BUM DEAL: Jake Lassiter Legal Thrillers

by Paul Levine

  Victoria said, “The usual procedure would be for the governor to assign a prosecutor from another circuit or someone from the attorney general’s office in Tallahassee. So why you?”

  “According to Pincher, the governor has a conflict, and so does the AG.”

  Victoria’s cell rang again. She checked the caller ID and shot me a look, accompanied by a shake of the head that said, “Scram.”

  I stayed put.

  “Yes, Clark,” she said.

  “Cover your ears, Jake,” Solomon said.

  My ears stayed uncovered in the soft evening breeze.

  “Of course you didn’t intend to kill her cat, Clark,” Victoria said.

  I whispered to Solomon, “Killing your wife is one thing, but the cat? Abominable.”

  “I can’t talk right now,” Victoria said, looking straight at me. “I’ll be there in the morning. Please try to get some sleep.”

  She clicked off, and Solomon said, “You mean we.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “You told our new client, ‘I’ll be there.’ Didn’t you mean ‘we’?”

  Ah, trouble in paradise, I thought. Already, Solomon and Lord were on different pages. A prosecutor could use that, even a prosecutor who loved them like younger siblings.

  “Sure, Steve. We’ll go together,” Victoria said. “If you think that’s the way to proceed, that’s fine.”

  “We’re partners! Why wouldn’t you want me there?”

  “I was thinking that maybe Clark would be forthcoming on a first meeting with me alone.”

  “Why? Because you used to sleep with him?”

  “Uncalled for, Steve,” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Psychologically speaking, Steve might have a point.”

  “Really?” Victoria glared at me as if I were the cockroach in the potato salad. “And this is based on what, Jake? Your knowledge of relationships gained from a lifetime of dating Dolphins cheerleaders and outcall masseuses?”

  “Your fiancé asked a legitimate question. Solomon can bring an objective analysis to your ex-sweetie’s case. Why would you shut him out?”

  “Jake, you know how much I adore you,” she said.

  I heard a but coming.

  “But I know you. You’re a very cagey lawyer, and you’re a lot smarter than you look.”

  “Thank you,” I said, choosing to take that as a compliment.

  “And you’re not going to sow dissension between Steve and me. As for Clark, I’ve known him since I was eighteen. We spent nearly three years together.”

  “Three years?” Solomon shook his head. “It lasted that long?”

  I loved this. Confusion to the enemy, even if they’re my best pals. Before long, they’d be Sparta and Athens, stalwart allies during the Greco-Persian Wars, then chopping each other to pieces during the Peloponnesian War. Hey, I got a B-plus in Ancient History at Penn State, thanks to sitting next to a brainy girl with excellent handwriting.

  “All I’m saying, Steve,” Victoria continued, “I know the man.”

  “Three years, I guess you do,” I said, tossing petrol on Solomon’s slow burn.

  Victoria ignored me and said, “Clark would never kill anyone.”

  I raised my eyebrows, one of which had nearly been ripped off by a New York Jets lineman known for his dirty play. “Victoria, you remind me of those neighbors of serial killers. ‘He always kept his lawn mowed.’”

  “Clark’s a brilliant man. His IQ is off the charts. He speaks five languages. He plays classical piano. He flies his own plane. He was the chief resident in orthopedics, had two prized fellowships, and from what I’ve heard, is a wonderful surgeon.”

  “Sounds like a catch,” I said agreeably. “Seems to me you’re marrying the wrong guy, though I doubt Solomon would ever kill your cat.”

  Victoria kept her voice even, but her blue eyes had turned ice-cold. “If you prosecute Clark, it will be the biggest mistake of your life.”

  “Bigger than a holding penalty on a kickoff return that negated a touchdown against the Colts?”

  “I’m going to defend Clark, and I’m going to beat you,” she said firmly.

  “She means ‘we’re’ going to beat you,” Solomon said.

  “And when we’re done with you,” she continued, “your reputation will be in shreds. You’ll be humiliated. Pincher will dump you, and when you resume your practice, no clients will hire you. You’ll be the guy who couldn’t cut it as a prosecutor.”

  “Wow,” I said. Thinking Victoria didn’t need any more lessons in assertiveness.

  “Wow,” Solomon repeated. “That’s pretty brutal, Vic. Jake’s our bestie.”

  “In my opinion, Victoria,” I said, “you can’t represent Clark Calvert.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  “A surgeon doesn’t operate on a loved one. Same goes for lawyers.”

  “I don’t love Clark.”

  “But you once did, right?”

  She was quiet a moment. What could she say? I nearly felt guilty for picking on her, but she was so damn competitive. Truth be told, so was I. God, I hate to lose.

  “I take your silence as a yes,” I said. “Of course you loved him once.”

  “I was a kid, Jake. I was infatuated with Clark. Maybe even overwhelmed that he cared for me. But what does it matter now?”

  “Emotions cloud our judgment, and judgment is our stock-in-trade.”

  “Thanks for the advice, oh wise one.”

  I glanced toward Solomon. “Have you ever seen your fiancée like this?”

  He shook his head.

  “Me, either. If I were you, Solomon, I’d look into those three years with Clark Calvert she never told you about. And I’d ask just what bond still exists between them.”

  “Damn it, Jake!” Victoria’s fine porcelain complexion was turning sunset pink.

  “There’s no bond, just distant memories.”

  “How distant when he has your cell phone number?” I turned to Solomon. “If she were my fiancée, I might ask a few questions, starting with ‘When’s the last time you saw each other?’”

  “Steve, don’t listen to him. He’s just trying to drive a wedge between us to gain an advantage in the case.”

  “I’m not listening,” Solomon said, a lie so bald-faced it wouldn’t have to shave in the morning.

  -5-

  Who Is This Guy?

  Victoria Lord…

  Riding shotgun, Victoria considered grabbing the steering wheel and yanking it hard right, sending the car over the curb, through a fence, down an embankment, and into the Coral Gables Waterway.

  That’s how much her fiancé was aggravating her, and it had been only five minutes since they had left the Red Fish Grill. They were heading north on Old Cutler Road in Steve’s torch-red Corvette with the personalized license plate, “I-OBJECT.” Victoria disliked the sports car’s low-slung seats that were difficult to get into with her long legs. Now that she thought of it, she despised the car, hated the license plate, and—at this moment—wasn’t terribly fond of the driver.

  Steve had Clark Calvert on his brain and couldn’t let it go. She tried to divert his attention by talking about their upcoming wedding. They had to pick a date. It cost $12,500 to rent Vizcaya Gardens on a Friday or Saturday night and only $7,500 during the week. And that’s before the food, the band, the flowers, the valet parkers, and a bunch of other expenses that would undoubtedly pop up. But did she really want a Wednesday-night wedding?

  Steve couldn’t be distracted. He was fixated on the man in her past. “It doesn’t compute,” he said. “You and this doctor. Were you ever engaged to him?”

  “No! Of course not. I was a kid.”

  “You were engaged to Bruce Bigby, the avocado king, when we met.”

  “And I broke it off when I fell in love with you. Why are you acting so threatened?”

  “You broke off one engagement. Maybe you’ll break off another.”

  “Oh
, please!”

  “Why didn’t you ever mention this guy? Haven’t I told you about all my relationships?”

  “Multiple times,” she said, “and in exhausting detail.”

  “So why were you holding out on me?”

  “I tried to tell you about Clark very shortly after we met. But you kept changing the subject to your athletic triumphs and romantic conquests.”

  The Corvette was about to navigate LeJeune Circle when she pondered the steering wheel and weighed the merits of crashing through the guardrail and into the waterway. The night was warm and moist, and with the top down, the air was heavy with jasmine, which grew wild in Coconut Grove.

  “I honestly don’t remember you ever mentioning Calvert,” Steve said.

  “It was our third date. I told you about being with a doctor when I was an undergrad, but you interrupted with a story about hitting a home run to win a game in the College World Series.”

  “The Regionals, not the World Series. And it was an infield hit. In the series, I was picked off third base in the bottom of the ninth of the championship game.”

  “Oh, right. Bad call, you told me.”

  “The pitcher balked! I should have scored. Instead, the series ended with me being tagged out.”

  “Life’s so unfair.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic, Vic. That was a very traumatic moment for me. Still is.”

  Honestly, she thought. Men and their games. Baseball, football, hockey. All the time and energy they waste. Okay, baseball at the University of Miami was Steve’s game. He’d played. That she could understand. But sitting in front the television, yelling his brains out for some professional team just because they’re from his city… well, that was incomprehensible. Every time Steve took her to a Marlins game, she thought, Here go three hours I’ll never get back.

  “Another time, I told you I had lived with a man when I was young,” she said. “That was Clark, of course, but you didn’t express much interest, didn’t ask any questions. As I recall, you immediately launched into a story about a flight attendant for Qatar Airways who bunked with you when she had layovers in Miami. Bunked was your exact verb, by the way.”

  “How do you remember this stuff?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “It’s a feminine thing. We remember when our mates are acting like thick-skulled knuckle draggers.”

  Steve turned right onto Loquat, faster than necessary. The Corvette hugged the road with nary a squealing tire. “Your cell. How did this long-lost love have your number?”

  “Five or six years ago, before you and I met, Clark moved to Miami to relocate his practice. He looked me up.”

  “Ha!” He shot a triumphant look at her, as if he’d scored a major point on cross-examination. “Did you start dating again?”

  She shook her head. “Clark was already involved with Sofia and was thinking about asking her to marry him. We had lunch, and he basically asked for my advice.”

  Steve eased the ’Vette left onto Kumquat. Two blocks from home.

  “He told me they were very different,” she continued. “Clark has always been introverted, the way a lot of intellectuals are. Sofia was outgoing, very social, lots of friends. But also very mercurial and given to mood swings and depression. She told him she’d attempted suicide as a teenager, but he wasn’t sure she was telling the truth.”

  Steve processed this, his defense-lawyer brain taking over from his jealous-fiancé brain. “Suicide is a helluva good defense to murder.” He shot her a look. “Did you advise your old boyfriend to marry this drama queen?”

  “I told him to follow his heart.”

  “Oh, jeez. I never understood what that means.”

  She smiled to herself. “Oh, yes, you do.”

  “Did you ever consider that he was giving you the right of last refusal?”

  “To marry him?”

  “Sure. He comes to you, hoping you’ll say, ‘Oh no, Clark. I made such a mistake dumping you back in the day.’”

  “I never said I dumped him.” She exhaled a long breath. “But…”

  “But you did, right?”

  “By the time I graduated from college, I realized that Clark had been a passage in my development, so yes, I’m the one who suggested we each go our separate ways but remain friends.”

  They pulled into the brick driveway of their Grove bungalow, and Steve said, with more certainty than the evidence would allow, “He wanted you. Maybe he still does.”

  “I doubt that.”

  Steve killed the engine, and they sat there in the darkness. It was quiet, except for a peacock screeching from a neighbor’s yard.

  “Was he ever abusive to you?” he asked.

  “No, never.”

  “Any acts of violence toward anyone?”

  “None.”

  Steve thought a moment, then asked, “Is there anything you’re not telling me?”

  For a lawyer, Victoria was a terrible liar, so she was glad Steve could not make out her features in the dark. “Of course not,” she said. “Like you said, you and I are lovers and law partners. We’re going to marry. We can’t have secrets. We can’t tell lies.”

  Except little ones, Victoria thought.

  -6-

  The Beast in All of Us

  Victoria Lord…

  Sitting in Steve’s Corvette, Victoria considered the difference between “facts” and the “truth.”

  She had told Steve the facts, things that actually happened.

  But were her answers the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

  No, because she had omitted and edited. She had pruned the branches of the unsightly leaves that would cast the truth in a harsher light.

  She did not tell Steve about Clark’s hair-trigger temper. How he could explode at the slightest provocation or none at all. A waiter who delivered lukewarm soup, a cabdriver who missed a turn, a hotel desk clerk slow delivering the room key. And occasionally—not often, to be sure—he could lash out at her.

  But he was not violent. Not in actions. Therefore, she’d told the truth when she said that Clark had never abused her, had never acted violently.

  But the whole truth was complex. She tried now to remember the precise notion she had so long ago when breaking up with Clark. Ah, there it was.

  Clark intellectualizes violence.

  The concept of violence intrigues him.

  He thinks about violent acts but would never commit them.

  She remembered their last week together and the terrifying incident that ended their relationship. A vacation in California. They drove north along the Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Clark had been even more withdrawn than usual, his quiet spells occasionally interrupted by bizarre musings. None weirder than on a chilly day on an ocean-side cliff near Big Sur, where the wind whipped strands of fog across the shoreline.

  Far below, waves pounded at jagged rock formations and foamed into tidal pools. They stopped at a lookout point, their shoes just inches from the precipice. A steel-gray sky above, a steel-gray sea below. An unspoiled spot. No barrier or fence. No one else around. Clark spoke softly, and she leaned close to hear him over the cacophony of wind and waves.

  “Ever wonder what it would be like?” he said. “How easy it would be?”

  “What?”

  “To kill someone.” He moved a step behind her and gripped her shoulder with his right hand, a surgeon’s hand that sawed through bones. “What would it take, twenty pounds of force? Maybe less if the leverage were right?”

  “That’s just the mechanics, Clark.” She made no move to twist away. “It doesn’t account for the person. Most of us—you, me, the people we know—would never do that. Only a beast would take another’s life.”

  He raised his dark eyebrows and smiled. “We’re all beasts. In the right time and place, we’re king of the beasts.”

  Letting go of her shoulder, he roared like a lusty lion and laughed at his own joke.

  “I don’t
have such a cynical view of human nature,” she said.

  “No?”

  He shoved her hard in the back. Her knees buckled, and she stumbled forward, her head and shoulders over the cliff’s edge, her arms flailing in space.

  His left hand shot forward and caught her just above the elbow a split second before she would have tumbled over the cliff.

  “Clark! What the hell! Are you insane?”

  She was shaking, birds flapping their wings inside her rib cage. He was laughing, oblivious to her fear and rage. His failing, she realized then, was an inability to empathize. He had no idea how terror had just clutched at her heart. He was a man of contradictions. On the surface, he was caring and kind, sensitive to her needs. But underneath, there was a coldness that killed her feelings for him.

  “Relax, Victoria,” he said. “I just wanted to change your view of human nature to something more realistic.” He roared with laughter again, the king of the beasts, then turned and walked back toward the car, leaving her there, shivering in the wind.

  She broke up with him the next day.

  -7-

  The Pursuit of Happiness

  Jake Lassiter…

  I was smoking weed and feeling groovy.

  On doctor’s instructions. More or less.

  Dr. ld, carrying a grocery bag, approached the park bench where I’d been planted like a fern for the past hour. I was in South Pointe Park at the tip of Miami Beach. A hundred yards away, a cruise ship flying the Norwegian flag plowed out of Government Cut, headed toward the Caribbean with three thousand fun seekers aboard. If a couple hundred contracted norovirus and spent their vacation pooping out their guts, maybe I could pick up a PI case or two against the cruise line. A hundred yards in the other direction was the beach, which ended at a jetty that formed a barrier to the Cut. A biplane flew along the beach trailing a sign advertising suntan oil. No mention was made of skin cancer.