by Paul Levine
I wouldn’t repeat that to Barrios. The argument with Pamela gave me two motives for murder. If Pamela was the thief: rage. If I was thief: avoiding detection. Heads, I’m guilty. Tails, I’m screwed and tattooed. I’d already said too much and felt as tense as a man juggling hand grenades.
“I’m gonna exercise my right to remain silent from here on out.” I looked toward the Intracoastal, where a shiny white sport fisherman in the 50-foot range was heading toward open water. I wanted to be on board.
Barrios stayed quiet. I hadn’t asked for a lawyer, so there was no legal requirement to stop pestering me. We sat, feeling the breeze and the listening to the caw of sea birds.
“Jake, let’s try again,” Barrios said, after a moment. “Back in the suite, you were arguing and—”
”Forget it, George. I’m done. Either arrest me or let me go home.” I stood and he didn’t tell me to sit back down. “And in case you don’t know it, you were wrong about something. I didn’t have sex with Pam yesterday.”
For the first time, Barrios looked confused. What the hell had I hit on?
“You’re sure?”
“Sex with Pam was pretty damn memorable, so yeah George, I’m sure.”
“Are you a jealous man, Jake?”
“No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“Maybe I’ve been wrong about motive.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“When’s the last time you had sex with Ms. Baylins?”
It was suddenly clear. The Medical Examiner had already performed a preliminary physical examination. I said, “You thought we had sex because the M.E. found semen in her vagina, didn’t he?”
“He thinks so. It has to be tested in the lab.”
“Well, it isn’t mine.”
“Okay, let’s assume that’s true.”
“Isn’t it obvious then?” I said, excitedly. “You’ve got a rapist murderer!”
“Nothing disturbed in the room. No forced entry. No bruising or abrasions or defensive wounds. No evidence of any struggle. No signs of trauma on the victim, other than the strangulation itself. Almost certainly, it was consensual sex.”
“Who with!”
“Obviously, I assumed it was you,” Barrios said. “But if it wasn’t, and if you found out she was having sex with someone else…”
“What?”
“With that temper of yours, well, that could be your motive for murder.”
5
My Bentley and Me
Well, didn’t I feel like a damn fool? I’d been monogamous with Pamela. I had expected the same in return. There’d been this growing wellspring of care within me for her, and I’d expected that, too, in return. She had indicated it was there. Obviously, I’d been deceived about that as well as about the thievery. The anger spread like a fever across my chest.
We’d been planning more trips together, more time together. The word “love” had been bandied about. I’d even thought about asking her to move in. Now, the damn clinical term “semen in her vagina” was a blade straight to the heart. Did Pamela have sex with someone yesterday before meeting me at the hotel? What kind of woman does that? What kind of man is taken in by that? Wasn’t it bad enough being a suspected murderer? Did I have to be a fall guy and a schmuck rolled into one? I fought to contain my rage, like water behind a dam.
I had to get the hell out of there.
I gave a hundred bucks to the Fontainebleau valet – one night’s ransom plus tip for my metallic red Bentley Continental convertible – and sailed across the Tuttle Causeway to the mainland. Like a lot in my life the last 18 months, the car was Pam’s idea.
“You can’t project success driving that old clunker.”
“My Eldo’s a classic. I’ll never give it up.”
But now, my beloved 1984 Biarritz Eldorado with its pimpmobile red velvet pillowed upholstery sat under a tarp in my driveway. The car had belonged to Strings Hendricks, a Key West piano tuner and marijuana dealer, and I’d taken it as a fee many years ago.
Now, my butt was settled into the black quilted cowhide of the Bentley, just as Pam had intended. She’d found the car at an estate sale the bank was handling.
“It’s dirt cheap Jake, $187,500.”
“In my world, that buys a lot of dirt.”
“But you’ll look so good driving it.”
At the time, I wondered if Pam meant she’d look good riding in it, but I let her talk me into it. I wasn’t spending a small fortune on a car, I was marketing myself, she argued. The bank funded the purchase, the loan folding into my law office’s line of credit, so I never really noticed the payments. Pam had that way about her, smoothing over the troublesome transactions of life. Lately, I’d felt like an imposter driving the car.
Jake Lassiter, Bentley owner? If my old teammates could see me now, they’d laugh their fat asses off.
Now, top down, buzzing across the Causeway, high above the turquoise waters of Biscayne Bay, I realized I hadn’t let myself begin to grieve. When the cops had turned the spotlight on me, I wondered how I appeared to them. Playing back the interrogation in my head, I feared I seemed self-centered and defensive. In reality, I’d been numbed. But I must have looked unmoved by the inert body on the floor.
It had been surreal. Was that really Pamela, the life squeezed out of her? She had been a vibrant, electric presence, bouncing on her toes when she walked, her eyes sparkling when she laughed. A strong, confident woman, she loved wearing sleeveless tops, always showing the smooth slope of her neck and her toned delts. She danced barefoot, drank tequila straight, and slept in the nude. She teared up when Diana Krall sang songs of heartbreak, and she could discuss macroeconomic policies of the International Monetary Fund. In short, she was a total package of a woman, and for a short time, she seemed to enjoy nothing so much as wrapping her long, tanned legs around my hips and squeezing every ounce of pleasure out of me. In return, she offered a myriad of pleasures, and I took them all.
And then what?
Had she become a thief? And a cheating girlfriend, too?
Why?
The Bentley effortlessly climbed the peak of the bridge, and I could see the tiny islands in the bay to the north. It’s amazing that some politically-connected developers haven’t figured a way to dredge and fill the place, and build high-rise condos on those specks of sand and weeds. Thirty years ago, the artist Christo wrapped the islands in pink polymer sheets. The artsy-fartsy crowd cooed about how the project illuminated the existential link between land and water. I thought it looked like a Halloween prank, someone pouring Pepto Bismol into Biscayne Bay.
Top down, I was cruising at 75 shooting down the slope of the bridge, headed for the mainland. What’s the worst that could happen? A speeding ticket would have been the high point of the day.
When I took the southbound exit onto I-95, I called Barry Samchick, my accountant, giving him the shorthand version of the shitstorm that was raining on my head. I told him to get all the trust account records together for a meeting, and he reminded me it was Sunday morning. Had it only been 17 hours since Pamela and I had checked into the Fontainebleau? I told him it couldn’t wait, and he said he’d get everything together by noon.
“I don’t think you’re a thief, Jake.”
“Thanks, Barry.”
“But murder? That I can see you doing.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You have a temper.”
“The hell I do!”
I hung up on him and tried reaching Doc Charlie Riggs, the retired Medical Examiner. Charlie took a liking to me in my early days in the practice. Or maybe he just felt sorry for me. Usually, he treated defense lawyers with disdain. M.E.’s are government employees with front row seats to the cruelties of mankind. Many are in the prosecutors’ pockets. But Doc Riggs was fair and honest and acknowledged that cops and prosecutors and medical examiners made mistakes.
Doc Riggs also helped me find my moral compass, which was rarely pointed due
north. Ten years ago, when I confided in him that I was seeing Emilia Vazquez at the same time we had a case against each other, he offered a stern warning not found in the law books: “You can’t litigate by day and copulate by night, my boy. At least not with the prosecutor.”
Now, I needed Doc Riggs for something more attuned to his expertise: analyzing the forthcoming autopsy report on Pamela Baylins.
Voicemail told me that Doc Riggs was bonefishing in the Keys and wouldn’t turn on his phone until he’d landed a few of the wily critters. As Charlie was a better canoe maker – as we called guys who excavated human torsos – than a fisherman, I didn’t expect to hear from him until tomorrow. Feeling alone, I missed and needed the old coot.
I headed through downtown Miami, past quiet skyscrapers where the city’s lawyers and bankers plied their mysterious but lucrative trades. Condo towers, too. Some were still lightly occupied from the overbuilding that preceded the Big Dipper of a real estate recession, but savvy investors had bought blocks of the empty apartments and rented them out, awaiting the revival in prices that was now underway.
I had to make another call. It was time to lawyer up. Actually, the time should have been when Detective Barrios started asking questions. But no, good ole Jake Lassiter had to show how smart and tough he was. After all, I’m the guy who, while playing college ball, ran full speed into a goalpost. I shattered my face mask and knocked the post out of kilter so that the crossbar dipped like a power line strung with overfed owls.
By the time I hit South Dixie Highway, I was trying to figure out what lawyer to call. It’s the single most important decision for anyone suspected of a crime. I would not be an easy client, and all the bigshot mouthpieces in town would know it. Lawyer defendants are meddlesome, always trying to manage their own cases. An honest self-appraisal would peg me as worse than most.
I considered waiting for an indictment, then picking a lawyer based on which trial judge caught the case. It’s no secret that judges play favorites. Sometimes, it’s smart to hire a lawyer who was a Sigma Chi brother of the judge back in their gator-chomping University of Florida days.
But I didn’t think I could wait. I needed someone I could trust now. Someone smart and strong who wouldn’t tell me what I wanted to hear. A half dozen names popped into my head. While I was still thinking about it, my cell rang.
Juan Martinez calling. He owned Havana Banana, the restaurant situated directly below my second floor “penthouse” office in a broken-down building on South Beach.
“Cops!” Martinez shouted. “Cops broke down your door.”
Shit. If they’d have asked, I would have let them in. But Barrios must have gotten a Sunday morning search warrant and sent the storm troopers there before I could get to the office.
“Door’s split in two,” Martinez said.
“What’d they take?”
“How should I know? I was stirring a pot of ropa vieja. But Lourdes said she saw them carrying out a computer and boxes of files.”
I thanked him, and he told me he’d like my monthly restaurant tab paid first thing in the morning, especially the liquor bill. Apparently, he thought I might be going away for a long while.
Ten minutes later, I was hanging the right hand turn from Douglas Road onto Kumquat in the South Grove. Which is when I heard the insistent beep-beep-beep of a car horn behind me. I slowed, checked the rear-view, saw a black Dodge Ram pick-up with a dark tinted windshield easing up on me. What’d this guy want?
The pick-up accelerated and slammed into the rear of my snazzy English convertible. My head whiplashed, and my vision turned into a black night with a starlit sky.
What the hell!
Eyes blurry, I hit the brakes and jammed the Bentley into Park. Unbuckled. Painfully turned and opened the door. My neck felt rigid, frozen in cement. Stepping out, I saw the driver of the Hummer approaching. Big guy with a crew cut. Bigger than me, and I’m an ex-linebacker. He was in his thirties. Jeans, boots, muscle-T, the tattoo of a red and green serpent coiled around his right arm.
He didn’t look like he played for the Marlins. So, why the hell was he carrying a baseball bat?
6
Batting Practice
The bat was black with a thin, whippy handle. The guy was white and thick through the chest. My taillight cover was big and red and shaped like a parallelogram, roughly the size of home plate. The guy’s first swing shattered it into a hundred pieces of plastic.
His second swing dented the trunk. Ka-thunk!
I stood there, gaping. Had I done something to inspire road rage?
“Hey! The hell’d I do to you?”
“You don’t know?”
He took three steps toward me, twirling the bat. I backed up, staying just out of range.
“All I know, a maniac is trashing my wheels.”
“Rich dipshit Bentley.”
“I love this car,” I lied.
“Rich dipshit,” he repeated.
“I’m not rich. Not Miami rich, anyway. The car is just for marketing.”
He took a short, low swing and smacked the spokes of the right rear wheel, which pinged in protest. Two more swings pretzeled them. “Market that, asshole.”
“Why you doing this?”
“I loved Pam!”
It took a second. “Crowder? You’re Mike Crowder, Pam’s ex.”
“Mitch Crowder, asshole!”
“I’m sorry about Pam. I’m gonna do everything I can to find who killed her.”
“Won’t have to look far, will you, asshole?” He used an overhead tomahawk swing to crush the trunk.
“You got that wrong, Crowder. I would never have hurt her.”
He drew the bat back and approached me. I was two blocks from my house. I could turn and run, but I usually run into trouble, not away from it. And there was a chance the guy was faster than me and would split open the back of my skull as I skedaddled.
“Pam tell you about me?” he demanded.
“Told me she got a restraining order.”
“Legal bullshit.”
“You stalked her. You called her a hundred times a day.”
“And you killed her!”
“Who told you that?”
“I own the Iron Asylum, best gym on South Beach. Cops get free memberships. They talk.”
“Maybe they ought to haul your ass in for questioning.”
“Cops already talked to me, asshole. I got an alibi.”
“Want to run it by me?”
“Screw you. She was my soulmate!”
“No disrespect, Crowder, but Pam’s soulmate probably isn’t wiping sweat off Nautilus machines.”
“Bastard!”
He came at me, cocking the bat. I fought the urge to move backwards and stepped toward him. His backswing was long and looping and gave me a chance to duck low. The bat whistled over my head, and I dug a short right into his gut. He whoomphed but didn’t drop the bat. He swung again, backhanded this time, the barrel of the bat clipping the meat of my shoulder. I grimaced and stomped on the instep of his right foot. His head jerked forward, and I hit him with a right uppercut that caught him squarely in the Adam’s apple. He gagged and squawked and fell to all fours, dropping the bat.
I twined the fingers of each hand together, making a double fisted hammer and thought about smashing the back of his neck, but I didn’t. No killer instinct, no desire to inflict more pain.
“I didn’t kill Pam,” I said.
He was too busy choking to reply.
I picked up the bat and tossed it into my car. Not so much to keep it away from him, but rather, to have his prints taken from it. Maybe DNA, too. When defending a murder trial, one traditional defense is SODDI. Some Other Dude Did It.
It’s a helluva lot better if you can say just who that dude might be.
7
Lard Butt at Home
“Did you kill that girl?” Granny demanded.
“‘Course not.”
“If you did kill her, I
expect you had a good reason.”
“I didn’t!”
“You can tell me the truth. I’d never turn against you in court.”
“Heartwarming to know you’d commit perjury for me.”
“What’s family for, anywho?”
Ten minutes after I left Mitch Crowder gasping for breath, Granny Lassiter was fixing me breakfast of pecan pancakes, cheese biscuits, ham with red eye gravy rich with black coffee. In my short tenure with the Dolphins, Coach Shula used to call me “lard butt,” and there was more truth to it than he knew. Granny couldn’t make a pie crust without lard or red eye gravy without ham drippings.
I checked the front window a couple times. No Crowder. No cops. No nosy reporters for the Miami Herald, which probably couldn’t afford overtime for a Sunday morning stake-out.
“Ah never liked that girl.” Granny’s Cracker accent was as thick as the gravy she stirred with a wooden spoon. “A bottle blond with plastic boobs.”
“Boobs were real.”
“How would you know?”
“Practice, Granny. Practice.”
Granny harrumphed her displeasure. “Filthy money!” She tossed a handful of pecans onto the pancakes, which had started bubbling in the pan. “Money, money, money.”
“What are you talking about?”
“All the bottle blond knew was money.”
“She was a banker, Granny.”
“You ask me, she was mixed up in no good.”
“Jeez, Granny. What ever happened to not speaking ill of the dead?”
We were in the kitchen of my coral rock bungalow in Coconut Grove. Granny had moved in a few years ago, leaving her place in Islamorada to help me raise my nephew Kip after my drug-addled half-sister abandoned him. It was an encore performance for the old gal. After my father was killed in a Key Largo saloon and my mother ran off, Granny raised me, too. Her real name was Dorothea Jane Lassiter. She was most likely my great aunt, but the Lassiter clan wasn’t inscribed in the Social Register, so blood lines were often a matter of conjecture and drunken debate.
