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Save $17 off the original price on this matchless 865-page historical epic: FALL OF GIANTS: Book One of the Century Trilogy by Ken Follett
Save $17 off the original price on this matchless 865-page historical epic: FALL OF GIANTS: Book One of the Century Trilogy by Ken Follett
It’s Giveaway time! Get a free bonus entry into our monthly raffle and check out Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard
It’s Giveaway time! Get a free bonus entry into our monthly raffle and check out Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard
He is blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, and his country considers him a traitor… Running With The Enemy by Lloyd Lofthouse
He is blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, and his country considers him a traitor… Running With The Enemy by Lloyd Lofthouse
“So, tell me, Detective. Do you kiss all your murder suspects?” MY BEST AND LAST: A Romantic Suspense by Jill Rice
“So, tell me, Detective. Do you kiss all your murder suspects?” MY BEST AND LAST: A Romantic Suspense by Jill Rice
A killer without a conscience who knows no bounds… Can the Roadside Cross Killer be stopped? Crime Victims by Chuck Morgan
A killer without a conscience who knows no bounds… Can the Roadside Cross Killer be stopped? Crime Victims by Chuck Morgan
Think The West Wing done as an episode of The Twilight Zone… IMP: A Political Fantasia (Revised Edition) by Steven Paul Leiva
Think The West Wing done as an episode of The Twilight Zone… IMP: A Political Fantasia (Revised Edition) by Steven Paul Leiva
It’s Giveaway time! Get a free bonus entry into our monthly raffle and check out Magic Hour: A Novel by Kristin Hannah
It’s Giveaway time! Get a free bonus entry into our monthly raffle and check out Magic Hour: A Novel by Kristin Hannah
Charlie Magus enters a fantastical world hidden deep in the forest… Do You Believe in Monsters? (Dark Circles Trilogy Book 2) by award-winning author Jim Melvin
Charlie Magus enters a fantastical world hidden deep in the forest… Do You Believe in Monsters? (Dark Circles Trilogy Book 2) by award-winning author Jim Melvin
A heart-wrenching story of a family torn apart because of a moment in time… The Ones We Leave Behind by Deanna Lynn Sletten
A heart-wrenching story of a family torn apart because of a moment in time… The Ones We Leave Behind by Deanna Lynn Sletten
Dark family secrets have a way of finding their way to the light… She’s My Sister Complete Series Box Set, Books 1-10 by Jacie Middlemann
Dark family secrets have a way of finding their way to the light… She’s My Sister Complete Series Box Set, Books 1-10 by Jacie Middlemann
A thrilling private club romance that explores the limits of dominance and submission… The Dominant: A Brother’s Best Friend Complete Series by Sienna Snow
A thrilling private club romance that explores the limits of dominance and submission… The Dominant: A Brother’s Best Friend Complete Series by Sienna Snow
It’s Giveaway time! Get a free bonus entry into our monthly raffle and check out Lakeside Cottage by Susan Wiggs
It’s Giveaway time! Get a free bonus entry into our monthly raffle and check out Lakeside Cottage by Susan Wiggs
Just in time for the countdown to this year’s Super Bowl, master crime storyteller Paul Levine unleashes his narrative powers in a “bookie-fixes-Super Bowl” caper — with equal parts football, frisky fun, and fast-paced ferocious suspense — that jumps off the page and dives …
“A sizzling caper with suspense, laughs, thrills, some football, and a touch of romance!”- The Daily Review
Bobby Gallagher had it all…and lost it.
Now, to reclaim his life…
All he has to do — with the help of his brainiac 12-year-old son — is rig the Super Bowl, win a huge bet…and avoid getting killed.
PRAISE FOR EDGAR NOMINEE PAUL LEVINE
“A breathless thriller.” – Atlanta Constitution
“Mystery writing at its very, very best.” – Larry King, USA TODAY
“Irreverent…genuinely clever…great fun.” – New York Times Book Review
“Genuinely chilling.” – Washington Post Book World
“Cracking good action-mystery.” – Detroit Free Press
“Levine’s prose gets leaner, meaner, better with every book. -Miami Herald
“Filled with smart writing and smart remarks.”- Dallas Morning News
“High suspense with innovative twists.” – Chicago Tribune
TRY THESE SIZZLING THRILLERS FROM PAUL LEVINE
TO SPEAK FOR THE DEAD: Linebacker-turned-lawyer Jake Lassiter begins to believe that his surgeon client is innocent of malpractice…but guilty of murder.
RIPTIDE: Lassiter chases a beautiful, deadly woman and stolen bonds from Miami to Maui.
IMPACT: A law clerk seduces and extorts her boss – the newest Justice on the Supreme Court – to win his vote in a multi-million-dollar air crash case. The results are lethal.
THE ROAD TO HELL: A Kindle 99-cent special. Four thrilling short stories including: “Solomon & Lord: To Hell and Back.” A hellishly good read.
“Jake Lassiter, the toughest lawyer in Miami, is back, fighting for justice and his fees, not always in that order. Paul Levine’s LASSITER is the courtroom drama of the year.” – Harlan Coben
Author Paul Levine exchanges barbs with Jake Lassiter, the linebacker-turned-lawyer of his legal thrillers. The occasion is the publication of LASSITER, out today in hardcover and as an e-book from Random House.
* * *
Paul: You haven’t aged a day in 14 years. How do you do it?
Jake: Being fictional helps. You could use some sun. Don’t you ever get out of the house?
Paul: Careful, or I’ll kill you off in the next book.
Jake: Here’s what the flap says. “Eighteen years ago, Jake Lassiter crossed paths with a teenage runaway who vanished into South Florida’s sex trade. A suspect in her disappearance, Jake re-traces her steps and runs head-on into a conspiracy of Miami’s rich and powerful who would do anything to keep the past as dark as night and the girl’s fate as silent as the grave.” Sheesh. Who writes this hokum, anyway?
Paul: Lee Child says “Cracking wise and butting heads, Lassiter is the lawyer we all want our side, and on the page.”
Jake: What does Child know? His Jack Reacher character is a menace to society.
Paul: You hear what Harlan Coben says about LASSITER?
Jake: He must owe you some dough from a rigged poker game.
Paul: That’s defamatory.
Jake: So sue me, scribbler
Paul: Anything else you want to say about the new book?
Jake: Why the heck is the price $9.99?
Paul: Set by the publisher, counselor. The hard cover is $25.00 before discounts. Original price of the e-book was $12.99, but I got the publisher to reduce it.
Jake: Oh, aren’t you the hero?
Paul: If $9.99 is too much, the backlist is still priced at $2.99 on Kindle. In fact, why don’t you tell us about some of those books?
Jake: In TO SPEAK FOR THE DEAD, I defend a surgeon accused of malpractice and start to think he’s guilty of murder. In NIGHT VISION, I switch sides and get appointed to prosecute a serial killer stalking women on the Internet. In FALSE DAWN, I don’t believe my client who confesses to killing a man. In MORTAL SIN, I’m sleeping with my client’s wife.
Paul: Sounds unethical.
Jake: I knew her before she met her husband, so I’m relying on the legal principle that I’m grandfathered in.
Paul: I’m not touching that line.
Jake: You want to hear about the other books?
Paul: Not really. Readers can go to my Website for more details about LASSITER and the entire series. Thanks for taking the time to talk. Can we do this again?
Eighteen years ago, Jake Lassiter crossed paths with a teenage runaway who disappeared into South Florida’s sex trade. Now he retraces her steps and runs head-on into a conspiracy of Miami’s rich and powerful who would do anything to keep the past as dark as night and silent as the grave. In this tale of redemption and revenge, Edgar-nominated author Paul Levine delivers his most powerful thriller yet. Jake Lassiter, second-string linebacker turned low-rent lawyer, is cynical about the law, but if you hire him, he’ll take a punch for you . . . and maybe a swing at the prosecutor, too.
Amy Larkin—beautiful, angry, and mysterious—accuses Lassiter of involvement in the disappearance of her sister eighteen years earlier. What does Lassiter know about Krista Larkin, the runaway teen turned porn actress? More than he’s saying. Seeking to atone for his own past, Lassiter follows the cold trail of the missing Krista and butts head with the powerful men who also knew her: a former porn king turned philanthropist, a slick Cuban-born prosecutor who’d love to be governor, and an aging mobster who once worked for the infamous Meyer Lansky.
The evidence leads to a long-ago night of kinky sex, designer drugs—and possible murder. But before Lassiter can nail the truth, a gun goes off, a suspect falls dead, and Amy is charged with murder.
The state has an eyewitness and a slam-dunk case. Lassiter has a client he doesn’t trust and a case he can’t win. Did Amy shoot the man who killed her sister? Or the wrong man? And what really happened to Krista? The answers, buried under years of deceit and corruption, are revealed in an explosive courtroom finale proving that rough justice is better than no justice at all.
If not for an injury, I never would have become a novelist.
This is the backstory of “Riptide.” In
1986, I rented a condo on Maui for the summer, intent on polishing my
skills as a competitive windsurfer. Strong trade winds, gorgeous waves
for jumping, and warm water. What could go wrong?
My
second day at Hookipa Beach, bouncing over the lip of a roller, the
board exploded out of the water and smashed my femur. The E.R.
physician told me nothing was broken and recommended smoking a little
Maui Wowie for the pain. (No, it was not Dr. House).
No
more windsurfing, so I sat on the beach with a yellow pad and, without
knowing what I was doing, started handwriting a novel featuring a
character that popped into my mind: linebacker-turned-lawyer Jake
Lassiter. Here’s the first sentence of fiction I ever wrote, (not
counting certain statements in my appellate briefs). “The old man loved
gadgets, money, and large-breasted women, and at the moment, he had all
three.”
When I returned home to Miami, I put the novel aside and wrote “To Speak for the Dead,”
which became my first published book. I kept re-writing “Riptide,”
which appeared as a William Morrow hardcover under the title
“Slashback.” And that line about gadgets, money, and breasts? It’s now
the first sentence of chapter two. Here’s what the Tampa Tribune had
to say:
“A thriller as fast as the wind…a bracing rush, as breathtaking as hitting the Gulf waters on a chill December morning.”
“Riptide”
is the only one of the Lassiter thrillers based on one of my cases.
Yes, I really had an octogenarian client who kept $2 million in
negotiable bonds in a desk drawer. And yes, his secretary, a woman
“somewhere between forty and hell,” ripped him off. Though I was a
lawyer, I really acted as a P.I., tracking down the bonds without
killing anyone or getting shot at myself. Is Jake Lassiter as lucky in
“Riptide?” Aw, it’ll cost you $2.99 to find out.
All
I’ll say now is that the trail of clues leads to a sinister
professional windsurfer and his companion, Lila Summers, a champion
athlete and a lethal femme fatale. Jake chases the missing bonds and
the mysterious woman from Miami to Bimini to Maui where, in an explosive
finale, he learns lessons never taught on the football field or in the
courtroom.
If John Grisham, Carl Hiaasen and Robert B. Parker had a love child, they would have named him Paul Levine and set him loose writing the Jake Lassiter series about an ex-linebacker turned trial lawyer with a nose for tackling the seedy side of life in South Florida … including today’s Kindle eBook of the Day.
Jake Lassiter, former jock turned Miami lawyer, takes on the case of Dr. Roger Salisbury. He’s being sued for malpractice by a beautiful young woman, Melanie Corrigan, widow of a wealthy developer who died on Salisbury’s care. Lassiter wins that case, but the charges just won’t die.
The dead man’s daugter, sportswriter Susan Corrigan, objects to Roger’s acquittal. She tells Jake that Melanie conspired with Salisbury to murder her father. She claims the suit was meant to divert attention from their illicit relationship.
But the widow throws a kink into the story, putting blame on Roger and making a case for herself.
The daughter secretly has the body exhumed to provide proof of her allegations. But she sneaks off with two bodies. The grave robbing tips the city prosecutor to more clues, and he arrests Roger. The charge is murder. That leaves Jake in the middle of a confusing mystery.
Attorney Levine’s lively fiction debut introduces Jake Lassiter, ex-jock turned Miami trial lawyer. Levine spins his tale briskly, his use of medical evidence and legal argument heightening the excitement rather than weighing it down. –Publishers Weekly.
A finely tuned plot from….novelist Levine, who orchestrates his tense courtroom and medical scenes with expert panache, fluid prose, and sly humor. An excellent choice and the first in a series–From Library Journal
“Better than Grisham! I read John Grisham, Scott Turow, Steve Martini, Lisa Scottoline, Linda Fairstein and other writers of legal thrillers. I’m also a lawyer, so I’m a stickler for authenticity. TO SPEAK FOR THE DEAD is maybe my favorite courtroom novel of all time.”
PAUL LEVINE worked as a newspaper reporter, a law professor and a trial lawyer before becoming a full-time novelist. His books have been translated into 23 languages.
Levine won the John D. MacDonald Florida Fiction Award for his Jake Lassiter series. Lassiter appeared in seven novels. He has been described by Booklist as “one of the most entertaining series characters in contemporary crime fiction” and by The Miami Herald as having “a lot more charisma than Perry Mason ever did.”
Levine also wrote 20 episodes of the TV series JAG, which gave him an opportunity to steer a nuclear submarine and land on the deck of an aircraft carrier, all without endangering national security. He has written about beginning his Hollywood career at the “advanced age of 51.”
Levine is a graduate of Penn State University where he majored in journalism and the University of Miami Law School where he he claims he “majored in the swimming pool.”
He was a trial lawyer with, as he says, “the mammoth, filthy rich international law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, where he did not even pretend to know all his partners’ names. He specialized in ‘complex litigation,’ cases so abstruse that even lawyers charging 500 bucks an hour didn’t fully understand them.”
Paul tried hundreds of cases and handled appeals at every level, including the Supreme Court.
Coming in Fall 2011 in hardcover: Lassiter. In it, Lassiter searches for a missing young woman who disappeared years earlier into the maze of Miami’s porn industry. The book will join the current lineup of 7 Jake Lassiter novels.
And here, in the comfort of your own browser, is your free sample:
Are you tired of being tired? This morning’s latest addition to our 500+ Free Book Alert listings is a book that may put you to sleep, but this time you could be grateful for it….
It would be interesting to know, if there were an authoritative way to find out, if crime novelists are more likely than the rest of us, in any situation, to do the right thing. Preoccupied as they are with the quest for justice, it seems like a real possibility.
If it were on us to prove the affirmative, we could do much worse than to offer, as Exhibit #1, Kindle Nation fave and all-around good guy Mr. Paul Levine. It’s been a treat to get to know Paul over the past year or so, and it is a special treat to go all the way back down the alley with him here today to offer a special price and a chance to help him do some good with his very first novel in his much-loved Jake Lassiter series, To Speak For The Dead.
You’ll get a chance to say hello to Lassiter, a lawyer who doesn’t mind breaking the rules to serve justice, and along the way, as you’ll discover below, you’ll have a chance to help kids who need it most, because Paul is donating all proceeds from To Speak For The Dead to support the search for a cure to childhood cancer.
PAUL LEVINE worked as a newspaper reporter, a law professor and a trial lawyer before becoming a full-time novelist. Obviously, he cannot hold a job. Paul claims that writing fiction comes naturally: he told whoppers for many years in his legal briefs. His books have been translated into 23 languages, none of which he can read. He has won the John D. MacDonald fiction award and has been nominated for an Edgar, a Macavity, the International Thriller Writers Award, and the James Thurber Humor Prize.
What’s new? Now on Amazon Kindle at $2.99: The 20th Anniversary edition of “To Speak for the Dead,” the first of the bestselling Jake Lassiter novels. All author proceeds of the novel are pledged to the Four Diamonds Fund, which supports cancer treatment and research at Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital.
Paul wrote 20 episodes of the TV series JAG, which gave him an opportunity to steer a nuclear submarine and land on the deck of an aircraft carrier, all without endangering national security. He is a graduate of Penn State University where he majored in journalism and the University of Miami Law School where he majored in the swimming pool. He passed the Florida Bar exam in his first try in what he suspects was a computer glitch.
He was a trial lawyer with the mammoth international law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, where he did not even pretend to know all his partners’ names. He specialized in “complex litigation,” cases so abstruse that even lawyers charging 500 bucks an hour didn’t fully understand them. He tried hundreds of cases and handled appeals at every level, including the Supreme Court. Along the way, he filed expense accounts nearly as creative as his legal briefs.
Paul says he enjoys writing more than lawyering because he no longer keeps time sheets and gets to work in his underwear. He lives in the hills of Southern California, which he claims are populated by rattlesnakes and coyotes, and those are just the Hollywood agents. More info at http:www.paul-levine.com
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Free Contemporary Titles in the Kindle Store
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Only a very lucky few of us will have the opportunity to spend this Summer touring Europe, but if there’s any chance you might be among that elect any time soon, it’s an absolute must that you pick up the new HSA travel guide that sits with three other brand new selections atop this morning’s latest additions to our 250+ Free Book Alert listings….
But first, a word from … Today’s Sponsor
A major fave among Kindle Nation readers, the award-winning author Paul Levine is back with what he promises is his “best Jake Lassiter novel” to date. This time Lassiter’s new client literally tumbles into his lap with the vapors just seconds after having shot the guy next to him – who turns out to be her father. And that’s just for starters…
“Lively entertainment…Jake Lassiter is attractive, funny, savvy, and brave.” —Scientific American (And who’s to say we’re not all scientific Americans?)
Pro football player turned lawyer Jake Lassiter is savoring a drink at a South Beach bar when a beautiful young woman shoots the man on the next bar stool and faints in Lassiter’s arms. It’s one way to get clients, he figures. The woman, Chrissy Bernhardt, is charged with the first-degree murder of her father, whom Chrissy believes abused her as a child. Lassiter takes the case, which is complicated by the fact that Chrissy’s repressed memories of her father’s abuse have been “unlocked” with the help of a therapist who turns out to be her late mother’s former lover. The seventh Lassiter novel continues the series’ steady improvement. Lassiter is smart, tough, funny, and very human. He’s coming on fast as one of the most entertaining series characters in contemporary crime fiction.
What the Reviewers Say
“Mystery writing at its very, very best.” — Larry King about the Lassiter series in USA TODAY
“[Lassiter has] a lot more charisma than Perry Mason ever did.” –The Miami Herald
The idea for “Flesh & Bones” came from a real murder case involving the controversial notion of repressed memory syndrome.
Here’s how it started. A 29-year-old California woman reported to police that she suddenly remembered seeing her father rape and kill a schoolmate twenty years earlier. Were the memories real? Or dreams? Or outright fabrications?
The D.A. thought they were real. And so did the jury which heard the case of the previously unsolved child killing. The father was sentenced to life in prison and served seven years before a federal court determined that the daughter’s testimony had been tainted by hypnotic therapy.
Out of that grew my notion of a troubled young model, Chrissy Bernhardt, who walks into a Miami Beach bar and shoots her father in front of dozens of witnesses…including linebacker-turned-lawyer Jake Lassiter. Chrissy claims that, under hypnotic regression therapy, she recovered memories repressed long ago: her father’s sexual abuse.
As I did while researching the book, Lassiter interviews a skeptical psychiatrist who tells him that memories are “malleable” by therapists.
“We can thank Freud for the theory that all our experiences are stored away somewhere in the brain, just waiting to be recovered by therapy,” Dr. Santiago said. “A huge number of his patients seemed to recall terrible memories of childhood incest. Initially, Freud accepted the stories as true. Later, he concluded they were ‘screen memories,’ fantasies hiding primitive wishes. Others believe they’re just false memories.”
“So what’s the truth?” I asked.
“Oh, memories may be repressed and then recovered, but does that make them true? I’m sure you remember many events in your life that are absolutely false.”
“I don’t get it. If I remember them, they’re true.”
“Not necessarily. You may try to store memories like a librarian shelving books. But each of us constructs a personal myth about what we think is true. We may exaggerate. Good times in the past become even better, hard times even worse. Individuals who were bad become outright demons. And some of our memories might simply be dreams that never took place at all.”
Lassiter soon discovers that his client’s shrink might have his own motive for wanting Chrissy’s father dead. So might her brother, for purely financial reasons. All of that plays out against the very real debate about the science of the mind. Are the memories dug out of the subconscious through hypnosis real or imagined?
The psychiatrist tells Lassiter:“Memory suppression is hardly unknown. In one study, researchers found that thirty-eight percent of adult women who had been treated for sexual abuse as children had no memories of the incidents. The difficulty is to recover the memories without contamination by post-event occurrences or suggestions by therapists, whether innocent or malevolent.”
That’s the heart of “Flesh & Bones”and every murder trial. Separating the innocent from the malevolent.
–Paul
Click here to downloadFlesh & Bones (The Jake Lassiter Series) (or a free sample) to your Kindle, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, Android-compatible, PC or Mac and start reading within 60 seconds!
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Free Contemporary Titles in the Kindle Store
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Just use the slider at right of your screen below to scroll through a complete, updated list of free contemporary Kindle titles, and click on an icon like this one (at right) to read a free sample right here in your browser!Titles are sorted in reverse chronological order so you can easily see new freebies.
Before he gave up suits for underwear as work garb, author Paul Levine was a lawyer for a high-powered, high-priced firm.
He tried hundreds of cases and handled appeals at every level, up to and including the Supreme Court.
He has won the John D. MacDonald fiction award and has been nominated for an Edgar, a Macavity, the International Thriller Writers Award, and the James Thurber Humor Prize.
Today’s Free Kindle Nation Short is a 6,300-word excerpt luring you to the full novel, Flesh & Bones, which grew out of a real-life murder case involving a legal defense based on the resurrection of repressed memories.
Flesh & Bones is the latest Jake Lassiter mystery, and Paul says it is his best yet. And speaking of underwear, please accept our apologies for teasing you with this line from the very first page of Flesh & Bones:
According to the A-Form later filled out by a bored female cop, the tall blond woman wore three items of clothing that night, and the Charles Jourdan shoes were two of them.
The idea for “Flesh & Bones” came from a real murder case involving the controversial notion of repressed memory syndrome.
Here’s how it started. A 29-year-old California woman reported to police that she suddenly remembered seeing her father rape and kill a schoolmate twenty years earlier. Were the memories real? Or dreams? Or outright fabrications?
The D.A. thought they were real. And so did the jury which heard the case of the previously unsolved child killing. The father was sentenced to life in prison and served seven years before a federal court determined that the daughter’s testimony had been tainted by hypnotic therapy.
Out of that grew my notion of a troubled young model, Chrissy Bernhardt, who walks into a Miami Beach bar and shoots her father in front of dozens of witnesses…including linebacker-turned-lawyer Jake Lassiter. Chrissy claims that, under hypnotic regression therapy, she recovered memories repressed long ago: her father’s sexual abuse.
As I did while researching the book, Lassiter interviews a skeptical psychiatrist who tells him that memories are “malleable” by therapists.
“We can thank Freud for the theory that all our experiences are stored away somewhere in the brain, just waiting to be recovered by therapy,” Dr. Santiago said. “A huge number of his patients seemed to recall terrible memories of childhood incest. Initially, Freud accepted the stories as true. Later, he concluded they were ‘screen memories,’ fantasies hiding primitive wishes. Others believe they’re just false memories.”
“So what’s the truth?” I asked.
“Oh, memories may be repressed and then recovered, but does that make them true? I’m sure you remember many events in your life that are absolutely false.”
“I don’t get it. If I remember them, they’re true.”
“Not necessarily. You may try to store memories like a librarian shelving books. But each of us constructs a personal myth about what we think is true. We may exaggerate. Good times in the past become even better, hard times even worse. Individuals who were bad become outright demons. And some of our memories might simply be dreams that never took place at all.”
Lassiter soon discovers that his client’s shrink might have his own motive for wanting Chrissy’s father dead. So might her brother, for purely financial reasons. All of that plays out against the very real debate about the science of the mind. Are the memories dug out of the subconscious through hypnosis real or imagined?
The psychiatrist tells Lassiter:“Memory suppression is hardly unknown. In one study, researchers found that thirty-eight percent of adult women who had been treated for sexual abuse as children had no memories of the incidents. The difficulty is to recover the memories without contamination by post-event occurrences or suggestions by therapists, whether innocent or malevolent.”
That’s the heart of “Flesh & Bones”and every murder trial. Separating the innocent from the malevolent.
“I was sitting at the end of the bar sipping single-malt Scotch when I spotted the tall blond woman with the large green eyes and the small gray gun.”
The next thing Jake Lassiter knows, the woman pumps three bullets into the man on the next barstool.
And Jake, the linebacker-turned-lawyer, has a new client.
She’s stunning model Chrissy Bernhardt, and the dead man is her wealthy father.
The defense? Chrissy claims that she’s recently recovered repressed memories of having been sexually abused by her father.
Jake wants to believe her but suspects that the memories were either implanted by a shady psychiatrist or fabricated by Chrissy herself.
Complicating the situation, Jake falls for his client, clouding his judgment. Is she an anguished victim or a cold-blooded killer? And what about her brother, who stands to inherit a fortune if Chrissy goes to prison?
Jake wades into a quagmire of dirty water deals, big money, and family corruption, all leading to an explosive finale.
Copyright 2011 by Paul Levine and reprinted here with his permission.
1
Loaded Dice
I was sitting at the end of the bar sipping single-malt Scotch when I
What Page One Would Look Like, If This Were a Picture Book
spotted the tall blond woman with the large green eyes and the small gray gun.
Not that I knew she had a gun. Not that I even saw her at first, even though she was five feet eleven barefoot, and at the moment was wearing black stiletto heels. According to the A-Form later filled out by a bored female cop, the tall blond woman wore three items of clothing that night, and the Charles Jourdan shoes were two of them. The third was a scooped-back, low-cut, black tank minidress. Nothing more. No rings, necklaces . . . or underwear. She did carry a beaded black Versace handbag, which apparently held the gun, until she pulled it out and . . .
But I’m getting ahead of myself. When she walked in, I was twirling a snifter, admiring the golden liquid inside, trying to catch the smoky scent that had the Yuppies all atwitter, and likewise trying to figure out why I wasn’t home drinking beer, eating pizza, and watching ESPN, as is my custom. Life in the no-passing lane.
“Do you sense the reek of the peat?” Rusty MacLean asked me, while twirling his own glass. “Do the pepper and the heather transport you to the Highlands?”
At the moment we were five feet above sea level, two blocks from the ocean on South Beach, with palms swaying and a Jamaican steel band playing, so you’ll pardon me if the outdoor club called Paranoia didn’t feel like Inverness or the Isle of Skye. “Can we drink it now, or are you going to keep blowing smoke up my kilt?” I asked.
“Patience, Jake, patience. Did you clear your palette of the Royal Lochnagar?”
“Palette clear, throat dry. Can we drink it now?”
“Did you appreciate the Lochnagar’s muscular, oaky flavor? The hint of sherry?”
“Okee? As in Okefenokee? As in swampy?”
Rusty gave me his exasperated, why-do-I-put-up-with-you look. “Jake, I’m trying to civilize you. I’ve been trying for years.”
Rusty MacLean had been my teammate on the Dolphins about a thousand years ago. He was a flashy wide receiver with curly red hair flapping out of his helmet. A free spirit, the sports-writers called him. Undisciplined, the coaches said. Used to drive Shula crazy. Rusty loved to baby himself, nursing small injuries, sitting out Tuesday practices. It is a given in pro football that by midseason everyone is hurt. I’ve played-though not very well- with turf toe, a broken nose, and a separated shoulder, once all at the same time. Rusty, who had far more natural ability, could make a hangnail seem like a compound fracture.
Rusty MacLean raised his glass and said something that sounded like “Slanjeh. To your health, old buddy.”
I hoisted my glass. “Fuel in your bagpipes.”
He sipped at his Glenmorangie, while I swilled mine, letting it warm my throat. Damn good, but I wouldn’t admit it. No need to spoil my image as a throwback and relentlessly uncool, unhip, and out of it. I am so far behind the trends that sometimes I’m back in fashion, just like the Art Deco buildings in the very neighborhood where we now sat, drinking and swapping lies. I wore faded jeans, a T-shirt from a Key West oyster bar advising patrons to eat ’em raw, and a nylon Penn State windbreaker. I thought I was underdressed until I saw a skinny guy in black silk pants, no shirt, and an open leather vest that couldn’t hide his navel ring. Or his nipple ring. Rusty wore a black T-shirt under a double-breasted Armani suit, his hair tied back in a ponytail.
He savored his drink, eyes closed, a beatific smile on his face. “Mmmm,” he purred. “I’ve screwed girls younger than this Scotch.”
“And you’re trying to civilize me?”
Rusty was signaling the bartender, pointing to another bottle of the single-malt stuff. We were going in some sort of ritualized order, from Lowlands to Highlands to islands, and The Glenlivet was next. “Not Glenlivet,” Rusty had instructed me, “The Glenlivet.”
“I know. Like the Eiffel Tower, The Donald, The Coach.”
“Robust with a long finish,” Rusty said as the bartender poured the liquid gold into fresh snifters. “The marriage of power and finesse.”
A waitress slinked by, offering canapés from a silver tray, smoked salmon curled around cream cheese, caviar on tiny crackers. A long way from the trailer park in Key Largo. I remembered a tavern song my father used to warble after he’d had a few, none of them sips of single-malt Scotch aged in oak casks.
Rye whiskey, rye whiskey,
Rye whiskey, I cry.
If I can’t get rye whiskey,
I surely will die.
Funny thinking about my father at that moment, a knife plunged into his heart, dying on a saloon floor.
I watched her approach the bar, not from some sixth sense that trouble was brewing, though in my experience, tall blondes are trouble indeed. I watched because Rusty MacLean, using the peripheral vision that had always let him know where the safety was lurking, had just gestured in her direction and compared her knees to Dan Marino’s. Unfavorably to Dan’s, I might add.
A few minutes earlier, I had asked him why he’d given up being a sports agent to open SoBeMo, a modeling agency. His answer competed in volume with the Dolby-enhanced nihilistic baritone poetry of Leonard Cohen. Everybody knows that the dice are loaded. Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
“Forty percent,” Rusty said.
Everybody knows the fight was fixed; the poor stay poor, the rich get rich.
My look shot him a question, so he continued. “Twenty percent from the model, another twenty percent from the company booking the shoot. Compare that to four percent for representing some sixth-round, preliterate prima donna from Weber State, and I’ll take the babes every time.”
“We don’t call them babes anymore,” I corrected him, having been dragged into the nineties, just in time for the millennium.
Now, as I followed his gaze, Rusty said, “Here’s another reason. Whose knees would you rather look at it, Dan Marino’s or Chrissy Bernhardt’s?”
If they’d asked similar questions on the Bar exam, I would have passed the first time.
I watched Chrissy Bernhardt walk the walk, hips rotating with that exaggerated roll forward, the arms swinging gracefully so far back she could have been waving at someone behind her. A stroll down the runway in Milan. Her bare shoulders had the rounded, developed look of hundreds of hours in the gym. Her ash-blond hair slid across those shoulders with each stride, and in her black stiletto heels, she was as tall as me, though a hundred pounds lighter.
Twenty feet away now, headed right for us, Chrissy Bernhardt seemed to look at Rusty. He always got the eye contact before I did. I am not a bad-looking man, despite a nose that goes east and west where it should go north and south. I have shaggy, dirty-blond hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders, and a waist that is just beginning to show the effects of numerous four-Grolsch nights. Rusty has a different look, sleek and feral, and women love it. He always seems to send out sonar waves that bounce off attractive women and back to him. This time, though, when he smiled, she didn’t smile back.
Now I saw she was looking past Rusty at the beefy man on the next barstool. About sixty, a pink well-fed face, a nose that seemed too small for the rest of him, and thick arms with a golfer’s tan peeking out from beneath the short-sleeved guayabera. Earlier, the man had twice asked the bartender for the time. Then he had given me a look and grinned. “I know you. Number fifty-eight for the Dolphins, right?”
“Long time ago.”
“I remember a game against the Jets, you made a helluva hit on the kickoff team, recovered the fumble . . .” He smiled again, then continued in a deep, gravel-voiced rumble, “Then went the wrong way. You ran toward the wrong end zone.”
“I got turned around when I made the hit,” I explained, as I have so many times over the years.
“Lucky for you, your own kicker tackled you.”
Yeah. Garo Yepremian couldn’t tackle me if I was drunk and blindfolded. He had, however, fallen on me after I tripped on the twenty-yard-line stripe.
Everybody knows the war is over. Everybody knows the good guys lost.
Now the woman reached into the little beaded black handbag she was carrying. The deep-voiced man next to us seemed to recognize her, too, and a thin smile creased his face. When it disappeared, I glanced back at Chrissy Bernhardt, who now was holding a Beretta 950, a silly little handgun that shoots .22 shorts out of a two-inch barrel. It’s a lousy weapon for killing someone, but it weighs only ten ounces and leaves room for cigarettes and makeup in a tiny handbag.
With a single tear tracking down her face-navigating the contours of those granite cheekbones-Chrissy Bernhardt held the small pistol in both hands and squeezed off the first shot. The pop was no louder than a champagne cork’s, and anyone in the bar who heard it probably thought it was just another celebratory bottle of the middling California hiccupy stuff the management was serving to the SoBe, chi-chi crowd of opening-night freebie-glomming party freaks.
Of course, the beefy man with the pale, thinning hair didn’t think it was a champagne cork. Not after the red stain appeared on the right side of his chest, armpit high. He sat there a second in disbelief, watching the blood dribble down the front of his creamy guayabera. Then, speechless, he looked up toward the tall young woman.
And so did I.
A second tear rolled down her lovely face, now illuminated by the spotlights set into the recessed ceiling of the outdoor bar. Potted palms rustled gently in the soft evening breeze, carrying the scent of the ocean mixed with jasmine and a hint of locally grown high-grade marijuana. There was something faintly Hollywood about the whole scene, except if this were a movie, I would have dived from my barstool and knocked the gun from the woman’s hand, after which she would have fallen in love with me.
But I didn’t. And she didn’t. Or did she?
Mouth agape, like the cop holding on to Lee Harvey Oswald as Jack Ruby plugged him, I just watched as she fired the second shot, this one lower, plinking the tip of the man’s pelvis and ricocheting toward the dance floor, where the police would later find it and slip it into a little plastic bag, as they are inclined to do.
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking. Everyone knows the captain lied.
Frozen to my barstool, I watched Chrissy Bernhardt lower the gun slightly, aiming at the man’s crotch.
Everybody got this broken feeling like their father or their dog just died.
The man tried covering his groin with his hands, and the third bullet slipped between his spread fingers, nicked his penis, then entered his thigh, lodging in but not breaking his femur.
All of this took just a few seconds. Rusty never moved, except to lean toward me and away from the line of fire. In games, he’d always head for the bench during brawls, and I’d be out there busting my knuckles against the top of some gorilla’s helmet.
As she took aim again, I finally leaped from the barstool and dived for the gun, knocking it away. Chrissy Bernhardt fainted, and I caught her, just scooped her up and held her there, her cheek resting on my shoulder, her flowing hair tickling my neck. Which is how my picture came to be plastered on page one of The Miami Herald, a beautiful, unconscious woman in my arms, a dumb, gaping look on my face. Beneath the photo, the caption “Lawyer disarms gun-toting model-too late.” Story of my life: a step too slow.
2
Concussion Zone
“Patricide,” Doc Charlie Riggs said with distaste. “A crime of biblical dimensions.”
“And mythical,” I added.
“Oedipus, of course,” Charlie said. “And let’s see now . . .”
Talking to the retired coroner is like playing poker with ideas, and today it was my turn to deal. “Orestes,” I told him. It isn’t often I get the upper hand on Charlie, so I milked it. “Orestes beheaded his mother, Clytemnestra, for plotting the death of his father, Agamemnon.”
“Yes, of course. Very good, Jake. Very good, indeed.”
He gave me his kindly teacher look. It’s fun proving that I didn’t spend five years at Penn State for nothing, if you’ll pardon the double negative. My freshman year, I was drafted by the Thespian Club to play Big Jule in a student production of Guys and Dolls, mostly because the other actors had the physique of Michael J. Fox. It was fun, and it prompted me to switch my major from phys. ed. to drama, where I specialized in playing large, dumb guys. Yeah, I know, type casting. My favorite part was Lennie in Of Mice and Men, and I still remember hearing sobs in the audience when I asked George to tell me about the little place we’d get, and there was George pulling the gun out of his pocket. “And I get to tend the rabbits,” I said, and George was pointing the gun at the back of my head, and the people in the audience were sniffling and bawling. I wish Granny could have been there.
Anyway, here I was-two careers later-still acting, but this time for judges and juries. At this precise moment, I was listening as my old friend told me about the autopsy report, which his friends at the county morgue had slipped him last night.
The gunshots should not have killed Harry Bernhardt, Doc Riggs told me. Would not have killed him if he hadn’t had a heart condition. Seventy-five percent blockage of two coronary arteries due to a lifetime of Kentucky bourbon, Cuban cigars, and Kansas beef.
“The shock of the shooting set loose a burst of adrenaline,” Charlie said, leafing through the report. “Combined with the blockage, that could have killed him instantly.”
“But it didn’t,” I protested. “He survived. The surgery was supposedly successful.”
“Sure, the bullets were removed, the bleeding stopped. But, between the shooting and the surgery, the system had taken some brutal shocks, especially for a man with damaged arteries. While recovering in the ICU, the unfortunate Mr. Bernhardt went into spontaneous ventricular fibrillation. The muscle fibers of the heart weren’t getting enough oxygen.” Charlie opened and closed his fist rapidly to demonstrate. “The heart was literally quivering, but no blood was being pumped. Cardiac arrest followed. The Code Blue team attempted to resuscitate and defibrillate but was unsuccessful. Death was imminent.”
“But he was fine when they put him into the ambulance,” I said.
“Fine?” Charlie raised a bushy eyebrow. It was a look he’d used hundreds of times to tell jurors that the lawyer questioning him was full of beans. Charlie Riggs had been medical examiner of Dade County for twenty-five years before retiring to fish the Keys and drink Granny Lassiter’s moonshine. Now, he was sitting in my office high above Biscayne Boulevard, giving me the benefit of his wisdom, without charging me a fee, except for a promised Orvis graphite spinning rod. A small bandy-legged man with an unruly beard, he wore eyeglasses fastened together with a bent fishhook. A cold meerschaum pipe was propped in the corner of his mouth. “Fine?” he repeated. “Mr. Harry Bernhardt was leaking blood from three bullet wounds. Four, if you count both the thigh and the penis, which were hit with the same bullet.”
“Let’s count the penis. I would if it were mine.” I riffled through the paramedics’ report and the hospital records. “But he survived the surgery, which stanched the bleeding and removed the bullets. He was in critical but stable condition in the ICU for two hours after he was patched up.”
“What are you getting at, counselor?”
“The heart attack could have been independent of the shooting. Maybe I can get Socolow to charge her with aggravated assault, instead of-“
“You can’t represent her! You’re a witness.”
“Me and a hundred others, plus a security videotape that caught the whole thing. I already talked to Socolow. He said he’d rather have me as an opposing lawyer than a witness.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t take that as a compliment.”
“Socolow’s been wrong before. Besides, Ms. Christina Bernhardt asked me to represent her.”
“What’d you do, slip your card into her bra when she was passed out?”
“Wasn’t wearing a bra, Charlie. Panties, either.”
“Good heavens!”
“It’s a model thing. Interferes with the smooth flow of fabric on skin.”
Charlie Riggs looked at me skeptically. “Just when did you become an expert on models?”
“Rusty MacLean taught me a few things. Actually, he’s the one who retained me. He’s her agent, promises to pay the tab.”
“Better get a hefty retainer from that weasel,” Charlie advised, “or you’ll never see a dollar.”
“Hey, Rusty’s an old friend. He introduced me to every after-hours watering hole in the AFC East and many of the women therein.”
“Even in Buffalo?”
“Especially in Buffalo. What else is there to do?”
Charlie harrumphed his displeasure. “I never trusted a receiver who didn’t like going over the middle.”
Like coaches and generals, Doc Charlie Riggs had remarkable tolerance for other people’s pain.
“Charlie, believe me, no one likes going over the middle. It’s a concussion zone.”
It’s true, of course. No one wants to run full speed into Dick Butkus, Jack Lambert, or even little old me, Jake Lassiter, linebacker with a tender heart and a forearm smash like a crowbar to the throat.
“It’s not just that he short-armed it,” Charlie said. “It’s that he never gave a hundred percent. With you, Jake, it was different. You had no business being out there. You just gave it everything and overachieved.”
“It was either that or drive a beer truck,” I said. In those days, I hadn’t thought about law school, still confining myself to honest work. But Charlie Riggs was right about one thing. Rusty had talent he never used.
Rusty MacLean was a natural. A four-sport star at a Chicago high school, he was an All-American at Notre Dame and a first-round draft choice with the Dolphins. I was a solid, if unspectacular, linebacker at Coral Shores High School in the Florida Keys, a walk-on at Penn State, and a free agent with the Dolphins. I hung on as a pro because of a willingness to punish myself-and occasionally an opponent-on kickoff teams. I played linebacker only when injuries to the starters were so severe that Don Shula thought about calling Julio Iglesias to fill in.
Rusty could do anything-pole-vault, high-jump, play tennis with either hand. The first time he touched a golf club, he shot a 79. But he hated practice and loved parties. Blown knee ligaments ended his career when he didn’t have the discipline to suffer through a year of painful rehabilitation. My career ended differently. I fought back after knee surgery, numerous fractures, and separated shoulders, but was simply beaten out by better, younger players. I enrolled in night law school because it left days free for windsurfing.
Charlie grumbled something else about my old teammate, then went back to the autopsy report, pausing once to tap tobacco into his pipe and then light it. I stood up and paced, stopping in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the bay, Key Biscayne, and the ocean beyond. From the thirty-second floor, I could make out tiny triangles of colorful sails on the waters just off Virginia Key. Windsurfers luxuriating in a fifteen-knot easterly. Beats murder and mayhem any day.
“What about it, Charlie? Will you testify that the heart attack was an intervening cause?”
“But it wasn’t!” he thundered. “The shooting was the proximate cause of the coronary.”
“Not so fast,” I cautioned. “At his age, with the condition of his arteries, Harry Bernhardt could have had a coronary at any time, right?”
“But he didn’t have it any time. He went into cardiac arrest three and a half hours after your client-if that’s what she is- plugged him, her own father, for God’s sake.”
“How about just helping me out at the bond hearing, Charlie? Maybe give a little song-and-dance to get her out of the can.”
Charlie raised his bushy eyebrows at me. “Are you suborning perjury?”
“No, I was just saying-“
“That I lie at the bond hearing, as if that would be a lesser evil than at the trial.” His look was a dagger. “Jake, an oath is an oath.”
I remembered what a writer once said about another lawyer, the disgraced and now deceased Roy Cohn: “He only lies under oath.” Well, why not? That’s when it counts.
“Veritas simplex oratio est,” Charlie said. “The language of truth is simple. But lies, prevarications, calumnies, they’ll catch you in their web.”
I hate arguing with Charlie Riggs because he’s always right, and he keeps me semihonest with his damned Yankee rectitude. “The grand jury meets tomorrow,” I said. “I was hoping to talk Abe Socolow into a plea to a lesser-“
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