Entrapment,” Cyrus Horner said, his cigarette dancing in the corner of his mouth, spraying ashes on his chest. “Plain and simple. Female cops got no business working massage parlors.”
I studied the A-form while Horner kept yammering away. He paced in front of my desk, banging his right fist into his left palm, cursing the police, the courts, his probation officer, and his three ex-wives. Horner was one of those scrawny guys with a potbelly. He was bald on top with pale wispy hair covering his ears. His sideburns were so far out of date they had just come back into style, and his Hawaiian shirt was decorated with pink roses, some of which had cigarette holes in the blossoms. His eyes were tiny black pebbles, his skin the color of curdled milk. Naturally, he considered himself irresistible to women.
“I been a regular at the Feather Touch for years,” Horner was saying, “so I know all the girls, and they know me. Some of them, you gotta cajole a little.”
“Cajole? Like with compliments?”
“No, like with Ulysses S. Grant.”
Outside, a rare spring thunderstorm pelted the high-rise windows. The vultures, which circled the courthouse all winter, were no longer soaring in the updrafts. Like the tourists, they had returned to the north. The ugly birds make their summer home in Hinckley, Ohio, where their diet probably consists of leaves and field mice. In Miami, they feast on beheaded goats from Santeria sacrifices and drug lords stuffed into garbage bags.
Cindy, my secretary, stuck her headful of copper-colored curls into the office. She wore studded jeans, black shoes with stiletto heels, and a purple T-shirt emblazoned I LIVE FOR LOVE. She was chewing a wad of Juicy Fruit when she asked, “Would you gentlemen like some coffee?”
Why did she roll her eyes when she said gentlemen?
“Doughnuts?” she inquired. “Danish…”
She shot a look at Horner and seemed to make a mental note to disinfect his chair.
“… burglary tools?”
“Cindy, scram!”
She shrugged and ducked out of the room and into her cubicle. Cindy’s secretarial skills are limited-with three-inch fingernails, she does not so much type as slash at the keyboard-but she is smart and loyal. For years, Cindy has been trying to persuade me to upgrade my practice. This is hard to do when your clients are con men, real estate developers, and doctors accused of malpractice. It is sometimes difficult to tell which group has the most accomplished perjurers.
“One time, the Feather Touch gets this new girl,” Horner was saying, his cigarette wagging at me, “Lucinda from Loxahatchee. And she won’t do nothin’. ‘Whatsa matter,’ I say, ‘you don’t touch genitals?’ She goes, ‘Sure, genitals, Jews, it don’t matter none, long as they pay.’”
Granny Lassiter was right; I should have been a civil engineer. Build roads, she said, something solid. Instead, here I was listening to Cyrus Horner-part-time grifter, professional whiner-bemoan the sorry state of our law enforcement community.
“Entrapment,” he repeated. “I had no predisposition to commit a criminal act.”
Whew. Your three-time losers sure know the lingo. I grabbed his file and spread the contents across my desk. “The room was bugged, so they have tapes and transcripts plus video and still photos. Want to see?”
I gave him a moment to add it up. Addition was not his strong suit.
“They have a warrant?” he asked.
“Didn’t need one. It was their place, not yours, so you didn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
“I had a reasonable expectation of a blow job.”
“Tell it to Chief Justice Rehnquist. Maybe you can change the law.”
He flicked ashes on my carpet. “I studied some law, you know.”
I figured. Our prisons have excellent libraries.
“I got a well-rounded education,” he continued. “I was on the fencing team in school.”
“Really, like with sabres and foils?”
“Nah, like with tires and TV’s.”
Why didn’t I listen to Granny? “C’mon, Cy. You’re avoiding the issue. We should be talking about a plea.”
He kept pacing; I stared out the window. Heavy gray thunderheads hung over Biscayne Bay, obscuring the view of Miami Beach, Fisher Island, and Virginia Key. If there were any windsurfers out there, they were using their masts as lightning rods.
“All right, let’s see what they got.”
I opened a manila folder and poured out a dozen eight-by-ten glossies. They made me think of Lourdes Soto, lady PI and long-lens photographer. What had she come up with, anyway? And why had she scouted me out? Just looking for some new business, or was there something more?
Horner came around the desk, leaned over my shoulder, and belched, giving me a whiff of tobacco and sour mash whiskey. I spread the photos in front of him. They had been shot from a peephole in the ceiling. Horner lay on his back, wearing only a Fruit-of-the-Loom athletic shirt and black socks that barely reached his ankles. A woman in a blond wig and a camisole sat on the edge of the bed, a bottle of oil in one hand, a fifty-dollar bill in the other. If Horner had been excited, his brain forgot to tell his loins.
“Hey, that’s libelous!” he blurted out.
“What?”
He jabbed the photo with a nicotine-stained fingernail. “That picture’s taken out of context.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jeez, shooting me all limp like that. When I get an erection, I gotta take out a building permit.”
A flash of lightning streaked across the bay, striking behind the warehouse area at the port. Horner moved back in front of the desk and slumped into an old leather chair. He used a seventy-nine-cent lighter on another cigarette. I don’t know what happened to the first one. He either swallowed it or tossed the butt behind the credenza when I wasn’t looking. His Hawaiian shirt had flapped open, and his belly-hairier than his head-peeked out at me. A delayed thunderclap rattled the windowpane.
“You could cop a plea. Soliciting for prostitution is only a second-degree misdemeanor.”
“No can do. I’m on probation.”
I found the rap sheet the state attorney’s office had been kind enough to provide. “I remember the B.R.C., but what’s the fraud conviction?”
“Rubbertech, Inc., a franchise I promoted. Strictly legit. Sold condom machines to restaurants, convenience stores, what have you. I should have told the investors about a little problem we had with the machines.”
“Stolen, right?”
“Nah, nothing like that. My ex-brother-in-law made them in the tool shop when he was doing thirty months at Avon Park. Only problem, the damn machines put a little hole in the package as it came out the slot.”
“In the package?”
“Well, in the condoms, too, about two out of three. Hey, you bat. 333, you’re in the Hall of Fame, right?”
I flipped to the next page. I had seen longer rap sheets, but few as eclectic.
“What about the grand larceny?”
“Complete railroad job, a kangaroo court. I was selling prints of the Last Supper for four grand per set and advising customers to donate them to a church and take a nineteen-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine-dollar charitable tax deduction.”
“Nineteen thousand…”
“Yeah. If it’s more than twenty grand, you gotta have an independent appraisal. This way, I give them my appraisal certificate from the Church of the Shining Sun. The rectory’s in my garage.”
“You’re a preacher, too?”
He gave me a sly grin and let me see a matched set of yellow incisors. “They call me Brother Cyrus.”
Another peal of thunder, but Horner didn’t flinch. Maybe he answered to a Higher Authority. “Look at it this way,” he said. “If you’re in the thirty-one-percent tax bracket, I could save you twenty-two hundred on a four-thou investment. The IRS gets pissed off, and the Justice Department flips a coin with the state attorney. Tax fraud or grand larceny. The state attorney won.”
I watched two raindrops race each other down the outside of my windowpane. I put my money on the juicy, oblong one, but the thin guy seemed to pick up a tailwind.
“Brother Cyrus, if you want me to try the case, we’d better prepare your testimony.”
