One day my senior year in high school, Granny grilled a mess of mangrove snapper with Vidalia onions for a coach with a Brooklyn accent who kept talking about books and classes. I wanted to hear about bowl games and cheerleaders, but he was yammering away in this funny voice about SAT scores and graduation rates. Granny smiled and served him an extra slab of her key lime pie, and I went off to Penn State, where I survived frostbite, aced American Theater 461, and stayed out of jail.
I was a decent enough college player, but the stopwatch doesn't lie, and the NFL scouts could take a nap while I ran the forty. Since then, I've come to figure I must have been the three hundred thirty-seventh best player in the nation my senior year. This bit of mathematical logic stems from the fact that the pros drafted three hundred thirty-six players, none of them named Lassiter. I packed my spikes and gray practice shorts in what was then a not-yet-antique convertible and drove south. I caught on with the hometown Dolphins as a free agent, barely surviving each cut, playing second string, earning my keep by wreaking havoc on kickoffs, and occasionally starting when the star weakside linebacker was in drug rehab. When I realized I wasn't bound for the Hall of Fame (or even a league pension), I started taking night law classes. I had seen Gregory Peck playing Atticus Finch and figured I knew what lawyering was all about. After finally passing the bar exam the third try-the first time coming two days after knee surgery and hefty doses of Darvon, the second after generous rations of Grolsch-I concluded there are no more Atticus Finches. Today's lawyers are slaves to computerized time sheets and, rather than fighting for justice, spend their days punching voluminous pleadings out of word processors and sleeping through endless pretrial depositions. But they seldom stand in front of juries and plead for justice, which, if it is kin to the law, is a distant cousin, at best.
I joined the public defender's office, where I soon discovered that my clients were not necessarily saintly just because they were impoverished. Most of them went to prison, got early release because of overcrowding, and became repeat customers in the Jake Lassiter legal merry-go-round. Then I joined the downtown firm of Harman and Fox, where I became another paper-pushing civil trial lawyer, until Nick Fox called me back to the criminal-law jungle, this time representing the state.
I showered and put on a seersucker suit, but the sweat continued to flow. I poured some orange juice and grabbed a fresh mango, green and red on the outside, sweeter than a peach inside. The neighborhood is overflowing with mangoes and lichee nuts. Peel the nuts, slice the mango, chop a tart carambola into star-shaped pieces, and you've got a fine breakfast. No preservatives, no caffeine.
Inside the ancient Oldsmobile, the cracked leather felt slick and the carpeting smelled of mildew. I put the top down and pretended that the soggy air cooled me. I headed up Miami Avenue under an umbrella of red Poinciana trees. I passed the house that once belonged to a client, a doctor who killed, and I was there when he crumbled under the weight of the guilt and the shame.
Charlie Riggs had helped me then, had taught me how to speak for the dead. He had been the county medical examiner for so long, people swore he began his career digging musket balls out of bodies at Bull Run. He still reads the first forensic medicine textbook, Questiones medico legales, in its original Latin. He can determine the time of death by algor mortis, livor mortis, and rigor mortis-the temperature, color, and stiffness of death. When an inexperienced assistant ME found sunflower seeds in the stomach of a dead banker who died with a smile on his face, Charlie knew that death was by horribly painful strychnine poisoning. The smile was risus sardonicus, a sardonic grin produced by contortions of facial muscles. The sunflower seeds were the remnants of rat poison, and a sharp-eyed hardware-store clerk soon identified the grieving widow with the million-dollar insurance policy as the town's leading pesticide purchaser.
Charlie Riggs knows so much about so many things. I could never figure how a guy who spent his life hollowing out lifeless shells could understand the living so well. There must be lots of canoe makers who know everything about in-shoot wounds and lividity and blood typing. They help the cops figure the when and how of death, and sometimes, piecing together all their clues, they even find the murderer, the who. But if you don't have bullet fragments and a matching gun, or latent prints and a matching hand, you'd better know the why to figure the who. That's why I need you, Charlie Riggs. You bearded old wizard, I need you again.
"Jeez, get a load of that suit," Cindy said, fishing a pen out of her rust-colored, hyper-curled hair. "Why's it all crinkly?"
"It's cool," I said.
She shook her head, each concrete curl staying put. "Co-ol, el jefe, it ain't. You look like a Rotarian."
Cindy had been my secretary in the PD's office and came with me downtown. Her shorthand was indecipherable, her typing haphazard, and her filing disorganized. But she was smart and loyal and could sweet-talk a judge's assistant into an early trial date, and she protected me from the political piranhas in the law firm. She was also a pal.
Cindy's desk was covered with unfiled pleadings and unanswered memos.
"Any messages?" I asked.
She picked up a handful of while-you-were-out memos. "The newsboys are going bonkers over the Diamond murder. All the local stations called, plus your pals at the Journal, a reporter from Reuters, and somebody from Broadcasting magazine who wants to know if there might be terrorist plots against television personalities."
I looked at the messages but didn't plan to return the calls. What could I say? We had no leads, and if we did, we wouldn't put them on the front page. I couldn't even disclose why Nick Fox had appointed me as a special prosecutor. An overworked office, according to the party line. But Cindy was right. The news media would hound us until the case was solved. If it went on too long, they would start wondering about the competence of the ex-football player, ex-public defender, ex-a-lot-of-things appointed to handle the case.
We average a murder a day in Dade County, but few are deemed truly newsworthy. Your average Saturday-night, liquored-up stabbing over a woman or a card game gets you two paragraphs inside the local section, just above the ads for the all-nude body-shampoo parlors in Lauderdale. But this was different. This was one of their own. And judging from the hype on the local stations-a freeze-frame close-up of Marsha Diamond with Verdi's Requiem in the background-you'd have thought we lost Edward R. Murrow instead of a second-rate interviewer who also read commercials on a five p.m. fluff show.
The Journal played it straight. The Diamond death shared page one of the local section with an expose that revealed that a sizable percentage of our taxicabs are repainted stolen cars.
"Anything else?" I asked Cindy.
"Yeah. The managing partner wants to know why you let yourself get appointed to be Nick Fox's flunky."
"The old man have something against fulfilling my civic duty?"
"No, something against a case that pays only a third of your normal hourly rate. He wants a written response, with copies to the New Business Committee, the Senior Council, and the Allocation Committee."