Paul Levine - False Dawn

Mickey Cumello is a bartender from the old school. No ponytail, earring, or track shoes. His gray hair was combed straight back, revealing a handsome widow’s peak. He always wore a short-sleeve white shirt, charcoal gray pants, and polished black leather shoes, and he never spoke unless spoken to. In the dim light, he looked forty-five and had for twenty years.

I sipped at the cool poison and let it slide down the throat. “Mickey, you know every client I ever had is a liar.”

He hunched his bushy eyebrows but didn’t say a thing. Maybe he felt the same way about his customers. “They either lie to the jury or to me, or both,” I continued.

Mickey allowed me a small smile while he polished an old-fashioned glass that was dry and spotless.

“But they always swear they weren’t there, or the other guy started it, or the full moon made them do it.”

A man in a dark suit sat down a polite three bar stools away and, without being asked, Mickey hit a long-handled tap and drew a glass of Canadian ale. Just as silently, he resumed his position in front of me.

“But until now, I never had a client claim he iced a guy when it’s clear somebody else did it. Now why would he do that?”

Mickey wiped his hands on the towel and neatly folded it on a drying rack. “That’s easy, Jake. To protect someone else.”

“Right, but why?”

A swarthy man in a white guayabera slid onto the bar stool next to me. Mickey turned his body to shield our conversation. Is there such a thing as the bartender-client privilege?

“Because whatever he’s involved in, Jake, is a lot bigger than he is.”

My look told him to continue. He said, “And whatever a judge could do to him…”

“Twenty-five years to life.”

“… is nothing compared to what’ll happen if he spills what he knows. So, not to tell you your business, but if I were you, I wouldn’t be so anxious to hear this guy’s story.”

I drained the rest of the martini, tasting the sharpness of the gin against the smokiness of the burnt lemon. “Since when are you concerned about the health of my clients?”

Mickey Cumello shook his head. “Not his health, Jake. Yours.”

The psychologist said I stood too close to the jury during opening statement. My client said I was too loud. The judge said I was argumentative. And Marvin the Maven wasn’t talking to me.

Everyone’s a critic.

“Be aware of horizontal space zones,” Dr. Lester (Call Me Les) Weiner warned. “You’re using social zones when the courtroom demands public zones.”

I used to know a thing or two about end zones, but this was new to me.

Dr. Weiner toyed with the top button on his black Italian silk shirt. He wore no tie, and the sleeves were pushed up on his baggy sportcoat, a look favored by Miami Vice wannabes. The pleated pants were also black and had room for another Les inside. His dark hair was moussed and slicked straight back, and he studied me from behind dark-tinted aviator glasses. The general impression was Darth Vader with a Ph. D. “Jake, you’re still a stranger to the jury, so keep a horizontal zone of at least eight feet. By closing argument, if you establish rapport, you may move up to the rail.”

Marvin the Maven sat in the front row of the gallery pretending not to listen. Even at age seventy-six, there was nothing wrong with his hearing. He had said barely a word since learning I’d hired a psychologist to help with jury selection and trial tactics. For years, Marvin had the job, his only degree a lifetime of experience selling shoes, his expert’s fee a cup of tea and a bagel with a schmear. Now, feeling abandoned, he threatened to spend the rest of the week watching the ticker at the Miami Beach Merrill Lynch office, tracking the path of his fifty shares of AT amp;T.

I was sitting at the defense table, half listening to the witness, half listening to Dr. Weiner, who kept reminding me of my many deficiencies. “Your directional gestures are also too strong. And your height power is menacing this early in the trial, especially when you encroach on the neutral zone.”

Five-yard penalty, I figured.

“Did you notice the jurors crossing their arms and turning to the side as you violated their space bubble?” he asked.

“I thought it might have been the anchovies on the Caesar salad,” I said.

The psychologist crossed his arms, and I wondered if it was something I said. Dr. Lester Weiner was deeply tanned, excessively self-confident, and for three hundred dollars an hour could tell you whether a woman will vote for the plaintiff by examining her makeup. A few blocks from the courthouse at Miami Marina, he kept a thirty-eight-foot Bertram-the Pleasure Principle — docked at what he called his Freudian slip.

“Perhaps a woman lawyer could approach the rail during opening statement,” Dr. Weiner whispered, not letting it go. He was chewing on his lower lip, and his pencil had bite marks, but I refrained from asking whether he was bottle-fed as an infant. “It is easier for women to gain rapport, but a man of your size, well…”

He let it hang there, sort of telling me that I was a bull in the china shop. As if I didn’t know.

“Now it is true the women on the jury will find you attractive in, shall we say, an animalistic fashion. The way your neck threatens to burst out of your shirt collar, it’s quite provocative.”

His burst had a faintly lascivious ring to it.

“But stay in the shadows at first. Approach too quickly, and you might intimidate them.”

What am I, Phantom of the Courthouse?

“And the men will want to identify with you. The bald ones wish they had your shock of sandy hair…” He made a motion as if to run his hand across my head, and I leaned the other way.

“… The small ones will envy your size.” What did he mean by that, remembering that we had stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the men’s room at the midmorning recess. Now, my legs instinctively crossed.

This was getting embarrassing. I wanted to use Marvin the Maven, but my client insisted I hire “Les Is More” Weiner, a guy who couldn’t get into med school but had a booming business in hypnotic regression, sex therapy, and jury counseling.

I tried to pay attention. Percy Tucker, founder of Percy’s Perfect Poultry (“The Cluck Stops Here”) and my client, sat on one side of me, the psychologist on the other. Marvin the Maven sat directly behind us on the other side of the bar. Perched on the witness stand was icily smooth Christopher Middleton, president of Chicken Prince, Inc., the plaintiff and chief tormentor of my client.

“Your witness, counselor,” H. T. Patterson, the plaintiff’s lawyer, informed me with a confident smile that invited me to take my best shot.

“Mr. Middleton,” I began, easing out of my chair and approaching the witness stand, “you never registered the name ‘Chickee Tender,’ correct?”

“Correct, but we spent millions advertising the name. It’s nearly as well known as our Poultry Burger and our Milkshake Mucho.”

“Yes, but really these so-called tenders are nothing more than breaded chicken breast with spices, correct?”

“ Nothing more? They are the product of years of research, consumer testing-”

“So you’ve testified. But the name ‘tender’ is just an abbreviation of tenderloin, the meat covering the chicken’s breastbone, correct?”

Christopher Middleton eyed me warily. His delay told the jury that he didn’t want to answer the question, that he knew the question would lead to another and another, and somewhere down that road was a patch of quicksand. He touched a finger to the fringes of his blow-dried hair. “The meat does come from the breastbone,” he answered, finally.