Lassiter 07 - Flesh and Bones

by Levine, Paul

  We were bouncing through ruts and drainage ditches between rows of gnarly mango trees, and Guy Bernhardt was lecturing on the fertilizers, yields per acre, and every other damned bit of minutia you probably didn't want to know about Mangifera indica, including the fact that the fruit is related to the cashew.

  I was inhaling the musky aroma of the field, half listening to Guy, half wondering what the hell was going on with the odd couple of Guy Bernhardt and Larry Schein. I couldn't shake the feeling that Guy was more complicated than a good-ole-boy mango grower and Schein had more secrets than Freud's Wolf Man.

  "You have a problem with varmints?" I asked, and Guy seemed puzzled for a moment, then saw I was looking at a 12-gauge mounted between the front seats.

  "Oh, that? Yeah, the two-legged kind. It's to protect the water, which is more valuable than the fruit—hell, more valuable than oil. We've got our own well fields out here, and some of the neighboring farmers claim we're sucking their wells dry. Then the state cited us for supposedly lowering Little Bass Lake a foot or so."

  We passed under a forty-foot irrigation tower that resembled an oil derrick, and I watched a rainbow form in the parabola of a giant stream of water that shot from the gun assembly at its peak. Mist drifted into the Jeep, cooling us.

  "You do any environmental law, Jake?" Guy asked.

  Seducing me with the hint of future business.

  "Don't know the first thing about it."

  "You oughta learn. It's a real lawyers' relief act, all those regulations. They want to fine us ten thousand dollars a day, can you believe that horse crap? I told them it's the drought, go sue God."

  "What about your neighbors?"

  "Hell, when their wells went dry, I sold them water. Got a special act through the legislature—Pop had some clout up in Tallahassee—so they treated us like a mini-utility. Some of the locals, the lime and avocado growers, didn't like my price and didn't like me, so the bastards complained to the state, to the Department of Environmental Resources Management, to the Army Corps of Engineers, to their congressmen, who wouldn't know a well field from . . ."

  "A hole in the ground," I helped out.

  "Yeah. So I said, screw you. No more water for you at any price, and we'll pump as much as the Water Management District lets us, and maybe a little more." He laughed, and we crossed a wooden bridge into a different section of the field. "Now we have some hardcases who sneak out here at night and cut our irrigation pipes."

  After about fifteen minutes, we turned onto a road of crushed seashells and into the tree farm, where palms of a dozen different varieties were growing from seed. Here, too, irrigation towers shot long graceful arcs into the air, which misted into kaleidoscopes of color.

  "Pop loved to grow things," Guy said. "Jake, you ought to come up to Palm Beach sometime, see Pop's work at the house on A1A. Shouldn't he, Larry?"

  Next to me, Dr. Schein's ball cap nodded in assent.

  "Flowering trees were Pop's favorites. Jacaranda, mahogany, pigeon plum, wild tamarind. Planted some for old man Castleberry, kept planting them after he owned the place. Liked to dig the holes himself, get his hands dirty."

  "Like father, like son," Dr. Schein said, taking off his cap and running a hand over his gleaming scalp.

  "It's true," Guy said, laughing. "The mango doesn't fall far from the tree."

  "I'd like to see the place someday," I allowed.

  "Anytime," Guy said, fiddling with his gold earring.

  It seemed out of place on him, this husky son of a farmer. I don't wear an earring, carry a purse, or say "ciao," so men with pierced ears seem as out of place to me as a nun shooting the bird.

  The Jeeps crossed a narrow irrigation stream where water rippled through a shallow gully. Guy said something in Spanish to the driver, and I turned to Schein. "You're pretty close to the family, aren't you?"

  "Oh, I've been making house calls—to all their houses—for twenty years. I'm more of a friend than a doctor."

  To Guy Bernhardt, he meant. To Chrissy, he was still a doctor, I figured. And despite Guy's apparent attempts to help Chrissy, I couldn't help but wonder which was stronger, Schein's relationship with his patient or that with his friend.

  "I need to ask both of you some questions about Chrissy's case."

  "Shoot," Guy said. Then he laughed. "No pun intended."

  I sat there a moment, trying to keep from looking startled. A trial lawyer never wants to appear surprised, in or out of court. The man's father had been shot dead two weeks ago, and he was making a little joke. Okay, we all react to loss differently, but it just struck me as a discordant note.

  Turning to the doctor, I said, "The tape recorder you use on your office sessions, does it take batteries?"

  "Well, it can. But I use the jack to a wall outlet, or else I'd be changing batteries twice a week."

  "Uh-huh. There seemed to be a gap on the tape of the hypnotic regression session when Chrissy remembered the abuse."

  "A gap?" Sounding innocent enough. "I could have run out of tape and inserted a new one."

  "No. The tape was about two thirds of the way through. You had just asked Chrissy about her father, and the tape went dead. Then it picked up again, but of course I can't tell how long it was off."

  The doctor shrugged. "Sometimes my secretary buzzes me if there's an emergency call I have to take, and I'll hit the Stop button. Or maybe I had to sign for a package. Who knows?"

  Not me, that's for sure. I hadn't heard a secretary buzzing or a UPS driver toting packages into the room. All I'd heard was the click, and next thing I knew, Chrissy was recovering lost memories.

  "Then on the last tape, June fourteenth, she was going to tell you something, some decision she made, but you turned off the recorder."

  "No. I wouldn't do that. Did you look at my office notes of the session?"

  "Yeah. They just say Chrissy's agitated and anxious. She's to continue medication and see you on the seventeenth."

  "But on the night of the sixteenth . . ." he said, and he didn't have to finish.

  "Do you have any idea how long Chrissy was in your office on June fourteenth?"

  "Not offhand."

  "But your appointment book would tell us."

  "Yes. I mean, it could. But if there wasn't an appointment right after hers, it might appear she was there longer than she was."

  "Uh-huh. How long was she usually there?"

  "It varied. The hypnosis sessions could last two or three hours, some even longer."

  "Three hours," I repeated.

  The team's orthopedic surgeon hadn't taken that long rebuilding my knee. Five days a week. Chrissy wasn't a patient; she was a career.

  "Hey, Jake, what's the big deal?" Guy Bernhardt broke in. "If it took an hour or a year, Chrissy came up with it. I didn't want to accept it, but Larry says that Sis is telling the truth, so I have to live with the knowledge that my old man was a miserable letch, and you can make hay with it in court."

  "Yeah, maybe. Let me ask you something, Guy. In court the other day, you mentioned an insanity plea. But our defense is lack of intent due to posttraumatic stress disorder, and that's not insanity."

  We passed over another road and into a stand of tropical fruit trees. Surinam cherry, carambola, and banana. The air was sweet with ripening fruit.

  "I was just giving you another option," Guy Bernhardt said. "Larry and I talked about insanity as another way to go."

  Great, the inmates were running the asylum. And trying to send my client there.

  "Thanks for the help," I said evenly.

  "According to Larry, you weren't jumping for joy over the defense he handed you."

  He handed me? Funny, that was the same term Schein had used the other day. These guys did talk a lot. Now what were they handing me? Manure for the mangoes?

  The doctor cleared his throat. "We're not trying to interfere. You're the lawyer. We're just members of your team."

  "You're the captain," Guy Bernhardt said.


  They seemed so sincere. Why couldn't I just take what they were offering? Why did my Dream Team have nightmare written all over it?

  "You don't do much forensic work, do you, Doctor?" I asked.

  "No. I have a private practice, and thankfully, my patients don't often end up in court. A divorce once in a while, but nothing like this."

  "Then let me clue you in, so you can give me informed advice, teammate to teammate. I filed a written not-guilty plea yesterday. If we're going to rely on insanity, I have two weeks to notify the state. Then the judge will appoint three psychiatrists to examine Chrissy. I have no control over who the judge picks or what they'll say at trial. So even if you're willing to venture an opinion that Chrissy was insane at the time of the shooting— which I've yet to hear you say—you might be outvoted three to one."

  "Oh, we wouldn't want that, would we?" Schein asked rhetorically.

  "Hell, no," Guy said. "Don't let any other shrinks go poking around."

  Why not? I wondered. What might they find?

  "I won't, at least not any the state can call to testify," I said. "I was thinking about hiring my own, though, as backup."

  "Is that necessary?" Schein said. "I mean, I'm the treating physician. I don't know what anyone could add who's just coming in cold."

  Objectivity, I thought.

  "You may be right," I said. "If it ain't broke, why fix it?"

  We were almost back to the house, having made a circle of the tree farm and listened to Guy's soliloquy on the Senegal date palm, thatch palm, queen palm, fishtail palm, and sago palm. While his father had loved the trees, Guy's favorites were the tropical fruits, which he claimed had medicinal properties. The Haitians use the Surinam cherry to soothe a sore throat, he told me. The papaya, or fruta bomba, is a digestive aid, and the Jamaicans squeeze the tamarind to cure stomachaches. Guy Bernhardt had a real pharmacy growing out here.

  The Jeeps were digging ruts in a dirt perimeter road on the mango fields when a radio on the dashboard crackled with static followed by some rapid-fire Spanish that I didn't catch.

  "Go!" Guy shouted to the driver, who blew his horn twice at the accompanying Jeeps.

  The driver stomped on the accelerator, and we jolted through muddy potholes off the road and into a row of blooming mango trees. In the Jeep ahead of us, the guard in the passenger seat stood and leveled his shotgun across the top of the open windshield.

  Guy spoke excitedly in Spanish into the radio, then turned to me. "You must be psychic, my friend."

  "Huh?"

  "We got a problem with varmints."

  When we rounded a corner, close enough to a tree to rattle the branches and have a couple one-pounders fall into the Jeep, I saw what he meant. A heavy-duty pickup truck with no license plate, its bed filled with mangoes, was racing down the row ahead of us. A shotgun blast reverberated from the Jeep in front of us, and the pickup swerved but stayed on the road. Another shot, and I heard the ping of buckshot off the rear gate of the pickup.

  "Son of a bitch! We'll head them off," Guy shouted, and again the driver blew the horn.

  The Jeep in front peeled off to the left, the one behind to the right. We gained on the pickup. Guy reached under his seat and came up holding a Glock nine-millimeter handgun. He stood and held the gun in both hands, reminding me of his half sister in the club, though this weapon was bigger and packed more punch. The pop-pop-pop-pop was followed by Guy's grunt, then, "Damn! Can't steady it." He braced himself, then fired off several more rounds. Another shotgun blast from the Jeep to the left. The aim must have been high, because in a second, a tree was dripping with eviscerated fruit.

  As we approached a T-intersection at the end of the grove, the pickup swung to the right, but one of the Jeeps was headed straight at it. The pickup swerved back to the left, but the third Jeep was coming from that direction. The truck tried to straighten out, slid in the mud, and flew straight across the road and up and over an earthen levee.

  We heard the splash as our Jeep skidded to a stop at the base of the levee. Guy was the first one out, and he tromped up the slope, pistol in hand. I followed, and by the time I reached the top, two guards were aiming shotguns at the overturned pickup truck. Three men tumbled out of the cab and stood with their hands over their heads in the shallow water. A thousand pounds of freshly picked mangoes were dribbling into the water and slowly floating down the irrigation channel.

  Guy Bernhardt pointed the Glock in the general direction of the mango rustlers. "Bastards! Chickenshit thieving bastards! I ought to kill you."

  His face was red, and his little eyes were slits in his porcine face. "You know what I do to shitheads who steal from me! I kill them! Who would even miss you, buried under a jacaranda tree, you jerk-offs!" He aimed at one of the men, who trembled visibly. "What about it, Lassiter?"

  "What?"

  "You're my lawyer. If you can get Sis off, what about me? If I kill these pukes, do I have a problem?"

  "Are you in imminent fear for your life?"

  "Hell, no! But they are."

  "Then you'd better not shoot them."

  "Fucking poachers! And fucking lawyers! Everybody wants something for nothing. But nothing worth having is free. Not water. Not mangoes. Not nothing. I've worked for everything I've got, Lassiter."

  He fingered his earring with one hand and held the gun with the other. "You ready, poachers? You ready to die?"

  "Guy, I think that's enough venting for today," Schein said placidly. "I believe the gentlemen get the point."

  Guy Bernhardt shot Schein an angry look, then swung the gun toward the channel. He emptied the magazine, killing several innocent mangoes as they floated toward Biscayne Bay.

  As the echoes died down, my mind wandered. Had Chrissy worked for everything, too? Or had it all come too easily? The career. And now the inheritance. I was still thinking about red-faced Guy and his half sister when I noticed that there was something vaguely familiar about the pickup. Just then the driver, knee-deep in the channel, spoke for the first time.

  "Jake, mi amigo, am I glad to see you," Roberto Condom said, hands high over his head, blood dripping from his nose.

  Sirens' Song

  Step into the lobby of the Fontainebleau, and it's 1959. You can almost hear Bobby Darin singing "Mack the Knife," and you expect to see Sammy Davis, Jr., walking out of the Poodle Lounge, maybe chatting up Frank Sinatra. The architecture—all gilt and marble—is a combination of faux French and Miami Beach kitsch. We've lost a lot of our local landmarks in recent years. Gone is the Coppertone sign on Biscayne Boulevard with the puppy pulling off the little girl's bikini bottom. Gone are Eastern Air Lines, Pan Am, and the Miami News. But the Fontainebleau is still here, and I love the place. It has no pretensions about its pretensions and is off limits to the South Beach terminally trendy crowd.

  From the lobby, I took the escalator down to the ground floor, strolled past the obligatory sunglasses and sundries stores, and found something new. A spy shop. In the window were voice-activated tape recorders to catch a cheating spouse or business partner, bionic binoculars with earphones, telephone scramblers, bomb suppression blankets, and ninety-thousand-volt stun guns. A nice touch, I thought, but the hotel could do even more. With rampant mayhem against tourists, shouldn't the Fontainebleau offer a modified American plan: breakfast and dinner plus a bulletproof vest and transportation from the airport in a Humvee?

  The Season was over, and summer is still an afterthought here, so the pool deck was mostly deserted, except for a few Chileans escaping their cold season. The day was sweltering, but a breeze from the ocean rattled the palm fronds and kept things bearable.

  It wasn't hard to find Chrissy. She wore a white one-piece swimsuit cut low in front and high on the sides. She slouched in one of those canvas-backed director's chairs under an umbrella, a queen bee, while the drones buzzed around her. A makeup artist—a pale young woman sans makeup—dusted her forehead. A hair stylist—a skinny guy with unruly shoulder-length curls— used a
portable dryer to comb out her hair. A barefoot male assistant in khaki shorts fanned Chrissy with a magazine.

  A scrawny young man I took to be the director hovered over her, gesturing with a rolled-up script toward the free-form pool, where a waterfall tumbled over Disneyesque rocks. He looked about twenty-five and was lost inside a huge gray T-shirt that claimed to be the property of the Chicago Bears, though I doubted the guy had ever heard of Mike Ditka, much less sweated through a nutcracker drill.

  "Chrissy, you look positively fab," he gushed. "Perfecto! Next, scene three, catching rays in the lagoon."

  Okay, so it wasn't Gone With the Wind.

  Sitting in a matching chair was another model, a dark-haired, deeply tanned young woman in a green bikini. She seemed to be pouting, maybe because Chrissy was getting all the attention, or maybe it was just her normal look. A photographer toted a video camera to the edge of the pool while an assistant took readings with a light meter. Several technicians and production people busied themselves around the pool with lights, reflectors, and assorted accoutrements of their trade. The place hummed with serious activity, Mission Control before a launch. Everyone wore shorts and T-shirts, except this big lug of a lawyer, whose blue oxford-cloth shirt was already beginning to show sweat stains.

  I headed toward Chrissy when a young woman with a stopwatch hanging from her neck held up her hand. "Whoa! Crew only."

  "I'm with Chrissy," I said.

  She looked at me dubiously, but I was saved by my client. "Jake! Over here. We'll just be a minute."

  I gave the stopwatch woman my best crooked grin. "Making a commercial is pretty intense, I guess."

  "An advertorial, not a commercial." She sounded offended.

  "Sorry." I walked past her and into the little circle around Chrissy. My social standing had just improved by several strata.

  The director was talking to Chrissy and gesturing with his hands. "It's not merely suntan oil. It's an attitude, a way of life. It makes you glow on the inside, as well as outside."