Flesh and Bones: A Jake Lassiter Novel

by Paul Levine

  We gel our drinking water. Baker had already told me, from the Biscayne Aquifer, the layer of porous rock that sits just under the ground. Go deeper and you'll run into sediments about seven hundred feet thick. Below that is the Upper Floridan, containing brackish, highly mineralized water not suitable for drinking unless you remove the salt.

  "Some cities have done it," Baker said, turning to me, "but no private party ever has, not with a plant like you're describing, not on that scale."

  "So what's Guy Bernhardt going to do with all the water he's going to produce?" Charlie Riggs asked.

  I knew, of course, but my granny was quicker. "Unless he's a dang fool," she said, "he's gonna sell it."

  17

  I Am a Man

  I didn't tell Chrissy Bernhardt where we were going. I didn't want her to have time to call Dr. Schein, or her brother, or anyone else who might have told her what to do.

  Like take a pill raising her blood pressure.

  I figured she wouldn't know the other tricks the cons are so good at. Biting the tongue. Sticking a nail in the shoe.

  So I wasn't playing straight with her. Because I was afraid she wasn't playing straight with me.

  A lawyer needs to know the truth.

  No, strike that. I can't speak for my brethren. I need to know the truth.

  Maybe it's a failing. Maybe I'd be better off not knowing. Maybe I should just take whatever gift horse Schein was riding. But I couldn't. I don't know why, I just couldn't.

  With the top down, I aimed the Olds 442 west on the MacArthur Causeway, caught the connector north onto I-95, then swung west again on the Miami Dolphin Expressway. Though I didn't pour the asphalt, I always took a bit of pride in the highway, especially when passing the Orange Bowl, the faded lady on our left.

  "Where are we going?" Chrissy asked.

  "To see an old friend."

  I got off at Le Jeune Road, just east of the airport, and headed north to Okeechobee Road, turning left along the old Miami Canal. West of the canal was Miami Springs. East was Hialeah, once a haven for Georgia crackers and now overwhelmingly Hispanic. I hung a right on Palm Avenue, drove a few blocks into a neighborhood of single-story stucco homes, many with statues of the Virgin Mary planted along with the hibiscus, and pulled up in front of pink house with an orange barrel-tile roof.

  "Here?" Chrissy asked.

  "Here."

  "Your friend has a odd sense of color combinations."

  "The house belongs to an ex-cop," I said, as if that explained it.

  Tony Cuevas was a lifelong bachelor. He had bought the house when he retired from the Sheriff's Department, and if you asked him the color, he probably wouldn't have a clue.

  On the way to the front door, Chrissy stopped and looked at me. "So why are we here?"

  She was wearing spandex shorts and a halter top, and when I grabbed her shoulders, her skin was warm from the sun. I pulled her close to me and looked into those green, luminous eyes. "It's important that I treat you like a client, and not like . . ."

  "A lover, a woman . . . a person," she helped out.

  "Yeah, sort of. If we hadn't gotten involved, this would be easy."

  "What, Jake? What would be easy?" Exasperated now.

  "In preparing for trial, in planning strategy, lawyers sometimes ask their clients to . . ."

  I couldn't say it.

  The door opened before we could knock. Tony Cuevas stood there, a little paunchier than when he'd worked Internal Affairs. He still wore the short-sleeved shirt and tie. "Hello, Jake," he said. "You look like shit."

  "Thank you, Tony."

  He smiled pleasantly at Chrissy. "Hello, Miss Bernhardt. Let me tell you what you need to know about your polygraph exam."

  Chrissy sat in a hard wooden chair, her eyes blazing at me. A blood pressure cuff was wrapped around her right arm, pneumograph tubes circling her chest and abdomen. Electrodes were attached to two fingers of her left hand. She sat on an inflatable rubber bladder and leaned back in the chair against another one.

  "Just relax," I said.

  "Go to hell!" Chrissy responded, and Tony's eyebrows shot up as he watched five pens on the chart scrawl a steep mountain.

  "Actually, it is important that we stabilize your blood pressure," Tony said.

  "Get him out of here," she commanded.

  Him was me.

  I wanted to say something. Something about how I needed to know the truth and how my feelings for her wouldn't change even if she was a cold-blooded murderer. But the words didn't come. Retreating in silence, feeling cowardly and deceptive, I walked into the screened Florida room, where a paddle fan clunked out of plumb over my head.

  We are not all smart in all things. Left brain, right brain. A writer of sonnets may not be able to adjust a carburetor. A physicist may be incapable of constructing a simple sentence with subject and verb. I am moderately proficient in a number of fields. I can sense the location of the lurking bonefish. I can lead a hostile, perjurious witness into a humiliating mass of contradictions. I can predict run or pass from whether the offensive tackle leans forward or backward in his three-point stance.

  But with a woman, my wiring shorts out. My senses respond to the physical and the chemical, the scent and sheen of her. Evil could not possibly reside in the form of this angel, could it? Sure, I'm politically incorrect. I'm retro, a caveman.

  I admit it.

  I confess.

  Nolo contendere. Guilty as charged. I am, Your Honor, the lowest of the species, still wet from the swamp, tracks of webbed feet fossilized in the mud. I am a Man.

  Through the open door, I could hear Tony's soothing voice. "Let's just chat a while."

  He asked several innocuous questions about Chrissy's background and schooling, the names of her pets, whether she enjoyed skiing or surfing. At the same time, he fiddled with the cardioamplifier and the galvanic skin monitor. Chrissy doubtless thought the test hadn't even begun, but it had.

  The neutral questions set the parameters for the lower range of blood pressure, respiration, and perspiration. They also set the stage for the control question, an attempt to elicit a lie.

  "Have you ever smoked marijuana?" Tony Cuevas asked.

  "Sure."

  "Have you ever used cocaine?"

  "That, too."

  Tony paused, and I knew he was still searching for the little lie that could help uncover the big one.

  "Did you ever have sex with more than one person at a time?"

  "I worked in Paris," Chrissy said. "Surely you've heard of ménage à trois."

  "Is that a yes? Did you ever have sex with more than one person at a time?"

  "Does a schizophrenic boyfriend count?"

  "Miss Bernhardt." Firmly now.

  "All right, yes! I had sex with two people, and it wasn't twice the fun. I was playing with nose candy at the time, a couple of bumps a night. It was Paris, and I was nineteen."

  "Have you ever had sex with a woman?"

  "I've tried a lot of things."

  Calmly, never changing his inflection, "Is that a yes?"

  "Yes! I've had sex with a woman. That's related to your last question. In fact, it's redundant."

  Whatever her responses to the big questions, it was hard as hell to get Chrissy to lie about the little ones.

  "Have you ever had sex in return for money?"

  "Modeling's a form of prostitution."

  "Ms. Bernhardt, please answer the question."

  "One time on a test shoot, an Italian photographer stripped naked. We were in his hotel room. As he shot me, he jerked off. He was very famous. You would know his name. Well, maybe you wouldn't, but believe me, he was big-time, and all the girls knew he liked to get off during a shoot, but he'd never touch you."

  "Ms. Bernhardt, have you ever had sex in return for money?"

  "No, but I've been offered. A lot!"

  "Please confine your answers to yes or no."

  "Sure."

  "Have you ever used he
roin?"

  A pause. "I thought we were done with the drug questions."

  "Have you ever used heroin?"

  After a moment, "No."

  A longer pause from Tony, and I knew he had his control question. He was letting the physiological reactions die before getting to the heart of it. I was thinking about her lie. She had told me she had been a "chipper" in Paris, occasionally smoking a potent combination of heroin and cocaine, but she'd given it up without becoming addicted. Still, the stigma prevented her from admitting it to a total stranger. The sexual improprieties, I guessed, were mere peccadilloes compared to smoking smack.

  Tony started up again. "Did your father have sexual relations with you when you were a minor?"

  A soft "Yes."

  I knew Tony was watching the squiggles. If the reaction to the little lie about not using heroin was greater than the reaction to the question about her father, she was telling the truth. If the reaction to the relevant question was greater, her concern about it meant she was probably lying.

  "Did you kill your father?"

  "Yes." An obvious answer to a neutral question.

  "Did you kill him because he had sex with you as a child?"

  "Yes."

  "Did you tell Jake Lassiter the truth about everything?"

  "Does anybody tell the truth about everything?" she said, and I heard the sound of the tape tearing off skin, then tubes crashing against the terrazzo floor as Chrissy stood and ran for the door.

  18

  Hell on Earth

  The winds shifted to the southeast, bringing the humid Caribbean air, then died altogether. Days were broiling, nights stifling, and my little house felt like a hamper filled with sweat socks. The temperature soared, thunderheads formed over the Glades, and afternoon squalls rolled in from the west, a hard, pounding rain that did not cool the air. Steam rose from the pavement. Hell on earth.

  Summer in South Florida starts early and ends late. This year, a dozen tropical storms and hurricanes chugged through the Atlantic and Caribbean, swirling up clouds, then breaking off to the northwest, skimming the coast, or heading due west across the Yucatán. Each time a storm came within a thousand miles, our breathless TV reporters stirred up memories of Andrew's flattened buildings, scaring the bejesus out of us. Just as gullible as my neighbors, I stood in line at the supermarket for bottled water and flashlight batteries, and because I had read that chick-peas are an excellent source of protein, my cupboard was now chock-full of them.

  My little house in the South Grove is made of coral rock two feet thick, and it has withstood every hurricane from 1926 onward. If it is blown down, there won't be anything left standing in Dade County, and don't crack wise by saying that's not such a bad idea.

  With the summer, the southeasterly breezes are too light for windsurfing, especially if you weigh more than a ballerina. I carted the board out to Key Biscayne a few times to catch the tail ends of gusty thunderstorms, but I've never been entirely comfortable on the water with a sixteen-foot-high mast that doubles as a lightning rod.

  One day in August, the water slate-gray in a pelting rainstorm, I cruised on a broad reach off Virginia Key. I was hooked into the harness, leaning back against the weight of the sail, enjoying the sheer pleasure of speed, tasting the salty spray as the board chop-hopped past the reef. A disk-shaped Atlantic ray swam alongside, looking like some prehistoric beast, its winglike pectoral fins undulating, propelling it just below the waterline. I watched until the ray disappeared in the foam of a roller.

  A few years ago, when I missed a jibe and landed ass-over-elbows next to the board, I was trying to waterstart, lying under the sail on my back like a beached turtle, when my arm caught fire. At least that's what it felt like, the spiny tail of a southern stingray wrapping itself around my wrist. The venomous sting left me with a scar that looks like a bracelet melted into my skin.

  Then there are the sharks. It's hard to windsurf any distance from shore and not see a few. The Tourist and Convention Authority doesn't advertise it, but schools of tiger sharks, lemon sharks, and many of their cousins feed in schools just a few hundred yards off our beaches. I've enjoyed swimming and boardsailing in the Miami Beach surf for years, and it's still a thrill to paddle over a nurse shark lying motionless on the bottom in five feet of water.

  With our sea creatures—barracuda, sharks, morays, jellyfish, Portuguese men-of-war, sea urchins, and stinging corals—it's a wonder more tourists don't end up in the emergency room.

  So this day, as the ray squooshed by me and vanished in the vast, deadly sea, I thought about the other dangerous creatures in my life. Guy Bernhardt was paying the bills on time, calling me with pep talks about the case, doing everything except sending me notes with little smiling faces. Dr. Schein answered all my questions as I prepared for trial. He seemed eager to testify to the veracity of Chrissy's repressed memories, as well as the likelihood of her diminished mental state when she pulled the trigger— three times. Chrissy wouldn't talk to me at all, except in the most perfunctory way about the case. The personal relationship was over, tanked by the polygraph exam.

  "I've never felt so betrayed," she told me as we sat across from each other in my conference room, separated by a mountain of files and a gulf of wounded feelings. I thought the statement was a bit overdone, especially from someone who claimed she'd been sexually molested by her father. Still, who was I to tell her what she should be feeling?

  Tony Cuevas called to say what I already knew. Chrissy had passed the polygraph test. "So her father sexually abused her," I said.

  "She thinks he did," Tony said. "She remembers it."

  All right, she wasn't lying. But memories can be wrong. I remembered everything Dr. Millie Santiago had told me. Or was it everything?

  By day, I prepared for trial—interviewing witnesses; gathering boxes of exhibits; deposing cops, bystanders, paramedics, doctors, nurses, and the assistant medical examiner. By night, I wandered around the Grove, avoiding Cocowalk with its teens and tourists, its guys with boa constrictors around their necks or macaws on their shoulders. In my time, I have gone to great lengths to attract women, but being strangled by a reptile or shit on by a bird is not my idea of foreplay. I'd head to the Taurus, the only bar in the Grove that's older than I am. It's a brew-and-burger place in a quiche-and-cappuccino world, and I like it there. I'd have a couple of drafts, shoot some blow darts on the patio, tell harmless lies to various women, all the time wondering just what the hell was going on. Swimming through the surf of the upcoming murder trial, I had the gnawing feeling that I had yet to see the shark lurking on the ocean floor.

  Summer turned to fall, not that you would know it. Tropical depressions still formed in the Atlantic. Our news boys and girls still went agog at the prospect of every gale. The night air in the Grove was heavy with the scents of jasmine and hibiscus. An occasional cold front made its way south, always petering out in northern Florida, but clocking the winds around and reducing our humidity.

  I spent interminable days in the sadly misnamed Justice Building, a seven-story structure attached to the county jail by an overhead tunnel, an umbilical cord through which prisoners were force-fed into the so-called justice system.

  We get the idea from books and television that the courthouse is a theater, the trial a play. The better analogy is a huge tent with a three-ring circus inside. The judge is the ringmaster, wielding his chair, cracking his whip, forcing the lions onto their haunches in mock-serious poses of respect. We rise when the judge enters and exits, and we beg for permission before we speak. The judge feeds us when we are good, chastises us when we are bad, and either way we bow our heads in meek gratitude.

  In any given courtroom on any given Monday morning, the performers are not preparing for O. J. Simpson or the Menendez brothers. Not a trial of the century or even of the week. Hundreds of everyday cases flow along the conveyor belt of justice, dozens of bored inspectors picking them off, tossing them into this box or that for handling.
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br />   The system, both civil and criminal, intervenes when society has broken down. A wrong has been committed, or at least alleged. Offended at this breach of order, the system devises ways to make the offender pay, with either money or liberty. Like watching sausages or laws being made, observing the grist being milled in the courthouse is not an appetizing sight.

  If we could peel off the outer wall of the Justice Building, as Hurricane Andrew did to several condos just south of here, we would see a beehive buzzing with activity. Defendants stream into courtrooms from their holding cells; dark-suited lawyers slouch against the bar, whispering their deals or their golf scores; cops bleary-eyes from the graveyard shift sip coffee in the corridors, their holsters emptied in respect to this place of constitutional reverence; robed judges in their high chairs listen as the endless flow of humanity streams by them: victims, witnesses, defendants, and the prosecutors and defense lawyers, engaged in an obligatory conspiracy to dispose of cases with dismissals, plea bargains, and reduced sentences, lest the entire system crunch to a halt.

  In a dozen governmental offices, other anonymous functionaries push the paper and store the bytes that record the comings and goings of a world run amok. Stenographers, probation officers, bailiffs, translators, clerks, plus the girlfriends, mothers, and wives of the defendants themselves, bit players in the sagas that unfold under the pretentious and misleading sign that adorns each courtroom: WE WHO LABOR HERE SEEK ONLY TRUTH.

  If we moved our camera close to the shaved-off walls, if our microphone picked up the whispers and cries, what would we see, what would see hear? The rap of a guard's nightstick on the holding cell's bars, the muttered curses of the inmates, the whining entreaty to a prosecutor of a defense lawyer ("No way we agree to three years min-man") refusing to accept the consequences of a plea with a minimum mandatory sentence, the mechanical drone of the judge accepting a guilty plea, finding a defendant "alert and intelligent," which, if true, would probably preclude his being there in the first place.