Lassiter 03 - False Dawn (10 page)

“Complete railroad job, a kangaroo court. I was selling prints of the Last Supper for four grand per set and advising customers to donate them to a church and take a nineteen-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine-dollar charitable tax deduction.”

“Nineteen thousand …”

“Yeah. If it’s more than twenty grand, you gotta have an independent appraisal. This way, I give them my appraisal certificate from the Church of the Shining Sun. The rectory’s in my garage.”

“You’re a preacher, too?”

He gave me a sly grin and let me see a matched set of yellow incisors. “They call me Brother Cyrus.”

Another peal of thunder, but Horner didn’t flinch. Maybe he answered to a Higher Authority. “Look at it this way,” he said. “If you’re in the thirty-one-percent tax bracket, I could save you twenty-two hundred on a four-thou investment. The IRS gets pissed off, and the Justice Department flips a coin with the state attorney. Tax fraud or grand larceny. The state attorney won.”

I watched two raindrops race each other down the outside of my windowpane. I put my money on the juicy, oblong one, but the thin guy seemed to pick up a tailwind.

“Brother Cyrus, if you want me to try the case, we’d better prepare your testimony.”

His beady eyes lit up. “Great. I love testifying. I’m very affluent, you know.”

J
udge Herman Gold had retired eleven years ago, but that didn’t keep him off the bench. With our crowded dockets and the propensity of our criminal judges to be removed from office in the wake of bribery scandals, we need retired judges to help out. Some of the old judges have forgotten more law than most of us ever learned. That could have been true of Judge Gold, but he’d also forgotten most everything else. Hardening of the arteries had left the bulb a bit dim. There he was, perched on his high-back chair, peering into the cavern of the courtroom, a wizened bald buzzard of eighty-one, wearing his custom-made, minilength fuchsia robes, yapping at court personnel, keeping order in the snake pit.

“A
tango
!” the judge demanded.

“A
tanga
, Your Honor,” replied Sally Corson, a proper young assistant state attorney in a blue suit and white silk blouse. “It’s a Brazilian bikini, and it’s illegal on state beaches.”

She held up state’s exhibit one, and if you had good eyes, you might identify a red piece of string as the bottom of a bikini. The evidence tag was at least twice as wide.

“Illegal?” the judge demanded. “Says who?”

“The legislature, Your Honor. No buttocks or breasts on state-owned beaches. Chapter eight forty-seven.”

The judge was shaking his head. “
Meshuga
. Ay, Marvin, what do you think?”

In the first row of the gallery, Marvin the Maven consulted with Saul the Tailor. “If she’s a
shayna maidel
, a Kim Basinger, what’s the problem? If she’s
zaftig
, a Roseanne Barr, I’d throw the book at her.”

Judge Gold nodded judiciously. At the defense table, a young woman who was demurely dressed in a knee-length skirt and long-sleeve blouse looked from the judge to Marvin and back again. Alice in Wonderland couldn’t have been more confused. At least her lawyer had the good sense to dress her for court. It’s one of the first rules. If you can manage it, even a murderer should look like a choirboy. When I was a young lawyer, I once forgot to give my dress-for-acquittal lecture to a weightlifting champion charged with aggravated assault. He showed up in a muscle-T that depicted Darwin’s ascent of man—an ape, a Neanderthal, and finally, good old homo sapiens moving up the evolutionary ladder. The jury thought he most resembled the ape, and he got two years to plan his next wardrobe.

The assistant state attorney cleared her throat, trying to regain the momentum before the rest of the gallery voted. “Your Honor, the defendant was observed by numerous witnesses at Keys Memorial Beach. She was playing Frisbee while wearing state’s exhibit A.”

“Frisbee?” the judge demanded. “Is that illegal, too?”

I
waited while Judge Gold ran through the rest of his calendar. It was a typical day. A man convicted of murder wanted a new trial
and
a divorce because his wife had an affair with his lawyer sometime between opening statement and closing argument. A Hialeah homeowner faced zoning charges for building a statue of La Virgen de La Caridad in his front yard. The Biting Bandit of Miami Beach was arraigned on charges of stealing two watches and thirty dollars in food stamps, and severing three ears and one index finger. The prosecutor was careful not to stand too close when pointing toward the carnivorous fellow and intoning, “This defendant …”

I waited through several dozen other hearings. The clerk called a number of minor drug cases, all scheduled for pretrial intervention, just one of a number of devices to toss cases out of the courthouse. The criminal justice system does not so much dispense justice as process defendants. The prisons cannot hold the miscreants already there, much less the thousands who should be added each year. So the prosecutors, public defenders, probation officers, and various state agencies engage in a gentle conspiracy with judges—real and retired—to spit out the defendants who are swept into the maw of a system that has bitten off more than it can chew.

We think of the courts as slow, unwieldy machines with creaking parts. Not in Miami. Here, what passes for justice takes place with frightening speed, each judge sometimes ruling on a hundred cases a day, hearing motions, taking pleas, dismissing charges, and occasionally even presiding at trial.

The players in the justice game speak their own language. Rapists are treated in a program for MDSO, mentally disordered sex offenders. Sleazy street criminals who rat on their pals are CI, confidential informants. First-time offenders get bounced into PTI, pretrial intervention with CTS, credit for time served.

“Set aside the
alias capias
, and send him back to PTI,” Judge Gold ordered the clerk, in a case where a drug defendant, a college instructor, finally showed up in court.

“The meter is ticking on the speedy trial rule,” an anxious prosecutor told the judge, pleading for an early court date.

“We’d take a deal,” the public defender offered, “if the state
nolle prosses
all but one count, agrees to CTS, in-house rehab, five years’ probation, early termination on completion of MDSO.”

“I’m thinking about one year incarceration,” the judge mused, considering a plea bargain.

“Min man is three,” the prosecutor responded, shaking her head, indicating she’d love to help, but the legislature has set minimum mandatory sentences.

Behind the bench, the flag of the state of Florida hung forlornly. The flag itself is a glorious historical fabrication. An Indian woman stands on the beach, greeting an arriving steamship with flower petals. A more appropriate state symbol would be a fat county commissioner taking cash from a condo developer with the skeleton of a rickety high-rise in the background.

Finally, the clerk called out: “State of Florida versus Francisco Crespo. Motion to dismiss.”

I stood, stretched my neck out of its eighteen-inch collar, and approached the lectern in front of the bench. Abe Socolow beat me there. Credit his daily power-walking routine. He hadn’t changed. Lean as a rake, mean as a snake. Black suit, black hair, white shirt, black tie decorated with gold handcuffs and prison bars. A sallow complexion, a sardonic sneer, a brooding intelligence that barely controlled his seething anger at every defendant who crossed his path. He is a rarity in today’s age of get-rich-quick lawyers who pass through the state attorney’s office long enough for a cup of coffee and a smidgen of trial experience before migrating downtown for the big bucks. Abe Socolow is a career prosecutor, and his career was built on being smart, tough, and nasty.

“Your Honor, this motion is frivolous, ludicrous, and utterly beyond the pale,” Socolow said. “It is a misuse of motion practice, outside the bounds of Rule three one-ninety, and should be summarily rejected by the court.”

Good day to you, too, Abe.

I cleared my throat and elbowed Socolow to one side. “There are no material disputed facts, and the undisputed facts do not establish a
prima facie
case of guilt against Mr. Crespo.”

Socolow snorted in my ear. “Mr. Lassiter is excellent at quoting the rule. Unfortunately, he does not know how to apply it. The evidence of a
prima facie
case is here.” He stabbed a finger at a stack of pretrial depositions.

Judge Gold took one look and cringed. He didn’t read the newspaper unless the ponies were running at Calder. “Why don’t you fellows summarize it for me?”

“The case is entirely circumstantial,” I began, jostling Socolow with a shoulder and screening him from the judge’s view with my height. “What proof does the state have? That my client was found in proximity to the scene of an alleged homicide.

That he had an altercation with the deceased. Where is the direct evidence of the crime?”

You can get away with that sometimes with juries, ridiculing the state’s case as based on circumstantial evidence, but judges know better. A few even remember Thoreau’s admonition: Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

“Your Honor!” Exasperated now. “Mr. Lassiter sees what he wants and ignores the rest. His client’s latents were all over the steering wheel of the forklift that impaled the victim.”

“Mr. Crespo used that forklift every day,” I replied. “It would be highly suspicious if his fingerprints were
not
there. What is significant is that the state has no eyewitness to put him on the forklift at the time of the assault. Indeed, the only eyewitness testimony, that of the paramedics, puts Mr. Crespo several aisles away and unconscious when the attack took place. Finally, other than what appears to have been a fistfight between the two men, there is no evidence of an assault at all.”

I sneaked a peek at Socolow. His jaw muscles were doing aerobics. I kept going. “The forklift could have been driven negligently by a third party who simply bolted after he accidentally ran down the deceased. Perhaps there was no driver at all. It could have been a runaway forklift.”

“A runaway forklift!” A touch of crimson crept into Socolow’s sallow complexion. “Why not suicide? Maybe Mr. Smorod-whatever-his-name-is jumped at the moving forklift in order to kill himself. Mr. Lassiter isn’t arguing the undisputed facts. He’s relying on his own vivid imagination. There’s a jury question here …”

In the gallery, I saw Marvin the Maven’s head swivel as the rear door opened and a woman walked in. Marvin doesn’t miss anything. He nudged Saul the Tailor, who nodded his approval as Lourdes Soto took a seat in the second row. Even under the fluorescent lights, the ivory skin was perfect, accented by the jet black hair. She wore a black jersey dress that came to midcalf and gathered itself under a wide matching belt. She carried a woman’s leather briefcase, not the all-purpose aluminum model with camera, lenses, and voice-activated recorder.

Of course, the black onyx necklace might be a wire, for all I knew.

“The autopsy is consistent with an attack by a forklift traveling at maximum speed,” Socolow was saying. He was waving some papers at the judge. It could have been the autopsy report or his laundry list. No matter, the judge wouldn’t read either one.

I didn’t need to read the report, either. It was one of those rare cases when I’d been there, a foot away from the deputy medical examiner when he did his dirty work. Crespo had called me within minutes of being arrested. The autopsy was scheduled twenty-four hours later. I had phoned Doc Charlie Riggs, and calling on an old friend, he got me into the cool crisp confines of the Last Hotel, a place where the guests sleep on wooden pillows.

T
he county morgue sits at Number One Bob Hope Road, just north of the intersection with Ed Newman Street. Newman used to play for the Dolphins. So did I, but the only thing they named after me was a missed sack—the Lassiter Leap—for a peculiar habit of leaving my feet at the wrong time on a blitz. As for Bob Hope, I doubt he’s funny enough to wake the dead.

The morgue is nearly new, a gleaming place with a handsome waiting room of rose-colored sofas, a three-story skylight, and sturdy brick walls. It is a sad fact of city life that most of those who end up here never lived in such splendid surroundings.

“Interesting puncture wound.” Dr. Bruce Harper poked at the gash in Smorodinsky’s abdomen. “See a lot of knife wounds, bullet holes, once in a while a screwdriver. Even had a corkscrew through the jugular last week. Domestic dispute, of course.” He held a tape measure to the wound while an assistant took photos. “Ten point two centimeters in width. Point six four centimeters in height.” A lab technician wrote with a special marker on a white wall. Later, the numbers would be transferred to a written autopsy report and the wall washed down. “What’d you say did this?”

“Forklift blade,” I told him.

Dr. Harper was one of the young ones, three years out of his residency in pathology, a guy who grew up not knowing whether he wanted to be a detective or a physician. Now he was both. He was of medium height and weight but with solid wrists and veined forearms. He had neatly parted dirty blond hair and wore latex gloves and a green smock. On a tray next to him, another deputy M.E. worked on the body of an enormous black woman killed in a head-on traffic accident on the Don Shula Expressway. He was whistling—it must have been the doc—the theme music from
Rocky
.

Dr. Harper went to work, grinning at the world, oblivious to his surroundings. After photos were taken of the entrance and exit wounds, he used a scalpel to make a Y incision in the chest. In one smooth motion, he sliced straight down the midline of the abdomen, then peeled the skin back, exposing a thick layer of yellow, fatty tissue and the rib cage beneath. Using what looked like your Saturday afternoon pruning shears, he cut through the cartilage of the ribs near the breastbone.

With quick, deft movements, he was inside the chest cavity, slicing away. He removed the heart and
plop
ped it into a scale. Three hundred grams, the technician wrote on the wall. The right lung was five hundred fifty grams; the left lung five twenty-five. In the abdomen, he inspected the wound track, and an assistant took more photos.