BUM DEAL: Jake Lassiter Legal Thrillers

by Paul Levine

  “Calm down, Jake,” Pincher said. “Someday you’ll thank Phil for teeing the ball up for you.”

  “Someday, I’ll kick his ass from here to Sopchoppy! And as for you, Ray…”

  I couldn’t form the words. The room swayed like a dinghy in a squall. I reached out and steadied myself by leaning on a credenza, my hand knocking over a framed photo of Pincher with some politicos at a black-tie gala.

  “Jake, you okay?” Pincher’s voice echoed in the distance. “Oka-a-a-a-a-ay.”

  I felt my knees buckle. Pincher bounded out of his high-backed chair. The little ex-boxer still had a lot of quick, and he grabbed my shoulder before I toppled forward.

  “What is it, Jake? You want an ambulance?”

  I regained my footing by holding on to him.

  How humiliating.

  Rescued by my tormentor.

  “I’m fine, Ray. Fine.”

  “You sure, pal? You want some water? Bourbon? Anything?”

  “I don’t know, Ray. I feel like I just stepped into a gator hole, and I don’t know if I’m gonna lose a foot or an entire leg.”

  Pincher turned to Flury and barked, “Phil, get outta here. Go push some papers.”

  “Yes, sir,” Flury said.

  When the weasel was gone, Pincher directed me into a client chair and sat on the corner of his desk, studying me with a look of concern that seemed genuine. “We go back a long way, Jake, and I always liked and respected you.”

  I kept quiet, declining to return the compliment.

  “I know you’re having a hard time right now with the illness and all, and I’m feeling some regret.”

  “For what, Ray? Inviting me to your party as your personal piñata?”

  He sighed and stared at his wall of fame, the photos and plaques attesting to his civic-mindedness and, shall we say, self-importance. “Pepe Suarez put me under tremendous pressure, Jake. If he withholds support for my gubernatorial run, I’m dead in the water. If I run for reelection as state attorney and he backs someone else, same deal.”

  “You’re supposed to do your job, Ray, and not sell your office to the highest bidder.”

  “Didn’t know you were such an idealist. Look, this is all about time and distance.”

  “No idea what you’re talking about, Ray.”

  “The time until the next election and the distance between me and the losing prosecution.”

  “Go on.”

  “I think Calvert killed his wife, but I admit the proof is weak. We’re never gonna find her body, never gonna have any forensics. Ever since Sofia disappeared, my choice has been whether to piss off Suarez every day for the next year while the investigation goes nowhere, or to get it over with.”

  “Lose quick or lose slow,” I said.

  “Exactly, Jake. If we lose quick, I’ll have eighteen months to mend fences before the election. That’s the ‘time’ I’m talking about. It’s why I pushed so hard for the indictment now. And I appointed you to have some distance between the case and me, should everything go south.”

  “You feel better telling me this, Ray? Ease some of the guilt?”

  “Some. But I’ve been thinking. You’ve got the tennis pro who’ll testify Sofia was terrified of her husband. You caught Calvert in a lie. The bastard’s getting a lap dance the day his wife disappears. Maybe you’ll find that other woman he choked into unconsciousness. And if you get Dr. Freudenstein’s testimony in, you’ve got a fighting chance, if he can hold his own on cross.”

  Suddenly I felt exhausted, my energy drained. If Pincher wanted to argue, he would have to do it with himself. What had happened to my vigor, my stamina? Where was my fighting spirit to go along with that fighting chance Pincher was trying to sell me?

  “I don’t know, Ray. I feel old. The lion in winter. Too slow to catch the wildebeest, too weak to chew through bone.”

  “Wrong! You may be the lion in winter. But, Jake, my friend, you are still the lion.”

  Stephen Solomon

  and

  Victoria Lord

  request the honour of your presence at their marriage

  on Saturday, the twenty-first day of October

  Two Thousand and Seventeen

  at six o’clock in the evening

  Vizcaya Gardens

  3251 South Miami Avenue

  Miami, Florida 33129

  Black-Tie Dinner to Follow

  -39-

  The Rabbi, the Minister, and the Disbarred Judge

  Victoria Lord…

  “You want your father to preside at our wedding?” Victoria asked. “Are you serious?”

  “I think he’s a good compromise,” Steve said.

  What a clever and sneaky negotiator, she thought, feeling a mini-squabble coming on. They were jogging south on Le Jeune Road, nearing the circle where Sunset Drive meets Old Cutler Road and the entrance to Cocoplum. It was late afternoon, and a storm had threatened, but it had been a false promise. Although sheet lightning flashed in the distance, the sky only dripped and drooled, an old man spitting out his soup.

  “How is your father a compromise?” she asked. “I’d like a minister. You’d like a rabbi.”

  “A reformed rabbi. So reformed he’s practically Episcopalian.”

  “And we compromise on a disbarred judge? Is he even qualified to officiate?”

  “Dad still has his notary license, so sure. It would mean the world to the old guy. Who knows how long he has left?”

  “Doesn’t your dad still catch spiny lobsters with a bag and tickle stick in fifteen feet of water?”

  “Sure. He’s been a snorkeler and a bug hunter his whole life.”

  “And doesn’t he still haul in a couple dozen over the legal limit?”

  “What’s your point, Vic?”

  “Your dad is going to outlive all of us!”

  “Okay, okay. It was just a thought. Meanwhile, Jake’s mad about the wedding date.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the night of the Penn State–Michigan game.”

  “Oh, tell him to grow up.”

  Victoria’s cell rang. She slipped it out of shorts, saw Clark Calvert was calling, and slid the ‘Answer’ button.

  “Victoria,” he said, his voice tight, “there are three police cars in my driveway.”

  -40-

  How Many Women?

  Steve Solomon…

  “There are rats in here!” Calvert’s voice was ragged with fear.

  For a moment, Steve thought he meant snitches. Informers.

  They were in a ground-floor lawyer’s room—actually a barred cell—at the Miami-Dade County jail. The place smelled of disinfectant and oily lubricants, body odor and urine. Solomon had long believed that if you brought every twelve-year-old boy in the county here for one day, the crime rate would drop precipitously in the coming years.

  “Rats as big as cats,” Calvert continued. “Jesus. The conditions are inhumane.”

  “Steve is working on bail.” Victoria paused, waiting for her partner to speak up, but he was lost in thought.

  Steve was fighting a war within himself. He wanted to win the trial because, well, he was a competitor who always wanted to win. But he despised their client, and deep in his heart, he would love to see Calvert go to prison. Talk about cognitive dissonance! How would it play out when given a chance to win—or lose—the case? He didn’t know.

  He asked himself: What would Jake do? The big guy was his role model, not that Solomon would ever admit it. He remembered their conversation outside Calvert’s house. He’d admitted that Calvert had unnerved him, had made him feel threatened about his relationship with Victoria. Jake gave him no sympathy.

  “Solomon, you gotta toughen up. Victoria loves you. God knows why, but she does.”

  It was solid advice. Man up! Women despise weakness. And just what was he afraid of? The wedding invitations had been sent out, the cake with bride and groom and a scales of justice had been ordered. The Solomon-Lord life plan was set in
motion, and their weasel client couldn’t do anything about it.

  In the same situation, Jake would take charge. Show strength. Betray no fear. Hell, he’d break down doors to win the case, even if he despised his client. Because that’s what lawyers do. We’re soldiers of the Constitution, Solomon thought. Not to get all misty about it, but we’re the infantry, defending the individual against the heavy artillery of the state. Solomon felt like snapping off a salute, but instead got down to business.

  “I’ve got a bail hearing scheduled for the morning,” he told Calvert. “For now, just chill.”

  “Please. Please get me out of here.” Calvert’s voice, usually so cocky, had become a whimper.

  So much for all that intellectual bravado. Cutter of bones. Pilot of planes. Pianist, linguist, and all-around Big Fucking Deal!

  Processing at the jail had taken hours. It was nearly 10:00 p.m. Steve imagined what Calvert was feeling. How the sounds, the smells, the garish lighting, the barking guards, the prisoners’ stares made him feel. Terrified, for one thing.

  Piss your pants, for all I care. I’ll show you, Calvert. I’ll show Victoria, show Jake, show the whole damn world who’s in control.

  “I got Jake to agree to a million dollars cash bail.” A note of pride in Steve’s voice. “The judge will go along.”

  “Steve hopped right on it,” Victoria said, giving him the credit he deserved.

  “Thank you. Both of you.” Calvert’s eyes darted to the corner of the cell, as if expecting to see a rat the size of Pepé Le Pew. “A million dollars. I can do that.”

  He was wearing an orange jumpsuit that was a couple of sizes too large and flip-flops that squeaked on the concrete floor. His hands were cuffed in front of his chest. He looked small, pale, afraid.

  “This so dehumanizing,” Calvert said. “They try to make you feel like a criminal so that you will believe you are, or at the very least, so that everyone else will think you are.”

  “Get through tonight,” Victoria said, “and tomorrow you’ll be home. Then we’ll start preparing in earnest.”

  “You’ll surrender your passport,” Solomon said, “and wear an ankle bracelet and monitor.”

  Calvert nodded. Solomon knew their client would agree to anything rather than stay in this palace of horrors. He had a pretty damn good idea what Calvert was thinking: You want my left arm, take it at the elbow. Just get me out of here!

  “The case has become very real,” Steve said, “and we have to move quickly.”

  “Tomorrow,” Victoria said. “Let’s let Clark get some sleep.”

  “When a doctor is charged with killing his wife, it makes news,” he persisted. “Sam Sheppard in Ohio. Carl Coppolino in Florida. Robert Bierenbaum in New York. Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret surgeon, in North Carolina. These days, with the Internet and social media and all those true-crime shows, this is going to hit everywhere, fast and hard.”

  “And your point is?” Calvert asked.

  “You told Victoria about a nurse in Boston who accused you of choking her into unconsciousness during sex. Are there any others? What are their names? Where are they located? If they hear about the case, are they likely to contact the prosecution?”

  Firing off the questions, rat-a-tat-tat, a commander of troops.

  Calvert didn’t immediately answer. His shoulders hunched, and he seemed to withdraw even farther into himself. Outside the cell, a buzzer blared, a discordant sound, and a steel door clanged shut.

  “Ste-phen,” Victoria said, dragging out his name, “perhaps we should have discussed this before you bring it up on what is perhaps the worst day in Clark’s life.”

  “Sorry. But I thought the day Sofia disappeared would have been the worst day.”

  “You know very well what I mean.”

  “Actually, I don’t. With any other client, you put the case first. Feeling down because you were arrested today? Get over it! The lawyer’s job isn’t to pamper the client but to protect him—from the state and from himself.” He turned toward Calvert. “So I’m sorry if you’ve had a shitty day. I want… we want to keep you from having forty shitty years. Okay?”

  Calvert raised both cuffed hands in what looked like a gesture of surrender. “Okay. Please. Victoria. Steve. We’re all on the same team.”

  My team, Steve thought. Victoria has been acting as if this is her case alone. Did she forget we’re partners in life and law? And my name is first on the letterhead.

  Still hunched over, looking at the cuffed hands in his lap, Calvert spoke in a whisper. “There might be more than one woman out there.”

  “Let’s start with the nurse in Boston,” Steve said matter-of-factly, wondering just how many names there would be. He shot a glance at Victoria to see if she registered shock or surprise, disappointment or disgust. No, she maintained her poker face. A professional, adhering to the first rule of lawyering: don’t act judgmental toward your client.

  Calvert said, “Her name is Lisa Hardt. A nurse at Mass General. That’s where I went after University Hospital in New Jersey. We dated. We were intimate. She greatly enjoyed the enhanced orgasms induced by cutting off the oxygen supply. She pretty much demanded that I do it.”

  “Quite a coincidence,” Steve said. “You told us the choking was also Sofia’s idea.”

  “Her idea. My idea. Does it matter if the high jinks were consensual?”

  “Maybe, if the high jinks led to death.”

  “With Lisa, there was only one incident when she lost consciousness. After we broke up, she complained about it to the hospital board. Claimed she didn’t consent to either the sex or the airflow restrictions. The board correctly determined that she was a woman scorned who was seeking her revenge.”

  Another moment of quiet, except for a man’s screams from somewhere on the first floor. “Lemmeeeee out! Lemmeeeee out!”

  Another buzzer, another steel door slamming, and a voice on an intercom, the sound scratchy and indecipherable.

  “Do you need to know anything else about her? And there might be two others.”

  “We’ll get to the others. Do you know where Lisa Hardt is today?”

  “Oh, sorry. I nearly forgot. You’re worried she might call Mr. Lassiter and offer to testify.”

  “Exactly.”

  “No chance of that. Lisa, poor dear, drowned.”

  “Oh, God. That’s terrible,” Victoria said.

  Steve just waited, didn’t ask the obvious question. He’d learned interview techniques from Lassiter, who’d long preached that silence is sometimes the best question.

  A few seconds later, just as he had hoped, Calvert continued speaking. “About three months after we broke up, she went swimming off Cape Cod. Late at night. Alone. There was a riptide.”

  “What did the autopsy show?” Steve asked.

  “There wasn’t one,” Calvert answered. “They never found her body.”

  -41-

  The Curvy Ethical Road

  Three months later

  Jake Lassiter…

  Summer turned to well, endless summer. September used to be the soggiest month. The buggiest month. The crappiest month. Now the rain and heat last deep into October. For some reason, the downpour usually catches me in my car, the staccato drumbeats against the canvas top so loud I can barely hear Johnny Cash ruing the day he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Me? In October, I get the Miami Blues.

  The rain does not relieve the heat, which rises in steamy waves from the pavement. Bugs abound. Mosquitoes breed in every puddle, threatening Zika virus. No-see-um gnats buzz your ears and nose. Cockroaches we euphemistically call palmetto bugs, but these guys are as big as roller skates.

  One bright note. When the sea levels rise enough, we can return South Florida to the gators and the birds, the bugs and the rodents.

  If the days are broiling, the nights are simply dank and sweaty, with barely a breath of moving air. One consolation: in my Coconut Grove neighborhood, the scent of jasmine is so lush a
nd sweet it will make you woozy. Not that I needed the jasmine. I’d been vertiginous, off and on, for the past few weeks. Usually, it would come at night, my mind clouding, a rug slipping out from under my feet.

  I never fell. Never lost consciousness. Just a bit of dizziness. My headaches had increased in number and worsened in degree. Oh, one more irksome matter. A couple of times in the past few weeks, I had trouble forming words. My brain knew what I wanted to say, but my mouth couldn’t spit it out.

  “How are you feeling?” Melissa Gold asked me every day.

  “Tip-top,” I usually replied. Unless I said, “Never better.” Occasionally, just to break the monotony, I’d say, “Peachy.”

  So, yeah, basically I lied.

  At Melissa’s urging, I continued to undergo tests. A new MRI seemed to rule out atrophy in my frontal lobes, a cause for some celebration. A different result would have indicated full-blown CTE or Alzheimer’s. Choose your poison.

  Melissa and her colleague Dr. Hoch kept poking me with needles and pestering me with questions. Based on their conversations with me and each other, I learned that, should I honestly disclose all my symptoms, they would send me to the hospital for a spinal tap. They’d insert a needle into the spinal canal to steal some fluid and test it for abnormalities.

  I didn’t want to do it. Not that I’m not afraid of needles. Back in the day, I had more painkiller injections than I can remember. I’ve had large-gauge needles jolt both knees with cortisone. I’ve had needles punched into my pelvis to withdraw bone marrow that was later injected into both my shoulders in futile attempts to fix my rotator cuffs. But just now, with the Calvert trial looming, I decided to call a halt to all the doctor visits other than house calls—and booty calls—after-hours by the lovely Melissa Gold.

  As for the Calvert case, Solomon and Lord had moved for a speedy trial, as I had expected. That’s what the defense does when it’s confident the state doesn’t have the evidence. Get the case under way before a body pops up from the bottom of the bay.