The Cutting Room

Manny glanced at his watch. Shit. It was already almost 2:00. Time to head over to the courthouse. His hearing was with an uptight, well-heeled prosecutor who probably really meant 1:30 when she said it — though Manny knew there was no way the case would be heard before 3:00, since it was Slow Steyn on the bench today and the man never returned from lunch before 2:00 and his calendars were always the size of a Harry Potter novel.

As he finished the last of his coffee, Manny stuck the photos and reports into an accordion folder that was already tearing at the edges. It was time to move up to a box. Or boxes. After enough years in the trenches, you developed a feeling for which cases would be ‘quickies’ — plenty of evidence, cooperative witnesses, a damning confession — all leading to a fast-tracked plea bargain. Then there were the headaches — sloppy scene, no witnesses, circumstantial evidence, and a closed-mouthed, cocky, SOB defendant. Not to mention the years of BS appeals if you did get a conviction. The State of Florida v. Talbot Lunders unfortunately fell into the headache pile.

Crumpling up the remains of his empanada in the deli wrapper, Manny pitched it across the room and over the head of the only other detective currently in the squad bay and not out to lunch. It landed in the overflowing wastebasket next to the copier, causing an avalanche of paper down one side. Mike Dickerson, an ornery fixture as old as the building itself, shot Manny a dark look over his black spectacles. ‘Watch it, Bear,’ he grumbled, shaking the sports section of the Miami Herald in Manny’s direction. ‘You ain’t no Josh Johnson.’ Then he buried his head behind the paper and carried on gumming his sub.

‘I coulda been, Pops,’ Manny said with a heavy sigh, as he crumpled up the paper bag lunch had come in and chucked that, too, across the room. This time he hit the copier.

‘Yeah, yeah. I don’t know what you was throwing those ten minutes you spent in the minor leagues, boy, but I’ll tell you, your aim is for shit now.’

‘Took your piece off.’

Mike’s hand shot to the top of his head.

‘Don’t have a heart attack, Pops. I’m just busting balls,’ Manny said with a hearty laugh. ‘It’s still there.’

‘Bald fucking Yeti.’

‘You should go natural, Mikey. It beats the rug. The missus would love it, rubbing her hands all over your smooth, silky melon.’

Manny had shaved his head the day he joined the force and worn it that way ever since. But he did let hair grow everywhere else it naturally wanted to on his body, including his arms, hands, back and chest — thus earning him the nickname Bear. He wore a five o’clock shadow by noon and a thick, wiry, black mustache 24/7. The decision to go bald wasn’t solely motivated by vanity, though. It kept him cool, for one thing. And as a hulking, over-sized, olive-skinned, bald Cubano with a thick mustache and dark, full eyebrows that were perpetually furrowed, he looked menacing. Most defendants thought twice before trying to fuck with him. And confessions came faster for him than they did for most of the other guys. Plus, the ladies seemed to like it. Considering he’d been married three times already and hadn’t had a hair on his head when he met any of his exes, being bald certainly didn’t hold him back.

Dickerson snorted and shook the paper again. ‘Don’t you have some murder to solve, Manuelo?’

‘Heading to court right now,’ Manny replied, pulling a sports jacket on.

‘Where’d you dig up that thing?’

‘What?’

‘The coat.’

‘The prosecutor asked me to get all fancy. You don’t like?’

‘Are those patches on the sleeves?’

‘Very funny. Ain’t no patches, Pops. This is a genuine …’ Manny peered at the label on the inside of his jacket, ‘… Haggar. I bought it at the Aventura Mall.’ Manny shrugged. ‘I can’t find my good suit. It must still be in the cleaners’ from my last trial.’

‘Nice tie.’

Manny wagged the tip of his teal tie that was speckled with tiny Miami Dolphins football helmets in the old detective’s direction. ‘Thanks.’

Dickerson rolled his eyes again. ‘You in trial?’

‘I got an Arthur.’ Arthur was short for Arthur Hearing — another way of saying bond hearing.

Dickerson smiled coyly. ‘I’m willing to bet your prosecutor has a nice set of gams and the initials ‘Ms’ in front of her name.’

‘Who the hell says “gams”?’

‘You wouldn’t wear a jacket to your own momma’s funeral.’

‘Not if it was in Miami in June, I sure as fuck wouldn’t. That’s why Cubans invented guayabera shirts, Pops. Dressy when you need to be, yet still cool and comfortable. You’re right — she is a she. And she does have fine legs. Not that I noticed.’

‘I knew it,’ Dickerson replied with the same lecherous cackle.

‘Fuck you, old man. You don’t know shit.’

‘What case you going on? Is that the dumpster girl?’

‘Yup. Holly Skole’s her name.’

‘Saw the pictures on your desk.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Didn’t realize you had a suspect. Is he good?’

‘I’m not counting chickens; I always get burned when I do. You saw the pictures — the guy’s an animal. He needs to pay for what he’s done.’

‘For once, young Jedi, we agree.’

Manny laughed. ‘For once.’ Then he picked up his file and headed out the homicide squad-room doors and into the controlled chaos of the rest of the City of Miami Police Department.

‘Call me if you get lonely, Sonny Boy,’ Dickerson called after him, as he returned to his paper. ‘I’ve only got one hundred and eighty-three days left. You still got time to learn from the master …’

The old man’s voice faded away as the hallway crowd got louder. Manny had learned early on to never boast about the strength of a case or predict a conviction. No case was airtight, and especially not this one. He would have to make his case as if he was building a house destined to be hit by a hurricane — slowly, carefully, with a strong foundation.

He slipped on his Oakley’s and stepped into the scorching sunshine. It was barely June and the humidity was already 95 per cent. He could feel his armpits start to drain as he headed across the steamy asphalt parking lot.

Bienvenido a Miami.

5

By 1:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, the criminal courthouse in downtown Miami was relatively quiet. The frenzied morning calendars had finally been cleared and the defendants, victims, witnesses, family members, defense attorneys, prosecutors and cops were long gone — their cases arraigned, continued, pled-out or set-over for motions or trials on another day. The hallways that had been clogged a few hours earlier were now deserted. Most of the building’s courtrooms were empty and locked, their judges either still at lunch or in recess till the following morning. The courtrooms that were open were either in trial or hearing motions.

Assistant State Attorney Daria DeBianchi pushed open the heavy doors of 4-10 and made her way into the one courtroom in the building that was still a beehive of activity. On the other side of the railing that partitioned the lawyers from the general audience, an invisible line separated prosecutors from defense attorneys, like a boy/girl middle school dance. Correction officers manned the exits and flanked the jury box, which was also filled with bodies, except they weren’t jurors, they were defendants — all dressed in bright orange jumpsuits, chained together at the wrists and shackled at the ankles. Filling the pews on the ‘state’s side’ of the gallery were detectives and cops. For the defense, it was friends and family. The judge hadn’t yet taken the bench and the courtroom sounded like a playground at recess. Seated at a desk in front of the bench was the judge’s judicial assistant, checking in a line of attorneys while simultaneously digging for gold inside her ear with a curved, glossy black fingernail. Daria took one look at the printed court calendar on top of the podium and sighed heavily. It was over two inches thick. She was gonna be here till friggin’ Christmas …

Standing four-foot-eleven and three-quarters, and weighing 94 pounds, with wavy auburn hair, blue eyes and skin so fair she broke out in freckles when she was next to an oven, everyone liked to tell Daria that: #1 — she didn’t look Italian, and #2 — she definitely didn’t look like a prosecutor. The Italian thing was understandable, she supposed. Every one of her relatives, including her nonna, was tan, dark-eyed, and blanketed in coarse, black hair all over their stocky, thick bodies. Daria got called ‘mick’ more often than she did ‘guinea’. As for the comments on her non-prosecutorial appearance, she wasn’t sure if those were intended as compliments or condolences, but since she was still getting them five years into her career, she figured the job had neither aged nor hardened her. To compensate for the fact that she wasn’t an Amazon who could arm wrestle an AK47 out of a defendant’s hands before carrying him up the river, she made sure she always wore heels — the higher, the better. And red lipstick — the redder, the better. She’d read in Vogue once that red lipstick made people think you were in control. For the most part it worked. Most defendants weren’t sure whether they should flirt with her or send over a death threat.

The majestically intimidating, wood-paneled courtroom was standing-room only. In the afternoons 4-10 was reserved solely for Arthur Hearings — bond hearings for badass defendants charged with non-bondable, badass offenses like kidnapping, drug trafficking, and murder. On a good day with a good judge, they were no big deal — a ten or twenty-minute defense fishing expedition that usually ended like it started, with a dangerous defendant denied bond and remanded to the county jail pending trial. But on Tuesdays Arthurs were presided over by Judge Werner Steyn, a former public defender who leaned so far to the left he had trouble standing up straight. That made him the natural favorite of defense attorneys everywhere, who all pushed to have their Arthurs set before him. With Monday’s Memorial Day holiday shortening the work-week, and Steyn dependably late taking the bench, Christmas might actually come and go before she returned to the mess that waited on her desk across the street at the State Attorney’s Office.

She found her case buried on page 22 of the calendar. With two defendants per page, it wasn’t hard to do the math. Unless she got moved up, there’d be no Toddlers &Tiaras tonight.

‘Hi, Harmony,’ she said sweetly when she’d finally made her way on the attorney line up to the clerk’s desk. ‘How are you? How’s your hubby feeling? I heard half of Probation is down with the flu. And it’s almost June. What’s with that?’

Harmony, the clerk with the name befitting either a stripper or a Life Coach, stared blankly at Daria as if she were a total stranger, not a Division Chief who’d appeared in her courtroom dozens of times before. And with whom she’d had dozens of — obviously meaningless — conversations. Her bulging eyes, which were lined like a dead body at a TV crime scene with black liner, blinked twice. Finally it clicked — at least that she had a husband. ‘Good, he’s good, thank God! Wow! No, no flu. What page you on, hon?’

So much for charm and chit-chat. ‘Twenty-two. Lunders. Talbot Lunders. Has the defense checked in yet?’