Lassiter 08 - Lassiter (6 page)

A trial was not what she had been planning. That was a secret she would have to keep from Lassiter. She had not come to Miami to prosecute the man who murdered her sister. She had come here to kill him.

Twenty minutes after leaving the video store, I parked in front of City Hall, a waterfront art deco building that in the 1930s had been the terminal for Pan Am’s seaplanes. I took a shortcut through the adjacent boatyard, dodging several oily puddles at the entrance to Scotty’s Landing, a ramshackle fish joint next to the marina. A few yards away, sailboats were docked, halyards pinging in the wind. A three-quarters moon hung over the bay.

I spotted Amy at a redwood picnic table, closest to the water.

“Thanks for meeting me.” I slid onto the bench across from her.

“Who’s the guy you found?” Small talk was not in the lady’s repertoire.

I told her about Charles Ziegler and Charlie’s Girlz and the porn video I watched. A shudder went through Amy’s body, and I gave her a moment to compose herself.

Then I told her Krista was last seen heading to a party at Ziegler’s house. I didn’t mention that I’d met the guy for about a minute, because that would have meant coming clean about my one-nighter with Krista. Amy had no need for the information, and I had no desire to take any more crap from her.

“Let me tell you my plan,” I said.

“Thanks, but I don’t need your plan. I’ll confront Ziegler myself.”

“No, you won’t. He’s a big deal in this town. He’ll have lawyers, layers
of people to get through. Besides, we’ve got nothing on him. There were lots of men at his parties. We may have only one chance to talk to Ziegler, and we need to do our homework first.”

She nailed me with a cold, hard, insurance investigator’s look. “Just what homework do
we
need to do?”

“We should pay a visit to Alex Castiel, the State Attorney.”

“The guy you claim is a friend.”

“We play basketball in the lawyers’ league.”

“That’s it? You dribble to each other?”

I didn’t explain that “dribble to each other” made no sense, basketball-wise. “Castiel has a staff of investigators,” I said. “He works with cops. He can subpoena witnesses.”

“Just how good of friends are you?” Suspicion laced her voice, or maybe that was her normal tone.

“A long time ago, I did a big favor for him.”

“What kind of favor?”

“The secret kind. What I’m saying, he owes me.”

It was true. I’d been carrying the guy’s IOU for a long time, never intending to use it. But then, I’d never been accused of making a teenage girl vanish before.

“So if you’re ready to work together,” I said, “I have a bunch of questions about Krista that will help me get started.”

Amy studied me, her eyes seeming to search for deception. I looked past her to an older couple pushing a cart of groceries along the pier. Tanned the color of a richly brewed tea, the couple was headed toward a Kaufman, a deep-water cruiser with a striking name on its transom,
Never Lost, Just Hard to Find
. I imagined them sailing around the world, but maybe that was my dream, not theirs.

“So how about it?” I prodded her. “Are we a team?”

“Do you win most of your cases, Lassiter?”

“Not even half. But damn few of my customers are innocent.”

“Customers …?”

“All I ask is a check that doesn’t bounce and a story that doesn’t make the judge burst out laughing.”

“Nice.”

“Hey, they don’t call us ‘sharks’ for our ability to swim.”

I figured she’d never buy it if I pretended to be Atticus Finch.

“Do you have any siblings, Lassiter?”

“A sister. Half sister, really. My mom had her out of wedlock after my father was killed down in the Keys. Why do you ask?”

“Krista’s my half sister, too. We have the same father.”

We were both quiet a moment, absorbing that small bit of commonality.

“Do you love her?” Amy asked. “Do you love your sister.”

Another weird question but I went along. “Janet’s a crack whore and a worse mother than Octomom, but yeah, I guess I love her.”

“If someone killed her, what would you do?”

“I’d go after him. Hard.”

Her eyes warmed up just a bit. It was the answer she wanted to hear. Better yet, it was true. “What do you need to know about Krista?”

That seemed to be her way of welcoming me aboard.

“Everything. About her, about you. About the Larkins of Toledo, Ohio.”

Amy looked off toward the bay, her sunset eyes seeming to reflect the moonlight. She told me about their father, Frank Larkin. After divorcing Krista’s mother, he married again, and his new wife gave birth to Amy. The two girls were close, even with the six-year age difference. Amy idolized her older sister. Krista was popular, smart, pretty. A cheerleader, but a secret one.

“Krista hid her uniform in her locker at school. She told Mom she was at Bible study group when they practiced or had games.”

Krista’s double life, it seemed, had started early.

“Why’d she run away?” I asked.

“Do you believe Jesus is the son of God?”

The question came so far out of left field it was beyond the bleachers. A waiter came over, giving me time to formulate an answer while I ordered a beer, smoked fish dip, conch fritters, and jalapeño poppers. Amy opted for white wine.

“I believe if there’s an all-seeing God, he must have his eyes closed. The universe is chaos. The Big Bang banged. Little molecules grew into big molecules, and after a thousand millennia, something slithered out of the swamp and turned into the bloodthirsty animal we call man.”

She looked as if I’d dropped my pants at Sunday vespers.

“No disrespect intended,” I added.

“How do you live your life with such feelings?”

“I try to do the least damage possible to people and God’s green earth.”

“
God’s
green earth?”

“I’m hedging my bets.”

Amy fiddled with her napkin. “Mom was a Higher Life Pentecostal. Dad sort of went along, but he drew the line at speaking in tongues. Krista refused to go to church. Her way of rebelling against my mom, her stepmom. Krista taunted her. Smoked and drank and ran around with boys. One night, I overheard Mom on the phone, talking to someone about an intervention. Kidnapping Krista, taking her someplace where the church would program her.”

It wasn’t hard to figure out what happened next. “You told Krista your mom was gonna snatch her.”

She nodded. “The next morning Krista was gone. Never even said good-bye.”

Headed to South Beach to be a supermodel, I guessed. Glamour and fame just a Greyhound ride away.

“If I’d kept my mouth shut, Krista never would have left.” Amy choked on her words. It was the first emotion, other than anger, I’d seen cross her face.

“You did what any sister would do.”

As she made an effort not to sob, I listened to the groan of hulls against pilings, giving her a moment to mourn all over again. It only took a moment, and she composed herself.

“If Krista didn’t say good-bye, how’d you know she came down here?” I asked.

“She called me after a week, said she was sleeping on the beach. She’d met an older guy who said she could make some money modeling, maybe get into the movies.”

“I don’t suppose she mentioned a name.”

Amy shook her head. “No, but now I guess it was Charlie Ziegler.”

“What did you tell your parents?”

“Nothing. Krista made me promise not to. A few months went by, and someone called Dad. He wouldn’t say who.”

Sonia Majeski, I knew.

“Dad just went to the airport, and when he came home, he said Krista had died in a boating accident in Florida, and her body was never found. He said we needed to get on with our lives.”

“When did you realize your father was lying?”

“Not until he died six weeks ago. I came across his journals and the photo from the strip club. Krista was dead to him, so he decided she had to be dead to me, too.”

That explained why it took Amy all these years to begin looking for her sister. I processed that and tried to figure just what it must have been like for an eleven-year-old girl growing up in that house. Thinking maybe I should cut Amy a break, given what she’d been through.

“Tomorrow, we’ll pay a visit to the State Attorney,” I told her. “Things are gonna start rolling.”

“You haven’t mentioned a fee. How much will this cost me?”

“Nothing. Not a dime. This one’s not about money.”

The next morning, I was late for our meeting with State Attorney Castiel. Unavoidably detained, as they say. The jury had reached a verdict in Pepito Dominguez’s DUI trial. So now I stood in Judge Philbrick’s courtroom, arms folded across my chest, waiting for the clerk to announce the verdict.

A shitty little misdemeanor, the equivalent of powder-puff football in a tackle league. Still, my heart pounded.

Yeah, I know I said I didn’t care. But now, with seconds to go, I was the guy on trial. The jury was about to rule on
me
.

It’s always like this. I want to win
.

And fast. Amy was waiting for me upstairs in the lobby of the State Attorney’s Office.

The gallery was empty, except for a couple of seniors who came in for the air-conditioning, and dozed off in the back row. CNN had chosen not to cover the trial, and legal scholars somehow never showed up.

Judge Philbrick asked the magic question: “Has the jury reached a verdict?”

The jury foreman gave the right answer: “We have, Your Honor.”

The foreman handed a slip of paper to the bailiff, who carried it to the judge, who glanced at it and passed it on to the female clerk, sitting directly in front of the bench.

“The clerk shall publish the verdict,” the judge said, in stentorian tones.

The clerk, a fifty-ish woman with eyeglasses slung around her neck on a chain of imitation pearls, squinted at the page, then read aloud: “We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty.”

She notched an eyebrow on the word “not.”

The judge nodded, the prosecutor scowled, and the jurors started gathering their things. Pepito Dominguez threw his arms around me. “Papa said you were the best! And you are. Thanks, man!”

I peeled Pepito’s hands off my shoulders. “You’re welcome. Tell your old man the bill is in the mail.”

“How ’bout I buy you a drink?”

“You shitting me?”

“Let’s hit Lario’s. Couple pitchers of margaritas. Place is full of models.”

I wanted to bitch-slap the kid. I also wanted to keep my Bar ticket, and the folks in Tallahassee have warned me, scolded me, and placed me on double-secret probation several times. “Didn’t you just get out of New Horizons?”

“My old man put me in, but I didn’t need no rehab.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have been upset. The little prick was grateful, and so many clients aren’t. If you win, they think, Hey, I’m innocent, why’d I need you? If you lose, they blame you.

I jabbed a finger into the kid’s bony chest. “I’m gonna be watching you. And if I see you within fifty yards of a bottle, I’m gonna kick your ass.”

Looking confused, Pepito tried to work up a cool retort, but his brain cells wouldn’t cooperate. Finally, he said, “I thought we could hang together, even though you’re, like, an old dude.”

“Did you hear me? I represented you because I like your father. But I don’t like you. Why don’t you get a job and stop sponging off your parents?”

“I wanted to talk to you about that, too.”

“What?”

“Dad said maybe you could hire me.”

“Doing what?”

“I’ve always thought it’d be cool to be a P.I.”

“Forget it. Tell your dad nothing doing.”

The kid’s old man, Pepe Dominguez, owned Blue Sky Bail Bonds. Pepe
sent me clients, and unlike most bail bondsmen, never demanded kickbacks.

Now I turned to his punk-ass son. “You
want
to be a P.I. So you figure someone will just hand it to you? Ever think there might be some training involved? Some schooling? Some work? Your problem is, you have a great father but you’re a rotten kid.”

“I’m gonna tell Dad you dissed me.” A sissy little whine.

“Tell him there’s a limit to my friendship.”

It was not the last lie I was to tell that day.

State Attorney Alejandro Castiel was waiting in his office atop the Justice Building. Amy had dressed for the occasion, a white silk blouse with girly ruffles down the front and a form-fitting navy skirt that ended just above a pair of lovely knees. She looked both professional and demure.

I introduced her to Castiel, who flashed his politician’s smile as he steered us to comfy chairs, then leaned against the edge of his desk like a helpful doctor in a TV commercial.

He wore a dark Italian suit and was so deeply tanned he wouldn’t need makeup if Channel 4 wanted a quick quote on the latest battle for justice. His hair—flecks of gray at the temples—was swept straight back like a young Pat Riley of Miami Heat fame.

My goal was straightforward enough. Convince Castiel to open an investigation into the disappearance of Krista Larkin eighteen years ago. He could start by questioning Charles Ziegler, his party guests, and a biker named Snake if he could be found.

“You putting on weight, Jake?” It was Alex’s shoulder punch, a guy’s greeting.

“Don’t start,” I said.

“I’m gonna hang 30 on you this week.”

I sucked in my gut and said, “I still own you in the paint.”

He laughed and explained to Amy that we played against each other in
Lawyers’ League basketball. She replied that I’d already told her, and isn’t it nice that boys can still be boys as they crept toward middle age?

Alex Castiel—“Alejandro” too long for a campaign poster—was a born politician. Miami knew his story well. The Castiels were Sephardic Jews who had emigrated from Spain to Cuba two centuries before Fidel Castro was born. So, Alejandro was a Jewbano. A crossover candidate, he spoke Spanish fluently and knew enough Yiddish jokes to make the yentas laugh. He won the election in a landslide of
pastelitos
and matzoh balls. Some people mentioned Castiel as a possible candidate for governor. I thought the guy could go even higher.