by Levine, Paul
"Water level goes down a little every year."
"And the salt level comes up! We're headed for a disaster unless we change our ways."
He moved a few steps to the house and turned off the spigot, giving an extra tug to stop the dripping. Then he picked up pruning shears and clipped some dead leaves from a bright red bougainvillea vine.
"You knew the Bernhardts, Chrissy's parents," I said, trying to move the discussion from landscaping to the law.
"I did, and I've known Chrissy since she was a child."
"Tell me about Chrissy and her father."
"She didn't tell you?"
"Not yet."
"But surely you've surmised . . ."
"Yeah, but I need to hear it. From you and from her."
"May I be blunt?"
"I prefer it."
"Harry Bernhardt raped Chrissy when she was eleven. He committed incest, a crime of unspeakable ugliness." The doctor seemed pained. He didn't look at me, but snipped a branch of the bougainvillea with such vigor, he might have thought he was castrating old Harry. "He continued coming to her bed—oh, damn the euphemisms—he continued fucking his little girl until she was fourteen and he found her in the barn with a stableboy. He called her a dirty slut, said her mother was frigid and she was a whore, something like that."
I tried to picture Chrissy as a child, burdened with the secret, living in fear and pain. I had to force myself to keep a professional distance. Clients need logic and clarity from their lawyers, not emotions and pity.
"During these years, you spent a lot of time in the Bernhardt home, didn't you?" I asked.
"Yes."
"But you never suspected her father of abusing her?"
"Unfortunately, no. Looking back, of course, you see things differently. Christina in her father's lap, something that seemed so innocent, takes on a different connotation. He doted on her, was jealous of others' attentions to her. At the time, I thought he was just being overly protective, but in retrospect, that wasn't Harry's way at all."
"What was his way?" I asked, thinking of Granny's complaint: Attack the victim.
"Harry Bernhardt was a hard man. Insensitive to Emily, Christina's mother, who was a lovely woman, as refined and sophisticated as Harry was crude. Still, who could have known, this hideous thing, incest . . ." He let the ugly word hang there a moment, then said, "I have to confess that it caught me completely by surprise."
He picked up a rake and smoothed some mulch around the roots of a wild coffee plant. "Holds the moisture in, prevents evaporation," he explained.
"So Chrissy shot her father because she remembered what he had done to her?"
"Oh, that's an oversimplification. Christina suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder. I'm sure you're familiar with the term."
"Yeah. I saw it on Geraldo."
"Vietnam syndrome, we called it a generation ago. And that was just an offshoot of shell shock from World War I and combat fatigue from the Second World War. But psychiatry's come a long way. We know so much more now. You don't have to be a soldier to have sublimated the horror in your life."
Dr. Schein was talking to me, but he was examining the leathery green leaves of the coffee plant. I wondered what a shrink would say about his failure to make eye contact.
"When Christina came back from Europe and I first treated her," he said, "she had great difficulty controlling her emotions. Her history was an encyclopedia of clues. She overreacted to stress, misdirected her anger, and had problems with alcohol, drugs, even food. Classic symptoms right down the line."
"Classic?"
"For the survivor of incest. Migraines, nightmares, feelings of dread without reason. She had huge blocks from her childhood that were missing. She couldn't, or wouldn't, remember them, another indication that she was in denial. She simply locked out the memories."
"And you unlocked them?"
He cocked his head and showed a little smile. "Let's just say I handed her the key. She still had to turn it."
I gave him back his little smile just to show my appreciation at how gosh-darned clever he was. "You're confident the memories are real?"
"Unquestionably. The little girl in Christina, her inner child, was talking, and she had no reason to lie."
"Could she have been mistaken?"
"Not a chance. Christina had repressed her memories of childhood incest. I helped her recover those memories, which were always there, buried under layers of shame and denial. When they returned, they were clear and vivid and real."
"And they couldn't have been dreams or something she just imagined?"
"Counselor, you're looking the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. I'm handing you your defense."
"No, you're not. You're handing the prosecution its motive. Here's how Abe Socolow will see it. Once Chrissy turned the key you handed her, she hated her father for abusing her years ago. Harry Bernhardt posed no current threat to Chrissy, so the shooting couldn't be self-defense or justifiable homicide. It was pure revenge, and that's walking straight into a first-degree murder conviction."
"I see," the doctor said, somewhat subdued.
"Look, maybe you could help at a sentencing hearing, but that happens only after she's been convicted, and if it's murder one, the only two options are death and life without parole, no matter what you say."
Dr. Schein stopped fooling with the mulch and leaned on his rake. "Would it make a difference if Christina shot her father while suffering a blackout or a flashback to the abuse itself?"
"Did she?"
"Quite likely."
"You'd be willing to testify to that?"
"Of course."
I thought about it. If Chrissy had blacked out, she wouldn't have the requisite criminal intent to support a murder charge. Manslaughter, maybe, but not murder. With a plea, maybe ten years, out in six. Better than life without parole. Of course, I'd have to ask Chrissy about the blackout. Better yet, I'd get Jimmy Stewart to ask. "I'll need her complete file to get ready for the bond hearing," I said.
"Already copied it for you." He gestured toward a redwood picnic table just behind me.
I picked up a file six inches thick, then sat down to examine it. One folder contained handwritten notes of the therapy sessions; another seemed to be transcripts. "You taped the sessions?" I asked.
"Only the hypnosis. You'll find the transcripts to be quite complete."
"Good. But I'd like to have the tapes, too."
His arched eyebrows shot me a Why?
"If they're helpful, we play them for the jury," I said.
"If they're not, wouldn't it be better if you didn't have them?"
It took me a second to figure that out. Schein was a slippery shrink. First, he was handing me my defense. Now, he was playing hide the evidence. What was on those tapes anyway? "You're worried about me having to turn over the tapes to the prosecution?"
He began raking the mulch again, though as far as I could see, it was evenly spread. "Once I testify, your client will have waived the physician-patient privilege, will she not?"
"Yeah."
"And wasn't the psychiatrist's tape recording of the Menendez brothers admissible?" he asked.
"Sure was."
"So . . ."
"So, you can't destroy them, no matter what's on them. That'd be obstruction of justice."
"I see," he said.
"But I do appreciate the gesture."
I looked through the folder, checking the dates along the left margin of the therapy notes. "You were seeing her three days a week."
"At one point, five days a week."
I thumbed through several pages in a file labeled simply MEDICATION. "I had no idea she was taking so many drugs. Xanax and Ativan . . ."
"For anxiety related to depression."
"Mellaril . . ."
"To control flashbacks." He carried a potted fern to the picnic table and sat down across from me.
"Any idea whether she was taking them the day of the shootin
g?"
He shrugged. Another question for Chrissy.
"Prozac and Desyrel . . ."
"For depression." With a small clipper, he cut away some brown stems of the fern. For some reason, the gesture reminded me of a woman plucking her eyebrows.
"Restoril, Darvocet, and lithium."
"To help her sleep, for headaches, and mood swings."
"Better living through chemistry," I said.
"The proper use of drugs is an essential part of therapy."
"Uh-huh. What about now?"
"I beg your pardon."
"Does she need drugs, therapy, anything?"
"Oh, no. Christina has confronted her demons and exorcised them."
"By remembering . . . or by killing?"
Dr. Schein put down his clippers, briefly scanned his environmentally friendly, xeriscaped yard, then looked me in the eye for the first time. His smile was just this side of smug. "In one sense, the killing of Harry Bernhardt was quite unfortunate."
"Especially for Harry Bernhardt," I agreed.
"But in another sense, what Christina did was finally take control of her own life, and that was therapeutic. Quite therapeutic indeed."
A Perfect World
I approached the intersection of Calle Ocho and Twelfth Avenue in Little Havana, intending to turn left and head north. But the city padres had changed the street signs again and, momentarily confused, I missed the turn to the bridge on my way to the sadly misnamed Justice Building.
Oh, we seek justice in the building, just as we seek holiness in a house of worship. Both goals are difficult to achieve and seldom witnessed by mortals. Which is not to say that the building doesn't dispense "law" by the bucketful. Law is the product that spews out of the building's courtrooms, hundreds of times each day. Guilt, innocence, suspended sentences, pretrial intervention, nolle prosequi, time served, mistrials, adjudication withheld. The product comes in a dozen brands. But justice is an ideal, a vague concept we strive for but can barely define, much less master.
Justice requires lawyers who are prepared, witnesses who tell the truth, judges who know the law, and jurors who stay awake. Justice is the North Star, the burning bush, the Holy Virgin. It cannot be bought, sold, or mass-produced. It is intangible, ineffable, and invisible, but if you are to spend your life in its pursuit, it is best to believe it exists, and that you can attain it.
So there I was, going farther east on Calle Ocho, or Eighth Street, or Olga Guillot Way, according to the new sign that threw me. I don't know why the bolero singer got the honor, unless it was because a few blocks away, Celia Cruz, the salsa singer, has the same street named for her, and a few blocks from that, so do Carlos Arboleya, Felipe Vails, and Loring Evans. If that's not baffling enough, a stretch of Twelfth Avenue, near here, is called Ronald Reagan Avenue.
Our city and county commissioners, ever desirous of licking the boots of their constituents, once named a street Leomar Parkway after a major campaign contributor who turned out to be a major drug dealer. There are streets named for Almirante Miguel Grau, a Peruvian admiral in the 1800s, and Francisco de Paula Santander, a Colombian general. There's even one named for José Canseco, the baseball slugger, who has been fined repeatedly for driving his sports cars at more than one hundred miles an hour. Maybe a lane at the Daytona Speedway would be more appropriate.
Eventually, I doubled back and found General Máximo Gómez Boulevard—no, I don't know who the hell he was—and made my way north to the Justice Building, which houses criminals and other miscreants such as judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers.
It was just before nine A.M. when I slipped into a parking place next to the jail. Overhead, prisoners were being taken across an enclosed walkway directly into holding cells on the fourth floor. Chrissy would already be inside, having arrived by bus from the Women's Detention Center a few blocks away.
I hurried down a narrow alley toward the back entrance of the building, nearly running into Curly Hendry, who was leaning on his rolling trash bin. Curly, who was bald, had spent several stretches in the county jail, plus a couple of years upstate. I represented him once, when cops found an ATM machine all trussed up in a towing chain, the other end of which was attached to a winch on his heavy-duty Dodge pickup. These days, he pushed a broom for the county.
"Qué pasa, Curly?"
"Don't talk no Espan-oley to me, Jake. I'm just a cracker who's got to clean up after them crazy island fuckers." He pointed into the trash bin and held his nose. "So far this morning, three dead chickens and a goat's head. Now what's this?"
He bent down and looked at a cake with frosted icing.
"To sweeten a judge's disposition," I told him.
"Damn voodoo."
"More like Santería."
"Makes me want to move to Georgia. Yesterday, had some damn broken eggs out here. The sun got to 'em before I did, could smell 'em all the way to Hialeah."
"They're to make the case collapse."
He scooped up the cake and tossed it into the trash bin. "Last week, a dead lizard with its mouth tied shut."
"That's—"
"I know. To shut up a snitch."
"Right."
"So, Jake, what brings you out here with all these witch doctors and Third World types?"
"Bond hearing. Say, Curly, you find anything that'll get me bond in a murder one?"
"To hell with cakes and lizards, Jake. Just pray for a judge whose brother-in-law is a bondsman who needs the work. If not, slip some Ben Franklins in an envelope and call it a campaign contribution."
"Curly, you know I don't play the game that way."
He went back to his broom. "No damn wonder I did twenty-seven months at Avon Park."
"If a bad childhood were an excuse for murder, our prisons would be empty," Abe Socolow said gravely. "I'm quite sure every inmate on death row had a perfectly atrocious childhood. Far worse than that of Ms. Christina Bernhardt in her oceanfront mansion, I daresay."
He daresay?
Abe Socolow had a tendency toward pomposity, but for a prosecutor, he was almost human. A little rigid, a little self-righteous, but honest and fair. He was tall and lean and sallow and preferred undertaker-black suits with white shirts and blood-red ties. His cuff links were miniature silver handcuffs.
At the moment, Honest Abe was ridiculing my assertion that the state had overcharged my client, going for murder instead of manslaughter.
"Recovered memories," Socolow sniffed. "Posttraumatic stress disorder. Judge, these silver-tongued defense lawyers come up with more syndromes than a dog's got fleas."
Damn, it sounded like Abe had been talking to my granny. Either that or he was just trying to be folksy, something that didn't come naturally. Judge Myron Stanger peered down from the bench, his eyes hidden behind tinted glasses so we couldn't tell when he dozed off. He had a bulbous nose lined with tiny blue veins and a white fringe of hair on his egg-shaped head. His Honor was fond of the Bolivar brand of Cuban cigars, and at this moment was chewing on a cold Corona Gigantes, in violation of both courtroom protocol and the federal Embargo Act. The judge was flanked by the American flag and the Florida flag. A set of Florida Statutes sat, still in shrink wrap, on his desk. Only a few spectators were on the long wooden benches that resembled church pews. I was sitting at the defense table on a heavy mahogany chair whose brown leather seat had cracked with age and taken on the shininess of cheap trousers.
Abe rambled on, "Battered-spouse syndrome supposedly lets a woman kill her husband, though she's in no immediate danger. A white man guns down two black teenagers and says he's been traumatized by urban survival syndrome and ought to be excused. A woman who shot her husband on Super Bowl Sunday says she suffers from football widow syndrome. A fellow charged with tax evasion has failure-to-file syndrome. Abused-child syndrome, black rage, mob psychosis—where's it going to end? I ask Your Honor, where will it all end?"
Judge Stanger seemed startled, perhaps wondering if Socolow really wanted an answer. Then he sa
id, "Let's not argue the case today, gentlemen. This is merely a bond hearing, and under Arthur v. State, the defense has the burden of showing that the proof is not great and that a presumption of guilt is not evident. As I understand the proffered testimony of Dr. Schein and Mr. Lassiter's argument, there's no factual dispute. The defendant shot her father."
The judge nodded toward the defense table, where Chrissy, in a jailhouse smock, sat next to me. We'd get her dressed up prim and proper by the time a jury was called. She seemed dazed, out of place, in the controlled chaos of the courtroom. To those of us who work there, it's a second home. Same for my customers, those recidivists who know as much law as I do. But to someone from east of the highway, as we call those who grew up near the ocean, it's a frightening new world.
The judge waved his giant cigar in my direction and said, "While conceding that the shooting occurred, Mr. Lassiter argues that the defendant may not have had the requisite criminal intent to be charged with premeditated murder. Is that about it?"
"All the elements of the crime having been established, the grand jury indicted her for first-degree murder," Socolow said, raising his hands, as if it were out of his control.
"The grand jury would parade naked down Biscayne Boulevard if Abe asked them to," I piped up.
"Your Honor," Socolow said, shooting me a murderous glance, "even assuming all this psychiatric mumbo-jumbo is true, it's not a defense. Just because criminal behavior is caused doesn't mean it's excused."
I got to my feet and approached the lectern for the second time that morning. "May it please the court," I said, in the lawyer's traditional line of fealty, "Mr. Socolow ignores the fact that we have raised a substantial issue as to one of the elements of the crime. If the state cannot prove intent, it cannot secure a conviction. The court must instruct the jury that, to be found guilty of murder one, my client must have killed the decedent with premeditation, which the law defines in these terms . . ." I picked up the manual of jury instructions that Judge Stanger would eventually read to the jurors. " 'Killing with premeditation is killing after consciously deciding to do so. The decision must be present in the mind at the time of the killing, and the intent to kill must be formed before the killing.' "