Paul Levine - To speak for the dead

Again he paused, and the courtroom waited. He was running out of steam. He shot a surreptitious glance at the press. No help. He banged his gavel three times. When no one moved, he banged it again, then looked at me sternly and in his deepest tones announced, "You have fomented anarchy in a court of law." A good quote, and from the front row, Helen Buchman nodded approvingly, her gray bouffant bobbing. Encouraged, the judge worked some righteous indignation into his voice. "In sum, Mr. Lassiter, you have flaunted… that is flouted

… and in other words, you have affronted and offended the authority of this court. You are hereby ordered and adjudged in contempt of court. Report tomorrow morning at nine for sentencing. I suggest you bring counsel. And your toothbrush."

The judge bolted through the rear door into his chambers and away from the madness. A corrections officer helped Sergio to his feet. Reporters swarmed over me. From the corridor, the cameramen and grips stormed in, knocking spectators aside. A mini-cam examined my right ear. A microphone poked at my eye. I'd be the lead story at six o'clock. Good story, too. Defendant goes free, at least for a while; his lawyer heads for the stockade.

My ribs ached and my left hand was beginning to swell.

Roger Salisbury hadn't moved. He sat at the defense table, probably trying to figure out if I was a great lawyer or just a guy with an adequate left hook.

Abe Socolow looked at me and said, "You went too far this time, Jake, old buddy."

"In a pig's ass!" Granny Lassiter had hurdled the bar separating the lions from the Christians, exposing gray wool socks beneath her sundress. She hugged me and narrowed her eyes at Abe Socolow. "My Jacob can whup any man in the house, and a couple weeks of county victuals never did no harm."

I was playing a wicked first base, stretching this way and that, digging low throws out of the dirt, trying to avoid pulling a hamstring. The shortstop was a check bouncer with a weak wing. The third baseman was a bunco artist who threw hard but wild. The second baseman was a veteran, three falls for DUI, but I didn't know much about his arm. Every grounder trickled through his legs and into right field.

Seven days in the Dade County Stockade. Like a vacation. No phones, no partners' meetings, no hearings with cantankerous judges and disagreeable clients. Almost as good as a week-long cruise to St. Thomas, although chipped beef on toast is seldom served on the S. S. Norway. The stockade is different from the county jail, that dungeon attached to the Justice Building. The jail is for your hard guys-robbers, killers, rapists, and multikilo dopers. Here, just a bunch of misdemeanants, including my own contemptuous self.

I had just done my best imitation of a Nureyev split, scooping up a shin buster in time to nab a three-hundred-pound grocer doing ninety days for selling pork loins as kosher lamb chops. The applause from my teammates did not break my eardrums. "Good grab, shyster," the second baseman declared for the group.

Then, a familiar voice behind me: "Did I hear something crack or you just fart?"

I turned around. Now coaching first base for the Stockade Short Timers, Abraham Socolow.

"Hey, Abe. What'd they get you for? Purloining state-owned paper clips?"

He didn't laugh. "Looks like you been working on your tan."

"Yeah, lifting, too," I said. "Gonna get strong again. Maybe even take up karate like your favorite witness."

"Funny you mention him," he said, as if it weren't funny at all. "Machado-Alvarez is in Mount Sinai, got some weird sickness."

"I'll send flowers."

"You'll do better than that. You'll go there with me while I take a statement."

"You deputizing me?" I asked, keeping an eye on the runner at second, a shoplifter who would steal anything, including third base, if given the chance.

"He was busting up some boards at a karate exhibition over at Convention Hall, suddenly gets a fever, the shits, then he's paralyzed. One of the Beach cops working security ID'ed Salisbury hanging around the stage just before macho man did his stuff. I'll need to talk to Salisbury. Thought you'd want to be present. As usual, old buddy, I'm going out of my way to do you a favor."

Next time he does me a favor, I'll probably do a month in solitary. The pitcher, a pickpocket, called a conference on the mound. He slipped the ball to the shortstop, who hid it in his glove then tagged the runner leading off second. Time was called, the runner whimpered, and there ensued some plea bargaining with the umpire, a trusty.

"I can't leave," I told Socolow. "Got another three days to satisfy the judge."

"Let's go. I sprung you."

I put on my best Edward G. Robinson. "You sprung me? You dirty screw. I was going over the wall tonight with the boys. What'll they think?"

He didn't smile; he didn't scowl, just the same straight-faced look. Ten years and he has yet to laugh at one of my jokes.

With Socolow running interference, we sailed through the paperwork for my return to society. We headed east in his government Chrysler-four doors, blackwalls-toward Miami Beach. Abe wore a dark three-piece suit with his Phi Beta Kappa pin slung from a vest pocket. I wore a blue chambray shirt with a nine-digit number. If we went to a Coconut Grove club, I'd be considered highly trendy and he'd be stashed next to the kitchen with a busload of retirees from Century Village. We took the Julia Tuttle Causeway, which connects the mainland with Arthur Godfrey Road on

Miami Beach. It's a great drive, high above Biscayne Bay, sailboats swooping beneath the pillars of the bridge, a fine view of the white and pink buildings of Miami Beach. From the top of the causeway you appreciate the fragility of that long, skinny sandbar with the bay on one side, the vast ocean on the other.

On the way Socolow told me he'd asked Charlie Riggs to meet us there. I thought that over a second. "Why not the ME? He's the guy on your side."

Socolow was silent. Like a good soldier, he wouldn't squawk about intramural warfare. Then he surprised me. "Maybe too much on my side."

I let it go. But he didn't. "MacKenzie's a turd," he said stiffly.

I had noticed a certain scatological bent to Abe's patter lately, but this was not the time to question whether he had been toilet trained at the appropriate age.

"A turd?" I delicately inquired.

"I can't prove it, but I think he cooked those chromatographic tests that night in the morgue, the guys who died in surgery. He wouldn't let me near Blumberg all night."

Why was he telling me this?

"You're probably surprised I'm telling you this," he said.

Mind reader.

"There won't be a new trial," Socolow continued. "The widow refuses to testify."

"You could lean on her," I suggested, hoping he'd already tried and failed. "You've done it before with reluctant witnesses."

"Not in a case like this," he said. "What's it mean, Jake, 342 if a woman won't testify against a man she swore killed her husband?"

I thought about it. "Different possibilities. That she knows the defendant didn't do it. Or the defendant did it and she helped him. Or she knows who did it and she's afraid a trial would bring that out."

Abe Socolow didn't say a word, just nodded to himself, watched the causeway straight ahead, and kept both hands on the wheel, at ten o'clock and two o'clock, just the way they teach you. Some guys play it strictly by the book.

Charlie Riggs was standing inside the double doors of the ICU talking to a young doctor in a white lab coat. The doctor was short and pale with a bushy, unkempt beard. Charlie stroked his own beard; the young doctor stroked his. Charlie barely noticed our arrival. No introductions, we just picked up listening.