mistook him for an underfed exilado, then ended up with a busted nose or a shiv in the belly.
“You used the forklift merely to catch up with him,” I suggested, helpfully. “You never intended to-”
“ Estas loco? I intended to kill him.”
Oh, brother. What would Jimmy Stewart have done? I decided to listen. Francisco Crespo stood and walked around my office. He picked up a deflated football from a position of honor on a bookshelf and ran his finger over the white paint that told the score of a long-forgotten Dolphins-Jets game. He stood near the floor-to-ceiling window without getting too close, and he avoided the draft from the air-conditioning vent. Then he finished the story in a matter-of-fact voice. I studied his body language and watched his eyes. No sign of deception. But how could he be lying? With every word, he incriminated himself.
S morodinsky grabbed the rack’s support strut like a rider pulling himself aboard a trolley car. Crespo zoomed past on the forklift and jerked it around, the back wheels whirling it into a steep turn. The Russian jumped down and was running the other way, grabbing wooden crates from the shelves, tossing them into the aisle behind him. The forklift smashed over them and caught up with Smorodinsky at an intersection of four aisles. He swerved right, wanting the forklift to rush past him. But the big Russian lost traction on the slippery concrete. I pictured his feet sliding out from under him, and I remembered trying to cut on artificial turf after a rain.
The fork was set about belly-high. It caught Vladimir Smorodinsky in midstep, slightly below the rib cage on the right side. The blade pierced the oblique muscles of the abdomen and just missed the liver, but, according to the medical examiner, plunged through the ascending colon, the right kidney, the duodenum, and worst of all, the inferior vena cava, which ordinarily carries blood to the heart from the lower extremities, but just then emptied itself all over cartons of beach towels from the Dominican Republic.
There is a lever to the right of the steering wheel, Crespo told me, happily demonstrating how he pulled it back, raising the fork, hoisting Smorodinsky off the floor. Crespo never hit the brakes. Instead, he accelerated, carrying the bleeding Russian with him.
“The bastard was stuck like, like…” He searched for an expression. “Like an olive on a toothpick,” he said with malicious glee.
The forklift careened down the aisle, sideswiping metal racks with the clang of screeching metal and finally smashing into the corrugated metal door near the loading dock. The bloody steel fork reverberated against the wall like a pealing church bell. Vladimir Smorodinsky was impaled there, his feet four feet off the ground, his arms pinned to the wall in a macabre crucifixion, his insides oozing onto the concrete floor.
I peered out the window at Biscayne Bay three hundred feet below. A southeast wind rippled small whitecaps across the green water. At Virginia Key, three multicolored sails shimmered in the afternoon sun. Boardsailors. On cue, they jibed, and one of the masts dipped into the water, dunking the sailor who had flipped his boom too late.
I asked, “So why did the paramedics find you unconscious back at the refuse container?”
Crespo shrugged. “ No se. I must have walked back there and fainted.”
Right. You could cut off both his legs at the knees, and he wouldn’t faint.
“Francisco, listen to me. This isn’t a simple A and B. If you tell that story, you’ll take a fall for second-degree murder. Twenty-five years minimum. Now, I can’t tell you to go up there and lie, but maybe you don’t remember it all that well. You were under tremendous stress
…”
He waved his hand as if to say it was no big thing, just a little fight to the finish in a warehouse hard by the docks of the Miami River. He wasn’t going to help me, and that made it hard to help him. Outside my windows, one wet boardsailor water-started and pumped his sail to catch up with his two buddies. They were headed on a broad reach across the channel to Fisher Island, once a Vanderbilt retreat, now a condo sanctuary of vacationing millionaires who want the security of a saltwater moat to keep out the riffraff. If the boardsailors didn’t have their papers in order, the security guards might pick them off for target practice.
“Here’s how I see it. I can just keep you off the stand, and based on the state’s case, all they’ve got is a fight between the two of you, and after you’ve passed out, somebody else came along and made shish kebab out of the Russian.”
“ Pero, no one else was there.”
Sometimes, you just want to tell your clients to shut the hell up. “ Someone had to be there. Someone in the office called the police, right?”
“ No se, you gotta ask them.”
I already had. Somebody called 911 but wouldn’t leave a name. Somebody saw what happened, but who?
“If we can show who drove the forklift, or if we just raise enough doubt that you did, you’d walk on the murder charge. I could probably plead you to aggravated assault right now if you’d tell the prosecutor who it was. Abe Socolow isn’t stupid. An asshole maybe, but not stupid. It’s a low-profile case. Nobody knew the victim. But if Socolow thinks you’re covering for someone who ordered the hit, he’ll go after the maximum.”
Crespo shrugged again and touched a finger to the welts on his face. “You’ll figure it out for me, numero cincuenta y ocho. You always do.”
I wasn’t getting through to him. “You have no lawful excuse for attacking Smorodinsky. You’re going-”
“He was a comunista.”
“I didn’t know there were any left…”
Crespo shrugged.
“Or that you were political,” I added.
Still, he didn’t respond.
I rubbed my temples and stared out the window again. The boardsailors were hidden in the shadows of the Fisher Island condos. In a perfect world, I would be on the water, the wind crackling my sail. To the north, the cruise ships were lined up, single file, at the port along Government Cut, preparing for their Caribbean cruises, thousands of tourists clustered on the main decks, awaiting their prepackaged fun. For some reason, I thought of Pearl Harbor.
“So the two of you disagreed about politics,” I said. Take what they give you, get a few anti-Castro Cuban- Americans on the jury, who knows?
“No, we disagreed because the cocksucker stole twelve dollars from my locker.”
Oh, shit. I tried another theory. “You were defending your property. You caught him in the act, and in the heat of the moment-”
“No, he stole the money two months ago. Pero, I owed him thirty bucks at the time. He’d been bugging me about the eighteen I still owed him, and I just got tired of it. That’s all there is to it. I killed the hombre,” my client said, “because he was a pain in the ass.”
A tlantic Seaboard Warehouse was where it was supposed to be, on South River Drive, a pleasant thoroughfare if you like chainlink fences topped with barbed wire, vacant lots covered with broken beer bottles, and Doberman pinschers with psychopathic personalities. The warehouse opened to the rear, its loading docks fronting on the Miami River, home to rusty, overloaded freighters from the Caribbean and Latin America.
I had sent the photographer here the day after Crespo came to my office, but photos, diagrams, and police reports only take you so far. There’s no substitute for being there. Photos and sketches often mislead. You can’t pick up distances, lines of sight, the three-dimensional surroundings that make the setting real. That’s why jurors are sometimes taken to the scene of the crime.
The warehouse was cavernous, piled high with goods from dozens of countries. Crates of foodstuffs-cereals, canned vegetables, bottled juices-filled several acres along the western wall. You could feed a starving country with the inventory. In another section, boxes of bicycles from Taiwan were piled to the ceiling, and nearby, thousands of concrete fence posts from Colombia were crisscrossed in stacks that resembled a house of Popsicle sticks. The open doors, the width of a tractor trailer, admitted the brackish stench of Biscayne Bay and the thick smell of diesel fuel from the river. I heard three toots of a horn, then the coughs and sputters of a tugboat nudging a barge under the Second Avenue drawbridge.
I retraced the steps, starting with the grappling hook attack, ending with the forklift. The layout was just the way Crespo described it. Once Crespo-or whoever-mounted his trusty steed of a forklift, Smorodinsky never had a chance to get to the exit. I heard an electric buzz behind me, and whirled just in time to see a forklift approach the intersection of two aisles. The machine carried a pallet of dog food cans, and the driver, a young Hispanic with a
