Lassiter 07 - Flesh and Bones by Levine, Paul (best fiction books to read TXT) 📗

Tony Cuevas called to say what I already knew. Chrissy had passed the polygraph test. "So her father sexually abused her," I said.

"She thinks he did," Tony said. "She remembers it."

All right, she wasn't lying. But memories can be wrong. I remembered everything Dr. Millie Santiago had told me. Or was it everything?

By day, I prepared for trial—interviewing witnesses; gathering boxes of exhibits; deposing cops, bystanders, paramedics, doctors, nurses, and the assistant medical examiner. By night, I wandered around the Grove, avoiding Cocowalk with its teens and tourists, its guys with boa constrictors around their necks or macaws on their shoulders. In my time, I have gone to great lengths to attract women, but being strangled by a reptile or shit on by a bird is not my idea of foreplay. I'd head to the Taurus, the only bar in the Grove that's older than I am. It's a brew-and-burger place in a quiche-and-cappuccino world, and I like it there. I'd have a couple of drafts, shoot some blow darts on the patio, tell harmless lies to various women, all the time wondering just what the hell was going on. Swimming through the surf of the upcoming murder trial, I had the gnawing feeling that I had yet to see the shark lurking on the ocean floor.

Summer turned to fall, not that you would know it. Tropical depressions still formed in the Atlantic. Our news boys and girls still went agog at the prospect of every gale. The night air in the Grove was heavy with the scents of jasmine and hibiscus. An occasional cold front made its way south, always petering out in northern Florida, but clocking the winds around and reducing our humidity.

I spent interminable days in the sadly misnamed Justice Building, a seven-story structure attached to the county jail by an overhead tunnel, an umbilical cord through which prisoners were force-fed into the so-called justice system.

We get the idea from books and television that the courthouse is a theater, the trial a play. The better analogy is a huge tent with a three-ring circus inside. The judge is the ringmaster, wielding his chair, cracking his whip, forcing the lions onto their haunches in mock-serious poses of respect. We rise when the judge enters and exits, and we beg for permission before we speak. The judge feeds us when we are good, chastises us when we are bad, and either way we bow our heads in meek gratitude.

In any given courtroom on any given Monday morning, the performers are not preparing for O. J. Simpson or the Menendez brothers. Not a trial of the century or even of the week. Hundreds of everyday cases flow along the conveyor belt of justice, dozens of bored inspectors picking them off, tossing them into this box or that for handling.

The system, both civil and criminal, intervenes when society has broken down. A wrong has been committed, or at least alleged. Offended at this breach of order, the system devises ways to make the offender pay, with either money or liberty. Like watching sausages or laws being made, observing the grist being milled in the courthouse is not an appetizing sight.

If we could peel off the outer wall of the Justice Building, as Hurricane Andrew did to several condos just south of here, we would see a beehive buzzing with activity. Defendants stream into courtrooms from their holding cells; dark-suited lawyers slouch against the bar, whispering their deals or their golf scores; cops bleary-eyes from the graveyard shift sip coffee in the corridors, their holsters emptied in respect to this place of constitutional reverence; robed judges in their high chairs listen as the endless flow of humanity streams by them: victims, witnesses, defendants, and the prosecutors and defense lawyers, engaged in an obligatory conspiracy to dispose of cases with dismissals, plea bargains, and reduced sentences, lest the entire system crunch to a halt.

In a dozen governmental offices, other anonymous functionaries push the paper and store the bytes that record the comings and goings of a world run amok. Stenographers, probation officers, bailiffs, translators, clerks, plus the girlfriends, mothers, and wives of the defendants themselves, bit players in the sagas that unfold under the pretentious and misleading sign that adorns each courtroom: WE WHO LABOR HERE SEEK ONLY TRUTH.

If we moved our camera close to the shaved-off walls, if our microphone picked up the whispers and cries, what would we see, what would see hear? The rap of a guard's nightstick on the holding cell's bars, the muttered curses of the inmates, the whining entreaty to a prosecutor of a defense lawyer ("No way we agree to three years min-man") refusing to accept the consequences of a plea with a minimum mandatory sentence, the mechanical drone of the judge accepting a guilty plea, finding a defendant "alert and intelligent," which, if true, would probably preclude his being there in the first place.

I have spent too much time in this building, too much time listening to the presumably innocent, hearing fanciful tales of alibis, of being in the wrong car at the wrong time, of guns that fire without triggers being pulled, of lying cops, thieving partners, and cheating wives. My clients are the put upon, the wrongfully accused, victims themselves, and they have an excuse for everything.

Now I had a client I desperately wanted to believe, wanted to help.

But did I? Could I?

19

I Hate Surprises

I was doing what I always do the day before trial, trying to figure out what I'd forgotten to do. I thumbed through the pleadings, skimmed the deposition summaries, looked for the tenth time at the state's exhibit list, and sketched out some ideas for my opening statement. I was so lost in the file that I didn't notice Cindy slip into my office until she dropped a three-page faxed document under my nose.

"Just came in from the state attorney's office," she said.

I took a