Lassiter 01 - To Speak for the Dead (38 page)

"Hey, I don't need a chastity belt," she said, the voice a notch higher.

He slowly stretched out more gauze, soaked it, lifted her a few inches and wrapped it around the top of the left hip and through the crotch. He caressed it into place.

"She looks just like a little doll, doesn't she, Jake?" Another strip and then another and the two leg casts were joined. Melanie tried moving but could not, the weight was too much.

Then he pulled a white Dacron stocking out of a metal drawer, walked to the head of the table, brushed her hair back, and slipped the stocking over her head.

"Makes the plaster set more smoothly," he explained.

"Stop fuckin' around, Rog," she cried, each breath sucking the stocking into her mouth. "This ain't funny." Her voice rising, the beginning of fear.

He placed some padding over her mouth, but she shook her head and it dropped to the floor. He didn't seem to notice. He dipped another length of gauze into the water, waited a moment, and then began wrapping it around her mouth. Even through the stocking, her eyes reflected it.

The realization. The terror.

I studied that look, snapped it into place. I wanted to remember it. Susan was dead because of her, and now here she was, knowing what was about to happen, the horror of knowing probably worse than the pain itself,

She spit and coughed. The sticky mess stayed put, covering half her mouth. She breathed greedily through her nose and yelled something, muffled through the gauze. "Laschta, hughme."
Lassiter, help me.

This time, Roger fashioned a longer piece and swaddled it twice around her head, covering both mouth and nose. She bucked up and down, involuntary thrusts from the diaphragm lifting her, the lungs searching for air. In another minute she would lose consciousness. Three minutes after that, irreversible brain damage. Then . . .

She looked toward me, eyes pleading, mouth working, the words unintelligible, her fear filling the room.

Why should I?

I didn't know. I just reacted the way I do to most things. Moved without thinking it through, doing what seems right at the time, listening to some voice inside, a smarter guy than me, someone who didn't want me to scream myself awake, seeing Melanie Corrigan turn blue under all that white.

I came up behind Roger, grabbed him by the left arm, and spun him around. From the way his right shoulder pivoted, I saw the punch coming but not the rongeur, the large one, in his right hand. His arm came hard and fast. I was going to take his punch and give back one that would sit him down. What I took was a fistful of stainless steel. It caught me on the left temple. Solid.

In the movies, guys get hit on the head all the time. Usually with a gun. Their knees buckle, they say
oooh,
and they gently fall and go to sleep. It doesn't work that way. There's a thunderclap, a blaze of lights behind the eyes, and a shooting pain, a loss of equilibrium. Then a gray fog settling.

I didn't fall down. I stumbled across the room on shaky pins, a wounded buffalo, bouncing off cabinets. Roger was standing to my left, my right, and straight in front. I took a drunk's swing at the guy in front but it wasn't him. He pushed me to the floor. I hooked an arm behind his knee and brought him down on top of me. On a good day, I could bench press him twenty times, then throw him from short to first. This wasn't a good day. He was back up and I was on one knee like a fighter taking the eight-count.

Then I felt the jab in my upper arm.
Deja vu,
his thumb pushing the plunger on a hypodermic. I swatted at it and missed. He emptied it into me and I tore away from him, the needle still stuck in me, the world's largest voodoo doll.

I came at him again and took a swing in slow motion, my arms bulky girders. I didn't hit him and he didn't hit me. I just sat down at the end of the punch, then rolled onto my side, my face resting on the cool, clean tile. Then, just like in the movies, I said,
oooh,
and went to sleep.

My mouth was dry and my head was filled with barking dogs. I was cold. My face was still on the tile. It could have been hours or days. It must have been hours. Roger was sitting in a swivel chair next to me, splotches of plaster in his hair, on his face, on his gown. From the floor, I could see only the bottoms of Melanie Corrigan's bare feet sticking out of the casts. Nice feet, finely arched, clean dainty lady feet.

The feet weren't moving. I didn't need to see the rest.

"I'll help you up," Roger said hoarsely. "Don't worry about the Pentothal. You'll just be groggy for a while."

I tried to stand but he had to boost me. If he wanted to, he could finish me right there. I finally looked toward the table. The face gone, wrapped from forehead to chin, a mummy. Only the ends of her hair stuck out from beneath the plaster.

I sagged against a metal cabinet. Roger said, "You didn't mean it last night, did you, Jake?"

"Mean what?" My voice was thick; my head weighed a ton.

"That you're no longer my lawyer or my friend." "What difference does it make?"

He swiveled in the chair to face me, his eyes dancing to a silent tune.

"Because I need you, Jake."

"Now? You need me now. What for?"

"To prove it, Jake. That I'm one of the good guys."

About the Author

paul levine
is a Miami trial lawyer and a widely known authority on the First Amendment, who has represented the news media in libel and privacy lawsuits, including cases in the Supreme Court of the United States. He has taught communications law at the University of Miami Law School and authored both a syndicated television show,
You and the Law,
and a nationally syndicated newspaper column, "What's Your Verdict?"
To Speak For the Dead
is his first novel. His second Jake Lassiter novel,
Night Vision,
is available now from Bantam. He is currently at work on
Slashback,
which Bantam will publish in the Fall of 1992.

A JAKE LASSITER NOVEL

Here are special advance preview chapters from NIGHT VISION, the new Jake Lassiter novel by Paul Levine, a Bantam hardcover now available at your local bookstore.

NIGHT VISION

Paul

Levine

CHAPTER ©ME A Matter of Honor

If Marvin the Maven tells me not to yell in closing argument, I don't yell. Marvin knows. He's never tried a case, but he's seen more trials than most lawyers. Drifting from courtroom to courtroom in search of the best action, he glimpses eight or nine cases a day. Five days a week for the last seventeen years since he closed up his shoe store in Brooklyn and headed South.

Some lawyers don't listen to Marvin and his friends—Saul the Tailor and Max (Just Plain) Seltzer—and they pay the price. Me, I listen. The courthouse regulars can't read the fine print on the early-bird menus, but they can spot perjury from the third row of the gallery.

Marvin, Saul and Max already told me I botched jury selection. Not that lawyers
pick
jurors anyway. We
exclude
those we fear, at least until we run out of challenges.

"You're
meshuga,
you leave Number Four on," Marvin told me on the first day of trial.

"He's a hard-working butcher," I said defensively. "Knows the value of a dollar. Won't give the store away."

Marvin ran a liver-spotted hand over his toupee, fingering the part. "Lookit his eyes,
boychik.
Like pissholes in the snow. Plus, I betcha he lays his fat belly on the scale with the lamb chops. I wouldn't trust him as far as I could spit."

I told myself Marvin was wrong and that he hadn't intended to shower me with spittle to make his point.

Some lawyers hire psychologists to help with jury selection. They'll tell you that people who wear bright colors crave attention and feel for the underdog. Plaintiffs jurors. Dark colors are worn by introverts who don't care about people. Defendant's jurors. Hoop earrings and costume jewelry are good for the plaintiff, Rolex watches and three-carat diamonds for the defense. To me, that's a lot of malarkey. I pick jurors who smile when I smile and don't fold their bodies into tight balls when I stand close.

No second guessing, now. Closing argument. A time to sing the praises of freedom of the press, of the great newspaper that fulfills the constitutional function of
blah-blah-blah.
And Marvin said don't yell. No emotion.
The jury don't care about the Foist Amendment.
Besides, Nick Wolf is a great
schmoozer,
Marvin told me. The jurors love him. Number Five, a Cuban receptionist, keeps batting her three-inch eyelashes at him.

And I thought she had trouble with her contacts.

The four men on the jury are your real problem, Marvin said. One black, two Cubans, one Anglo, all men's men. Nick's kind of guys.

So what am I, chopped liver?

He gave me that knowing look.
Ey, Lassiter, it ain't your jury; it ain't your day.
And with that, the gang took off, a kidnapping trial down the hall drawing them away.

Nick Wolf's lawyer, H. T. Patterson, yelled in closing argument. Hell, he sang, chanted, ranted, rocked and roiled. A spellbinder and a stemwinder, H.T. worked the jurors like a holy roller. Which he was at the Liberty City Colored Baptist Church while attending law school at night in the days before Martin Luther King.

"They subjected Attorney General Nick Wolf to scorn and ridicule, to calumny and obloquy," Patterson now crooned in a seductive singsong. "They lied and distorted. They defamed and defiled. They took his honorable name and soiled it. Besmirched, tainted and tarnished it! Debased, degraded and disparaged it! And what should a man do when they stain, sully and smear his good name?"

Change it, I thought.

"What should a man of honor do when those with pens sharp as daggers poison his reputation, not in whispers but in howls, five hundred three thousand, six hundred seventy-nine times?"

Five hundred three thousand, six hundred seventy-nine being the Sunday circulation of the
Miami Journal,
and Sunday being the day of choice for fifty megaton, rock'em-sock'em, take-no-prisoners journalism. Which is what the
Journal
is noted for, though I thought the offending story—"State Attorney Violated Campaign Laws"—lacked characteristic punch. Not sharing my opinion was Nicholas G. Wolf, bona fide local high school football star, decorated Vietnam war hero, former policeman and currently State's Attorney for the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit in and for Dade County, Florida. The article accused Wolf of various technical violations of the campaign contributions law plus one unfortunate reference to accepting money from a reputed drug dealer.

"The man should seek redress in a court of law," Patterson solemnly declared, answering his own question, as lawyers are inclined to do. "He should come before a jury of his peers, citizens of the community. So my friends and neighbors, ladies and gentlemen of this jury, it is time to pay the piper. . . ."

I didn't think the metaphor held up to scrutiny, but the jury didn't seem to notice. The men all nodded, and Number Five stopped fluttering her eyelashes and now stared mournfully at poor, defamed Nick Wolf.

". . . It is time to assess damages; it is judgment day, it is time to levy the penalty for these knowing, reckless lies. And I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, is it too much to ask that the
Miami Journal,
that behemoth on the bay, that monster of malediction, pay ten dollars for each time it lied, yes, ten dollars for each time it sent its message of malice into our midst. . . ."

I never did better than C's in math, but I know when a lawyer is asking for five million bucks from a jury. Meaning H. T. Patterson hoped for two million, and I was beginning to wonder if taking this

case to trial was so damn smart after all.

,

"A letter of apology, a front page retraction and fifty grand might do it," I told the publisher six months earlier in his bayfront office.

Symington Foote
bristled.
"We don't pay extortion. A public official's life is open to scrutiny, and we had a
bona Jide
tip that Wolf was taking dirty money."

"From a tipster who refuses to come forward and a reporter who won't even reveal his source," I reminded the publisher, trying to knock him off the soapbox.

"But we don't need to prove the story was true, do we, counselor?"

He had me there. As a public official, Nick Wolf could win his libel suit only if he proved that the newspaper knew the story was false or had recklessly disregarded the truth. A nice concept for judges. For jurors, it's the same as in most lawsuits. If they like the plaintiff's attitude and appearance more than the defendant's, the plaintiff wins. Simple as that.

The case had been cleanly tried. A few histrionics from Patterson, but his tricks were mostly subtle. When I stood to make an objection, he would move close, letting me tower above him. He was a bantam rooster in a white linen three-piece suit and alongside was a bruiser representing the unrestrained power of a billion-dollar company.