"Right from wrong," she repeated. "Oh, how I know the difference."
"Let me stop you right there," I said. We were sitting on hard wooden chairs designed by Torquemada in the attorneys' conference room at the Women's Detention Center. Chrissy Bernhardt wore a blue jailhouse smock, matching loose-fitting pants with a drawstring, and the paper slippers they give inmates so they won't bash each other with leather shoes. It was an outfit never seen in Vogue or Elle, but still she looked… well, like she'd stepped out of the pages of a magazine. Her ash-blond hair fell across her shoulders. Her green eyes were clear and bright, no evidence of crying. No makeup, but her skin glowed, a good trick under the fluorescent jail lights where everyone looks jaundiced and some probably are.
I looked straight into those bright eyes and said, "Before you say anything else, remember this. If you tell me something now, I can't let you testify differently." This is the ethical lawyer's way of telling a client to be circumspect, even when talking to your very own mouthpiece. I won't lie to a judge or let a client do it. But I'm not averse to advising my presumably innocent client to tell me what the hell happened only after I explain what makes a better story in the eyes of the blindfolded lady with the scales.
"You're charged with first-degree murder," I told her. "It's a capital crime requiring premeditation. There is no question as to identity. You walked into a crowded bar and shot your father, not once, but three times."
"It would have been four, but I fainted," she said.
"I think we can rule out accident."
She gave me a little smile, dimples showing under the prominent cheekbones. "Do you know what Rusty says about you?"
"Probably that I was a sucker for the play-action fake."
"He says you're not the brightest lawyer in town, but that you have the biggest heart, and that if you believed in me, you'd bleed for me. I liked that. And I liked the way it felt when you carried me out of the club."
Through the interior window, a male jail guard watched us. Actually, he watched Chrissy. Most of the women inmates were drug addicts and hookers, plus an occasional poor soul who'd blown away an abusive spouse or lover. Most were not Chrissy Bernhardt.
"You were unconscious," I said.
"I was woozy and seeing stars, but I remember feeling your heartbeat against me. You're very strong, and I felt secure, protected in your arms."
"That was before I dropped you in the police car."
"Do you remember what you said to me?"
"Something about not saying a word to anyone until you had a lawyer. Standard advice."
"Then you brushed a tear from my face and squeezed my hand. You were very gentle and very caring. You had this look. I can't describe it, exactly. Sympathy, sorrow, empathy, and something that said you cared about me, even though you didn't know me."
I cleared my throat, embarrassed. What had I felt? That she was a beautiful young woman in terrible trouble. A damaged woman in great need. I'd been down that road before and had found only pain. "You did have an effect on me," I said. "Now all I have to do is get the jury to feel the same thing, and maybe we have a shot."
Yeah, and all Hannibal had to do was cross the Alps, and he still never got to Rome.
"Why don't I just tell you why I did it," Chrissy said, "then you figure out if I was legally justified?"
It's not the way Jimmy Stewart would have done it, but I said, "Shoot," and immediately regretted my choice of words.
"Where do you want me start?"
I'm no expert on the Bible, but I do remember the first three words of Genesis. "In the beginning," I said.
"I was a tomboy," Chrissy told me. "Tall and athletic. I'd wrestle with the boys, play football, go tarpon fishing with my father. We had the big house on the ocean in Palm Beach, a weekend place in Islamorada, a ranch outside Ocala. I raced horses, did some jumping events, even played polo." She stopped and let a memory drift by. "When I was fourteen, I started sneaking into the barn with a stableboy who worked for the family. My father caught us and chased him off the property with a pitchfork. Would have killed him if he'd caught him."
"Tell me about your father."
"A powerful man. My earliest memories are of his booming voice. He could rattle the windowpanes ordering coffee. He was so… competent at everything, so in charge. I admired him, respected him. Loved him."
Her eyes grew watery, and a tear trickled down her cheek just as it had when she nailed her beloved father with three. 22 shorts. Unless there was a darker side to powerful, competent, deceased Harry Bernhardt, the jury would be out about fifteen minutes before convicting my lovely and lethal client.
This time, Chrissy wiped away her own tear and said, "Do you have a cigarette?"
"No. They don't let you smoke in the jail anymore."
"Even on Death Row?"
I like clients with a sense of humor, even gallows humor.
"All models smoke," she told me. "We spend a lot of time waiting, at castings, at shoots, everyplace. Plus, it's a great way to control weight."
"Your father," I said, trying to bring her back. "Tell me more."
And she did.
Harry Bernhardt grew up poor but ambitious near Indiantown, east of Lake Okeechobee. Chrissy's mother, Emily Castleberry, grew up rich and privileged in Palm Beach, only child of Flagler T. Castleberry, banker, landowner, and sugarcane baron. Young Harry was a bass fishing guide on the lake, and old Flagler fancied himself quite a fisherman. He hired the husky young man, then brought him home to do odd jobs around the mansion.
When he wasn't pruning the hedges or replacing broken roof tiles, Harry would spend his time surf casting in the waters behind the oceanfront mansion. Which is where young Emily, a tall, slender teenager, would play volleyball and drink rum-and-Cokes with her equally rich Palm Beach friends. Always rebellious, Emily astonished her friends by running off with Harry to Georgia, where they were married by a justice of the peace.
The young and apparently mismatched couple lived in a hunting cabin for a year before old Flagler forgave them both, offered Harry a job, and established a trust fund that would make Emily a very wealthy young woman. Then he had the good taste to die of a spontaneous aortic aneurysm, leaving Harry to run the businesses, all of which were in Emily's name.
It was a childless marriage for six years until Christina was born, Emily having had three miscarriages along the way. Christina was an only child, or so it seemed until eight years later when Harry brought home a surprise. He was Guy Bernhardt, a surly seventeen-year-old, the unhappy product of a one-night stand in a fishing shack when Harry had been little more than a child himself. Guy's mother had either run off or had been sent to a state mental hospital, no one knew for sure, and now Guy inherited what had been his father's position at the mansion, handyman and not quite a member of the family.
"Did you have a happy childhood?" I asked.
Chrissy gave me an enigmatic smile before answering. "That's the way I always remembered it. I was Daddy's little angel, and he spoiled me. Whatever I wanted, I got. For a long time, he seemed embarrassed about Guy, like just looking at him brought back bad memories, reminded him who he was and where he came from. They weren't close, but then how could they be? Guy was practically grown before they even met. Of course, that changed over the years. Daddy brought Guy into the business, made him start at the bottom, shoveling shit, both literally and figuratively, just like my grandfather had done with him. But Guy is a lot like Daddy. He's not afraid of hard work and has great patience. It took over twenty years, but Guy pretty much runs everything now."
"And your mother?"
"So elegant and beautiful. I wanted to be just like her, at least until I went into my rebellious stage. Body piercing, drinking, drugs when I was twelve. Mom died of a heart attack when I was thirteen."