Flesh and bones

6

I approached the intersection of Calle Ocho and Twelfth Avenue in Little Havana, intending to turn left and head north. But the city padres had changed the street signs again and, momentarily confused, I missed the turn to the bridge on my way to the sadly misnamed Justice Building.

Oh, we seek justice in the building, just as we seek holiness in a house of worship. Both goals are difficult to achieve and seldom witnessed by mortals. Which is not to say that the building doesn't dispense "law" by the bucketful. Law is the product that spews out of the building's courtrooms, hundreds of times each day. Guilt, innocence, suspended sentences, pretrial intervention, nolle prosequi, time served, mistrials, adjudication withheld. The product comes in a dozen brands. But justice is an ideal, a vague concept we strive for but can barely define, much less master.

Justice requires lawyers who are prepared, witnesses who tell the truth, judges who know the law, and jurors who stay awake. Justice is the North Star, the burning bush, the Holy Virgin. It cannot be bought, sold, or mass-produced. It is intangible, ineffable, and invisible, but if you are to spend your life in its pursuit, it is best to believe it exists, and that you can attain it.

So there I was, going farther east on Calle Ocho, or Eighth Street, or Olga Guillot Way, according to the new sign that threw me. I don't know why the bolero singer got the honor, unless it was because a few blocks away, Celia Cruz, the salsa singer, has the same street named for her, and a few blocks from that, so do Carlos Arboleya, Felipe Vails, and Loring Evans. If that's not baffling enough, a stretch of Twelfth Avenue, near here, is called Ronald Reagan Avenue.

Our city and county commissioners, ever desirous of licking the boots of their constituents, once named a street Leomar Parkway after a major campaign contributor who turned out to be a major drug dealer. There are streets named for Almirante Miguel Grau, a Peruvian admiral in the 1800s, and Francisco de Paula Santander, a Colombian general. There's even one named for Jose Canseco, the baseball slugger, who has been fined repeatedly for driving his sports cars at more than one hundred miles an hour. Maybe a lane at the Daytona Speedway would be more appropriate.

Eventually, I doubled back and found General Maximo Gomez Boulevard-no, I don't know who the hell he was-and made my way north to the Justice Building, which houses criminals and other miscreants such as judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers.

It was just before nine A.M. when I slipped into a parking place next to the jail. Overhead, prisoners were being taken across an enclosed walkway directly into holding cells on the fourth floor. Chrissy would already be inside, having arrived by bus from the Women's Detention Center a few blocks away.

I hurried down a narrow alley toward the back entrance of the building, nearly running into Curly Hendry, who was leaning on his rolling trash bin. Curly, who was bald, had spent several stretches in the county jail, plus a couple of years upstate. I represented him once, when cops found an ATM machine all trussed up in a towing chain, the other end of which was attached to a winch on his heavy-duty Dodge pickup. These days, he pushed a broom for the county.

" Que pasa, Curly?"

"Don't talk no Espan-oley to me, Jake. I'm just a cracker who's got to clean up after them crazy island fuckers." He pointed into the trash bin and held his nose. "So far this morning, three dead chickens and a goat's head. Now what's this?"

He bent down and looked at a cake with frosted icing.

"To sweeten a judge's disposition," I told him.

"Damn voodoo."

"More like Santeria."

"Makes me want to move to Georgia. Yesterday, had some damn broken eggs out here. The sun got to 'em before I did, could smell 'em all the way to Hialeah."

"They're to make the case collapse."

He scooped up the cake and tossed it into the trash bin. "Last week, a dead lizard with its mouth tied shut."

"That's-"

"I know. To shut up a snitch."

"Right."

"So, Jake, what brings you out here with all these witch doctors and Third World types?"

"Bond hearing. Say, Curly, you find anything that'll get me bond in a murder one?"

"To hell with cakes and lizards, Jake. Just pray for a judge whose brother-in-law is a bondsman who needs the work. If not, slip some Ben Franklins in an envelope and call it a campaign contribution."

"Curly, you know I don't play the game that way."

He went back to his broom. "No damn wonder I did twenty-seven months at Avon Park."

"If a bad childhood were an excuse for murder, our prisons would be empty," Abe Socolow said gravely. "I'm quite sure every inmate on death row had a perfectly atrocious childhood. Far worse than that of Ms. Christina Bernhardt in her oceanfront mansion, I daresay."

He daresay?

Abe Socolow had a tendency toward pomposity, but for a prosecutor, he was almost human. A little rigid, a little self-righteous, but honest and fair. He was tall and lean and sallow and preferred undertaker-black suits with white shirts and blood-red ties. His cuff links were miniature silver handcuffs.

At the moment, Honest Abe was ridiculing my assertion that the state had overcharged my client, going for murder instead of manslaughter.

"Recovered memories," Socolow sniffed. "Posttraumatic stress disorder. Judge, these silver-tongued defense lawyers come up with more syndromes than a dog's got fleas."

Damn, it sounded like Abe had been talking to my granny. Either that or he was just trying to be folksy, something that didn't come naturally. Judge Myron Stanger peered down from the bench, his eyes hidden behind tinted glasses so we couldn't tell when he dozed off. He had a bulbous nose lined with tiny blue veins and a white fringe of hair on his egg-shaped head. His Honor was fond of the Bolivar brand of Cuban cigars, and at this moment was chewing on a cold Corona Gigantes, in violation of both courtroom protocol and the federal Embargo Act. The judge was flanked by the American flag and the Florida flag. A set of Florida Statutes sat, still in shrink wrap, on his desk. Only a few spectators were on the long wooden benches that resembled church pews. I was sitting at the defense table on a heavy mahogany chair whose brown leather seat had cracked with age and taken on the shininess of cheap trousers.

Abe rambled on, "Battered-spouse syndrome supposedly lets a woman kill her husband, though she's in no immediate danger. A white man guns down two black teenagers and says he's been traumatized by urban survival syndrome and ought to be excused. A woman who shot her husband on Super Bowl Sunday says she suffers from football widow syndrome. A fellow charged with tax evasion has failure-to-file syndrome. Abused-child syndrome, black rage, mob psychosis-where's it going to end? I ask Your Honor, where will it all end?"

Judge Stanger seemed startled, perhaps wondering if Socolow really wanted an answer. Then he said, "Let's not argue the case today, gentlemen. This is merely a bond hearing, and under Arthur v. State, the defense has the burden of showing that the proof is not great and that a presumption of guilt is not evident. As I understand the proffered testimony of Dr. Schein and Mr. Lassiter's argument, there's no factual dispute. The defendant shot her father."

The judge nodded toward the defense table, where Chrissy, in a jailhouse smock, sat next to me. We'd get her dressed up prim and proper by the time a jury was called. She seemed dazed, out of place, in the controlled chaos of the courtroom. To those of us who work there, it's a second home. Same for my customers, those recidivists who know as much law as I do. But to someone from east of the highway, as we call those who grew up near the ocean, it's a frightening new world.

The judge waved his giant cigar in my direction and said, "While conceding that the shooting occurred, Mr. Lassiter argues that the defendant may not have had the requisite criminal intent to be charged with premeditated murder. Is that about it?"

"All the elements of the crime having been established, the grand jury indicted her for first-degree murder," Socolow said, raising his hands, as if it were out of his control.

"The grand jury would parade naked down Biscayne Boulevard if Abe asked them to," I piped up.

"Your Honor," Socolow said, shooting me a murderous glance, "even assuming all this psychiatric mumbo-jumbo is true, it's not a defense. Just because criminal behavior is caused doesn't mean it's excused."

I got to my feet and approached the lectern for the second time that morning. "May it please the court," I said, in the lawyer's traditional line of fealty, "Mr. Socolow ignores the fact that we have raised a substantial issue as to one of the elements of the crime. If the state cannot prove intent, it cannot secure a conviction. The court must instruct the jury that, to be found guilty of murder one, my client must have killed the decedent with premeditation, which the law defines in these terms…" I picked up the manual of jury instructions that Judge Stanger would eventually read to the jurors. " 'Killing with premeditation is killing after consciously deciding to do so. The decision must be present in the mind at the time of the killing, and the intent to kill must be formed before the killing.' "

I put down the manual and did a little sidestep toward the defense table, forcing the judge's gaze toward the lovely defendant. She looked as helpless and innocent as an angel without wings. "If Christina Bernhardt was suffering from flashbacks or blackouts which coincided with the shooting, she made no conscious decision to shoot the gun and could not be guilty of murder one. If she's been overcharged, bond should be granted."

"Blackouts," the judge mused. "Flashbacks. Is that your case, Jake?"

Using my given name. A little familiarity, asking me to cut the bullshit and level with the court. What's the trial going to be all about? I had already summarized Dr. Schein's opinion, right down to Sigmund Freud's view of repression as a defense mechanism used to suppress psychic trauma.

"That is the proffer of Dr. Schein's testimony," I said, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Socolow shoot me a look. He doesn't miss much, and he didn't miss this. I hadn't answered the question.

Just before the bailiff called our case, I had huddled with Chrissy in the jury room, our courthouse being woefully insufficient in meeting space. "I look terrible," she said, fiddling with her hair, which was held back in a ponytail with a simple rubber band.

"You look beautiful," I told her, violating another of my rules, the one about maintaining a professional distance from the clients. I don't go fishing with the guy customers and I don't go to bed with the gals.

"Am I going to testify?" she asked.

"Not today. But before we go in there, I need to tell you something. Dr. Schein is prepared to testify that you may have suffered a blackout before the shooting, that you were in a trancelike state when you shot your father."

She looked at me with those bright green eyes. "You're asking me a question, aren't you? Like, is that the way it happened?"

I held my breath and nodded.

"Do you want the truth?" she asked.

"Yes," I said.

No, I thought. I can't handle the truth.

"I didn't black out. I wasn't in a trance. I saw Daddy sitting there, so pleased with himself. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to hear his screams. I wanted him to hurt as much as he had hurt me. But did I want to kill him? I don't know. I really don't."

"Doesn't matter. If you understood that your actions created a strong likelihood of death, you're guilty of premeditated murder."

Her eyes opened wider, seemed to ask a pleading question: What are we going to do? I didn't know. I came into the courtroom drowning in my dilemma, the ethical conflict of a lawyer who owes the highest duty of loyalty to his client and a somewhat more vague duty to the legal system.

Now, I was doing a high-wire act, portraying our defense in terms of "if." If there had been a blackout, blah, blah, blah. At trial, it becomes more difficult. I wouldn't be able to put Dr. Schein on the stand to testify to something Chrissy couldn't corroborate. And now that she told me she had known very well what she was doing, I couldn't let her take the stand to say she had blacked out, even if she wanted to. I've never lied to the court or let a client do it. I like to win, but I like to win fair and square. I know it's old-fashioned, but that's the way I am. I like the low-scoring, smash-mouth, frozen-field Big Ten game, not the lah-de-dah, point-a-minute passing of touch football in the SEC. I hate guys who jitterbug in the end zone after scoring a touchdown. Celebration of self, dirty dancing, and taunting opponents have no place in the game I love.

When I was at Penn State, Joe Paterno ordered us to hand the ball to the official should we ever be so fortunate as to cross the goal line while carrying the leather spheroid. "Act as if you've been there before," he said. I hadn't, but in a game against Pitt, I blocked a punt in the end zone, not with my hands, but with my head. The ball stuck in my face mask and gave me a concussion. I thought I should have had a touchdown, but the officials ruled it a safety because I never had possession of the ball… my helmet did. It took two equipment managers to get the ball out of the mask, and I saw double for a week. But I had scored. Two points for my career.

"So, to paraphrase your argument," Judge Stanger said, spitting out a few fibers of Cuban tobacco, "you're seeking bond as if this were a second-degree or manslaughter case."

"That's what they should have charged," I responded, "but let there be no mistake, Your Honor. Our plea is not guilty. We'll be seeking an instruction under 782.03 on excusable homicide."

"That's outrageous!" Socolow thundered. "This wasn't an accident. That's the most absurd argument I've ever heard in a courtroom."

"You've lived a sheltered life," I whispered to Abe, then turned back toward the judge. "Accident is not the only statutory excuse for homicide, Your Honor." Again, I picked up the book. Even when I've memorized the statute, it somehow seems more authentic if I read it to the court. "A killing is excusable and therefore lawful when done by 'accident or misfortune in the heat of passion, upon any sudden and sufficient provocation.' "

"Where's the heat of passion?" Socolow demanded, his face reddening. "Where's the provocation? Harry Bernhardt was sitting at the bar sipping mojitos, for crying out loud."

"The provocation could very well have been the flashback," I said, choosing my words carefully. "A flashback of the decedent raping my client could have been just as real as if it were happening now."

Could have been. Maintaining my integrity by hedging.

"What's the precedent for this?" Socolow demanded.

"It's a simple application of the law," I said. "A woman is lawfully justified in using deadly force to resist a rape. Therefore, if Christina Bernhardt thought she was being raped at that moment, then-"

"Nonsense!" Socolow thundered. "That's not the intent of the statute." I listened a few minutes as Socolow railed against the newfangled theories under which the wily Jake Lassiter was trying to wrangle bond.

Finally, the judge cut him off with a wave of his cigar, an orchestra conductor with his baton. "Okay, that's enough from both of you. Save it for trial." He made a note on the jacket of the court file. "This court has never before granted bond in a first-degree murder case. However…"

I loved that however.

"… I find that the defendant has no prior criminal record or history of violence, and Mr. Lassiter raises a substantial defense, albeit a novel one. Motion for bond granted. Cash or surety in the amount of one million dollars."

A million bucks? Ouch! That's like no bond at all.

"Defendant is to surrender her passport and not leave the confines of Dade and Broward counties without notice to the prosecution and leave of the court."

Judge Stanger banged his gavel, stood up, and left by the rear door to his chambers. His cigar was lit before the door closed behind him.

Socolow gave me a wry smile and a raised eyebrow. "Flashbacks and blackouts, Jake? I can hardly wait."

Chrissy Bernhardt hugged me and gave me a peck on the cheek. "Am I getting out of jail?"

"Only if you have a guardian angel. A very rich guardian angel."

From the gallery, a man I didn't know approached the defense table. He was about forty, stocky, with black hair slicked straight back, a brown western-style suit with shoulder piping, a gold ring in one ear. And a checkbook in his hand.

I knew who he was as soon as he opened his mouth. The same gravelly rumble of a voice I'd heard that deadly night. And now that I studied him, Guy Bernhardt looked a lot like his father. Thin-lipped, thick-necked, small piggy eyes. Seeing Chrissy's half brother made me realize how lucky she was to carry her mother's genes or, as Granny would say, favor her mama.

Guy gave Chrissy a hug and a look of either genuine concern or rehearsed sincerity, I couldn't tell which. "I don't know why you did it, Sis," he said, "and I'm heartbroken to lose Pop. But I'll do whatever I can to help."

"Thank you, Guy," Chrissy said. "I'm sorry. I know you loved him. I'm sorry for you, but not for him."

Guy nodded as if he understood. "Anything you need, just ask. If I'm not in the office, have them track me down. All hell's broken loose with Pop gone; I'm trying to keep things together while we sort through all the companies. He let me run the day-to-day operations, but he kept a lot of the business in his head."

Chrissy hugged him and thanked him again. Then Guy Bernhardt took me by the arm and steered me away from the defense table. "The bond's no problem," he said in a whisper. "I'll pay the premium, put up some property as collateral if that's okay."

"It's fine. It's better than fine. There aren't too many defendants who can put up a million-dollar bond."

He signed his name to a blank check and handed it to me. "Anything I can do to help your case, you just ask."

"Sometime soon, I'm going to want to sit down with you, ask what you know about Chrissy and your father."

"It's hard for me to believe he molested her, if that's what you mean. I knew Pop better than anyone in the world, and… it's just not like him."

"I've been taking a cram course on the subject, and that's what everyone always says."

"Who's everyone?"

"Family members always say 'Not him' when a loved one is charged with incest. It's gotten to be a real cliche, like the neighbors saying the serial killer next door was real quiet and liked to keep to himself."

His look hardened. "Look, Lassiter, I'm on your side. I don't want Chrissy to go to prison. Sis is a delicate thing, has been since she was a little girl. Her mother spoiled her, so did Pop. I've been talking to Larry Schein, and my advice is, plead insanity, work out some deal for confinement and treatment. I'll pay the bills, the best damn place where they handle this sort of thing. I've already looked into it. There's a private hospital just outside Seattle that's supposed to be first rate. Expensive as hell, but so what?"

A ringing came from inside his coat pocket, and he pulled out a cellular phone, punched a button, and looked at me apologetically. After a couple of short "yeahs," he covered the phone with a meaty hand and said to me, "I gotta take this. Whenever you want, call me to set up a meeting. I mean it. Anything you need, just ask."

He headed back down the row of pews toward the door, speaking in hushed tones into the phone, and in a moment he was gone.

A female bailiff took Chrissy back into a holding cell where she'd wait until I could get the bond processed. So I stood there alone in the empty courtroom.

Thinking.

Twice he had said it: "Anything you need, just ask."

Here's what I wanted to ask: Why this talk about insanity? Dr. Schein hadn't said anything about it, at least not to me. Insanity means confinement and treatment. Maybe you get out, and maybe you're John Hinckley.

And Seattle? There are a lot of institutions that are first rate, to use Guy's term. So why choose the one that's farthest from home?