Sergeant Ferguson picked himself up. “Enough bullshit. Hand-to-hand, commando style.” He spread his legs wide, bent his knees, and put his hands on his hips. The Kiba-dachi, an attack position.
“Not one of those,” Lassiter said, shaking his head. “What ever happened to good old American punchin’ and wrasslin’?”
From somewhere on the floor Lassiter heard Hopkins squeaking. It sounded like son of a bitch the way Donald Duck might say it.
“Now, Claude,” Stuart Zeman was saying. “This will complicate the settlement conference.”
The sergeant gestured in the general direction of his lawyer’s carotid artery. “Shove off, Zeman. You’re one of them. You want forty percent of what I get. I’ll give you forty percent of the big one’s nose and forty percent of the little shit’s tongue.”
“C’mon, Sarge,” Lassiter said. “Let’s talk this over.”
“Except talk isn’t cheap for you jaybirds, is it?”
“Hey, I’m on your side. Let’s just — “
Ferguson feinted with a Kizami-zuki jab, then followed up with a Oi-zuki lunge punch that caught Lassiter in the solar plexus. He doubled over, gasped, then came up hard, catching Ferguson’s chin with the top of his head. The sergeant staggered back a step, then the two men tied up like a couple of professional wrestlers.
The sergeant took a step forward and Lassiter a step back; the sergeant moved his right foot to the side, and Lassiter moved the same direction with his left.
“Personally, I always preferred a waltz,” Lassiter said.
“Linebacker, I’ll hurt you!”
The sergeant worked a hand free and boxed Lassiter’s ear, once, twice, a third time, until the lawyer heard the Bells of St. Mary’s. Then Lassiter pulled back and stomped on the sergeant’s instep and hooked his right fist into the man’s gut, followed by a looping left to the jaw. The sergeant didn’t fall all at once. He just rocked back two steps, his legs wobbling, then slumped to the floor. He wasn’t hurt, not physically anyway. He had snapped, snapped from watching his wife die of a disease hatched in her mother’s womb, snapped from having a piss-ant kid in a custom-made shirt ridicule him, a kid whose idea of a tough day is to lose at squash.
Emboldened, Hopkins finally stood up. Holding his throat, he managed to squeak, “We’ll prothecoot for atthalt.”
“Shut up, jerkoff!” Lassiter ordered.
Zeman was still frozen to his chair. He cleared his throat with a lawyerly harrumph. “I suppose this dashes any prospect of settlement.”
“Sethelment?” Hopkins squealed.
The silk-suited plaintiff’s lawyer ignored him. “Jake, if you want to cancel tomorrow’s mediation, it’s all right with me. Let things simmer down. If you seek sanctions, I’ll understand.” Zeman cleared his throat again. “Noting that the hour is growing late, and with my Ferrari parked vulnerably on Biscayne Boulevard, perhaps we should adjourn.”
Lassiter shook his head. “No sanctions, no postponement. Keep the mediation on. Give us your settlement demand. We’ll make an offer.”
“An offer?” Hopkins stammered. He was moving now, keeping his distance from the sergeant. “No! This guy will crack on the stand. He’s a fruitcake.”
Lassiter narrowed his eyes and took a step toward his associate. “Hopkins, you don’t know people and you don’t know the territory. You’ve got no heart, and you’ve got no soul. In short, Winnie, you are Grade A, prime-cut partnership material. You really fit in with the gazoonies who run this high-rise whorehouse.”
Hopkins stiffened, his eyes fluttering, searching for a rejoinder. “Mr. Tuttle won’t like the way you put that.”
“Maybe not, but he’ll sure love it when you smooch his lily-white ass.”
Clever, very clever, Lassiter thought, figuring he just cost himself another ten grand.
CHAPTER 8
Violet Belfrey walked arm in arm with Samuel Kazdoy, her heart doing little hippity-hops as they approached the front door of the theater. It was shortly after noon, and she’d been his shadow since dinner in his apartment the night before. Violet held her breath as the old man unlocked the front door and wobbled up the stairs to the mezzanine. She’d have to do some damn good acting, but Violet had been pretending for men all her life, and a look of shock can’t be any harder than the cowlike moans she’d perfected at age fifteen. Get ready, she told herself, it’s Academy Award time.
“What’s this?” Samuel Kazdoy asked, looking at a trail of coupons on the top steps, not yet comprehending. The office door hung open on one hinge, leaning against the inside wall like a drunk at a lamppost. Kazdoy switched on the lights and the scene unfolded. The file drawers were open, metal latches twisted out of shape. A handful of coupons remained, strewn across the floor like confetti. The clock, a memento from a 1948 convention of box manufacturers, lay shattered on the floor, its hands stuck at two-fourteen.
“Oy vay!” the old man wailed. His knees buckled and he caught himself by clutching the desk.
“Tarnation,” Violet said, raising the back of one hand to her mouth the way she imagined Bette Davis would do it. “Who woulda done this?”
“Zoll vaksen tsibiliss in zein pupik!”
“Huh?”
“Whoever did it, onions should grow in his navel.” A shudder went through Samuel Kazdoy’s body and he sagged on his desk, folded over at the middle as if his stomach ached. For a moment Violet felt his pain. Samuel Kazdoy had been nice to her, and now he was hurting. That was bad. But from the look on his face, there must have been a fortune there, and that was good. She couldn’t wait to see Harry and help with the counting, but first there was work to do.
“What are we gonna do, Mr. K.?” she asked.
Samuel Kazdoy’s eyes were misty and his skin was gray. “Jacob… I need Jacob. Hand me the phone.”
Bent over the sink in the partners’ rest room, Jake Lassiter closed his eyes and tossed cold water onto his face. The sign on the door did not say MEN, just PARTNERS. No women had yet gained entry into what Marshall Tuttle called The Brotherhood. The uniformed rest room attendant, a Cuban man in his seventies who pretended not to understand English, stood at a discreet distance with the practiced look of one paid not to observe.
Lassiter was letting the adrenaline ebb, sharing the sergeant’s grief. Claude Ferguson was striking out at the system, not at Jake Lassiter. It was a system that had buried him in endless delay, had tied him up in mind-numbing depositions and repetitive hearings, had pried into his personal life, picking at his wound, treating his loss with impersonal cruelty.
Men had killed his wife, men who went to work each day in suits and ties and met in quiet rooms where they calmly decided to place poisons on pharmacy shelves. These men, Lassiter knew, paid his salary, and the thought made him ill. Even now, in a hundred conference rooms, the bozos in research or marketing or risk management are figuring the cost-benefit analysis of selling death with a jingle and a rhyme, and if a few million-dollar settlements threaten to dent the quarterly report, not to worry, the excess liability coverage will pick up the tab. Earnings up, bonuses all around. The Glory of the Bottom Line.
But are you any better than they are, he asked, another splash of water hitting the face. What are you anyway, besides a moderately skilled practitioner of the fast shuffle and the soft shoe? Liability, now you see it, now you don’t. Comparative negligence, assumption of the risk, or that all-time favorite, statute of limitations. Sure, you caught us, but you caught us too late! His job was to excuse, to deny, and to obfuscate. There you are, Jake Lassiter thought. Former second-string linebacker, current All-Pro obfuscator ready to roll up the score with a verdict here, a summary judgment there.