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Authors: Paul Levine

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BOOK: Bum Rap
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I was about to begin extolling the virtue of double indemnity life insurance when the brunette started running her fingers through my hair. I had used some of my nephew Kip’s polisher to give my mop a sleeker look and hoped she wasn’t getting greasy fingers.

“Nice hair, big man,” she purred.

The blonde slipped a hand inside my Armani jacket and was letting her lacquered fingernails tickle my chest. “Strong man, too.”

We exchanged names. The brunette was Marina, the blonde Elena. I told them to call me Gus and gave them my best, “Pleased to meetcha.”

“Gus, do you like caviar?” Elena said.

“Yah. Haven’t had it since cousin Sven’s wedding over in Hibbing. Gotta say I prefer it to lutefisk. Any fish you gotta soak in lye, Gus J. Gustafson can do without.”

“We know a place with great caviar,” Marina said, just as I hoped she would.

“And champagne,” Elena added.

“Tickles my nose. But heck, ain’t that what life’s all about?”

My bookend beauties each slung an arm through one of mine. T
he gesture reminded me of a couple of cops escorting a client toward the slammer. But these two leaned into me so I could feel their breasts against my upper arms. The feeling was not unpleasant. I knew they did not intend to bed me down on fleece pillows. They merely intended to fleece me. Their smiles, their touches, were as smooth as a Ray Allen jump shot from the corner. Giving men hope. That’s what they did for a living. And they were damn good at it.

“Let’s go, Gus,” Marina said. “Tonight, we show you time of your life.”

-17-

The Night Has a Thousand Eyes

C
lub Anastasia was just off Washington Avenue between Seventh and Eighth Streets on South Beach. “Off” Washington, because the entrance was in an alley.

A dark alley with Dumpsters, mud puddles, and a clanging of a Jamaican steel band coming from a nearby apartment building with open windows.

A red velvet rope in front of a narrow door looked out of place. Like a festive ribbon wrapped around a garbage pail. Standing at the rope was your typical no-neck bouncer in a black suit, white shirt, and black tie. The sign above the door said simply,
PRIVATE CLUB
. The bouncer eyed Marina and Elena as if they were strangers and said, “Password?”

Marina muttered something in Russian. The bouncer nodded gravely and opened the velvet rope to paradise.

“You gals know your way around this burg,” I said as we climbed a scarred wooden staircase to the second floor. Music poured out of an open door at the top of the stairs. Not Russian music. American jazz. I could swear it was “In a Sentimental Mood,” a Duke Ellington composition with John Coltrane on sax. The club might be run by racketeers and mobsters, but their taste in music wasn’t bad.

Inside it was dark. Marina led us to a sofa behind a translucent curtain that gave the impression of privacy. The sofa was just large enough for three very close friends. We squeezed into it, me in the middle again. A pot of artificial ferns sat on each end of the sofa. I could make out several other mini-sofas, populated by threesomes. Men in the middle, hot women flanking them. More potted plants off to the side.

I could see the bar through the flimsy curtain. A three-hundred-pound bartender was staring into a mirror behind the bar, talking into a cell phone. A blue neon light above the mirror spelled out “Club Anastasia.”

“Champagne!” Elena shouted.

“Perrier-Jouët!” Marina chimed in.

A cocktail waitress waltzed through the curtains. She wore a French maid’s outfit you might see in a porno film. Black lacy mini with a white apron the size of a napkin and a white rhinestone collar. In five-inch platform heels, she appeared to be the height of an NBA forward. “A magnum?” she suggested helpfully.

“Da!”
my two friends cried in unison.

“But first, vodka shots?” The waitress, too, had an Eastern European accent. Russia or the Baltic states. They sound alike to me. “Best Russian vodka, not available in stores.”

“Da!”
Elena and Marina agreed.

The vodka arrived a microsecond later, courtesy of another cocktail waitress in an identical orgy outfit. The idea was to get me drunk quickly. The B-girl scam wasn’t invented by the Russians, but they were pretty good at it.

The drinks arrived in tumblers, not shot glasses. Icy cold. I tossed mine down. So did my two new best friends. It was cheap vodka, as raw on the throat as a rusty blade. Theirs, I was sure, was one-hundred-proof tap water.

“Another round!” Marina called out.

By now, “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” was coming from the speakers. Not the pop version by Bobby Vee. The earlier number with fine trumpet and sax riffs, as well as haunting lyrics:

“The night has a thousand eyes,

And it knows a truthful heart from one that lies.”

By the time the third vodka arrived—or was it the fourth?—I told the ladies I had to pee and carried my drink to a dingy restroom down a dark corridor. I wasn’t lying. I took my time pissing into a urinal filled with ice, melting about a quart of cubes. I washed my hands, splashed cold water on my face, and checked the walls and ceilings for cameras, finding none. Then I poured out the tumbler of rotgut vodka and filled it with water.

By the time I got back to our love sofa, a 1.5-liter bottle that claimed to be Perrier-Jouët was sitting in a champagne bucket roughly the size of an oil drum. The bottle had been opened in my absence and the girls had already poured three flutes of bubbly.

“Vashe zdorovye!”
Marina toasted me.

“Tvoye zdorovye!”
Elena said. “To your health.”

“And our fun!” I joined in.

I took a sip. It was the real thing. While I was guzzling, I glanced at Marina, who tossed her drink into the potted ferns with a quick flick of the wrist. Then she leaned in and nuzzled my ear with her lips. As I turned toward her, I could see Elena pour her drink into the plant at her end of the sofa. The girls were working. No time to get tipsy. I’m the mark who is supposed to be blubbering by the time the check comes.

“Drink!” Elena ordered.

By now, Marina was running her fingers inside my suit coat, headed southward in the general direction of my crotch. I could feel her breath in my ear as she whispered, “Do you like threesome?”

“You betcha.”

“We are fun girls with many tricks.”

Now she was running her hand over the outside of my pants. I was on assignment with a clearly defined goal, but there is a part of every man that doesn’t necessarily follow instructions. We can’t help it any more than the ape in the zoo. I was becoming aroused. I rationalized this on the grounds that it was in keeping with my horny tourist persona.

“Oh,
big
man,” Marina cooed in my ear. I was sure she said this to each and every male of the species who wandered into this den of spiders.

The women kept pouring, and I had no choice but to keep guzzling as they sluiced their drinks into the plastic ferns. Fortunately, I can hold my booze, but even so, I was beginning to feel a little groggy. One of the cocktail waitresses delivered the second magnum even before we’d finished the first. She also brought a check on a little silver tray.

“Time to start tab, mister. Need credit card.”

I had tucked my Gus J. Gustafson badge inside my jacket pocket as we were coming up the rickety stairs. No need to confuse the waitress, especially since my credit card read, “Timothy R. Dugan.” Yeah, this was one of those gray areas in the practice of law. When José Villalobos gave me the Piguet knockoff watch, he
also handed me the Timothy Dugan credit card. Not that it was phony . . . strictly speaking. Villalobos had several cards in several different mythical names. But here’s the thing: he always paid the bills.

It’s just better, he reasoned, not to be paying for the equipment, electricity, and water for his marijuana grow-house in his own name. Okay, maybe his lawyer gave him that advice. So sue me, I think the marijuana laws are bullshit.

Anyway, Villalobos had placed a restriction on the Timothy Dugan card, just for me. Any charge over $1,000, and he would get an automated text message notifying him. The charge would initially go through, but the alert would give him five minutes to call in and complain that he hadn’t used the card or authorized its use. If he made the fraud alert call, the company would immediately grant him a “charge-back” and notify the merchant that the charge, originally paid, was now being debited against that merchant’s account.

So I had five minutes from the time my card went through the Anastasia terminal. As the waitress handed me the pen to sign the slip, both Elena and Marina moved into high gear. Marina unzipped my fly and had one hand inside my pants.
Oh, what I do for clients!
Elena was massaging my neck. It felt good and made me a little sleepy, as was intended.

I gave the bill a quick glance without studying it. They’d charged for twelve rounds of vodka at ninety-nine dollars a shot, and the first magnum of champagne was a whopping $5,500. Altogether, with 9 percent sales tax the club never paid to the city, county, or state, and a convenient 20 percent service charge, the bill came to $8,627.52. And there was still that second magnum to be billed.

I signed the slip with a nearly indecipherable “Timothy Dugan.” Neither Elena nor Marina watched me sign. I’m sure they were trained that way: don’t draw attention to the bill itself. While Marina worked a hand under my boxers and onto Mr. Wonderful, Elena was nibbling one earlobe.

The cocktail waitress took off and handed my card and the charge slip to the bartender, who took less than ten seconds running it through the terminal. Then he smiled, gave a thumbs-up to the waitress, and went about his business.

Now the clock was really ticking. I had five minutes to work. “You know, I think I had a colleague come here a couple weeks ago,” I said.

“What?” Elena’s teeth let go of my ear.

“A friend from Saint Paul. Lester. Was down here for a flood insurance meeting. Told me he went to a Russian place, drank some champagne. Expensive as hell, but said it was worth it. You know why?”

“Why?”

“He met this girl named Nadia. Dark-haired tall gal with fair skin and blue eyes. Had a helluva night.”

“Nadia?” Marina’s hand shot out of my pants as if she’d touched an acetylene torch.

The women exchanged looks. No more stroking, no more nibbling. Everyone was quiet a moment. Just the sound of a jazzy piano and bass coming from the speakers, then a trumpet joining in. It could have been the Miles Davis version of “So What.”

“I thought you might know this Nadia,” I said. “I figure you girls are all friends.”

“Why do you want to meet her when you have us?” Marina’s voice overflowed with suspicion.

“Well, it’s gonna sound crazy, but my friend Lester, the flood insurance guy. He wants to send her a present. Jewelry, I think.”

“Is bullshit,” Elena said.

“What do you want?” Marina said.

I dropped the flat vowels of my Minnesota accent and looked hard at Elena. “I think Nadia’s in trouble and I want to help her.”

Marina’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Who are you, big bastard?”

“My name’s Lassiter. I’m the lawyer for the man accused of killing Nicolai Gorev. Lots of people are looking for Nadia and maybe want to hurt her. I need her to tell me the truth about what happened.”

Marina and Elena looked at each other, and I zipped up my pants. They said something to each other in Russian. Just then, the bartender barged through the curtain, waving a slip of paper in his meaty hand.

“Card bounced, Mr. Dugan. You got another one?”

“Is not Dugan!” Marina cried out.

“Who then?” the bartender asked.

Elena chattered a few angry sentences in Russian.

Marina did the same.

The bartender motioned to one of the waitresses. “Get Alex. Now!
Seychas!

Alex had to be Nicolai’s brother, the guy who liked to drop women from his helicopter.

The bartender pointed at me with a fat finger. “You! Up!”

-18-

The Pit and the Jeweler

E
verything happened very quickly. Both women leapt off the sofa and moved several feet away. The bouncer from downstairs tore through the curtain. At the same time, a third man emerged from a corridor in the back. Judging from Solomon’s story, the corridor led to the office where Nicolai Gorev had been killed. The office had likely been inherited by his brother Alex, the guy now approaching me with balled fists.

Alex wore a charcoal silk suit, Italian cut, not the right style for his burly frame. He had dark eyes and a bushy black mustache.
His salt-and-pepper hair was receding. I pegged him at about forty. From the body language of the others, Alex was the boss. The new boss.

“What the hell do you want?” he said.

A bebop saxophone was playing “Yardbird Suite,” and it was all I could do not to tap my toes. “Just making friendly conversation,” I said.

“He’s been asking the girls about Nadia,” the bartender said.

“Why do you care about that
shlyukha
?” Alex demanded.

“Why do you care that I care?”

“Who are you? FBI asshole?”

“No, lawyer asshole. I represent the man wrongfully accused of killing your brother.”

“Wrongfully?”

“Your brother pulled a gun, and Nadia shot him in self-defense.”

“Crap lie! Police found no gun. You know what I’d like to do with you?”

“Drop me out of a helicopter into a pit six hundred meters deep?”

That stopped him a second, and all we could hear was Charlie Bird Parker’s saxophone.

“What do you know about it?” His eyes were wary. I had just gone from a man with too many questions to a man who already knew too much.

“That you liked to drop Chechens out of your army helicopter.”

“Screw the Chechens.”

“And once in a while, drop a woman who was giving your brother a hard time.”

“Do you know who invented the helicopter, lawyer asshole?”

The bartender and the bouncer took positions on either side of me. If they grabbed my arms, Alex would have a clean shot at my face or gut.

“Leonardo da Vinci,” I said.

“Invented! Not drew picture. Igor Sikorsky. Russian.”

I decided not to say Sikorsky did the work in the United States and became quite wealthy without employing Bar girls.

“What’s your point?” I asked.

“I love helicopters. But I don’t have one to drop you out of.”

“Pity.”

“I have boat to drop you in Gulf Stream.”

I had no smart-ass reply to that.

“What do you know about that deep pit?” Alex said.

In reality, nothing. But I’d touched a nerve and wanted to probe like a dentist testing a tender tooth.

“I know enough,” I lied.

Alex Gorev moved closer, invading my personal space. “You can tell me now or I can have the shit beat out of you.”

I remembered something Solomon heard Nicolai Gorev say about that deep pit:
“Nadia, you know the place. The jeweler knows the place.”

“I know as much about the pit as the jeweler,” I said.

Gorev’s dark eyes went wide. I had surprised him, and he did not like surprises. He glanced around the bar. A couple of the other tourist marks were looking this way. Maybe getting edgy about the place.

“We need a more private place to talk.” Gorev turned to the bouncer and said something quickly in Russian. Then he turned back to me. “My car is downstairs. We go now.”

Before I could say
nyet
, the bouncer grabbed my left arm above the elbow while the bartender took my right arm. They started pushing me toward the door. I gave no resistance. I figured we had a staircase to go down, then the alley, before they shoved me into the backseat . . . or the trunk. I would much rather take my chances in the alley than in this confined space.

With my good-natured cooperation, there was no reason for the bouncer to latch on to my left wrist and hoist it into a hammerlock over my shoulder blade. I’d separated the shoulder three times. Then there was the rotator cuff surgery with its requisite scar tissue. So, I didn’t much care for the pain shooting through the joint.

That’s why I stomped hard on the bouncer’s instep. How hard? Two hundred forty-five pounds hard. I thought I heard his talus bone
cra-ack
. I know I heard him scream something in Russian.

With my left hand free, I pivoted and threw a short hook into the bartender’s huge gut. I caught a slab of his ribs instead of his solar plexus, but he still let go of my right arm. I threw my right elbow at his throat and smashed his Adam’s apple. He gagged and crumpled forward. But Alex came up from behind me and tossed a punch or a karate chop—I never saw it—at the back of my neck. It is a thick neck attached to a thick skull.

Still, I saw stars and staggered two steps forward. Joining in the fun were Marina and Elena. Marina leapt onto my back, wrapped an arm around my neck, and raked my cheek with her lacquered nails. Elena had removed her shoes and pounded a stiletto heel into my chest, which only a few minutes ago, she was lovingly stroking. Then she reached inside my suit coat, no doubt trying to pick my pocket. Fortunately, that’s not where I keep my wallet. But maybe that was a diversion, because I immediately noticed that my watch was gone. One of the women was now the proud owner of a knockoff Piguet.

Nearing the top of the staircase, I shook off both the women, turned, and ducked as Gorev threw a sloppy roundhouse right at my chin. His punch sailed high, and I did the manly thing. I kneed him in the groin because I hate hitting people in the face. I have missed the face so many times, slugging the skull instead and breaking knuckles.

Gorev squealed something in a Russian falsetto and doubled over. The bartender moved toward me and threw a big paw toward my face. I stepped backward . . .

Right off the top stair.

Arms windmilling, I caught the bartender’s wrist and pulled him toward me. I shifted my hips like a sneaky little wide receiver and pulled him around me like a dance partner.

We both tumbled down the stairs, but he was a three-hundred-pound pillow of lard that helped cushion the roll. The only downside, his breath smelled of beer and garlic as we bounced to the bottom.

I stumbled to my feet. The bartender stayed down.

I staggered outside, hearing rapid footsteps on the stairs behind me.

Alex and the bouncer. Followed by Marina and Elena.

I
didn’t have my sea legs, and as I wobbled away, the gimpy bouncer easily caught up, then used both hands to smash me into the side of a nearby Dumpster. A garbage can sat alongside. If this were the 1950s, the can would be metal, and I could have grabbed the lid and brained the bouncer, just the way Sonny Corleone beat up his lousy brother-in-law in
The Godfather
.
But this was 2014 and the can was blue rubber—recyclables on Thursday—and there was nothing to grab but maybe some Styrofoam peanuts inside.

The bouncer came at me with his fists, in a stand-up prizefighter stance. I covered up, bringing my elbows in to protect my gut and my fists up to shield my pretty face. He took a few swings, hitting me with short punches, my forearms taking the abuse. I would be black-and-blue tomorrow. When he paused to take a breath, I snapped a short left jab that hit him squarely on the nose, which spouted a Trevi Fountain of blood.

He brought up his hands to his face, so I pivoted and put all my weight into a right hook that dug deep into his solar plexus. That dropped his hands, giving me the time for a big whirling uppercut, the bolo punch. I’ve taught the punch to Kip on the heavy bag that hangs from a live oak tree in the backyard. With enough behind it, the bolo dents the bag, rattles the tree, and snaps the twigs on some orchids growing out of the limbs. But that’s against a bag. Against a man, it takes too long to deliver . . . unless you have the hands of Sugar Ray Leonard, or your opponent is already bloodied and hurting. I brought the punch up from below my waist, and it met no resistance until it landed squarely on the bouncer’s chin. The impact lifted him off his feet. Then he crumpled to the ground and pitched forward on his knees, vomiting, just missing my dress shoes. Nobody said fighting was pretty.

I turned and saw Gorev moving toward me, something in his right hand. A switchblade. Click. The blade popped out.

Lord, how I hate a knife.

“We haven’t finished our talk, big mouth,” he said.

That’s when I heard the car tires squealing in the alley behind me. A Miami Beach police cruiser braked to a stop. A uniformed officer sat at the wheel. Detective George Barrios leapt out of the passenger door and surveyed the scene. The bloody, vomitous bouncer by the Dumpster. The porcine bartender facedown in the doorway. The two B-girls, now both barefoot and holding their shoes, their bouncy hair messy and tangled. Gorev, watching me with a murderous glare, his knife and hand back in his pocket. And, of course, little old me. Disheveled and beaten, scratched face bleeding, suit coat shredded, and quite possibly drunk.

“You look like shit, Jake,” Barrios said.

“Whadaya mean? This is my best suit.”

“How about I give you a ride home?”

“My car’s a block away.”

“Not a good idea. There’s a DUI checkpoint at the entrance to the MacArthur, and you’ll never make it through.”

“Okay, you’re on.”

I was about to open the back door of the police cruiser when Gorev shouted at me. “We will talk again, lawyer asshole.”

“Make an appointment. Have your B-girl call my B-girl.”

“I promise you will tell me everything you know about Benny the Jeweler.”

“Benny the Jeweler?”

“Who the hell else we been talking about?”

I was groggy so it took me a moment to process the information. The jeweler who knew all about the pit in Russia was named Benny. The guy who hired Miguel Dominguez to find Nadia was also Benny. I never won the Fields Medal for mathematics, but I could put two and two together. They were the same guy. Just a shred of evidence, but still, maybe something that would help lead me to Nadia Delova.

“I’ll tell Benny you said hello!” I yelled to Gorev, ducking into the rear of the police car.

W
hen we were a block away, Detective Barrios said, “You shouldn’t mess with the Russians, Jake. They’re as ruthless as the Colombians back in the eighties.”

“Thanks for covering my back. Who called the cops, anyway?”

“No one. We been watching you ever since you got to the Fontainebleau.”

“To protect me?”


Hell, no. To let you do shit we can’t. And maybe pick up a scrap of evidence here and there.”

“Either way, I appreciate the help.”

“You’re getting too old for this shit, Jake.”

“You’re telling me.” My head was throbbing, and I knew the rest of my body would start feeling the pain as soon as the adrenaline ebbed. “George, there’s this burg in Vermont with a prep school. I’ll bet they’ve got a little police force with a kindly chief like Andy Griffith.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A New England Mayberry. Maybe the chief is about to retire just like the football coach at the prep school. We could have lunch every day at the local diner. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes.”

Barrios looked at me sideways. Maybe wondering if I’d left some of my brain cells back at Anastasia.

“When you go on pension, George, think about it. Vermont. You and me. Best pals.”

“Did you get a concussion, Jake? Vermont? Don’t you have a murder case to try?”

“You’re right. For now, I need to start putting the clues together. But when this is over, who knows?”

“What’d you find out from the Russians?”

“Nothing you didn’t hear.”

“I heard ‘Benny the Jeweler.’ You been looking for a guy named Benny who might want to kill Nadia Delova. Now you know he’s a jeweler with some connection to the Gorev brothers.”

“That’s about it.”

“So what’s Benny the Jeweler’s involvement in the shooting?”

“Not a clue.”

I straightened out my Armani suit coat, which had three tears. Granny would be pissed. Checked to make sure I still had my wallet, which I did. No more watch, of course. My Ray-Bans were gone. No cell phone, but I remembered leaving it in my car. I patted my suit pockets, reached into one, and came out with a folded napkin with the Club Anastasia logo. A phone number was written on it, 786 area code. A South Florida number.

Elena hadn’t been trying to pick my pocket. She’d slipped me the phone number in all the commotion.

“George, don’t drive me home. Take me to my car.”

“I told you. The DUI checkpoint.”

“I’m not impaired. Besides, I’ll stay off the MacArthur.”

“What’s going on, Jake?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I’m grateful and all. But at the end of the day, George, you’re a homicide detective and I’m a defense lawyer. You want to put my guy away, and I want to walk him.”

He gave a little harrumph. “And here I thought we were both after the same thing. Justice.”

He said it earnestly. No sarcasm intended. So I responded the same way, with deadly honesty. “George, you know how I always piss and moan about the system not working?”

“Yeah, you bore the shit out of me with it.”

“It’s real. I mean, it’s the way I feel. You know that, right?”

“If you say so, Counselor.”

“It’s the way I think. Call it my philosophy.”

“I know. The so-called justice system.”

“There ought to be a better way. Maybe we should abolish the adversary system altogether. Maybe we should have three investigating judges hop in a car and go out into the night to find the truth. And whatever they say—innocent or guilty—goes.”

“But that’s not the way it is.”

“Exactly. We’re gladiators, you and I. We go into an arena where there’s a winner and a loser.”

“I just sharpen the sword of the state attorney. He’s the gladiator.”

“Either way, blood will be shed. The strong will win. Not necessarily the one with the just cause or pure heart.”

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