Kill All the Lawyers (3 page)

"You can't bribe a witness."

"I'm paying her to tell the truth. If I don't, she'll lie and we'll lose."

"It's still illegal."

"When are you gonna grow up? When the law doesn't work, you've got to work the law."

Smack.
Vic slapped him. Hard. Sparring partners instead of law partners.

So just how would Victoria react if he told her the truth?

"Oh, by the way, Vic. State
versus
Kreeger. Forgot to tell you. I tanked the case."

She'd clobber him with his Barry Bonds rock-hard maple baseball bat. Or his Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, or Rafael Palmeiro models. Steve favored bats by baseball's most notoriously juiced players.

Or maybe not. Would she even believe him?

"You took a dive? You, the guy who cheats to win?"

As he walked through the front door, Steve decided to tell Victoria everything about the Kreeger case. What he did and why he did it.

Women appreciate honesty. He'd read that in one of Victoria's magazines, a relationship column tucked away in the ads for overpriced Italian footwear. Expose your doubts, express your fears, confess your weaknesses, and she'll be understanding and forgiving.

Okay, he'd bare his soul. He'd do it today. He made that promise to himself. He wished he had a Bible to swear on, wondering what happened to the one he lifted from a hotel room in Orlando.

* * *

"Ste-vie! Ste-vie!" A high-pitched whine.

"Wait up!" A second voice. Louder and more insistent.

The shouts came from somewhere between the photo studio and the wardrobe room.

Damn. If I don't hustle, they'll cut me off at the stairs.

"Stevie, wait!"

Steve heard the
clackety-clack
of leather hoofbeats, and in a second there they were. Lexy and Rexy. Pale blond twins. Models, six feet tall. As litigious as they were leggy.

One wore florescent orange spandex shorts and a white halter top. The other was in Daisy Duke cutoffs with a leopard-print halter. Both wore strappy sandals with stiletto heels that could take out an eye.

"You gotta help me," Lexy demanded. Or maybe it was Rexy. Who could tell?

"Got to," her sister agreed.

"What now, Lexy?" Taking a shot at the name. "I'm really busy."

"I'm Rexy! My belly button is an inny."

"And mine's an outy," Lexy confirmed.

"Everybody on South Beach knows that." Rexy shook a long index finger at him, the lacquered nail festooned with gold stars. "Margaux says you have to represent me. It's in your lease."

Margaux being the owner of Les Mannequins. Solomon & Lord got free office space under the litigate-for-rent clause he'd thought was such a great idea. Now he was spending half his time handling
mishegoss
for the models.

"Haven't I done enough for you two?" he asked.

"Hah." Rexy again.

He'd already gotten them handicapped parking stickers, successfully arguing that bulimia was as much a disability as paraplegia. He'd skated Lexy out of a RWI case—Rollerblading while intoxicated—even though she'd plowed into a group of tourists on Ocean Drive, knocking them over like bowling pins. And he'd beaten back a lawsuit against Rexy by an angry suitor who had spent two thousand bucks on dinner, drinks, a limo, and a Ricky Martin concert, only to have her go home with a member of the band.

"A man who dates a South Beach model takes the risk she'll be a rude, inconsiderate airhead," Steve had argued to the judge. Rexy thought he'd been brilliant.

Now the sisters blocked his path to the stairs, bony elbows akimbo, like wooden gates at a railroad crossing.

"Look at this!" Rexy waved an eight-by-ten flyer at him. An advertisement for a South Beach plastic surgeon with before-and-after shots of a woman's breasts. She pointed at the photo. "Can you believe
this
?"

"Boobs. What about them?"

"Don't you recognize them?" She yanked down her halter, exposing two coconut-size, gravity-defying breasts with pointy nipples.

"Ah," he said. "The afters." Suddenly, Steve was happy Victoria was across the causeway in the courthouse. Not that he kept his past a secret from her. Still, sleeping with a room-temperature IQ model wasn't something he'd post on his résumé. "They're your boobs, right?"

"You gotta sue that quack for my mental anguish." Rexy kept the top pulled down and stood, hipshot in model pose, as if Richard Avedon might record the moment for a coffee-table book. "A million dollars, at least."

Steve was about to say:
"A million bucks of mental anguish seems excessive for a twenty-dollar mind,"
then realized he'd told her that every time she wanted to sue someone.

"They're handing these out in the clubs," Rexy wailed, shaking the flyer in his face.

"I don't know, Rexy. Your face isn't even in the photo. What are your damages if you're the only one who knows it's you?"

"Are you nuts? You know how many guys already called me, saying they saw my tits on the way to the men's room?" She pulled her top back up, and Steve took the opportunity to brush past her and hightail it up the stairs.

"I'll go to the library, research the law," he called out, with as much sincerity as he could muster.

"Like you know where the library is," Rexy shot back.

At the top of the stairs, Steve was just about to open his reception room door when he heard a
thump,
followed by a woman's scream. Another
thump,
as if someone had bounced off a wall, then a woman's angry voice:
"No me toques, idiota!"

Cece's voice!

Steve threw open the door and saw a jumble of images. His secretary, Cece Santiago, in red panties and bra. A man hoisting her into the air, swinging her left and right, her feet sailing off the floor.

"Hey, put her down!" Steve thundered.

"Fuck you!" The man was bare-chested and big, with a watermelon gut. Mid-forties, face lathered in sweat. He wore suit pants with suspenders and was barefoot.

Steve crossed the room in two steps. The man let go in midswing, and Cece flew across her desk, knocking files to the floor.

Steve grabbed the man by the suspenders.

"Hey! I don't do guys," the man protested.

"Steve,
no te metas
!" Cece shouted, just as he uncorked a straight right hand. It caught the man flush on the chin, and he fell to the floor like a sack of mangoes.

"Jesus! You knocked him out," Cece wailed. "I'll never get paid."

"What are you talking about? This guy was trying to rape you."

Cece stepped into a pair of spandex workout shorts. "Rape me? That limp-dick pays me two hundred dollars to
wrestle.
"

"But you screamed. I thought—"

"I let him think he's gonna win, then I pin him."

"Here? In my office? You're running a sex service
here
?"

"Not sex,
jefe.
Fantasy wrestling. Some guys get off on it."

She tugged a sleeveless T-shirt over her head, her deltoids flexing, and the tattoo of a cobra coiling on her carved right bicep. Cece spent more time lifting than typing, and it showed, both in her ripped physique and in Steve's typo-laden legal briefs.

The guy moaned and tried to get to his feet.

"You all right, Arnie?" Cece asked.

"Gonna sue," the man mumbled, rubbing his jaw.

"Sorry I hit you, Arnie," Steve told him. "I didn't know."

"Yeah. Well, I know all about you, Solomon. I heard on the radio. You're that shyster who couldn't win a jaywalking case if the light was green."

"Aw, jeez."

"Gonna file criminal charges." Arnie grabbed his shirt from a corner of Cece's desk, picked up his socks and shoes from the floor, and hurried out the door.

"Are you gonna get in trouble,
jefe
?" Cece asked Steve.

"Me? What about you? This violates your probation."

"Doubt it. Arnie's my probation officer."

"No way."

"
Verdad, jefe
. On his reports, he says I enjoy competitive sports as a hobby."

Cece Santiago had been Steve's client before she became an employee. A little matter of beating the stuffing out of a cheating boyfriend, then driving his car off the boat ramp at Matheson Hammock.

Steve walked to his desk. "Do you think we can do a little work this morning, assuming it doesn't interfere with your hobby?"

"What work? Nobody called. Mail's not here yet. But you did get a personal delivery." She nodded toward the corner of the reception room.

Propped against the wall was a graphite pole, maybe eight feet long with a stainless-steel hook at the end.

"Fishing gaff," Steve said. "Who sent it?"

"
No sé.
It was outside when I opened up the store."

Steve picked up the gaff, hefted it, ran his hand over the sharp, lethal hook. "For landing big fish. Like marlin."

Kreeger on the radio. The marlin in the door. And now the gaff. It was all coming together, Steve thought, and he didn't like where it was heading.

Kreeger's telling me he's killed before, and he can kill again.

Steve felt a chill run up his spine. He sensed a presence behind him, whirled around, but no one was there.

The bastard's getting to me.

Which had to be part of Kreeger's plant, too. It would give him pleasure to inflict fear as well as pain.

"Deep-sea fishing?" Cece said. "Didn't you get seasick when you took Bobby on a paddle boat at Water World?"

"The gaff's not for me to use. It's to remind me of something."

"Of what,
jefe
?"

"Of the time a client of mine went fishing with someone else and only one of them came home."

SOLOMON'S LAWS

1. I'd rather lie to a judge than to the woman I love.

Four

LOGICAL LOVE

I hate lying. Strike that. I hate lying to someone I love.

Some lies were worse than others, Steve thought. In court, lies come in all shapes and sizes. Outright falsehoods, cautious evasions, clever prevarications. Lies are as plentiful as the silk-suited lawyers mouthing them. Not to mention clients, cops, witnesses, and the guy peddling stale empanadas on the courthouse steps. Judges and juries do not expect to be told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And their expectations are always fulfilled.

But you should not lie to the woman you love. This morning, Victoria had asked what happened with Kreeger, and Steve had skated around the thin ice of the truth. Now, headed to meet Victoria at a condo open house, he tried to work up the courage to tell her everything. Just as he passed Parrot Jungle on the MacArthur Causeway, his cell phone rang.

"If you been tuned to the AM dial, you ain't got no cheery smile."

Steve recognized the mellifluous voice. "Good morning, Sugar Ray."

Seven years earlier, when he prosecuted Kreeger, Ray Pincher was just another deputy in the major crimes unit. Now the ex–amateur boxer, ex–seminary student, ex–rap musician was the duly elected State Attorney of Miami-Dade County. "Too bad the dude got out the clink. That crook, that bum, that shady shrink."

"I didn't listen to the show," Steve said. Figuring he was the only one in town who hadn't heard Dr. Bill torch him.

"Said you were more crooked than a corkscrew. Lower than a rattlesnake's belly. As rotten as week-old snapper. And those were the compliments."

"So what? The man's a convicted felon. He's got zero credibility."

"You figure he knows what came down?"

Steve felt a chill. Why the hell bring that up? And on the phone yet? "You taping this call, Sugar Ray?"

"Now, that gives me pause."

"And probable cause?" Steve completed his rhyme.

Pincher laughed. "Golly, Solly. You must have a guilty conscience."

On Biscayne Boulevard now, Steve passed Freedom Tower, the Mediterranean Revival building some called Miami's Ellis Island. Hundreds of thousands of Cuban refugees were processed there in the 1960s. Now a developer planned to envelop it with a skyscraper.

"As I recall, Sugar Ray, your hands aren't exactly clean."

Pincher exhaled a breath that whistled through Steve's earpiece. "My job was to prosecute the dude. Yours was to defend him. I did
my
job, Solomon."

The conversation had taken a nasty turn. Was Pincher threatening him? "Why you calling me, Sugar Ray?"

"To say I can't protect you. If I'm subpoenaed, I'm gonna tell the truth. Only way I can get screwed is by covering for you. Malfeasance. Obstruction. Perjury."

"Hell, you do that before breakfast."

"Ain't gonna be funny, dude after your money."

"I don't have any, and Kreeger'd know that."

"Then he'll get excited to see you indicted."

Steve stayed silent. The conversation was sailing in rough waters. Approaching the Brickell Avenue Bridge, he beeped the horn at a lane-changer, a PT Cruiser with rental plates.
Damn tourists. Why don't they all stay at Disney World and let us clog our own streets?

Running late, he could picture Victoria impatiently tapping the toe of her hand-stitched pump on the marble floor of the high-rise condo. Steve's mood had dipped. His desire to buy overpriced real estate was waning by the minute.

"I never asked you to do anything wrong," Pincher continued. "You remember that, don't you, Solomon?"

Sure, he's recording this. Making exculpatory statements and trying to get my corroboration.

"Only thing I remember," Steve said, "when your wife was out of town, you asked me to fix you up with the Les Mannequins girls."

"You prick, Solomon."

"And now that I think about it, I seem to recall you asking where you could score some crystal meth."