Flesh and Bones: A Jake Lassiter Novel

by Paul Levine

  Believing it had never been like that for her before.

  I've had women say it. Once in a while even scream it. But I never believed it. Hell, no one's that good. Chrissy didn't say a word. But her look, as if she were in an altered state; her sounds, the guttural urgency that rose from within her; and the movement of her body against mine—finally led to an explosion that rocked us both and settled me deeper into her.

  After a moment she said, "I love you, Jake. God, how I love you."

  Chrissy was looking for something to wear.

  One hand fanned through her closet; the other clutched a liter bottle of French water. Four bottles a day, she told me. For the complexion. A cigarette dangled from her mouth. For the lungs.

  The closet was filled with clothing. Packed tight. Disorganized. Tasteful suits that Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly might have worn, jammed next to beaded, see-through bodysuits that could get you arrested in Tupelo, Mississippi. Skirts that stopped just below the knee, just above the knee, way above the knee, and some so short they were hardly there at all. Sculpted stiletto-thin dresses, shapeless tentlike dresses, ribboned dresses, embroidered dresses, chained dresses, one held together with a dozen brass safety pins, all for show.

  When she couldn't find anything in the closet, Chrissy swung open a six-foot-high cardboard closet, the kind movers use. There were two of these boxes in the bedroom, another three in the corridor. Inside, structured jackets, destructured jackets, crepe trousers, leather trousers, dresses with tie-up corsets and others that looked like bustiers, and lots of black and red.

  "This is going to take a while, isn't it?" I said.

  "Sorry, Jake, but I just don't have a thing to wear."

  "Hey, we're just getting a burger at the News Café. Gianni Versace isn't going to be there."

  "He was last week."

  "Oh."

  My sweatpants and Raiders jersey had just finished tumbling in her dryer. I was wearing Chrissy's kimono, but it looked a hell of a lot better on her. She was scattering assorted articles of clothing across her bed but seemed on the verge of selecting some Levi's with holes in the knees when I brought it up. "What is it you're not telling me?"

  "About what?"

  "Water. What do you know about Guy's water wells?"

  She exhaled a puff of smoke and looked puzzled. "Nothing. He's a farmer, he's got wells. So what?"

  "What about an industrial building under construction on the eastern edge of the tree farm?"

  "I don't know. What does it have to do with me?"

  "That's what I'm trying to find out. Tell me about you and your brother and Dr. Schein. What secrets does Guy have in his past?"

  "How should I know? I was in Europe modeling. I barely even know Guy."

  "What about Schein? There's a gap on the tape in the session where you recovered the memories."

  "A gap?"

  "Yeah, like the recorder was turned off and then back on."

  "I don't remember that. Maybe Larry took a phone call. Maybe he gave me another injection."

  "When the tape was off, did he tell you what to remember, what to say?"

  "Jake, I just said I don't remember the recorder being turned off, so how would I remember what—"

  "I thought when you're hypnotized, you remember everything."

  "Well, maybe I don't!"

  Rattled now. I do that to clients sometimes. Challenge them. Anger them. Push them into telling the truth. It comes with the territory, and usually it's easy. But usually I don't share a bathtub with my murder clients.

  "What about the last session, June fourteenth?" I asked. "You told Schein you'd made a decision he wasn't going to like. Then he turned off the recorder and never turned it back on. Two days later, you shot your father."

  She waited, though my next question had to be obvious.

  "What had you decided?"

  She seemed to think about it before answering. "To stop therapy. That's all right, isn't it? I mean, it doesn't hurt the case."

  "No, it's fine."

  It's a helluva lot better than having decided to be judge, jury, and executioner, I thought. And it made sense, didn't it? Quitting therapy, a decision Dr. Schein wouldn't like. But who knows what she really told the shrink behind the closed blinds of his office? I wanted to believe her. But could I? With clients and lovers, either you trust them or you don't.

  I studied her for a moment, then asked, "How did you get to me in the first place?"

  She stopped fiddling with the clothes and turned around to face me. "Why are you cross-examining me?"

  "It's my job."

  "Really? And in the bathtub just now, was that your job, too? Will Guy get billed for the time?"

  "I told you it would be a problem if we got involved."

  "No, you're the problem."

  "Just bear with me, please. Why did you choose me as a lawyer?"

  "You know why." Exasperated with me. "Rusty MacLean recommended you."

  "I've known Rusty a long time, and he never sent me legal work before, other than his own miscues, which I handled for free. Why now? Why you?"

  "I don't know!"

  "Does Rusty know your brother?"

  "How should I . . . Wait, yes, Rusty told me that Guy agreed to pay your fees."

  "When? Before the bond hearing?"

  "Yes. Right after you visited me in jail the first time."

  "So Rusty knew about it before I did." I turned to her, anger rising in my voice. I was angry at Guy Bernhardt and Lawrence Schein and Rusty MacLean, and angry at myself, too, but it probably sounded as if I were angry at Chrissy. "What else does Rusty know that I don't?"

  "Jake, why are you doing this? What's going on?" She seemed to be on the verge of tears.

  "I don't know! That's what's going on! I'm about to defend you in a murder trial, and I don't know the truth. I know that Schein and your brother have something cooked up, but I don't know what."

  She walked over, leaving a trail of smoke in her wake. She stood just out of reach. "And you think I do?"

  "No. I think they're keeping something from you, something they don't want you to find out. But you may know a bit of it. You may have picked up some clues."

  "If I had, I'd tell you. Jake, after getting this close to you, do you think I could lie to you?"

  My heart said no, but my head wasn't sure. "I don't know."

  She slapped me. Hard. "You bastard! I just told you I loved you. Do you think that's something that comes easy to me? It's not just the case you don't know about. You don't know me."

  "Then tell me. Chrissy, God knows I care about you . . . deeply. I want to be with you, but I can't let that interfere with the case. Tell me everything!"

  "I have. My father had sex with me when I was eleven. I repressed the memories. When the memories came back in therapy, the hatred just overcame me. I killed him, Jake. I killed him because of what he did to me, and that's the truth."

  "Then we're going to lose," I said.

  Rusty MacLean didn't see me coming toward his sidewalk table at the Booking Table Café. If I'd had a little gun in a beaded purse, I might have plugged him just to get his attention. Instead, I ran a Z-pattern around a ponytailed, earringed waiter and approached Rusty head on. He was sitting with two young women, one a freckled redhead, the other a blue-eyed blonde. Their books were spread open in front of them, eight-by-ten glossies spilling out. They were tall and young and freshly scrubbed, and their Caesar salads were barely picked over.

  When Rusty finally saw me, he smiled broadly, winked, and nodded his head, first toward one of the women, then the other. "Jake, c'mon. Make it a foursome."

  I didn't take the empty chair. Instead, I grabbed Rusty by the lapels of his aloha shirt and yanked him to his feet. I am blessed with strong wrists and forearms, the legacy of fighting big fish on little lines, and I lifted my old teammate cleanly into the air. Wide receivers can run with the wildebeests, but they have no iron in their bones.

  "Jake!" His smi
le was frozen into place. "I love you, but I don't want to kiss you."

  I pushed him backward into the open restaurant until he was pressed against the bar. Then I leaned him over, putting some pressure on his lower spine.

  "I'm feeling very loved, Rusty. You and Chrissy on the same day."

  "Hey, you're hurting me. I got a bad disk. Remember, I missed a play-off game in Pittsburgh."

  "You sat out the game because it was ten below zero and you had a hangover."

  "Look, Jake, I don't know what you're so mad about. Are you nailing one of these honeys? Which one, Tracy? 'Cause it's just business with me. You say the word, and I'll keep it in my pants."

  "Shut up, Rusty."

  He shut up.

  "Tell me about Guy Bernhardt," I ordered.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Was it his idea or yours to hire me?"

  He didn't answer, so I bent him farther across the bar. His arms flailed and he knocked over an empty margarita glass, which shattered on the tile floor. Two waiters eyed me but didn't move in my direction.

  "His idea. So what?"

  "When did he call you?"

  "The night it happened. Maybe two A.M. Said his old man croaked in the hospital. He knew I was Chrissy's agent, knew I was a witness. He's got some friends who are Miami Beach cops. Saw their reports before the homicide chief did. Anyway, he asked me if I knew you, the guy on barstool number three on the police reports. I told him we were like brothers."

  I released my grip a little.

  "He asked if you were a good lawyer," Rusty continued, "and I told him you were the best lawyer to ever play linebacker for the Dolphins, better than Buoniconti, though he was a helluva lot better on the field. So he said, 'Hire him.' He'd pay the tab, and that was it."

  "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "Guy said it would be better to keep it quiet for business and personal reasons. Like his wife wouldn't understand him helping his half sister or something."

  I looked at my old teammate and let him go.

  Like brothers?

  No. Rusty was too self-absorbed to be anyone's brother. On the team, opinion had been divided. Half the guys disliked him; the other half hated him. Sure, Rusty and I had gotten drunk together and chased women together. We'd celebrated wins and bitched about losses, but we weren't really friends, much less brothers. We had been thrown into the same pit, like foxhole buddies. That war was over. This one was just beginning.

  16

  Desal

  This is how I broke my hand.

  The second time.

  The first time, I took a wild swing at the head of a big-bellied Notre Dame offensive lineman, a head encased in a helmet. After the third crackback block of a bitterly cold, trash-talking, eye-gouging afternoon, he went for my knees, which were already held together with baling wire and spit. I lost it and launched a roundhouse right he never felt. I wound up with a cast on my hand, a fifteen-yard penalty for unnecessary roughness—a term I find quaintly amusing, given the sport—another fifteen for unsportsmanlike conduct for accusing the referee's mother of unnatural acts, and a seat so far down Joe Paterno's bench my feet were in Wilkes-Barre.

  The second time, just an hour after leaving Rusty MacLean on Miami Beach, I was standing at the counter of the Dade County Building and Zoning Department, staring through a Plexiglas window. There are three windows, and if they're not bulletproof they should be, just to protect indolent, slothful clerks from irate, ignored taxpayers.

  No one manned or even personed my window. Or the other two.

  Three clerks sat at their desks, a dozen feet or so behind their little windows, doing their best to ignore the broad-shouldered taxpayer leaning on the counter who, luckily for them, was not armed. "Hey there," I cooed at the enormous black woman directly in line with my window, the middle of the three.

  In her thirties, she was wearing an orange muumuu and had a telephone cradled on her shoulder. At the moment, she was loudly declaring that if Spike didn't get his raggedy-ass, lazy bones out of her house by six o'clock, she would haul his flea-bitten, egg-sucking worthless self halfway across the Everglades and feed him to the gators.

  So I turned my attention to the window on the right. A middle-aged Hispanic man sat at his desk, drinking Cuban coffee from a thimble-sized paper cup. He had a beard that needed trimming and wore an off-white guayabera. Maybe there was paperwork on his desk, but I couldn't tell. A carton of pastries took up most of the surface. "Hola!" I called out.

  "Estoy en mi hora de descanso," he said.

  "Now? It's ten past nine. You just started work."

  He took a bite of a pastelito, and guava filling oozed out onto his beard. "No hablo inglés," he said.

  "Really? So I'd be wasting my time telling you how much you look like Fidel Castro."

  "Fuck you," he said crisply.

  I turned to my left and looked through the third window. An Anglo kid of maybe nineteen with an earring and ponytail sat at his desk, feet propped on a stack of cartons. His eyes were closed, a Sony Walkman was plugged into his ears, and his feet kept time with undoubtedly clamorous music.

  "Hey, you!" I yelled.

  He didn't hear me.

  "You!" I tried again. "The brain-dead kid. Wake up!"

  Still no luck.

  I took heart that the utter indifference of our public servants was dispensed in an ethnically diverse, evenhanded manner. It also was a source of my civic pride that these well-paid, barely worked, juicy-pensioned paper shufflers were entitled to their birthdays off with pay, courtesy of property owners such as my very own taxpaying self.

  Still, yearning for some attention, I punched the Plexiglas window. Hard.

  A straight right hand.

  Which made a hell of a racket.

  Causing the Hispanic man to spill his coffee, the black woman to drop her phone, and the Anglo kid to pry open his eyes.

  The window didn't crack, but my third metacarpal did.

  "Hey, stupid. Destruction of county property is a misdemeanor," the black woman said in a bored tone that made me think she'd said it before. "I'm gonna call a cop."

  I was hopping on one foot, squeezing my right hand into my left armpit, trying to strangle the pain. "The only time I was arrested," I said grimacing, "it was a case of mistaken identity."

  She gave me a cross-eyed look.

  "I didn't know the guy I hit was a cop."

  "I don't understand, Carmody," I said, leafing through stacks of zoning permits and building plans. "It's got to be here."

  "Don't be stupid," Carmody Jones said.

  The huge woman clerk and I had progressed to first names. I called her Carmody and she called me Stupid.

  She thumbed through a file of her own. "That farm is in what's called a special taxing district. It's almost like a little city. Like what Disney World did. Constructs its own sewers and roads."

  "And buildings," I said, thinking of the giant structure rising along the irrigation ditch. "Just when did Guy Bernhardt get himself a special taxing district?"

  "Last November twelfth," she said, pulling out a blue-backed document with a gold seal. "A resolution followed by special ordinance of the county commission. It was unanimous. Recommended by the staff of Building and Zoning, also the Department of Environmental Regulation, the Planning Commission, the South Dade Master Plan Council. A special agenda item at the end of the meeting. No debate, no protesters."

  "No publicity," I said, looking at the file. My right hand was tucked into a Baggie filled with ice, courtesy of Carmody. I started reading aloud: "Whereas Bernhardt Farms, Inc., a Florida corporation, intends to pursue the public purpose of furnishing water both for itself and for other users, including Dade County; whereas Bernhardt Farms, Inc., has pledged to undertake this activity on its own without resort to public funds; whereas South Florida suffers the clear and present danger of drought and a falling water table; and whereas Bernhardt Farms, Inc., has pledged to use the latest technology in desalination
. . ."

  Desalination.

  Now there was a new one for me. Confusing as ever. First good old Guy Bernhardt outrages his neighbors by sucking their wells dry. And now he's going to turn salt water into gold.

  "Desal," Charlie Riggs said.

  "He's going to take salt water from the ocean and make fresh water?" I asked.

  "More likely he's going to draw up brackish water from the Floridan Aquifer."

  Doc Charlie Riggs knows most of what's worth knowing and a lot that isn't.

  "I would agree," said Harrison Baker, fiddling with his mustache. I was in the presence of two old coots, and that didn't include my granny, who was filling mason jars with a clear liquid that surely did not come from the aquifer. We were on the porch of her old house in Islamorada. The sun was setting in the gulf, the palm fronds were slapping the tin roof, and all of us were a tinge overheated from the white lightning, which only stoked the fires of a tropical July day. "Salt water is too expensive to treat," Baker went on, "except when there's no other choice. On desert islands, that sort of thing."

  "Then there's the salt byproduct and the question of disposal," Charlie Riggs added.

  "Quite right," Baker said, taking a sip of Granny's moonshine. "Produce ten million gallons of water a day and you'll end up with over two million pounds of salt. You can't leave it on the ground or it will pollute the groundwater. You can't put it back in the ocean or it will destroy all life for a hundred miles."

  He paused a moment, his eyes tearing, either from the thought of dying coral or the sting of Granny's liquor.

  "But with the new technology," Charlie Riggs said, "once you recovered capital costs for construction, you could probably treat brackish water for the same price as fresh groundwater and produce far less brine than with seawater."

  Baker nodded. "Reverse osmosis would be best."

  Charlie sipped at his mason jar and seemed to agree.

  I asked a few questions. I learned that reverse osmosis, like distillation, takes the water out of the salt, whereas electrodialysis and ion exchange take the salt out of the water. To oversimplify it, Charlie said with a look that implied I needed all the simplification I could get, all you need for osmosis is a lot of electricity, some high-pressure pumps, and a filter. And lots and lots of brackish water.