“Entrapment,” he repeated. “I had no predisposition to commit a criminal act.”
Whew. Your three-time losers sure know the lingo. I grabbed his file and spread the contents across my desk. “The room was bugged, so they have tapes and transcripts plus video and still photos. Want to see?”
I gave him a moment to add it up. Addition was not his strong suit.
“They have a warrant?” he asked.
“Didn’t need one. It was their place, not yours, so you didn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
“I had a reasonable expectation of a blow job.”
“Tell it to Chief Justice Rehnquist. Maybe you can change the law.”
He flicked ashes on my carpet. “I studied some law, you know.”
I figured. Our prisons have excellent libraries.
“I got a well-rounded education,” he continued. “I was on the fencing team in school.”
“Really, like with sabres and foils?”
“Nah, like with tires and TV’s.”
Why didn’t I listen to Granny? “C’mon, Cy. You’re avoiding the issue. We should be talking about a plea.”
He kept pacing; I stared out the window. Heavy gray thunderheads hung over Biscayne Bay, obscuring the view of Miami Beach, Fisher Island, and Virginia Key. If there were any windsurfers out there, they were using their masts as lightning rods.
“All right, let’s see what they got.”
I opened a manila folder and poured out a dozen eight-by-ten glossies. They made me think of Lourdes Soto, lady PI and long-lens photographer. What had she come up with, anyway? And why had she scouted me out? Just looking for some new business, or was there something more?
Horner came around the desk, leaned over my shoulder, and belched, giving me a whiff of tobacco and sour mash whiskey. I spread the photos in front of him. They had been shot from a peephole in the ceiling. Horner lay on his back, wearing only a Fruit-of-the-Loom athletic shirt and black socks that barely reached his ankles. A woman in a blond wig and a camisole sat on the edge of the bed, a bottle of oil in one hand, a fifty-dollar bill in the other. If Horner had been excited, his brain forgot to tell his loins.
“Hey, that’s libelous!” he blurted out.
“What?”
He jabbed the photo with a nicotine-stained fingernail. “That picture’s taken out of context.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jeez, shooting me all limp like that. When I get an erection, I gotta take out a building permit.”
A flash of lightning streaked across the bay, striking behind the warehouse area at the port. Horner moved back in front of the desk and slumped into an old leather chair. He used a seventy-nine-cent lighter on another cigarette. I don’t know what happened to the first one. He either swallowed it or tossed the butt behind the credenza when I wasn’t looking. His Hawaiian shirt had flapped open, and his belly-hairier than his head-peeked out at me. A delayed thunderclap rattled the windowpane.
“You could cop a plea. Soliciting for prostitution is only a second-degree misdemeanor.”
“No can do. I’m on probation.”
I found the rap sheet the state attorney’s office had been kind enough to provide. “I remember the B.R.C., but what’s the fraud conviction?”
“Rubbertech, Inc., a franchise I promoted. Strictly legit. Sold condom machines to restaurants, convenience stores, what have you. I should have told the investors about a little problem we had with the machines.”
“Stolen, right?”
“Nah, nothing like that. My ex-brother-in-law made them in the tool shop when he was doing thirty months at Avon Park. Only problem, the damn machines put a little hole in the package as it came out the slot.”
“In the package?”
“Well, in the condoms, too, about two out of three. Hey, you bat. 333, you’re in the Hall of Fame, right?”
I flipped to the next page. I had seen longer rap sheets, but few as eclectic.
“What about the grand larceny?”
“Complete railroad job, a kangaroo court. I was selling prints of the Last Supper for four grand per set and advising customers to donate them to a church and take a nineteen-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine-dollar charitable tax deduction.”
“Nineteen thousand…”
“Yeah. If it’s more than twenty grand, you gotta have an independent appraisal. This way, I give them my appraisal certificate from the Church of the Shining Sun. The rectory’s in my garage.”
“You’re a preacher, too?”
He gave me a sly grin and let me see a matched set of yellow incisors. “They call me Brother Cyrus.”
Another peal of thunder, but Horner didn’t flinch. Maybe he answered to a Higher Authority. “Look at it this way,” he said. “If you’re in the thirty-one-percent tax bracket, I could save you twenty-two hundred on a four-thou investment. The IRS gets pissed off, and the Justice Department flips a coin with the state attorney. Tax fraud or grand larceny. The state attorney won.”
I watched two raindrops race each other down the outside of my windowpane. I put my money on the juicy, oblong one, but the thin guy seemed to pick up a tailwind.
“Brother Cyrus, if you want me to try the case, we’d better prepare your testimony.”
His beady eyes lit up. “Great. I love testifying. I’m very affluent, you know.”
J udge Herman Gold had retired eleven years ago, but that didn’t keep him off the bench. With our crowded dockets and the propensity of our criminal judges to be removed from office in the wake of bribery scandals, we need retired judges to help out. Some of the old judges have forgotten more law than most of us ever learned. That could have been true of Judge Gold, but he’d also forgotten most everything else. Hardening of the arteries had left the bulb a bit dim. There he was, perched on his high-back chair, peering into the cavern of the courtroom, a wizened bald buzzard of eighty-one, wearing his custom-made, minilength fuchsia robes, yapping at court personnel, keeping order in the snake pit.
“A tango!” the judge demanded.
“A tanga, Your Honor,” replied Sally Corson, a proper young assistant state attorney in a blue suit and white silk blouse. “It’s a Brazilian bikini, and it’s illegal on state beaches.”
She held up state’s exhibit one, and if you had good eyes, you might identify a red piece of string as the bottom of a bikini. The evidence tag was at least twice as wide.
“Illegal?” the judge demanded. “Says who?”
“The legislature, Your Honor. No buttocks or breasts on state-owned beaches. Chapter eight forty-seven.”
The judge was shaking his head. “ Meshuga. Ay, Marvin, what do you think?”
In the first row of the gallery, Marvin the Maven consulted with Saul the Tailor. “If she’s a shayna maidel, a Kim Basinger, what’s the problem? If she’s zaftig, a Roseanne Barr, I’d throw the book at her.”
Judge Gold nodded judiciously. At the defense table, a young woman who was demurely dressed in a knee-length skirt and long-sleeve blouse looked from the judge to Marvin and back again. Alice in Wonderland couldn’t have been more confused. At least her lawyer had the good sense to dress her for court. It’s one of the first rules. If you can manage it, even a murderer should look like a choirboy. When I was a young lawyer, I once forgot to give my dress-for-acquittal lecture to a weightlifting champion charged with aggravated assault. He showed up in a muscle-T that depicted Darwin’s ascent of man-an ape, a Neanderthal, and finally, good old homo sapiens moving up the evolutionary ladder. The jury thought he most resembled the ape, and he got two years to plan his next wardrobe.
The assistant state attorney cleared her throat, trying to regain the momentum before the rest of the gallery voted. “Your Honor, the defendant was observed by numerous witnesses at Keys Memorial Beach. She was playing Frisbee while wearing state’s exhibit A.”
“Frisbee?” the judge demanded. “Is that illegal, too?”