Flesh and Bones: A Jake Lassiter Novel

by Paul Levine

  "This guy must have gone to prep school with Senator Packwood. What did you do?"

  "I smiled sweetly, reached over, and grabbed the book by each side, then slammed it shut as hard as I could."

  "Good for you!"

  "Yeah, well, my morals didn't hold up as well after I ran out of money and was hungry."

  "Didn't your father help you?"

  "He would have if I'd asked."

  "But you didn't."

  "I didn't even tell him where I was."

  "Why not?"

  She stared off into space. A shadow crossed her face for just a second, and there it was again, that vulnerability and need. I am not a white knight bedecked in armor, mounted on a gallant steed. But if I were, I would have scooped her up, tugged at the reins, and spirited her away to a refuge in a forest of high pines.

  "I didn't know at the time," she said finally, "but I do now."

  Why? I wanted to ask, but sometimes the best questions are left unspoken. I knew Chrissy would get around to it, so I let her tell the story in her own time, in her own way.

  "For the next two years, I was more of a party girl than a model. I went to Milan to build my book and fell in with a fast crowd. Figli di papà, Daddy's boys, Italians with trust funds. Some of them just want a beautiful girl on their arm; most want to fuck you and pass you off to a friend. When I started working, I lived in a models' apartment building the Italians called Principessa Clitoris."

  "Cute."

  "We just called it the Fuck Palace."

  I dragged a piece of pork through the rice and tossed the mixture into my mouth. Outside our enclosed room, three male guards looked in through a window. If there had been a curtain, I would have pulled it. Behind them, a stream of female inmates lined up on their way to the cafeteria. Stringy hair, sallow faces. I wondered what Chrissy would look like after a year behind bars. Or twenty.

  "I did the whole party scene," she said, "licking coke off hundred-dollar bills in rest rooms, skinny-dipping in fountains, parties for Arab sheiks, hanging with the disco droids. Amazingly, I was doing well, professionally at least. The makeup covered the dark circles under my eyes and I had a look that was hot, or so they said. I was traveling, making good money, but my personal life was chaotic and destructive."

  "The men?"

  "The wrong men. Playboys, married men, abusive men, starving actors, untalented painters. I was having nightmares, flashbacks that made no sense. I was bulimic one month, anorexic the next, then stuffed myself like a pig the third. I binged, gained weight, starved and lost weight, got depressed, got sick and was a total wreck. When I was fat, which was like a hundred twenty-eight pounds, the photographers would call me 'Flesh.' And when I was skinny, they'd call me 'Bones.' Finally, they combined the two."

  "Flesh and Bones," I said.

  "I really hated the name. One day, I'm walking up Fifth Avenue in New York, and one of those street-corner preachers with a filthy beard is ranting and raving, and he starts following me, right past St. Patrick's, heading toward the park, and he's waving his Bible and shouting, 'Flesh and bones cannot inherit the kingdom of God.' "

  "I think it's 'flesh and blood,' " I said, trying to remember Granny's Bible lectures.

  "That's what made it so creepy. It was like he knew me, like he was telling me I was gonna die for my sins of the flesh and— I don't know—go to the boneyard and straight to hell."

  "But you straightened yourself out."

  "It was either that or die. A few months later in Paris, I had a very bad trip on acid. Hallucinated I was jumping off a bridge into the Seine, and guess what, I almost was. I had climbed onto a railing and was model-walking above the water. The same week, my roommate, Pia, died of a heroin overdose. I was down to about a hundred five pounds, had these big dark circles under my eyes. Kept getting all this editorial work, the French photographers into their doomed-beauty stage."

  "What did you do?"

  "I came home."

  "To your father?"

  "No. To therapy. I went to Dr. Schein. Lawrence Schein. He'd treated my mother, became her friend when she and Daddy had nothing left to say to each other."

  I shoved the food cartons aside and made a note on my pad. At last, a witness. "A psychiatrist?"

  "Yes, and a good one. He said my problems had to be rooted in my childhood. We talked and talked and talked, but I couldn't remember anything more traumatic than falling off a horse. He insisted the memories were there but buried, 'sublimated' he called it, so we did hypnotic regression and repressed-memory therapy."

  I tore open the little plastic bag with a fortune cookie inside. "And it worked?"

  "He shined a light into dark corners I didn't know existed. It all came back to me. I owe him so much."

  She let the thought hang there a moment and I didn't grab it. I saw where we were going and it occurred to me that she might owe him even more than she knew. She might owe him life in prison.

  Chrissy looked around the barren little room. "I wish I could have a cigarette."

  "What, Chrissy? What came back to you?"

  Her eyes filled with tears. "My daddy. My daddy."

  I waited but she didn't go on. "Did he molest you?"

  No answer.

  "Chrissy, tell me," I whispered. "Did he rape you?"

  "No. He loved me."

  The tears streamed down her face.

  "Chrissy."

  "No!"

  She wrung her hands together on the table, her fingers entwined like restless snakes.

  "Chrissy, trust me. Tell me."

  Sobs stopped her. I waited. Her eyes were tightly closed. She put her head down between her arms and sobbed, keeping the sound and the pain inside as her body shuddered. I stood and moved around the table, wrapping my arms around her, tears dripping from her cheek to my shoulder. After a moment, she lifted her head and dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her smock.

  "I'm sorry. I can't talk. Not now. Not yet."

  I sat down again and looked into her puffy eyes, seeing the same doomed beauty the photographers found so compelling. She shook her head, as if arguing with herself. I waited. She would tell me; if not today, tomorrow.

  "You look terrible," Chrissy said after a moment, forcing a laugh. Then neither of us said a word. We sat that way a moment. The only sound in the room was the tick of an old schoolroom clock on the wall, its second hand jerking along. From somewhere on the other side of the window, a buzzer sounded and an electronic door banged shut.

  "A man raped me once," she said. "In Paris."

  Another sound then, too, the crack of the fortune cookie splintering in the palm of my hand.

  "I suppose you'd call it date rape. I was coked out at a party filled with Mexican drug dealers, French playboys, American models. Some combination, huh? Today, I don't even remember his face. He owned some shitty line of ready-to-wear, had pomade in his hair. At the time, I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill all of you."

  I reached out and took both her hands in mine. "All of who?"

  "You, Jake. Men! I wanted to kill you all."

  5

  Guilty as Sin

  I aimed my ancient but amiable chariot south on Useless 1, passing endless fast-food emporiums, gas stations, and strip shopping centers in Kendall and Perrine. The old engine was humming, all 400 cubic inches of the Olds 442 convertible, vintage 1968. Canary-yellow with a black canvas top, a four-speed stick, a four-barrel carburetor, and twin exhausts. Four-four-two, get it?

  I picked up the turnpike extension and passed through mango groves and tree farms near Homestead, then got off and found the old highway again, entering Monroe County where bait and shell shops joined the burger joints as roadside attractions. I cruised through Key Largo, which now has all the charm of Altoona but ten times the traffic.

  At a little past six P.M., I turned into the sandy driveway on the gulf side of Islamorada and parked in the shade of a coconut palm. The TV blared through the open windows, Granny Lassiter still
believing that air conditioning caused arthritis. Doc Charlie Riggs sat in a rocker on the porch of the old cracker house with the slanted tin roof. He was snoozing, a book folded across his chest. Medico-Legal Investigation of Death. Sleep well, Charlie. You already know everything about the subject.

  I opened the screen door and walked inside. Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson were yelling at each other in the Florida room.

  "You want answers?" Nicholson shouted with the impatience of a Marine colonel not used to being cross-examined.

  "I want the truth!" Cruise demanded, all decked out in his Navy JAG uniform.

  "You can't handle the truth!" Nicholson fired back from the witness stand.

  "Hello, Kip," I said to the towheaded twelve-year-old boy sprawled on the floor watching the tube.

  " 'Lo, Uncle Jake," the kid mumbled, without looking away from the screen.

  I wandered into the kitchen just as Jack Nicholson was launching into a diatribe about a world with walls and the men who guard them. Granny Lassiter hovered over the stove, slicing cabbage palm—called swamp cabbage hereabouts—into a frying pan filled with sizzling bacon. Supposedly, the native Calusas taught Ponce de León's Spaniards all about this delicacy. I'll have to ask Granny. She was probably there.

  "Well, look what the cat drug in," she greeted me, as always.

  "Hello, Granny," I said, and just to embarrass her, I gave her a peck on the cheek.

  "Don't be making a fuss," she said, waving me off with a spatula.

  Granny wore khaki shorts, climbing boots, and a T-shirt with the slogan I STILL MISS MY EX, BUT MY AIM IS IMPROVING. Her hair was jet-black, except for a white stripe down the middle, but the last guy who called her "Skunky" got brained with a tarpon gaff.

  "You hungry, Jake?" she asked. She checked on a pot, boiling with hopping John, black-eyed peas, and rice. In the sink, a bucket held several pounds of fresh frog legs soaking in beer.

  "Had a late lunch. Chinese. But I can always eat."

  "Chinese," she sniffed. "All that mono-sodium polluta-mate will shrivel your testicles." She gestured toward the bucket of marinating frog legs. "Give me a hand here."

  I grew up in this house, hanging on to Granny's apron strings, so I didn't need instructions or a second invitation. I just dipped a pair of legs into a bowl of milk and eggs, sloshed them through a dish of flour, then dropped them onto a hot griddle.

  "Seen your pit-cher in the paper," she said, pointing toward the refrigerator. Indeed, the clipping was held there by a magnet shaped like a stone crab. Some wit had added a mustache and hat so that I looked like a villain in a silent movie, the heroine unconscious in my arms.

  "I see Kip's been practicing his artistry again."

  "Don't stifle the boy, Jake." She looked into the sizzling pan. "And not so much flour! Those hoppers lose their taste with all that breading."

  I hadn't even known I had a nephew, or a half sister, until Kip was arrested for spray-painting graffiti on a movie theater that had changed the advertised showing of Casablanca to Revenge of the Nerds III. I got him probation and became his semilegal guardian, though Granny helped out considerably.

  On cue, Kip's bare feet padded onto the linoleum floor of the kitchen. "All righty then!" he proclaimed with a goofy Jim Carrey grin.

  "Kip, did anybody ever tell you that you watch too many movies?"

  "Yep. And Uncle Jake, did anyone tell you that you look guilty?"

  "What?"

  "In the paper. Doesn't he, Granny?"

  "Guilty as sin," she agreed.

  "Neat, Granny," Kip said, laughing. "That was a movie. Rebecca De Mornay's a lawyer who defends Don Johnson on charges he killed his wife. 'Course she falls for him."

  "Ain't that a conflict of interest?" Granny asked, looking at me. "Litigating by day, fornicating by night."

  "Sure is," I allowed.

  "You'd never do that, would you, Jake?"

  "Am I under oath?" I asked.

  "The same thing happened to Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges in Jagged Edge," Kip said. "He's a rich guy accused of killing his wife. She defends him, and they get it on."

  "Kippers," Granny warned, "watch your mouth!"

  "Does Hollywood always copy itself like that?" Kip asked.

  "Like a virus," I said.

  I took a long look at Kip, still in wonder that the same blood flowed through our veins. Razor-thin, blond hair, pale complexion with a light blue vein visible on his temple, he was almost fragile. Nothing like his thick-necked and thick-headed uncle.

  Kip opened the refrigerator door and grabbed a container of Granny's smoked mackerel. He dipped a finger in and licked it off. Closing the door, he gestured at the photo. "Look at yourself, Uncle Jake. Just like North by Northwest when a guy gets knifed at the UN, and a photographer shoots a picture of Cary Grant holding the dying man."

  "Jake doesn't look like Cary Grant," Granny chimed in. "More like Harrison Ford if somebody had broken his nose."

  "Hey, you two! I didn't kill anybody. Chrissy Bernhardt did."

  Granny took over at the stove, yanking a frog leg from my hands. "So how can you represent her if you know she's guilty?"

  " 'Cause she's a babe," Kip volunteered. "Just like Madonna in Body of Evidence. Willem Dafoe's defending her on charges she killed her husband by"—he lowered his voice—"screwing him to death."

  "Kippers!" Granny shouted.

  "Hey, Kip, why don't you do your homework?"

  "Don't have any."

  I looked at him skeptically. "Is that the truth?"

  He curled a lip at me and raised his voice into a twelve-year-old's snarl. "You don't want the truth!"

  "What?"

  "Because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall!"

  "Kip, I'm going to toss the VCR in the gulf and put my foot through the TV screen."

  "It's true, Uncle Jake. School ended yesterday."

  "Oh."

  Granny was rooting around in her walk-in pantry, where she puts up pickles and preserves. In a moment, she came out carrying three mason jars of her moonshine, or "rye likker," as she called it. "So why represent this no-count party girl what killed her father?"

  "What makes you think she's a party girl?" I was already thinking about jury selection and the impression my client makes.

  "I seen her pit-cher. I can tell."

  I made a mental note to have Chrissy the Model dress like Marian the Librarian when we picked a jury. "Just because she admittedly shot her father doesn't mean she's guilty," I told my assembled kinfolk.

  Granny poured the bacon-fried swamp cabbage from a pan into a serving platter and shoved it at me. "Just like an obfuscating, prevaricating, fast-talking shyster. Just like the so-called Dream Team that made me want to scream, lying through their teeth. 'It's not O. J.'s blood, but if it is, the cops planted it.' Now why would they do that? Seems to me the cops gave him all the breaks every time he slammed the bejesus out of his wife. It's not his glove, it's not his shoe, it's not his hair, it's not his cap, it's not his blood. I suppose the disguise in the Bronco wasn't his neither. So why the hell was he running away? Explain that one to me."

  "Granny, don't ask me. I'm just—"

  "A lawyer! 'Course you're not as good as Johnnie Cochran, who's slick as owl shit, so I don't expect you to get that party girl off."

  "Johnnie has his style, I have mine."

  It's true. My style is straight ahead, both hands wrapped around the ball. No ninety-yard touchdowns, but not many fumbles either.

  "Didn't you tackle that fellow when you were a so-called athlete?" Granny asked.

  "I missed a lot of tackles, including one in Buffalo, where I ended up with a snowdrift in my face mask and he got a touchdown."

  "Well, it just seems to me that you lawyer fellows are getting too damn good at making excuses," Granny went on, haranguing me as always. "You got your so-called battered wives slicing off their husbands' John Henrys. You got t
hose rich boys in Beverly Hills shotgunning their parents. The Abuse Excuse, I seen it on Oprah. You attack the victim and then haul out some phony-baloney eggheads to mix up the jury with syndromes and traumas and irresistible impulses. They got a reason for everything 'til it seems nobody takes responsibility for their own actions."

  "Remind me not to seat you on one of my juries," I said.

  "I wouldn't do it unless I could get conjugal visits from Charlie," Granny said, winking.

  "What's conjugal?" Kip asked.

  "Never you mind," my licentious granny told him. She put a pitcher of limeade on the table, then turned to me. "Would somebody please tell that old goat that supper's on?"

  Just then Charlie Riggs appeared in the doorway, rubbing his eyes. "Did I hear the word 'supper'?" he asked.

  Dr. Lawrence Schein let a stream of water play against the leathery green leaves of a wild coffee shrub and said, "Xeriscape landscaping. Environment-friendly and drought-resistant."

  After just a few moments, Schein turned the hose on a wild tamarind tree, its purple puffball flowers in full bloom. "You don't see any palm trees, hibiscus hedges, or blooming impatiens in my yard, do you?"

  Figuring it was a leading question, I could have objected, but instead I just listened.

  "They just swallow up the water. You know the town of Manalapan?"

  "Sure, up in Palm Beach County. Big houses, big yards, a Ritz-Carlton hotel."

  "Until they put a stop to it, that little town was using six hundred twenty-seven gallons of water a day per resident, most of it watering lawns and flowers. Can you imagine it?"

  We were in the yard of Dr. Schein's ranch house in the Redlands section of southern Dade County. I had spent the night at Granny's, eating her food, drinking her moonshine, and losing to Kip in gin rummy. At one point, in the cinematic equivalent of a mixed metaphor, he told me, "You play a mean game of gin, fat man."

  Now, on a steamy June morning, I was trying to determine just how useful Dr. Schein would be to the defense of Chrissy Bernhardt. He was a thin man in his late fifties with a shaved head and a small goatee. I had somehow pictured him in a herringbone sports coat with leather elbow patches, but today he wore bib overalls and L. L. Bean rubber boots as he watered his plants.