Paul Levine - Trial and Error

“I know the rule. But I’m no fool.” Pincher stepped into the jury room and, with a slight bow, held the door open, waiting for her to enter the interior room.

An odd feeling came over Victoria once inside. It was a Spartan place, having twelve chairs, one table, and no windows. Fleetingly, she wished she had heard all the debates that had taken place in this room. What a primer that would be for any trial lawyer.

“Hector Diaz paid me a visit this morning,” Pincher said.

The U.S. Attorney. Victoria had never met the man, but she knew Diaz’s reputation as a political opportunist.

Pincher paced at the head of the long table. “There’s an ongoing federal investigation of the Animal Liberation Movement. Diaz wants my dumb-shit nephew to cooperate, flip on the leaders of the group, maybe bring down the guys who hit that cruise ship.”

Victoria knew about the incident. For decades, Florida cruise lines had deposited passengers on a remote island for day excursions. “The Castaways Adventure, your own private, desert island,” according to the brochures. The brochure didn’t mention the tortoise beds along the beach, which the tourists would routinely trample.

One sunny day, half a dozen men and women wearing commando gear and armed with paintball guns landed in a speedboat. Screaming “Death to tyrants” and “Long live the turtles,” they splattered dozens of middle-aged tourists from the Midwest. Red seemed to be the predominant color, causing lots of people to think they’d actually been shot.

Chaos, of course. Six of the frightened passengers tried to swim back to the ship. One woman nearly drowned. A man had a heart attack. The paintballers were never caught.

“Diaz suggests you offer a plea,” Pincher continued. “Involuntary manslaughter. Six years. Seven years. Doesn’t care about the sentence. After all, the dead guy, what’s his name…?”

“Sanders.”

“Yeah. Sanders was a lowlife, one of the bad guys.”

“He was a retired naval officer,” Victoria corrected him. “Got a medal in Desert Storm.”

“Have any family members contacted you? Anyone claim the body?”

“No.”

“So no one cares about this guy. Why should we?”

“Felony murder’s a slam dunk. You said so yourself, Ray.” It was the first time she’d ever called him by his first name. But he was treating her as an equal, for once, and it just felt right. “We’ll have more leverage if I get the conviction, then bargain with Nash for his cooperation.”

“Already suggested it to the feds. Diaz says he can’t take the risk you’ll lose.”

“I won’t lose, dammit.”

“Don’t take it personally. It’s not about you.”

“What, then?”

“You never know what a jury will do. Or wasn’t that O.J. Simpson I saw on the first tee at Mel Reese the other day?”

Victoria didn’t want to plead out the case. She wanted to win it the old-fashioned way, with the reading of a verdict, the defendant slumping over, his lawyer looking like he’d taken an elbow to the Adam’s apple.

His lawyer. Steve.

Damn, what’s the right thing to do?

Victoria analyzed her feelings. Usually, she approached every legal issue with dispassionate logic. But now was her thinking warped by her competitiveness, her desire to beat Steve at his own game?

“All right,” she said with a sigh. “If I offer the plea, will your nephew cooperate?”

Pincher smiled. “He’d be a fool not to, but then my sister raised a house full of fools.”

“You think Nash has the information the feds want?”

“No idea. The ALM isn’t one group. It’s a bunch of disorganized cells. Losers who hook up and do one job, then go back to smoking weed. I’m betting Gerald doesn’t know a hell of a lot.”

“And you told this to the U.S. Attorney?”

“Of course. But he says he needs someone inside the group. For better or worse, he wants Nash.”

“So is this his request? Or yours?”

“We’ve got four or five joint operations with the feds. They’ve got more manpower and equipment than we do. I need their help, so yeah, I’m asking you to do this. But I can’t force you, Victoria. You know that.”

Likewise, it was the first time he’d called Victoria by her first name. She had never seen Pincher so humble. So human. There was something else, too. An air of resignation.

“Do you trust the U.S. Attorney, Ray?”

Pincher shrugged. “Diaz is a careerist who wants to run the Criminal Division of the Justice Department. He doesn’t take a crap unless someone in D.C. tells him to.”

“So this is coming from Washington? Why would a couple dolphin kidnappers be that big a deal?”

“Exactly what I asked Diaz. All he’d say was something about a ‘parallel investigation.’ Diaz thinks my nephew’s tied into something bigger than animal rights. But whatever it is, he won’t tell me.”

Victoria sized up the situation. If she tried the case, she’d win and Gerald Nash would get twenty-five years to life. Harsh. Especially when he didn’t pull the trigger and hadn’t intended to harm anyone. He was basically a naive kid who’d been led astray. If she let him plead to manslaughter, it wouldn’t exactly be striking like a tiger. But maybe there’d be a measure of justice in it. Surely there’d be a measure of compassion. Then there was her duty to the State Attorney’s Office and Pincher’s need for federal cooperation.

“I’ll make the offer,” she said. “But I doubt Steve will accept it.”

“Why? He’d be crazy not to.”

“Because he’s having too much fun trying to beat me.”

Steve parked his Mustang near the drawbridge on the Miami River, an inky and stinky body of water that wound its way through the middle of the city to the Bay. He never used the Justice Building parking lot, where his car had a fifty-fifty chance of being broken into, what with all the presumably innocent defendants in the vicinity.

Now Steve had a three-block walk to court, where Judge Gridley would hear discovery motions. He was running late for the hearing, but no matter. It was Thursday, and Judge Gridley always called his bookie right after lunch to run through the weekend’s college football games. The two o’clock calendar wouldn’t start until two-thirty at the earliest.

Victoria, of course, would already be there. Planning, prepping, rehearsing. Steve liked to wing it, both because he was better when he was spontaneous, and because he was criminally lazy.

He could hear the hum of tires over the 12th Avenue drawbridge. A few blocks south, the avenue had been renamed “Ronald W. Reagan Avenue” because the former President once ate lunch at a Cuban restaurant there. A number of Miami streets had been renamed by the city and county padres. You could get lost if you didn’t know that Southwest Eighth Street, already called “Calle Ocho” by everyone in Little Havana, had been rechristened “Pedro Luis Boitel Avenue,” after an anti-Castro dissident. Another few blocks of the same street were now called “Celia Cruz Way,” after the singer, and yet a third stretch was named “Carlos Arboleya Boulevard,” after a local banker.

War heros and artists, Steve could understand. But a banker?

Only thing he could figure, local politicians solicit wads of cash from the financial community. Which could explain Abel Holtz Boulevard, named for a banker who went to prison for perjury.

Steve’s favorite thoroughfare, however, was Southwest 16th Street, which the County Commission renamed “Jose Canseco Street,” after the famed steroidjuiced slugger and tattletale. Steve would have been even happier if Canseco had hired him for one of his domestic violence cases, but that was not to be.