SSC (2011) The Road to Hell (9 page)

Back in the car, Ramos asked, “Fuck we need a chain saw for?”

“
The horse.”

“
What horse?”

Diaz explained again, and Ramos started whining about his new white linen
guayabera
, and what a mess it would be. Diaz was so tired of the bellyaching, he agreed to forget about the horse—they’d just use the saw to scare the guy. The noise alone would make him shit his pants.

“
No need to chop him into pieces,” Diaz said. “Not like in that movie with Pacino and the guy in the shower.”

“
The movie with the horse?”

“
No, different movie. Pacino’s a
Marielito
in this one. More Cuban than you. Smarter, too.”

They stopped at a service station, and Diaz filled the small tank on the chain saw, dribbling gasoline onto his patent-leather loafers. At the horse farm, they found the trainer in a barn made of telephone poles set in concrete. A light rain was falling, pinging off the barn’s tin roof.

The trainer was a gray-haired man in his fifties, lean and wiry, with the blue-veined nose of the drinker. They backed him into a corner, where he stumbled over a pile of Seminole feed bags and nearly impaled himself on a pitchfork. The two enforcers felt out of place here, nearly intoxicated from the ripe, earthy smells of the barn, the distinctive tang of horse sweat, the sweetness of molasses from the feed mixing with the aroma of manure and urine, sawdust and creosote.

It took Diaz half a dozen pulls to get the new, warranty-covered Black & Decker chugging. He threatened to cut off the man’s head if he didn’t pay up. Diaz yelled this, because sure enough, the little machine made a hell of a racket. The trainer was crying, begging for more time to pay. All the while, two golden palominos and a paint were kicking and snorting in their stalls. Ramos cursed and lifted his left foot, a moist glob of excrement sticking to his tasseled loafer. Flies buzzed around Diaz’s ears. Not little houseflies. Big, blue-winged monsters that looked like they could suck blood. By the quart.

Diaz felt ill. He would rather be in Miami, banging a guy’s head against the asphalt in a back alley. He lived in a two-story stucco apartment building just off Jose Marti Avenue in Little Havana. The smells there were of cooking pork and steaming espresso. There were no horses with ugly square teeth and jackhammer hooves pounding the sideboards. He wanted to do the job and get the hell out of there.

While the trainer was pleading for another twenty-four hours, Diaz decided to send him a message. Take a little chunk out of the man’s shoulder, just as a warning. Maybe get the guy to find a safe with some cash in it underneath the manure piles. In a movie, he saw the bad guys chop off someone’s little finger. He couldn’t remember if it made the man talk.

Diaz lifted the chain saw with both hands. “No!” the trainer shrieked, his eyes filling with tears.

“
Ay, be thankful it’s not your
pinga
,” Diaz yelled over the roar.

The saw was bucking, and the man was screaming, and the horses were kicking the place down, and Ramos was saying something he couldn’t hear. Diaz tried to gently tap the wailing machine against the trainer’s shoulder, but he missed. The churning blade came to rest against the man’s neck, where it bit through his carotid artery, splattering Ramos’s white linen
guayabera
a rich scarlet and spraying the two palominos, turning them into pintos.

* * *

A week later, on that cool and breezy day, Guillermo Diaz sat in my office. “Grand jury meets this afternoon,” I told him.

“
Big fucking deal. They got no witnesses.”

“
Ramos turned state’s evidence, testified yesterday. You’re going to be indicted for Murder One.”

“
That’s bullshit. Where is the chickenshit
cobarde
? Where’s he now?”

“
In protective custody.

“
¿Dónde?
”

“
How should I know? And what difference does it make? You think you can get him to change his mind?”

“
No, I think I can kill him.”

Outside the windows, a buzzard landed on the ledge, spreading its six-foot wings, then folding them in that familiar hunched shoulder look. The ugly birds fly south each winter and perch outside the windows of high-rise lawyers, reminding us of our ethical standards.

“
You’re not kidding, are you Guillermo?”

“
You get to take his statement,
¿verdad?
”

“
Right, a pre-trial deposition.”

“
You tell me when and where, it’s over real quick.”

He stood up and paced to the window. Spooked, the buzzard spread its wings and soared away. I leaned back in my chair, put my feet up on the credenza, and flicked the button on the Dictaphone. A little red light blinked on. “Let me get this straight, Guillermo. You’re asking me to set up Rafael Ramos, so you can kill him.”

“
Ay, Counselor, I do it with or without your help. What other choice I got?”

* * *

“
Yes,” I told Wilbert Faircloth. “I recorded my conversation with Mr. Diaz.”

Faircloth let his voice pick up some volume. “And did you have a court order permitting you to conduct this recording?”

“
I did not.”

“
Was the recording made in the course and scope of a bona fide law-enforcement investigation?”

“
No, I did it on my own.”

“
And, as a lawyer, you are familiar with Chapter 934 of the Florida Statutes, are you not?”

“
I know the gist of it.”

“
The gist of it,” Faircloth repeated with some distaste. He paused, apparently considering whether to press me on the particulars of the law. “Do you know, sir, that the statute forbids tape recording a conversation unless all parties to that conversation have consented?”

“
Yes.”

“
Did you know that on February twelfth, 1993?”

What would be better, I wondered, denying knowledge of the statute and therefore admitting incompetence, or conceding I knew my conduct was felonious? Probably the former, but damn, it would be a lie. They couldn’t prove it, of course. No perjury charge. Still, one of Lassiter’s Rules is not to lie to the court.

“
Yes, I knew the law at the time.”

“
May we assume you obtained your client’s permission?”

“
You may assume it, but it wouldn’t be true.”

“
So then, you did not have Mr. Diaz’s consent to tape-record his conversation?”

I can’t stand it when lawyers posture. “You expect me to ask permission to record his threats to kill a witness?”

“
No, Mr. Lassiter. I expect you to follow the law.”

Touché.

“
Look, my plan was to record Diaz, withdraw from his case, and warn him that the tape would be turned over to the state attorney if anything happened to Rafael Ramos. The idea was to force him not to kill a man.”

“
But you were his
attorney
, Mr. Lassiter. You owed Mr. Diaz the duty of unyielding loyalty. The conversation was privileged. What gave you the right to act as his conscience?”

“
My
conscience,” I answered. “Besides, once he disclosed the plan to commit a crime in the future, I believed the privilege was lost.”

“
Did you seek an advisory opinion from the bar to confirm your so-called belief?”

“
No. There wasn’t time.”

“
So you proceeded to knowingly violate Chapter 934 and to also breach the privilege by contacting the state attorney?”

“
Yes. Diaz fired me when I wouldn’t agree to set up a murder. I contacted Abe Socolow after Ramos was found with three bullets in his skull.”

“
Do you have any regrets about your conduct?”

“
Yeah. I regret not calling Abe before Diaz killed Ramos.”

“
Now, isn’t it true that Mr. Diaz was never convicted of that crime?”

“
Right. There was a profound lack of witnesses.”

“
And you have no proof that Mr. Diaz committed this crime, do you, Mr. Lassiter?”

“
No. I mean, yes, I have no proof.” I hate questions phrased in the negative.

“
And do you have an explanation for your behavior?”

“
It seemed the right thing to do at the time,” I said.

Faircloth couldn’t suppress a snicker. “It
seemed
the right thing to do.” He shot a look at the judge, trying to figure if he was scoring points. When he turned back to me, his smirk announced he was three touchdowns up with a minute to play. “Is that how you live your life, Mr. Lassiter, doing what
seems
right at the time?”

I didn’t have to think about the answer. It was just there, the simple, stark truth. “As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I do.”

Chapter 3

Goblins in the Night

CHARLIE RIGGS WAS WATCHING A LITHE YOUNG WOMAN IN BLACK Lycra shorts and a bikini top whirl through a pirouette on her Rollerblades, smack in the middle of Ocean Drive. No drivers yelled. No horns honked. A white stretch limo politely pulled around her. Four bearded guys gunned their black Harleys in an admiring salute as they gave her room. Two Miami Beach cops in khaki shorts weaved in and out of traffic on their bicycles, looking tanned, fit, and friendly, despite the Sig-Sauer nine-millimeters on their hips.

“Fascinating,” Charlie said, as the young woman sped down the center line.

“Her abdominals, or the aerodynamics of the sport?” I asked.

“Dying of hypothermia in Miami in August,” he answered, dipping a piece of pita bread into a bowl of pureed eggplant with garlic. We were sitting at a sidewalk table of the News Cafe, gathering spot for artists, actors, models, and assorted junior-varsity wannabes. A light breeze from the ocean, a few hundred yards to the east, cut the midday heat to manageable levels. To the west, storm clouds gathered over the Everglades. In the summer, lunch is followed by midafternoon thunderstorms nine days out of ten. I was wearing jeans, running shoes, dark glasses, and a Hawaiian shirt festooned with orchids. Charlie had on baggy pants that he must have worn while painting his house, a green surgical smock, and a fisherman’s vest with various hooks and flies attached. He wore a shapeless canvas hat to keep the sun out of his eyes. To the casual observer, he was either the hippest guy on trendy South Beach or a demented professor.

Charlie took a sip of his lemonade and said, “A few years ago, a body turned up in Bayfront Park. It was July. A lad in his late teens, frozen stiff as a board and banged up a bit. Nobody could figure out what the deuce had happened. We checked the local meat lockers, ice plants, that sort of thing. I did the autopsy. Cause of death was asphyxia. Checked the inventory of his pockets. No wallet, no ID, no nothing except an Eastern Air Lines schedule and a hundred colons in Costa Rican currency. Of course, that solved the mystery.”

“It did?”

“The poor wretch had no visa and no money for a ticket, so he crawled into the wheel well of a jet at the airport in San Jose. There’s space up there that a man—well, not someone your size, but this fellow—could fit into. The wheel well isn’t pressurized, and if the lack of oxygen hadn’t killed him, the temperature would have.”

“The fall probably didn’t do him any good, either,” I speculated.

A group of Hare Krishnas chanted and bangled their way along the sidewalk, sweat glistening on their shaved heads. I took a bite of my cheeseburger. South Beach overflows with chichi cafes where the pasta is al dente and the tuna rare, but I’m still a burger-and-brew guy. I’m as health-conscious as the next guy, as long as the next guy is sitting on a barstool, but there are limits. It doesn’t bother me if someone waxes poetic about the joys of bean sprouts. If a scrawny woman feasts on grapefruit and lettuce, fine. If a guy is a vegetarian jogger, that’s great, too, though most look as if they couldn’t buck a force-three wind. I don’t tell other people how to live, and I appreciate reciprocity.

Once when I was chomping a cheeseburger with a side of fries at an outdoor cafe in Coconut Grove, a fragile-looking guy in a gold velour warmup suit and white bicycling helmet stopped short at my table. “I’d hate to see the inside of your arteries,” he said somberly.

“Fine,” I responded, taking a long swallow of my chocolate shake. “I’ll tear your heart out, and we’ll look at yours.”

He blinked and took a step backward. “Eat yourself to death, if you want. All that animal fat leads to cardiac arrest, and the excess protein causes kidney failure.”

“So does a good left hook,” I advised him.

I don’t believe in being judgmental. You eat your tofu, I’ll eat my T-bone. Today, though, it was a rare burger with purple onions, ripe tomato slices, and tangy mustard on a fresh-baked roll. A nice slab of melted Jarlsberg cheese to keep the juices in the meat. With all the pasta and sushi places, it isn’t easy to find a good burger anymore, so it’s a real quiniela if the same place also serves Grolsch, the Dutch beer.

“You say Mr. Tupton had been drinking?” Charlie asked.

“Heavily.”

“And the room temperature was in the fifties?”

“Fifty-six, right on the button, and Tupton was soaking wet.”

In the street, several young men carried a banner protesting discrimination against AIDS victims. The Miami Beach bicycle cops patiently directed traffic around the demonstrators. Charlie smoothed his beard with the back of his hand. “That could do it. Once in a while, in the winter down here, with the ambient temperature in the fifties, we’ll see a homeless person die of hypothermia. If there’s been excessive alcohol intake, vasodilation is the killer. The blood vessels dilate, body temperature plummets. All kinds of complications can result, metabolic acidosis, elevations in serum amylase, and pancreatitis.” A shirtless man walked by, a bright green mynah perched on his shoulder. Hardly anyone turned to stare. “How long was Tupton in there?”

“Twelve, fourteen hours. The maid discovered him in the morning. When the paramedics arrived, his body temperature was seventy-seven degrees. No respiration, no heartbeat.”

“Ventricular fibrillation was the likely terminal event. Seems like he died of natural causes, so what’s the problem, Jake?”

I shrugged. I didn’t know. It was just this vague uneasiness. I took a bite of the burger and drained the beer.

“Any surprises in the autopsy?” asked the man who had performed twenty thousand before retiring to a life of fishing and reading medical texts in their original Latin.

“M.F. says no. Nothing unusual in the system other than the elevated blood alcohol. No signs of a struggle, no toxins, no puncture wounds …”

That made us both pause. I can’t read minds, but Charlie Riggs had to be thinking about a twenty-gauge hypodermic track in the buttocks of rich old Philip Corrigan. Dead old Philip Corrigan, but that’s another story.

“The report confirms what you said, Charlie. Ventricular fibrillation caused by hypothermia.”

“So all you’re dealing with is a wrongful-death suit. Just another dispute about money.”

“Right. Social-host liability.”

Charlie seemed to be studying the man-made sand dunes on the beach across Ocean Drive. “Who’s the plaintiff’s lawyer?”

“Henry Thackery Patterson.”

“H.T.’s good, though a trifle flamboyant for my tastes,” Charlie observed.

“He’s already filed a boilerplate complaint. Simple negligence for serving alcohol to an intoxicated guest. I’ll file an answer with the usual affirmative defenses, comparative negligence and assumption of the risk.”

“Blame it on the victim, eh?”

“Sure. The old defense gambit. The plaintiff caused his own harm, so don’t point the finger at the party hosts who had to keep the hors d’oevres moving.”

Charlie shook his head. “Whatever happened to the concept
‘de mortuis nihil nisi bonum’
?”

“Damned if I know.”

“Speak kindly of the dead,” Charlie translated.

“Why? They’re the only ones who can’t sue for slander.”

Charlie tut-tut-tutted and finished cleaning his plate of the eggplant goo with a swipe of his pita. “I still don’t know what’s troubling you. Talk to me, Jake.”

“Too many questions don’t have answers. Didn’t they miss Tupton at the party? Didn’t anybody see him go in there or see his car parked all night in the street in front of the house? How about his clothes, still hanging in a closet in a guest room?”

Charlie wrinkled his forehead. “You’re talking like a prosecutor now. You’ve been retained to defend a simple civil suit. Just do your job.”

Charlie was right. I should file my pleadings, take my depos, make my motions, and eventually settle the case before trial. The usual old soft-shoe. I was trying to treat this like any other case. I really was. But my mind was buzzing with other thoughts. Gina. Nicky. Tupton.

“Is there coverage?” Charlie asked.

“A million in homeowner’s, another five-million umbrella policy.”

“So, you have no downside. Win, you’re a hero. Lose, the insurance company pays. Why go looking for goblins in the night?”

“Hey, you’re the guy who taught me not to accept things at face value. ‘Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream.’ That was you talking, Charlie. And how about this little ditty, ‘Seek the truth,’ or however the hell you say it.”

“Quaere verum
,” he instructed me. “And you’re the lad who told me that isn’t the lawyer’s job.”

“It isn’t,” I said. “My job’s to take the facts handed to me and present the best case I can. I’m not supposed to dig for stuff that’ll hurt my client.”

“Like in Philip Corrigan’s grave.”

“Thanks for reminding me. Can you believe that’s coming back to haunt me now?” I mimicked Wilbert Faircloth’s weasel voice: “‘Would grave robbery be ethical to you, Dr. Riggs?’ Jeez, Charlie, I’m in for a public reprimand, maybe even a six-month suspension.”

“Precisely my point. Why go looking for trouble now?”

“Why should
now
be different? Look, Charlie, I never liked Nicky Florio, and I never trusted him.”

Charlie Riggs harrumphed and rearranged his bulky body in his chair. “You never liked him because he married Star Hampton.” He paused, and a light flickered in his deep brown eyes. “Jake, you’re not seeing her again, are you?”

“Her name’s Gina now.”

“Your answer was not responsive, Counselor. Haven’t you got enough trouble with the Bar as it is ? Talk about conflicts of interest.” Charlie stared toward the ocean, screwing his face into thought. The clouds from the west were nearly overhead now, and the temperature was beginning to drop. Intermittent gusts tugged at the cafe’s umbrellas. “I never thought that girl was for you. She combines dependency on a man with an ability to manipulate him. She’s a user, Jake. I know the effect she had on you, and I only hope it’s over. You’ve got this flaw, you know. …”

“Only one?”

“Where women are concerned, you’re attracted to the birds with the broken wings. You want to mend them, make them whole. But Star, or Gina, or whoever, is a predator, a hawk, not a hummingbird. Let the Nicky Florios of the world deal with her kind.”

I always listen to Charlie, but sometimes I don’t follow his advice. This time, I kept quiet.

Charlie leaned back in his chair and eyeballed me from under his canvas hat. “You can’t represent Nicky if you’re seeing his wife. You understand that, don’t you?”

I stayed buttoned up. The Fifth Amendment was always dear to me.

“Are you listening, Jake? A meretricious relationship affects your judgment. You should be planning Nicky’s defenses, and instead you sit here implying that maybe this accident was really …”

“Say it, Charlie. That Peter Tupton was aced, offed, zapped, rubbed out.”

I had raised my voice without knowing it, and Charlie’s bushy eyebrows were arched as he appraised me. “You’ve been under a lot of stress, Jake. Maybe you should let one of your partners handle the suit, take some time off. From what you tell me, there’s no indication of a homicide.”

I signaled the waiter for another beer. “Motive, Charlie. It’s what you taught me to focus on. Tupton could cause Nicky a lot of trouble, cost him a lot of money and time fighting lawsuits instead of building his plug-ugly condos. Nicky invites the guy to a party, tries to soften him up, but it doesn’t work. …”

Charlie scowled and harrumphed in disbelief. “So he gets Tupton drunk and drops him in a chilly room. Really, Jake, if you’re going to the trouble to kill someone, you’d use a method that’d be sure to be lethal, and you probably wouldn’t do it in your home.”

Just then, Charlie’s beeper went off. He extracted it from his belt and squinted at the digital readout. “State attorney’s number.” Charlie balled up his napkin, stood, and headed inside the restaurant, looking for a pay phone.

While I waited, I mulled it over. The old sawbones was right. If Nicky wanted to kill Tupton, he wouldn’t do it himself, and he wouldn’t use a method that might just give the guy a cold. In this town, there are semipros who’ll ace somebody for a new outboard motor or a three-day pass to Disney World. And Florio could afford the best. But then, if everyone who committed a crime was so smart, nobody would ever be caught.

I was still thinking about it when Charlie toddled back to the table, his brow furrowed, one hand absentmindedly stroking a cork attached to his fishing vest by a 3/0 hook. “Abe Socolow,” he announced, gravely, “asked if I’d take an appointment to assist the M.E. in a suspected homicide.”

“So?”

“I told him I have a potential conflict of interest.”

Charlie hadn’t told me, but I knew. The state attorney was looking into the death of one Peter Tupton, a guy who didn’t fall out of a wheel well of a jet but still froze to death in Miami.

“Where’s your conflict?” I asked. “I haven’t retained you as an expert.”

“The conflict is that I’m your friend, but if you don’t have a problem with it, neither does Abe.”