by Paul Levine
“What happens,” I asked, “if personal loyalty conflicts with moral principles?”
“Then it would be the truest test of loyalty, would you not agree?”
I could have objected to the leading question, but I didn’t.
Before I could agree or disagree, Yagamata turned to greet two local politicians who attended every high-society bar mitzvah, communion, and bayside soiree on the public service gravy train. Yagamata didn’t turn back. He just left me standing there, my paw wrapped around a slender champagne flute. I guess it hadn’t been a question after all. It was a message. Dockworker Francisco Crespo was a damn lucky guy to have his millionaire boss paying a downtown mouthpiece to look the other way. And me, I was being paid handsomely to keep the boss’s name out of the papers and deliver Crespo into the garbage disposal we call the criminal justice system. Do the job right, there’d be others to follow. Screw it up, there’d be pain and ruin.
You and me both, Francisco. Just a couple of lucky guys.
N ow perched on the stage, Yagamata was introducing the local celebrities, a collection of county judges, city commissioners, TV anchorfolks, business executives, even a monsignor and two men who claimed to sit on the water and sewer board. Then Yagamata announced he was giving three million dollars to preserve some Art Deco properties on South Beach. In lieu of the mayor, who was on trial for bribery and extortion, the vice mayor of Miami Beach handed him a plaque, and all the politicos applauded politely and jockeyed for position as a local TV crew taped the event. Charlie and I moseyed over to a Henry Moore sculpture that looked like a gray marble camel. It made a fine, if lumpy, picnic table. I dug into a second portion of stone crabs, dipping the white meat into a tangy mustard sauce.
“ Menippe mercenaria,” Charlie said with genuine affection, spearing one of my claws. “Sweeter than lobster.”
“Bad for your cholesterol, Charlie,” I said, hoarding my remaining stoners.
“Don’t be a spoilsport.” When I signaled a waiter to bring me a beer instead of champagne spiked with vitamin C, Charlie pilfered another claw. I used to stalk stone crabs in the shallow coastal waters each winter. You can find them under rocks or buried in mounds of sand on the grass flats in the bay. Some folks use baited traps, but those attract the wily octopus, which eats your crab by sucking the meat from the shell, and leaves you with a bunch of tentacles to wrestle with. Others use a metal prober and a net, it being illegal to spear our eight-legged friends. Most people simply pay thirty bucks a la carte at Joe’s for a handsome tray of the claws, but I always enjoyed catching them by hand.
You don’t kill a stone crab. You grab it and rotate the body one way and the claw the other way. The claw snaps off cleanly. Toss the crab back into the water, and it will regenerate the claw. Then, next winter, do it again. Do the crabs feel pain, I wonder. And do they miss their claws?
Charlie was making slurping noises, leaving a trail of mustard in his beard. “What’s new, Jake? Still handling those chicken-shit civil cases?”
“You’re close, Charlie. Very close.”
I told him about Chicken Prince versus Percy’s Perfect Poultry, and Charlie scowled. “Arguing about the pectoralis minor muscle of the chicken, for goodness’ sake. Who cares? Now give me a good murder…”
Charlie went on for a while, reminiscing about a couple of cases we had worked together-the doctor caught in a web of lust and greed, the women strangled as they played computer sex-talk games-as other dignitaries took the stage to heap praise on our host. The director of a local art museum gave his thanks for Yagamata’s generous gifts, and the head of the symphony did the same.
Around us, Biscayne Bay shimmered black under a soft easterly breeze. The lights of the Collins Avenue hotels winked, and an occasional jet from M.I.A. soared overhead. It was a beautiful night filled with beautiful people doing beautiful things. As usual, I didn’t quite fit in.
“Will you look at that,” Charlie Riggs said, interrupting my reverie.
Yagamata stood alone on the stage. He had opened a red velvet box and withdrew what appeared to be a green and silver egg-shaped sculpture. At its base, two winged creatures stood with swords and shields raised high.
“Come closer, Jake,” Charlie said, moving toward the stage.
Yagamata was speaking to his guests: “As many of you know, I have given many gifts of art to museums both in Japan and in the United States.” He allowed himself a modest chuckle. “I thought you might like to see a little something I gave myself.”
The crowd tittered at the “little something.” Yagamata was showing off and enjoying it.
“I love art, and I love jewelry. So the jewelry-art of Carl Faberge is most attractive to me. When Faberge made imperial eggs for the family of the czar, he often enclosed a surprise.” Carefully, Yagamata lifted the lid of the egg and delicately pulled out what at first looked like a thick gold chain.
Moving closer, I saw it clearly, a miniature train, an engine, a tender, and five coaches of solid gold.
“The Trans-Siberian Railway Egg of 1900,” whispered Charlie Riggs, who knows everything worth knowing and a lot that isn’t.
“I don’t know if you can appreciate the incredible detail from where you are standing,” Yagamata said to the crowd. “One coach even has a miniature imperial chapel. There are tiny signs for ‘smokers’ and ‘ladies only.’ It is really quite special.”
Charlie made a harrumphing sound that he sometimes uses to clear his throat and his mind.
I nudged him from behind. “What do you suppose that thing cost?”
“You couldn’t buy it,” Charlie replied, testily.
“I know I couldn’t, but what do you suppose Yagamata spent?”
“He couldn’t buy it, either. Not if it’s the real McCoy.”
“You think it’s fake? Skim milk masquerading as cream?”
“Trust me, Jake. The original could not be bought. What I don’t understand is how anyone could afford to copy something so intricate. It would simply be too expensive to duplicate.”
Yagamata was still fondling his little gold train, and Charlie Riggs was still chewing over something I didn’t understand.
“Didn’t that magazine publisher buy a lot of those eggs?” I asked.
“Yes, Malcolm Forbes. But he bought them from private collections.”
“So, maybe Yagamata-”
“The Trans-Siberian Railway Egg is in the Armoury Museum in the Kremlin, and not in the gift shop, either. You can’t buy it, Jake, any more than you could buy Lenin’s Tomb. It belongs to the Russian Republic.”
Yagamata folded the train together. The cars fit snugly together by the minute gold hinges that connected them. He put the train back into the egg, and the egg into its red velvet box. The guests began gravitating toward the dessert table, where white-gloved waiters served chocolate eggs filled with white mousse and a raspberry for a surprise. I just love theme parties.
“Sometimes, Charlie, you make life too complicated,” I said to my old pal.
“I’m waiting,” Charlie said, “ arrectis auribus, with ears pricked up.”
“Sometimes, things are just the way they seem.”
“Meaning what?”
I seldom get anywhere quicker than Charlie Riggs, so I wanted to prolong the moment. “If Matsuo Yagamata wanted that shiny little choo-choo train and it wasn’t for sale, what do you suppose he’d do?”
Doc Riggs eyed me suspiciously but didn’t say a word.
“He’d just take it, Charlie. He’d steal the damn thing.”
4
THE PROFESSOR AND THE PRIVATE EYE
You smell anything fishy?” Marvin the Maven whispered to Saul the Tailor.
“Vad you say?” asked Saul, fingering the part in his steel gray toupee and cupping a hand around his ear.
“The smell,” Marvin repeated, tapping his nose. “You can still smell, can’t you?”
Saul the Tailor sniffed the air and nodded. “Somethin’ ain’t kosher
in Denmark.”
H. T. Patterson carried a brown bag to the clerk’s table and pulled out your everyday supermarket chicken. In the pale fluorescent light of the courtroom, the dead bird was pasty white. “At this juncture, without further ado,” Patterson began, in his hypnotic singsong, “the plaintiff wishes to offer demonstrative evidence, ipso facto, the deboning of a deceased fowl in order to facilitate the jury’s understanding of Professor Pennywhistle’s testimony.”
Translation: A farmer with a Ph. D. was gonna cut up a dead chicken.
“Time out, Your Honor!” I was on my feet. “We’ve had no notice of this. They’re going to perform-”
“A simple demonstration,” Patterson interrupted.
“An autopsy is more like it. It serves no purpose, none at all.
Either Chicken Prince has the exclusive right to use the term ‘Chickee Tender,’ or it doesn’t. The anatomy doesn’t matter.”
“Objection overruled,” said Judge Bricklin. “Let’s see what they’ve got, but move it along, Mr. Patterson.”
The clerk, a young Cuban woman with dyed red hair and three-inch fingernails, wrinkled her nose and tied an exhibit tag-plaintiff’s number twenty-seven-around the deceased’s drumstick. The bailiff opened the door to the corridor and ushered the witness down the aisle. Professor Clyde Pennywhistle toddled to the witness stand. He was a fifty-year-old cherub, portly and round-faced with a small mouth curved in a perpetual smile. His hair was a 1950’s flattop gone gray. He wore bifocals, and his eyes were slightly crossed behind the lenses.
H. T. Patterson ran sonorously through the professor’s background, all the way from working on a pig farm as a kid to professor of poultry science at Purdue. Patterson opened a gunnysack and pulled out a stainless steel instrument that looked like an upside-down funnel. “The deboning cone,” he told the jury gravely, as if it were the Holy Grail. On cue, the professor stepped down and walked to the clerk’s table, just a few feet from the jury box. With a sharp knife and a deftness that Charlie Riggs would admire, the professor made an incision down the back, peeled the skin off, and started carving away.
“This will just take a moment,” the professor said, expertly slicing through the shoulder joint, then pulling at the wing to tear the carcass apart. Then, with small precise movements, he pared some more, removing the breast. He held up a piece of the meat. “The pectoralis major, often called the chicken fillet…” Next he sliced off a strip of muscle, maybe an inch wide and six inches long.
The high-ceilinged courtroom was hot and stuffy, the ancient air-conditioning wheezing just to stir the soggy air. Even without decaying flesh on the premises, the courthouse usually smelled like a locker room after three-a-day practices in August.
I thought the professor made a mistake when he moved the deboning cone and the eviscerated chicken from the clerk’s table to the rail of the jury box. Juror Number Two, a Coral Gables housewife, seemed to be leaning backward, increasing what Dr. Les Weiner would call her horizontal zone from the professor and the poultry. Number Three, a commercial fisherman, didn’t seem to mind, but Number Five, an accountant in a three-piece suit, looked a tad green around the gills.
“The tenderloin, or pectoralis minor, pulls the wings down when the bird tries to fly,” Professor Pennywhistle explained.
Wafting across the courtroom along with the tepid air was the unmistakable smell of rotting tissue, and some of the spectators began to leave. Behind me, Marvin the Maven was fanning himself with his straw hat: “That ain’t no spring chicken.”
“The term ‘tenderloin’ came from the pork industry,” the professor droned on, oblivious to the odor, “then was borrowed by the turkey growers, and finally was adopted by the chicken industry, but it was Chicken Prince that gave the word ‘tender’ its specific commercial meaning…”
The professor gestured with his knife, accidentally sideswiping the deboning cone, sliding it over the rail and into the jury box. What was left of the chicken dropped straight into the crotch of the queasy accountant. All except for the liver, which squirted into the lap of the Coral Gables housewife, and the gizzard and heart, which plopped with a satisfying splat onto the stenographer’s open-toed sandals.
“Oh, duck feathers and flapdoodle,” said the Purdue professor. “Should have brought a wog.”
“Haven’t heard that word since Lawrence of Arabia,” whispered Marvin the Maven.
“Larry Oravian?” asked Saul the Tailor, leaning forward, head cocked toward the witness stand.
“A wahg?” the stenographer dutifully asked, wiggling her bare toes free of the glop.
“W-O-G,” the witness explained. “Without giblets.”
The professor bent down and picked up the gizzard, which the stenographer had kicked in the general direction of the bailiff. Sniffing it, his mind seemed to wander. “Wonderful digestive tool, the gastric mill.”
The accountant did it first, upchucking in the front row of the jury box. As he gagged, the housewife covered her mouth, then let go, too. I had never seen anything like it. A chain reaction, four of the six losing their lunch right after the other.
“What mishegoss,” Marvin the Maven said, picking up his hat. “C’mon, Saul, there’s a sexual harassment trial gonna start down the hall.’’
T he day of the arraignment and not even a paragraph about State of Florida v. Francisco Crespo. Fine with me. I’ve never tried my cases in the newspaper. The press always convicts.
The lack of publicity wasn’t surprising. That morning’s Miami Journal featured a quarter-page map of the county showing where each of last year’s 441 homicides occurred, according to zip codes. In some cities, folks buy their homes depending on the quality of the school district. In Greater Miami, cautious citizens check the neighborhood’s body count. Best I could figure, 33039 was the safest zip code. Not one homicide all year. Unfortunately, that’s Homestead Air Force Base, and I’m not real good at saluting, so I continue to live in the little coral-rock cottage tucked alongside chinaberry and live oak trees between Poinciana and Kumquat in Coconut Grove. It’s quiet except for an occasional police siren, and my pillbox of a house could withstand a hurricane and has. It weathered the storms of ’26 and ’50 and only lost a couple of shutters to Hurricane Andrew, which leveled the air force base in ’92.
So it would be just another item on the clerk’s computer printout when Francisco Crespo stood to enter a plea. By local standards, a warehouse brawl-even a homicidal brawl-was barely newsworthy, though in the warped world of the news media, another case was. I was eating my morning papaya with a slice of lime when I saw the Journal’s headline: JURORS BARF; JUDGE BARKS. Oh, the courthouse gang would have fun with me over that one.
A fine layer of dew covered the old canvas top of the convertible. Only April, but the humidity was picking up already. I headed to the criminal justice building, happy to stay out of the downtown civil courthouse. On the exit ramp of the Don Shula Expressway, a few blocks from the sheriff’s department, a black Porsche Testarossa with dark tinted windows downshifted and powered past me on the right berm. Ordinarily, in that situation, I hit the horn, shout, and make a few gestures that would make John McEnroe blush. But the bumper sticker on the Porsche said, “ Honk if you’ve never seen an Uzi fired through a car window,” and I already had.
There weren’t any reporters in the courtroom when I pleaded my friend Francisco Crespo not guilty to second-degree murder. That’s right. The plea is “not guilty.” A defendant doesn’t have to be “innocent.” That’s for the gods to decide. A jury only determines whether the state meets its burden of proving guilt to the exclusion of a reasonable doubt. If the state fails, the defendant is adjudged “not guilty,” even though the jurors may believe the guy is a slimeball who hasn’t been “innocent” since kindergarten.
I did the usual: waived reading of the criminal information, demanded trial by jury, and requested all the discovery materials in the state’s possession. I also asked the state not to inadvertent
ly lose evidence favorable to the defense, which prompted the prosecutor to ask if I thought he was unethical or incompetent, and I simply said “yes.”
The judge set the trial for June. Stone crabs would be out of season, and rich Miamians would be headed out of state. The jury panel would be comprised of folks angry at the heat, the mosquitoes, and the person responsible for their involuntary civic duties, one Francisco Crespo.
I didn’t tell Crespo any of this. We had only a moment together. He stood next to me, looking deceptively puny in an oversize pale yellow guayabera. I asked him if there was anything else he wanted to tell me, and he shook his head. I told him I wanted to talk about Matsuo Yagamata, and he gave me a sad smile that said no. He asked me to tell his mother that he was okay, and then he left the courtroom, free on bond, trusting me with his life.
I slipped from the courthouse nearly unnoticed. The only people who needled me about the mistrial were two bailiffs who flapped their wings, a probation officer who clucked an excellent cock-a-doodle-do, and an ex-client, shackled at the ankles, who told me not to chicken out.
L ourdes Soto tilted her head and gave me a mischievous smile. I figured it might have been my twinkly eyes or suave manner.
Then I caught sight of myself in the mirrored wall of the Versailles, a Cuban restaurant with a French name. I saw the same thing she did: an overgrown boy with a splendid guava milkshake mustache. Resisting the urge to use my shirtsleeve, I wiped my mouth with a napkin, swallowed a mouthful of my sandwich-sliced pork, turkey, and cheese with a pickle on crunchy Cuban bread-and got down to business. I’ve got nothing against angel hair pasta with olive oil, pine nuts, and sun-dried tomatoes. Nothing except the downtown yuppies who populate the trendy restaurants. Same thing with French water and German cars. Fine products. It’s just the assholes who use them as status symbols that get me down. So I prefer lunch in Little Havana, which I suggested when Lourdes Soto called me and asked if I could use a good investigator.
