"No, I'm dumber than dogshit. You suckered me. It's the night before trial and I've got no defenses. Not temporary insanity, not posttraumatic stress disorder, not some blackout. I've got nothing, and even if I wanted to plead Chrissy to manslaughter, Socolow wouldn't take it. Why should he? He's got murder one, so he's not gonna offer a deal. And you figured all that out. Because with a manslaughter conviction, Chrissy could still inherit from her father's estate. But murder's different. It would all go to you, just like you planned all along. You got her to do your dirty work and then tanked her case."
"To the contrary. On the one hand, I am enraged that Christina killed Pop. On the other hand, I love her as my blood kin and pity her. I am conflicted. I am suffering from… what is it, Larry?
"Cognitive dissonance," Lawrence Schein said.
"Cognitive bullshit!" I said.
"Your problems, on the other hand, are more immediate, your options more limited," Bernhardt said. "Especially since Rusty also told us you were an essentially honest lawyer."
"If that's not an oxymoron," Schein said.
Bernhardt ignored the doctor and kept going. "When Rusty was a sports agent, he got in a dispute with an athlete over commissions. There was a rough draft of a contract that the athlete had signed by mistake. Rusty wanted to testify it was the operative contract. You tore it up."
"It would have been a fraud," I said. "I don't lie to the court or let a client do it."
"How noble," Bernhardt said. "Subsequently, you lost. Without the phony contract, you had no case."
"Just as you'll lose this one," Schein said. I was beginning to think Bernhardt kept him around as a Greek chorus.
"Plead her to second degree," Bernhardt said, making it sound like an order. "Twenty years, out in twelve. Of course, she still forfeits her share of the estate."
"And if I don't?"
"Socolow gets the tape," Bernhardt said evenly. "Christina will be convicted of first-degree murder, life without parole."
"You really have no choice," Schein said, his courage bolstered by his bourbon. "Once the tape is played, it's over. I couldn't help you even if I wanted to. God couldn't help you. Just like with Rusty, you've got no case."
"There's one difference," I said with just enough hostility to make Schein sit up a little straighten "I never loved Rusty."
20
A tear streaked down my cheek as I drove north from Bernhardt's farm toward Miami Beach.
Then another tear.
I wasn't embarrassed. I wasn't ashamed.
I am a big tough guy. I have bricklayer's shoulders and an acre of chest. I played the game with the oblong spheroid in knickers and plastic hats at the highest level, even if my talent was less than my desire. When I broke my nose on an opening kickoff-catching an elbow through the face mask-I stuffed cotton in each nostril to stanch the blood and hustled downfield on the punt return team three plays later.
I am used to physical pain and accept it without complaint.
Emotional pain is different.
My father was killed in a barroom brawl when I was ten. He was a shrimper, and I remember his strong, coarse hands and the smell of his clothes, caked with salt and fish guts. We would wrestle in the shallow water of Buttonwood Sound off Key Largo. He could hold a fishing rod in one hand and toss me over his shoulder with the other. I marveled at his strength and took comfort in his arms. He was not afraid to show emotion and told me- more than once-that he loved me. I miss him terribly.
One day, I saw my father sitting alone on the porch of our weather-beaten cracker house with the tin roof. The sun was setting in the gulf, the flat water shimmering orange with bursts of silver. Dad was sipping Granny's moonshine from a mason jar, and at first I thought the alcohol was wringing tears from his eyes. But it wasn't the booze. It was something with Mother, and though it was left unsaid, I knew. A few moments later, the screen door banged open, and my mother darted out of the house and flew off the porch, a blur of bleached-blond hair and a tight sleeveless dress with a pattern of red hibiscus, a look Granny called "all tramped up." A moment later, the old Plymouth kicked up shells in the driveway, then tore down U.S. 1. I crawled onto my father's lap, and he wrapped his arms around me, his chin resting on top of my head, and I heard him sob.
About a year later, a man in a tavern shoved a knife through my father's heart. Granny never told me, but I always suspected Dad was defending my mother's honor, such as it was. But that could be my imagination. It could have been an argument over a poker debt, a football game, or who had the right to shrimp Card Sound.
My mother took off for Oklahoma with a roughneck who had wintered in a trailer park near Marathon. His name was Conklin, and though he left without marrying my mother, he was kind enough to leave her something to remember him by: a daughter, Janet. Mom is long dead, Janet is somewhere in drug rehab, and her son, Kip, now bunks with me. Granny also pitches in, figuring if she raised me from a pup, she can do it again.
I tried to tell Kip about my mother, his grandmother, and even though I sugar-coated it-"a real friendly blonde with a big laugh who loved to play Elvis on the jukebox of the Poachers' Inn and Saloon"-Kip pegged her. "Sounds like Jessica Lange in Blue Sky," he said.
I told him about my father, too. How a good, strong man can weep, too.
"I never cry," Kip said, and it was true. He had been abandoned and hurt, and now he had erected a wall to protect himself from more pain.
"Don't you ever get sad?" I asked him.
"Nope. Never."
"When I was your age, I read a book that made me cry," I told him.
"A book?"
"Yeah, lots of pages with two covers on it."
"I know what books are. Uncle Jake. They must have been great before the Internet and a hundred movie channels on the satellite."
"It was called The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank."
"I know it, Uncle Jake. I saw the movie. I thought the TV was fried until I figured out it was in black and white." The shadow of a thought wrinkled his forehead. "It was real sad."
"The saddest story ever."
"Okay, is that the uncle-gram for today?"
"Not just that. One time, on the practice field at Penn State, a row of thunderheads moved into the valley. Big steel-gray clouds were just hanging over the field, but toward the mountains, it was clear and sunny. It started raining, pouring on us, and in the distance was the brightest rainbow I've ever seen."
"Yeah?"
"It brought tears to my eyes."
"Why?"
"I'm not sure. Maybe because it made me think of my father. I wished he could have seen it. He loved natural beauty. Dolphins jumping together, a waterspout on the bay, sunset in the gulf."
"What's your point, Uncle Jake?"
"It's okay to cry. It's okay to show your emotions." I tried to think of an example. "Let's say you're watching a sad movie-"
"Like Terms of Endearment where Debra Winger dies."
"Yeah. It's okay to bawl your eyes out if you want to."
"Uh-huh."
"Or if something makes you sad, you can talk about it with your uncle Jake."
It was all he could do to keep from rolling his eyes. "Sure."
"Anything you want to talk about right now?"
"No thanks, Uncle Jake, but I'm glad we had this little talk."
My ancient convertible navigated the interstate, exited in downtown Miami, then picked up the MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach. As I sped north on Alton Road, passing kosher delis, funeral homes, and Rollerblade shops, the wind finally dried my tears. I turned right on Eleventh Street, passed Flamingo Park, and headed toward Ocean Drive.
The apartment building had rounded corners, porthole windows, a porch with terrazzo floors, and decorative nautical pipe railings. The walls had recently been painted a color I would call Pepto-Bismol pink but the renovation artist probably described in more decorous terms. Concrete eyebrows hung over the casement windows, and a spire stuck out of the roof like the mast of a fine sailing ship. Tour guides would call the place Art Deco, or Streamline Moderne, but to us locals, it's just an old stucco building with a fresh coat of paint.