Lassiter

5 A Man Named “Charlie”

My office is on the second floor of a building that’s too old, too boxy, and too gray to be called art deco. My “suite,” as the advertisement on craigslist called it, consists of a waiting room I share with a marriage counselor, a narrow book-lined corridor that ends at my assistant’s cubicle, and my twelve-by-twelve slice of heaven with a window overlooking a municipal parking garage.

It was not always this way. I started in the Public Defender’s Office, where I learned how to try homicide cases without pissing my pants. I moved into private practice with a deep-carpet firm of paper pushers who settled all their civil cases and pled out all their criminal clients. I was an oddity there, a guy who’d hit more blocking sleds than law books. They discarded me after one-too-many contempt citations. So now I fly solo and follow my own rules. It’s the only way I can live.

The building is owned by Jorge Martinez, who runs Havana Banana, a Cuban restaurant on the first floor. A few years ago, I saved Jorge’s huevos con bacon by keeping the Health Department from shutting the joint down. That’s more than I could do for his earlier restaurant, Escargot-to-Go, which landed in bankruptcy. Turned out there wasn’t much of a market for fast-food snails in paper cups. These days I defend food poisoning lawsuits involving cockroaches in the caldo gallego.

I do a few divorces, too. Mostly, they’re referrals from the marriage counselor next door. His failures become my paychecks. I kick back one-third of the fee to him, which is dicey under the ethical rules, if you pay attention to that sort of thing.

I found Cindy, my assistant, in her cubicle, grooming her cuticles. She’s Gothic pale with purple hair exploding in different directions like the twigs of an osprey nest. Today she wore a black sleeveless leather vest with dangling silver chains. Two chrome studs poked out of the flesh above her left eyebrow, and werewolf tattoos covered her toned upper arms.

“Hold my calls, Cindy,” I ordered, moving past her.

“What calls?”

“And clear my calendar.”

She waved a hand like a genie. “Poof! Done.”

Sonia Majeski answered on the first ring. I told her who it was and she hollered into the phone, “No way! Lord, how long’s it been?”

We did the pleasantries. She was aboard ship in St. Thomas. The passengers were sightseeing and buying duty-free liquor. American tourists will happily skip historic sites and forgo exotic meals for a chance to save a few bucks on their booze.

“I need to ask you about a girl from the old days,” I said.

“I don’t remember her.”

“Whoa. I haven’t given you a name.”

“I’ve spent a long time forgetting the ‘old days.’ Not gonna start remembering now.”

“This is important. I think the two of you might have worked together in a strip club.”

“Not going there, Jake.”

“Help me out, Sonia. This girl was underage.”

“Lots were back then. So what?”

“Her name was Krista. Krista Larkin.”

The pause on the line told me I had hit paydirt.

“Sonia?”

“Did they find her body?” she asked, softly.

I told Sonia about my meeting with Amy. Told her that Krista was missing but no body had been found, and I asked her to tell me everything she remembered.

Sonia said she’d been living in an apartment in Miami Springs, near the airport. The place was filled with stewardesses, as they were still called. Eastern Air Lines had recently gone under, and the building was only half full. Sonia was stripping in a club owned by Russian gangsters.

“One day, I get a new neighbor,” she said. “Krista. She looked like a high school girl. Hell, she was a high school girl. But when she got dolled up, Jesus, Jake, bar the door.”

“Did you know a guy named Charlie she hung around with?”

“That sleazebag. Charlie’s the one who got her into porn.”

I remembered what Krista told me that night at Bozo’s. “There’s this guy.… An old guy. Like almost forty. He pays my rent and wants me to do these gross movies.…”

And I was the dumb bastard who delivered her to the dirtbag.

“Any chance you remember his last name?” I asked Sonia.

“You don’t want to be messing with this guy.”

“So you know. Tell me.”

“He’s connected, Jake.”

“Organized crime?”

“Political connections that are even scarier.”

“Just tell me, Sonia. What’s his name?”

“Ziegler. Charlie Ziegler.”

It hit me then. “Charles Ziegler” was a bold-face name on the society page. There was a Ziegler wing of the hospital in South Miami. A Ziegler charity golf tournament in Coral Gables. But why fear that guy? He seemed more like Daddy Warbucks than John Gotti.

“You talking about the Ziegler who gives all that money away?” I asked.

“That’s him. Went legit and made a bundle in cable TV. Back in the day, he was the prince of porn and Krista’s sugar daddy. Rented a mansion on Sunset Island he called the ‘Fuck Palace.’ ”

Change, I thought, was in the air. Rusty. Sonia. Even the prince of porn had become respectable. Which made me think again about the lunkhead in that photo at Bozo’s. Just how much had I changed?

“His videos were called ‘Charlie’s Girlz,’ ” Sonia continued. “With a ‘z,’ as in ‘Ziegler.’ ”

That was all I needed. I had a name to give Amy Larkin, crack insurance investigator from Podunk, Ohio. Now I could get the hell out. But something kept me on the phone with Sonia, asking questions. Maybe it was just curiosity. Or maybe, subconsciously, I was trying to make amends for having been such a shit all those years ago.

“Was Krista involved with anyone else?” I asked.

“Depends what you mean by ‘involved.’ Ziegler passed her around to his friends.”

“Know any of their names?”

“Not really. Rich, older guys. Sick fucks, from what she told me. Into drugs and kinky sex.”

The list of possible suspects just multiplied, I thought. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

“I tried to warn her, Jake. The men, the drugs, the violence. But she was a kid and you couldn’t tell her anything. She started shooting four or five videos a week. Ziegler just cranked them out, using up girls and finding new ones.”

“She get involved with any of the actors or crew?”

“Not that I know of. But she was doing her drug dealer off and on. A guy who called himself ‘Snake.’ Rode a Harley. Smelled like motor oil, but handsome as sin in that bad-boy way.”

“A biker named ‘Snake’?” I couldn’t hide my rolling eyes from my voice.

“It’s true. Tattoos, leather, the big ass Harley. He wanted Krista to go to California with him.”

“You sure she didn’t go?”

“Doubt she would have left Ziegler. He was paying the bills, giving her a sense of security.”

“And the last time you saw her …?”

“The parking lot of our apartment building. Said she was going to Ziegler’s house for some wild party with the high mucky-mucks.”

Whoa. That was big. If Krista was last seen heading to Ziegler’s, he just stepped to the front of the line called “persons of interest.”

“Any idea who might have been at the party?”

“All I know is Krista said there were always cops and politicians. Even judges, if you can believe that.”

I could. Easily.

“Her car wasn’t in its space the next morning,” Sonia said, “but that wasn’t unusual. A couple days later, she still hadn’t shown up. All her clothes were still in the apartment. I didn’t know what to do, so I drove over to Ziegler’s office. They said they hadn’t seen Krista, and Ziegler was out of town.”

“Anyone file a missing persons report?”

“Me. But you know how it is. Stripper and porn actress. Not the cops’ highest priority.”

Over the line, I heard two quick whistle blasts and the exhalation of steam in the background.

“I found Krista’s home number in her things,” Sonia said, “and called her father. He flew down the next day.”

That solved one small mystery. “You gave him the photo from Bozo’s.”

“Yeah. And I told him the truth about what Krista was doing. You could see the light in him just die. Maybe I did the wrong thing, Jake.”

“The truth is always best.”

A policy I didn’t really believe and clearly didn’t adhere to.

“I could tell from her dad’s face,” Sonia said, “he wasn’t going to look for her. He just wrote her off.”

We were both silent a moment. I heard two more whistle blasts. Then I asked the same question I leave with every friendly witness. “Can you think of anything else that might be useful, Sonia?”

After a moment, she said, “There’s one thing, but I almost hate to say it.”

“What?”

“I knew a couple girls who worked in one of Ziegler’s clubs. They were always stoned, so you can’t believe half of what they said. But one of them told me something really scary.”

“Yeah?”

“That Ziegler was making snuff films in Mexico. Whenever one of the girls gave him a problem, he’d say, ‘How’d you like your next movie to be your last?’ Or ‘You’re worth more to me dead.’ Creepy stuff like that.”

“Did she see any of the films herself?”

“No, she was just repeating what she’d heard.”

“Hearsay on hearsay.”

“I know, Jake. But that day I went to Ziegler’s office, looking for Krista, they told me he was out of the country.”

“So?”

“They said he was in Mexico.”