The Victim (15 page)

“
Nice cross-exam. Maybe you should have been the lawyer.”

“
Maybe. Now seriously. Think about it. Are. You. Happy?”

The waiter appeared and took their order for an appetizer called Bacon, Eggs, and Toast—a fried slice of pork belly served on toasted brioche topped with fig jam and quail eggs, cooked over-easy. Anton ordered another Harp.

“
I have thirty thousand dollars in my pocket. I have a beautiful wife with whom I’ll soon be celebrating four years of marriage. We have a wonderful little girl at home. Nice house. Two luxury cars. I think that qualifies as happiness.”

Gina stirred her tea with her straw. “Four years of marriage and a wonderful little girl at home I’ll give you. The other stuff doesn’t count. I remember two broke twenty-somethings living in an apartment in North Miami Beach, struggling to pay the rent but happy. You had that god-awful red Corolla you’d been driving since your freshman year of college.”

“
Wow, been a minute since I thought about that car. Now if ‘Country Grammar’ starts playing I’ll really feel eighteen again.”

Gina laughed. “At Florida State it was Shaggy, ‘It Wasn’t Me.’ You couldn’t find a frat party that didn’t blast that song at some point in the night.”

“
Let’s not forget ‘Butterfly.’ I don’t think Crazy Town had any follow-up hits.”

After their laughter subsided, Gina asked, “Things are getting better, aren’t they?”

The waiter set the appetizer down, as well as a perfectly poured pint. The bitter beer was a welcome compliment to the salty pork belly.

“
You mean with you?”

She nibbled a toast point. “Yeah.”

One and a half pints of beer swirled in his head, tinkering with his vision just enough so that the room had a glassy sheen, as if life were suddenly animated.

“
Yeah, things have gotten a lot better. You had me worried for a while.”

“
You never wanted to leave me, right?”

He purposefully directed his gaze at her, consciously fighting the involuntary eye movements that come with being less than truthful.

“
Never.”

“
You mean it?”

“
I mean it.”

“
Doctor Szabel’s gonna start tapering off my meds.”

“
So that means you’re okay now?”

She flashed a
come hither
wink. “That means I’ll be back to normal, if you know what I mean.”

He folded his tongue and bit down, a tic he’d inherited from his father. He knew what
back to normal
meant. He also knew that it implied the passage of time between the now—which was killing him—and some undetermined date in the future.

An image of Daniella flashed in his mind.

“
How soon?”

Gina cocked her head, raised her brow. “C’mon. Are we
really
gonna have that discussion now?”

Anton pulled the reins in. They’d had this argument before and it never concluded in Anton’s favor. Being nice didn’t help. Guilting her into it certainly didn’t do wonders either. Was it a crutch to blame their marital stagnation on her illness? Yes; it was easy, sort of a built-in excuse. The therapy, the meds. They were helping. But the ordinary strain of parenting coupled with her diagnosis had taken its toll. All too often they seemed like coworkers, not so much husband and wife.

“
No. We’re not. I just wonder…I just wonder if you’re still attracted to me, that’s all.”

She inhaled and let it out, her shoulders rising and falling. “You know it’s not you, right?”

“
I guess.”

“
You know I think you’re very handsome. You have that broad-shouldered, rugged thing going on.”

He studied his convex reflection in his spoon. “I ain’t pretty.”

Gina gestured toward the dining room. “You wanna be pretty?”

Anton panned the room. A good number of the men looked better than the women. They had that androgynous boy band look—carefully sculpted hairdos and smooth faces, tight designer T-shirts and skinny jeans. One guy was even wearing a scarf.

“
No, ma’am.”

“
Just be patient with me. I promise I’ll make it up to you.”

He sipped his drink and forced a tight smile. That Gina couldn’t, or wouldn’t, avail herself burned inside him, shoveled coal into that furnace in his belly. Such a small favor to ask; just lie still and become a vessel for his much-needed release. Take one for the team. No effort on her part required. He didn’t get it.

At this juncture—nearly a five-month dry spell—he wasn’t looking for any semblance of the hardcore stuff he watched on triple-X websites on slow afternoons with the door closed and the volume down. Just a little sacrificial fucking now and then, missionary, moderately paced, Gina doing her best to conceal her disinterest.

The waiter took their dinner orders. Gina ordered the grouper; Anton ordered the duck. Gina dug into her purse for her phone, sending a text to Emily to check on Charley.

Anton gazed around. It was after eight and the tables were full. Runners shuttled steaming plates while waitresses balanced trays of drinks. He couldn’t get over the number of people, standing at the bar, seated at their tables, mindlessly playing on their phones. Those damned devices had turned humankind into zombies. People seemed more content to update their statuses and post photos than engage in real human contact.

While Gina played on her phone his mind wandered, ultimately settling on the moment of terror, seizing his heart, nearly disrupting the mood.
The
moment. He remembered that muggy evening nine months earlier, Gina asleep on the couch, her psychosis having taken her to another place. The minute—probably less—that spanned from the time he realized she had left Charlotte in the car until he was holding her in his shaking arms, his mind wandering into places unknown, exposing each and every
what if
his imagination could conjure. Although Charley was fine, he felt little relief.

CHAPTER 15

Anton cleared four courtrooms in less than an hour. Two misdemeanor trials were nolle prossed for officer failure to appear. He was granted a continuance in a worker’s comp fraud case and accepted pretrial intervention for a client charged with stealing a Prada bag from Neiman Marcus.

It was just after ten and he was enjoying a
cafe con leche
at ABP, seated around a table with four other attorneys, shooting the shit, bitching about judges. He unfolded a
Miami Herald
left spread out on the table and read David Ovalle’s write-up on the latest developments in the Quincy Arrington case. Ovalle was a good guy and his portrayals of Anton were normally positive. But the tone and the title of the article—
police union president unhappy with delays in attempted murder case—
cut to the core of the issue. Justice delayed was justice denied. The police union president was quoted as saying, “The prosecutor needs to take responsibility for this case and do her part to avoid unnecessary delays. This only permits Quincy Arrington to further manipulate the court system, ensuring that his life sentence is put off as long as possible. What about justice for Dayan Campos?”

Anton’s phone buzzed on the table. He unlocked the screen. A text from Mandy.

Need to talk. ASAP.

Anton replied:
?

Mandy:
Meet 4 lunch? Flanigans in Grove.

Anton checked the time on his phone. It was way too early for lunch but something told him that food wasn’t the purpose of this meeting. Mandy was as relentless as he was resourceful. Anton had just filed his notice of appearance with the clerk’s office an hour ago but no doubt Mandy had already begun his investigation.

Anton opened up the web browser on his phone and brought up the Miami-Dade Clerk of Courts mobile website. He wanted to see if his pleadings had been clocked in and entered into CJIS—the Criminal Justice Information System, the court’s online database. That way, the ASA doing the intake on the case would see that Bryan Avery was represented.

Bryan’s case would be assigned to Domestic Crimes for intake. A paralegal would schedule the pre-file conferences and pass along a filing recommendation to an ASA. A run-of-the-mill burg-batt, the case would be handled by the B in Judge Morales’s division. Each felony trial division consisted of three line prosecutors with one division chief. The C prosecutor handled the less egregious felonies—coke possession, grand theft, car burglary—while the A handled the armed robberies and second-degree murders. The B was assigned the middle-tier offenses—trafficking, attempted murder, and cases like Bryan’s.

Anton knew the average B caseload was around sixty to one hundred cases. Anton was a B when he left the office and had roughly seventy-five serious felony cases on his audit, most of which involved substantial litigation in preparation for trial. A B caseload can easily overwhelm an ASA working sixty hours a week for $43,000 a year. A line prosecutor was like a doctor in a triage ward, applying basic life-saving care to the cases before closing them out and moving on to the next. Rarely was an ASA able to dedicate sufficient time and attention to a case, which worked to the defense’s advantage.

Anton had seen enough DV cases to know that Daniella would eventually come around. If he could get her signature on an affidavit of non-prosecution and suggest—without coaching or coercion—that she ignore her subpoenas and simply not return the prosector’s voicemails, the case would eventually go away.

The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office routinely filed over fifty thousand felony cases a year. He knew the resources and the desire to push forward on a case where the victim wasn’t onboard were sorely limited.

The menu page loaded and Anton selected the
case search
option. He keyed in the case number and the docket for
State of Florida vs. Bryan Avery
appeared. Sure enough, a diligent deputy clerk had already logged in his notice of appearance. The State had done the same.

The intake prosecutor assigned to the case was Sylvia Kaplan.

Anton downed his coffee, grabbed his briefcase off the floor, and darted across the street to the E.R. Graham Building—the hub of the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, a squat pink building anchoring the corner of Northwest 12th Avenue and Northwest 12th Street. The drab gray skybridge connecting the Pretrial Detention Center to the Gerstein Building hovered above the street.

Anton flashed his Florida Bar card to the security guard at the door and was waved past the metal detector. The sickly sterile odor of the building brought him back to 2008. It seemed like an eternity since he graced these halls each and every day. Of the fifty-nine lawyers who started with him, only about six still worked there. The elevator doors opened. He pressed the number two.

Sylvia had a corner office on the second floor with a sweeping view of Jackson Memorial Hospital. Her walls were adorned with framed thank you cards and handwritten letters from the children, parents, and family members of the murder victims for whom she had so fiercely advocated during her tenure.

She looked up from her computer screen, surprised to see him standing in her doorway.

“
What are you doing here?”

Anton let himself in and took a seat, one of two stiff chairs placed in front of her desk.

“
What the hell are you doing with Bryan Avery? Aren’t you busy enough?”

He motioned to her bookshelf, stacked with a dozen cardboard boxes, each containing the contents of a complete homicide file. Typed pages taped to the front of the boxes indicated the case name, the investigating agency, and the name of the victim. Of her twelve active homicide cases, all were first-degree, and in each one the State had filed its notice of intent to seek the death penalty. The newest case was less than three months old. The oldest was from 2007. The mountain of litigation that had to be conquered before a judge could impose a death sentence that would withstand appellate scrutiny was immense. This further supported Anton’s personal view that life without parole served a cheaper, quicker, and just as adequate purpose.