Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (2 page)

But back to ethics. I’m not interested in
the rules made up by bar association bigwigs in three-piece suits
who gather in ritzy hotels to celebrate their own self-importance.
Their rules are intended to protect clients and industries with the
most money. It’s just like my old game, which they sissified to
protect the lah-de-dah quarterbacks. To me, a late hit is just a
reminder that football is a contact sport.

Anyway, as far as I could tell, no one in
courtroom 4—2 of the Justice Building was zealously engaged in
truth seeking at the moment. My client had a more elementary quest.
Blinky Baroso merely sought a not-guilty verdict (“Gimme a big
N.G., Jake”) so he could resume his career of shams, swindles, and
sleight-of-hand business deals.

Judge Herman Gold, peering at us over his
rimless spectacles, just wanted a verdict—any verdict—in time to
play a couple of quinielas at the jai alai fronton.

Chief Prosecutor Abe Socolow, looking
appropriately funereal in his black suit, wanted another slam-dunk
guilty verdict to add to his ninety-six percent conviction
rate.

The jurors gave no
indication of wanting anything at all, although number five, a
female bus driver, looked like she had to pee. It was a fairly
typical jury by Miami standards. Besides the bus driver, we had a
body piercer (noses, nipples, and ears), a shark hunter, a lobster
poacher, a county kosher meat inspector, and a self-proclaimed show
girl, who was telling half the truth, since
she
was a
he
who performed at a cross-dresser’s
club on South Beach.

The jurors sat, poker-faced (except for the
squirming bus driver), occasionally shivering in the
air-conditioning, usually staring into space, once in a while
smiling at an inadvertent witticism. Trials are usually so
stultifyingly boring that the slightest glimmer of humor is nearly
as welcome as the mid-afternoon recess. When I was a newly minted
lawyer, having just passed the bar in what was most likely a
computer glitch, a judge asked my first client, a repeat offender
car thief, if he wanted a bench trial or a jury trial.

“
Jury trial,” my client
responded, somewhat hesitantly.

“
Do you know the
difference?” the judge asked.

“
Sure, Judge. A jury trial
is six ignorant people instead of one.”

Ah, from the mouths of babes and felons.

***

Abe Socolow was still droning on about the
evil deeds of Blinky Baroso, whose eyes fluttered three times
whenever he was nervous, or whenever he told a fib. His eyes had
been flapping like Venetian blinds the last four days.

“
You have heard the
testimony,” Socolow said, his long, lean frame hunched over the
podium. “Louie Baroso and Kyle Hornback are con men, pure and
simple.”

Blinky leaned close and
gave me another whiff of his partially digested
sopa de frijoles negros
. “Nobody
calls me Louie,” he protested, as if we could use that point on
appeal.

“
These unscrupulous men
used what is known as affinity fraud,” Socolow continued. “By
pretending to be born-again Christians, they ingratiated themselves
into the lives of decent, God-fearing citizens at the West Kendall
Baptist Church. They conned hundreds of thousands of dollars from
their victims, who were taken in by promises of huge returns on
their investments. These criminals wove a clever web of deception,
promising both profits and holy redemption. The parishioners,
honest citizens all, were induced to spend their retirement funds
on diamond investment scams only to learn that Mr. Baroso and Mr.
Hornback never bought the diamonds. Where did the money go? Into
the pockets of Louie Baroso and his underling, Kyle
Hornback.”

Blinky whispered something in my ear that
sounded like caveat emptor.

“
Next, you heard proof of
the real estate scam.
Su casa, mi casa
. Your house, my house.
You heard how Mr. Baroso was a regular visitor in
the real estate deed room of the courthouse...”

“
Is that a crime?” Baroso
grumbled.

“
...where he researched
titles on various expensive homes. Then Mr. Hornback, armed with a
fake driver’s license and the legal description of the property,
persuaded banks that he was the owner, and secured loans on other
people’s property. Again, honest citizens were shocked to learn
that second and third mortgages were recorded on their
properties.”

“
So what, the title
insurance company paid,” Blinky whined. “The owners didn’t get
hurt.”

At the far end of the defense table, Kyle
Hornback, a handsome young man whose clean, chiseled features
disguised a reservoir of guile, was scratching furiously on a legal
pad. If the jurors looked at his lawyer, H. T. Patterson, they
would see a smile so confident, it stopped just short of smugness.
H.T. had been around long enough to know the first rule of the
trial lawyer: Never let them see your fear.

“
Now, when I sit down,”
Socolow continued, removing his eyeglasses and pinching the top of
his nose, “Mr. Lassiter is going to tell you that there is no
direct evidence against his client, Louie Baroso. He is going to
tell you that all the victims dealt with the salesman, Kyle
Hornback.”

I just love it when the opposition makes my
closing argument for me.

“
But you are entitled to
use your common sense. Who was the boss? Whose name appeared on all
the fraudulent paperwork? Who gave Kyle Hornback his marching
orders? You all know who.”

Or was it
whom
? I never know the
difference.

“
Louie Baroso, that’s who,”
Socolow announced, cranking up the volume.

Just then, the ornate wooden door to the
courtroom opened with its usual squeak. Three of the jurors looked
that way, and three didn’t. One of the alternates sneaked a peek,
and the other didn’t. Okay, so half were paying close attention.
About average.

I swung around, too. A tall young woman
walked through the door and down the aisle that split the nearly
empty gallery. She sat down at the end of one of the church pews in
the first row.

Josefina Jovita Baroso. I used to call her
Jo Jo, although I suppose the correct pronunciation would be Ho Ho.
And we did have some laughs, as well as tears.

“
Why’s your sister here?” I
whispered.

Blinky shrugged. “To wish me bad luck. Maybe
you, too. Too much history.”

***

History
.

Blinky was right. How many years since we
had met? I was still playing ball, Blinky was a small-time bookie
who hadn’t yet Americanized his name by adding an “o” to Luis, and
Jo Jo was a poli-sci major at Florida State. Blinky asked me to
Christmas dinner at his mother’s home on Fonseca, just a block off
Ponce de Leon in Little Havana. Why not? I’d blown five grand with
him during the last season alone, without once betting on a
Dolphins game. I’ve got ethics, you know.

Senora Baroso was cooking a
whole pig,
lech
ó
n asado
, in
the backyard when Josefina Jovita walked through the wrought-iron
gate past the lawn statue of the Virgin Mary. Jo Jo was toting her
books and laundry in an army-green duffel bag, and she looked at me
with bright, dark, fearless eyes. We sat outside at a redwood
picnic table, telling our life stories while sharing the
juca con mojo
, and over
espresso and flan, I asked whether she’d like to be my guest at the
Jets game Sunday, maybe come over to the house afterward. She
didn’t say no.

History
.

We became friends, then lovers. Looking
back, I cared more for her than she did for me. To her, I was a
project. Mature beyond her years, Jo Jo encouraged me to apply to
law school when my demi-career was fading. My other choices were
tending bar or becoming the assistant to the regional vice
president of a beer distributor. I went to law school, and so did
she. But we headed down different paths. I always rooted for the
underdog, so the P.D.’s office was a natural. She was less
forgiving of human failings, so the prosecutor’s office was a
second home.

Josefina Jovita Baroso was attractive and
bright and combative, and seemed to enjoy all three. We debated
politics, religion, sports, and her brother. We didn’t agree on
anything except the virtues of hard pretzels and cold beer. She
voted straight Republican, and like most Cuban Americans, viewed
Ronald Reagan as a combination of Jose Marti and Teddy Roosevelt. I
always thought of him as a Notre Dame running hack, and I never
liked Notre Dame.

Eventually, we broke up. Okay, so I broke up
with her, but there were no major explosions, just a disengagement
of lives going different directions. Blinky kept me informed of
major events in her life. On a ski trip out west, Jo Jo met a man
and had a whirlwind romance. She took a leave of absence from the
state attorney’s office, spent six months with the guy on his
Colorado ranch, but came back alone. On the few occasions we would
run into each other, she never referred to the relationship. To
this day, I don’t know what happened, though Blinky says it’s
simple. “She busted his chops, like she did to you, to me, to
everybody. Nobody measures up to Josie.”

***

I caught another glimpse of her over my
shoulder. She wore a beige cotton dress that stopped just above the
knee. Her dark hair was pulled back in a pony tail, emphasizing the
strong bone structure of her face. It wasn’t her trial uniform, and
because of the conflict of interest, she couldn’t be assisting
Socolow with the case.

I must have been staring at her.

“
Hard to believe she’s my
sister, isn’t it?” Blinky whispered, reading my
thoughts.

I glanced at Josefina Baroso and then at
Blinky Baroso. My client resembled a sausage stuffed into an
Italian silk suit. A green Italian silk suit that shimmered under
the fluorescent glare of the courtroom lights. Jo Jo was tall and
slim and in an earlier age would have been called elegant.

I turned my attention back
to Abe Socolow, who was prattling on about the utter depravity of
preying on the virtuous. He reminded the jury of the witnesses he
had brought before them, a retired airline mechanic, an Amway
distributor, a widowed schoolteacher. Abe believed in swamping
jurors with testimony. As Charlie Riggs, the retired coroner, likes
to say, “
Testis unus, testis
nullus
.” One witness, no
witness.

When the victims are
likable, the prosecutor’s job is easy. Put ‘em up there, extract a
tear or two, and get a guilty verdict in time for everyone to get
home to watch
Roseanne
.

Socolow seemed to be winding down now. “You
folks are contributing to a sacred function of government.’’ Abe
was not a naturally down-home guy, but he was getting into his
flag-waving, Fourth of July, you-folks shtick, and it sounded
pretty good. “As envisioned by our Founding Fathers, you folks from
the community, not some wigged and robed judges, are to determine
what is true and what is false, who is innocent and who is guilty.
And when you look at this man…” He pointed at poor Blinky again.
“What do you see?”

I couldn’t help myself. My eyes darted to my
client, just as did the jurors’. I didn’t know what they saw, but
to me, he looked like a big, fat crook.

“
You see a thief, a con
man, a deceiver,” Socolow said, lest there be any mistake. He was
dying to mention Baroso’s criminal record but he couldn’t get it
into evidence because I had kept Blinky off the stand. A prior
conviction can only be used for impeachment, and that was enough
reason to keep Blinky at the defense table during the trial. So was
the nervous twitch that made Blinky look like a pathological liar
when he was giving his name and address.

“
So on behalf of the people
of the state of Florida ...”

All of them, I wondered?

“
...I ask that you convict
both defendants on each and every count of grand theft, fraud,
racketeering, and conspiracy. Thank you and God bless
you.”

Socolow gathered his notes from the podium,
took down

his Technicolor charts that detailed various
feats of grand larceny, and lowered himself majestically into his
seat at the prosecution table. I stood up, cleared my throat, and
thanked the jurors for their rapt attention to the case, but I left
God out of the equation. Then I pointed to the U.S. flag behind
Judge Gold and started talking about the Constitution, Mom, and
apple pie. I wasn’t about to let Abe out-folks me.

“
Our great democracy
depends on citizens like you, leaving your homes, your jobs, your
loved ones and serving as the last bastion of protection for your
fellow citizens ...”

I always try to make jury service sound like
joining the Marines.

“
We have the greatest legal
system in the world ...”

Excluding trial by combat,
of course
.

“
Now Mr. Socolow and I have
other cases to try, other fish to fry…”

Other fish to fry? Did I say
that?
Sometimes the mouth moves faster
than the brain.

“
But Louis Baroso has only
one case ...”

Pending, that is.

“
It is here and it is now.
This is Louis Baroso’s case. This is his life, his fate, and it’s
in your hands.”