Lassiter

by Paul Levine

  While Castiel pounded away, I took inventory of the jury. I was reasonably happy with our Dirty Dozen. I landed five women, three in their twenties, a pedicurist, a homemaker mother of twins, and a colon hydrotherapist. I didn’t ask the last one any detailed questions about her work.

  Another woman, a pharmaceutical rep, was a striking redhead in a short skirt. Drug companies like their salespeople young, female, and pretty. The final woman wore safari khakis and worked as a python wrangler, clearing the snakes out of neighborhood canals.

  The seven men included two retirees, a guy who drove a Doritos truck, two wannabe actors, both waiting tables. One man was unemployed, and another said he was a life coach, a term neither Don Shula nor Joe Paterno ever used.

  Castiel picked up steam, repeating his key words, “obsessed,” “stalked,” and “shot” a few times. When I got my turn, I would talk about Amy as little as possible and the two pals, Perlow and Ziegler, a lot. My key phrase would be “an army of assassins,” which I hoped would perk up the jurors’ ears.

  “Enemies, criminals, and assassins. That’s who could have lurked outside Charlie Ziegler’s windows that fateful night. Max Perlow was a lifelong gangster with deep connections in organized crime. Charles Ziegler spent years as a pornographer, a world crawling with crime and corruption. These men made enemies. Yes, there could have been an army of assassins lurking in those bushes that night.”

  Before I could give that spiel, Castiel had to finish, and he seemed to be having too much fun to stop.

  “Remember that no one piece of evidence is conclusive of guilt or innocence,” the State Attorney was saying. “Think of your favorite recipe.”

  Gin, vermouth, olive … if you’re talking to me.

  “Take strawberry shortcake. If you just eat the dry cake, it’s not all that tasty. Add the strawberries and we’re getting there. But it’s the whipped cream that ties it all together. Please wait until the whipped cream is on top before reaching any conclusions.”

  Castiel sat down, and the judge said, “This seems like a propitious time for our lunch recess.”

  55 Clay Pigeons

  A criminal trial is not the last half of a Law & Order episode. It does not sail along with pithy questions, furious objections, and searing answers. A criminal trial is a slog through the mud, boring and repetitious, with fits and starts and endless downtime. It is played out in an arena cold enough to preserve fish—and hopefully keep jurors awake—under yellow fluorescent lighting that makes even the robust and hearty appear jaundiced and sickly.

  The days crawled by as Castiel methodically put on the state’s case. An assistant medical examiner with a Pakistani accent testified as to the autopsy results.

  Max Perlow, deceased. Death classified as a homicide. Gunshot wound to the chest. Cause of death, exsanguination. The decedent bled to death.

  The bullet tore a wide path through bone and tissue and blood vessels. The M.E. explained that the bullet’s kinetic energy slowed down when it crashed through the solarium window. A slower bullet causes greater tissue damage. He used a blackboard to describe a mathematical equation.

  “Kinetic energy equals the weight of the bullet times its velocity squared,” the M.E. said, “divided by gravitational acceleration times two.”

  I wouldn’t have cross-examined that, even if I knew how.

  The mention of the bullet’s weight segued smoothly to the ballistics tech, who testified that the slug pulled from Perlow was a .38 caliber. He compared the striations of that spent bullet with those of the two slugs pulled from the tires of my Eldo. Yep. All three were fired by the same gun.

  The state didn’t have the murder weapon but didn’t need it. The day after the M.E. testified, two witnesses from the gun range told their stories. Both said they saw Amy Larkin slay my innocent Michelins with a weapon they recognized as a Sig Sauer .380. The logical paradigm was simple and straightforward:

  Amy Larkin shot my tires with a .38 caliber gun.

  The same gun was used to kill Perlow.

  Therefore, Amy Larkin killed Perlow.

  Then came the physical evidence I’d been expecting. Amy’s finger-prints were on two panes of glass in the solarium windows. A scrap of fabric taken from the jagged leaves of the bayonet plants matched a unitard seized in Amy’s motel room.

  On cross, I got both the experts to admit that the prints and the cloth could have been left several nights earlier. That’s what defense lawyers do. Wait for the state to launch a clay pigeon, then try to blast it out of the air. What makes it tough is when the state has more pigeons than you have ammo.

  Sitting next to me at the defense table, Amy remained composed. When I glanced at her profile, I sometimes saw her sister. The same angular jawline, the same girl-next-door quality.

  I had told Amy that I was still looking for Krista and that I’d found Snake, the biker-turned-reverend. I expected the news to excite her, but she expressed little curiosity, even after my telling her that Snake placed Krista at Ziegler’s party.

  I gave Amy a legal pad to make notes. Clients sometimes come up with better questions than lawyers. But Amy didn’t give me any help. She doodled. She drew pictures of a house with four people standing out front. Mom, Dad, and two daughters, a bright sun in the sky. It reminded me of the artwork in the women’s jail, cheerful paintings mocked by the grimness around them.

  At one lunch recess, I joined Amy in her cramped holding cell, just down a corridor from the courtroom.

  “What’s Ziegler going to say on the stand?” I asked, yet again.

  “What did he say when you took his deposition?”

  “You know damn well. He saw you outside the window.”

  “So …?”

  “So I’m wondering if he had a change of heart.”

  She was tying the bow on her silk blouse, fumbling a bit without a mirror. “If you must know …”

  “If I must know! I’m your lawyer, dammit! When Ziegler came to the jail, what did he say?”

  “That he was going to do what’s right.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

  “The son-of-a-bitch told the cops you were the shooter. He signed an affidavit to that effect for Castiel. In deposition, under oath, he repeated the same thing to me. It’s a big deal to recant. But you didn’t ask?”

  “It’s in God’s hands.”

  “Let’s hope He doesn’t have butterfingers.”

  “Don’t be blasphemous.”

  Playing the religion card. It could have been an act. But with Amy, who knew?

  We had about two minutes before court would reconvene. For weeks, I’d been pressuring her to tell me what Ziegler had said during his jailhouse visit. This do the right thing bit was the first crack in her can’t tell you armor. I decided to stay quiet a moment. In court, it’s a trick I use to keep a witness talking. Give the room a moment of silence that demands to be filled. I looked into Amy’s green eyes and waited.

  “Charlie’s different than I expected.”

  “Yeah?”

  C’mon, Amy. Talk to me.

  “He asked for my forgiveness.”

  “For what?”

  “For taking advantage of Krista all those years ago. For my being in the situation I’m in now. He blames himself and he’s looking for redemption.”

  Ziegler had talked to me about redemption, too. But talk’s cheap, and the man was a born bullshit artist.

  “He had tears in his eyes,” she continued, “and seemed truly repentant.”

  What’s next? I wondered. Amy and Ziegler as Facebook friends?

  She grabbed one of my hands and clutched it in both of hers. “Charlie told me that after all this time, he’s almost certain Krista is dead.”

  “Sounds like he might feel guilty about that.”

  “I think so, too. But not in the way you mean.”

  “How, then?”

  “Looking at him, listening to him,
I don’t think Charlie had anything to do with Krista’s death. In a strange way, that brought me peace.”

  She managed a small, soft smile. Placid and accepting. I tried to measure her sincerity. It’s what I do for a living, but if I had to deal with Amy every day, I’d go broke. From day one, the woman has been a mystery.

  “I don’t want you at peace, Amy.”

  “Why?”

  “To help me at trial, I need you alert and wired. Not in some Zen state. Not the president of the Charlie Ziegler Fan Club.”

  “I can only be who I am, Jake.”

  Just who the hell that was, I still didn’t know.

  56 The Portable Vagina

  Kip promised to clean his room, do all his homework a week in advance, and never talk back for the rest of his life … if only I would take him to the erotica convention.

  I turned the kid down.

  “C’mon, Uncle Jake. Why should you have all the fun?”

  “I’m gonna interview Angel Roxx. It’s strictly business.”

  I knew Angel had a special relationship with Charlie Ziegler. She’s who he sent to my house that first night, and she was at his place when he invited me over for sushi and tough-guy talk. Now I wanted to see what the porn actress knew about her boss’s relationship with my client.

  “You took me to the gun and knife show,” Kip said, pouting. “You let me watch Reservoir Dogs on DVD.”

  “So?”

  “Violence is okay for kids, but sex isn’t? That what you’re saying, Uncle Jake?”

  Where in the world did he learn the art of cross-examination?

  “I make the rules, Kip. Deal with it.”

  “That’s so arbitrary!”

  “So’s life. Deal with that, too.”

  I try to be a good surrogate dad. I really do. But sometimes Kip can be a real pest. How do parents handle it? The ones with three or four kids, always yapping, always wanting something. Where does that patience come from? Only this morning, I got a phone call from Commodore Perkins at school. My latest request for a continuance was denied. I’d have to show up for Kip’s official disciplinary hearing next week.

  “Jeez, I did all that work for you and this is how you treat me,” my nephew whined.

  “You researched a porn star. It wasn’t like digging ditches.”

  Kip spent last night happily downloading material from Angel’s fan sites. He also printed out several photo sets. Some were highly educational. 101 Positions to Try at Home illustrated the difference between reverse cowgirl and rodeo, something that had always puzzled me.

  I skimmed Kip’s research and learned that Angel grew up in horse country in Central Florida. “I was just another little cocksucker from Ocala who decided to get paid for it,” she was quoted as saying. “Charlie Ziegler discovered me. One day I was doing Stable Girls in Heat, and the next I was a legit personality on reality TV. I even have health insurance!”

  The convention center was mobbed. Young guys in University of Miami T-shirts and shorts; bikers with multiple piercings and body art; some old hippies, ash-gray hair tied back in ponytails, some with their old ladies along. Booths ran along narrow aisles, like any trade show. But these were staffed by young women in micro-minis, leather corsets, and all manner of see-through teddies, baby-dolls, and assorted come fuck me attire. Under the bright lighting, it was a pretty bizarre sight, even by Miami standards.

  I passed the Titty Tattoo booth, the Penile Cosmetic Surgery Center, the Sin Toy Shoppe, and a fetish place called “Fluffy Bunny Whips.” The biggest crowd—a bunch of young guys cheering and high-fiving—gathered around the Anal Ring Toss competition.

  A newspaper ad had alerted me that Angel Roxx would be working the Dip-Stick booth. The business had nothing to do with oil changes. Dip-Stick was a patented plastic cylinder about the size of a flashlight with a pink foam top. A slit ran through the foam with puffy lips on each side and a little clitoral button inside, like the prize in a Cracker Jack box. Basically, a portable vagina. Pussy to go.

  The sales hook was customization. The foam receptacles were created from molds of various porn stars … including Ms. Angel Roxx.

  “Hey, big fellah, how ’bout some MILF pussy?” a woman said, as I approached the booth.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  The woman wore a peekaboo pink teddy and knee-high, fleece-lined boots. Underneath sheer lingerie, her breasts were a matched set of dirigibles. A muffin top of jelly fat spilled over the elastic top of her thong. She’d had some work done, her nose a thin wafer. Her skin—as tight as the head of a drum—shined with an eerie waxiness, as if buffed by a floor polisher. I pegged her age at somewhere between 40 and hell.

  “Anyone ever mention you look a little like Studley Do-Right?” she said.

  “All the time. You know the old Studster?”

  “Know him? I’ve blown him. We costarred in Splendor in the Ass. I was just a kid, and he was on his farewell tour.” She gave a little curtsy. “I’m Cherries Jubilee. I won the Golden Dildo for best girl-on-girl with Bananas Foster back in the eighties.”

  “Congrats.”

  “Here’s my beav.” She handed me a Dip-Stick, vagina-side up, then stuck her index finger between the foam lips, exposing a bulbous little button. “Have you ever seen anything like that?”

  In fact, I hadn’t. “A clit like a cornichon,” I said, agreeably.

  “On sale for eighty-nine bucks, and we throw in a tube of lube and batteries for the vibrometer. You can take her for a test drive if you want.”

  “Can’t. Got a suspended license. Is Angel Roxx here?”

  “She’s in the back, giving hand jobs to guys in uniform.”

  I was wearing my old Dolphins jersey but figured that didn’t count.

  “Vets in wheelchairs get priority,” Cherries said. “Angel’s the most patriotic porn star I know.”

  I waited five minutes until Angel emerged from behind a black velvet curtain. She wore a red, white, and blue bikini with cowboy boots and a matching cowboy hat.

  A close-cropped, square-jawed young man in a wheelchair rolled out just behind her. He wore a U.S. Marines T-shirt, and his body was bulked up, but his legs were twigs poking out of camo shorts.

  “Bye, hon,” Angel said, kissing him on the forehead. She saw me standing there and said, “You had your chance, big guy. I don’t give rain checks.”

  We sat at a plastic table in the lunchroom, off the main floor of the convention. “Charlie’s been good to me,” she said. “I’m not gonna stab him in the back.”

  “Not asking you to. Just trying to find out why he’s gotten friendly with my client.”

  “Didn’t know he had. I thought she tried to shoot him.”

  “Did you know he visited her in jail?”

  “No way! Why would he?”

  I shrugged. “My client won’t tell me, and I can’t talk to him.”

  “Cool. A mystery.”

  Angel seemed to loosen up. Everyone, it seems, loves a good mystery.

  “Ziegler ever mention my client’s sister? Krista Larkin, the girl who went missing?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Any changes in his mood lately?” I asked.

  “Charlie’s always been weird. When your client started stalking him, he got freakier than usual.”

  “In what way?”

  “Nervous. Noises spooked him. Like if he didn’t see you and you said something, he’d jump.”

  “Anything else?”

  She adjusted the strap on her bikini, and her right boob did a little dance. “He hasn’t been focused on work, I can tell you that.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “We were supposed to shoot a pilot for my new show, Who Wantz to Do a Porn Star? Charlie never hired the director, never did location scouting. Time came and went. No show.”

  Men streamed by the lunch area, carrying souvenir T-shirts, bumper stickers, and mouse pads, some affixed with photos of their favorite porn stars.

 
“Does Ziegler ever talk to you about what’s bothering him?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Not even in intimate moments?”

  She laughed. “I’m not fucking Charlie.”

  “When I saw you at his house that night, I just assumed …”

  “Charlie likes having girls around. But he doesn’t do them. I doubt he even does his wife. He only does his girlfriend.”

  “Melody Sanders.”

  “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “It’s my job, and every once in a while I do it. What’s Melody like?”

  “Never met her. But she must be something.”

  “Why?”

  “Charlie listens to her. I’ve overheard him on the phone. He talks business.”

  “And this surprised you?”

  “Yeah, I figured he’d be shouting at her, ‘I’ll be over for my blow job at seven,’ but it’s not like that. His voice gets all quiet and he reads her the overnight ratings and asks her advice, which he doesn’t do with anybody, even his corporate officers.” Angel checked her watch and rubbed her hands together, maybe to warm them up. “If you want to know what makes Charlie tick, ask Melody. I’m betting she knows him better than anyone in the world.”

  57 Too Many Questions

  It was Monday morning, the start of another week of trial. I planned on a breakfast of toasted Bimini bread, Cuban coffee, and Haitian fried bananas. Hey, it’s Miami. We’re not a cornflakes town.

  Althea’s Taco Truck is my office when I’m in trial. It’s parked each day in front of the Justice Building, so it’s equally convenient for cops, defense lawyers, and home invasion robbers. The owner/driver/cook is Althea Rollins, a Sequoia-size woman in her late sixties who’s partial to Caribbean and Hispanic food.

  A dozen years ago, one of her sons was picked up for supplying half the senior class at Killian High with weed. I got the kid into pre-trial intervention and the arrest was expunged. He straightened out, went to college, then pharmacy school, and now he’s dispensing legal drugs at a chain store in South Miami.