Paul Levine - False Dawn

Vladimir Smorodinsky ducked to the left, and the grappling hook, rather than piercing his skull, bit into the fleshy meat of his trapezius, just missing the collarbone. Okay, so maybe he wasn’t Muhammad Ali in his prime, but still a pretty fancy move, since Smorodinsky was busy toting a hundred-fifty-pound crate of Mexican flatware at the time, expecting nothing worse than a hernia, and never seeing his assailant approach from behind.

Maybe the burly Russian felt something, air stirring or sneakers squeaking. Maybe he caught a whiff of the cafe Cubano on his attacker’s breath, or possibly the last fragment of genetic matter derived from a hairy-knuckled Paleolithic hunter warned him of the danger. Whatever the reason, Smorodinsky ducked left, the grappling hook whizzed right and sliced through his blue chambray shirt, sinking into his shoulder.

He never cried out.

Not a sound.

Just the trace of a grimace, his jaw muscles tightening.

His assailant twisted the hook free, ripping out chunks of muscle and tendon and splattering himself with blood. Still, not a grunt from the big man, who dropped the wooden crate of knives and forks, turned, lowered his head, and like a wounded boar, attacked. The top of his skull caught the assailant squarely on the chin, knocking him backward and skittering the grappling hook across the floor and under a wooden pallet.

Both men stayed on their feet and, like cable TV wrestlers, clawed, gouged, and chewed on each other’s vulnerable spots. They toppled into a tower of Scotch whiskey cartons and bounced off a stack of rectangular boxes of Taiwanese bicycles. They slugged and kicked and cursed-one in Russian, the other in Spanish-as they scuffed and bruised each other with a series of pokes and punches. An elbow caught Smorodinsky in the Adam’s apple, but the Russian merely gagged before cuffing the smaller, darker man on the ear with a thunderous forearm that spun him sideways. Thirty pounds lighter than Smorodinsky, he threw a series of jabs, stinging the man’s face but inflicting little damage. When the Russian moved closer, the man aimed a kick at his groin but connected with the hipbone.

Eventually, Smorodinsky got the better of it. He fractured two ribs with a decent right hook. He paralyzed the man’s right arm with a two-fisted blow that did nerve damage to the shoulder. Then, moving inside, he bear-hugged the fellow, crushing his broken ribs and raising him off the floor. He dragged the man’s face across the chicken-wire mesh of a freestanding refuse container, tearing off a goodly portion of mustache and some lower lip. With the man howling in pain, Smorodinsky did it again.

H ow do I know all this? I wasn’t there, of course. I never am. In my profession, I hear tales of mayhem after the fact. Clients, witnesses, expert consultants all reconstruct what happened, seldom agreeing. They don’t necessarily lie, but, the power of observation being what it is, they don’t tell the literal truth either. Each of us sees reality through a lens of our own making. Our prejudices and self-interest shape the world into what we want it to be, or fear it is. So I was stunned that day when Francisco Crespo told a story guaranteed to get him twenty-five years to life.

Crespo sat in my office thirty-two floors above Biscayne Bay, watching me through eyes the color of burned toast, sipping a WASP law firm’s watery imitation of espresso through torn lips. He wore baggy khaki pants and a Disney World T-shirt-Mickey, Minnie, and Pluto-and was shivering in the air-conditioning. He had a grid of welts across his forehead and cheeks as if he’d been run over by a steel-belted radial tire. Good. That would help the self-defense claim, though it might be difficult to explain sneaking up on the Russian from behind.

I could think about that later, but the first task was to summon a photographer and tell him to beef up the contrast to emphasize the cuts and scrapes. The face should be shot in close-up to accentuate the damage. There’s a personal injury lawyer in town who once hired a professional makeup artist to crank up the color of his clients’ bruises. Using his experience with South Beach models who often tarnished their complexions with latenight drugfests before morning shoots, the artist found that reversing the process- adding eggplant-colored stains to perfectly fine skin-was easier and more profitable. But the lawyer got carried away, using a defrocked doctor to suture uninjured fender-bender clients, occasionally removing a healthy spleen or gall bladder. That seemed a tad excessive for the state bar, which suspended the fellow for sixty days or so.

For the full-body pictures, I told the photographer to stand on a ladder and angle down, making Crespo look even smaller. Up close, you could see my client was one of those sinewy guys who was plenty quick and twice as strong as he looked. All muscles and wires strung taut across a small bone structure. Work-hardened hands, wrists thickened from his latest job, hauling crates at a customs broker’s warehouse for nonunion wages. The words “Cuba Libre” were crudely tattooed on his right tricep. His face was narrow, his complexion dusty, at least it had been before it had been bashed by the thick-necked Russian warehouseman. There was a gap where a front tooth should have been, but it didn’t matter. Crespo seldom smiled.

W hen Smorodinsky finished shaving Crespo with the chickenwire mesh, he just dropped him to the cement floor. While Crespo gagged and dry-heaved, the Russian gave him one good thwack to the temple with a reinforced work boot. The paramedics say the blow knocked Crespo unconscious, leaving him with a concussion. They found him that way, sprawled out alongside the refuse container. I would subpoena them as defense witnesses. Almost as good as alibi witnesses.

But no, Crespo insists, the lights never went out. Tucked into the fetal position, feeling the cold concrete floor against his bleeding face, Crespo watched Smorodinsky dab at the blood on his own shoulder and lumber down the aisle between thirty-foot-high rolls of Haitian cotton.

Y ou know it would help your case if you were unconscious just like the 911 boys said,” I told him, as nonchalantly as possible. Okay, okay, I know all about the canons of ethics. A lawyer shall not suborn perjury. But there’s a footnote. It’s okay to let the client know whether the truth will set him free or buy a one-way ticket to Raiford.

I learned my ethics watching Jimmy Stewart coach Ben Gazzara into his temporary insanity defense in Anatomy of a Murder, and if that’s too subtle for your tastes, how about James Mason teaching his client, a doctor accused of malpractice, a few courtroom tricks in The Verdict.

“If you were seeing stars,” I continued, “somebody else must have-”

“ Si, yo se, pero no paso asi. The medics are wrong. I wasn’t going to let the bastard get away so he could drink vodka with his amigos and laugh at me.”

It got worse then, of course. It always does.

There was the Russian, heading for the exit, and here was my client, revving up his brain cells into the highest reaches of their two-digit IQ, seeking revenge on a guy who resented being mistaken for a side of beef.

Crespo said he watched the Russian turn left at the end of the aisle and head toward the loading dock. The Mitsubishi forklift was at the end of the second row. Crespo had used it that morning to move fertilizer crates, and now he wanted to cut Smorodinsky off before he reached the exit. Crespo ran to the forklift, started it up, and chased after the Russian, approaching him from behind. Why is it my clients are never inclined to face guys head-on?

“The big bastard heard me coming,” Crespo said. He seemed to be staring at or through the photo of my college football team on my office wall. On the credenza is a no-frills white helmet with a single blue stripe and a crack that would do the Liberty Bell proud. I don’t keep my diplomas here. My clients ask me to trust them; I figure they ought to have faith I studied some law, even if it was after the sun went down.