BUM DEAL: Jake Lassiter Legal Thrillers

by Paul Levine

  My car, a cream-colored 1984 Biarritz Eldorado, had red velour upholstery that would have felt at home in a New Orleans brothel. The Eldo was my fee in a possession-with-intent-to-distribute case in the Florida Keys. Two hundred pounds of marijuana. My client went free on an illegal search claim, and I got the car, which had a suspicious aroma similar to pine trees and fresh-mowed lawns coming from the trunk.

  Dr. Freudenstein’s home was a two-room cottage at the rear of an estate on Harbor Point, a small peninsula of mansions on the Biscayne Bay side of the Key. This one was a three-story behemoth, Mediterranean Revival with iron balcony railings, an orange barrel-tile roof, and lots of archways and loggias and gardens of blooming birds-of-paradise and red bougainvillea. It had a dock roughly the length of a football field.

  The shrink’s cottage probably had been a caretaker’s place. Now, according to Detective Barrios, the elderly widow who owned the mansion provided shelter to the shrink to guarantee his 24-7 availability for therapy and late-night conversation.

  I found Freudenstein in an open-air chickee hut set back from the seawall and close to the fifty-meter swimming pool. He was sitting cross-legged and barefoot on a bamboo mat in the center of the hut. The skin of his cheeks shined as if buffed with wax and a chamois, the sure sign of a face-lift and probably injections of various fillers. His hair, the color of storm clouds, was pulled back into a ponytail. He wore a colorful African dashiki over khaki cargo shorts. I didn’t have a clue as to his age, but if I had to guess, seventy was in his rearview mirror.

  His eyes were closed as I approached, and I figured he might have been meditating. Or possibly dead. But he must have heard me, because he waved a bony index finger toward a fluorescent-orange beanbag chair and said, “Welcome, Counselor.”

  “Is this your office?” I surveyed the pool deck and the bay beyond.

  “Restful, don’t you think? Aids in contemplation and meditation.”

  Just then two teen boys on Jet Skis roared past the seawall, kicking up a wake and scattering seabirds.

  “Please sit.” Freudenstein opened his eyes and smiled, revealing two rows of perfect white crowns any game-show host would have been proud to show off.

  I eased downward into the beanbag without dislocating any vertebrae. The only sound was the tinkle of new age music and the whompety-whomp of a paddle fan overhead. Hanging from wooden beams that supported the palm-frond roof were half a dozen white origami birds, their wings flapping in the breeze.

  “Tell me about Clark and Sofia Calvert,” I said.

  “No time for reflection in your world, eh, Counselor? You’re saying, ‘Cut to the chase,’ aren’t you?”

  “More like ‘Cut the crap.’”

  A calm smile, perhaps with a bit of condescension. “Fascinating couple, the Calverts. Most dysfunctional I’ve ever met. And I’ve treated some doozies.”

  Doozies being a technical medical term, I figured.

  “Tell me, Doctor.”

  “In a nutshell, Sofia has classic borderline personality disorder. Wholly unstable. Lives in constant fear of abandonment by her partner, yet engages in reckless, impulsive behavior calculated to force him away.”

  “Her infidelity,” I said.

  “A serial adulteress. But it’s not just the promiscuity. As a teenager, she was a cutter, a self-mutilator, and there was a suicide attempt. As an adult, she’s extremely needy and anxious. Yearns for security, yet does everything that threatens stability in her life once she obtains it.”

  “And her husband?”

  Dr. Freudenstein paused as if to choose the right words. Above my head, the origami birds kept flying without getting anywhere.

  “A narcissist,” he said. “An oversize ego. Not only does he think he’s the smartest guy in every room, he needs to prove it. Talking to him is like sparring. He has to land the last punch. He has an inflated sense of his own importance, an unquenchable need for the admiration of others, and yet a total inability to feel empathy for others. Calvert also has a penchant for getting lap dances at strip clubs. Sofia complained about it, and he admitted it.”

  “None of which makes him necessarily dangerous,” I said. “And yet, your Tarasoff letter.”

  He closed his eyes, his expression pained. “Yes, poor Tatiana Tarasoff. A tragic case that haunts every therapist. When does the duty to warn outweigh the doctor-patient privilege?”

  These days, all shrinks knew of the famous case from four decades ago; the court ruled that a therapist was liable for not warning the police of his patient’s murderous intentions.

  “You covered your ass by writing the Tarasoff letter.”

  “It was my moral and legal duty. I didn’t want Sofia to end up dead, like Tatiana Tarasoff.”

  “Did Dr. Calvert take your advice regarding therapy?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t, not that it would make a difference. The man is a psycho-sociopathic criminal. He can’t be cured.”

  “Whoa! When did you arrive at that conclusion?”

  “Almost immediately.”

  The doc had a quick trigger finger, I thought. If his testimony could ever come into evidence, a defense lawyer would slice him up like a sushi chef with a piece of juicy ahi.

  “Was Calvert having delusions or hallucinations?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Showing signs of paranoia?”

  “No.”

  “Did you give him any of the personality tests that point to psychosis?”

  “Not the ones you’re probably thinking of. But I did give him the HTP test. Are you familiar with it?”

  “House, tree, person drawings. Supposedly, people’s personalities are expressed through their art.”

  “No supposedly about it, Counselor. The drawings are revealing if analyzed properly, and I consider myself an expert at the task.”

  “What did Calvert draw?”

  “It’s not ‘what’ so much as ‘how.’ First, he’s an excellent artist with great attention to detail. He drew one picture with his right hand and another with his left.”

  “What did you deduce from that?”

  “His need to show off. It’s in the details that he revealed himself. He drew a house with bars on the windows, obviously an indication that he stores secrets inside. He drew a man with extremely large hands. Dangerous hands. You don’t have to be trained to figure that out when we now suspect him of strangling his wife, do you?”

  “Isn’t that a little simplistic, Doctor?”

  “Let me finish. He drew a sky with a sun partially obscured by clouds, creating both a shadowed and sunny landscape, indicating a fragmented personality. Tree trunks split in half as if struck by lightning, as if his brain itself had been cleaved. Gnarled branches unveiling his own twisted self, the tree dying, indicative of his own emptiness and hopelessness.”

  This isn’t a medical diagnosis, I thought. It’s an afternoon soap opera. I felt a headache coming on. Tap-tap-tap inside my skull, the opening percussion notes of the overture. The booming tympani would soon follow.

  “There are two Clark Calverts,” Freudenstein continued. “The shiny marble he presents to the world and the nasty piece of work he reveals through violence and now, apparently, murder.”

  “Dr. Freudenstein, did it occur to you that Calvert was playing you?”

  “How so?”

  “He knows the HTP test. Hell, I know it because I’ve had clients take it, hoping they’d come back with schizophrenia and give me a defense. Calvert purposely drew the figures he knew would set off alarms. And he did it with both hands to show you he could outsmart you, whichever direction you turned. He was just having fun, toying with you.”

  The shrink snickered at me in a most condescending way. “I’m the expert here, Mr. Lassiter. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I know when someone is fudging.”

  As expected, my headache was gaining steam, the pressure building inside my skull.

  “Were you stoned when you talked t
o Calvert and administered the test?” I asked.

  “My mental acuity on psychoactive drugs is sharper than most people’s—including yours—stone-cold sober. No offense.”

  I could picture him saying that under Victoria’s cross-examination, alienating the jury, if they hadn’t already laughed him out of court.

  “I’d like to have copies of those drawings so I can give them to another expert.”

  “Happily, except I didn’t keep them. He wasn’t my patient, and I have no file. Everything, however, is stored in my hard drive.” He pointed to his temple.

  I exhaled a long breath and rubbed my eyes. When I opened them, the shrink was still there. This wasn’t a bad dream. My headache throbbed in time with my heartbeats.

  “What are you thinking, Counselor?” Dr. Freudenstein asked.

  “Just that I’m jealous of Victoria Solomon, Calvert’s lawyer. If you testify for the state, she will have the profound pleasure of cross-examining the bluster right out of you. No offense.”

  “None taken. I realize I’m a little unorthodox. But trust me, Counselor. After one hour, I had no doubt that Clark Calvert was fully capable of killing Sofia and of having no remorse for doing so.”

  “And you don’t think your quick diagnosis is, at the very least, premature and, at the worst, reckless and wrong?”

  “I’m quite confident in all my diagnoses over the years. My track record is impeccable.”

  Reckless and arrogant, I thought.

  The shrink kept at it for a few more minutes, telling me about Calvert’s domineering and controlling nature. I had no reason to doubt that Freudenstein was correct in identifying all the bullet points of Calvert’s personality. But what is the sum of those parts? Add them up, and you have an unsavory man, but certainly not proof that he’s a murderer. Then there was the evidentiary problem.

  “Unless I come up with a fancy legal argument,” I said, “your letter will be inadmissible, as will be your conclusions about Calvert’s mental state.”

  “I don’t see why, Counselor.”

  “First, you’ve got the doctor-patient testimonial privilege.”

  “Technically only Sofia was my patient. She brought her husband along for marriage counseling.”

  “Victoria Lord will argue persuasively that Calvert was protected by the privilege the moment he walked into your office, or your chickee hut, as the case may be.”

  Dr. Freudenstein seemed to consider that. Over by the pool, two men in khaki shorts and blue polo shirts began the task of scrubbing the sides to keep the algae in check. I could feel the wind shift from the ocean to the west. Soon the breeze would come from the Everglades, where storms were forming. Inside my skull, the headache swelled to a category five hurricane, snapping tree trunks, toppling power lines, and swamping the dinghy I clung to with all my might.

  “And how will the judge rule?” he asked.

  I squinted against the furious pain. “No way to tell. Judges are only human—or almost human—and they don’t want to be reversed. The state can’t appeal an acquittal, so most judges rule for the defendant in close cases, just to cover their asses.”

  He unfolded his crossed legs and stretched his back this way and that. “Wasn’t it Dickens who said that the law is an ass?”

  -13-

  You Are the Cat

  I spent the next twenty minutes looking for a nugget of gold in a pile of elephant turds. I did so while fending off a spike-through-the-eye headache and the clanging percussion of a Bahamian Junkanoo band in my brain.

  “Dr. Freudenstein, what I need to prosecute Calvert is hard evidence.”

  “Such as?”

  “Preferably a photo of Calvert standing over his dead wife’s body. Lacking that, some admissions he might have made, even inadvertently.”

  “What kind of admissions?” the shrink asked.

  “Did he ever threaten Sofia?”

  “Not in my presence.”

  “Even indirectly? ‘Sometimes I wish she was gone.’ Anything like that?”

  “Would it help your case if I said he did?”

  “It would help the justice system if you told the truth.”

  “Jus-tice,” he sang out. “It’s such a slippery notion.”

  “Even without K-Y Jelly,” I agreed. “But one thing is certain. Justice requires witnesses who tell the truth. Not to mention judges who know the law, and jurors who stay awake.”

  “How’s that working, Counselor? Do most witnesses tell the truth in court?”

  “Strangely enough, most do. In my experience, more lies are told in bedrooms than courtrooms.”

  The shrink nodded and continued, “Truth is, Dr. Calvert never said anything that could be construed as a threat, directly or indirectly. I gleaned my conclusions about his propensity for violence not from his words but from what I intuited based on my training and expertise and, of course, the HTP test.”

  The wind kicked up, whistling through the chickee hut. Fat, fluffy clouds were turning angry, taking on the gray pallor of a dead man. The afternoon storms would be early today.

  “Anything else about Clark Calvert I should know?”

  He thought a moment and said, “He liked to strangle Sofia during sex.”

  “I heard.”

  “His story is that she liked it. Enhanced her orgasms. More likely it got his rocks off. But he didn’t confine choking to bedroom games. He used it to punish her.”

  That, I didn’t know.

  “Punish her for what?”

  “If he caught her smoking. Or eating ice cream. She’d slip some Chunky Monkey into the back of the freezer. He’s a health nut. Always railing about sugar and fat and carbs. Smoking drove him batshit. She’d sneak a cigarette outside the house by the seawall, and he’d go out at night with a flashlight and tweezers, looking for butts that she neglected to toss into the water. If he caught her violating his rules, he’d choke her until she reached twilight unconsciousness.”

  Dr. Freudenstein waited for my reaction. I didn’t give him one, so he continued, “Do you know about her cat?”

  I had eavesdropped on Victoria’s first conversation with Calvert when he denied having harmed his wife’s feline.

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “Escapar, by name. Sofia claimed Clark strangled it because the cat didn’t show enough gratitude for his cleaning the litter box. He said it was an accident. But Sofia was telling the truth.”

  “How do you know?”

  “When she prevaricates, she blushes, her eyes blink, she turns away. Makes it easier to know when she’s telling the truth, which she was. Clark’s denial was very revealing to me. Understand that he admitted to all sorts of untoward behavior. The strip clubs. His controlling nature, his jealousy, his problems with anger.”

  “But not the cat?”

  “Clark Calvert is incredibly bright, his IQ off the charts. And he took some psychiatry in med school. Intentionally killing his wife’s cat? He knew what it would mean to me.”

  “I’m sorry, Doc, but I don’t get it. I took phys ed at Penn State, with some theater thrown in because that’s where the girls were. To me, there’s a big difference between killing a cat and killing your wife.”

  “No, there’s not! Not if you lack empathy for living things. That’s what I explained to Sofia. That’s why I wrote the letter. I told her, ‘You are the cat, Sofia, and the cat is you.’”

  -14-

  Marching Orders

  After leaving Dr. Freudenstein, my head throbbing, I aimed the Caddy toward the mainland and took inventory as I crossed the causeway into the teeth of the coming storm. The shrink had added one more opinion to the side of the ledger that read “guilty.”

  Yeah, opinion.

  Not facts. Not evidence. Gut feelings.

  Just like Detective Barrios, who knows a helluva lot about homicide, and whose judgment I trust. And ASA Flury, who needs two hands to unzip his fly, but whose opinion I didn’t totally discard. And Pepe Suarez, S
ofia’s father, who had basically promised to buy Ray Pincher the governor’s mansion if he convicted Calvert of murder.

  So, too, Dr. Freudenstein believed Clark Calvert killed his wife. Sure, he dressed up his opinion in some medical jargon. He even patted himself on the back for predicting spousicide in his Tarasoff letter. But there was little chance of that testimony sneaking into evidence.

  And what do I have in my trial bag?

  As the proprietor of the Lassiter Five & Dime Homicide Store, just what products did I have to sell to shoppers, i.e., the jurors?

  Opinions!

  As wispy as clouds.

  Consider what I didn’t have on my store shelves: a corpse, for starters. If you’re going to prosecute someone for murder, it’s best to prove, as a starting point, that someone else is dead. What else did I lack? Physical evidence linking Calvert thereto, plus time and manner of death, and something indicating that the defendant was in the same zip code when all this happened.

  My cell rang while I was brooding. State Attorney Pincher on the line.

  “Jake, I’ve been calling you. How close are you to an indictment?”

  “C’mon, Ray. I just got into this today. Cut me some slack.”

  “No slack, Jack! Get on the bus, Gus!”

  “Jeez, and they say I’m punch-drunk.”

  “Where the hell are you, anyway, Jake?”

  “On the Key. Just left the shrink.”

  “And…?”

  “He’s colorful. Theatrical. Flamboyant.”

  “What the hell does that mean? Does he know his stuff?”

  “He’s either brilliant or a total whack job. He diagnosed Calvert with a psychosis pretty much after saying hello. Even if I can get his testimony into evidence, Victoria Lord will carve him into little pieces on cross.”