State vs Lassiter

by Paul Levine

  “How, Kip?” I asked. “How can Pam screwing my client help my case?”

  “I dunno exactly. But aren’t most murders committed by people who know the victims?”

  “Yeah, sure. But what’s the motive? With me, they’ve got the allegation about stealing from the trust accounts. With Novak, we can prove they argued. With Crowder, we have the oldest motive in the book, jealousy. But what skin did Castillo have in the game?”

  Granny chuckled lasciviously and said, “You really want me to answer that in front of the boy?”

  “Which man was she closest to?” Kip asked, ignoring Granny’s filthy mind.

  “I thought it was me. But Mitch Crowder seems to be the one she called when the going got tough.”

  “So maybe he can answer the question about Castillo.”

  I thought about the kid’s idea. Crowder had helped before, though hardly willingly.

  Now, I had a stack of files in front of me. The trust account records, with all the circuitous transfers of money in and out of Novak Global Investments and all of Pamela’s personal brokerage accounts we’d gotten through pre-trial discovery. She had her own investments with Novak and had been making a steady 20 to 30 per cent per year. But on Monday morning, the day after Crowder peeped on the Pam/Novak squabble-cum-fuck, she liquidated all her personal Global accounts and Castillo’s clean-as-a-laundry accounts as well.

  Why? What did Pam learn that Sunday night?

  I tried to re-construct what I knew from Crowder. First, Pam turns Novak away from her condo. She’s looking at her computer, the Novak Global Investments logo on the screen. She sees something and calls Novak, who returns to the condo. They argue…then have sex.

  None of it made any sense to me. Unless…

  A thought came to me. It all had to do with Novak and just how amoral Pam was. And maybe how I’d underestimated Mitch Crowder from the start.

  “What are you gonna do, Uncle Jake?” Kip asked.

  “Gonna follow your advice. Gonna talk to the guy Pam trusted.”

  ***

  I found Mitch Crowder in the cramped office inside the Iron Asylum on South Beach. Only a few late-night gym rats were still working out. Crowder was wearing nylon shorts and a University of Miami cropped tee. A 16-ounce Budweiser sat on his cluttered desk. Three of its deceased cousins reclined in a metal waste basket. My guess was that we were equally plastered.

  “The hell you want, shyster?”

  “That night you crawled up the balcony and spied on Pam…”

  He belched a Bud burp. “What about it?”

  “In court you didn’t tell everything.”

  “I wasn’t asked everything.”

  “Before Novak came in, you were looking through the window, watching Pam work at the computer.”

  “What about it?”

  “You said you saw the logo of Novak Global.”

  “I did.”

  “You left the impression Pam was on the company website.”

  He took a long gulp of beer. “I never said it was the website.”

  “I just realized that tonight over some whiskey. So what was she looking at?”

  “You tell me, shyster man.”

  “I have the glimmer of an idea, and if I’m right, you oughta be damn proud of yourself.”

  “I know your lawyer games. You’re trying to get me to talk, to boast about what I did. But you’re not getting it out of me, so go home.”

  “That night on the computer. Pam was looking at Novak Global’s internal documents. Studying them.”

  Crowder shrugged as if he didn’t understand.

  “You mislead a lot of people, Crowder, because you look like you have muscles for brains. But as a nerdy kid, you were a terrific hacker, even if you did get busted for identity fraud.”

  “So?”

  “I figure you hacked Novak Global’s mainframe or their cloud, or wherever the hell they keep their secrets. You got their internal documents and sent them to Pam. The reason you were on the balcony had nothing to do with Novak. He’d already driven off. You wanted to see what happened when Pam read the financials.”

  “Novak’s financials were public records.”

  “Oh, sure. The ones that showed him paying incredible returns, even after the stock market crashed and real estate was dead. But I’m talking about the real numbers. Maybe you had a hunch about Global, or maybe you just did it because you hated Novak for screwing Pam. Either way, you didn’t bother with the public filings. You hacked Novak’s computers to get the real documents.”

  “And what’s my motive for committing a crime like that?”

  “To tank Pam’s relationship with Novak. And if Pam wasn’t such a conniving sociopath, your plan would have worked. Hell, her first reaction was horror. How could Novak have done this? She sent him away. But then, she must have thought about it as she studied the numbers. Maybe she admired that he could pull it off all those years. Her crusty criminal heart envied the son-of-a-bitch. In the end, she wasn’t mad at him for being a con artist and a thief. She was mad he hadn’t told her! So after berating him, she takes him to her bed. Face it, Crowder, the two of them were made for each other.”

  “Crazy theory if you ask me.”

  “I feel bad for you. Deep down, you probably loved Pam more than anyone else. And all you succeeded in doing was driving those two miscreants closer together. All your clever plans and all you got was a little lover’s spat.”

  “You’re nuts. I don’t know anything about Global. I just run a gym.”

  “Bullshit. I’d bet anything the documents showed that Eddie Novak’s been running a Ponzi scheme. A fraud. A pyramid. A multi-million-dollar scam. That’s why Pam closed out her account and Castillo’s the next morning. But woe to those suckers who stayed in. They’re gonna get slaughtered when this comes out in court. And when it does, you’ll be the number one suspect in Pam’s murder.”

  “That’s nuts. You just said I loved her.”

  “But you couldn’t get over the unfairness of it all. You drove Pam out of Novak’s investments and straight into his bed.”

  26

  The Cornstarch Alibi

  I was drinking Cuban coffee outside the Justice Building when Willow Marsh strutted over on those long legs, a smile forming, her eyes flashing. “I’ve got great news and not-so-great news,” she said.

  “Let’s start with the great.”

  “What’s the best possible piece of evidence we could come up with?”

  “We could place someone else in the hotel suite after I left.”

  “We got it!”

  I felt my hopes soar as high as those black vultures over the Justice Building.

  “It’s Mitch Crowder!” Willow said, triumphantly.

  “I knew it!”

  “I thought you’d be happy.” She signaled the vendor at the coffee wagon for her own nitroglycerine, a/k/a Cuban coffee. “The DNA came back from the gloves. It matches Crowder.”

  “Wait a second. We can’t place the gloves in the room, only in the garbage can next to the elevators.”

  “The gloves were lubricated with cornstarch. Trace amounts of cornstarch were found on your laptop keys. That’s all the nexus we need to the gloves. Crowder was hacking your computer to find Samchick’s email.”

  “That’s why Pam called him from the restaurant. Not because she was afraid of me.”

  “Her histrionics in the suite were intended to get you out of there so Crowder could come up.”

  “Exactly. She’s the one who suggested I go get some air. Then she let Crowder into the room, which explains why no pass key was used.” My excitement waned. “But what’s not so great?”

  “There’s no cornstarch on your belt. Or on Pam’s neck. Or anywhere on Pam.”

  “Not good.”

  “Yeah. It’s illogical that Crowder went to a lot of trouble to keep his prints off your computer by wearing gloves but wouldn’t care if he left them on Pam’s neck.”

 
“But he didn’t leave any prints.”

  “No, but think about it. No one takes off their gloves to strangle someone.”

  “So if Crowder didn’t kill her, who did?”

  Willow shrugged. “It’s a conundrum. We’ve effectively placed him in the suite and simultaneously ruled him out as a suspect.”

  “Unless he came in with someone else.”

  “Who?”

  I sipped at my Cuban coffee. Sometimes, the combination of sugar and caffeine will stimulate an idea or two. This time, it only made me jittery.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” I said. “Does the state have the DNA results, too?”

  “And the cornstarch. Everything’s shared. You know that. No more trial by ambush.” Willow took in enough of her Cuban coffee to make her eyes water.

  “What about Eddie Novak?” Willow suggested. “Could he have been with Crowder?”

  “Crowder hates him.” I told Willow about our inebriated conversation. How Crowder tried to break up the Pam/Novak lovebirds and how it just seemed to bring them closer together.

  “Some piece of work, your Pam,” Willow said. “She gets turned on because Novak creates a Ponzi scheme that fools the whole city.”

  “We keep coming back to the same question,” I said. “Who had the motive to kill Pam?”

  ***

  Once they had the glove DNA, the state had a potential problem with Crowder as a witness. Just as before, Emilia Vazquez chose to hang a lantern on the dilemma and turn it into a plus. No way she would rest without confronting head-on the fact that Mitch Crowder was in the hotel suite the night of the murder.

  She did this with four witnesses.

  A crime scene investigator identified the surgical gloves as having been found in the trash can at the elevators on our floor. He also established chain of custody with a yawn-inducing explanation of the police department’s bagging and tagging and storing system.

  A DNA expert took two hours to essentially say that deoxyribonucleic acid was the molecule that encodes the genetic instructions of all living organisms. It took another hour to explain how he extracted DNA from the latex surgical gloves and 45 minutes after that to conclude that there was less than one chance in a zillion that the gloves were worn by someone other than Mitch Crowder.

  Next, a chemist linked the cornstarch on the surgical gloves to the keys on my computer and declared unequivocally that no cornstarch was found on the murder weapon – my belt – or on Pamela Baylins. Emilia practically crowed at this news. The picture for the jury was becoming clearer. Mitch was there, helping Pam…not killing her.

  Next, a computer expert explained that whoever wore the gloves discovered my password by using any of a hundred possible mobile hack tools. Once the password was obtained, at 2:27 a.m., my email was opened to the message sent earlier in the evening from Barry Samchick. The state put the e-mail into evidence, Samchick expressing shock that my trust accounts were out of whack and questioning my integrity. The implication was that I had done something wrong, so already Emilia Vazquez was turning this evidentiary jar of turds into a pot of gold for the state.

  Twelve minutes later, at 2:39 a.m., the computer expert said, Pamela used her own laptop to send her frantic e-mail to her boss. That legal gambit allowed Emilia to get this little ditty in front of the jury a second time:

  “Within the past few hours, I have learned of discrepancies in various client trust accounts maintained at Great Southern by Jake Lassiter’s law office. I strongly suggest that full audits be started Monday morning. In the event that improprieties are determined to have occurred, I will take responsibility for communicating our findings to banking authorities and The Florida Bar.

  “It would appear that I have placed too great a trust in our client and I apologize in advance for any embarrassment that may accrue to the bank. I have made no secret of my personal relationship with Mr. Lassiter, and I regret to say that he has preyed on my emotions for his own pecuniary purposes. I have confronted him with his improprieties, and he has responded with veiled physical threats. Robert, as I fear for my safety, I am asking the general counsel’s office to seek a restraining order against Mr. Lassiter on my behalf, as soon as practicable.”

  It was a bravo performance for the prosecution. Without recalling Crowder to the stand and subjecting him to cross examination, Emilia was able to bolster her case. All in all, a pretty shitty day in court for the good guys.

  Finally, as if all that weren’t enough, Emilia re-called one of the hotel security managers for one final thrust of the rapier. At precisely 2:39 a.m., the very moment Pamela was writing her I’m-so-scared email – and obviously very much alive – there was Crowder leaving the hotel by the front doors. Alone. The man’s alibi was complete, and we were no closer to pointing a finger at some other dude.

  Willow kept a poker face in front of the jury while this dagger was being twisted into our guts. Shortly thereafter – we’d worked past 6 p.m. – the judge adjourned for the day. When the jury filed out, Willow forced a smile, but I could see the concern in her eyes. “We’ll have better days,” she said. It’s what lawyers do for their clients, shout out sis-boom-bah in the face of impending doom.

  “Sure we will,” I said. “By the way, if I could have sneaked back through the hotel’s delivery entrance, so could Crowder.”

  “I know. I know. I’ve thought of that.”

  “Let me ask you something else, Willow. Here’s Mitch Crowder, a guy who can bench press a city bus, and he’s in the hotel suite in the middle of the night. If Pamela is so damn scared I’d come back and hurt her, why the hell doesn’t she have him stay?”

  27

  One-Way Ticket

  I slid into the front seat of my 1984 Biarritz Eldorado and immediately felt the barrel of a gun pressed against the back of my head.

  “Shit!” was all I could say.

  “Relax, Lassiter. I’m your best friend in the world.”

  I shot a look at the rear-view mirror. Eddie Novak sat in my backseat, his right hand holding what looked like a nine millimeter Glock, his arm jiggling. The barrel scraped at the nape of my neck. I had expected one of Castillo’s thugs, so if anything, this was a relief. Except the way Novak’s hand was shaking, this could be even more dangerous.

  “Novak, I’m guessing you haven’t done much of this, so do us both a favor and take your finger off the trigger.”

  “I’m not here to kill you, but I will if I have to.”

  “Think hard about it. It’s a lot messier than juggling numbers on a profit-and-loss statement.”

  “Turn on the ignition. We need some air in here. I’m schvitzing my ass off.”

  “Did you jimmy my door lock?” The engine turned over with a cough and sputter, and the A/C came to life. “Do you know how much it costs to repair this old boat?”

  “Shut up and listen. I don’t think you killed Pam.”

  “You got a funny way of showing your appreciation.”

  My eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror. He’d taken off his sleek lightweight sport coat – Zegna, I’d guess – and was sweating through a coral blue shirt. His cuff links were heavy gold nuggets. He looked as if he’d lost weight since I’d seen him at the party at the Gables Club.

  “My problem with you has nothing to do with Pam,” Novak said. “Crowder tells me you know all about Global’s finances.”

  “Well, aren’t you just one happy little family?”

  “I pay him to keep quiet, and I can do the same with you.”

  “How? I’m on trial for my life. Evidence you were running a Ponzi scheme is part of my defense.”

  “I know that, and so does Carlos Castillo.”

  “You and Castillo? Perfect.”

  He blames me for the screw-up. For Pam finding out and horning her way in. For you and your big mouth. He wants to kill you, but I told him there was a way around it.”

  “Suddenly, I like you a lot better, Novak. In fact, you’re my favorite sleazebag Ponzi schemer.”<
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  “Do you know how to get to Tamiami Airport from here?”

  “West on the Dolphin Expressway, south on the Turnpike would be my guess. But then I don’t own a private jet.”

  “I do, pal, and this is your lucky day, ‘cause you’re getting a ride to Rio de Janeiro and a briefcase filled with cash.”

  “Wait a second. What did you say a minute ago? ‘Pam finding out and horning her way in?’ What the hell does that mean?”

  “Crowder says you figured it out.”

  “I figured out Pam got all hot and bothered when she found you were running a Ponzi scheme and she couldn’t wait to jump your bones.”

  “That’s half the equation, but it leaves something out. C’mon, Lassiter, you’ve figured Pam out. What makes her tick?”

  I thought about it a moment, and then it seemed obvious. “Greed. She extorted you, blackmailed you!”

  “She called it a non-disclosure agreement, but that’s about it.”

  “Pam told you she’d blow the whistle on the Ponzi scheme if you didn’t cut her in for a piece of the action.”

  “Finally, you’re starting to see our mutual girlfriend through clear eyes.”

  A police car pulled into a parking spot near us. The lot was crawling with cops. We were, after all, outside the criminal Justice Building. It was not the smartest place to pull a gun on someone. Again, I didn’t think Novak had much experience at this. But strangling a blackmailing woman? Maybe he was better at that.

  “Jesus, Novak, you just confessed to a motive to kill Pam.”

  “Only if I believed her. Only if I believed she’d really go to the S.E.C. or U.S. Attorney.”

  He didn’t have to explain. If Pam blew the whistle, she opened herself to scrutiny. Her dipping into my trust accounts would have come out. Plus there was the matter of Carlos Castillo, a guy not as squeamish about bloodshed. Any investigation of Novak Global would soon turn to one of his biggest investors, and Castillo would rightly blame Pam. Still, for my purposes – beating a murder rap – Pam extorting Novak was a helluva good way to distract attention from me to another possible killer.