False Dawn

1

Vladimir Smorodinsky ducked to the left, and the grappling hook, rather than piercing his skull, bit into the fleshy meat of his trapezius, just missing the collarbone. Okay, so maybe he wasn’t Muhammad Ali in his prime, but still a pretty fancy move, since Smorodinsky was busy toting a hundred-fifty-pound crate of Mexican flatware at the time, expecting nothing worse than a hernia, and never seeing his assailant approach from behind.

Maybe the burly Russian felt something, air stirring or sneakers squeaking. Maybe he caught a whiff of the cafe Cubano on his attacker’s breath, or possibly the last fragment of genetic matter derived from a hairy-knuckled Paleolithic hunter warned him of the danger. Whatever the reason, Smorodinsky ducked left, the grappling hook whizzed right and sliced through his blue chambray shirt, sinking into his shoulder.

He never cried out.

Not a sound.

Just the trace of a grimace, his jaw muscles tightening.

His assailant twisted the hook free, ripping out chunks of muscle and tendon and splattering himself with blood. Still, not a grunt from the big man, who dropped the wooden crate of knives and forks, turned, lowered his head, and like a wounded boar, attacked. The top of his skull caught the assailant squarely on the chin, knocking him backward and skittering the grappling hook across the floor and under a wooden pallet.

Both men stayed on their feet and, like cable TV wrestlers, clawed, gouged, and chewed on each other’s vulnerable spots. They toppled into a tower of Scotch whiskey cartons and bounced off a stack of rectangular boxes of Taiwanese bicycles. They slugged and kicked and cursed-one in Russian, the other in Spanish-as they scuffed and bruised each other with a series of pokes and punches. An elbow caught Smorodinsky in the Adam’s apple, but the Russian merely gagged before cuffing the smaller, darker man on the ear with a thunderous forearm that spun him sideways. Thirty pounds lighter than Smorodinsky, he threw a series of jabs, stinging the man’s face but inflicting little damage. When the Russian moved closer, the man aimed a kick at his groin but connected with the hipbone.

Eventually, Smorodinsky got the better of it. He fractured two ribs with a decent right hook. He paralyzed the man’s right arm with a two-fisted blow that did nerve damage to the shoulder. Then, moving inside, he bear-hugged the fellow, crushing his broken ribs and raising him off the floor. He dragged the man’s face across the chicken-wire mesh of a freestanding refuse container, tearing off a goodly portion of mustache and some lower lip. With the man howling in pain, Smorodinsky did it again.

H ow do I know all this? I wasn’t there, of course. I never am. In my profession, I hear tales of mayhem after the fact. Clients, witnesses, expert consultants all reconstruct what happened, seldom agreeing. They don’t necessarily lie, but, the power of observation being what it is, they don’t tell the literal truth either. Each of us sees reality through a lens of our own making. Our prejudices and self-interest shape the world into what we want it to be, or fear it is. So I was stunned that day when Francisco Crespo told a story guaranteed to get him twenty-five years to life.

Crespo sat in my office thirty-two floors above Biscayne Bay, watching me through eyes the color of burned toast, sipping a WASP law firm’s watery imitation of espresso through torn lips. He wore baggy khaki pants and a Disney World T-shirt-Mickey, Minnie, and Pluto-and was shivering in the air-conditioning. He had a grid of welts across his forehead and cheeks as if he’d been run over by a steel-belted radial tire. Good. That would help the self-defense claim, though it might be difficult to explain sneaking up on the Russian from behind.

I could think about that later, but the first task was to summon a photographer and tell him to beef up the contrast to emphasize the cuts and scrapes. The face should be shot in close-up to accentuate the damage. There’s a personal injury lawyer in town who once hired a professional makeup artist to crank up the color of his clients’ bruises. Using his experience with South Beach models who often tarnished their complexions with latenight drugfests before morning shoots, the artist found that reversing the process- adding eggplant-colored stains to perfectly fine skin-was easier and more profitable. But the lawyer got carried away, using a defrocked doctor to suture uninjured fender-bender clients, occasionally removing a healthy spleen or gall bladder. That seemed a tad excessive for the state bar, which suspended the fellow for sixty days or so.

For the full-body pictures, I told the photographer to stand on a ladder and angle down, making Crespo look even smaller. Up close, you could see my client was one of those sinewy guys who was plenty quick and twice as strong as he looked. All muscles and wires strung taut across a small bone structure. Work-hardened hands, wrists thickened from his latest job, hauling crates at a customs broker’s warehouse for nonunion wages. The words “Cuba Libre” were crudely tattooed on his right tricep. His face was narrow, his complexion dusty, at least it had been before it had been bashed by the thick-necked Russian warehouseman. There was a gap where a front tooth should have been, but it didn’t matter. Crespo seldom smiled.

W hen Smorodinsky finished shaving Crespo with the chickenwire mesh, he just dropped him to the cement floor. While Crespo gagged and dry-heaved, the Russian gave him one good thwack to the temple with a reinforced work boot. The paramedics say the blow knocked Crespo unconscious, leaving him with a concussion. They found him that way, sprawled out alongside the refuse container. I would subpoena them as defense witnesses. Almost as good as alibi witnesses.

But no, Crespo insists, the lights never went out. Tucked into the fetal position, feeling the cold concrete floor against his bleeding face, Crespo watched Smorodinsky dab at the blood on his own shoulder and lumber down the aisle between thirty-foot-high rolls of Haitian cotton.

Y ou know it would help your case if you were unconscious just like the 911 boys said,” I told him, as nonchalantly as possible. Okay, okay, I know all about the canons of ethics. A lawyer shall not suborn perjury. But there’s a footnote. It’s okay to let the client know whether the truth will set him free or buy a one-way ticket to Raiford.

I learned my ethics watching Jimmy Stewart coach Ben Gazzara into his temporary insanity defense in Anatomy of a Murder, and if that’s too subtle for your tastes, how about James Mason teaching his client, a doctor accused of malpractice, a few courtroom tricks in The Verdict.

“If you were seeing stars,” I continued, “somebody else must have-”

“ Si, yo se, pero no paso asi. The medics are wrong. I wasn’t going to let the bastard get away so he could drink vodka with his amigos and laugh at me.”

It got worse then, of course. It always does.

There was the Russian, heading for the exit, and here was my client, revving up his brain cells into the highest reaches of their two-digit IQ, seeking revenge on a guy who resented being mistaken for a side of beef.

Crespo said he watched the Russian turn left at the end of the aisle and head toward the loading dock. The Mitsubishi forklift was at the end of the second row. Crespo had used it that morning to move fertilizer crates, and now he wanted to cut Smorodinsky off before he reached the exit. Crespo ran to the forklift, started it up, and chased after the Russian, approaching him from behind. Why is it my clients are never inclined to face guys head-on?

“The big bastard heard me coming,” Crespo said. He seemed to be staring at or through the photo of my college football team on my office wall. On the credenza is a no-frills white helmet with a single blue stripe and a crack that would do the Liberty Bell proud. I don’t keep my diplomas here. My clients ask me to trust them; I figure they ought to have faith I studied some law, even if it was after the sun went down.

“He turned around,” Crespo continued, “said something in Russki, and jumped onto a rack of Japanese transmissions. A tough hombre, big through the shoulders, like you, but shorter, and slow. Heavy legs.” Crespo snorted, and his eyes focused somewhere else, probably remembering some barroom brawl where another big lug mistook him for an underfed exilado, then ended up with a busted nose or a shiv in the belly.

“You used the forklift merely to catch up with him,” I suggested, helpfully. “You never intended to-”

“ Estas loco? I intended to kill him.”

Oh, brother. What would Jimmy Stewart have done? I decided to listen. Francisco Crespo stood and walked around my office. He picked up a deflated football from a position of honor on a bookshelf and ran his finger over the white paint that told the score of a long-forgotten Dolphins-Jets game. He stood near the floor-to-ceiling window without getting too close, and he avoided the draft from the air-conditioning vent. Then he finished the story in a matter-of-fact voice. I studied his body language and watched his eyes. No sign of deception. But how could he be lying? With every word, he incriminated himself.

S morodinsky grabbed the rack’s support strut like a rider pulling himself aboard a trolley car. Crespo zoomed past on the forklift and jerked it around, the back wheels whirling it into a steep turn. The Russian jumped down and was running the other way, grabbing wooden crates from the shelves, tossing them into the aisle behind him. The forklift smashed over them and caught up with Smorodinsky at an intersection of four aisles. He swerved right, wanting the forklift to rush past him. But the big Russian lost traction on the slippery concrete. I pictured his feet sliding out from under him, and I remembered trying to cut on artificial turf after a rain.

The fork was set about belly-high. It caught Vladimir Smorodinsky in midstep, slightly below the rib cage on the right side. The blade pierced the oblique muscles of the abdomen and just missed the liver, but, according to the medical examiner, plunged through the ascending colon, the right kidney, the duodenum, and worst of all, the inferior vena cava, which ordinarily carries blood to the heart from the lower extremities, but just then emptied itself all over cartons of beach towels from the Dominican Republic.

There is a lever to the right of the steering wheel, Crespo told me, happily demonstrating how he pulled it back, raising the fork, hoisting Smorodinsky off the floor. Crespo never hit the brakes. Instead, he accelerated, carrying the bleeding Russian with him.

“The bastard was stuck like, like…” He searched for an expression. “Like an olive on a toothpick,” he said with malicious glee.

The forklift careened down the aisle, sideswiping metal racks with the clang of screeching metal and finally smashing into the corrugated metal door near the loading dock. The bloody steel fork reverberated against the wall like a pealing church bell. Vladimir Smorodinsky was impaled there, his feet four feet off the ground, his arms pinned to the wall in a macabre crucifixion, his insides oozing onto the concrete floor.

I peered out the window at Biscayne Bay three hundred feet below. A southeast wind rippled small whitecaps across the green water. At Virginia Key, three multicolored sails shimmered in the afternoon sun. Boardsailors. On cue, they jibed, and one of the masts dipped into the water, dunking the sailor who had flipped his boom too late.

I asked, “So why did the paramedics find you unconscious back at the refuse container?”

Crespo shrugged. “ No se. I must have walked back there and fainted.”

Right. You could cut off both his legs at the knees, and he wouldn’t faint.

“Francisco, listen to me. This isn’t a simple A and B. If you tell that story, you’ll take a fall for second-degree murder. Twenty-five years minimum. Now, I can’t tell you to go up there and lie, but maybe you don’t remember it all that well. You were under tremendous stress

…”

He waved his hand as if to say it was no big thing, just a little fight to the finish in a warehouse hard by the docks of the Miami River. He wasn’t going to help me, and that made it hard to help him. Outside my windows, one wet boardsailor water-started and pumped his sail to catch up with his two buddies. They were headed on a broad reach across the channel to Fisher Island, once a Vanderbilt retreat, now a condo sanctuary of vacationing millionaires who want the security of a saltwater moat to keep out the riffraff. If the boardsailors didn’t have their papers in order, the security guards might pick them off for target practice.

“Here’s how I see it. I can just keep you off the stand, and based on the state’s case, all they’ve got is a fight between the two of you, and after you’ve passed out, somebody else came along and made shish kebab out of the Russian.”

“ Pero, no one else was there.”

Sometimes, you just want to tell your clients to shut the hell up. “ Someone had to be there. Someone in the office called the police, right?”

“ No se, you gotta ask them.”

I already had. Somebody called 911 but wouldn’t leave a name. Somebody saw what happened, but who?

“If we can show who drove the forklift, or if we just raise enough doubt that you did, you’d walk on the murder charge. I could probably plead you to aggravated assault right now if you’d tell the prosecutor who it was. Abe Socolow isn’t stupid. An asshole maybe, but not stupid. It’s a low-profile case. Nobody knew the victim. But if Socolow thinks you’re covering for someone who ordered the hit, he’ll go after the maximum.”

Crespo shrugged again and touched a finger to the welts on his face. “You’ll figure it out for me, numero cincuenta y ocho. You always do.”

I wasn’t getting through to him. “You have no lawful excuse for attacking Smorodinsky. You’re going-”

“He was a comunista.”

“I didn’t know there were any left…”

Crespo shrugged.

“Or that you were political,” I added.

Still, he didn’t respond.

I rubbed my temples and stared out the window again. The boardsailors were hidden in the shadows of the Fisher Island condos. In a perfect world, I would be on the water, the wind crackling my sail. To the north, the cruise ships were lined up, single file, at the port along Government Cut, preparing for their Caribbean cruises, thousands of tourists clustered on the main decks, awaiting their prepackaged fun. For some reason, I thought of Pearl Harbor.

“So the two of you disagreed about politics,” I said. Take what they give you, get a few anti-Castro Cuban-Americans on the jury, who knows?

“No, we disagreed because the cocksucker stole twelve dollars from my locker.”

Oh, shit. I tried another theory. “You were defending your property. You caught him in the act, and in the heat of the moment-”

“No, he stole the money two months ago. Pero, I owed him thirty bucks at the time. He’d been bugging me about the eighteen I still owed him, and I just got tired of it. That’s all there is to it. I killed the hombre,” my client said, “because he was a pain in the ass.”

A tlantic Seaboard Warehouse was where it was supposed to be, on South River Drive, a pleasant thoroughfare if you like chainlink fences topped with barbed wire, vacant lots covered with broken beer bottles, and Doberman pinschers with psychopathic personalities. The warehouse opened to the rear, its loading docks fronting on the Miami River, home to rusty, overloaded freighters from the Caribbean and Latin America.

I had sent the photographer here the day after Crespo came to my office, but photos, diagrams, and police reports only take you so far. There’s no substitute for being there. Photos and sketches often mislead. You can’t pick up distances, lines of sight, the three-dimensional surroundings that make the setting real. That’s why jurors are sometimes taken to the scene of the crime.

The warehouse was cavernous, piled high with goods from dozens of countries. Crates of foodstuffs-cereals, canned vegetables, bottled juices-filled several acres along the western wall. You could feed a starving country with the inventory. In another section, boxes of bicycles from Taiwan were piled to the ceiling, and nearby, thousands of concrete fence posts from Colombia were crisscrossed in stacks that resembled a house of Popsicle sticks. The open doors, the width of a tractor trailer, admitted the brackish stench of Biscayne Bay and the thick smell of diesel fuel from the river. I heard three toots of a horn, then the coughs and sputters of a tugboat nudging a barge under the Second Avenue drawbridge.

I retraced the steps, starting with the grappling hook attack, ending with the forklift. The layout was just the way Crespo described it. Once Crespo-or whoever-mounted his trusty steed of a forklift, Smorodinsky never had a chance to get to the exit. I heard an electric buzz behind me, and whirled just in time to see a forklift approach the intersection of two aisles. The machine carried a pallet of dog food cans, and the driver, a young Hispanic with a mustache, expertly steered the load around a corner.

The concrete floor was remarkably clean, but as I neared the cartons of beach towels, I saw the black spots. Concrete is just porous enough to soak up blood and ugly it. The drips continued down the aisle to the corrugated metal door, where a dark puddle of Vladimir Smorodinsky’s innards left their spot for the ages. On the door itself, two indentations, at just the width of the forklift’s prongs, just as Francisco Crespo said there would be.

There was a small office near the rear loading dock that led to the parking lot and a larger office overhead that could be reached by metal stairs and a catwalk. From above, you could see into every aisle. There were no witnesses to the fight, at least none I could find. None of the workmen in the warehouse or the office knew anything about it. No one admitted calling the police. No one knew much about the two workers, except Crespo was a hothead, always causing trouble. You want to know anything else, come back when Mr. Yagamata, the owner, is here.

Hothead was right on the money. I first met Francisco Crespo in his mother’s house in Little Havana. He was a skinny Marielito just out of Castro’s prisons who arrived in Miami barefoot and sopping wet. I remember thinking he must have been just off a raft, but it had been a rainy day, and he arrived at the little pink house off Calle Ocho in the back of a pickup truck.

I rented a room from Emilia Crespo in what had been the garage, having arrived in Miami-undrafted and unheralded-after a steady but unspectacular college football career. I wanted to live close to the Orange Bowl, not realizing the team practiced and virtually lived at the other end of town. It didn’t matter. I never figured to make the Dolphins, and when I did, earning the league minimum, and hanging on a few years because of a willingness to sacrifice my body on kickoffs, I stayed put.

Emilia Crespo was a sturdy widow who always seemed to wear an apron. She cooked me picadillo and platanos and taught me a smidgen of Spanish. She also asked me to look after Francisco, who refused to live with her, saying he wanted solitude. He rented a first-floor apartment on Fonseca, just east of Ponce de Leon Boulevard, and kept to himself.

To please her, I got him a job in the locker room, tossing jockstraps and towels into a washing machine with ample quantities of bleach and disinfectant. Just as often, he was brawling. I remember him flailing away at the assistant strength coach-a two-hundred-thirty-five-pound weightlifter-who smacked his lips at Crespo, suggesting he was one of the maricones who recently washed up on the beaches courtesy of the Jimmy Carter flotilla across the straits. The coach slapped Crespo around, then tossed him into the whirlpool.

Crespo was reassigned to the groundskeeping crew. He got in less trouble outdoors and soon knew the vagaries of Kentucky bluegrass, fine fescue, and perennial ryegrass, as well as everything worth knowing about aeration, seeding, sodding, and mulching. Ignoring the automatic sprinkler system, Crespo hosed the field by hand, watering dry spots and patching the divots with patience and care. He seemed to like grass more than people, but then, most people he’d known the last ten years had worn boots and kicked him around.

I kept an eye on Crespo, slipping him some sweat socks when I saw his bare ankles sticking out of secondhand shoes. He returned the favor by giving me mangoes he filched from a South Dade farm. Then I gave him some old jerseys that could be turned into cash at swap meets. He sold Griese’s, Csonka’s, and Warfield’s, but kept mine, hanging it in the front window of his apartment. It was not so valuable as to provoke a burglary or a call from the Smithsonian.

Once, in a close game against the Jets, I was in my usual position on the bench and Crespo was handing out Gatorade and towels.

“ Ves al numero setenta y nueve?” he asked me.

“I been watching him all day. Their weak-side tackle, a Pro Bowler.”

“Why does he rock back on his heels when they’re going to pass the ball?”

“What!”

“When he is crouching down in como se llame…”

“The three-point stance.”

“ Si, he leans forward when they are going to run, and rocks back when they are going to pass.”

“Holy shit, Francisco, you oughta be a coach. We got thirty hours of game films plus Polaroids of every snap of the ball and nobody noticed that.”

He shrugged and ambled down the sideline, carrying a tray of drinks to some guys who deserved them more than I did. “When you fight, must watch your enemigo’s every move,” he called back at me.

Two plays later, we lost a starting outside linebacker to a hip-pointer, and I had a chance to get my uniform dirty. Two sacks and three tackles for losses in the fourth quarter. The only game ball of my career.

The year I retired-which is a nice way of saying I was placed on waivers where twenty-five other teams managed not to notice me-Crespo left, too. I spent the next year engulfed in booze and blondes, and by the time I started night law school, I had lost track of him. I figured he was either in jail or contending for the welterweight championship.

Then, a few years later, Emilia Crespo called me. I was in my last days as a public defender, copping pleas for guys too poor to buy a decent defense. Did I want to stop by for some picadillo con frijoles negros y arroz bianco? Did I ever! The years had added a few white streaks to the black hair pulled straight back, a little heavier maybe, but the apron was crisply starched and her greeting was the same. A hug that could knock the wind out of Dick Butkus. I ate heartily, and she watched in silence, nibbling at a plantain. I sipped a mojito, the rum and soda drink with fresh mint leaves from her garden. I asked Emilia Crespo about Francisco, and her dark eyes filled with pain.

“I don’t know what that asesino, Castro, did to him in prison, but he has never been the same. Angry all the time. Violento. It is as if my son cares about nothing.”

“He cares about you. And so do I. What can I do?”

Her answer was a tender plea. “Will you be his friend?”

“I tried in the old days. He isn’t easy to get close to.”

“Will you try again, Jake? For me?”

She knew I would. In my life, I have Granny Lassiter, who raised me, Charlie Riggs, who taught me, and Emilia Crespo, who put a roof over my head and meat on my bones. There was something else, too, a path of obligation that ran straight from Jake Lassiter, ex-football player, to Francisco Crespo, ex-preso politico, and it was something neither of us would ever tell his mother.

Two days later, I tracked Crespo down at the jai alai fronton where he sat in the back row, his feet draped over the seat in front of him, a program balled up in one hand. He was alone and seemed to like it that way. I sat to one side, watching him through the first three games, listening to the plonk of the pelota against the front wall. Nobody talked to him, and he reciprocated. Finally, I went up and said hello, how about a drink and a sandwich later. He said, fine, but if he was pleased to see me, it didn’t show.

“What are you up to?” I asked him that evening, over a beer at a Calle Ocho taberna.

“This and that.”

I took a sip of a Brooklyn Lager, a rare find in these parts. Burnt amber color, a taste of toasted malt, it goes well with spicy Spanish food. “Do you need work?”

“No.”

“Money?”

“No.”

“Anything?”

“No.”

This wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe I wasn’t any good at reaching out. Maybe he thought I was there only because his mother asked me to be. Or maybe it was just hard for him to accept friendship, especially friendship sparked by obligation. My attempts at gratitude had always been awkward, his responses perfunctory.

“Francisco, you’re making this difficult for me. I owe you. You haven’t forgotten, have you?”

He dismissed the notion with a shrug. “It has been many years.”

“Some things don’t go away, even when you want them to. Particularly when you want them to. I still dream about it, nightmares really.”

“Dreams are dreams,” he said. “Life is life.”

I wanted to reach out to him, give him a brotherly hug, but I didn’t. He wouldn’t have wanted me to. Or was that just my excuse? Maybe I’d been stiff-arming him because he reminded me of that night and my eternal obligation. “It’s our secret, Francisco, something only the two of us share.”

He finished his beer. His expression hadn’t changed. “ Dos minutos. That’s all it was out of your life and mine.”

“That’s a lot,” I said, “if it lets someone keep on living.”

“You think about it too much.”

“Don’t you… don’t you ever wake up, remembering?”

“My nightmares are different,” Francisco Crespo said.

We finished our beer and polished off a couple of Cuban sandwiches with black bean soup on the side. I promised to stay in touch the same way Hollywood producers promise to call for lunch. He gave me his phone number, and I tucked it in my pocket, then taped it on the refrigerator door. When I finally tried to reach him, the phone had been disconnected. I could have called his mother. I could have tracked him down. I could have done a lot of things. But I didn’t. Then came the call from the county jail; Crespo was booked on a second-degree murder charge.

I left my Olds 442 convertible, vintage 1968, in the parking lot, and walked along the river, a narrow, oil-slicked snake of a waterway that runs from just north of the airport to Biscayne Bay near the downtown commercial district. Half a mile away, the air horn on the Flagler Street drawbridge was tooting the alarm, the tender preparing to raise the span. I remembered a humid night on the MacArthur Causeway, the dark vision of death haunting me still. I shook off the cobwebs and stared at a Panamanian freighter loaded with bicycles and truck tires heading toward the bay. The bikes-nearly all stolen-would be headed for Haiti, where a battered old Schwinn can bring fifty bucks. Freighters routinely use the river to haul illicit cargo, but that’s nothing new. During Prohibition, rumrunners from the Bahamas found their way up the Miami River with their contraband.

A few years ago, the city padres decided to clean up the polluted channel and decrepit surroundings where even the hookers can’t be trusted: they’re transvestites. The city planned a Riverfest extravaganza, which was going fine until a sewer line broke, spoiling the fun because it’s tough to enjoy your lobster and paella when the afternoon breeze is ripe with the stench of raw sewage. Now, rustbuckets from a dozen Central American countries were tied up, their crews idling on the shore or heading to roughneck bars along Flagler Street. The ships are essential to Miami’s commerce, hauling drugs and illegal aliens in, carting stolen cars and bicycles out.

I stopped at an outdoor fish market, bought a pint of cold conch salad, spicy with peppers and onions, and admired the fresh stone crab claws. The stoners were arranged in iced boxes, according to size-medium, large, and jumbo. In a triumph of marketing, even the smallest claw was labeled “medium.” Apparently, “small” claws would have as much consumer appeal as “petite” condoms.

My canary yellow convertible was still there when I walked back to the warehouse, beating the odds in a county where a hundred cars are stolen every day. I haven’t gone for any of the new devices so popular hereabouts: the LoJack transmitter to help the cops find your missing car; the Hook Crook Cane to lock the steering wheel; the electronic starter disabler and computer chip car key. If somebody really wants your car, they’re going to get it, and love her as I do, the old 442 is still just a chunk of metal.

The radio was untouched, too, probably because it’s older than most car thieves. It has no CD, no tape deck, not even an FM band. It does pick up Radio Havana, though, plus a big band station near the top of the AM dial. Some Filipino seamen were in the lot, but no one showed any interest in my antique, except a white ibis who was probably lost. The snowy bird was pecking at my tires with its long orange beak. Maybe I’d run over a juicy grasshopper.

I got in the car and drove five minutes to the Gaslight Lounge downtown. Once inside, I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, then made my way to the bar. The conch salad had made me thirsty; the case of State v. Crespo required an expert consultation. I had come to the right place for both.

The Gaslight is fine for a beer and a bacon cheeseburger, onion rings on the side. The red imitation-leather banquettes and matching bar stools are right out of the Fifties, and so is the clientele. Usually I drink Grolsch. For my money, the Dutch brewmasters are the best. But everyone has his own tastes, and if the yuppies want to buy watery Mexican beer because the longnecked bottles are trendy, let them. If they impress each other with a pricey Swedish vodka that is indistinguishable from half a dozen other brands, that’s fine, too. I stay out of the Misty Fern, and they stay out of the Gaslight, a place with no hanging plants, no pickled-wood latticework, and no nachos with salsa. Just a long, scarred teak bar with a brass foot rail, smoked mirrors, and barely enough light to read your check without striking a match.

For some reason, I didn’t feel like a beer, so I pointed to a bottle on the mirrored shelf, and Mickey Cumello poured two and a half ounces of Plymouth gin into a mixing glass without using the jigger to measure. Why should he? Does Pavarotti need sheet music?

Usually, I only drink gin after being drop-kicked by a judge, a jury, or a lady friend. Come to think of it, I’ve had more than my share of martinis lately.

Mickey gently dropped in four ice cubes-the large square ones, so they won’t melt the instant they hit the alcohol-and dribbled a splash or two of dry vermouth into the mixture. He stirred with a glass swizzle, but not out of fear of bruising the gin. Drinks don’t bruise; only drinkers do, but shaking clouds a martini. Finally, he strained the drink into a chilled glass, sliced a sliver of lemon peel, and lit a match. He squeezed the rind above the burning match until oil dropped into the flame, shooting off little sparks, which settled into the martini, giving it a hint of burnt lemon.

Mickey Cumello is a bartender from the old school. No ponytail, earring, or track shoes. His gray hair was combed straight back, revealing a handsome widow’s peak. He always wore a short-sleeve white shirt, charcoal gray pants, and polished black leather shoes, and he never spoke unless spoken to. In the dim light, he looked forty-five and had for twenty years.

I sipped at the cool poison and let it slide down the throat. “Mickey, you know every client I ever had is a liar.”

He hunched his bushy eyebrows but didn’t say a thing. Maybe he felt the same way about his customers. “They either lie to the jury or to me, or both,” I continued.

Mickey allowed me a small smile while he polished an old-fashioned glass that was dry and spotless.

“But they always swear they weren’t there, or the other guy started it, or the full moon made them do it.”

A man in a dark suit sat down a polite three bar stools away and, without being asked, Mickey hit a long-handled tap and drew a glass of Canadian ale. Just as silently, he resumed his position in front of me.

“But until now, I never had a client claim he iced a guy when it’s clear somebody else did it. Now why would he do that?”

Mickey wiped his hands on the towel and neatly folded it on a drying rack. “That’s easy, Jake. To protect someone else.”

“Right, but why?”

A swarthy man in a white guayabera slid onto the bar stool next to me. Mickey turned his body to shield our conversation. Is there such a thing as the bartender-client privilege?

“Because whatever he’s involved in, Jake, is a lot bigger than he is.”

My look told him to continue. He said, “And whatever a judge could do to him…”

“Twenty-five years to life.”

“… is nothing compared to what’ll happen if he spills what he knows. So, not to tell you your business, but if I were you, I wouldn’t be so anxious to hear this guy’s story.”

I drained the rest of the martini, tasting the sharpness of the gin against the smokiness of the burnt lemon. “Since when are you concerned about the health of my clients?”

Mickey Cumello shook his head. “Not his health, Jake. Yours.”