Night vision

CHAPTER 18

The plaintiff leaned back, crossing his arms in front of his chest as if to ward off blows. He was a short, slender Oriental man in his fifties, and he fidgeted in a squeaky chair. He wore a short-sleeve white shirt and baggy trousers and kept shooting glances from the stenographer to me and back again.

H. T. Patterson crammed all of us into his miniature conference room-Chong Gong Wong, his client; Rosalina Bustamente, the stenographer; Symington Foote, publisher and noted critic of the legal system; and little old me, courageous battler for the rights of Fortune-500 companies. Patterson sat next to his client, trying to calm him with occasional smiles and soothing pats on the arm. The room had no windows, one table, and six chairs, and was overflowing with the detritus of the plaintiff's personal-injury practice-models of the spine and circulatory system, printed posters totaling damages for nearsighted jurors, blowups of various rear-end collisions at local intersections, and a tire that had suffered a blowout with ominous results.

Either the air-conditioning was broken or my crafty adversary was employing the oldest trick in the book for shortening his client's deposition. It didn't matter to me. I just took off my suit coat, rolled up my sleeves, and plunged ahead.

"In fact, Mr. Wong, shortly after the Journal' s review appeared, you changed the recipe for the duck a l'orange, did you not?"

Wong didn't say a word but his chair squealed.

"Ob-jec-tion!" H. T. Patterson sang out.

"On what ground?" I demanded.

"Remedial measures are inadmissible," Patterson proclaimed with a heavy dose of self-righteousness.

I corrected him. "This is not a case where a defendant has remedied a safety problem after an accident. A city would never fix a pothole after an accident if the remedial actions were admissible. But your client is the plaintiff, and the doctrine simply does not apply."

"Thank you for a most cogent lecture on the rules of evidence, Mr. Lassiter, but my objection stands, and I instruct my client not to answer your insulting and harassing question. If you disagree, I suggest you take it up with the judge after the deposition."

I disagreed, but I didn't have time to run to the courthouse. I also was getting nowhere with Chong Gong Wong, owner-chef of Chez Saigon, Miami's only French-Vietnamese restaurant.

"Can he get away with this?" Symington Foote whispered.

I leaned close to Foote's ear. "As long as we're in his office and deposing his client, he's the boss. We'll file a motion to compel after the depo."

Sweat dripping from his patrician nose, Foote sneered his disapproval and made a note in his pocket calendar. Tomorrow, I suspected, the Journal would condemn lawyers who prolong litigation and cause untold expense to our last bastion of freedom, billion-dollar media conglomerates.

"Now, Mr. Wong, what is your recipe for duck a l'orange?"

Again, Wong clammed up and the chair creaked. Patterson said, "At what point in time?"

A lawyer will never use one word when five will do.

"Before the newspaper published the review," I told him.

"Objection! Irrelevant."

"What about the current recipe, Mr. Wong?"

Before Wong had a chance not to answer, Patterson sang out, "Objection! Trade secret."

Patterson sat there smiling at me, resplendent in a three-piece white linen suit, unfazed by the heat and humidity. I wanted to strangle him with his Italian silk tie, and he knew it.

"Tell me, H.T., is there any question I can ask this transmitter of ptomaine, this bearer of botulism, that won't draw an objection?"

"What he say?" Chong Cong Wong demanded. The chair was silent.

Patterson slapped the conference table in mock horror. "Slander! Defamation! Obloquy piled upon libel! Is it not enough that your illiterate restaurant critic referred to the acclaimed Wong entree as 'duck a la slime'?"

"Fair comment," I retorted.

"Is it not enough that he called the rice soup 'cream of phlegm'?"

"Hyperbole, nothing more."

"That he denigrated the foie gras as 'toxic scum.'"

"A timely reference to environmental concerns."

"That the rabbit cassoulet tasted like 'road-kill muskrat.'"

"Intended humorously, no doubt."

Patterson bounded from his chair, put a hand on his client's shoulder, and thrust his chin toward the heavens. "Lies! Prevarications! I have never witnessed such calumny-"

"Save it for the jury, H.T. Look, we're wasting a lot of time. You've got a waiting room full of clients, and from the looks of them, most are lucky to be out on bond. Let's conclude discovery, ask for an early trial date, and finish this."

"— A string of malicious canards impugning my client's cuisine, damaging his reputation, assaulting his honor. The jackals of the Journal shall pay the ultimate price; their ledgers will flow with red ink in this, the Mother of all Lawsuits. And may I enlighten you as to how Shakespeare described the importance of a man's reputation in Richard II? "

I'd already heard it, something about the purest treasure mortal times afford. By now I figured Patterson was getting paid by the word or maybe the syllable. He would go on for a while, making the stenographer earn her keep. I checked my watch. Three-thirty. Barely time to beat rush hour on the drive to Hialeah.

"A man loses everything in his war-ravaged country…"

Odd, since Wong was a Viet Cong sympathizer.

"Then in our land of opportunity, he employs dozens of unfortunate souls from the Caribbean, South America, and the Orient…"

Not one green card in the bunch.

"Our city leaders dine at his famous establishment…"

Freebies for the commissioners, no kitchen inspections for Wong.

"Until that savage reporter unleashed his venom…"

Actually he was drunk and the copy editor asleep.

Max Blinderman looked me up and down and didn't like anything high or low. "She ain't here," he announced, leaning on the counter in the Compu-Mate office.

I gawked over his shoulder, which isn't hard to do when you're nearly a foot taller. True enough, Bobbie was nowhere to be seen. Max wore a black T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. I hadn't seen anything like it in years.

"Actually, I came to see you," I said, and waited for my nose to grow.

He looked at me skeptically. On his forearm, the tattooed snake seemed to hiss. Looking down, I noticed a bald spot expertly camouflaged by some vigorous back-to-front combing and a healthy dose of hairspray.

"I wanted to apologize for that story in the Journal," I continued, making it up as I went along. "Bobbie threatened a lawsuit because of what it would do to your business. I just wanted you to know that I had nothing-"

"Fergit it. Hey, business never been better. Babes are calling in, wanting to join, talk to the murderer. Some kind of turn-on, can you believe it? And guys, too, one wants the handle 'Sexy Strangler,' I won't give it to him." He paused a moment to pat himself on the back. "This is a classy operation."

I nodded in agreement, and my nose was still normal except for a curve where an elbow once came through my face mask. "It's a strange world out there, eh, Max?"

"Yow."

"One more thing. When Bobbie responded to the subpoena, she gave me a printout of the calls to both women on the nights they were killed."

"Yow."

"Could the list be wrong?"

"Whaddaya mean?"

"Is it possible for someone's name to be listed by mistake? Can the computer be wrong?"

He loosened up a bit, probably figuring I'd have served him with a warrant by now if that was my mission. "Don't see how. The computer records the handle automatically when the customer gets online. No human error possible."

"What about an impostor? My handle's Stick Shift, but what's to keep me from logging in as Passion Prince?"

"Won't work. Customer's handle can only be used when matched with his password. And that's something known only to the customer."

"Not quite," I said.

"How's that?"

"You know all the passwords, don't you, Max?"

A smile flashed like a blade beneath his mustache. "Yow. What of it?"