by Paul Levine
Senora Baroso was cooking a whole pig, lechón asado, in the backyard when Josefina Jovita walked through the wrought-iron gate past the lawn statue of the Virgin Mary. Jo Jo was toting her books and laundry in an army-green duffel bag, and she looked at me with bright, dark, fearless eyes. We sat outside at a redwood picnic table, telling our life stories while sharing the juca con mojo, and over espresso and flan, I asked whether she’d like to be my guest at the Jets game Sunday, maybe come over to the house afterward. She didn’t say no.
History.
We became friends, then lovers. Looking back, I cared more for her than she did for me. To her, I was a project. Mature beyond her years, Jo Jo encouraged me to apply to law school when my demi-career was fading. My other choices were tending bar or becoming the assistant to the regional vice president of a beer distributor. I went to law school, and so did she. But we headed down different paths. I always rooted for the underdog, so the P.D.’s office was a natural. She was less forgiving of human failings, so the prosecutor’s office was a second home.
Josefina Jovita Baroso was attractive and bright and combative, and seemed to enjoy all three. We debated politics, religion, sports, and her brother. We didn’t agree on anything except the virtues of hard pretzels and cold beer. She voted straight Republican, and like most Cuban Americans, viewed Ronald Reagan as a combination of Jose Marti and Teddy Roosevelt. I always thought of him as a Notre Dame running hack, and I never liked Notre Dame.
Eventually, we broke up. Okay, so I broke up with her, but there were no major explosions, just a disengagement of lives going different directions. Blinky kept me informed of major events in her life. On a ski trip out west, Jo Jo met a man and had a whirlwind romance. She took a leave of absence from the state attorney’s office, spent six months with the guy on his Colorado ranch, but came back alone. On the few occasions we would run into each other, she never referred to the relationship. To this day, I don’t know what happened, though Blinky says it’s simple. “She busted his chops, like she did to you, to me, to everybody. Nobody measures up to Josie.”
***
I caught another glimpse of her over my shoulder. She wore a beige cotton dress that stopped just above the knee. Her dark hair was pulled back in a pony tail, emphasizing the strong bone structure of her face. It wasn’t her trial uniform, and because of the conflict of interest, she couldn’t be assisting Socolow with the case.
I must have been staring at her.
“Hard to believe she’s my sister, isn’t it?” Blinky whispered, reading my thoughts.
I glanced at Josefina Baroso and then at Blinky Baroso. My client resembled a sausage stuffed into an Italian silk suit. A green Italian silk suit that shimmered under the fluorescent glare of the courtroom lights. Jo Jo was tall and slim and in an earlier age would have been called elegant.
I turned my attention back to Abe Socolow, who was prattling on about the utter depravity of preying on the virtuous. He reminded the jury of the witnesses he had brought before them, a retired airline mechanic, an Amway distributor, a widowed schoolteacher. Abe believed in swamping jurors with testimony. As Charlie Riggs, the retired coroner, likes to say, “Testis unus, testis nullus.” One witness, no witness.
When the victims are likable, the prosecutor’s job is easy. Put ‘em up there, extract a tear or two, and get a guilty verdict in time for everyone to get home to watch Roseanne.
Socolow seemed to be winding down now. “You folks are contributing to a sacred function of government.’’ Abe was not a naturally down-home guy, but he was getting into his flag-waving, Fourth of July, you-folks shtick, and it sounded pretty good. “As envisioned by our Founding Fathers, you folks from the community, not some wigged and robed judges, are to determine what is true and what is false, who is innocent and who is guilty. And when you look at this man…” He pointed at poor Blinky again. “What do you see?”
I couldn’t help myself. My eyes darted to my client, just as did the jurors’. I didn’t know what they saw, but to me, he looked like a big, fat crook.
“You see a thief, a con man, a deceiver,” Socolow said, lest there be any mistake. He was dying to mention Baroso’s criminal record but he couldn’t get it into evidence because I had kept Blinky off the stand. A prior conviction can only be used for impeachment, and that was enough reason to keep Blinky at the defense table during the trial. So was the nervous twitch that made Blinky look like a pathological liar when he was giving his name and address.
“So on behalf of the people of the state of Florida ...”
All of them, I wondered?
“...I ask that you convict both defendants on each and every count of grand theft, fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy. Thank you and God bless you.”
Socolow gathered his notes from the podium, took down
his Technicolor charts that detailed various feats of grand larceny, and lowered himself majestically into his seat at the prosecution table. I stood up, cleared my throat, and thanked the jurors for their rapt attention to the case, but I left God out of the equation. Then I pointed to the U.S. flag behind Judge Gold and started talking about the Constitution, Mom, and apple pie. I wasn’t about to let Abe out-folks me.
“Our great democracy depends on citizens like you, leaving your homes, your jobs, your loved ones and serving as the last bastion of protection for your fellow citizens ...”
I always try to make jury service sound like joining the Marines.
“We have the greatest legal system in the world ...”
Excluding trial by combat, of course.
“Now Mr. Socolow and I have other cases to try, other fish to fry…”
Other fish to fry? Did I say that? Sometimes the mouth moves faster than the brain.
“But Louis Baroso has only one case ...”
Pending, that is.
“It is here and it is now. This is Louis Baroso’s case. This is his life, his fate, and it’s in your hands.”
I shot a look at my client. He blinked at me. Thrice.
“Our Constitution provides certain rules that protect men and women accused of crimes. Anyone accused is innocent until proven guilty, innocent until you say otherwise, innocent until and unless you conclude after considering all of the evidence, after searching your conscience, after using all your powers of common sense and intelligence and fairness, that the state has proven guilt beyond and to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt. A jury’s job is not to presume evidence where there is none. It is not to assume evidence, to fill in evidence, to believe there must be evidence just because the prosecutor says so. We don’t guess people into jail. We don’t assume people into jail.
No, the jury’s job is to look critically at the evidence and ask, ‘Did the state prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt?’
I blathered on for a while about reasonable doubt. That’s what you do when you don’t have much of a defense. When I have favorable evidence, I use it. Hell, I hoist it up the flagpole and salute it. Lacking a defense, I tap-dance around the state’s evidence and say it just isn’t enough.
“Now, Mr. Socolow told you the evidence indicates that Mr. Baroso conspired with Mr. Hornback. The evidence implies that Mr. Baroso profited from Mr. Hornback’s endeavors. The evidence suggests that Mr. Baroso knew what was going on. Well, there’s a phrase for that kind of evidence, and you’ve all heard it. It’s called circumstantial evidence ...”
The jurors nodded en masse. Good, they’d heard the phrase on Larry King.
“...And I’m going to tell you a story about circumstantial evidence. A mother bakes a blueberry pie and puts it on a shelf to cool. She tells her little boy not to touch that pie, but he climbs up on the shelf and digs in anyway. Now he hears his mom coming into the kitchen, so he grabs his pet cat and rubs the cat’s face in the pie. The mother walks in and yells for the boy’s father. The father takes the cat out to the barn, and then, boom! There’s a shotgun blast. The boy is still there in the kitchen licking off his fi
ngers, and he says, ‘Poor Kitty. Just another victim of circumstantial evidence.’ “
I paused just long enough to let the jurors chuckle. Then, becoming serious, I lowered my voice and said, “I’m pleading with you not to let Louis Baroso be another victim of circumstantial evidence.”
This time, only two jurors nodded, and one of them might have been asleep. I wrapped it up with an appeal to the basic decency of the American people, then sat down. Blinky gave my arm a good squeeze and patted me on the back.
I looked into the gallery again at Jo Jo Baroso, who avoided my gaze.
“We were never close,” Blinky said, watching me. “I was hot-wiring cars when Josie was still making mud pies. She always thought she was better than me.”
Which didn’t exactly put her in an exclusive club. “So what’s she doing here?” I asked for the second time.
“She hates me,” Blinky answered, as if that said everything.
Looking back now, I know that wasn’t it at all.
Chapter 2
The Shyster, the Grifter, and the Lanky Brunette
We all have our little rituals. On the morning of the last day of trial, I always slice a mango and a papaya for breakfast, then toss two paperback books into my briefcase. You never know how long the jury will be out, and reading keeps me from replaying the case in my mind, second-guessing myself and cursing the decision to go to law school instead of doing something productive like bulking up on steroids and joining the World Wrestling Federation.
An hour after the jury disappeared into its tomblike room, Blinky Baroso and I headed down the street to the Gaslight Lounge, where many a lawyer has washed away the memories of judges and juries in rivers of icy gin. The lounge was dark and windowless with red Naugahyde barstools. Even half empty, the place reverberated with the pleasant clink of ice against glass.
I don’t chitchat when the jury is out, so I sat there, sipping a Samuel Adams draft, reading Nelson DeMille’s The Gold Coast, a tale of an honest lawyer who is compromised by a charming Mafioso, when Blinky Baroso started his chatterbox routine.
Some clients clam up when waiting for a verdict. They become pale, withdrawn. Maybe they’re apologizing to their Maker, making silent promises to go straight if only they’re given a second (or fifth or sixth) chance. Other clients become nonstop motor mouths.
Nerves.
Blinky Baroso, his face flushed, his pudgy hands gesticulating, was keeping his mind occupied and mine distracted with a loud soliloquy retracing the many stages of his misspent life. Plopped onto his barstool, he used a nail file to amputate the filters of an endless chain of Marlboros, which he occasionally smoked, the ashes dropping into his lap as he told his tales. He interrupted himself every few minutes to ask, “That right, Jake?” which was probably intended to determine whether I was listening.
“Maybe I should go to Russia,” Blinky said, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “There’s no more free-enterprise system in this country. Too many controls. Too many regulations. I remember when I started selling waterfront homesites. We made a killing for what, eighteen months. Then those rubes from Tallahassee came clown here in their Sears sports coats and short-sleeve shirts. Restraining orders, permanent injunctions, cease and desist orders. Jeez, all the profits went to the attorneys. That right, Jake?”
I drained my beer and put down the book. “The homesites weren’t waterfront, Blinky. They were under water. You were selling swampland in the Everglades.” I had been listening. He brushed me off with a wave of his hand, his diamond pinky ring sparkling, even in the muted light. I must be slipping. Rule number one for trial: no gold chains, no flashy rings, no dark glasses. The trick is make a hoodlum look like a choirboy.
I ordered my second beer and Blinky went into a loud lament about the demise of his precious metals business. “Who would think you could sell gold bullion on the phone? Who the hell thought that farmers in Iowa would give their credit card numbers on the basis of cold calls? Jake, it was a thing of beauty. The world headquarters of Million-Dollar Minerals Inc. was just up the road in Lauder-damn-dale. You should have seen it Jake, thirty salesmen, twenty-five hundred calls a day.”
Actually, I saw it the day the state padlocked the doors. Blinky’s world headquarters was a boiler room operation where they sold pieces of paper attesting to the ownership of precious minerals. Blinky swears he would have delivered the gold, too, if he hadn’t presold the stuff at twenty dollars an ounce less than it would have cost to buy. Like smoking, breaching contracts was a nasty habit for Blinky.
“The market was moving. If the damn bureaucrats had given me time, I could have come back. That right, Jake?”
Before I had a chance not to answer, I became aware of a presence just behind me at the bar. My first thought was that Ernie Cartwright, the ninety-year-old asthmatic bailiff, was there to inform me that the verdict was in, but we still had time for a round together if I was paving. My second thought was that Ernie Cartwright doesn’t wear Panther perfume.
“Well, well,” our visitor said, malice in her voice, “the shyster and the grifter.”
“Gimme a break, Josie,” Blinky responded, blowing a cloud of smoke toward his sister.
She stood there a foot from me, her head cocked, her hip shot, her look challenging look. I had seen it plenty of times before, but it had been years since I stared into those dark eyes from this distance. She was standing, and I was sitting, and she looked down at me from a position of geographical and moral superiority. I looked back with my crooked grin that had been good enough for several busloads of cheerleaders, flight attendants, and dental hygienists.
She shook her head, seeming to dismiss me. Looking at her brother, she said, “Thanks to your smooth-talking friend here, you’ve had more breaks than you deserve.”
“C’mon, Jo Jo,” I said. “Why not call me ‘Jake’? Smoothtalking friend sounds so impersonal.”
Her eyes glinted at me and her dark complexion seemed to glow. Josefina Jovita Baroso was a self-confident woman with what my granny would call gumption. She reminded me of Dashiell Hammett’s “lanky brunette with a wicked jaw.”
“You’re looking good, Jo Jo,” I told her.
“Don’t change the subject,” she said.
“I didn’t know there was one, except that old standard, my many personal failings.”
Blinky nudged me. “Join the club. Nobody’s as perfect as Josie.
She narrowed her eyes at me, or maybe it was the noxious cigarette smoke blinding her. “Just like old times, isn’t it? Luis is in trouble, and Jake is here to help.”
“I know it doesn’t rank with feeding starving children or even prosecuting shoplifters, but it’s my job. And for what it’s worth, your brother is my friend.’’
Without an invitation, she swiveled a hip onto the barstool next to mine and gave me a little smile. A very little smile. “My brother,” she said, rolling the words on her tongue to see how they tasted, “is a major embarrassment. My brother is a lazy, cowardly criminal, and you are his mouthpiece.”
“Blinky’s not lazy,” I said, in my client’s partial defense.
“I don’t have to listen to this garbage.” Blinky slid off his barstool. “I’m gonna take a leak.”
I turned my attention to Josefina. Her mouth was wide, the lips full, the face oval with prominent cheekbones.
“Look, Jo Jo, I could give you the standard spiel about how every client deserves the best representation possible, but I won’t. I won’t apologize for defending your brother because I like him. I’d like him even more if he went straight, and maybe he will. I once got him a job selling time-share condos in Sarasota.”
“I know all about it. When sales were slow, he stripped the units. Everything from the microwave and VCR right down to the copper wiring.”
“That was never proved,” I said, sounding like a shyster, even to myself. “Blinky wasn’t even charged.”
“Thanks to you,” she said with some bitterness. “Look, Jake,
you may not believe me, but this isn’t personal.”
“Really, do you chase down every defense lawyer to criticize his character, or just the ones you’ve slept with?”
Unlike her brother, she didn’t blink. “That was beneath you, Jake. You weren’t always like that, but I suppose that’s what comes from hanging around the Justice Building, spending every day with sociopaths.”
“Some of the judges are okay.”
“You’re not funny, Jake. Not to me, anyway. You’re just an aging jock who’s never grown up.”
“Is this the part I’m not supposed to take personally?”
She sighed. “Okay, you’re right. I’m disappointed in you. You had such potential, but you never explored it. You never reached higher. You were a second-rate football player, but maybe you couldn’t help that. You went to a second-rate law school, and maybe that’s the best you could have done, too. Now you have a second-rate practice, and you seem happy with it, and that’s what disappoints me so much. You don’t strive anymore. You take pride in negatives, like that stupid line you always say, you’ve never been this, you’ve never been that ...”
“It’s true. I’ve never been disbarred, committed, or convicted of moral turpitude, and the only time I was arrested, it was a case of mistaken identity. I didn’t know the guy I hit was a cop.”
She didn’t laugh or even crack a smile. “I don’t blame you for the way you are, Jake. You were raised without a family, and it made you a loner. You’re really dysfunctional when it comes to relationships.”
“I hate words like ‘dysfunctional.’ It’s right up there with ‘prioritize’ in bullshit quotient. Besides, I had a family. I had my granny.”
“That’s what I mean. You were raised on moonshine whiskey by an old woman who’s half loco. You had no parents, no siblings, and it shows. Where do you hang out? The morgue! Dios mio! Who’s your best friend? A retired coroner who still does autopsies for fun! When you picked me up on Saturday nights, you smelled of formaldehyde.”