Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (3 page)

I shot a look at my client. He blinked at
me. Thrice.

“
Our Constitution provides
certain rules that protect men and women accused of crimes. Anyone
accused is innocent until proven guilty, innocent until you say
otherwise, innocent until and unless you conclude after considering
all of the evidence, after searching your conscience, after using
all your powers of common sense and intelligence and fairness, that
the state has proven guilt beyond and to the exclusion of every
reasonable doubt. A jury’s job is not to presume evidence where
there is none. It is not to assume evidence, to fill in evidence,
to believe there must be evidence just because the prosecutor says
so. We don’t guess people into jail. We don’t assume people into
jail.

No, the jury’s job is to look critically at
the evidence and ask, ‘Did the state prove its case beyond a
reasonable doubt?’

I blathered on for a while about reasonable
doubt. That’s what you do when you don’t have much of a defense.
When I have favorable evidence, I use it. Hell, I hoist it up the
flagpole and salute it. Lacking a defense, I tap-dance around the
state’s evidence and say it just isn’t enough.

“
Now, Mr. Socolow told you
the evidence
indicates
that Mr. Baroso conspired with Mr. Hornback. The
evidence
implies
that Mr. Baroso profited from Mr. Hornback’s endeavors. The
evidence
suggests
that Mr. Baroso knew what was going on. Well, there’s a
phrase for that kind of evidence, and you’ve all heard it. It’s
called circumstantial evidence ...”

The jurors nodded en masse. Good, they’d
heard the phrase on Larry King.

“
...And I’m going to tell
you a story about circumstantial evidence. A mother bakes a
blueberry pie and puts it on a shelf to cool. She tells her little
boy not to touch that pie, but he climbs up on the shelf and digs
in anyway. Now he hears his mom coming into the kitchen, so he
grabs his pet cat and rubs the cat’s face in the pie. The mother
walks in and yells for the boy’s father. The father takes the cat
out to the barn, and then, boom! There’s a shotgun blast. The boy
is still there in the kitchen licking off his fingers, and he says,
‘Poor Kitty. Just another victim of circumstantial evidence.’
“

I paused just long enough to let the jurors
chuckle. Then, becoming serious, I lowered my voice and said, “I’m
pleading with you not to let Louis Baroso be another victim of
circumstantial evidence.”

This time, only two jurors nodded, and one
of them might have been asleep. I wrapped it up with an appeal to
the basic decency of the American people, then sat down. Blinky
gave my arm a good squeeze and patted me on the back.

I looked into the gallery again at Jo Jo
Baroso, who avoided my gaze.

“
We were never close,”
Blinky said, watching me. “I was hot-wiring cars when Josie was
still making mud pies. She always thought she was better than
me.”

Which didn’t exactly put her in an exclusive
club. “So what’s she doing here?” I asked for the second time.

“
She hates me,” Blinky
answered, as if that said everything.

Looking back now, I know that wasn’t it at
all.

Chapter 2

The Shyster, the Grifter,
and the Lanky Brunette

We all have our little rituals. On the
morning of the last day of trial, I always slice a mango and a
papaya for breakfast, then toss two paperback books into my
briefcase. You never know how long the jury will be out, and
reading keeps me from replaying the case in my mind,
second-guessing myself and cursing the decision to go to law school
instead of doing something productive like bulking up on steroids
and joining the World Wrestling Federation.

An hour after the jury disappeared into its
tomblike room, Blinky Baroso and I headed down the street to the
Gaslight Lounge, where many a lawyer has washed away the memories
of judges and juries in rivers of icy gin. The lounge was dark and
windowless with red Naugahyde barstools. Even half empty, the place
reverberated with the pleasant clink of ice against glass.

I don’t chitchat when the
jury is out, so I sat there, sipping a Samuel Adams draft, reading
Nelson DeMille’s
The Gold
Coast
, a tale of an honest lawyer who is
compromised by a charming Mafioso, when Blinky Baroso started his
chatterbox routine.

Some clients clam up when waiting for a
verdict. They become pale, withdrawn. Maybe they’re apologizing to
their Maker, making silent promises to go straight if only they’re
given a second (or fifth or sixth) chance. Other clients become
nonstop motor mouths.

Nerves.

Blinky Baroso, his face flushed, his pudgy
hands gesticulating, was keeping his mind occupied and mine
distracted with a loud soliloquy retracing the many stages of his
misspent life. Plopped onto his barstool, he used a nail file to
amputate the filters of an endless chain of Marlboros, which he
occasionally smoked, the ashes dropping into his lap as he told his
tales. He interrupted himself every few minutes to ask, “That
right, Jake?” which was probably intended to determine whether I
was listening.

“
Maybe I should go to
Russia,” Blinky said, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “There’s no more
free-enterprise system in this country. Too many controls. Too many
regulations. I remember when I started selling waterfront
homesites. We made a killing for what, eighteen months. Then those
rubes from Tallahassee came clown here in their Sears sports coats
and short-sleeve shirts. Restraining orders, permanent injunctions,
cease and desist orders. Jeez, all the profits went to the
attorneys. That right, Jake?”

I drained my beer and put
down the book. “The homesites weren’t waterfront, Blinky. They
were
under water
.
You were selling swampland in the Everglades.” I
had
been listening. He
brushed me off with a wave of his hand, his diamond pinky ring
sparkling, even in the muted light. I must be slipping. Rule number
one for trial: no gold chains, no flashy rings, no dark glasses.
The trick is make a hoodlum look like a choirboy.

I ordered my second beer and Blinky went
into a loud lament about the demise of his precious metals
business. “Who would think you could sell gold bullion on the
phone? Who the hell thought that farmers in Iowa would give their
credit card numbers on the basis of cold calls? Jake, it was a
thing of beauty. The world headquarters of Million-Dollar Minerals
Inc. was just up the road in Lauder-damn-dale. You should have seen
it Jake, thirty salesmen, twenty-five hundred calls a day.”

Actually, I saw it the day the state
padlocked the doors. Blinky’s world headquarters was a boiler room
operation where they sold pieces of paper attesting to the
ownership of precious minerals. Blinky swears he would have
delivered the gold, too, if he hadn’t presold the stuff at twenty
dollars an ounce less than it would have cost to buy. Like smoking,
breaching contracts was a nasty habit for Blinky.

“
The market was moving. If
the damn bureaucrats had given me time, I could have come back.
That right, Jake?”

Before I had a chance not to answer, I
became aware of a presence just behind me at the bar. My first
thought was that Ernie Cartwright, the ninety-year-old asthmatic
bailiff, was there to inform me that the verdict was in, but we
still had time for a round together if I was paving. My second
thought was that Ernie Cartwright doesn’t wear Panther perfume.

“
Well, well,” our visitor
said, malice in her voice, “the shyster and the
grifter.”

“
Gimme a break, Josie,”
Blinky responded, blowing a cloud of smoke toward his
sister.

She stood there a foot from me, her head
cocked, her hip shot, her look challenging look. I had seen it
plenty of times before, but it had been years since I stared into
those dark eyes from this distance. She was standing, and I was
sitting, and she looked down at me from a position of geographical
and moral superiority. I looked back with my crooked grin that had
been good enough for several busloads of cheerleaders, flight
attendants, and dental hygienists.

She shook her head, seeming to dismiss me.
Looking at her brother, she said, “Thanks to your smooth-talking
friend here, you’ve had more breaks than you deserve.”

“
C’mon, Jo Jo,” I said.
“Why not call me ‘Jake’? Smoothtalking friend sounds so
impersonal.”

Her eyes glinted at me and her dark
complexion seemed to glow. Josefina Jovita Baroso was a
self-confident woman with what my granny would call gumption. She
reminded me of Dashiell Hammett’s “lanky brunette with a wicked
jaw.”

“
You’re looking good, Jo
Jo,” I told her.

“
Don’t change the subject,”
she said.

“
I didn’t know there was
one, except that old standard, my many personal
failings.”

Blinky nudged me. “Join the club. Nobody’s
as perfect as Josie.

She narrowed her eyes at me, or maybe it was
the noxious cigarette smoke blinding her. “Just like old times,
isn’t it? Luis is in trouble, and Jake is here to help.”

“
I know it doesn’t rank
with feeding starving children or even prosecuting shoplifters, but
it’s my job. And for what it’s worth, your brother is my
friend.’’

Without an invitation, she swiveled a hip
onto the barstool next to mine and gave me a little smile. A very
little smile. “My brother,” she said, rolling the words on her
tongue to see how they tasted, “is a major embarrassment. My
brother is a lazy, cowardly criminal, and you are his
mouthpiece.”

“
Blinky’s not lazy,” I
said, in my client’s partial defense.

“
I don’t have to listen to
this garbage.” Blinky slid off his barstool. “I’m gonna take a
leak.”

I turned my attention to Josefina. Her mouth
was wide, the lips full, the face oval with prominent
cheekbones.

“
Look, Jo Jo, I could give
you the standard spiel about how every client deserves the best
representation possible, but I won’t. I won’t apologize for
defending your brother because I like him. I’d like him even more
if he went straight, and maybe he will. I once got him a job
selling time-share condos in Sarasota.”

“
I know all about it. When
sales were slow, he stripped the units. Everything from the
microwave and VCR right down to the copper wiring.”

“
That was never proved,” I
said, sounding like a shyster, even to myself. “Blinky wasn’t even
charged.”

“
Thanks to you,” she said
with some bitterness. “Look, Jake, you may not believe me, but this
isn’t personal.”

“
Really, do you chase down
every defense lawyer to criticize his character, or just the ones
you’ve slept with?”

Unlike her brother, she didn’t blink. “That
was beneath you, Jake. You weren’t always like that, but I suppose
that’s what comes from hanging around the Justice Building,
spending every day with sociopaths.”

“
Some of the judges are
okay.”

“
You’re not funny, Jake.
Not to me, anyway. You’re just an aging jock who’s never grown
up.”

“
Is this the part I’m not
supposed to take personally?”

She sighed. “Okay, you’re right. I’m
disappointed in you. You had such potential, but you never explored
it. You never reached higher. You were a second-rate football
player, but maybe you couldn’t help that. You went to a second-rate
law school, and maybe that’s the best you could have done, too. Now
you have a second-rate practice, and you seem happy with it, and
that’s what disappoints me so much. You don’t strive anymore. You
take pride in negatives, like that stupid line you always say,
you’ve never been this, you’ve never been that ...”

“
It’s true. I’ve never been
disbarred, committed, or convicted of moral turpitude, and the only
time I was arrested, it was a case of mistaken identity. I didn’t
know the guy I hit was a cop.”

She didn’t laugh or even crack a smile. “I
don’t blame you for the way you are, Jake. You were raised without
a family, and it made you a loner. You’re really dysfunctional when
it comes to relationships.”

“
I hate words like
‘dysfunctional.’ It’s right up there with ‘prioritize’ in bullshit
quotient. Besides, I had a family. I had my granny.”

“
That’s what I mean. You
were raised on moonshine whiskey by an old woman who’s half
loco
. You had no parents,
no siblings, and it shows. Where do you hang out? The
morgue!
Dios mio!
Who’s your best friend? A retired coroner who still does
autopsies for fun! When you picked me up on Saturday nights, you
smelled of formaldehyde.”

She was shaking her head. I seem to have
depressed her.

Then she reached over and took a sip of my
beer, leaving a faint impression of lipstick on the glass. It was
the most intimate gesture she’d shared with me in years.

“
You know what Abe Socolow
says about you?” she asked, sliding the beer in front of
me.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“
That you’re not as bad as
most defense lawyers. Is that how you want to be known?”

“
Abe’s a good man. A bit
rigid, haughty, and self-righteous, but what prosecutor isn’t?” I
smiled and hoisted my diminishing beer in her direction.