispered, not letting it go. He was chewing on his lower lip, and his pencil had bite marks, but I refrained from asking whether he was bottle-fed as an infant. “It is easier for women to gain rapport, but a man of your size, well …”

He let it hang there, sort of telling me that I was a bull in the china shop. As if I didn’t know.

“Now it is true the women on the jury will find you attractive in, shall we say, an animalistic fashion. The way your neck threatens to burst out of your shirt collar, it’s quite provocative.”

His
burst
had a faintly lascivious ring to it.

“But stay in the shadows at first. Approach too quickly, and you might intimidate them.”

What am I, Phantom of the Courthouse?

“And the men will want to identify with you. The bald ones wish they had your shock of sandy hair …” He made a motion as if to run his hand across my head, and I leaned the other way.

“… The small ones will envy your size.” What did he mean by that, remembering that we had stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the men’s room at the midmorning recess. Now, my legs instinctively crossed.

This was getting embarrassing. I wanted to use Marvin the Maven, but my client insisted I hire “Les Is More” Weiner, a guy who couldn’t get into med school but had a booming business in hypnotic regression, sex therapy, and jury counseling.

I tried to pay attention. Percy Tucker, founder of Percy’s Perfect Poultry (“The Cluck Stops Here”) and my client, sat on one side of me, the psychologist on the other. Marvin the Maven sat directly behind us on the other side of the bar. Perched on the witness stand was icily smooth Christopher Middleton, president of Chicken Prince, Inc., the plaintiff and chief tormentor of my client.

“Your witness, counselor,” H. T. Patterson, the plaintiff’s lawyer, informed me with a confident smile that invited me to take my best shot.

“Mr. Middleton,” I began, easing out of my chair and approaching the witness stand, “you never registered the name ‘Chickee Tender,’ correct?”

“Correct, but we spent millions advertising the name. It’s nearly as well known as our Poultry Burger and our Milkshake Mucho.”

“Yes, but really these so-called tenders are nothing more than breaded chicken breast with spices, correct?”

“
Nothing more
? They are the product of years of research, consumer testing—”