Lassiter jl-8, Page 3

  With the top down, my car attracts whistles, horn toots, and tail-fin envy. It’s a 1984 Caddy convertible that’s gone to the moon, according to the odometer.

  The Biarritz Eldorado was my fee from Stan (Strings) Hendricks, a Key West piano tuner, who was picked up on the Overseas Highway with three hundred pounds of Acapulco Gold in the trunk. If I didn’t win the case, Strings would do a dime for trafficking, and I’d get squat.

  The sheriff’s deputy testified that he had kept pace with the Caddy, which was supposedly speeding. After the stop, the cop said he smelled marijuana, giving him probable cause to search the car. But I subpoenaed the cruiser’s videotape, and by counting the seconds between a clearly visible bridge and a gas station, I proved that Strings was going only 43 mph. Search quashed, marijuana excluded. My client went free, and I got his cream-colored Biarritz Eldorado with red velour pillowed upholstery. The car looked like a Bourbon Street brothel on wheels, and naturally, I loved it.

  My cell rang just as I passed the Fisher Island ferry port.

  “Jake, you worthless SOB,” Rusty greeted me. “Where you been hiding out?”

  “Unlike some people, I have to work for a living.”

  “Screw that. C’mon down to the Keys and let’s chase some bonefish.”

  When he wasn’t at his house-on-stilts in Islamorada, Rusty lived on thirty acres of what used to be mango orchards in the Redlands. He’d married a lovely woman and fathered twin girls. In his spare time, of which he had plenty, Rusty ran a foundation that kept at-risk kids in school and out of trouble. After Rusty the Reprobate retired from the game, he had changed. I respected him for that.

  We swapped insults, and then I asked Rusty what he remembered about the night at Bozo’s.

  “I don’t wanna revisit that shit,” Rusty said. “I was a total dog back then.”

  “One hundred percent pussy hound,” I agreed. “But it’s important, okay?”

  “I’ve pretty much erased the nineties from my memory bank. Except for ’91 when I made the Pro Bowl.”

  I could have said, “As an injury replacement,” but that would have been unkind.

  “Let me refresh your recollection, Rusty,” I said, as if cross-examining a hostile witness. “You got rough with the girl, she stabbed you, and a friendly doc in Hialeah stitched you up under a tequila anesthetic.”

  “Yeah, still got the scar. All right, what do you want to know?”

  “The girl ever mention a guy named Charlie?”

  “Who the hell can remember?”

  “Try, okay?”

  “You got a last name?”

  “That’s what I’m looking for.”

  “Can’t help you. Sorry.”

  “Ever see the girl again?”

  “Why would I? What’s this about, anyway?”

  I told him about my meeting with Amy Larkin.

  “Bummer,” Rusty said, reaching back decades for the word. “But don’t blame yourself, Jake. Jeez, compared to me, you were a gentleman.”

  “Compared to you, the Marquis de Sade was a gentleman.”

  “You want my advice, let it go.”

  “I intend to. But I’d like to give the sister a lead, some nudge in the right direction. Then I’m done.”

  “Wish I could help you, Jake.”

  “What about the other stripper?” I asked. “Sonia something.”

  “Sonia Majeski. You need her number?”

  “You’re still in touch?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “She called me a couple years ago after reading about Rusty’s Scholars.”

  One of the New Rusty’s good deeds. He selected several of the best-and poorest-students at Miami Central High School and took them on Caribbean cruises, along with volunteer guidance counselors and SAT tutors.

  He told me that Sonia had gotten out of the life. Studied accounting at Miami-Dade, married a Customs agent, and snagged a job with Royal Caribbean. Now she was a purser on a cruise ship and got Rusty hefty discounts for his scholarship cruises.

  He promised to text me Sonia’s number as soon as we hung up. I told him I’d chase the wily bonefish with him soon. He called me a liar. I told him to fuck off. Translation: We’re still asshole buddies.

  In ten minutes, I would be sitting at my desk, punching the phone. With a little luck, Sonia Majeski would know what happened to Krista Larkin. With a lot of luck, maybe Krista wasn’t dead. Maybe she’d changed her name and married a dentist and was living in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea in a four-bedroom house with two kids, a swimming pool, and a hybrid SUV parked out front.

  Yeah, and maybe I’ll be the first ambulance chaser appointed to the Supreme Court. Chances were, Krista was long gone. I just didn’t want her sister running around town shouting that I had something to do with it.

  5 A Man Named “Charlie”

  My office is on the second floor of a building that’s too old, too boxy, and too gray to be called art deco. My “suite,” as the advertisement on craigslist called it, consists of a waiting room I share with a marriage counselor, a narrow book-lined corridor that ends at my assistant’s cubicle, and my twelve-by-twelve slice of heaven with a window overlooking a municipal parking garage.

  It was not always this way. I started in the Public Defender’s Office, where I learned how to try homicide cases without pissing my pants. I moved into private practice with a deep-carpet firm of paper pushers who settled all their civil cases and pled out all their criminal clients. I was an oddity there, a guy who’d hit more blocking sleds than law books. They discarded me after one-too-many contempt citations. So now I fly solo and follow my own rules. It’s the only way I can live.

  The building is owned by Jorge Martinez, who runs Havana Banana, a Cuban restaurant on the first floor. A few years ago, I saved Jorge’s huevos con bacon by keeping the Health Department from shutting the joint down. That’s more than I could do for his earlier restaurant, Escargot-to-Go, which landed in bankruptcy. Turned out there wasn’t much of a market for fast-food snails in paper cups. These days I defend food poisoning lawsuits involving cockroaches in the caldo gallego.

  I do a few divorces, too. Mostly, they’re referrals from the marriage counselor next door. His failures become my paychecks. I kick back one-third of the fee to him, which is dicey under the ethical rules, if you pay attention to that sort of thing.

  I found Cindy, my assistant, in her cubicle, grooming her cuticles. She’s Gothic pale with purple hair exploding in different directions like the twigs of an osprey nest. Today she wore a black sleeveless leather vest with dangling silver chains. Two chrome studs poked out of the flesh above her left eyebrow, and werewolf tattoos covered her toned upper arms.

  “Hold my calls, Cindy,” I ordered, moving past her.

  “What calls?”

  “And clear my calendar.”

  She waved a hand like a genie. “Poof! Done.”

  Sonia Majeski answered on the first ring. I told her who it was and she hollered into the phone, “No way! Lord, how long’s it been?”

  We did the pleasantries. She was aboard ship in St. Thomas. The passengers were sightseeing and buying duty-free liquor. American tourists will happily skip historic sites and forgo exotic meals for a chance to save a few bucks on their booze.

  “I need to ask you about a girl from the old days,” I said.

  “I don’t remember her.”

  “Whoa. I haven’t given you a name.”

  “I’ve spent a long time forgetting the ‘old days.’ Not gonna start remembering now.”

  “This is important. I think the two of you might have worked together in a strip club.”

  “Not going there, Jake.”

  “Help me out, Sonia. This girl was underage.”

  “Lots were back then. So what?”

  “Her name was Krista. Krista Larkin.”

  The pause on the line told me I had hit paydirt.

  “Sonia?”

  “Did they find her body?” she asked, softly.
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br />   I told Sonia about my meeting with Amy. Told her that Krista was missing but no body had been found, and I asked her to tell me everything she remembered.

  Sonia said she’d been living in an apartment in Miami Springs, near the airport. The place was filled with stewardesses, as they were still called. Eastern Air Lines had recently gone under, and the building was only half full. Sonia was stripping in a club owned by Russian gangsters.

  “One day, I get a new neighbor,” she said. “Krista. She looked like a high school girl. Hell, she was a high school girl. But when she got dolled up, Jesus, Jake, bar the door.”

  “Did you know a guy named Charlie she hung around with?”

  “That sleazebag. Charlie’s the one who got her into porn.”

  I remembered what Krista told me that night at Bozo’s. “There’s this guy.… An old guy. Like almost forty. He pays my rent and wants me to do these gross movies.…”

  And I was the dumb bastard who delivered her to the dirtbag.

  “Any chance you remember his last name?” I asked Sonia.

  “You don’t want to be messing with this guy.”

  “So you know. Tell me.”

  “He’s connected, Jake.”

  “Organized crime?”

  “Political connections that are even scarier.”

  “Just tell me, Sonia. What’s his name?”

  “Ziegler. Charlie Ziegler.”

  It hit me then. “Charles Ziegler” was a bold-face name on the society page. There was a Ziegler wing of the hospital in South Miami. A Ziegler charity golf tournament in Coral Gables. But why fear that guy? He seemed more like Daddy Warbucks than John Gotti.

  “You talking about the Ziegler who gives all that money away?” I asked.

  “That’s him. Went legit and made a bundle in cable TV. Back in the day, he was the prince of porn and Krista’s sugar daddy. Rented a mansion on Sunset Island he called the ‘Fuck Palace.’ ”

  Change, I thought, was in the air. Rusty. Sonia. Even the prince of porn had become respectable. Which made me think again about the lunkhead in that photo at Bozo’s. Just how much had I changed?

  “His videos were called ‘Charlie’s Girlz,’ ” Sonia continued. “With a ‘z,’ as in ‘Ziegler.’ ”

  That was all I needed. I had a name to give Amy Larkin, crack insurance investigator from Podunk, Ohio. Now I could get the hell out. But something kept me on the phone with Sonia, asking questions. Maybe it was just curiosity. Or maybe, subconsciously, I was trying to make amends for having been such a shit all those years ago.

  “Was Krista involved with anyone else?” I asked.

  “Depends what you mean by ‘involved.’ Ziegler passed her around to his friends.”

  “Know any of their names?”

  “Not really. Rich, older guys. Sick fucks, from what she told me. Into drugs and kinky sex.”

  The list of possible suspects just multiplied, I thought. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

  “I tried to warn her, Jake. The men, the drugs, the violence. But she was a kid and you couldn’t tell her anything. She started shooting four or five videos a week. Ziegler just cranked them out, using up girls and finding new ones.”

  “She get involved with any of the actors or crew?”

  “Not that I know of. But she was doing her drug dealer off and on. A guy who called himself ‘Snake.’ Rode a Harley. Smelled like motor oil, but handsome as sin in that bad-boy way.”

  “A biker named ‘Snake’?” I couldn’t hide my rolling eyes from my voice.

  “It’s true. Tattoos, leather, the big ass Harley. He wanted Krista to go to California with him.”

  “You sure she didn’t go?”

  “Doubt she would have left Ziegler. He was paying the bills, giving her a sense of security.”

  “And the last time you saw her …?”

  “The parking lot of our apartment building. Said she was going to Ziegler’s house for some wild party with the high mucky-mucks.”

  Whoa. That was big. If Krista was last seen heading to Ziegler’s, he just stepped to the front of the line called “persons of interest.”

  “Any idea who might have been at the party?”

  “All I know is Krista said there were always cops and politicians. Even judges, if you can believe that.”

  I could. Easily.

  “Her car wasn’t in its space the next morning,” Sonia said, “but that wasn’t unusual. A couple days later, she still hadn’t shown up. All her clothes were still in the apartment. I didn’t know what to do, so I drove over to Ziegler’s office. They said they hadn’t seen Krista, and Ziegler was out of town.”

  “Anyone file a missing persons report?”

  “Me. But you know how it is. Stripper and porn actress. Not the cops’ highest priority.”

  Over the line, I heard two quick whistle blasts and the exhalation of steam in the background.

  “I found Krista’s home number in her things,” Sonia said, “and called her father. He flew down the next day.”

  That solved one small mystery. “You gave him the photo from Bozo’s.”

  “Yeah. And I told him the truth about what Krista was doing. You could see the light in him just die. Maybe I did the wrong thing, Jake.”

  “The truth is always best.”

  A policy I didn’t really believe and clearly didn’t adhere to.

  “I could tell from her dad’s face,” Sonia said, “he wasn’t going to look for her. He just wrote her off.”

  We were both silent a moment. I heard two more whistle blasts. Then I asked the same question I leave with every friendly witness. “Can you think of anything else that might be useful, Sonia?”

  After a moment, she said, “There’s one thing, but I almost hate to say it.”

  “What?”

  “I knew a couple girls who worked in one of Ziegler’s clubs. They were always stoned, so you can’t believe half of what they said. But one of them told me something really scary.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That Ziegler was making snuff films in Mexico. Whenever one of the girls gave him a problem, he’d say, ‘How’d you like your next movie to be your last?’ Or ‘You’re worth more to me dead.’ Creepy stuff like that.”

  “Did she see any of the films herself?”

  “No, she was just repeating what she’d heard.”

  “Hearsay on hearsay.”

  “I know, Jake. But that day I went to Ziegler’s office, looking for Krista, they told me he was out of the country.”

  “So?”

  “They said he was in Mexico.”

  6 She Likes It Rough

  “Sure, I remember Charlie’s Girlz,” Coleman said. “Thin story lines but decent production values. All hard core. A lot of S and M.”

  “I don’t suppose you have any of their videos.”

  “ ‘Videos?’ No. Everything’s been transferred to DVD.” Coleman sucked on a Lucky Strike and gestured toward a back aisle. “Check between Hustler and Vivid in the last row.”

  A former client, Elmore Coleman was manning the cash register at a XXX-video store on South Dixie Highway. He was a small-time grifter in his fifties with grayish skin, a snow-white ponytail, and nicotine-stained fingernails. A couple years ago, he’d been caught at the airport soliciting cash for tsunami relief, but the only tidal wave was the whiskey he’d consumed with the money he’d collected. I walked him out of the courtroom with a nice fat Not Guilty. Then, a few weeks later, he was busted for selling counterfeit Girl Scout cookies. I lost that case, and Coleman served eight months before getting early release, courtesy of jail overcrowding. That’s when he landed the job at the video store, thanks to his only lawful skill, an encyclopedic knowledge of pornography.

  “The Charlie’s Girlz brand had its run in the early nineties,” Coleman told me. “Won a couple AVNs for its Bound and Gagged series. They’re the Oscars of porn.”

  I thanked him and moseyed toward the aisle he’d pointed o
ut. It was just after six P.M., and there were three or four guys in the place. All well groomed and normal-looking, deeply engrossed in examining DVD covers.

  I scanned the covers of the Charlie’s Girlz videos, searching for Krista Larkin. The photos were a succession of boobs and butts and a few bald crotches. The head shots started to look alike. Young blondes with fake eyelashes, phony smiles, and invented names. Cherry Cola. Lolita Lick. Jenny Talia. Many titles were highly descriptive: Three Guys and a Girl. Some sounded like instruction manuals: How to Fuck on a Jungle Gym. And others were just lousy puns: Remembrance of Times Gone Bi.

  I found the “Bound and Gagged” series and thumbed through the stack of DVDs. It only took a minute before I found Krista-all auburn hair and freckles-on the cover of She Likes It Rough. Bent over a wooden stool, she wore a black leather bustier that propped up her small breasts, and her bare butt was being paddled by an unseen man.

  Coleman inserted the DVD into a master player behind his counter, and I settled into a booth in the back. The plot, such as it was, combined incest with sadomasochism. Krista was a schoolgirl in a plaid mini-skirt, bunny barrettes in her hair. She’d been cutting class, a handy excuse for her father-potbellied and balding-to paddle her. The plot turned to irony here. Krista was supposed to like the paddling. The pinker her butt shone, the more she licked her lips and begged for another whack. But her eyes were dead, her mind elsewhere. “Harder, Daddy!” sounded hollow and false.

  The air was bad in the enclosed booth, and I felt hot and itchy, as if spiders were crawling up my pants legs. When Krista straddled the lard butt and rode him, cowgirl style, a memory came back to me. That night long ago, I’d seen the same shimmy of her hips. Were there sparks in her eyes then, or the same cold flatness I saw now?

  My stomach was starting to feel queasy, and I wanted to get the hell out of there. I had what I needed. “Charlie Ziegler” was the guy’s name. Krista had been one of “Charlie’s Girlz.” I could turn this over to Amy Larkin and weasel my way off her Most Wanted list. Go back to my life of work and play and play some more. Focus on the present, not the past. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?