Flesh and bones

2

"Patricide," Doc Charlie Riggs said with distaste. "A crime of biblical dimensions."

"And mythical," I added.

"Oedipus, of course," Charlie said. "And let's see now…"

Talking to the retired coroner is like playing poker with ideas, and today it was my turn to deal. "Orestes," I told him. It isn't often I get the upper hand on Charlie, so I milked it. "Orestes beheaded his mother, Clytemnestra, for plotting the death of his father, Agamemnon."

"Yes, of course. Very good, Jake. Very good, indeed."

He gave me his kindly teacher look. It's fun proving that I didn't spend five years at Penn State for nothing, if you'll pardon the double negative. My freshman year, I was drafted by the Thespian Club to play Big Jule in a student production of Guys and Dolls, mostly because the other actors had the physique of Michael J. Fox. It was fun, and it prompted me to switch my major from phys. ed. to drama, where I specialized in playing large, dumb guys. Yeah, I know, type casting. My favorite part was Lennie in Of Mice and Men, and I still remember hearing sobs in the audience when I asked George to tell me about the little place we'd get, and there was George pulling the gun out of his pocket. "And I get to tend the rabbits," I said, and George was pointing the gun at the back of my head, and the people in the audience were sniffling and bawling. I wish Granny could have been there.

Anyway, here I was-two careers later-still acting, but this time for judges and juries. At this precise moment, I was listening as my old friend told me about the autopsy report, which his friends at the county morgue had slipped him last night.

The gunshots should not have killed Harry Bernhardt, Doc Riggs told me. Would not have killed him if he hadn't had a heart condition. Seventy-five percent blockage of two coronary arteries due to a lifetime of Kentucky bourbon, Cuban cigars, and Kansas beef.

"The shock of the shooting set loose a burst of adrenaline," Charlie said, leafing through the report. "Combined with the blockage, that could have killed him instantly."

"But it didn't," I protested. "He survived. The surgery was supposedly successful."

"Sure, the bullets were removed, the bleeding stopped. But, between the shooting and the surgery, the system had taken some brutal shocks, especially for a man with damaged arteries. While recovering in the ICU, the unfortunate Mr. Bernhardt went into spontaneous ventricular fibrillation. The muscle fibers of the heart weren't getting enough oxygen." Charlie opened and closed his fist rapidly to demonstrate. "The heart was literally quivering, but no blood was being pumped. Cardiac arrest followed. The Code Blue team attempted to resuscitate and defibrillate but was unsuccessful. Death was imminent."

"But he was fine when they put him into the ambulance," I said.

"Fine?" Charlie raised a bushy eyebrow. It was a look he'd used hundreds of times to tell jurors that the lawyer questioning him was full of beans. Charlie Riggs had been medical examiner of Dade County for twenty-five years before retiring to fish the Keys and drink Granny Lassiter's moonshine. Now, he was sitting in my office high above Biscayne Boulevard, giving me the benefit of his wisdom, without charging me a fee, except for a promised Orvis graphite spinning rod. A small bandy-legged man with an unruly beard, he wore eyeglasses fastened together with a bent fishhook. A cold meerschaum pipe was propped in the corner of his mouth. "Fine?" he repeated. "Mr. Harry Bernhardt was leaking blood from three bullet wounds. Four, if you count both the thigh and the penis, which were hit with the same bullet."

"Let's count the penis. I would if it were mine." I riffled through the paramedics' report and the hospital records. "But he survived the surgery, which stanched the bleeding and removed the bullets. He was in critical but stable condition in the ICU for two hours after he was patched up."

"What are you getting at, counselor?"

"The heart attack could have been independent of the shooting. Maybe I can get Socolow to charge her with aggravated assault, instead of-"

"You can't represent her! You're a witness."

"Me and a hundred others, plus a security videotape that caught the whole thing. I already talked to Socolow. He said he'd rather have me as an opposing lawyer than a witness."

"If I were you, I wouldn't take that as a compliment."

"Socolow's been wrong before. Besides, Ms. Christina Bernhardt asked me to represent her."

"What'd you do, slip your card into her bra when she was passed out?"

"Wasn't wearing a bra, Charlie. Panties, either."

"Good heavens!"

"It's a model thing. Interferes with the smooth flow of fabric on skin."

Charlie Riggs looked at me skeptically. "Just when did you become an expert on models?"

"Rusty MacLean taught me a few things. Actually, he's the one who retained me. He's her agent, promises to pay the tab."

"Better get a hefty retainer from that weasel," Charlie advised, "or you'll never see a dollar."

"Hey, Rusty's an old friend. He introduced me to every after-hours watering hole in the AFC East and many of the women therein."

"Even in Buffalo?"

"Especially in Buffalo. What else is there to do?"

Charlie harrumphed his displeasure. "I never trusted a receiver who didn't like going over the middle."

Like coaches and generals, Doc Charlie Riggs had remarkable tolerance for other people's pain.

"Charlie, believe me, no one likes going over the middle. It's a concussion zone."

It's true, of course. No one wants to run full speed into Dick Butkus, Jack Lambert, or even little old me, Jake Lassiter, linebacker with a tender heart and a forearm smash like a crowbar to the throat.

"It's not just that he short-armed it," Charlie said. "It's that he never gave a hundred percent. With you, Jake, it was different. You had no business being out there. You just gave it everything and overachieved."

"It was either that or drive a beer truck," I said. In those days, I hadn't thought about law school, still confining myself to honest work. But Charlie Riggs was right about one thing. Rusty had talent he never used.

Rusty MacLean was a natural. A four-sport star at a Chicago high school, he was an All-American at Notre Dame and a first-round draft choice with the Dolphins. I was a solid, if unspectacular, linebacker at Coral Shores High School in the Florida Keys, a walk-on at Penn State, and a free agent with the Dolphins. I hung on as a pro because of a willingness to punish myself-and occasionally an opponent-on kickoff teams. I played linebacker only when injuries to the starters were so severe that Don Shula thought about calling Julio Iglesias to fill in.

Rusty could do anything-pole-vault, high-jump, play tennis with either hand. The first time he touched a golf club, he shot a 79. But he hated practice and loved parties. Blown knee ligaments ended his career when he didn't have the discipline to suffer through a year of painful rehabilitation. My career ended differently. I fought back after knee surgery, numerous fractures, and separated shoulders, but was simply beaten out by better, younger players. I enrolled in night law school because it left days free for windsurfing.

Charlie grumbled something else about my old teammate, then went back to the autopsy report, pausing once to tap tobacco into his pipe and then light it. I stood up and paced, stopping in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the bay, Key Biscayne, and the ocean beyond. From the thirty-second floor, I could make out tiny triangles of colorful sails on the waters just off Virginia Key. Windsurfers luxuriating in a fifteen-knot easterly. Beats murder and mayhem any day.

"What about it, Charlie? Will you testify that the heart attack was an intervening cause?"

"But it wasn't!" he thundered. "The shooting was the proximate cause of the coronary."

"Not so fast," I cautioned. "At his age, with the condition of his arteries, Harry Bernhardt could have had a coronary at any time, right?"

"But he didn't have it any time. He went into cardiac arrest three and a half hours after your client-if that's what she is- plugged him, her own father, for God's sake."

"How about just helping me out at the bond hearing, Charlie? Maybe give a little song-and-dance to get her out of the can."

Charlie raised his bushy eyebrows at me. "Are you suborning perjury?"

"No, I was just saying-"

"That I lie at the bond hearing, as if that would be a lesser evil than at the trial." His look was a dagger. "Jake, an oath is an oath."

I remembered what a writer once said about another lawyer, the disgraced and now deceased Roy Cohn: "He only lies under oath." Well, why not? That's when it counts.

" Veritas simplex oratio est," Charlie said. "The language of truth is simple. But lies, prevarications, calumnies, they'll catch you in their web."

I hate arguing with Charlie Riggs because he's always right, and he keeps me semihonest with his damned Yankee rectitude. "The grand jury meets tomorrow," I said. "I was hoping to talk Abe Socolow into a plea to a lesser-"

"Jake, how long have you known Abe?"

"Since he was prosecuting shoplifters and I was a rookie learning how to obfuscate the facts, confuse the jury, and obstruct justice."

"You mean when you were in the PD's office."

"That's what I said."

"So you've known Abe your entire career."

"Such as it is."

Doc Riggs cocked his head to one side and gave me his disappointed-mentor look.

"Okay, Charlie, I know what you're saying. Abe's a hard ass, and I should know it. I just thought we had a special case here. A woman with no prior record who's no threat to the community…"

"Right. She's got no other fathers to kill."

"Charlie, all those years working for the state have warped your sense of fairness. You've become a real shill for the prosecution."

"A shill?" He growled and jabbed his pipe at me. "I'm just objective, and you're not."

"Of course not!" Now it was my turn to raise my voice. "I'm Christina Bernhardt's lawyer, her shield against the powerful forces of the state or anyone else who would do her harm."

"So what is it you want? Probation, counseling, community service?"

My shrug asked, Why not?

"Face it, Jake. You've got yourself a murder trial, and a loser at that."

"Don't underestimate me, Charlie."

"I never have. I just think that sometimes you don't know when you're in the concussion zone."

I was chomping a cheeseburger at my desk when Cindy, my secretary, walked in, made a face, and twirled a finger through her burnt-orange curls. "If the nitrites and benzopyrene don't give you cancer, the pesticides and heavy metals will."

"What?" A drop of grease splattered a slip-and-fall file that was open in front of me.

"That disgusting fat-laden animal flesh you're eating will kill you. The excess protein will cause kidney failure, and the antibiotics actually lower your resistance to infection."

"Bon appetit," I said, hoisting my dripping burger toward her.

"Do you know that the production of animal foods consumes twenty percent of our energy supply? Do you know that seventy-five percent of our water is devoted to raising animals for food?"

"And worth every drop." I belched. "Where do you get these numbers, anyway?"

"The Vegan Society," she said, plopping down in one of the two matching client chairs, the oak armrests stained by years of sweaty palms.

Oh, the vegans. No animal products whatsoever, including dairy, eggs, and honey. I pictured a bunch of skinny busybodies, eating their tofu and raising hell with your basic steak-and-lobster guys such as my very own carnivorous self.

"What do you have for me?" I asked.

She consulted her pad. "Roberto Condom is in the waiting room," she said, stifling a laugh. "With all the legal work you do for him, you'd think he'd ask for a name change, too."

"What's wrong with 'Roberto'?"

She wrinkled her nose at me. Droll wit is so seldom appreciated. "Anyway, you gotta get moving," Cindy ordered. "You've got Rusty MacLean at three, his place. Then Christina Bernhardt at five, her place."

"Very funny, Cindy."

Chrissy's place was the Women's Detention Center, where she was being held without bond. At least for now.

"Bobby, you look great!"

" No se, Jake. They want to revoke my probation."

"What? Are you looting lobsters again?"

My client gave me his pained look. "Jake, mi amigo, I was setting them free from their traps. Don't you remember our defense?" He let his voice slip into a pretty fair impression of my impassioned closing argument. "Roberto Condom, protector of the environment, friend of flora and fauna, mammal and crustacean alike."

"We might have won," I reminded him, "if the Marine Patrol hadn't found three hundred deceased lobsters iced down in your pickup truck."

Roberto shrugged. That's life. He was in his mid-thirties, toreador thin, with slicked-back black hair, a pencil mustache, and long curving sideburns that resembled the blade of a scythe. He wore a bird's-egg-blue linen shirt with puffy sleeves, and pleated white slacks. Though he looked like a gigolo in a 1940s movie, Roberto Condom was more at home in a swamp than in St. Moritz.

As a thief, Roberto was a specialist, and his especialidad was stealing living things. He never boosted a car, but he had rustled cattle from ranches near Ocala. He never rifled a cash register, but he had once broken into a pet store and stolen every tropical fish in the place. He poached sea turtle eggs, which he could sell for a hundred bucks a pop to botanicas in Little Havana where they were believed to be aphrodisiacs, water spider orchids from Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, and live ostrich chicks from Lion Country Safari. At this very moment, Roberto Condom was wearing hand-sewn ostrich-skin cowboy boots that would run you a thousand bucks, unless you brought your own ostriches to the bootmaker.

Roberto disdained mundane crime, especially drug dealing. Which was how I'd gotten him off when a partner double-crossed him and stuffed condoms-yeah, I know-filled with cocaine inside seven hundred boa constrictors Roberto was smuggling into the country. Before the boas left Bogota, someone had jammed the packets of cocaine inside their rectums, then sewed the orifices shut, a job I have never seen advertised in the "Help Wanted" section. When the constipated and ornery snakes were discovered by Customs, Roberto was charged with drug importation as well as cruelty to animals. Roberto showed up for trial with Bozo, his pet six-foot boa, curled around his neck, pleading that he loved snakes and would never do such a thing. The jury was out only twenty minutes, and Roberto walked. At Christmas, I was rewarded with a snakeskin jacket that looked familiar, but it took me three months to figure out that I hadn't seen Bozo in a while.

"So if it's not lobsters, what?" I asked. "Stone crabs, sponges, starfish, wood storks? You're not stealing live coral from Pennekamp Park, are you?"

"Jake!" Again feigning insult. Then he fingered his necklace of alligator teeth, and I knew.

"Gators. You're poaching in the Everglades."

" Chingate! I'm no poacher. I have a license."

"Which limits you to six gators a season."

"Six," he sniffed. "How can a man make a living? I get two hundred dollars a hide, then some fancy store in Bal Harbour sells one purse for twenty times that."

"Nobody said life is fair."

" Verdad. Even if you shoot a big caiman right in the eye, it'll flop around in your boat for hours. You gotta stick a wire in its spine to kill it, and then you'll be up to your knees in gator shit."

"If that's an invitation to your next hunt, forget it."

"I'm just saying that your everyday working guy like me has it tough."

"Okay, so you're Lunch-Bucket Jose. How many hides they catch you with?"

" Solamente fifty-seven."

"Jeez, a serial poacher."

"Three days' work. This time of year, it should be more like a hundred. I tell you something funny. The water level's been down in the Glades for six months."

" 'Course it has. It's the end of the dry season. Wait a few weeks, and it'll rain every dog day afternoon."

"Yeah, but the dry season hasn't been that dry this year. Something's screwy. The gator holes are parched. Damn few turtles and ducks for them to eat, and fishing's shot to hell. I called the Water Management Office, pretended to be one of those Audubon Society types. They said they'd look into it, but you know how government is."

I filed the information away in one of the dusty recesses of my mind, wondering how we would use it. As usual, my client was a step ahead of me.

"So I'm thinking, Jake, maybe I was doing the gators a favor."

"How, by plugging them through the eye with a three hundred Weatherby?"

"Beats starving to death, verdad? Jeez, I'm just speeding evolution along. Natural selection, survival of the fittest, in a way, I'm a visionary, ahead of my time."

I remembered what Charlie had said about Chrissy's case. "So what do you want, Bobby-probation, community service?"

"Hell, no! I'm a goddamn hero. They should give me a medal."