Flesh and bones

18

The winds shifted to the southeast, bringing the humid Caribbean air, then died altogether. Days were broiling, nights stifling, and my little house felt like a hamper filled with sweat socks. The temperature soared, thunderheads formed over the Glades, and afternoon squalls rolled in from the west, a hard, pounding rain that did not cool the air. Steam rose from the pavement. Hell on earth.

Summer in South Florida starts early and ends late. This year, a dozen tropical storms and hurricanes chugged through the Atlantic and Caribbean, swirling up clouds, then breaking off to the northwest, skimming the coast, or heading due west across the Yucatan. Each time a storm came within a thousand miles, our breathless TV reporters stirred up memories of Andrew's flattened buildings, scaring the bejesus out of us. Just as gullible as my neighbors, I stood in line at the supermarket for bottled water and flashlight batteries, and because I had read that chick-peas are an excellent source of protein, my cupboard was now chock-full of them.

My little house in the South Grove is made of coral rock two feet thick, and it has withstood every hurricane from 1926 onward. If it is blown down, there won't be anything left standing in Dade County, and don't crack wise by saying that's not such a bad idea.

With the summer, the southeasterly breezes are too light for windsurfing, especially if you weigh more than a ballerina. I carted the board out to Key Biscayne a few times to catch the tail ends of gusty thunderstorms, but I've never been entirely comfortable on the water with a sixteen-foot-high mast that doubles as a lightning rod.

One day in August, the water slate-gray in a pelting rainstorm, I cruised on a broad reach off Virginia Key. I was hooked into the harness, leaning back against the weight of the sail, enjoying the sheer pleasure of speed, tasting the salty spray as the board chop-hopped past the reef. A disk-shaped Atlantic ray swam alongside, looking like some prehistoric beast, its winglike pectoral fins undulating, propelling it just below the waterline. I watched until the ray disappeared in the foam of a roller.

A few years ago, when I missed a jibe and landed ass-over-elbows next to the board, I was trying to waterstart, lying under the sail on my back like a beached turtle, when my arm caught fire. At least that's what it felt like, the spiny tail of a southern stingray wrapping itself around my wrist. The venomous sting left me with a scar that looks like a bracelet melted into my skin.

Then there are the sharks. It's hard to windsurf any distance from shore and not see a few. The Tourist and Convention Authority doesn't advertise it, but schools of tiger sharks, lemon sharks, and many of their cousins feed in schools just a few hundred yards off our beaches. I've enjoyed swimming and boardsailing in the Miami Beach surf for years, and it's still a thrill to paddle over a nurse shark lying motionless on the bottom in five feet of water.

With our sea creatures-barracuda, sharks, morays, jellyfish, Portuguese men-of-war, sea urchins, and stinging corals-it's a wonder more tourists don't end up in the emergency room.

So this day, as the ray squooshed by me and vanished in the vast, deadly sea, I thought about the other dangerous creatures in my life. Guy Bernhardt was paying the bills on time, calling me with pep talks about the case, doing everything except sending me notes with little smiling faces. Dr. Schein answered all my questions as I prepared for trial. He seemed eager to testify to the veracity of Chrissy's repressed memories, as well as the likelihood of her diminished mental state when she pulled the trigger- three times. Chrissy wouldn't talk to me at all, except in the most perfunctory way about the case. The personal relationship was over, tanked by the polygraph exam.

"I've never felt so betrayed," she told me as we sat across from each other in my conference room, separated by a mountain of files and a gulf of wounded feelings. I thought the statement was a bit overdone, especially from someone who claimed she'd been sexually molested by her father. Still, who was I to tell her what she should be feeling?

Tony Cuevas called to say what I already knew. Chrissy had passed the polygraph test. "So her father sexually abused her," I said.

"She thinks he did," Tony said. "She remembers it."

All right, she wasn't lying. But memories can be wrong. I remembered everything Dr. Millie Santiago had told me. Or was it everything?

By day, I prepared for trial-interviewing witnesses; gathering boxes of exhibits; deposing cops, bystanders, paramedics, doctors, nurses, and the assistant medical examiner. By night, I wandered around the Grove, avoiding Cocowalk with its teens and tourists, its guys with boa constrictors around their necks or macaws on their shoulders. In my time, I have gone to great lengths to attract women, but being strangled by a reptile or shit on by a bird is not my idea of foreplay. I'd head to the Taurus, the only bar in the Grove that's older than I am. It's a brew-and-burger place in a quiche-and-cappuccino world, and I like it there. I'd have a couple of drafts, shoot some blow darts on the patio, tell harmless lies to various women, all the time wondering just what the hell was going on. Swimming through the surf of the upcoming murder trial, I had the gnawing feeling that I had yet to see the shark lurking on the ocean floor.

Summer turned to fall, not that you would know it. Tropical depressions still formed in the Atlantic. Our news boys and girls still went agog at the prospect of every gale. The night air in the Grove was heavy with the scents of jasmine and hibiscus. An occasional cold front made its way south, always petering out in northern Florida, but clocking the winds around and reducing our humidity.

I spent interminable days in the sadly misnamed Justice Building, a seven-story structure attached to the county jail by an overhead tunnel, an umbilical cord through which prisoners were force-fed into the so-called justice system.

We get the idea from books and television that the courthouse is a theater, the trial a play. The better analogy is a huge tent with a three-ring circus inside. The judge is the ringmaster, wielding his chair, cracking his whip, forcing the lions onto their haunches in mock-serious poses of respect. We rise when the judge enters and exits, and we beg for permission before we speak. The judge feeds us when we are good, chastises us when we are bad, and either way we bow our heads in meek gratitude.

In any given courtroom on any given Monday morning, the performers are not preparing for O. J. Simpson or the Menendez brothers. Not a trial of the century or even of the week. Hundreds of everyday cases flow along the conveyor belt of justice, dozens of bored inspectors picking them off, tossing them into this box or that for handling.

The system, both civil and criminal, intervenes when society has broken down. A wrong has been committed, or at least alleged. Offended at this breach of order, the system devises ways to make the offender pay, with either money or liberty. Like watching sausages or laws being made, observing the grist being milled in the courthouse is not an appetizing sight.

If we could peel off the outer wall of the Justice Building, as Hurricane Andrew did to several condos just south of here, we would see a beehive buzzing with activity. Defendants stream into courtrooms from their holding cells; dark-suited lawyers slouch against the bar, whispering their deals or their golf scores; cops bleary-eyes from the graveyard shift sip coffee in the corridors, their holsters emptied in respect to this place of constitutional reverence; robed judges in their high chairs listen as the endless flow of humanity streams by them: victims, witnesses, defendants, and the prosecutors and defense lawyers, engaged in an obligatory conspiracy to dispose of cases with dismissals, plea bargains, and reduced sentences, lest the entire system crunch to a halt.

In a dozen governmental offices, other anonymous functionaries push the paper and store the bytes that record the comings and goings of a world run amok. Stenographers, probation officers, bailiffs,

translators, clerks, plus the girlfriends, mothers, and wives of the defendants themselves, bit players in the sagas that unfold under the pretentious and misleading sign that adorns each courtroom: WE WHO LABOR HERE SEEK ONLY TRUTH.

If we moved our camera close to the shaved-off walls, if our microphone picked up the whispers and cries, what would we see, what would see hear? The rap of a guard's nightstick on the holding cell's bars, the muttered curses of the inmates, the whining entreaty to a prosecutor of a defense lawyer ("No way we agree to three years min-man") refusing to accept the consequences of a plea with a minimum mandatory sentence, the mechanical drone of the judge accepting a guilty plea, finding a defendant "alert and intelligent," which, if true, would probably preclude his being there in the first place.

I have spent too much time in this building, too much time listening to the presumably innocent, hearing fanciful tales of alibis, of being in the wrong car at the wrong time, of guns that fire without triggers being pulled, of lying cops, thieving partners, and cheating wives. My clients are the put upon, the wrongfully accused, victims themselves, and they have an excuse for everything.

Now I had a client I desperately wanted to believe, wanted to help.

But did I? Could I?