Paul Levine - False Dawn

“Vad you say?” asked Saul, fingering the part in his steel gray toupee and cupping a hand around his ear.

“The smell,” Marvin repeated, tapping his nose. “You can still smell, can’t you?”

Saul the Tailor sniffed the air and nodded. “Somethin’ ain’t kosher in Denmark.”

H. T. Patterson carried a brown bag to the clerk’s table and pulled out your everyday supermarket chicken. In the pale fluorescent light of the courtroom, the dead bird was pasty white. “At this juncture, without further ado,” Patterson began, in his hypnotic singsong, “the plaintiff wishes to offer demonstrative evidence, ipso facto, the deboning of a deceased fowl in order to facilitate the jury’s understanding of Professor Pennywhistle’s testimony.”

Translation: A farmer with a Ph. D. was gonna cut up a dead chicken.

“Time out, Your Honor!” I was on my feet. “We’ve had no notice of this. They’re going to perform-”

“A simple demonstration,” Patterson interrupted.

“An autopsy is more like it. It serves no purpose, none at all.

Either Chicken Prince has the exclusive right to use the term ‘Chickee Tender,’ or it doesn’t. The anatomy doesn’t matter.”

“Objection overruled,” said Judge Bricklin. “Let’s see what they’ve got, but move it along, Mr. Patterson.”

The clerk, a young Cuban woman with dyed red hair and three-inch fingernails, wrinkled her nose and tied an exhibit tag-plaintiff’s number twenty-seven-around the deceased’s drumstick. The bailiff opened the door to the corridor and ushered the witness down the aisle. Professor Clyde Pennywhistle toddled to the witness stand. He was a fifty-year-old cherub, portly and round-faced with a small mouth curved in a perpetual smile. His hair was a 1950’s flattop gone gray. He wore bifocals, and his eyes were slightly crossed behind the lenses.

H. T. Patterson ran sonorously through the professor’s background, all the way from working on a pig farm as a kid to professor of poultry science at Purdue. Patterson opened a gunnysack and pulled out a stainless steel instrument that looked like an upside-down funnel. “The deboning cone,” he told the jury gravely, as if it were the Holy Grail. On cue, the professor stepped down and walked to the clerk’s table, just a few feet from the jury box. With a sharp knife and a deftness that Charlie Riggs would admire, the professor made an incision down the back, peeled the skin off, and started carving away.

“This will just take a moment,” the professor said, expertly slicing through the shoulder joint, then pulling at the wing to tear the carcass apart. Then, with small precise movements, he pared some more, removing the breast. He held up a piece of the meat. “The pectoralis major, often called the chicken fillet…” Next he sliced off a strip of muscle, maybe an inch wide and six inches long.

The high-ceilinged courtroom was hot and stuffy, the ancient air-conditioning wheezing just to stir the soggy air. Even without decaying flesh on the premises, the courthouse usually smelled like a locker room after three-a-day practices in August.

I thought the professor made a mistake when he moved the deboning cone and the eviscerated chicken from the clerk’s table to the rail of the jury box. Juror Number Two, a Coral Gables housewife, seemed to be leaning backward, increasing what Dr. Les Weiner would call her horizontal zone from the professor and the poultry. Number Three, a commercial fisherman, didn’t seem to mind, but Number Five, an accountant in a three-piece suit, looked a tad green around the gills.

“The tenderloin, or pectoralis minor, pulls the wings down when the bird tries to fly,” Professor Pennywhistle explained.

Wafting across the courtroom along with the tepid air was the unmistakable smell of rotting tissue, and some of the spectators began to leave. Behind me, Marvin the Maven was fanning himself with his straw hat: “That ain’t no spring chicken.”

“The term ‘tenderloin’ came from the pork industry,” the professor droned on, oblivious to the odor, “then was borrowed by the turkey growers, and finally was adopted by the chicken industry, but it was Chicken Prince that gave the word ‘tender’ its specific commercial meaning…”

The professor gestured with his knife, accidentally sideswiping the deboning cone, sliding it over the rail and into the jury box. What was left of the chicken dropped straight into the crotch of the queasy accountant. All except for the liver, which squirted into the lap of the Coral Gables housewife, and the gizzard and heart, which plopped with a satisfying splat onto the stenographer’s open-toed sandals.

“Oh, duck feathers and flapdoodle,” said the Purdue professor. “Should have brought a wog.”

“Haven’t heard that word since Lawrence of Arabia,” whispered Marvin the Maven.

“Larry Oravian?” asked Saul the Tailor, leaning forward, head cocked toward the witness stand.

“A wahg?” the stenographer dutifully asked, wiggling her bare toes free of the glop.

“W-O-G,” the witness explained. “Without giblets.”

The professor bent down and picked up the gizzard, which the stenographer had kicked in the general direction of the bailiff. Sniffing it, his mind seemed to wander. “Wonderful digestive tool, the gastric mill.”

The accountant did it first, upchucking in the front row of the jury box. As he gagged, the housewife covered her mouth, then let go, too. I had never seen anything like it. A chain reaction, four of the six losing their lunch right after the other.

“What mishegoss,” Marvin the Maven said, picking up his hat. “C’mon, Saul, there’s a sexual harassment trial gonna start down the hall.’’

T he day of the arraignment and not even a paragraph about State of Florida v. Francisco Crespo. Fine with me. I’ve never tried my cases in the newspaper. The press always convicts.

The lack of publicity wasn’t surprising. That morning’s Miami Journal featured a quarter-page map of the county showing where each of last year’s 441 homicides occurred, according to zip codes. In some cities, folks buy their homes depending on the quality of the school district. In Greater Miami, cautious citizens check the neighborhood’s body count. Best I could figure, 33039 was the safest zip code. Not one homicide all year. Unfortunately, that’s Homestead Air Force Base, and I’m not real good at saluting, so I continue to live in the little coral-rock cottage tucked alongside chinaberry and live oak trees between Poinciana and Kumquat in Coconut Grove. It’s quiet except for an occasional police siren, and my pillbox of a house could withstand a hurricane and has. It weathered the storms of ’26 and ’50 and only lost a couple of shutters to Hurricane Andrew, which leveled the air force base in ’92.

So it would be just another item on the clerk’s computer printout when Francisco Crespo stood to enter a plea. By local standards, a warehouse brawl-even a homicidal brawl-was barely newsworthy, though in the warped world of the news media, another case was. I was eating my morning papaya with a slice of lime when I saw the Journal’s headline: JURORS BARF; JUDGE BARKS. Oh, the courthouse gang would have fun with me over that one.

A fine layer of dew covered the old canvas top of the convertible. Only April, but the humidity was picking up already. I headed to the criminal justice building, happy to stay out of the downtown civil courthouse. On the exit ramp of the Don Shula Expressway, a few blocks from the sheriff’s department, a black Porsche Testarossa with dark tinted windows downshifted and powered past me on the right berm. Ordinarily, in that situation, I hit the horn, shout, and make a few gestures that would make John McEnroe blush. But the bumper sticker on the Porsche said, “ Honk if you’ve never seen an Uzi fired through a car window,” and I already had.