State vs Lassiter

by Paul Levine

  I hadn’t been indicted yet. The state grand jury was still meeting, hearing the evidence, but I knew that Detective Barrios and Prosecutor Vazquez had put together what lawyers call a prima facie case. It wouldn’t be long before 23 citizens would sign the “true bill” attesting that a homicide had been committed and that there was probable cause I’d committed it. Thus would start the relentless wheels of the so-called justice system.

  “‘As I fear for my safety,’” Willow read aloud from the email that had her so aggravated, “‘I am asking the general counsel’s office to seek a restraining order against Mr. Lassiter as soon as practicable.’ Shit!”

  “A cover-her-ass document,” I said. “I had just accused her of skimming the trust accounts. We argued and she tried to turn the tables on me. I stormed out of the hotel suite and she sent the bullshit email, claiming she’d found the discrepancies in the accounts.”

  “So you say.” Willow studied me a moment, either judging my credibility, or sizing me up for prison garb.

  I had decided early on that I wanted a female defense lawyer. A no brainer. The victim was a young woman, presumably killed by her lover, a miserable wretch named Jake Lassiter, soon to be confronted with evidence of his violent nature. I needed a female protector to fend off the awesome power of the state. I needed the jury to see her comforting hand on my arm, her presence attesting to my lack of misogynistic rage.

  So now, with the grand jury meeting behind closed doors, plotting against me, I delivered my future – or lack thereof – to the capable hands of Willow Hampton Marsh, Esquire, cagey trial lawyer and still a major babe.

  Willow had been chief prosecutor in the major crimes division of the state attorney’s office and knew the players there. She’d crossed over and become a defense lawyer a dozen years ago. She was a tall, lanky blonde approaching 50 with grace and wit and intelligence.

  The times I’d seen Willow in trial, she was utterly at ease in the courtroom. Despite her Mensa I.Q., she never talked down to the jury, and she possessed powerful persuasion skills. Thankfully, unlike the situation with Emilia Vazquez, there was no past between Willow and me.

  “I don’t know which is the worst fact,” she said, “that suck-ass email, your belt around Pamela’s neck, your DNA under her fingernails, or that half the tourists on Miami Beach heard you two squabbling that night.”

  “I vote for the DNA,” I said.

  “Right. It’s the damn CSI effect. Here’s the DNA. Slam the jailhouse door.”

  “The truth is really simple. When we argued in the hotel suite, she came at me and scratched my face. That’s where the DNA came from.”

  “The state will argue Pamela was defending herself against your assault.”

  “I never laid a hand on her or any other woman.”

  “Nicely said. If I let you testify, make sure you say that, perhaps with even more righteous indignation. And instead of ‘her,’ say ‘Pamela.’ Personalize it. She was the woman you loved.”

  I decided to practice. “I never laid a hand on Pamela or any other woman!”

  “Good. Very good.” Willow made a note on a yellow pad then moved on. “Next we have the ludicrous fact that you, a seasoned trial lawyer, talked to the detective and prosecutor without counsel at the crime scene. What the hell was that about?”

  “It’s what an innocent man does. A true sign of innocence.”

  “You know better than that. A first-year law student knows better than that. Cops are not your friends. Their job is to make a case against you. Your job is not to make their job easier.”

  “I didn’t say anything incriminating.”

  “You made jokes! Your lover was dead on the floor and you cracked wise.”

  “I was nervous.”

  “Really, is that another sign of innocence?” Before I could answer, she said, “Now, tell me about Emilia Vazquez.”

  “She’s a fine prosecutor.”

  Willow laughed. “No kidding. What about you and her?”

  “We were involved for a while, about 10 years ago. At least I thought we were. Apparently, she thought we were just fuck buddies.”

  “That’s her rationalization,” Willow said. “Belittling the relationship after you dumped her is a defense mechanism against suffering pain.”

  “I didn’t dump her. I just stopped calling.”

  Another laugh. A fine hearty one, like water tumbling over a falls. “What you don’t know about women, Jake, exceeds what you don’t know about the law.”

  Both ends of that statement stung.

  “I’ve won my share of cases,” I said defensively.

  “Sure you have. You’re big and handsome and have presence in the well of the courtroom. You plunge straight ahead, like a fullback into the line. When you try a case, there are always bodies on the floor and broken teacups on the shelf.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Not at all. You’re just not known for subtlety or trick plays. Like the…what’s it called when the running back takes the ball then tosses it back to the quarterback who passes it down field.”

  “The flea flicker.”

  “You’re definitely not a flea-flicker lawyer.”

  “And you are?”

  “I mold myself to the occasion. If a case takes brute strength, I can do that. If trickery is involved, I can do that, too. Whatever it takes, Jake.”

  I considered the ramifications of what she was saying. A flea-flicker is a lawful play on the football field, as opposed to say a chop-block. But the word “trickery” in a court of law might have other meanings. Like lying or cheating. Was Willow Marsh saying she’d do anything to win?

  “Not sure you’re gonna need trickeration to win,” I said.

  “Why, because you’re innocent?”

  “Yes, but you don’t seem particularly glad to hear it.”

  “Makes little difference to me, other than certain strategic choices. I’m committed to forcing the state to prove its case, either way. If anything, your innocence makes my job more stressful.”

  I knew what she meant. No lawyer wants to lose when the client is innocent.

  “You have any other suspects for me to point the finger at?” she asked.

  I told her about Mitch Crowder, the ex-boyfriend, semi-stalker. Willow said she already knew about him. It was the first thing her private investigator uncovered. Her P.I. was doing a full work-up on Pamela. If she’d been stealing from me – or my clients – there could be others out there. Who knows how many people with grievances there might be?

  “There’s something else for your P.I. to look into,” I said. “The autopsy showed semen in Pamela’s vagina. There are none of the usual signs of rape, so…”

  “You’re wondering who she had sex with before showing up at the hotel to meet you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who else was she seeing?”

  “No one I know about. We’d never discussed being monogamous, but I was. I just figured she was, too.

  “Really, you have no clue who she was screwing.” Willow’s look conveyed the impression I should be wearing a dunce cap.

  “No.”

  “Because my investigator got the video surveillance at her condo. You usually spent Friday and Saturday nights there, right?”

  “Yeah. And Pamela usually spent one weeknight at my place. So…”

  “Well the guy who spent almost every Sunday night at Pamela’s was Eddie Novak.”

  13

  Strangulation by Ligature

  “Fracture of the hyoid bone and the thyroid cartilage was pretty well crushed,” Doc Charlie Riggs said, reading from the autopsy report. “Whoever did this was strong and angry.”

  I stayed quiet and sipped at my Grolsch. But the beer couldn’t erase the taste of rusty nails as I listened to Doc describe Pamela’s excruciating death.

  “Hemorrhage at the site of the cartilage fracture,” the ex-coroner droned on. Doc Riggs was one of my closest friends and has been helping me – in
and out of court – for 20 years. “Traces of dried semen found on her inner thigh. Sperm all dead, poor fellows. Live sperm found in Pamela’s genital tract, which doesn’t tell us much. Those bad boys can last several days in cervical mucus.”

  I took another pull on my beer. “DNA?”

  “Human.” An M.E.’s idea of a joke. “But not yours. And no matches in any of their databases.”

  “It’s Eddie Novak’s. The cops will figure that out, if they haven’t already, just like Willow did.”

  I had told Charlie about my meeting with Willow Marsh, and her delivery of the harsh analysis of my case. Now, I was dealing with the realization that, not only was Pamela looting the accounts, she was sleeping around behind my back.

  This was lousy news, both personally and legally. It shot down my wounded duck of a theory that a rapist-murderer had broken into the room. I was sure that Emilia Vazquez was already planning her attack.

  “It is not necessary that the state prove Mr. Lassiter’s motive for murder,” she would tell the jury. “But we can point to at least two. He killed Pamela Baylins either to cover up his own crime of stealing from his trust account or out of a jealous rage over her infidelity. Or both.”

  Charlie and I were sitting at the bar at Scotty’s Landing, a waterfront shack next to the marina in Coconut Grove. The city padres plan to tear the place down and replace it with a shiny, waterfront mall. Sometimes, I hate progress.

  A breeze rippled the bay and kept the temperature manageable, which meant I was sweating droplets and not rivers. A grilled grouper sandwich sat in front of me, but I wasn’t hungry. Thirsty yes, hungry, no. I had just written a check for $125,000 to Willow Marsh. A hundred grand retainer plus 25 for costs. Two years ago, I never would have been able to afford her. But now thanks to the cash cow named Carlos Castillo, I’m flush. And, thanks to his business, I had needed a personal banker to handle my gushing accounts. Sometimes, we don’t have to look far to find irony in our daily lives.

  “Eddie Novak may have no more to do with the murder than you do,” Charlie said. “If Pamela was stealing from you – or your clients – and she had access to other bank accounts, it’s reasonable to postulate she was stealing from others, too. Clients she wasn’t necessarily sleeping with, any of whom might have the motive.”

  I told Charlie I’d already raised that theory with Willow Marsh, and he nodded approvingly. Teachers always appreciate it when their students turn out not to be dunces.

  “Did Pamela take any phone calls when you were with her that day?”

  “Calls and texts were mother’s milk to her. Her phone rang or chimed about every five minutes, so that’s not unusual.”

  “I assume Ms. Marsh will get her cell phone records.”

  “Made and received, sure.”

  And Vazquez will get my records, I knew. Nothing to fear there. My story that my accountant called during dinner would be corroborated both by my phone records and Barry Samchick himself.

  “Did Pamela seem upset or frightened after any calls?”

  I shook my head. “I’m the only one who upset her by calling her a thief.”

  “Did Pamela place any calls herself?”

  “Not that I recall.” A thought came to me then. “At dinner, she said she had to call someone but never did.”

  “How’s that?”

  “At the table, after Samchick called me, just when we started arguing, Pam excused herself, saying she had to make a call. But she’d left her cell phone on the table.”

  “So she came back for it?”

  “No. After a couple minutes, she came back, and I asked how she made the call. She said that ‘make a call’ is girly talk for ‘take a pee.’ Said she went to the restroom.”

  “And you didn’t think anything of it.”

  I drained my beer. “I was too wrapped up in what Samchick had just told me.”

  “Did she walk toward the restroom when she got up from the table?”

  I shrugged. “Who can remember?”

  “Did she seem flustered or upset when she came back to the table?”

  “We just kept arguing and it got more heated. What are you driving at?”

  This time, Charlie took a pull on his own beer, a Mexican brand I think tastes like chilled dishwater. “Did she take her purse when she got up from the table?”

  “Probably. She always did. But she’d left the phone on the table. So what?”

  “Was Pamela shy about bodily functions? Did she always close the bathroom door when she urinated?”

  I shook my head. “If you must know, we’d reached the comfort level where we could pee in front of the other person.”

  “Uh-huh. So there’d be no reason to resort to the euphemism ‘make a call.’ She could have said ‘take a pee,’ or even the more decorous, ‘visit the loo.’”

  “What are you getting at, Charlie? And hurry up and answer, because with the beer and the talk, I gotta pee like a race horse.”

  “If Pamela said she had to make a call, I’d take her at her word. If she didn’t come back to get her cell phone, I’d assume she still made the call, perhaps the last one before she was murdered.”

  “And just how did she do that?”

  “She could have used the phone at the bar. Or she could have had a second phone in her purse. Something prepaid because there were certain calls that she never wanted traceable to her.”

  “So who’d she call?” I asked.

  “Whoever she had to tell about your accusations. A partner in crime, perhaps. A co-conspirator. Or just a friend. Someone who could help her out of the jam.”

  I gave Charlie a little smile and tipped my beer glass toward him. Sometimes, a student wants to thank his teacher for being so damn smart.

  Now Charlie was thinking aloud. “If she bought a prepaid cell phone, she would have paid cash and wouldn’t have kept a receipt. It will be very difficult to trace it and pin down who she was calling.”

  “Unless we come at it from the other end,” I said. “I can narrow the time of the call. We’d had a round of drinks. The appetizers hadn’t come yet. It was probably just after 9 p.m. We start with Crowder and Novak, get their phone records.”

  Charlie smiled at me. “Now, you’re playing poker with ideas.”

  That was one of Charlie’s old lines. Lawyering – good lawyering – is like playing poker with ideas.

  “Then we do the same with every number in Pam’s contact list,” I continued. “Check for calls at the right time from either the restaurant phone or a prepaid cell number.”

  “How many do you suppose that would be? Pamela’s contacts, I mean.”

  “Hundreds. And if we add to those every number that called her in the last 60 days but might not be in her contacts list, hundreds more.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The magnitude of the task hit me then, and it must have shown on my face.

  “Buckle up, Jake. You gotta start somewhere. If you catch a hit, you may just figure out who was conspiring with Pam, who was helping her jiggle your trust accounts, and who had a motive to kill her.”

  Playing poker with ideas suddenly seemed like trying to fill an inside straight. “And while I’m at it, I’ll solve the Black Dahlia murder, find Amelia Earhart, and discover the truth about the shroud of Turin,” I said, motioning the waiter for another beer.

  14

  The Stalker

  I am a good lawyer but a lousy client.

  Willow Marsh had given me express instructions. “No more investigating on your own. Stay away from Eddie Novak. Stay away from everybody. Anything you say will be repeated in court, and not in a light most favorable to you.”

  I’d given the same speech to several pro-active clients who just couldn’t let me do the work. Now, the cleats were on the other foot, and I finally understood the psychology of the accused.

  I gotta do something in my own defense. I am not a potted plant.

  After all, it was the great trial lawyer Louis Nizer wh
o once said, “The facts of the case never fly in through the window. They have to be dragged in by the heels.”

  Which is what brought me to the Iron Asylum, the hard-core muscle gym on South Beach. Its owner was Mitch Crowder, Pam’s ex-boyfriend, stalker, and wielder of baseball bats. Several possibilities floated in my brain as I entered the place and heard the familiar clang of weights and grunts of beefy guys.

  There was a chance Crowder was the “dude,” as in Some Other Dude Did It.

  Even if innocent, Crowder had been stalking Pam. He could be a useful witness. If he’d been surveilling Pam, what did he see? What did he hear? What did he know about her involvement with Eddie Novak? There was the very real possibility that the lunkhead Crowder knew far more about Pam than I did. That thought pissed me off at my late girlfriend…banker…cuckold maker.

  The gym smelled of sweat, hand chalk, and metal. Kelly Clarkson was singing What Doesn’t Kill You through speakers in the ceiling. I recognized a couple off-duty Miami Beach cops doing curls with ridiculously heavy dumb bells. “Curls for the girls,” the Penn State strength coach used to say, belittling guys who were more body builders than athletes.

  I saw Crowder, in a muscle t-shirt, standing at a nearby bench press where an enormous young man with a watermelon belly seemed to be lifting 500 pounds or so. Hands resting lightly on the bar, Crowder was spotting and encouraging.

  “Six! You got it Yuri,” Crowder yelled.

  I waited until Yuri blasted four more reps, his face turning crimson. He dropped the bar back on the rack, coughed, farted, and thanked Crowder for his help.

  “Can we talk?” I said.

  Crowder turned. His smile turned downward when he saw me, and I swear his pecs danced under his muscle tee. “The hell you want?”

  “To find who killed Pam.”

  “Try looking in the mirror.”

  “You’re the one who was stalking her, big guy.”