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

Next door, the mother and daughters were gone. In a corridor, a booking agent was watching a female model step onto a doctor's scale. It reminded me of a jockey weighing in at the track, only the model was a foot taller and wasn't carrying a saddle. She looked fine to me, even a bit too thin, but the booking agent scribbled something on a clipboard and mouthed the words three pounds, her scowl making it seem like a capital offense.

Finally, Rusty said, "The point is that Chrissy had all the advantages. Do you know who Harry Bernhardt is?"

"Was," I reminded him. "From now on, Harry Bernhardt is purely past tense. Didn't he do some farming?"

Rusty barked out a laugh. "Yeah. And Johnny Unitas did some throwing. Harry Bernhardt is . . . was a goddamn conglomerate. Sugarcane, cattle, real estate, you name it. Houses in Palm Beach, Aspen, and London. Well connected both politically and socially, major contributor to both political parties at the state and national levels. The only red on that old boy's neck came from the afternoon sun in Monaco."

"Chrissy ever talk about him?" I asked.

"Not a word. She left home when she was a teenager. Damn few people even knew the connection 'til she aced him."

"Any other acts of violence? Ever see her threaten anyone?"

"Chrissy? Hey, Jake, listen to me. Chrissy Bernhardt might not be an angel, and she sure as hell has a past, but I've never known her to hurt anyone, with the possible exception of herself. So if she killed her old man, which you and I saw with our very own eyes, she had a damn good reason."

Am I Getting Warmer?

I learned how to interview clients from Jimmy Stewart and José Ferrer.

Okay, so maybe watching old movies isn't quite the same as earning an Ivy League law degree or even toting Edward Bennett Williams's briefcase, but we all work with what we've got. So as I exited the Dolphin Expressway—honoring the likes of Griese, Buoniconti, Csonka, and Warfield, not Flipper—I couldn't help playing the scenes.

Jimmy Stewart is smoking a cigar while interviewing his jailed client, Ben Gazzara, in Anatomy of a Murder.

"What's your excuse, Lieutenant, for killing Barney Quill?"

Ben Gazzara paces around the sheriff's office, noodling it. "What excuses are there?" he asks, and right away you know this is a savvy client. Not some blabbermouth, but a thinking man's defendant.

"How should I know?" Jimmy Stewart answers in his aw-shucks drawl. "You're the one who plugged Quill."

Ben Gazzara paces some more, then mumbles, half to himself, "I must have been mad."

"No," Jimmy says. "Bad temper's no excuse."

You can see the light bulb blink in Gazzara's head.

"I mean, I must have been crazy. . . . Am I getting warmer?"

That's the right way to do it. Hint a little, but don't come right out and coach your client.

The other night, I was watching television with my nephew Kip, a twelve-year-old who doesn't do his homework but has total recall of the newsreel voice-overs from Citizen Kane. Kip had asked me the secret to being a good lawyer. First, I told him, you've got to win your client's confidence by expressing optimism. Then we sat down to watch José Ferrer meet his clients in The Caine Mutiny.

"I don't want to upset you too much," José Ferrer tells the nervous defendants, "but you have an excellent chance of being hanged."

"So what's your excuse for shooting your father?" I asked Christina Bernhardt. I am nothing if not a good student by rote.

"My excuse?" She shook her head in that way women have of clearing the hair out of their eyes. I always thought it was an unconscious gesture, but maybe they do it only when men are watching.

"Ms. Bernhardt—"

"Chrissy," she said, "and I'll call you Jake."

"Fair enough. Chrissy, what's your legal justification for what would otherwise be cold-blooded murder?"

"I have my reasons."

"I'm sure you do. I just hope they constitute a lawful defense."

"Such as?"

Good question. Maybe she'd seen Ben Gazzara, too. "Self-defense, defense of others, accident, insanity. For insanity, we'd have to prove that you didn't know right from wrong at the time of the shooting."

"Right from wrong," she repeated. "Oh, how I know the difference."

"Let me stop you right there," I said. We were sitting on hard wooden chairs designed by Torquemada in the attorneys' conference room at the Women's Detention Center. Chrissy Bernhardt wore a blue jailhouse smock, matching loose-fitting pants with a drawstring, and the paper slippers they give inmates so they won't bash each other with leather shoes. It was an outfit never seen in Vogue or Elle, but still she looked . . . well, like she'd stepped out of the pages of a magazine. Her ash-blond hair fell across her shoulders. Her green eyes were clear and bright, no evidence of crying. No makeup, but her skin glowed, a good trick under the fluorescent jail lights where everyone looks jaundiced and some probably are.

I looked straight into those bright eyes and said, "Before you say anything else, remember this. If you tell me something now, I can't let you testify differently." This is the ethical lawyer's way of telling a client to be circumspect, even when talking to your very own mouthpiece. I won't lie to a judge or let a client do it. But I'm not averse to advising my presumably innocent client to tell me what the hell happened only after I explain what makes a better story in the eyes of the blindfolded lady with the scales.

"You're charged with first-degree murder," I told her. "It's a capital crime requiring premeditation. There is no question as to identity. You walked into a crowded bar and shot your father, not once, but three times."

"It would have been four, but I fainted," she said.

"I think we can rule out accident."

She gave me a little smile, dimples showing under the prominent cheekbones. "Do you know what Rusty says about you?"

"Probably that I was a sucker for