"Any idea whether she was taking them the day of the shooting?"
He shrugged. Another question for Chrissy.
"Prozac and Desyrel…"
"For depression." With a small clipper, he cut away some brown stems of the fern. For some reason, the gesture reminded me of a woman plucking her eyebrows.
"Restoril, Darvocet, and lithium."
"To help her sleep, for headaches, and mood swings."
"Better living through chemistry," I said.
"The proper use of drugs is an essential part of therapy."
"Uh-huh. What about now?"
"I beg your pardon."
"Does she need drugs, therapy, anything?"
"Oh, no. Christina has confronted her demons and exorcised them."
"By remembering… or by killing?"
Dr. Schein put down his clippers, briefly scanned his environmentally friendly, xeriscaped yard, then looked me in the eye for the first time. His smile was just this side of smug. "In one sense, the killing of Harry Bernhardt was quite unfortunate."
"Especially for Harry Bernhardt," I agreed.
"But in another sense, what Christina did was finally take control of her own life, and that was therapeutic. Quite therapeutic indeed."
6
I approached the intersection of Calle Ocho and Twelfth Avenue in Little Havana, intending to turn left and head north. But the city padres had changed the street signs again and, momentarily confused, I missed the turn to the bridge on my way to the sadly misnamed Justice Building.
Oh, we seek justice in the building, just as we seek holiness in a house of worship. Both goals are difficult to achieve and seldom witnessed by mortals. Which is not to say that the building doesn't dispense "law" by the bucketful. Law is the product that spews out of the building's courtrooms, hundreds of times each day. Guilt, innocence, suspended sentences, pretrial intervention, nolle prosequi, time served, mistrials, adjudication withheld. The product comes in a dozen brands. But justice is an ideal, a vague concept we strive for but can barely define, much less master.
Justice requires lawyers who are prepared, witnesses who tell the truth, judges who know the law, and jurors who stay awake. Justice is the North Star, the burning bush, the Holy Virgin. It cannot be bought, sold, or mass-produced. It is intangible, ineffable, and invisible, but if you are to spend your life in its pursuit, it is best to believe it exists, and that you can attain it.
So there I was, going farther east on Calle Ocho, or Eighth Street, or Olga Guillot Way, according to the new sign that threw me. I don't know why the bolero singer got the honor, unless it was because a few blocks away, Celia Cruz, the salsa singer, has the same street named for her, and a few blocks from that, so do Carlos Arboleya, Felipe Vails, and Loring Evans. If that's not baffling enough, a stretch of Twelfth Avenue, near here, is called Ronald Reagan Avenue.
Our city and county commissioners, ever desirous of licking the boots of their constituents, once named a street Leomar Parkway after a major campaign contributor who turned out to be a major drug dealer. There are streets named for Almirante Miguel Grau, a Peruvian admiral in the 1800s, and Francisco de Paula Santander, a Colombian general. There's even one named for Jose Canseco, the baseball slugger, who has been fined repeatedly for driving his sports cars at more than one hundred miles an hour. Maybe a lane at the Daytona Speedway would be more appropriate.
Eventually, I doubled back and found General Maximo Gomez Boulevard-no, I don't know who the hell he was-and made my way north to the Justice Building, which houses criminals and other miscreants such as judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers.
It was just before nine A.M. when I slipped into a parking place next to the jail. Overhead, prisoners were being taken across an enclosed walkway directly into holding cells on the fourth floor. Chrissy would already be inside, having arrived by bus from the Women's Detention Center a few blocks away.
I hurried down a narrow alley toward the back entrance of the building, nearly running into Curly Hendry, who was leaning on his rolling trash bin. Curly, who was bald, had spent several stretches in the county jail, plus a couple of years upstate. I represented him once, when cops found an ATM machine all trussed up in a towing chain, the other end of which was attached to a winch on his heavy-duty Dodge pickup. These days, he pushed a broom for the county.
" Que pasa, Curly?"
"Don't talk no Espan-oley to me, Jake. I'm just a cracker who's got to clean up after them crazy island fuckers." He pointed into the trash bin and held his nose. "So far this morning, three dead chickens and a goat's head. Now what's this?"
He bent down and looked at a cake with frosted icing.
"To sweeten a judge's disposition," I told him.
"Damn voodoo."
"More like Santeria."
"Makes me want to move to Georgia. Yesterday, had some damn broken eggs out here. The sun got to 'em before I did, could smell 'em all the way to Hialeah."
"They're to make the case collapse."
He scooped up the cake and tossed it into the trash bin. "Last week, a dead lizard with its mouth tied shut."
"That's-"
"I know. To shut up a snitch."
"Right."
"So, Jake, what brings you out here with all these witch doctors and Third World types?"
"Bond hearing. Say, Curly, you find anything that'll get me bond in a murder one?"
"To hell with cakes and lizards, Jake. Just pray for a judge whose brother-in-law is a bondsman who needs the work. If not, slip some Ben Franklins in an envelope and call it a campaign contribution."
"Curly, you know I don't play the game that way."
He went back to his broom. "No damn wonder I did twenty-seven months at Avon Park."
"If a bad childhood were an excuse for murder, our prisons would be empty," Abe Socolow said gravely. "I'm quite sure every inmate on death row had a perfectly atrocious childhood. Far worse than that of Ms. Christina Bernhardt in her oceanfront mansion, I daresay."
He daresay?
Abe Socolow had a tendency toward pomposity, but for a prosecutor, he was almost human. A little rigid, a little self-righteous, but honest and fair. He was tall and lean and sallow and preferred undertaker-black suits with white shirts and blood-red ties. His cuff links were miniature silver handcuffs.
At the moment, Honest Abe was ridiculing my assertion that the state had overcharged my client, going for murder instead of manslaughter.
"Recovered memories," Socolow sniffed. "Posttraumatic stress disorder. Judge, these silver-tongued defense lawyers come up with more syndromes than a dog's got fleas."
Damn, it sounded like Abe had been talking to my granny. Either that or he was just trying to be folksy, something that didn't come naturally. Judge Myron Stanger peered down from the bench, his eyes hidden behind tinted glasses so we couldn't tell when he dozed off. He had a bulbous nose lined with tiny blue veins and a white fringe of hair on his egg-shaped head. His Honor was fond of the Bolivar brand of Cuban cigars, and at this moment was chewing on a cold Corona Gigantes, in violation of both courtroom protocol and the federal Embargo Act. The judge was flanked by the American flag and the Florida flag. A set of Florida Statutes sat, still in shrink wrap, on his desk. Only a few spectators were on the long wooden benches that resembled church pews. I was sitting at the defense table on a heavy mahogany chair whose brown leather seat had cracked with age and taken on the shininess of cheap trousers.
Abe rambled on, "Battered-spouse syndrome supposedly lets a woman kill her husband, though she's in no immediate danger. A white man guns down two black teenagers and says he's been traumatized by urban survival syndrome and ought to be excused. A woman who shot her husband on Super Bowl Sunday says she suffers from football widow syndrome. A fellow charged with tax evasion has failure-to-file syndrome. Abused-child syndrome, black rage, mob psychosis-where's it going to end? I ask Your Honor, where will it all end?"