by Levine, Paul
"And that rhymes with P, and that stands for 'pool,' " Kip sang out.
"Indeed," Doc Charlie Riggs said. "Ubi mel ibi apes. Where there is honey, there will be bees."
"I asked you folks over here to help me, not trash me," I said.
"I'll order a blood work-up on her," Charlie said, looking down at the sleeping Chrissy. "It may be as simple as hypoglycemia, and Granny's advice would be right. A better-balanced diet would help. But, while you're at it, get a drug screen done."
"Why?"
"No reason. No reason at all. But if you ask for my advice, follow it!"
"Okay, okay. Why is everybody on my case today?"
"Because we love you, Uncle Jake," Kip said.
"Good. I feel like a hug."
Kip came over and jumped into my arms. He was tall and gangly, and I hoisted him up so he could wrap his legs around me. "I love you, too."
Charlie harrumphed his displeasure at the display of emotion and said, "I already have the hospital records and I've talked to the doctors and nurses."
"Yeah?"
"Nothing special. They had Harry Bernhardt hooked up to an EKG. The ventricular fibrillations are clearly visible in the squiggles. Looks like a nine on the Richter scale. No doubt about the cause of death. Lethal dysrhythmia."
"Maybe we ought to have a cardiologist take a look," I said.
"Sure, if you want. I've double-checked everything in the autopsy report. Harry Bernhardt's heart was soft and flabby, four hundred five grams. Microscopically, there was some separation of myocardial fibers. His grossly fatty liver weighed three thousand one hundred twenty-five grams, suggesting excessive alcohol consumption. His blood alcohol at death was point nine. He had a four point five percent carbon monoxide hemoglobin saturation, which could be expected in a cigarette smoker."
"The son of a bitch would still be alive if he took better care of himself," I said. "He would have survived the shooting."
"Don't start whining about that again," Charlie said. "The cause of death may have been a heart attack, but the heart attack was caused by your client shooting him."
"Walk me through it."
"What?"
"Harry's last moments on earth. Would he know he's dying? Would he be conscious?"
"When the ven fibs start, the heart muscle quivers, and no blood is being pumped. He'd suffer cerebral anoxia almost immediately. Figure about ten seconds of consciousness."
"Enough to say something," I said.
"Like Mel Gibson in Braveheart, just before they chop off his head," Kip blurted out.
We all looked at him, waiting.
"Free-dom!" he shouted, loud enough that Chrissy stirred on the sofa.
"Then what?" I asked.
Charlie shrugged. "Harry's heart monitor starts ringing like a slot machine hitting jackpot. The Code Blue team gets there in a matter of seconds. They work on him. He has some agonal reflexes, maybe a few audible gasps, some limb and axial skeletal contractions, regurgitation of the gastric contents into the upper airway. They can't revive him."
"Did he say anything to the doctors or nurses?"
"Not a word. I asked them. He was just trying to breathe and dying in front of their eyes."
I was picturing the scene, Harry dead in the ICU, Chrissy on her way to jail, and me heading home, the aroma of Chrissy's perfume on my clothing.
"Why did she shoot her own father?" Kip asked innocently.
Charlie and I exchanged looks. What do you say to a kid?
"Years ago, when Chrissy was a child, about your age, her father . . ." I tried to figure out how to explain it.
"Did he rape her?" Kip asked.
As usual, he was way ahead of me.
"Yeah. She says so."
"So why did it take all these years for her to kill him?"
A kid's question. And a juror's.
"She forgot," I said, realizing how stupid it sounded.
"Forgot?"
"Actually, it's more like she pushed the memory aside so she wouldn't have to remember. Then the memory came back."
Kip looked at me skeptically. "That's your case? She forgot something that awful and then remembered years later, and that's why she killed her father?"
"A lawyer can't make up the facts, Kip. You play poker with the hand you're dealt."
"I know, Uncle Jake. Granny taught me to play. She said never to draw to an inside straight, and fold your cards when you know you're beat."
10
Slippery When Wet
The paddle fan above my bed was making its endless circles with a sleepy whompeta-whompeta. Outside, a mockingbird sang its lonely song in the chinaberry tree, calling for a mate. The TV in Kip's room was turned low, but I could still hear its metallic drone. I was sitting up in bed, rereading a Travis McGee novel, envying the life of that "big brown loose-jointed boat bum." No matter how tight a jam he was in, he could think and fight his way out. Me, I'm just a second-string jock turned night-school lawyer who tries to do the right thing but usually ends up leading with his chin.
I got out of bed and walked to the head of the stairs. The door to Kip's room was closed, so I didn't bother him. He'd fall sleep when he was ready, and if he wanted to watch TV all night, let him. After a couple of days, he'd be so tired that he'd adjust his schedule without any help from me. I belong to the hands-off school of child rearing, because that was how Granny raised me after my mother ran off and my father was killed.
"We are each the sport of all that goes before us," Clarence Darrow once said. That's an argument a lawyer makes when trying to spare the life of a ruthless killer who had a lousy childhood, but it applies to more mundane matters, too. We unconsciously pick up the habits and attitudes, likes and dislikes, biases and tolerances of those who raise us. Maybe I missed out on some things, but Granny taught me never to pick on anyone weaker and to help those who deserve it. She taught me to have a healthy disrespect for authority and to make my own path through the woods. She would have been just as happy if I'd been a shrimper like my father, or a trucker, bartender, or fishing guide, like the men who passed the time with her over the years. Ever since my teenage years, I've tried to follow her credo of going through life doing the least damage possible.
Wearing my red-plaid boxer shorts, I padded barefoot down the stairs. Chrissy was still asleep on the sofa, purring softly into a pillow. Her face was in such peaceful repose, she was almost childlike in her beauty and innocence. I stared at her a moment and felt a stirring, then a pang of guilt at being a voyeuristic satyr.
I walked into the kitchen and pulled a piece of Granny's peanut butter pie from the fridge. The first bite was melting in my mouth when it hit me. Granny. I hadn't heard her leave. Or Charlie.
They weren't upstairs. They weren't downstairs. Where were they? My house is a compact two-story box with a backyard overgrown with junglelike trees and vines.
The yard.
I looked out through the jalousie windows. The yard was illuminated by an eerie glow from my neighbor's sodium-vapor anticrime lights. There, in the hammock slung between a live oak and a poinciana tree, was my mentor. And my granny. All curled up on this warm, humid night scented with jasmine, sleeping soundly, arms wrapped around each other. Crazy kids.
I finished my pie with a glass of cold milk and headed back up the stairs. The TV still hummed in Kip's room, and as I passed the door, I heard his voice.
Then another voice. And a giggle.
What the hell?
I tapped gently on the door and opened it.
Kip was in bed, a pillow propped behind him. Jim Carrey was on the tube, trying to rescue Dan Marino from an insane cross-gender kidnapper. Frankly, Dan's a better quarterback than actor.
Someone else was in bed, too, also propped up on a pillow.
"All righty then!" Kip said. "Uncle Jake, this is Tanya."
"Hello, Tanya," I said to the girl, because it's more polite than saying, What are you doing in my nephew's bed, harlot?
"Tanya lives across the street," Kip said.
Of course. "Tanya! You're Phoebe's daughter."
"Hello, Mr. Lassiter," she said sweetly. She was a dark-haired, petite girl of about twelve. The last time I noticed, she'd been maybe six years old, riding a bike with training wheels. Now she wore cutoff jeans and a T-shirt that blossomed with her budding womanhood. Oh, Lord.
"How's your mom?" I asked.
"Great," Tanya said.
"Does she know you're here? This late, I mean." I didn't like the sound of my own voice, old and uptight.
"Sure. She's spending the weekend doing the smokehouse and fire-walking shtick at the Miccosukee village, so I'm sort of on my own."
"I see," I said, my voice filled with disapproval. I had already concluded that Phoebe's mothering didn't measure up.
"Mom's into a lot of neat stuff," Tanya said. "She has her own shaman who teaches naturopathy, herbalism, psychic healing."
No wonder she didn't have time to trim the hedge.
"I asked Tanya to sleep over," Kip said.
"Uh-huh," I said, as if this were as natural as mosquitoes following a rain.
"But if there's a problem," Kip said, "we could stay at her place."
"No!" I responded, a little too quickly, the volume a little too high. "Tanya can stay here. Of course, we don't actually have another bedroom."
They both giggled, and I knew I was the object of adolescent ridicule. I considered having her mother arrested for conduct unbecoming a parent. I remembered Phoebe had a tattoo on her shoulder and wondered if Tanya did, too, and whether Kip would see it before the night was out.
Now I was getting angry at myself. Just when had I become so judgmental? All this time, I'd thought I was such a hip surrogate dad, and it turned out I was really Ward Cleaver.
"It's okay, Mr. Lassiter," Tanya said. "I brought my sleeping bag." She gestured toward the corner of the room, where indeed a sleeping bag was stretched across the carpet between piles of videotapes and Sega game cartridges.
"I see," I said for the second time, because I was utterly speechless.
"Hey, Uncle Jake, you're not going to get all freaky on us, are you?" Kip said.
"No. Why? I mean, of course not."
" 'Cause just now you seem like a major goober."
Tanya's voice managed to be both soothing and mature. "Kip and I just hang out. We're not, you know . . ."
I looked at my nephew, trying to remember what I'd been like when I was twelve. I seem to recall thinking a lot about girls but never doing anything icky like kissing them.
"All right," I said. "But don't stay up too late, and . . ."
And what?
"And don't forget to brush your teeth."
That set them to giggling again.
I left the room, closing the door behind me, feeling like a major goober indeed. Back in bed, I got back to my book, following Travis across the Gulf Stream toward Bimini, chasing a very bad character named Junior Allen. I remembered my own trip across the stream, where I'd followed a beautiful but lethal board-sailor named Lila Summers.
I was feeling sad and alone when there was a soft knock at my bedroom door. If Kip was going to ask permission to share a sleeping bag, the answer was a firm—
"Jake," came the woman's voice from the other side of the door, "are you awake?"
Chrissy and I sat on my bed, not unlike the twelve-year-olds across the hall. Except, if Kip was thinking what I was thinking, I was going to ground him for the next dozen years.
Chrissy arched her long neck and exhaled a puff of cigarette smoke toward the overhead paddle fan. I would try to get her to quit. Orders from her boy scout lawyer: no more shooting, no more smoking.
We sat there, side by side, talking. She told me everything she liked. Stone crabs and hash browns, Paris in the rain, snorkeling over tropical reefs. Yeah, and walks on the beach with somebody she cared about. We talked about plays and movies and even football. She had a decent understanding of the game and thought Troy Aikman was cute. I always thought quarterbacks were pampered, overpaid sissies, the rock stars of the business, but at least Aikman could take a hit.
We played a word association game we made up as we went along, and we laughed at each other's jokes. We talked about those who had sailed through our lives and examined each other's psychic scars.
I was quiet a moment, and she just looked at me.
"What?" I asked.
"No man has ever cared for me."
It was such an outrageous statement that I laughed. Her look told me she was serious.
"That's hard to believe," I said. "Impossible, in fact."
"Oh, men have bought me things, taken me places. They've used me, and I've used them. But they never cared for me."
She let the line dangle there. I circled it but didn't bite.
"You do, though—don't you, Jake?"
"I do," I said.
"So you don't have to pretend that this is just another case."
"I won't. I can't."
"Then talk to me. Tell me what you're feeling."
"That's not easy for me. Never has been."
"All right. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of. . ."
Court of what? She didn't say. Law? Last resort? Love?
"Tell me how you feel," she ordered.
How do you wrap words around feelings? I didn't know.
"It's complicated," I said. "I have a duty to you. You're relying on me, not as a man, but as a—"
"Knight in shining armor."
I shook my head. "No, as a lawyer."
She ground out her cigarette in a Super Bowl commemorative plate on the nightstand. "Aren't you going to rescue me?"
"I want to. Believe me, I want . . ."
Outside, the mockingbird was at it again, and in the distance, a police siren wailed. "What do you want, Jake?"
"I want to wrap my arms around you and carry you off somewhere. Someplace safe where no one can hurt you."
"Ah, you are my knight."
"No. The armor's rusted, the knees are creaky, and my steed has thrown a shoe. Besides that, I've always been a step too slow."
She leaned over and kissed me. Smoky and sweet. "Not for me," she said.
Softly, tentatively, she kissed me again. Waiting for me to kiss her back. But I didn't. I stalled.
"It's important that we maintain some distance," I said. "At least until the case is over."
"You mean geographical distance?" She scooted closer on the bed, gave me a playful smile, and ran a hand through my hair. "Or emotional distance?"
"Both. I find the two are usually related."
"Oh, I don't know. I've been physically close to lots of men. But not emotionally close."
"Everyone's done that," I said. "But it's so meaningless. So . . ."
"Empty."
"Exactly."
"You don't want to get involved with me, do you?" she asked.
"It's not that I don't want to. I can't."
"What are you afraid of?"
"You. Me. I've been down this road before."
"Would it be unethical?"
"Technically, yeah. The Bar passed a rule that prohibits lawyers from sleeping with their clients."
"Really?"
"Unless they were involved before the case. Then the lawyer's grandfathered in."
"Nice choice of words," she said.
"But that's not the point. I didn't learn my ethics from a book. I just try to do what's right. And if we're involved, it'll cloud my judgment."
"And we wouldn't want that," she said, wriggling close enough that we were breathing the same oxygen.
"Chrissy, I'm serious."
"So am I." She stripped the T-shirt off over her head, and then the shorts that covered her bikini bottom, and then the bottom, too. She stood and stretched, and though there was something practiced in it, back arched, breasts thrust forward, a pose she may have struck a thousand times, it was
also so completely natural and innocent as to be even more provocative. Which, of course, was exactly what she intended. Some beautiful women may be unaware of their effect on men. Others, particularly those whose living depends on their looks and the moods they can create, know precisely the effect of every tilt of the head, every turn of the hip, every shadowy smile. There is neither pride nor shame in their display of naked flesh. It is just a fact, and in the perfection of details, the symmetry of features, the combination of physical strength and robust health that emanates from such a creature, there is always the knowledge that it will fade. Next year's model will soon replace it, so if you possess such beauty, the time to use it is now.
Chrissy turned toward the door, giving me a view of her tapered back, the slope of her ass. She flicked the light switch, then whirled and came back to the bed, moving gracefully, silhouetted in the darkness, a lithe, willowy sexual animal totally aware of her powers. She sat down, tucked her legs under her, and leaned toward me, her breasts pressed against my chest.
I'm sure some man exists somewhere on this planet who could have resisted. But Pope John Paul II wasn't in bed with Chrissy Bernhardt. That poor excuse for a chivalrous knight, Jake Lassiter, was there, all six feet two, 223 pounds of him, blood pumping, imagination soaring. I needed a stern warning. Caution, libido loose. Dangerous curves. Slippery when wet.
She tilted her head and kissed me again. This time, I kissed back. Slowly, then deeply. I cradled her head in my hands, and we kissed some more, our tongues fencing; then she dug her teeth into my lower lip.
I wanted to save her and savor her, taste her and devour her. I wanted a thousand things, and all of them now. A yearning moan rose from her, and we clutched at each other, hands roaming.
She reached down and pulled off my boxers, which I kicked across the room. She let a hand run down over my chest to my stomach, to my crotch. I was so hard it hurt.
We kissed some more, hungrily, biting each other's lips, sucking, searching, finding. Our hands explored each other, stroking and grasping. I cupped a hand around a firm round breast and took a nipple between forefinger and thumb.
"Harder, Jake. It won't break."
I squeezed, and she gasped, and I took the nipple into my mouth like a ripe red cherry. My hand swept down across her flat stomach and found the wet heat of her. As I touched her, she gasped, then grabbed me by the back of the neck and put her lips to my ear. "Love me, Jake. Love me, please." Her voice heavy with yearning and sadness and a crushing physical need. The sounds reverberating like a bass chord deep inside me. I wanted to cover her with my shield, to protect her from harm, to carry her away to a place where no one could hurt her again.
