Mortal Sin jl-4

by Paul Levine

  “Hey, you’re the guy who taught me not to accept things at face value. ‘Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream.’ That was you talking, Charlie. And how about this little ditty, ‘Seek the truth,’ or however the hell you say it.”

  “Quaere verum,” he instructed me. “And you’re the lad who told me that isn’t the lawyer’s job.”

  “It isn’t,” I said. “My job’s to take the facts handed to me and present the best case I can. I’m not supposed to dig for stuff that’ll hurt my client.”

  “Like in Philip Corrigan’s grave.”

  “Thanks for reminding me. Can you believe that’s coming back to haunt me now?” I mimicked Wilbert Faircloth’s weasel voice: “‘Would grave robbery be ethical to you, Dr. Riggs?’ Jeez, Charlie, I’m in for a public reprimand, maybe even a six-month suspension.”

  “Precisely my point. Why go looking for trouble now?”

  “Why should now be different? Look, Charlie, I never liked Nicky Florio, and I never trusted him.”

  Charlie Riggs harrumphed and rearranged his bulky body in his chair. “You never liked him because he married Star Hampton.” He paused, and a light flickered in his deep brown eyes. “Jake, you’re not seeing her again, are you?”

  “Her name’s Gina now.”

  “Your answer was not responsive, Counselor. Haven’t you got enough trouble with the Bar as it is? Talk about conflicts of interest.” Charlie stared toward the ocean, screwing his face into thought. The clouds from the west were nearly overhead now, and the temperature was beginning to drop. Intermittent gusts tugged at the cafe’s umbrellas. “I never thought that girl was for you. She combines dependency on a man with an ability to manipulate him. She’s a user, Jake. I know the effect she had on you, and I only hope it’s over. You’ve got this flaw, you know…”

  “Only one?”

  “Where women are concerned, you’re attracted to the birds with the broken wings. You want to mend them, make them whole. But Star, or Gina, or whoever, is a predator, a hawk, not a hummingbird. Let the Nicky Florios of the world deal with her kind.”

  I always listen to Charlie, but sometimes I don’t follow his advice. This time, I kept quiet.

  Charlie leaned back in his chair and eyeballed me from under his canvas hat. “You can’t represent Nicky if you’re seeing his wife. You understand that, don’t you?”

  I stayed buttoned up. The Fifth Amendment was always dear to me.

  “Are you listening, Jake? A meretricious relationship affects your judgment. You should be planning Nicky’s defenses, and instead you sit here implying that maybe this accident was really…”

  “Say it, Charlie. That Peter Tupton was aced, offed, zapped, rubbed out.”

  I had raised my voice without knowing it, and Charlie’s bushy eyebrows were arched as he appraised me. “You’ve been under a lot of stress, Jake. Maybe you should let one of your partners handle the suit, take some time off. From what you tell me, there’s no indication of a homicide.”

  I signaled the waiter for another beer. “Motive, Charlie. It’s what you taught me to focus on. Tupton could cause Nicky a lot of trouble, cost him a lot of money and time fighting lawsuits instead of building his plug-ugly condos. Nicky invites the guy to a party, tries to soften him up, but it doesn’t work…”

  Charlie scowled and harrumphed in disbelief. “So he gets Tupton drunk and drops him in a chilly room. Really, Jake, if you’re going to the trouble to kill someone, you’d use a method that’d be sure to be lethal, and you probably wouldn’t do it in your home.”

  Just then, Charlie’s beeper went off. He extracted it from his belt and squinted at the digital readout. “State attorney’s number.” Charlie balled up his napkin, stood, and headed inside the restaurant, looking for a pay phone.

  While I waited, I mulled it over. The old sawbones was right. If Nicky wanted to kill Tupton, he wouldn’t do it himself, and he wouldn’t use a method that might just give the guy a cold. In this town, there are semi-pros who’ll ace somebody for a new outboard motor or a three-day pass to Disney World. And Florio could afford the best. But then, if everyone who committed a crime was so smart, nobody would ever be caught.

  I was still thinking about it when Charlie toddled back to the table, his brow furrowed, one hand absentmindedly stroking a cork attached to his fishing vest by a 3/0 hook. “Abe Socolow,” he announced, gravely, “asked if I’d take an appointment to assist the M.E. in a suspected homicide.”

  “So?”

  “I told him I have a potential conflict of interest.”

  Charlie hadn’t told me, but I knew. The state attorney was looking into the death of one Peter Tupton, a guy who didn’t fall out of a wheel well of a jet but still froze to death in Miami.

  “Where’s your conflict?” I asked. “I haven’t retained you as an expert.”

  “The conflict is that I’m your friend, but if you don’t have a problem with it, neither does Abe.”

  “Why does he want you?”

  “Metro Crime Scene tried to lift prints off the corpse with the plate-glass method. See if somebody carried Tupton into the wine cellar. They came up with something on the wrists, but they’re not good enough to match up, though they seem to exclude the paramedics. Socolow wants me to oversee a methyl-methacrylate test.”

  Charlie was too modest to say it, but he’s the old coot who invented it. Getting latent prints from the body of a corpse was tricky stuff. Moisture, the breakdown of tissues, and the surface of the skin itself were major problems. Sometimes, prints would show up by rolling a piece of glass across the body, but usually it didn’t work. Charlie came up with the Super Glue method. Convert the glue into fumes and tent the body. The sticky stuff settles on the skin, and voila! if someone manhandled the body, prints appear in the glue as the fumes condense on the skin.

  “I don’t mind, Charlie. Take the job.”

  “I don’t need the money,” he said.

  “C’mon, take it. I’d rather have you on the other side than some yahoo who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Remember, I’m supposed to be seeking the truth.”

  “No, you’re not, Jake. You’re supposed to be representing Nicky Florio.”

  Chapter 4

  Playing Footsie

  “Just what is your net worth, Mr. Florio.” H.T. Patterson asked.

  “Objection,” I called out, slapping the table with a palm. “The defendant’s financial resources are irrelevant.”

  “Irrelevant!” Patterson boomed, as if there were a judge and jury to appreciate his righteous indignation. “Dare you say irrelevant?”

  “I dare. And while I’m at it, I dare say immaterial, inadmissible, and just plain none of your business.”

  Patterson feigned outrage and turned to the court reporter. “Has the stenographer recorded every word of this obloquial colloquy? When we bring this before the Court, I shall seek sanctions.”

  The reporter, a heavyset young woman, nodded silently. Patterson was decked out in a white linen three-piece suit, which was set off nicely by his cocoa-colored skin. He was short and trim, a native of the Bahamas and a former fundamentalist preacher at the Liberty City Baptist Church. After law school, he continued his Holy Rolling, only in the courtroom.

  Five of us sat around the conference table in Patterson’s law office-Nicky and Gina Florio, the court reporter, Patterson, and a big lug who used to wear number 58 in the aqua and orange and was now squeezed into an off-the-rack, 46-long seersucker suit.

  Before we started the deposition, I sat in H.T. Patterson’s office as he slid a videotape into a VCR. The television screen flickered to life, a helicopter shot of the Miami skyline. Then the music came up, a strident beat stolen from Miami Vice. Finally, two men appeared on the screen, a beaming interviewer and a super-serious Peter Tupton. They sat in straight-backed chairs on a carpeted riser. Between them was a coffee table on which sat an artificial rhododendron, and behind them a logo, QUE PASA, MIAMI? One of those S
unday morning public-affairs shows you watch when the hangover is so bad you can’t bend over to pick up the remote control.

  The tape was marked Plaintiff’s Exhibit Seven, and Patterson intended to introduce it at the trial. Under the rules of discovery, I could see it first.

  “What’s the relevance of this?” I asked, as the interviewer was telling us Tupton’s background.

  “Two weeks before his tragic death, Peter Tupton gave this interview. I hanks to the wonders of modern technology, we can show the jury that this was a man. Yea, more than a man, a towering figure of vision, courage, and honor.”

  “I’d like to listen to your client before you canonize him,” I said.

  I watched for a few minutes. The towering figure appeared to be a short, overweight man in his late thirties with receding pale hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and thin, grim lips. He wore a safari jacket over a blue chambray shirt. The pants were khaki, and when he crossed his legs, I could see one hiking boot stained with mud. I quickly learned that Tupton had studied petroleum engineering at a university out West, that his first job had been with an oil company, and after an explosion and fire on an offshore rig, he had been so shocked by the ecological destruction that he had quit. Tupton didn’t say anything about the men who had been killed, but the loss of fish and birds really seemed to frost his buns. He went back to school, picked up a master’s degree, and became involved in environmental protection, first with the government, later with the Everglades Society.

  The interviewer asked about the history of the Everglades, and Tupton used its Indian name, Pa-hay-okee, grassy water, a reference to the tooth-edged saw grass in the shallow, vast stream. He talked about the diversity of the Glades, the shallow sloughs and gator holes, shell-filled beaches and tangled mangroves. He decried development, claiming it had caused the drought, turning parts of the Glades into a prairie. He talked about the ecosystems, pine rock-lands, mangrove swamps, hardwood hammocks, bay heads, and cypress heads. He bemoaned the sugarcane fields, sucking up nutrients from the saw-grass peat that accumulated over thousands of years. He criticized the man-made irrigation channels that artificially restrict the natural cycle of dry winters and flooded summers.

  On the screen, a file videotape showed a variety of animals in their natural habitat, and Tupton gave a voice-over narration in a calm, measured voice. He described the endangered species in the Glades, and we looked at crocodiles and turtles, manatees and panthers, a bald eagle, a wood stork, a pair of snail kites, and a peregrine falcon.

  “We must keep ever vigilant,” Peter Tupton said. He radiated sincerity, seriousness of purpose. “When there are threats to the environment, we must respond with protests, lawsuits, political pressure, every tool at our disposal.”

  The interviewer asked, “Aren’t people much more aware of the environment these days?”

  Tupton nodded. “Twenty-five years ago, some so-called regional planners proposed building a huge jetport in the Big Cypress Swamp smack in the Glades. They publicly announced that entire cities would be built around the jetport, as if that was something to be proud of. Before anyone knew what was going on, they dredged and even built a trial runway. That’s how close it came before the public rose up and shut it all down. Now there’s a local developer who wants to build a town out there.”

  Next to me H.T. Patterson chuckled. I listened some more.

  In the space of thirty minutes, interspersed with public-service spots and commercials for every Jim Nabors record ever made, Tupton told everything I wanted to know about the Everglades, and then some. I concluded that the judge would allow the tape into evidence and that the jury would like Peter Tupton.

  Maybe not like so much as respect. Patterson knew what he was doing. Wrongful-death cases with a surviving widow involve two kinds of plaintiffs. The regular guy- No, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this was not a special man. This was not an extraordinary man. ‘This man was not an Eagle Scout or a high public official. He packed bags at the Piggly Wiggly, but he was someone special to his wife, because this was the one man in the world who had fallen in love with her, who had spent his life with her, who had shared her joys and her sorrows all these many years…

  That kind of case was tough enough to defend, but Patterson was going after something else. The special person- Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this was a special man, a man who made a difference in our lives. While we went about our daily chores, oblivious to our surroundings, he was there fighting the good fight to assure we have water to drink, to bathe our children, to wash our cars. He fought to make sure our grandchildren can enjoy the majesty of the southern bald eagle. This was a man who was our keeper of the lighthouse. He kept a watch out for us all. He was a special man…

  Oh, my, how H.T. Patterson could play this one.

  Now, barely ten minutes into the deposition, we were hung up on the issue of the plaintiff’s right to details of the defendant’s financial condition. “If you persist in your mulish intractability,” Patterson announced, “we shall forthwith and with due dispatch move to amend the complaint and add a claim for punitive damages. Thereupon, the issue of the defendant’s net worth is relevant, admissible, and if I may say so, quite instructive to the jury in assessing damages.”

  He was doing his best to intimidate Nicky, trying to convince him that the discovery process would be so burdensome and invasive of his privacy that he should settle the case. Trouble was, Nicky Florio didn’t intimidate easily.

  I was about to make my objection when Florio spoke up: “You guys can keep on yapping and running up the bills, if you want. I don’t give a shit. I’m not gonna answer questions about my finances to you, the judge, or even my beautiful wife.”

  Across the conference table, Gina giggled.

  I put my hand on Florio’s arm to hush him up. Refusing to answer questions sometimes backfires. Once, in a divorce case, I asked a flagrantly unfaithful wife if she had stayed with a particular gentleman at a hotel in New York.

  “I refuse to answer that question,” she responded.

  “Did you stay with the man in Los Angeles?”

  “I refuse to answer that question.”

  “Did you stay with the man in Miami?”

  “No,” she answered proudly.

  Florio quieted down, and I turned my attention to Patterson. “This isn’t a case for punies, and you know it, H.T., so until I see your motion, and until the judge grants it-which should be the same time Tampa Bay wins the Super Bowl-you can forget about prying into financial resources.”

  Patterson kept blathering as if he hadn’t heard me. “Your client is guilty of gross and glaring negligence, willful and wanton misconduct, egregious and intentional deviation from the standard of care imposed on social hosts. Thus, we are entitled to what is euphemistically called smart money in an amount sufficient to make the defendant smart, i.e., feel pain. Hence, your objection is obdurate and obstinate, ornery and obstreperous. Your conduct is predictably perverse and consistently contumacious. You…”

  When H.T. lapses into his seductive singsong, even I stop and listen, usually tapping my toe on the floor, keeping time with the rhythm until he runs out of steam.

  “…thwart justice by defending actions that are depraved and degenerate. If you continue this iniquitous and unscrupulous stonewalling, we shall have no recourse but to take this matter before the judge and apply for sanctions.”

  “H.T., chill out.”

  His eyes lit up. “That’s just what your client’s tortuous misconduct caused to occur. The terminal chilling-out of a dedicated citizen, a man who put civic duty above financial reward, a man who spent his all-too-brief life fighting the robber barons and the well-connected. A man who walked through the valley of greed and gluttony, cupidity and corruption, and sought the straight-and-narrow path.

  “Save it for the jury, H.T.”

  “A man cannot indiscriminately let flow a river of demon rum to his guest,” H.T. continued, impervious, “then abdicate his respon
sibility. No, he must be made to pay, and pay till it hurts.”

  Nicky Florio’s olive complexion was beginning to color. He drummed his well-manicured nails on the tabletop. His black hair was slicked straight back, his dark eyes blazing at H.T. Patterson. Florio wore a jet-black suit, a white-on-white shirt, and one of those expensive Italian silk ties that looks like a bouquet of flowers and costs more than most small appliances. He leaned toward me and whispered, “Do I have to listen to this shit? Jesus, let’s get it over with. I got a business to run.”

  I calmed him with a hand on his shoulder and turned to my opponent. “H.T., you’re wasting a lot of valuable time and paper. I’d swear you were getting paid by the word instead of your usual forty percent.”

  “Blasphemer! I have promised a percentage of my fee to the Everglades Society, so that Mr. Tupton’s grand works can continue after his untimely passing.”

  “How thoughtful. I don’t suppose the group is returning the favor by helping you with the lawsuit, is it? And what percentage are you contributing, Henry Thackery? A tiny morsel, a single digit, no doubt? It’ll be good for a tax deduction and a mention of your generosity in the newspapers, probably at the time we’re picking a jury.”

  “Counselor, you vex me.”

  “Good. We’re even.”

  I yawned and decided to keep quiet. Maybe if I ignored Patterson’s diversions, he’d get back on track. I stretched my legs, locked my hands behind my neck, and cracked my knuckles.

  Something touched my left leg.

  At first I thought that Nicky, seated to my left, had bumped into me under the table. He hadn’t. I glanced at Gina, sitting directly across from me. She wore a sleeveless red leather mini-dress. Too hot for Miami in the summer, but it covered so little, maybe it didn’t matter. A gold zipper ran diagonally from the hem to the neck. It was unzipped to the middle of her breasts.

  Something touched my leg again and moved upward.

  Gina’s foot.

  Unless you were watching, you wouldn’t notice her slipping slightly lower into her chair as her foot inched upward along my leg. A small smile played at her lips.