False Dawn

  FALSE DAWN

  A Jake Lassiter Novel

  (2017 Edition)

  Paul Levine

  CONTENTS

  FALSE DAWN

  “MORTAL SIN” SNEAK PREVIEW

  “BUM RAP” SNEAK PREVIEW

  ALSO AVAILABLE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  1

  HOOKED

  Vladimir Smorodinsky ducked to the left, and the grappling hook, rather than piercing his skull, bit into the fleshy meat of his trapezius, just missing the collarbone. A pretty fancy move, since Smorodinsky was busy toting a hundred-fifty-pound crate of Mexican flatware, expecting nothing worse than a hernia, and never seeing his assailant approach from behind.

  Maybe the burly Russian felt something, air stirring or sneakers squeaking. Maybe he caught a whiff of the café Cubano on his attacker’s breath, or possibly the last fragment of genetic matter derived from a hairy-knuckled Paleolithic hunter warned him of the danger. Whatever the reason, Smorodinsky ducked left, the grappling hook whizzed right and sliced through his blue chambray shirt, sinking into his shoulder.

  He never cried out.

  Not a sound.

  Just the trace of a grimace, his jaw muscles tightening.

  His assailant twisted the hook free, ripping out chunks of muscle and tendon and splattering himself with blood. Still, not a grunt from the big man, who dropped the wooden crate of knives and forks, turned, lowered his head, and like a wounded boar, attacked. The top of his skull caught the assailant squarely on the chin, knocking him backward and skittering the grappling hook across the floor and under a wooden pallet.

  Both men stayed on their feet and, like cable TV wrestlers, clawed, gouged, and chewed on each other’s vulnerable spots. They toppled into a tower of Scotch whiskey cartons and bounced off a stack of rectangular boxes of Taiwanese bicycles. They slugged and kicked and cursed—one in Russian, the other in Spanish—as they scuffed and bruised each other with a series of pokes and punches.

  An elbow caught Smorodinsky in the Adam’s apple, but the Russian merely gagged before cuffing the smaller, darker man on the ear with a thunderous forearm that spun him sideways. Thirty pounds lighter than Smorodinsky, the assailant threw a series of jabs, stinging the Russian’s face but inflicting little damage. When Smorodinsky moved closer, the man aimed a kick at his groin but connected with the hipbone.

  Eventually, Smorodinsky got the better of it. He fractured two ribs with a decent right hook. He paralyzed the man’s right arm with a two-fisted blow that did nerve damage to the shoulder. Then, moving inside, he bear-hugged the fellow, crushing his broken ribs and raising him off the floor. He dragged the man’s face across the chicken-wire mesh of a freestanding refuse container, tearing off a goodly portion of mustache and some lower lip. With the man howling in pain, Smorodinsky did it again.

  ***

  How do I know all this? I wasn’t in that warehouse along the Miami River. I’m never at the scene of a crime. In my profession, I hear tales of mayhem after the fact. Clients, witnesses, and expert consultants all reconstruct what happened, seldom agreeing. They don’t necessarily lie, but, the power of observation being what it is, they don’t tell the literal truth either. Each of us sees reality through a lens of our own making. Our prejudices and self-interest shape the world into what we want it to be, or fear it is. So I was stunned that day when Francisco Crespo told a story guaranteed to get him twenty-five years to life:

  He claimed to have killed Vladimir Smorodinsky.

  Crespo sat in my office thirty-two floors above Biscayne Bay, watching me through eyes the color of burned toast, sipping a deep-carpet law firm’s watery imitation of espresso through torn lips. He wore baggy khaki pants and a Disney World T-shirt—Mickey, Minnie, and Pluto—and was shivering in the air-conditioning. He had a grid of welts across his face as if he’d been run over by a steel-belted radial tire. Good. That would help the self-defense claim, though it might be difficult to explain sneaking up on the Russian from behind.

  I could think about that later, but the first task was to summon a photographer to beef up the contrast and emphasize the cuts and scrapes. There are personal injury lawyers in town who use professional makeup artists to crank up their clients’ bruises. It’s the opposite of the artists’ usual work: cleaning up models’ complexions after late-night drugfests. I know one P.I. lawyer who got carried away, using a defrocked doctor to suture uninjured fender-bender clients, occasionally removing a healthy spleen or gall bladder. That seemed a tad excessive for the Florida Bar, which suspended the fellow for sixty days or so.

  For the full-body pictures, I told the photographer to stand on a ladder and angle down, making Crespo look even smaller. Up close, you could see my client was one of those sinewy guys who was twice as strong as he looked. All muscles and wires strung taut across a small bone structure. Work-hardened hands, wrists thickened from manual labor.

  The words “Cuba Libre” were crudely tattooed on his right forearm. His face was narrow, his complexion dusty, at least it had been before it had been bashed by the thick-necked Russian warehouseman. There was a gap where a front tooth should have been, but it didn’t matter. Crespo seldom smiled.

  ***

  When Smorodinsky finished shaving Crespo with the chicken wire mesh, he just dropped him to the cement floor. While Crespo gagged and dry-heaved, the Russian gave him one good thwack to the temple with a reinforced work boot. The paramedics say the blow knocked Crespo unconscious, leaving him with a concussion. They found him that way, sprawled out alongside the refuse container. I would subpoena them as defense witnesses.

  But no, Crespo insists, the lights never went out. Tucked into the fetal position, feeling the cold concrete floor against his bleeding face, Crespo watched Smorodinsky dab at the blood on his own shoulder and lumber down the aisle between thirty-foot-high rolls of Haitian cotton.

  ***

  “It would help your case if you were unconscious just like the 911 boys said,” I told him, as nonchalantly as possible. Okay, okay, I know all about the canons of ethics:

  A lawyer shall not suborn perjury.

  But there’s a footnote:

  It’s okay to let the client know whether the truth will set him free or buy a one-way ticket to Raiford.

  “If you were seeing stars,” I continued, “somebody else must have—”

  “The medics are wrong. I wasn’t going to let the bastard get away so he could drink vodka with his amigos and laugh at me.”

  It got worse then, of course. It always does.

  There was the Russian, heading for the exit, and here was my client, peeling himself off the floor, taking another shot at the guy. Crespo said he watched the Russian turn left at the end of the aisle and limp toward the loading dock. A Mitsubishi forklift sat at the end of the second row. Crespo had used it that morning to move fertilizer crates, and now he wanted to cut Smorodinsky off before he reached the exit. Crespo raced to the forklift, started it up, and chased after the Russian, approaching him from behind.

  Why are my clients seldom inclined to face guys head-on?

  “The big bastard heard me coming,” Crespo said. He seemed to be staring at the photo of my college football team - Penn State - on my office wall. On the credenza is a no-frills white helmet with a crack that would do the Liberty Bell proud. I don’t keep my diplomas here. I figure my clients ought to have faith I studied some law, even if it was after the sun went down. Night school, University of Miami. Top quarter of the bottom third of the class.

  “He turned around,” Crespo continued, “said something in Russki, and jumped onto a rack of Japanese transmissions. A tough hombre, big through the shoulders like you, but shorter, and slow. Heavy legs.”

  “Y
ou used the forklift merely to catch up with him,” I suggested, helpfully. “You never intended to—”

  “Estas loco? I intended to kill him!”

  That shut me up. Francisco Crespo stood and walked around my office. He picked up a deflated football from a position of honor on a bookshelf and ran his finger over the white paint that told the score of a long-forgotten Dolphins-Jets game. He stood near the floor-to-ceiling window without getting too close, and he avoided the draft from the air-conditioning vent. Then he finished the story in a matter-of-fact voice.

  I studied his body language and watched his eyes. No sign of deception. But how could he be lying? With every word, he incriminated himself.

  ***

  Smorodinsky grabbed the rack’s support strut like a rider pulling himself aboard a trolley car. Crespo zoomed past on the forklift and jerked it around, the back wheels whirling into a steep turn. The Russian jumped down and was running the other way, grabbing wooden crates from the shelves, tossing them into the aisle behind him. The forklift smashed over them and caught up with Smorodinsky at an intersection of four aisles.

  The Russian swerved right, wanting the forklift to rush past him. But the big guy lost traction on the slippery concrete. His feet slid out from under him on the turn, and I pictured myself trying to cut on artificial turf during a monsoon.

  The fork was set about belly-high. It caught Vladimir Smorodinsky in midstep, slightly below the rib cage on the right side. The blade pierced the oblique muscles of the abdomen and just missed the liver, but, according to the medical examiner, plunged through the ascending colon, the right kidney, and the duodenum. Worst of all, the blade tip opened the inferior vena cava, which ordinarily carries blood to the heart from the lower extremities, but just then emptied itself all over cartons of beach towels from the Dominican Republic.

  There is a lever to the right of the steering wheel, Crespo told me, happily demonstrating how he pulled it back, raising the fork, hoisting Smorodinsky off the floor. Crespo never hit the brakes. Instead, he accelerated, carrying the bleeding Russian with him.

  “The bastard was stuck like, like . . .” He searched for an expression. “Like an olive on a toothpick,” he said with malicious glee.

  The forklift careened down the aisle, sideswiping metal racks with the clang of screeching metal and finally smashing into the corrugated metal door near the loading dock. The bloody steel fork reverberated against the wall like a pealing church bell. Vladimir Smorodinsky was impaled there, his feet four feet off the ground, his arms pinned to the wall in a macabre crucifixion, his insides oozing onto the concrete floor.

  ***

  I peered out the window at Biscayne Bay three hundred feet below. A southeast wind rippled small whitecaps across the green water. At Virginia Key, three multicolored sails shimmered in the afternoon sun. Boardsailors. On cue, they jibed, and one of the masts dipped into the water, dunking the sailor who had flipped his boom too late.

  I asked, “So why did the paramedics find you unconscious back at the refuse container?”

  Crespo shrugged. “No se. I must have walked back there and fainted.”

  Right. You could cut off both his legs at the knees, and he wouldn’t faint.

  “Francisco, listen to me. This isn’t a simple A and B. If you tell that story, you’ll take a fall for second-degree murder. Twenty-five years minimum.”

  He shrugged, as if it were no big deal.

  “Ethically, I can’t tell you to take the stand and lie, but maybe you don’t remember it that well. You’d been hit in the head. You were under tremendous stress…”

  He waved his hand as if to shut me up. He wasn’t going to help me, and that made it hard to help him. Outside my windows, one wet boardsailor water-started and pumped his sail to catch up with his two buddies. They were headed on a broad reach across the channel to Fisher Island, once a Vanderbilt retreat, now a condo sanctuary of vacationing multi-millionaires who want the security of a saltwater moat to keep out the riffraff. If the boardsailors didn’t have their papers in order, the security guards might pick them off for target practice.

  “Here’s how I see it,” I said. “I can just keep you off the stand, and based on the state’s case, all they’ve got is a fight between the two of you, and after you’ve passed out, somebody else came along and made shish kebab out of the Russian.”

  “Pero, no one else was there.”

  Sometimes, I just want to tell my clients to shut the hell up. “Someone had to be there. Someone in the office called the police, right?”

  “No se, you gotta ask them.”

  I already had. Somebody called 911 but wouldn’t leave a name. Somebody saw what happened, but who?

  “If we can show who drove the forklift, or if we just raise enough doubt that you did, you’d walk on the murder charge. I could probably plead you to aggravated assault right now if you’d tell the prosecutor who it was. Abe Socolow isn’t stupid. Arrogant maybe, but not stupid. It’s a low-profile case. But if Socolow thinks you’re covering for someone who ordered the hit, he’ll go after the maximum.”

  Crespo shrugged again and touched a finger to the welts on his face. “You’ll figure it out for me, numero cincuenta y ocho. You always do.”

  I wasn’t getting through to him. “You have no lawful excuse for attacking Smorodinsky. You’re going—”

  “He was a comunista.”

  “I didn’t know there were any left…”

  Crespo shrugged.

  “Or that you were political,” I added.

  Still, he didn’t respond.

  I rubbed my temples and stared out the window again. The boardsailors were hidden in the shadows of the Fisher Island condos. In a perfect world, I would be on the water, the wind crackling my sail. To the north, the cruise ships were lined up, single file, at the port along Government Cut, preparing for their Caribbean cruises, thousands of tourists clustered on the main decks, awaiting their prepackaged fun. For some reason, I thought of Pearl Harbor.

  “So the two of you disagreed about politics.” Not that I believed it. But you have to take what they give you. Maybe get a few anti-Castro Cuban-Americans on the jury, and who knows?

  “No, we disagreed because the bastard stole twelve dollars from my locker.”

  Oh, shit. I tried another theory. “You were defending your property. You caught him in the act, and in the heat of the moment—”

  “No, he stole the cash two months ago. Pero, he claimed I owed him the money.”

  “An honest dispute over a debt got out of hand,” I ventured.

  My client shook his head. “I didn’t care about the money. I killed the hombre because he was a pain in the ass.”

  2

  WATCHING THE LINEMEN MOVE

  Atlantic Seaboard Warehouse was on South River Drive, a pleasant thoroughfare if you like chain-link fences topped with barbed wire, vacant lots covered with broken beer bottles, and Doberman pinschers with psychopathic personalities. The warehouse opened to the rear, its loading docks fronting the Miami River, home to rusty, overloaded freighters from the Caribbean and Latin America.

  I had sent a photographer here the day after Francisco Crespo came to my office, but pictures, diagrams, and police reports only take you so far. There’s no substitute for being there. Photos and sketches often mislead. You can’t pick up distances, lines of sight, the three-dimensional surroundings that make the setting real. That’s why jurors are sometimes taken to the scene of the crime.

  The warehouse was cavernous, piled high with goods from dozens of countries. Crates of foodstuffs—cereals, canned vegetables, bottled juices—filled several acres along the western wall. You could feed a starving country with the inventory. In another section, boxes of bicycles from Taiwan were piled to the ceiling, and nearby, thousands of concrete fence posts from Colombia were crisscrossed in stacks that resembled a house of Popsicle sticks. The open doors, the width of a tractor trailer, let in the stench of diesel fuel from the river
. I heard three toots of a horn, then the coughs and sputters of a tugboat nudging a barge under the Second Avenue drawbridge.

  I retraced the steps, starting with the grappling hook attack, ending with the forklift. The layout was just the way Crespo described it. Once Crespo—or whoever—mounted his trusty steed of a forklift, Smorodinsky never had a chance to get to the exit. I heard an electric buzz behind me, and whirled just in time to see a forklift approach the intersection of two aisles. The machine carried a pallet of dog food cans, and the driver, a young Hispanic man with a mustache, expertly steered the load around a corner.

  The concrete floor was remarkably clean, but as I neared the cartons of beach towels, I saw the black spots. Concrete is just porous enough to soak up blood and ugly it. The drips continued down the aisle to the corrugated metal door, where a dark puddle of Vladimir Smorodinsky’s innards left their spot for the ages. On the door itself, two indentations, at the width of the forklift’s prongs, just as Francisco Crespo said there would be.

  There was a small office near the rear loading dock that led to the parking lot and a larger office overhead that could be reached by metal stairs and a catwalk. From above, you could see into every aisle. But there were no witnesses to the fight, at least none I could find. No one in the warehouse or the office knew anything about it. No one admitted calling the police. No one knew much about the two workers, except Crespo was a hothead, always causing trouble. You want to know anything else, come back when Mr. Yagamata, the owner, is here.

  ***

  Hothead was right on the money. Francisco Crespo was not a client who had wandered in from the street. I had known him for years and his mother even longer. More important, I owed him.

  I first met Francisco in his mother’s house in Little Havana. He was a skinny Marielito just out of Castro’s prisons who arrived in Miami barefoot and sopping wet. I remember thinking he must have been just off a raft, but it had been a rainy day, and he arrived at the little pink house off Calle Ocho in the back of a pickup truck.