BUM DEAL: Jake Lassiter Legal Thrillers

by Paul Levine

  She couldn’t stifle a laugh.

  “What was that?” His voice reflected his wounded pride.

  “I’m sorry, Steve. You’re very smart and very clever and a very good lawyer.”

  “But not brilliant.”

  “You got me to fall in love with you when I was engaged to someone else. That’s pretty darn brilliant, isn’t it?”

  A pair of gray terns landed in front of them and pecked at the wet sand, hunting for treats.

  “The two of you have this vibe,” Steve said.

  She regretted having laughed a moment earlier. Steve’s usually robust ego—often too robust—had taken a battering.

  “Honestly, Steve, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Electricity. Chemistry. I don’t know, some secret language between the two of you.”

  “Did Jake put these thoughts in your head? Because you, of all people, know his strategy. Drive a truck between enemy platoons. He’s a master at psychological warfare.”

  “Jake was pulling my chain last night at the Red Fish. I know that. But maybe he was onto something, without realizing it. So tell me. Do you feel a little buzz with Calvert in the room?”

  “No. But knowing of my past with Clark, maybe it seems that way to you. If you didn’t know he was my first guy, would you think the same thing? Or would you just think it’s a good working relationship between attorney and client?”

  Five hundred feet above their heads, a biplane flew along the beach, hauling a banner advertising a nightclub with cheap drinks and allegedly hip people.

  “I don’t know. I can only tell you what I see and how I feel.”

  “And I hear you. I know your concern comes from a place of love. But you must know that I have no interest in Clark Calvert and haven’t since I was barely out of my teens. You, Steve Solomon, are the man for me. The only man who creates a buzz in the room.” She smiled at him. “And other places.”

  She hoped that would settle it. They walked without speaking for several minutes, their bare feet leaving footprints in the wet sand. Ahead of them was a lifeguard stand painted a ferociously bright red and yellow. The nearly fluorescent beach shacks were the city’s iconic monuments to La Dolce Vita. The lifeguards had gone home for the day. The sunbathers had folded their beach chairs, and except for a few joggers and seabirds, Steve and Victoria were pretty much alone.

  “Last night, you said Clark called you to get your advice before he married Sofia,” Steve said.

  “And I told him to follow his heart.”

  “I asked whether you thought he was giving you a right of last refusal, marriage-wise. You evaded. You went into a story about breaking up with him all those years before, but you never answered the question, and I didn’t press you.”

  “If you’re asking again, Clark never said, ‘Marry me or I’ll marry her.’”

  “But did you get the impression that’s what he meant?”

  She thought about her answer as they stopped then, in tandem, turned, and began retracing their steps southward. Some elements of their relationship were like that. Wordless agreements, a sense that each knew and shared the other’s thoughts and desires. But there were times when one’s thoughts seemed jarring and alien to the other.

  “I had no impression other than what Clark said. I took his words at face value.”

  “What about subtext? That the talk of love and marriage was really about the two of you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  She was tired of the cross-examination and hoped that would shut him up. Every couple was in sync and out of sync at times, she figured. It’s the ratio of sameness and differences that counts, bearing in mind the importance of the issues on which they agree and disagree. She had been a pretty good math student in high school and at Princeton before turning to the less precise world of law.

  As they walked in silence, she wondered if there might be a Happiness Quotient, a mathematical formula that could predict the odds of a couple’s happily-ever-aftering, to borrow a phrase from Camelot.

  She ran some rough equations through her head. Zero was a flatline relationship, and ten a perfect score. There could also be a negative score, bottoming out at minus ten. Anything above zero was positive.

  Numbers and percentages floated through her mind. Multiply the percentage of agreed-on issues times the average “importance weight” of those issues. If she and Steve agreed 70 percent of the time on issues with an average eight-out-of-ten importance weight, they scored five-point-six. Then figure they disagreed 30 percent of the time on issues with an average importance weight of four. Multiply the numbers and you get one-point-two. Subtract that number from five-point-six and you get a Happiness Quotient of four-point-four.

  That’s above zero, but is it high enough?

  She’d have to ask her married girlfriends to run their numbers.

  “Can you remember exactly what Calvert said in the call about his getting married?” Steve asked, interrupting her calculations.

  “Steve, really? Is this necessary?”

  “I just want to process his words myself.”

  She wanted to tell the truth. But she wondered, Can Steve handle the truth?

  “He told me he loved Sofia very much, but with her history of psychological issues, he wanted to run it by me before marrying her. The conversation was almost clinical in nature, as if he were consulting his own shrink. Maybe he just had to say everything aloud to make his own decision, and I’m a pretty good listener. To answer your question, he never indicated any continuing interest in me. It was all about Sofia, nothing about me.”

  There is the truth, the little white lie, and the damn dirty lie, she thought. Remembering the conversation with Clark Calvert, she considered this a little white lie, an itsy-bitsy sin based on her need not to inflict pain on Steve.

  “Victoria, it occurs to me that all of this is so unnecessary,” Clark said after they discussed Sofia.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Instead of my angst over my forthcoming nuptials, we should be celebrating the two of us reconnecting.”

  “Clark, don’t…”

  “I’ve thought so much about us over these years. I have regrets. I should have given you more room to grow. You were so young. But so perfect.”

  “Clark, I’m not going there, and you’re marrying Sofia.”

  “Life, my darling Victoria, is a long and winding road. Who knows when it will circle back again?”

  Steve and Victoria continued along the beach, the coppery glow of the sunset washing the horizon. Victoria considered the nature of what she had told Steve.

  A necessary and benevolent deception.

  Sometimes, she thought, to boost the numbers of the Happiness Quotient, it’s necessary to fudge the calculations.

  -24-

  The Unsworn Lie

  Steve Solomon…

  Steve processed the conversation as they veered across the sand to the boardwalk at Seventh Street, passing a potbellied octogenarian man sunbaked the color of cooked chestnuts. The man wore Speedos and nothing else and was waving a metal detector across the sand, hunting for lost watches and spare change.

  Victoria so seldom lied; she wasn’t good at it, he thought. Overall, that was a positive. But just now, it ate at him. He figured he’d been right the first time. Calvert had called Victoria, testing the water. He wanted to get back with her. She demurred, so why not just say that now?

  Screw you, Clark Calvert, and your classical piano and your zillion languages and your aerobatic plane.

  Victoria interrupted his thoughts. “Steve, there’s something we need to talk about.”

  Now what? he wondered.

  “Would you agree that Clark handled himself very well today?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure. He was brilliant. Genius. Best interview ever.”

  She ignored his sarcasm. “Well… he lied.”

  “What!”

  “When Jake asked him if he ever choked any other wom
en…”

  “No! You?”

  She exhaled a laugh. “Not me! No. Never. A young nurse he was dating in Boston after he’d left New Brunswick. They’d had an argument, and he lost it. Choked her into unconsciousness. She filed a complaint with the hospital where they both worked.”

  “Ho-ly shit!”

  “He’s very remorseful about it. Says that isn’t who he is.”

  “Apparently it is.”

  “There was a hearing before the hospital board. To his credit, Clark admitted the incident. He got a warning letter placed in the file—not for the choking, but because she was on his surgical team and he shouldn’t have been dating her.”

  “No criminal charges?”

  “She never took it to the police. The hospital personnel file is confidential, and Clark says it was expunged five years later in any event.”

  “When did Calvert tell you about it?”

  “Moments before the interview, when you were bringing Jake to the patio. He asked what he should do if Jake asked about choking other women.”

  “And…?”

  “Steve, I had so little time to process the information.”

  “You told him to lie?”

  Her expression gave it away. “He wasn’t under oath. I did nothing unethical.”

  “An unsworn lie is okay? That’s slicing the bologna pretty thin.”

  “What would you have done?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “Same thing, but you’re not me. I’m Slippery Steve. You’re Miss Propriety. Or at least you were until Clark Calvert dropped into our lives.”

  “It was a judgment call, and I’m not sure I made the right decision. But we need to be on the same page, so there it is.”

  Steve stayed quiet as they climbed the stairs to the boardwalk and down the other side, heading toward the parking garage. He returned to his thoughts, picking up right where he had left off. He couldn’t understand Calvert’s power over Victoria. Svengali was changing her right before his eyes.

  More than ever, I really hate this guy.

  So how, Steve wondered, could he help Lassiter convict the son of a bitch?

  -25-

  The Titanic, Burning Coal, and Me

  Jake Lassiter…

  They were taking my blood, and I was reading about two friends who might be dying.

  The Miami Herald’s heartbreaking story reported that Nick Buoniconti, the undersize, brainy Hall of Fame linebacker, and Jim Kiick, the running back as tough as his name, were suffering from cognitive impairment. Both had symptoms of CTE, the incurable, fatal bastard of a disease caused by repeated concussions.

  Buoniconti and Kiick were key players on the Miami Dolphins 1972 Super Bowl championship team. The term perfect was always associated with that undefeated squad. Now CTE and early death may be the watchwords. Five players had already died. Eight more appear stricken with brain damage, showing classic symptoms of dementia. With living players—including me—there can be no certain diagnosis. As Dr. Melissa Gold kept reminding me, that can only be done postmortem in an autopsy.

  I sat on the edge of an examining table in a room at the University of Miami Hospital. Melissa asked questions as a young female medical technician filled four tubes with blood from a vein in my arm. They wanted baseline readings of various substances before I started taking lithium, the neuroprotective drug being used experimentally when CTE is suspected.

  “On a scale of one to ten,” Melissa asked, “how would you describe the severity of your headaches?”

  “On a good day, about a four. Bad day, roughly a quadrillion.”

  Her brow furrowed. She was wearing a white lab coat emblazoned with Dr. M. Gold in blue lettering. She held a clipboard and filled out boxes on a questionnaire filled with medical mumbo jumbo. A pair of rimless reading glasses was perched on the end of her upturned nose, giving her the look of a studious—and sexy—librarian. Her reddish-brown hair was tied back in a bun, and in the world’s worst lighting—hospital fluorescent—she still looked smashing.

  “Any recent episodes of confusion?” Melissa asked.

  “I’m having a little trouble with names.”

  The medical technician removed the needle from my arm, covered the injection site with a cartoon Band-Aid—Fred Flintstone—and left the room with my vials of blood.

  “You forget names or confuse them?” Melissa asked.

  “Kim Jong Un and Kim Jong Il. I can’t remember which is which.”

  She frowned, unhappy with either me or the North Koreans. “Do you find yourself growing more irritable?”

  “No! Damn it!”

  “It would be helpful if you took this seriously, Jake.”

  “Truth is, I’m feeling okay, except for the headaches and tinnitus. And maybe a general malaise I can’t put my finger on.”

  “Try.”

  “It’s possible I’m worried.”

  “About your condition?”

  I nodded. “And what happens to my nephew, Kip, if I’m not around. And to you. You’ve raised the stakes by putting a lot of yourself into my diagnosis and treatment. Not to mention our relationship.”

  “Not to mention? Isn’t that one of the things you’re actually worried about?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Let’s speak directly without euphemisms. You’re worried that, if you die, it will be horribly painful for your nephew and for me.”

  I nodded. “I lose sleep thinking about both of you.”

  She took off her glasses, cocked her head, and studied me. “At least you’re being real now. That’s a start. What else is bothering you?”

  “The case I’m investigating and supposedly prosecuting. The alleged murder of Sofia Calvert.”

  “It’s a difficult case?”

  “Impossible. There’s no body. No proof the woman’s even dead. I should never have agreed to prosecute.”

  “If there’s no case, can’t you just walk away?”

  “I have one more interview and if nothing comes out of it, that’s what I’ll do. The judge says she’ll let me out anytime before an indictment.”

  “Then you have a plan.”

  “Tentative plan. I’m still not sure. I’m not a quitter. Never have been.”

  “Is it really quitting? To drop something you don’t believe in?”

  “The State Attorney thinks so. He’s pushing me hard to get an indictment, to hell with the evidence. So yeah, I’m stressed.”

  “Your work has always been stressful, and you’ve always handled it.”

  I smoothed the ridges of the Band-Aid on the inside of my elbow, Fred Flintstone looking at me with that goofy grin. “Until now I’ve never entertained the notion that I might be dying. Lately I’ve been asking, what the hell am I doing? Why am I working so hard? Why am I taking orders from Pincher? And of course, the big one, what’s it all about? Life, I mean.”

  Her face reflected both concern and warmth. “I’m glad you feel so comfortable with me that you can share these things.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s something new for me. Admitting weakness.”

  “It’s not weakness, Jake. It’s simply being honest and open. Let’s deal with it in small bites, starting with your legal case. It’s putting a huge amount of pressure on you, and that’s detrimental to your condition.”

  “I don’t see the relationship.”

  A nurse poked her head inside the door, saw us, and left again. Maybe they needed the room for a paying customer, not a freeloading volunteer in an experimental study.

  “You’re like the Titanic,” Melissa said.

  “How?”

  “The Titanic wasn’t sunk by an iceberg.”

  “Sure it was.”

  “Not an iceberg alone. There was a smoldering fire in one of the coal bunkers below the waterline. The fire started even before the Titanic left Southampton.”

  “But the ship hit an iceberg. Everybody knows that.”

  “Right. By total chance, the iceberg’s impact was direc
tly on the area of the hull that had been weakened by the fire. Without that, the hull likely would have held.”

  “Your point being…”

  “Reduce the number of things in your life that can add up to hurt you. Let’s put out the small fires and focus on the iceberg. And maybe on the good things, too.”

  She watched, waiting for me to respond. “You’re in my life. And that’s good. Huge. Bigger than any damn iceberg.” She smiled warmly. “Yesterday at South Pointe, you said your mind wandered to thoughts of me during the day. You said you cared deeply for me. I said the same about you.”

  “Sure. I remember.”

  “How deeply do you care?” she asked.

  “How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky?”

  “Try not to be cute, okay? Be real.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Right after you said you cared, you said, ‘But…’ And left it hanging there. Left me hanging there.”

  “But what?”

  “That’s what I’m asking, Jake.”

  “But…” I repeated. Women, I have long believed, remember everything you say. Perhaps they also remember everything you almost said.

  “What gives you pause when you think about how much we care for each other?” she asked. “What’s the but that you want to use to modify our relationship?”

  I just blurted it out. “But because of my condition, I don’t know if it’s a good idea for our lives to become so intertwined. My future is uncertain. You’ve said as much. Dr. Hoch has, too. I’m betting he’s been even more grim in his consultations with you.”

  “Wrong. You have a precursor to CTE. Neither of us can say whether that will result in the full-blown disease.”

  “But if it does, if the misshapen tau in my brain hardens into those fibrous tangles of sludge, I’ll die. And not quietly. Or prettily. And you can’t offer me any hope of treatment.”

  “Currently, there is none.”

  “And my life expectancy would be three to five years. Lousy years.”

  “Unless medicine makes advances.”

  “Like I said, Melissa, an uncertain future. It’s made me get in touch with my own mortality. Meanwhile, for the past year, you and I have been getting closer. And the closer we get, the harder it will be for you if I die. And there’s something else I think about late at night when you’re sleeping alongside me or when I’m tossing and turning alone. The day we met, I ended up unconscious in a restaurant, and later that night, I was hooked up to monitors in an emergency room. If we’d met under ordinary circumstances—waiting for a table at Joe’s, in line at the DMV, or even a blind date—would you have been attracted to me?”