Lassiter 03 - False Dawn (5 page)

Little lines formed creases at the corners of his eyes and he chuckled. He liked bantering with me. Maybe nobody ever argued with him, even politely. “The system,” he told me pleasantly, “is made to be warped. If I had not retained you, Mr. Crespo would have employed the—”

“Public defender.”

“Yes, and the representation would have been, shall we say, perfunctory?”

I nodded and grabbed a mimosa from a passing silver tray. The orange bubbles sparkled in the torchlight. “The state’s case looks open-and-shut until you get into it, and the P.D.’s office is so overworked, they might not even talk to Crespo until just before the trial.”

“Then I would say that Mr. Crespo is quite fortunate to have you as his attorney and me as his employer.” Yagamata moved closer and used his broad back to shield us from the party guests. His voice was little more than a whisper. “They tell me you are a pleasant fellow and a decent if undistinguished lawyer, but that you have problems with authority.”

Who was I to argue with the truth? I downed the sparkling drink and kept listening.

“In my country,” he continued, “the failure to adhere to a rigid structure is considered a major personal failing.” Yagamata paused and looked toward the channel just off the patio where a huge Bertram chugged along at no-wake speed, its running lights glowing in the darkness. He seemed to resent the intrusion on his personal space. “On the other hand, I have always believed life is more interesting if you have your own identity. My country cultivates faceless technicians. A man needs personality, singularity. That is why I love your country so much, Mr. Lassiter. Land of the cowboys. Rugged individuals. You understand this, I know.”

Somehow I heard a “but” coming.

He gave me a wintry smile. “But it is one thing to be an individual and another to be disloyal to those who are willing to assist you. In our lives, Mr. Lassiter, we cross paths with many people. Most will be of little use. Loyalty to them is misplaced, a waste. Others will be in a position to further careers, to look after interests. Loyalty to these people will be rewarded. Disloyalty will bring shame and dishonor, pain and ruin.”

“What happens,” I asked, “if personal loyalty conflicts with moral principles?”

“Then it would be the truest test of loyalty, would you not agree?”

I could have objected to the leading question, but I didn’t.

Before I could agree or disagree, Yagamata turned to greet two local politicians who attended every high-society bar mitzvah, communion, and bayside soiree on the public service gravy train. Yagamata didn’t turn back. He just left me standing there, my paw wrapped around a slender champagne flute. I guess it hadn’t been a question after all. It was a message. Dockworker Francisco Crespo was a damn lucky guy to have his millionaire boss paying a downtown mouthpiece to look the other way. And me, I was being paid handsomely to keep the boss’s name out of the papers and deliver Crespo into the garbage disposal we call the criminal justice system. Do the job right, there’d be others to follow. Screw it up, there’d be pain and ruin.

You and me both, Francisco. Just a couple of lucky guys.

N
ow perched on the stage, Yagamata was introducing the local celebrities, a collection of county judges, city commissioners, TV anchorfolks, business executives, even a monsignor and two men who claimed to sit on the water and sewer board. Then Yagamata announced he was giving three million dollars to preserve some Art Deco properties on South Beach. In lieu of the mayor, who was on trial for bribery and extortion, the vice mayor of Miami Beach handed him a plaque, and all the politicos applauded politely and jockeyed for position as a local TV crew taped the event. Charlie and I moseyed over to a Henry Moore sculpture that looked like a gray marble camel. It made a fine, if lumpy, picnic table. I dug into a second portion of stone crabs, dipping the white meat into a tangy mustard sauce.

“
Menippe mercenaria
,” Charlie said with genuine affection, spearing one of my claws. “Sweeter than lobster.”

“Bad for your cholesterol, Charlie,” I said, hoarding my remaining stoners.

“Don’t be a spoilsport.” When I signaled a waiter to bring me a beer instead of champagne spiked with vitamin C, Charlie pilfered another claw. I used to stalk stone crabs in the shallow coastal waters each winter. You can find them under rocks or buried in mounds of sand on the grass flats in the bay. Some folks use baited traps, but those attract the wily octopus, which eats your crab by sucking the meat from the shell, and leaves you with a bunch of tentacles to wrestle with. Others use a metal prober and a net, it being illegal to spear our eight-legged friends. Most people simply pay thirty bucks a la carte at Joe’s for a handsome tray of the claws, but I always enjoyed catching them by hand.

You don’t kill a stone crab. You grab it and rotate the body one way and the claw the other way. The claw snaps off cleanly. Toss the crab back into the water, and it will regenerate the claw. Then, next winter, do it again. Do the crabs feel pain, I wonder. And do they miss their claws?

Charlie was making slurping noises, leaving a trail of mustard in his beard. “What’s new, Jake? Still handling those chicken-shit civil cases?”

“You’re close, Charlie. Very close.”

I told him about Chicken Prince versus Percy’s Perfect Poultry, and Charlie scowled. “Arguing about the
pectoralis minor
muscle of the chicken, for goodness’ sake. Who cares? Now give me a good murder …”

Charlie went on for a while, reminiscing about a couple of cases we had worked together—the doctor caught in a web of lust and greed, the women strangled as they played computer sex-talk games—as other dignitaries took the stage to heap praise on our host. The director of a local art museum gave his thanks for Yagamata’s generous gifts, and the head of the symphony did the same.

Around us, Biscayne Bay shimmered black under a soft easterly breeze. The lights of the Collins Avenue hotels winked, and an occasional jet from M.I.A. soared overhead. It was a beautiful night filled with beautiful people doing beautiful things. As usual, I didn’t quite fit in.

“Will you look at that,” Charlie Riggs said, interrupting my reverie.

Yagamata stood alone on the stage. He had opened a red velvet box and withdrew what appeared to be a green and silver egg-shaped sculpture. At its base, two winged creatures stood with swords and shields raised high.

“Come closer, Jake,” Charlie said, moving toward the stage.

Yagamata was speaking to his guests: “As many of you know, I have given many gifts of art to museums both in Japan and in the United States.” He allowed himself a modest chuckle. “I thought you might like to see a little something I gave myself.”

The crowd tittered at the “little something.” Yagamata was showing off and enjoying it.

“I love art, and I love jewelry. So the jewelry-art of Carl Fabergé is most attractive to me. When Fabergé made imperial eggs for the family of the czar, he often enclosed a surprise.” Carefully, Yagamata lifted the lid of the egg and delicately pulled out what at first looked like a thick gold chain.

Moving closer, I saw it clearly, a miniature train, an engine, a tender, and five coaches of solid gold.

“The Trans-Siberian Railway Egg of 1900,” whispered Charlie Riggs, who knows everything worth knowing and a lot that isn’t.

“I don’t know if you can appreciate the incredible detail from where you are standing,” Yagamata said to the crowd. “One coach even has a miniature imperial chapel. There are tiny signs for ‘smokers’ and ‘ladies only.’ It is really quite special.”

Charlie made a harrumphing sound that he sometimes uses to clear his throat and his mind.

I nudged him from behind. “What do you suppose that thing cost?”

“You couldn’t buy it,” Charlie replied, testily.

“I know
I
couldn’t, but what do you suppose Yagamata spent?”

“He couldn’t buy it, either. Not if it’s the real McCoy.”

“You think it’s fake? Skim milk masquerading as cream?”

“Trust me, Jake. The original could not be bought. What I don’t understand is how anyone could afford to copy something so intricate. It would simply be too expensive to duplicate.”

Yagamata was still fondling his little gold train, and Charlie Riggs was still chewing over something I didn’t understand.

“Didn’t that magazine publisher buy a lot of those eggs?” I asked.

“Yes, Malcolm Forbes. But he bought them from private collections.”

“So, maybe Yagamata—”

“The Trans-Siberian Railway Egg is in the Armoury Museum in the Kremlin, and not in the gift shop, either. You can’t buy it, Jake, any more than you could buy Lenin’s Tomb. It belongs to the Russian Republic.”

Yagamata folded the train together. The cars fit snugly together by the minute gold hinges that connected them. He put the train back into the egg, and the egg into its red velvet box. The guests began gravitating toward the dessert table, where white-gloved waiters served chocolate eggs filled with white mousse and a raspberry for a surprise. I just love theme parties.

“Sometimes, Charlie, you make life too complicated,” I said to my old pal.

“I’m waiting,” Charlie said, “
arrectis auribus
, with ears pricked up.”

“Sometimes, things are just the way they seem.”

“Meaning what?”

I seldom get anywhere quicker than Charlie Riggs, so I wanted to prolong the moment. “If Matsuo Yagamata wanted that shiny little choo-choo train and it wasn’t for sale, what do you suppose he’d do?”

Doc Riggs eyed me suspiciously but didn’t say a word.

“He’d just take it, Charlie. He’d steal the damn thing.”

Y
ou smell anything fishy?” Marvin the Maven whispered to Saul the Tailor.

“Vad you say?” asked Saul, fingering the part in his steel gray toupee and cupping a hand around his ear.

“The smell,” Marvin repeated, tapping his nose. “You can still smell, can’t you?”

Saul the Tailor sniffed the air and nodded. “Somethin’ ain’t kosher in Denmark.”

H. T. Patterson carried a brown bag to the clerk’s table and pulled out your everyday supermarket chicken. In the pale fluorescent light of the courtroom, the dead bird was pasty white. “At this juncture, without further ado,” Patterson began, in his hypnotic singsong, “the plaintiff wishes to offer demonstrative evidence,
ipso facto
, the deboning of a deceased fowl in order to facilitate the jury’s understanding of Professor Pennywhistle’s testimony.”

Translation: A farmer with a Ph.D. was gonna cut up a dead chicken.

“Time out, Your Honor!” I was on my feet. “We’ve had no notice of this. They’re going to perform—”

“A simple demonstration,” Patterson interrupted.

“An autopsy is more like it. It serves no purpose, none at all.

Either Chicken Prince has the exclusive right to use the term ‘Chickee Tender,’ or it doesn’t. The anatomy doesn’t matter.”

“Objection overruled,” said Judge Bricklin. “Let’s see what they’ve got, but move it along, Mr. Patterson.”

The clerk, a young Cuban woman with dyed red hair and three-inch fingernails, wrinkled her nose and tied an exhibit tag—plaintiff’s number twenty-seven—around the deceased’s drumstick. The bailiff opened the door to the corridor and ushered the witness down the aisle. Professor Clyde Pennywhistle toddled to the witness stand. He was a fifty-year-old cherub, portly and round-faced with a small mouth curved in a perpetual smile. His hair was a 1950’s flattop gone gray. He wore bifocals, and his eyes were slightly crossed behind the lenses.

H. T. Patterson ran sonorously through the professor’s background, all the way from working on a pig farm as a kid to professor of poultry science at Purdue. Patterson opened a gunnysack and pulled out a stainless steel instrument that looked like an upside-down funnel. “The deboning cone,” he told the jury gravely, as if it were the Holy Grail. On cue, the professor stepped down and walked to the clerk’s table, just a few feet from the jury box. With a sharp knife and a deftness that Charlie Riggs would admire, the professor made an incision down the back, peeled the skin off, and started carving away.

“This will just take a moment,” the professor said, expertly slicing through the shoulder joint, then pulling at the wing to tear the carcass apart. Then, with small precise movements, he pared some more, removing the breast. He held up a piece of the meat. “The
pectoralis major
, often called the chicken fillet …” Next he sliced off a strip of muscle, maybe an inch wide and six inches long.

The high-ceilinged courtroom was hot and stuffy, the ancient air-conditioning wheezing just to stir the soggy air. Even without decaying flesh on the premises, the courthouse usually smelled like a locker room after three-a-day practices in August.

I thought the professor made a mistake when he moved the deboning cone and the eviscerated chicken from the clerk’s table to the rail of the jury box. Juror Number Two, a Coral Gables housewife, seemed to be leaning backward, increasing what Dr. Les Weiner would call her horizontal zone from the professor and the poultry. Number Three, a commercial fisherman, didn’t seem to mind, but Number Five, an accountant in a three-piece suit, looked a tad green around the gills.

“The tenderloin, or
pectoralis minor
, pulls the wings down when the bird tries to fly,” Professor Pennywhistle explained.

Wafting across the courtroom along with the tepid air was the unmistakable smell of rotting tissue, and some of the spectators began to leave. Behind me, Marvin the Maven was fanning himself with his straw hat: “That ain’t no spring chicken.”

“The term ‘tenderloin’ came from the pork industry,” the professor droned on, oblivious to the odor, “then was borrowed by the turkey growers, and finally was adopted by the chicken industry, but it was Chicken Prince that gave the word ‘tender’ its specific commercial meaning …”

The professor gestured with his knife, accidentally sideswiping the deboning cone, sliding it over the rail and into the jury box. What was left of the chicken dropped straight into the crotch of the queasy accountant. All except for the liver, which squirted into the lap of the Coral Gables housewife, and the gizzard and heart, which plopped with a satisfying
splat
onto the stenographer’s open-toed sandals.