Riptide

CHAPTER 3

Jake Lassiter waited patiently for an answer from number three, a portly thirty-year-old accountant in a gray suit. The man’s eyes darted from side to side, and he tightened his arms across his chest. Lassiter stole a glance at Marvin the Maven in the front row of the gallery.

Marvin tugged his right ear, ran a hand over his bald head, and nodded. Either he wanted Lassiter to steal second base or he was telling him to keep this guy on the panel. Some lawyers hire psychiatrists at three-hundred bucks an hour to help pick juries. The shrinks are full of advice: The man who sits with his elbows in his lap is submissive, while the one who encroaches on the next juror’s armrests is dominant; the guy who crosses his legs is tense; the woman in a miniskirt with exotic earrings is plaintiff oriented. In Chicago, a cab driver sometimes helps a famous personal injury lawyer by pinpointing jurors’ neighborhoods and determining their economic standing. That wouldn’t work in Miami where most cab drivers don’t speak the language and wouldn’t know 1-95 from the Tegucigalpa Turnpike.

Lassiter preferred to rely on his own instincts with help from Marvin the Maven and Saul the Tailor, two retirees who spend every weekday, nine to five, in the courtrooms and corridors of the Dade County Courthouse.

“Why… yes,” the accountant finally answered. “I would agree that just because someone has been injured doesn’t mean someone else is at fault.”

Lassiter nodded, letting all the jurors appreciate number three’s wisdom. He wouldn’t have a drink with this guy, but he might let him sit on the jury.

“And you understand that the defense is as entitled to a fair trial as the plaintiff?”

“Of course,” the accountant piped up, without hesitation. “Insurance companies have rights, too.”

Lassiter nodded at this pearl of tight-assed wisdom. “And you will not be swayed by sympathy for the injured person?”

“Absolutely not.”

Lassiter smiled. Bingo!

Marvin the Maven leaned toward Saul the Tailor and whispered, “Fatso saves his sympathy for clients with long-term capital losses.”

Lassiter had watched the accountant when he had landed in the third chair in the jury box. Unhappy to be there, he had examined the orange vinyl seat as if a wad of Juicy Fruit might have formed a stalagmite there. Too busy to waste his time, he would likely take out his displeasure on the plaintiff. Which was fine with Jake Lassiter because at the moment he was stuck on the skid row of trial work, the slip-and-fall case.

Only thing worse than defending a slippin’ Sylvia suit, Lassiter thought, was a dog bite case.

It would be all Lassiter could do to keep awake while witnesses debated why Mrs. Ana Fraga-Freitas slipped on a slice of papaya at San Pedro’s Supermercado and skidded headfirst into a pyramid of Pony Malta bottles. Bebida de campeones, drink of champions. The Fraga-Freitas case was not nearly as interesting as one involving the soft drink a few years earlier when Colombian drug dealers laced a shipment with pure cocaine, then overlooked one case after it had cleared customs. A man who bought a spiked bottle at a convenience store ingested enough of the drug to make a buffalo think it was a butterfly. The man didn’t last the night.

Lassiter looked across the courtroom at Mrs. Fraga-Freitas. She wore a neck brace, but that was for show. The soft tissue injury was a product of her chiropractor’s vivid imagination. The broken collarbone had long since healed, and at a solid five feet three, 230 pounds, she could unload refrigerators at the dock. With one hand.

God, how he hated slip-and-falls. The cases were nearly always identical. The plaintiffs were middle-aged to elderly, and if they didn’t slide across the floor at a supermarket, they tripped over invisible cracks in the sidewalk. Every two-bit plaintiffs lawyer with an office in a shopping center and commercials on late-night TV had a fistful of slipping, falling, tripping clients and a stable of orthopedic surgeons better at testifying than operating. The cases took little legal ingenuity but a substantial ability to schmooze with doctors and push them to the limits of their oath, something that became easier when the hefty expert witness fee was paid in advance.

Lassiter had begun voir dire the same as always. We ask these questions only for the purpose of seating a fair and unbiased jury. A little white lie, he told himself. After all, he could hardly reveal the truth: We seek a jury predisposed by background and experience to favor our clients and to despise the opposition.

It’s an imperfect system, lawyers like to say, but the best one ever devised. Excluding trial by combat, of course.

While trying to decide about the accountant, Lassiter was still concerned about his neighbor, juror number two. A self-employed carpenter, he responded to questions quickly and loudly, then looked around, waiting for the applause. Might want to show off in the jury room, Lassiter worried, get macho and run roughshod over the others. A one-man jury, no lawyer wants that.

There were two other men seated so far, a college student wearing jeans and a cable TV installer in a khaki jumpsuit with his name above the pocket. Three women had survived the cut, a social worker, a flight attendant, and a homemaker. It was a typical jury, but hardly a fair cross-section of Miami. To truly represent the community, you’d have to include drug dealers, boiler-room bullion salesmen, small arms runners, porno filmmakers, swampland hucksters, and goat-sacrificing santeros.

Choosing jurors is like going out on a blind date. No matter how much you’ve been told in advance, there are always surprises. “Look at their shoes,” Marvin the Maven always advised. “Leather oxfords, shined up good, that’s your foreman.” Marvin had owned a shoe store in Pittsburgh, and he could analyze your temperament with a downward glance.

“What about the women?” Lassiter once asked him.

“Stay away from the ones who show their toes. Especially if they’ve painted their nails.”

Jake Lassiter looked at his notes. The carpenter wore paint-stained loafers, the student sandals. Only the accountant had shoes with laces. Tied tight, Lassiter figured. Two of the women wore conservative pumps, the flight attendant ankle-high work boots that make SoBe club hoppers look like lumberjacks.

Lassiter squeezed his six-foot-two frame out of the heavy oak chair and walked toward the jury box. Every juror watched him. He gave the impression of filling his space and the next guy’s too, had what they can’t teach in law school… presence. A dozen years since he’d torn down the field to make a tackle — or get his clock cleaned — on a kickoff, but you could still play racquetball against his abdominals. He watched the jury panel through clear blue eyes and tried not to betray his boredom, then pretended to study the juror chart on his yellow pad. Struggling to appear earnest, he stroked his chin and ran a hand through his thick, sandy hair. He looked toward Marvin the Maven who tugged his left ear this time and nodded.

“The defense accepts the jury panel,” Lassiter said to the judge.

Lester Jeffries, the plaintiff’s lawyer, walked to the podium and bowed formally to the jury before speaking to the judge. The obsequious bastard was trying to score points already, Lassiter thought.

Jeffries was short and squat with a high forehead and sparse, dark hair. He was partial to suspenders and bow ties and cowboy boots, a combination that made no sense to Lassiter. “Your Honor, I believe we tendered the jury panel to Mr. Lassiter without accepting it,” Jeffries said. “Therefore, at this juncture, without undue delay and without further inconvenience to the venire, and noting that the lunch recess is nearly upon us, the plaintiff now excuses juror number three.”

A lawyer will always use a bushel of words when just a peck will do. Lassiter slumped in his chair and rolled his eyes upward. A heavy teak beam split the middle of the ceiling and connected with rows of smaller beams that spiraled downward toward the walls. A giant spinal column with ribs attached. I’m in the belly of a whale, Lassiter thought, and in a moment, I’ll be whale shit. He glumly watched the accountant leave the jury box, then rose from the defense table and strode to the podium, where Lester Jeffries peered into the gallery, smile cemented into place.

“Jeffries, we’re gonna be here all week with this lousy case,” Lassiter whispered hoarsely.

“C’mon, Jake, that guy was an anal retentive numbers cruncher. It’d be malpractice for a plaintiff’s lawyer to seat him.”

“Yeah, but I left on the lady social worker with the heart of gold. We could have called it even.”

“Maybe next time,” Jeffries said.

“Next slip-and-fall, let’s make a deal. No peremptories, no challenges. We’ll seat the first six people, no matter what. Put your perjurious osteopaths and chiropractic quacks on the stand by ten a.m., case goes to the jury by noon.”

Jeffries thought about it and fiddled with his yellow bow tie.

“What if a juror doesn’t speak English?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Lassiter said.

“What if they’re all illiterates or cousins of the plaintiff?”

“Hell, I don’t care if they’re illegal aliens or convicted felons.”

“Actually, I’d like that,” Jeffries said. “Resentment of authority is always good for the plaintiff, but I don’t think they’re eligible.”

Lassiter shrugged. “I’m not kidding. Let’s grab the first six people on Flagler Street.”

“I’ll think about it,” Jeffries said, hooking a thumb into his suspenders, trying to look like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, but actually resembling Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinnie.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” whined the judge, “if your colloquy is complete, may we resume picking a jury?”

Judge Morgan Lewis stood five feet three and sat three feet seven. When he sank into his cushioned chair, he disappeared from view, but he was still within earshot, and the lawyers could hear the rasp of the irascible jurist from time to time. Under his breath, Judge Lewis cursed them for their youth, his parents for his shortness, and himself for the dumb-ass decision to become a judge at $93,111 a year, while snot-nosed lawyers drove home in Porsches after knocking off seven-figure verdicts in his courtroom, the by-God biggest courtroom in the Eleventh Judicial Circuit in and for Dade County, Florida.

“Or if you prefer,” squeaked the voice from behind the bench, “I’ll pick the jury, and you two can keep quiet.”

The bailiff, a retired bail bondsman whose primary job was to collect campaign contributions for the judge, summoned a replacement for the accountant. Lassiter watched a woman with dyed-red hair and a leather mini rise from the gallery. As she walked toward the jury box, Lassiter noticed the earrings, large as basketball hoops. On her feet were Roman sandals, the toenails painted fuchsia and embedded with little gold stars. From the front row of the gallery, Lassiter thought he heard a sigh.

On Flagler Street a group of chanting Hare Krishnas competed for sidewalk space with Nicaraguan exiles denouncing the Sandinistas, or maybe these were Sandinistas denouncing the new regime, you could never tell. The fronds swayed gently on the palm trees in front of Miami Center, a skyscraper of brown travertine marble wedged between the bay and eight lanes of Biscayne Boulevard. Near the top floor, black turkey buzzards — ugly as death — glided outside the windows of Miami’s high-rise lawyers. Vultures and lawyers, Jake Lassiter thought, birds of a feather. One difference, though. The feathery scavengers arrive from the north each autumn and depart each spring. The birds in seersucker stick around all year.

“The souls of lawyers paying endless penance,” a Cuban spiritualist once told Lassiter, pointing at the vultures flying their endless circles.

“Not so,” he replied. “Lawyers never repent.”

On the ground, Haitian immigrants lounged in nearby Bayfront Park hawking bags of oranges. Old Cuban men with pushcarts sold doughy empanadas and sweet pastelitos, jockeying for position with hot dog vendors. Slinging his navy blue suit coat over one shoulder, Jake Lassiter settled into the elevator of Miami Center, bulky trial bag resting on the handrail. As the elevator door closed, a woman’s hand snaked in and caught the rubber bumper. When the doors parted, Lassiter saw the smiling face of Cindy Clark, his secretary. Two middle-aged men in white guayaberas followed her in the door.

“Thought I recognized that hand,” he said. “So few women wear rings on all five fingers these days.”

“What about Cher?” his secretary laughed.

Cindy Clark, a twenty-two-year-old free spirit, was an aberration in a conservative, downtown law firm that represented banks, construction companies, and insurance carriers. Monday through Friday, Cindy was the perfect secretary, running interference through the law firm’s bureaucracy like a blocker leading a sweep. On weekends she could be found on the back of a candy-apple red Harley-Davidson Electra Glide Classic headed for the Keys. On the front in a sleeveless leather vest was Tubby Tubberville, all 260 pounds of him, much of which was decorated with tattoos.

If Cindy was different from the upscale secretarial staff, her boss was just as much an outsider. Jake Lassiter’s partners in the old Miami firm were buttoned-down MBA types, corporate lawyers who poisoned the worlds of business and law with clinically efficient takeovers, and litigators whose frivolous pleadings tied up opponents in strike suits and class actions. Wimps outside the boardrooms and courtrooms, these lawyers got their rocks off by manipulating the rules for money, power, and prestige.

“You’re back early,” Cindy said.

“Settled for one-fifty, sent everybody home.”

The elevator stopped, and the men in guayaberas got off on seventeen, home of a Panamanian banco with few customers but enormous cash transactions.

Cindy was thinking it over. “One-fifty, as in a hundred and fifty thousand?”

“Yeah.”

“Jeez, I thought you said her injuries were phonier than Dan Quayle’s smile.”

“Who?”

“C’mon, Jake. Why’d you throw in the towel?”

“Their orthopod was giving her a fifty percent disability of the upper-right extremity, fifteen percent of the body as a whole, and she’s got a whole lot of body. Plus she’s got an MRI printout that looks like the Milky Way and her expert is talking nerve damage. Then, there’s Mister Fraga-Freitas, who’s got his lost consortium claim. Says their sex life headed south, or as he put it, ‘ de mal en peor.’”

“What’s a broken collarbone got to do with sex?”

“I was dying to ask and hoping the answer had something to do with a trapeze or a chandelier.”

“So you settled, just like that?”

“I also had a short trial judge, a short plaintiff’s lawyer, and a short guy on the jury who might have ended up the foreman.”

“Not your Napoleonic complex theory again. What about your defenses? Remember, she showed up for her depo wearing glasses, but the day of the accident…”

“Yes, my performance could have rivaled Clarence Darrow’s in the Leopold and Loeb trial. ‘And now, Mrs. Fraga-Freitas, isn’t it true that when you did your half gainer into the soda display, you were not wearing your bifocals?’”

The elevator stopped at twenty-one, and a cleaning crew got in and rode to twenty-two, where they got off.

Cindy said, “Well anyway, it was something to try. The MP’s not going to be happy if he thinks you gave the store away.”

MP being Managing Partner, not Member of Parliament, though maybe it stood for Major Prick, too. “Yeah, Cindy, I know.”

“I mean, San Pedro’s Supermercado is his client.”

“Yeah, but who does he turn to when they’re in trouble. Who got them off the hook on health code violations?”

“I remember,” she said.

“Cockroaches in the frijoles negros. Story of my life.”

“Don’t knock it. Your closing argument was great.”

Lassiter lowered his voice and spoke to an invisible jury. ” ‘So what if there’s a little thorax with the beans, a hairy antenna with the rice. Once you mix in the onions and spices, who can tell?’”

“Don’t forget the part about insects being considered delicacies in certain parts of the world,” Cindy reminded him.

The elevator stopped at thirty-two with a soft whoosh, and Lassiter held the door open.

“I still don’t know why you settled,” Cindy said. “Your experts would contradict hers, plus you had a chance to win on liability.”

“No way. All the witnesses except Mr. San Pedro agreed the papaya was the color of licorice, meaning it had been on the floor long enough that some produce worker should have cleaned it up, if they all weren’t smoking reefer out on the loading dock.”

“So you caved in?”

“I settled. I didn’t want to lose.”

They walked together in silence along the burgundy-carpeted corridor of Harman amp; Fox. The walls were tastefully decorated with oil paintings of the British men’s club variety: hunting dogs, whaling ships, and leather riding gear. Lassiter always thought a school of feeding sharks would be more appropriate but the partners’ art subcommittee, which reported to the facilities committee, which in turn reported to the finance committee, never took him seriously.

Few of the lawyers were in their offices. It was usually that way. Fifty bucks a square foot for a view of the ocean, and hardly anyone was ever there. A few would be in court, a few might be interviewing witnesses, some would be goofing off at the racetrack, but others were just not accounted for, except when they padded their time sheets with the catchall entry for “research.”

“I didn’t think that’s the way you played the game,” Cindy said finally. “Just trying not to lose.”

“Maybe you thought wrong, or maybe that was another game. I decided I was saving San Pedro money by settling, and that happens to be my job.”

“Some job,” Cindy said.

“It is unnecessary to remind me that playing poker with half-assed lawyers and cantankerous judges is insufficient grounds for sainthood. And speaking of jobs, why aren’t you doing yours?”

They stopped in front of Lassiter’s office. The door was open, files propped on the desk and credenza inside. The windows faced east squarely over Biscayne Bay, Miami Beach, and the Atlantic Ocean beyond.

“I needed to get out of the ant farm, find some inspiration,” Cindy answered. “Listen to this.”

November sky,

Bums in park,

Miami.

Lassiter winced. “Haiku again, another lily pad and teahouse phase?”

“It’s spiritually uplifting, you should try it.”

“Sure thing,” Lassiter said. “How’s this?”

Back to work,

Type, type, type.

Cindy.

“Oh, Jake, there’s more to life than work. Besides, there was another reason I went to the park. I wanted to see the body. A Colombian cowboy got snuffed and dumped in the piss pool.”

She swung a handful of zebra-striped nails in the general direction of Bayfront Park and the octagonal Claude and Mildred Pepper Fountain. Much to the dismay of the city fathers, the derelicts used the four-million-dollar fountain as a urinal. This was the first time, however, a drug dealer had practiced the dead man’s float there. Usually, when a deal soured, the losing entrepreneur turned up behind the wheel of a Ferrari at the bottom of a West Dade canal, a neat pattern of entry wounds at the base of his skull. No need for lawyers to resolve those disputes. A MAC-10 leaves no grounds for appeal.

“Sounds gruesome,” Jake Lassiter said.

“Nah, except he bled all over, and from the top floor, the water looked like a bowl of punch at the junior prom.”

Lassiter groaned. “Any messages?”

“Lots of calls. Thad the Cad, some crappy problems at the bank. Then a guy from Hawaii, something about his fee for coming to Miami for the windsurfing race. And Mr. Kazdoy. He wants you to go to the theater tonight.”

Thaddeus G. Whitney, general counsel of Great Southern Bank, could wait. The bank’s work was fine if you were the kind of guy who liked sneaking tricky acceleration clauses into mortgages and drafting collateral agreements so abstruse most people would sign them just to avoid reading them. Lassiter wasn’t that kind of guy. He would call Keaka Kealia, the Hawaiian who was arriving Tuesday for the Miami-to-Bimini sailboard race. And Lassiter would show up at Kazdoy’s theater on Miami Beach for a lecture on Russian-American relations, an Eisenstein film, and a cup of borscht with the old man after the show.

First, though, there was work to do, plenty of work for a good lawyer these days. Miami had become a boomtown. The biggest business was importation — an assortment of weeds, powders, and pills — and the town was awash with dirty money. Greedy bankers laundered millions in tens and twenties for one point of the action. Lawyers formed offshore companies to hide drug profits and sometimes wound up offshore themselves, tied to concrete blocks if they were unfortunate enough to be subpoenaed before grand juries. Sleek women sniffed at a tropical high and attached themselves to swarthy men draped with gold.

To Jake Lassiter, all that was another world. He lived in a tiny house built of coral rock on a lot lush with live oak and red mulberry trees between Poinciana and Kumquat streets in Coconut Grove. He was one of the last Miamians without air-conditioning, preferring a half-dozen paddle fans that stirred the soggy air but did not seal him inside. At night he could hear the cries of herons and terns on their way from the Everglades to the beaches, and he could taste the aroma of a dozen mango trees next door.

Lassiter preferred the beach to nightclubs and cutoff jeans to lawyers’ blue suits. He loved Miami for the water and the solitude he found on a nine-foot sailboard on a twenty-knot day, shredding the breaking waves of the Atlantic. Sailing east, hopping the chop, he would watch the sky meet the ocean at the horizon. The world was limitless, possibilities infinite. But jibe and head west, back to shore, and there in the distance were the glass-and-marble towers of downtown. Inside, plush jail cells twelve-by-twelve. The sun glared against the tiny windows, sharp as a dagger in the eye, and Lassiter imagined ten thousand lawyers, bankers, and accountants pushing their papers from one desk to another and back again, a cycle as endless as the orbit of the circling vultures.

Jake Lassiter would rather sail east.

Cindy Clark typed the settlement papers in the San Pedro case and returned to her haiku, trying to work “bloody corpse” into a poetic triplet. Jake Lassiter called the Hawaiian and promised that an appearance fee would be delivered before the race. An unusual request, but for Keaka Kealia, the world’s greatest boardsailor, it was worth it.

From his high-rise perch, phone cradled on shoulder, Jake Lassiter reached for his binoculars. He watched the surf break on the reef at Virginia Beach on nearby Key Biscayne. He envisioned Keaka Kealia, six thousand miles away where Pacific waves slapped the north shore of Maui. Lassiter wished he were there with the sailors and surfers whose lives mocked his own. He envied their endless summer, conjuring images of sails crackling in steady trade winds, warm nights grilling mahimahi on the beach by torchlight, surrounded by women with bronzed bodies and sun-kissed hair.

The call completed, Lassiter dropped the San Pedro file on the floor next to a bulging folder of antitrust pleadings. He sidestepped half a dozen mortgage foreclosures and made his way to the marble windowsill three hundred fifty feet above Biscayne Bay.

“Maui,” Jake Lassiter said wistfully, kicking off his black leather wing tips and squinting into the brightness of the bay.