Flesh and bones

5

I aimed my ancient but amiable chariot south on Useless 1, passing endless fast-food emporiums, gas stations, and strip shopping centers in Kendall and Perrine. The old engine was humming, all 400 cubic inches of the Olds 442 convertible, vintage 1968. Canary-yellow with a black canvas top, a four-speed stick, a four-barrel carburetor, and twin exhausts. Four-four-two, get it?

I picked up the turnpike extension and passed through mango groves and tree farms near Homestead, then got off and found the old highway again, entering Monroe County where bait and shell shops joined the burger joints as roadside attractions. I cruised through Key Largo, which now has all the charm of Altoona but ten times the traffic.

At a little past six P.M., I turned into the sandy driveway on the gulf side of Islamorada and parked in the shade of a coconut palm. The TV blared through the open windows, Granny Lassiter still believing that air conditioning caused arthritis. Doc Charlie Riggs sat in a rocker on the porch of the old cracker house with the slanted tin roof. He was snoozing, a book folded across his chest. Medico-Legal Investigation of Death. Sleep well, Charlie. You already know everything about the subject.

I opened the screen door and walked inside. Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson were yelling at each other in the Florida room.

"You want answers?" Nicholson shouted with the impatience of a Marine colonel not used to being cross-examined.

"I want the truth!" Cruise demanded, all decked out in his Navy JAG uniform.

"You can't handle the truth!" Nicholson fired back from the witness stand.

"Hello, Kip," I said to the towheaded twelve-year-old boy sprawled on the floor watching the tube.

" 'Lo, Uncle Jake," the kid mumbled, without looking away from the screen.

I wandered into the kitchen just as Jack Nicholson was launching into a diatribe about a world with walls and the men who guard them. Granny Lassiter hovered over the stove, slicing cabbage palm-called swamp cabbage hereabouts-into a frying pan filled with sizzling bacon. Supposedly, the native Calusas taught Ponce de Leon's Spaniards all about this delicacy. I'll have to ask Granny. She was probably there.

"Well, look what the cat drug in," she greeted me, as always.

"Hello, Granny," I said, and just to embarrass her, I gave her a peck on the cheek.

"Don't be making a fuss," she said, waving me off with a spatula.

Granny wore khaki shorts, climbing boots, and a T-shirt with the slogan I STILL MISS MY EX, BUT MY AIM IS IMPROVING. Her hair was jet-black, except for a white stripe down the middle, but the last guy who called her "Skunky" got brained with a tarpon gaff.

"You hungry, Jake?" she asked. She checked on a pot, boiling with hopping John, black-eyed peas, and rice. In the sink, a bucket held several pounds of fresh frog legs soaking in beer.

"Had a late lunch. Chinese. But I can always eat."

"Chinese," she sniffed. "All that mono-sodium polluta-mate will shrivel your testicles." She gestured toward the bucket of marinating frog legs. "Give me a hand here."

I grew up in this house, hanging on to Granny's apron strings, so I didn't need instructions or a second invitation. I just dipped a pair of legs into a bowl of milk and eggs, sloshed them through a dish of flour, then dropped them onto a hot griddle.

"Seen your pit-cher in the paper," she said, pointing toward the refrigerator. Indeed, the clipping was held there by a magnet shaped like a stone crab. Some wit had added a mustache and hat so that I looked like a villain in a silent movie, the heroine unconscious in my arms.

"I see Kip's been practicing his artistry again."

"Don't stifle the boy, Jake." She looked into the sizzling pan. "And not so much flour! Those hoppers lose their taste with all that breading."

I hadn't even known I had a nephew, or a half sister, until Kip was arrested for spray-painting graffiti on a movie theater that had changed the advertised showing of Casablanca to Revenge of the Nerds III. I got him probation and became his semilegal guardian, though Granny helped out considerably.

On cue, Kip's bare feet padded onto the linoleum floor of the kitchen. "All righty then!" he proclaimed with a goofy Jim Carrey grin.

"Kip, did anybody ever tell you that you watch too many movies?"

"Yep. And Uncle Jake, did anyone tell you that you look guilty?"

"What?"

"In the paper. Doesn't he, Granny?"

"Guilty as sin," she agreed.

"Neat, Granny," Kip said, laughing. "That was a movie. Rebecca De Mornay's a lawyer who defends Don Johnson on charges he killed his wife. 'Course she falls for him."

"Ain't that a conflict of interest?" Granny asked, looking at me. "Litigating by day, fornicating by night."

"Sure is," I allowed.

"You'd never do that, would you, Jake?"

"Am I under oath?" I asked.

"The same thing happened to Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges in Jagged Edge," Kip said. "He's a rich guy accused of killing his wife. She defends him, and they get it on."

"Kippers," Granny warned, "watch your mouth!"

"Does Hollywood always copy itself like that?" Kip asked.

"Like a virus," I said.

I took a long look at Kip, still in wonder that the same blood flowed through our veins. Razor-thin, blond hair, pale complexion with a light blue vein visible on his temple, he was almost fragile. Nothing like his thick-necked and thick-headed uncle.

Kip opened the refrigerator door and grabbed a container of Granny's smoked mackerel. He dipped a finger in and licked it off. Closing the door, he gestured at the photo. "Look at yourself, Uncle Jake. Just like North by Northwest when a guy gets knifed at the UN, and a photographer shoots a picture of Cary Grant holding the dying man."

"Jake doesn't look like Cary Grant," Granny chimed in. "More like Harrison Ford if somebody had broken his nose."

"Hey, you two! I didn't kill anybody. Chrissy Bernhardt did."

Granny took over at the stove, yanking a frog leg from my hands. "So how can you represent her if you know she's guilty?"

" 'Cause she's a babe," Kip volunteered. "Just like Madonna in Body of Evidence. Willem Dafoe's defending her on charges she killed her husband by"-he lowered his voice-"screwing him to death."

"Kippers!" Granny shouted.

"Hey, Kip, why don't you do your homework?"

"Don't have any."

I looked at him skeptically. "Is that the truth?"

He curled a lip at me and raised his voice into a twelve-year-old's snarl. "You don't want the truth!"

"What?"

"Because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall!"

"Kip, I'm going to toss the VCR in the gulf and put my foot through the TV screen."

"It's true, Uncle Jake. School ended yesterday."

"Oh."

Granny was rooting around in her walk-in pantry, where she puts up pickles and preserves. In a moment, she came out carrying three mason jars of her moonshine, or "rye likker," as she called it. "So why represent this no-count party girl what killed her father?"

"What makes you think she's a party girl?" I was already thinking about jury selection and the impression my client makes.

"I seen her pit-cher. I can tell."

I made a mental note to have Chrissy the Model dress like Marian the Librarian when we picked a jury. "Just because she admittedly shot her father doesn't mean she's guilty," I told my assembled kinfolk.

Granny poured the bacon-fried swamp cabbage from a pan into a serving platter and shoved it at me. "Just like an obfuscating, prevaricating, fast-talking shyster. Just like the so-called Dream Team that made me want to scream, lying through their teeth. 'It's not O. J.'s blood, but if it is, the cops planted it.' Now why would they do that? Seems to me the cops gave him all the breaks every time he slammed the bejesus out of his wife. It's not his glove, it's not his shoe, it's not his hair, it's not his cap, it's not his blood. I suppose the disguise in the Bronco wasn't his neither. So why the hell was he running away? Explain that one to me."

"Granny, don't ask me. I'm just-"

"A lawyer! 'Course you're not as good as Johnnie Cochran, who's slick as owl shit, so I don't expect you to get that party girl off."

"Johnnie has his style, I have mine."

It's true. My style is straight ahead, both hands wrapped around the ball. No ninety-yard touchdowns, but not many fumbles either.

"Didn't you tackle that fellow when you were a so-called athlete?" Granny asked.

"I missed a lot of tackles, including one in Buffalo, where I ended up with a snowdrift in my face mask and he got a touchdown."

"Well, it just seems to me that you lawyer fellows are getting too damn good at making excuses," Granny went on, haranguing me as always. "You got your so-called battered wives slicing off their husbands' John Henrys. You got those rich boys in Beverly Hills shotgunning their parents. The Abuse Excuse, I seen it on Oprah. You attack the victim and then haul out some phony-baloney eggheads to mix up the jury with syndromes and traumas and irresistible impulses. They got a reason for everything 'til it seems nobody takes responsibility for their own actions."

"Remind me not to seat you on one of my juries," I said.

"I wouldn't do it unless I could get conjugal visits from Charlie," Granny said, winking.

"What's conjugal?" Kip asked.

"Never you mind," my licentious granny told him. She put a pitcher of limeade on the table, then turned to me. "Would somebody please tell that old goat that supper's on?"

Just then Charlie Riggs appeared in the doorway, rubbing his eyes. "Did I hear the word 'supper'?" he asked.

Dr. Lawrence Schein let a stream of water play against the leathery green leaves of a wild coffee shrub and said, "Xeriscape landscaping. Environment-friendly and drought-resistant."

After just a few moments, Schein turned the hose on a wild tamarind tree, its purple puffball flowers in full bloom. "You don't see any palm trees, hibiscus hedges, or blooming impatiens in my yard, do you?"

Figuring it was a leading question, I could have objected, but instead I just listened.

"They just swallow up the water. You know the town of Manalapan?"

"Sure, up in Palm Beach County. Big houses, big yards, a Ritz-Carlton hotel."

"Until they put a stop to it, that little town was using six hundred twenty-seven gallons of water a day per resident, most of it watering lawns and flowers. Can you imagine it?"

We were in the yard of Dr. Schein's ranch house in the Redlands section of southern Dade County. I had spent the night at Granny's, eating her food, drinking her moonshine, and losing to Kip in gin rummy. At one point, in the cinematic equivalent of a mixed metaphor, he told me, "You play a mean game of gin, fat man."

Now, on a steamy June morning, I was trying to determine just how useful Dr. Schein would be to the defense of Chrissy Bernhardt. He was a thin man in his late fifties with a shaved head and a small goatee. I had somehow pictured him in a herringbone sports coat with leather elbow patches, but today he wore bib overalls and L. L. Bean rubber boots as he watered his plants.

"You know what's happening to the Biscayne Aquifer, don't you?" Dr. Schein asked.

"Water level goes down a little every year."

"And the salt level comes up! We're headed for a disaster unless we change our ways."

He moved a few steps to the house and turned off the spigot, giving an extra tug to stop the dripping. Then he picked up pruning shears and clipped some dead leaves from a bright red bougainvillea vine.

"You knew the Bernhardts, Chrissy's parents," I said, trying to move the discussion from landscaping to the law.

"I did, and I've known Chrissy since she was a child."

"Tell me about Chrissy and her father."

"She didn't tell you?"

"Not yet."

"But surely you've surmised…"

"Yeah, but I need to hear it. From you and from her."

"May I be blunt?"

"I prefer it."

"Harry Bernhardt raped Chrissy when she was eleven. He committed incest, a crime of unspeakable ugliness." The doctor seemed pained. He didn't look at me, but snipped a branch of the bougainvillea with such vigor, he might have thought he was castrating old Harry. "He continued coming to her bed-oh, damn the euphemisms-he continued fucking his little girl until she was fourteen and he found her in the barn with a stableboy. He called her a dirty slut, said her mother was frigid and she was a whore, something like that."

I tried to picture Chrissy as a child, burdened with the secret, living in fear and pain. I had to force myself to keep a professional distance. Clients need logic and clarity from their lawyers, not emotions and pity.

"During these years, you spent a lot of time in the Bernhardt home, didn't you?" I asked.

"Yes."

"But you never suspected her father of abusing her?"

"Unfortunately, no. Looking back, of course, you see things differently. Christina in her father's lap, something that seemed so innocent, takes on a different connotation. He doted on her, was jealous of others' attentions to her. At the time, I thought he was just being overly protective, but in retrospect, that wasn't Harry's way at all."

"What was his way?" I asked, thinking of Granny's complaint: Attack the victim.

"Harry Bernhardt was a hard man. Insensitive to Emily, Christina's mother, who was a lovely woman, as refined and sophisticated as Harry was crude. Still, who could have known, this hideous thing, incest.. " He let the ugly word hang there a moment, then said, "I have to confess that it caught me completely by surprise."

He picked up a rake and smoothed some mulch around the roots of a wild coffee plant. "Holds the moisture in, prevents evaporation," he explained.

"So Chrissy shot her father because she remembered what he had done to her?"

"Oh, that's an oversimplification. Christina suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder. I'm sure you're familiar with the term."

"Yeah. I saw it on Geraldo."

"Vietnam syndrome, we called it a generation ago. And that was just an offshoot of shell shock from World War I and combat fatigue from the Second World War. But psychiatry's come a long way. We know so much more now. You don't have to be a soldier to have sublimated the horror in your life."

Dr. Schein was talking to me, but he was examining the leathery green leaves of the coffee plant. I wondered what a shrink would say about his failure to make eye contact.

"When Christina came back from Europe and I first treated her," he said, "she had great difficulty controlling her emotions. Her history was an encyclopedia of clues. She overreacted to stress, misdirected her anger, and had problems with alcohol, drugs, even food. Classic symptoms right down the line."

"Classic?"

"For the survivor of incest. Migraines, nightmares, feelings of dread without reason. She had huge blocks from her childhood that were missing. She couldn't, or wouldn't, remember them, another indication that she was in denial. She simply locked out the memories."

"And you unlocked them?"

He cocked his head and showed a little smile. "Let's just say I handed her the key. She still had to turn it."

I gave him back his little smile just to show my appreciation at how gosh-darned clever he was. "You're confident the memories are real?"

"Unquestionably. The little girl in Christina, her inner child, was talking, and she had no reason to lie."

"Could she have been mistaken?"

"Not a chance. Christina had repressed her memories of childhood incest. I helped her recover those memories, which were always there, buried under layers of shame and denial. When they returned, they were clear and vivid and real."

"And they couldn't have been dreams or something she just imagined?"

"Counselor, you're looking the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. I'm handing you your defense."

"No, you're not. You're handing the prosecution its motive. Here's how Abe Socolow will see it. Once Chrissy turned the key you handed her, she hated her father for abusing her years ago. Harry Bernhardt posed no current threat to Chrissy, so the shooting couldn't be self-defense or justifiable homicide. It was pure revenge, and that's walking straight into a first-degree murder conviction."

"I see," the doctor said, somewhat subdued.

"Look, maybe you could help at a sentencing hearing, but that happens only after she's been convicted, and if it's murder one, the only two options are death and life without parole, no matter what you say."

Dr. Schein stopped fooling with the mulch and leaned on his rake. "Would it make a difference if Christina shot her father while suffering a blackout or a flashback to the abuse itself?"

"Did she?"

"Quite likely."

"You'd be willing to testify to that?"

"Of course."

I thought about it. If Chrissy had blacked out, she wouldn't have the requisite criminal intent to support a murder charge. Manslaughter, maybe, but not murder. With a plea, maybe ten years, out in six. Better than life without parole. Of course, I'd have to ask Chrissy about the blackout. Better yet, I'd get Jimmy Stewart to ask. "I'll need her complete file to get ready for the bond hearing," I said.

"Already copied it for you." He gestured toward a redwood picnic table just behind me.

I picked up a file six inches thick, then sat down to examine it. One folder contained handwritten notes of the therapy sessions; another seemed to be transcripts. "You taped the sessions?" I asked.

"Only the hypnosis. You'll find the transcripts to be quite complete."

"Good. But I'd like to have the tapes, too."

His arched eyebrows shot me a Why?

"If they're helpful, we play them for the jury," I said.

"If they're not, wouldn't it be better if you didn't have them?"

It took me a second to figure that out. Schein was a slippery shrink. First, he was handing me my defense. Now, he was playing hide the evidence. What was on those tapes anyway? "You're worried about me having to turn over the tapes to the prosecution?"

He began raking the mulch again, though as far as I could see, it was evenly spread. "Once I testify, your client will have waived the physician-patient privilege, will she not?"

"Yeah."

"And wasn't the psychiatrist's tape recording of the Menendez brothers admissible?" he asked.

"Sure was."

"So…"

"So, you can't destroy them, no matter what's on them. That'd be obstruction of justice."

"I see," he said.

"But I do appreciate the gesture."

I looked through the folder, checking the dates along the left margin of the therapy notes. "You were seeing her three days a week."

"At one point, five days a week."

I thumbed through several pages in a file labeled simply MEDICATION. "I had no idea she was taking so many drugs. Xanax and Ativan…"

"For anxiety related to depression."

"Mellaril…"

"To control flashbacks." He carried a potted fern to the picnic table and sat down across from me.

"Any idea whether she was taking them the day of the shooting?"

He shrugged. Another question for Chrissy.

"Prozac and Desyrel…"

"For depression." With a small clipper, he cut away some brown stems of the fern. For some reason, the gesture reminded me of a woman plucking her eyebrows.

"Restoril, Darvocet, and lithium."

"To help her sleep, for headaches, and mood swings."

"Better living through chemistry," I said.

"The proper use of drugs is an essential part of therapy."

"Uh-huh. What about now?"

"I beg your pardon."

"Does she need drugs, therapy, anything?"

"Oh, no. Christina has confronted her demons and exorcised them."

"By remembering… or by killing?"

Dr. Schein put down his clippers, briefly scanned his environmentally friendly, xeriscaped yard, then looked me in the eye for the first time. His smile was just this side of smug. "In one sense, the killing of Harry Bernhardt was quite unfortunate."

"Especially for Harry Bernhardt," I agreed.

"But in another sense, what Christina did was finally take control of her own life, and that was therapeutic. Quite therapeutic indeed."