[Jake Lassiter 03.0] False Dawn

by Paul Levine

  “I will survive. I always do.”

  “We’re the ones who care about you. Not Yagamata. Do you understand that?”

  “He is taking care of my fees, verdad?”

  “Yes, but I don’t care who’s paying the freight. I don’t answer to Yagamata. My loyalty is to you. I don’t know what Yagamata’s agenda is. I only have one, and that’s to give you the best defense possible. I can’t do that if you’re compromising your own case on orders from Yagamata.”

  He looked straight into his beer.

  “Francisco, I need you to help yourself. Show as much care for yourself as you did for me on a hot Sunday night a long time ago.”

  “Jake, mi amigo, it is not your concern. I will handle it.”

  “Wrong. It’s my concern. Even if I didn’t feel the way I do about you and your mother, there’s something else involved. It’s called ethics.”

  Crespo furrowed his brow, and the little scars grew pinker. He didn’t seem to understand, but most lawyers don’t, either. The ethical rules are a hundred fifty pages of mush. Mine are shorter and simpler. I won’t lie to a judge, steal from a client, or bribe a cop. And I won’t bed down a wife in a divorce. Until the case is over.

  “C’mon, Francisco,” I implored him. “Tell me what happened in the warehouse. Why did you attack him? Who put you up to it? And when you were knocked unconscious, who killed Smorodinsky?”

  Silence.

  “Who are you protecting?”

  He helped himself to the beer but stayed quiet.

  “Will you talk to me?”

  “No se. Maybe later.”

  “Once jury selection begins, if Socolow withdraws the offer. You understand?”

  Before Crespo could answer, we were interrupted. “Hola, lawyer! Ay, where’s your little sail?”

  Them again. Hector and what’s-his-name. Yagamata’s goons. Wiry guys in muscle shirts to show off their stylish tattoos.

  “And where’s your blonde?” Hector said. “¿Donde está la rubia?”

  I felt the little surge of adrenaline our knuckle-dragging ancestors must have known. The fight-or-flee response. But I’m a lawyer, so I had another alternative, talk. “Tell your boss if he wants to have lunch, he can come here for some swamp cabbage and chicken wings.”

  “He don’t wanna see you, asshole. It’s your friend here el jefe wants. He’s worried about him.”

  “Get lost.”

  “It’s okay, Jake.” Crespo got to his feet. “I’ll go.”

  “No way, Francisco. We’re not finished here. And this time, let me handle the problem.”

  “Jake, it is all right. If Señor Yagamata wishes to see me, I will go.”

  “Bueno,” Hector’s buddy said, a thin smile curling his lips. “We don’t like hacerle daño, to hurt nobody.”

  “Good thing,” I said, “because it would take another dozen just like you.”

  Hector looked surprised, but then, the time of day would surprise this guy. “What you mean by that?”

  I was still in my chair, and they had moved, one on each side of me. In the movies, the hero would just reach out and grab each one by the neck, bang their heads together, and calmly finish his beer. Try it sometime, and you’ll get slaughtered by two guys who have leverage and mobility on their side.

  A smart guy would just call it off. Who was I to play hero anyway? But I was steamed at Matsuo Yagamata, who had bought himself some trinkets and some people. He owned Francisco Crespo and two petty thugs and maybe me, too. So here I was, expiating my guilt by spitting in the dragon’s eye, because mad as I was at Yagamata, I was enraged at me, and short of banging my own head against a wall, I didn’t know what else to do.

  “What I mean, Hector,” I said, “is that you’re a two-bit sack of shit with a brain smaller than a mouse’s asshole. You’re a candy-assed errand boy who needs both hands to find your own dick.”

  It takes years of legal training to become so eloquent. At the next table, the gator hunters stopped talking and turned to listen to our sophisticated colloquy.

  Hector cracked a malicious grin. He liked this. His buddy started bouncing on the balls of his feet, excited and expectant.

  “And your friend here is so scared his asshole’s whistling Dixie,” I concluded.

  “Jake,” Crespo said. “This is not necessary. Please. I will see Señor Yagamata and meet you in court in the morning. Tell Mr. Socolow we go to trial.”

  “You’re a good man, Francisco,” I told him, “and even if you weren’t, you’re my brother because of what happened in a place like this. So don’t worry. I can handle Hector. He’s shaking like a dog shitting peach pits.”

  There are times when a man’s got to act like a man, and other times like an adolescent.

  “Cagado cabrón!” Hector snarled. I didn’t know what it meant but figured it wasn’t Have a nice day. He picked up a handful of peanuts and dropped them into the pitcher of beer where they sizzled happily. Then he picked up the pitcher and poured it over my head.

  At the next table, I heard someone say, “Shee-it,” and I heard chairs scraping against the planks of the wooden floor, veteran spectators giving us room to arbitrate our grievances. Hector placed the pitcher on the table. Peanuts stuck in my hair. The beer stung my eyes, soaked the front of my shirt, and dripped, icy cold, into my crotch.

  “Hector,” I said softly, “I hate Budweiser.”

  I slipped a hand under the table, grabbed it where the base met the top, planted both feet, and pivoted, swinging the table hard into Hector’s crotch. He let out a high-pitched squeal.

  I stood, expecting a first punch from his buddy and taking it, a glancing right hand off the side of the skull. I squared up, and snapped a left jab that he ducked. I followed with another that missed, and then feinted yet another jab and came across the top with a right that he tried to avoid by turning his head. He had good quickness, but I still caught him solid on the ear. I felt the jolt all the way to my elbow, and his cerebellum must have been dialing 911, because he folded neatly in half and crumpled into a carpet of peanut shells, unconscious before he hit the floor.

  I didn’t have time to give him the mandatory eight-count because Hector took that moment to smash a pool cue across the back of my head. The wood broke with a hellacious cr-ack, but it didn’t hurt my head. Not a bit. Then he ricocheted what was left of the cue stick off my shoulder, and again, same thing. No pain. Those chairs they smash over cowboys’ heads in B westerns must be made of cue sticks.

  I was starting to feel invincible, a celluloid cowboy, snapping long-distance jabs. Since I was taller and stronger, I wanted to maintain an outfighting range, keeping Hector from getting inside with quick punches or kicks. But Hector knew what he was doing. He had some hand speed and understood how to retreat, then bounce back with a flurry. When he counterattacked, I covered up with the double forearm block. It isn’t pretty, something like boxing’s peek-a-boo style. It leaves you with bruises on both arms but protects your dimpled chin and semi-handsome face.

  I stalked Hector halfway across the bar, around the pool table, and up against a cooler, but he spun away. He kept leaping in and leaping out, a flurry of punches, and then a retreat. He knew something about martial arts, his style similar to the White Crane method of kung fu. A crane can defeat a gorilla, simply by spinning out of its grasp and counterattacking with furious beats of its wings, beak, and claws. But it takes patience, intelligence, and timing. The bird must continuously circle the beast, changing position and attack angles, retreating time and again until it can attack and peck away at the gorilla’s eyes or otherwise discourage it from continuing the fight.

  Hector had landed enough rat-a-tat-tats to raise some welts on my forehead. The back of my skull, where the cue stick had landed without immediate effect, was starting to ache. Pain is like that, sometimes creeping up on you. I’m not exactly immune to hurt, , but I’ve grown accustomed to its pace. I played ball when a lot of guys got intimate at halftime with the C
aine Brothers— Novocain and Xylocaine.

  It was expected. You played hurt or you didn’t play at all. I resisted the needle until a game against the Bills when I took an elbow through the face mask on a kickoff, and my nose went east and west where it used to be north and south. If we hadn’t been so thin on the special teams, they would have sent me to the locker room, but you don’t tackle with your nose, so you can play—compound fracture notwithstanding—if you control the pain. With the offensive line huddled around me on the bench to block the view of the cameras, the team doc put a shot of Xylocaine right between my eyes, and damned if I didn’t recover a fumble on a kickoff in the fourth quarter. After that, it was Darvocet for a separated shoulder, cortisone for turf toe, and an occasional jolt of my buddies, the Caine Brothers, for assorted twists and sprains.

  Now I moved in again, and Hector caught me in the chest with the front snap kick they call Mae keage in karate. Then he spun to his right and tried to connect with the Yoko keage, the side snap kick. His timing was off, and he missed, leaving himself off balance, still spinning toward my left, his body open.

  From somewhere in my peripheral vision, I was aware of the faces at the bar, intently watching us. They seemed to be smiling. The jukebox had switched gears, and Paula Abdul was in a rush for a guy who kissed her up and down.

  I pivoted from the hips and stepped forward. I hit him square in the solar plexus with a left hook that had everything I’ve got behind it. I heard the air wheeze out of him, and as he gasped for breath, I unleashed a right uppercut that started near my shoelaces and ended on the point of his unshaven chin. The punch lifted him off the floor and stretched him out on his back, feet twitching.

  Francisco Crespo had gotten up and now stood at the bar, watching without expression. He hadn’t helped them and he hadn’t helped me. He was a good soldier who didn’t want to cross the general, his boss. I wondered what he would have done if I’d been in real trouble. But then, I already knew that.

  I was aware of some murmuring at the tables, and in a moment, everyone was drinking and talking as if nothing had happened.

  I was breathing hard when I paid the tab. I threw in twenty bucks for a broken cue stick and a fifty to cover renting the place as a boxing ring. Another twenty for the waitress, who asked us to come back real soon and bring our friends.

  In the parking lot along the canal, an ugly Bufo frog the size of a double cheeseburger burped hello. Or was it good-bye? Some extremely unbalanced druggies are known to lick the Bufo, which secretes a milky hallucinogenic goo. I could never help wondering what bozo discovered this pharmaceutical phenomenon by first putting tongue to toad.

  The knuckles of my hands were split and beginning to swell. I sank stiffly into my old convertible and looked at my maniacally macho self in the rearview mirror. Angry knots were already popping out of my forehead. A judge once told me that, based on my trial strategy, I must have played football too long without a helmet. Now I looked the part. Maybe that was good for my buddy Francisco. When the jurors filed into the box, they wouldn’t be able to figure out which guy was the felon.

  10

  THE LADY IN RED

  I didn’t expect a woman to be waiting for me at home.

  A tractor-trailer had collided with a bus on Tamiami Trail, snarling traffic on the way back into the city. A light rain was falling, and it was growing dark. An ambulance sat on the soggy berm alongside the canal where the bus was jammed nose-first into the shallow water, its rear wheels angled into the air. Raindrops slithered down my windshield, glowing blood red with each revolution of the ambulance’s flashing light.

  From the east, I could hear a siren drawing closer. I know a personal injury lawyer who, whenever he hears an ambulance, turns to his partner and says, “They’re playing our song.” Yeah, lawyers.

  Eventually, the traffic cleared, and I headed into town, passing Sweetwater, heading into Little Havana, then south on Ponce de Leon, through the Gables, and into Coconut Grove. The neighborhood was quiet, except for the buzz and crackle of insects and the warbling of a mockingbird in the marlberry bush in my front yard. By this time of night, most birds were nuzzling their mates and telling whoppers about the fat, juicy night crawler that got away. But here was my mocker chirping nighttime melodies.

  My neighborhood is what the guidebooks would call eclectic, if they called it anything, which they don’t. To me, it’s just weird. Not fancy enough for the crème de la crumbs, real estate developers and drug dealers, it is home to a collection of what I call soloists, men and women who reject marital and suburban bliss.

  In the blank marked “occupation” on the census form, my neighbors are all “other.” Geoffrey, who lives in the stucco house behind the Poinciana trees, is a free-lance cameraman who works the wee hours and peddles videos of late-night car crashes and drug busts to the local TV stations. On the other side of the limeberry shrubs, Mako is ensconced in a wooden tree house reachable only by rope ladder. He trades custom-made hammocks for Florida crawfish with Homer Thigpen, a lobster pot poacher down the street. Phoebe with the bright red hair hosts swingers parties complete with nude diving contests in her swimming pool.

  My parking spot in the gravel under a chinaberry tree was occupied by a BMW convertible. On my front porch, a lady in a red leather mini and white silk blouse sat in Granny Lassiter’s cherry wood rocker. Granny used to rock while sipping from a Mason jar filled with liquid propane she called home brew. Now the Lady in Red sat there holding a supermarket bag. A loaf of Cuban bread stuck out the top.

  “You hungry?” Lourdes Soto asked.

  In the glow of a three-quarter moon enhanced by the misty green anticrime lights, Lourdes appeared as an apparition, her creamy complexion in soft focus. Her slight smile had the peacefulness of a Madonna, and for a moment I thought maybe Hector had hit me harder than I realized. When I got close enough for her to see my face, she let out a low whistle.

  “Is this what you downtown lawyers do on weekends? Flex that Y-chromosome, burn off some testosterone?”

  “I was meeting with a client.”

  She sniffed at the air and didn’t smell frangipani. “You sure you weren’t runner-up in a beer-guzzling contest?” She shook her head with disapproval. “Maybe I should put something on those scrapes.” said.

  I gestured toward the groceries. “After you cook some dinner.”

  “Cook? What do you think, I came here to make paella and boniatos? I’m not a traditional Cuban girl. We’re having sandwiches, Jake.”

  “Okay, okay. Sandwiches are fine.”

  I put a shoulder against the humidity-swollen front door and gave a good shove. It groaned open and I chivalrously allowed Lourdes to enter my palace. She surveyed the surroundings and remained graciously silent. In decorating, I have spared great expense.

  Lourdes didn’t blink an eye at the coffee table made of a sailboard propped on concrete blocks. She didn’t fuss at two weeks of newspapers spread across sofa and floor. She ignored a rusty scuba tank, a wetsuit that had dripped itself dry into a potted geranium, now comatose with saltwater poisoning, and she didn’t comment on my architectural skill at building a miniature house out of empty cartons of home delivery pizza.

  I flicked on the lamp with the translucent rotating Dolphins helmet for a shade. She looked at me in the orange-and-turquoise light and gently touched my forehead where welts were popping up. “Thankfully, your head is so hard, a few dents and scrapes won’t do any damage.” She put a hand on my shoulder and steered me toward the corridor. “Why don’t you shower? I’ll tidy up a bit.”

  “You sure? I don’t want you to violate some feminist manifesto.”

  “Don’t be a jerk. Go!” She ran a hand through my beer-sticky hair, then paused, a puzzled look crossing her face. “Is it my imagination or is that a peanut in your ear?”

  ***

  I showered and slipped into blue nylon running shorts. The occasion didn’t seem formal, so I skipped the shirt, socks, and shoes. I fou
nd her in the kitchen. The living room had been rearranged, dusted, and sorted out.

  “What I assumed to be garbage, I stacked in the corner by the door,” she said. “The cans and bottles are in separate bags, the newspapers tied in bundles for recycling.”

  “Thanks. Those sneakers with the missing tongue and flapping soles were my favorites, but I can live without them. And that’s quarter-inch outhaul line around the papers.”

  The coffee cups and cereal bowls that had filled the sink were now in the dishwasher, which had come out of retirement and was happily chugging away. The countertops had been wiped clean, and the floor mopped. And I always thought the kitchen tile was gray.

  I gave her a look. “What was that speech about not being the domestic type?”

  “You exceeded even my limits of tolerance.”

  “I guess the place could use a woman’s touch.”

  “Or even a human touch,” she said.

  She rooted around in a drawer, not finding what she wanted. “Do you have any flatware, or do you just use your hands?”

  I opened a second drawer filled with paper plates, paper cups, and plastic forks, spoons, and knives.

  “Environmentally unsound,” she said, peering inside.

  “I reuse the forks and spoons,” I replied, defending myself against charges of pillaging the earth.

  “I can see that.” She inspected a fork for toxic scum.

  After some sudsing and rinsing, she made sandwiches of roast turkey, cream cheese, and strawberry jam on Cuban bread. I watched her slender hands moving quickly. I watched the muscles in the calves of her legs as she moved across the small kitchen. I watched myself watch her and wondered what was going on.

  “You know Cubans have a weakness for sweets.” She added an extra dollop of jam to her bread. “This one’s yours.” She slid a plate across the counter to me. It contained a thick sandwich, a garnish of fresh pineapple, and a pile of banana chips. “Beer?” she asked.

  “No, thanks. I filled my quota today. Besides, the combination …”