“How?”
She seemed reluctant to go on. Was Victoria Lord too refined, Steve wondered, to speak ill of the dead? That never troubled him. The deceased were the only people who couldn't sue you for slander.
“Sometimes, at a dinner party,” she continued apologetically, “Charles would bring up some book by Proust or a Sylvia Plath poem, and you got the idea he'd just read it that day and shoehorned it into the conversation.”
“So Barksdale was a phony? A pseudo-intellectual?”
“More like he had to show everybody he was the smartest guy at the table.”
“Who cares what he read?” Cece said. “Did his bony-assed wife kill him?”
“Let's take a vote,” Steve said. “Gut impressions. Who thinks Katrina murdered her husband?”
“Cooch wouldn't have the balls,” Cece said.
“Okay, that's a not guilty. Bobby.”
“Ubi mel, ibi apes.”
“Meaning?”
“Honey attracts bees.”
“Meaning?” he repeated.
“She killed him for the money.”
“One not guilty. One guilty.” Steve turned to Victoria. “Partner?”
“I don't think we have enough facts,” she said.
“Facts shmacks. What's your gut say?”
“I try not to go with my gut.”
“I know. If you did, you wouldn't be marrying Mr. Guacamole.”
“Don't take that shit from him,” Cece said. “He talk that way to me, he wouldn't be able to feed himself.”
“C'mon,” Steve said. “There's a question pending. Guilty or innocent?”
After a moment, Victoria said: “I just don't see how Katrina could have done it. How do you live with a man, have breakfast with him every day, kiss him before he goes to the office, sleep with him every night, then kill him?”
“A vote for the goodness of human nature, a vote for innocence,” Steve said.
“I'm hoping,” Victoria said. “And what do you think?”
“She's our client,” Steve said, “and she's relying on us for every breath she takes. If a hundred witnesses saw her shoot a man on Flagler Street at high noon, they're lying or nearsighted or insane. If the polygraph goes off the Richter when she professes love for old Charlie, the machine is on the fritz. If the forensics all point to her, they've been tainted by mendacity or incompetence. She's our client, which means she's wrongfully accused, an innocent victim of a system run amuck. We hold her key to the jailhouse door, and we, my friends, shall swing that door open and set her free.”
6. Lie to your priest, your spouse, and the IRS, but always tell your lawyer the truth.
Fifteen
SKELETONS IN THE CABANA
Victoria was trying to decipher the first autopsy report she'd ever read in the first murder case she'd ever handled.
“What are Tardieu's spots?” she asked.
“Pinpoint hemorrhages on the face,” Steve said. “Common in strangulation.” He was leaning back in his chair, flipping the pages of a magazine.
“Charles Barksdale's thyroid cartilage was intact. Shouldn't it have been fractured?”
Steve didn't look up from the magazine. “Maybe in a hanging, but not a slow, steady pressure like we've got here.”
Victoria was starting to wonder about Steve's work ethic. He'd spent half an hour drinking Cuban coffee, eating guava pastries, and reading the Miami Herald, laughing out loud at Carl Hiaasen's column. He'd spoken on the phone with a man he called Fat Louie, saying, “Gimme the over for a nickel on the Dolphins-Jets.” And for the past twenty minutes, he'd been thumbing through Sports Illustrated, and it wasn't even the swimsuit issue. She longed to say, “Get to work, lazybones,” but that would sound too much like her mother.
“Other than the injury to the neck, Charles had no bruises or lacerations,” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
Sounded bored. When was he going to roll up his sleeves, dig into the file?
“That's consistent with Katrina's story that Charles consented to being tied up and collared,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“The toxicology was normal. Blood gases showed-”
“Hey, rookie.” He tossed down the magazine. “You're interrupting my train of thought.”
“Excuse me. I'm trying to learn the forensics.”
“You're wasting your time.”
“Really?”
“Pretend you're Pincher. How do you prove the death was a homicide and not an accident?”
“Motive,” she said. “Pincher needs a reason Katrina would kill Charles or he can't win a circumstantial case.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Forget the blood gases. Figure out motive.”
“You didn't get anything from Katrina?”
“Nothing besides passion-fruit iced tea.”
“Maybe if you hadn't been so busy flirting.”
“I was establishing common ground, building a bond. It's what I do.”
“Especially with attractive women.”
“Not always successfully.” He gave her a long look. “Like I told you, she swears she loved her husband with all her heart. They had a perfect marriage. She had no reason to kill good old Charlie.”
“And you believe she's telling the truth?”
“Absolutely. I'm the Human Polygraph Machine, and we've got ourselves an innocent client.”
Had he been convincing? He had not told Victoria the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He knew she badly wanted Katrina to be innocent, needed her to be innocent. A career prosecutor-if you call three trials and two cups of coffee a career-Victoria had never defended any client, much less a murder client. Steve feared her demeanor could give it away, their client's guilt written all over her face. He doubted she'd fight as hard if she thought their client was guilty. Hell, that's when you have to fight harder and be more creative.
Maybe Katrina was innocent, but in the real world, the arithmetic was against it. How many lost souls, swallowed by the so-called justice system, were truly innocent? Five percent? Less.
Best was to have a client you liked, a cause that was just, and a check that cleared. One out of three was the norm, he figured.
Yesterday, he'd given his trial team-as he'd come to think of Victoria, Bobby, and Cece-his old key-to-the-jailhouse-door speech. That was true; they had a duty to set Katrina free if they could. But he hadn't revealed how he felt on the ultimate question: Did she kill her husband?
When he was skimming through the magazine, he was replaying those moments alone with Katrina before Victoria arrived. He had tried to rattle Katrina to shake out the truth. It's always a good idea to give your client a dose of cross-examination before the prosecutor has a chance to do it.
Sitting at the table in the courtyard, Katrina's smile had been teasing, her eyes sparkling, her laugh tinkling. As he watched the slit on her skirt slide up her thigh, he wondered: Why so frisky for such a recent widow?
Steve had told her his ground rules for the attorney-client relationship. “Lie to your priest, your spouse, and the IRS, but not to your lawyer. I don't want any surprises at trial, so if there are any skeletons in the cabana…”
“Meaning?” Katrina asked, guileless as a child bride.
“Any men in your life besides your husband?”
“Only my masseur, my Pilates instructor, and my plastic surgeon.” She laughed and tossed layers of raven hair his way.
“I guess that's a no.”
“On the ice tour, we were all young and in great shape. A different hotel every other night, lots of parties, guys with great butts. Some of the guys were even straight, and boy, did they make out like bandits. But when I met Charlie, I quit that scene. I've been faithful to him since the day he proposed.”
“And vice versa?”
“Charlie would never stray, I can guarantee you that.”
Boasting more about her own abilities than her husband's fidelity, Steve thought. “Anything out there that can embarrass you?”
“There was a party once with about half the Detroit Red Wings, but that's ancient history. And Charlie knew all that stuff, anyway. He liked hearing about the other men, the group sex, the girl-on-girl. Give Charlie a hot story and leather restraints, he'd be sailing over Viagra Falls.”