Paul Levine - Lassiter

I told her that, in my experience, God helps those who help themselves.

As the trial date approached, I considered the situation and came to a few, well-thought-out conclusions. It was pretty simple, really. I had a client I didn’t trust and a case I couldn’t win.

Lucinda Bailey loves fine wine. At Christmas, I buy Lucinda a case of Syrah from the Eberle Winery in California. All year long, she keeps me informed of the comings and goings at the county’s penal institutions.

Lucinda runs Information Technology for the jail system, and she’d been calling me every morning for the last nine weeks. I had asked her to keep tabs on Amy. If my client really had been with a man the night Perlow was shot, I figured that guy might visit her in jail. But each day, Lucinda had the same news-no visitors the previous day. Until this morning.

I was in the office. I had no customers, so I was studying the pre-season college football betting lines. Alabama was the favorite to win its second straight national championship. But pre-season wagers are sucker bets. Too many variables. A twelve-game season, plus a conference championship game, plus the BCS title game, if the Crimson Tide got that far. I’d wait until September, place a sentimental bet on Penn State, and start studying the point spreads week to week.

Lucinda Bailey’s call interrupted my dreams of greenbacks. “Your client had a male visitor at 8:05 A.M. yesterday. Stayed for thirty-seven minutes.”

“Finally! What’s his name?” I was prepared for a guy named John Doe with phony I.D. and a Groucho Marx nose and glasses.

“Charles Ziegler, Anglo male, lives on Casuarina Concourse in Gables Estates.”

What the hell!

The man Amy supposedly intended to kill comes visiting. Bizarre. He couldn’t be her alibi witness. He was two feet away when Perlow took a slug in the chest, and he claimed Amy was the shooter. So what was he doing there? What hadn’t my client told me?

I headed for the jail. Driving across the causeway, I ran through what I knew and what I didn’t know, the latter outweighing the former. I had stirred up the waters surrounding Krista Larkin’s disappearance. Castiel, Ziegler, and Perlow all went to battle stations. Perlow threatened my life, but he’s the one who ended up dead. What secret was I close to discovering? If I could figure that out, I would know who killed Perlow.

Or was it far less complicated? Had my client simply taken a shot at Ziegler and hit the wrong guy? Had she used me to find the guy who killed Krista, not for a trial, but for an execution? Which still didn’t answer the question of why Ziegler came visiting.

Something else. My previously high-strung, nerves-rubbed-raw client was oddly at peace, just a week before she was to be tried for murder. On the other side, Alex Castiel was so cocky of a conviction he didn’t even offer a plea.

Forty minutes after taking Lucinda’s call, I was sitting across from Amy in the glass-walled lawyer’s room at the women’s jail. She seemed intent on making me an even less effective trial lawyer than I already was.

“I can’t tell you why Ziegler was here.”

“Sure you can. What did you talk about?”

“I’m sorry, Jake.”

“Is it dangerous for Ziegler, too? Like your bullshit alibi witness? Mr. X?”

“I just can’t.”

“You want to know my theory? You and Ziegler killed Perlow together.”

“Why would we do that?”

“Beats the hell out of me.”

“I didn’t shoot Perlow. I swear it.”

“You know what? I don’t care. I quit. I’m firing myself.”

“You can’t, Jake. I checked. No judge will let you out right before trial. Besides, you don’t quit on people.”

“Says who?”

“You.”

Great. Just great. I was going to trial not believing my client, and that wasn’t the worst of it. I knew land mines were buried in the sand, but the only way to find them was to run blindly ahead, awaiting the roar.

Castiel was not happy with his star witness. “You look like shit, Charlie.”

“Lemme alone, Alex.”

“You having trouble sleeping?”

“Not bad enough to call Michael Jackson’s doctor … yet.”

They were on Ziegler’s pool deck just after sunset. A warm breeze tickled the fronds of the tiki hut bar. Castiel had stopped by to check on his photographers and graphic artists. They were doing their last round of photos and illustrations for the state’s trial exhibits. Castiel believed in entertaining the jurors. He knew that people retain information more readily when it’s presented visually. His trials were renowned for their compelling slide shows, computer graphics, and animations. All to keep the jurors alert and involved.

Castiel wanted to do another session of trial prep, but the tequila snifter in Ziegler’s hand and the two bottles of Clase Azul on the table ruled that out.

“With the trial coming up, you really ought to watch your drinking, Charlie.”

“You do the watching, Alex. You were always good at that.”

Uncle Max had been right all along, Castiel thought.

“Use Ziegler for your own purposes, but don’t get too close to the man. His life is like Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Castiel looked at the man now, sprawled on a chaise, hairy belly sticking out from under a Hawaiian shirt. His face was stubbled with gray whiskers and he smelled like dried sweat and booze. Trial was starting next week and Ziegler would have to pull his shit together before Lassiter cross-examined him.

Castiel knew better than to underestimate his old buddy. Lassiter ate prosecutors for lunch and crapped out cops before the afternoon recess. Cross-exam was his forte. He didn’t adhere to any of the accepted styles taught in legal seminars. Lassiter once told him over drinks that he viewed the courtroom as a saloon in an old Western. He liked to burst through the swinging doors, knock over a poker table, pistol whip a gunfighter, toss a big lug through a window, and flip a chair into the mirror above the bar.

“And that, Alex, is just when I say ‘good morning.’ ”

In the Larkin murder trial, Lassiter didn’t have much to work with, but Castiel knew that’s when he was at his best. Give Lassiter an easy case, and he gets bored. He becomes just another lawyer asking the witness, “What happened next?” Give him a sure loser and he’ll latch onto an opposing witness like an alligator and take the guy’s leg off at the knee.

All of which made Castiel nervous about Ziegler.

How will Charlie hold up?

Lassiter needed to raise reasonable doubt by suggesting there was an unknown assassin hiding in the bushes that night. To do that, Lassiter would try to prove that Ziegler was a sleaze and Perlow a mobster. He wanted to link the worlds of pornography and organized crime and suggest that there were lots of potential killers who might have fired that shot through the window at either man.

“Where were you this weekend, Charlie?”

“Bahamas. Want to see my passport?”

“You take Lola?”

“She’s in L.A. getting work done. Bigger boobs or smaller thighs, can’t remember which.”

“Your girlfriend, then.”

“She was knitting a quilt for the church.”

Over by the solarium window, the techs were packing their metal boxes. Job done. Castiel waved to them, and the photographer responded with a thumbs-up sign. If he could just get through the trial without Ziegler cracking, the saga of Krista Larkin could be put to rest forever. Ziegler was always the weak link. A sieve when it came to keeping secrets. Max had said that eighteen years ago when all three of their lives became inextricably entwined.