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

look. "What the hell's Abe doing?"

On cue, the phone rang on the private line. I picked it up, and Abe Socolow barked his name. Life is like that sometimes. But this was no coincidence.

"Jake, you're gonna get a supplemental witness list, if you haven't already," he said.

"I'm looking at it right now," I told him. "What bullshit! It's the eve of trial."

"Only two new names, and I'll make them available for depo during recesses," he said quickly.

I scanned the document. Two witnesses I'd never heard of, one with a Rome address, the other Hampshire, England. "Who the hell are Luciano Faviola and Martin Kent?"

"Ex-boyfriends of your client. Four years ago, she ran over Kent in his own Jaguar, or at least tried to. Pulled a gun on him, too, but never fired. Faviola she tried to kill with a handgun two years ago in Italy. Fired twice, missed both times."

"So what?" I said, angry at Abe, but twice as angry at Chrissy for not telling me. "I punched out a tight end for the Jets. You gonna bring that up, too?"

"Under the Williams rule, Jake, we've got a pattern of misconduct."

"The hell you do! This isn't a case where a wife killed five husbands in a row with arsenic in the omelets. This is a bullshit attempt to prejudice the jury with irrelevant facts, if they're facts at all."

"It's all true. I'll get you the police reports by courier."

I wanted to say a few choice expletives to my old buddy Abe, but Cindy was signaling me that I was wanted on another line.

It was Guy Bernhardt. Something had come up. Something important. Could I get there right away?

I had never been in Guy Bernhardt's den. Oh, I had looked into the den through the jalousie windows. Now I peeked out the window into the rosebushes and Spanish bayonet shrubs where I had once lurked. Sensing Bernhardt's glance, I looked guiltily back at the boar's head mounted on the wall.

"You like to hunt?" I asked pleasantly.

"No, that was Pop's hobby. Nailed that one up in the forest north of Sopchoppy. Big bastard had already gutted two hounds." Guy winked at me. "The boar, that is. Not my pop."

Dr. Lawrence Schein sat on a leather sofa next to me, holding a glass of bourbon, idly swirling the ice cubes around in his glass.

"Those antlers came off a buck Pop shot up in Montana," Guy said, pointing at the buck on the other wall. "Me, I never cared much for guns or killing living things. I'm a grower. I create life."

"Like a god," Lawrence Schein said. His loopy smile was the giveaway. He'd been putting away bourbon long before I arrived.

"You're a man who likes a beer, aren't you?" Guy asked, looking my way.

"Sometimes two or three," I answered.

He bent down at the bar, opened a little refrigerator, and pulled out a large green bottle with a porcelain stopper. "Grolsch, right?"

"How'd you know?"

He laughed. "I do my research."

Guy brought my beer and settled down on the sofa with his own bourbon, straight up. No mango daiquiris tonight. Bourbon and beer for the menfolk. He was chewing on a unlit cigar, a fat Bolivar from Havana. I recognized the Belicosos Finos, a 52-gauge number my teammates and I used to smoke Sunday nights after victories. Hell, after losses, too. Overhead, the paddle fan swished through the air. Outside, the trees were bare, stripped of their fruit, and bedding down for the coming winter.

"Did you two ask me down here to help me pick a jury or just to have a drink?"

"Neither one, actually," Guy Bernhardt said, fiddling with the stitching on his pale gray guayabera. "Larry wants to share some new evidence with you."

"New evidence? The night before trial, and you've found some new evidence?"

"The missing tape," Schein said matter-of-factly.

"What missing tape?" I asked, louder than I intended.

"Oh, it wasn't missing, really. I'd turned off the recorder on the last session. But the backup continued rolling."

"You didn't tell me about a backup."

He sipped at the bourbon. "No, that would have spoiled the surprise." He giggled. It must have been a four-lap head start with the liquor.

I hate surprises. There was no sound in the room but the incessant whoosh and whir of the paddle fan. I studied Lawrence Schein. His shaved head was showing black bristles above the ears, and his goatee needed trimming. I was going to have to tell my star witness to clean up his act and lay off the bourbon. But first I had to figure out if he was still my star witness.

"You want to tell me about it?" I asked finally.

"Actually," Guy Bernhardt said, "we thought you'd like to hear it. What's the expression, something like a picture is worth a thousand words?"

"Res ipsa loquitur," I said, thinking of Charlie Riggs. "The thing speaks for itself."

"Oh, it does," Bernhardt said. "It surely does."

"I've thought some more about what we discussed yesterday." Chrissy's voice.

"The need for goals?" Schein. I'd heard all this before.

"No. What we talked about afterward."

There was a pause.

"Oh, that."

"I've made a decision that you're not going to like," Chrissy said on the tape.

"Maybe you shouldn't tell me."

This time, it sounded even more ominous.

"But I've told you everything else. I can't imagine not telling you first."

"All right then. But first, let me . . ."

The sound of papers rustling and a chair squeaking and a click. I'd heard that all before. But then, something new.

"Is it off?" Chrissy's voice.

"It's off," Schein said.

"Well, like I said, I was thinking . . ."

"Yes?"

"I've bought a gun."

"I thought you were just going to visualize it."

"No. That's not enough. I've got to kill him." "Figuratively? As part of therapy?"

"C'mon, Larry. That isn't what you meant. It couldn't be."

"I didn't mean anything. I raised certain hypothetical actions, all intended to be therapeutic."

"I decided last night. I couldn't sleep. I haven't slept through the night in weeks. I'm having nightmares and migraines."

"It's all part of the process. The pain is coming