Bum Rap by Paul Levine

was right. In my younger days, my sly grin and my bucket of blarney unbuttoned the blouses of numerous barmaids, wannabe actresses, and aspiring models just off the bus from Apalachicola. My emotional maturity was nil. Nothing mattered outside the scope of my own pleasure. But now, after so many wastrel years, I was not in a relationship and I sensed what I had missed . . . the mutual commitment, the total involvement with the needs of the other person. As I am pushing middle age—oh hell, I’m in it—the smile has gone all crinkly-eyed, the hair is flecked with gray, and I am left with the empty feeling that I may have lost out. Do I even deserve a woman like Victoria Lord? A smart, capable, accomplished woman who still manages the seductive purr of a she-lion.
    “Any other advice, Granny?”
    “Nothing you haven’t figured out. You gotta find that missing Russian gal of ill repute.”
    “Top priority. She never went back to the house where she lived with the other B-girls. They told the cops they don’t know where she is, and my investigator can’t get near them.”
    “So get off your lazy butt and do your own legwork,” Granny said. “Just like the old days.”
    I’d already sent Sam Pressler, my investigator, to Anastasia, but he couldn’t get past the thug in a black suit at the velvet rope. “Private club,” the guy had said. Meaning you had to come in with one of the girls who secretly worked there. Pressler was a retired cop who wore perma-press short-sleeved white shirts and baggy pants. He had as much chance of being picked up by a Bar girl as I did of becoming Miss Universe. Before leaving, Pressler did a “trash pull” from the Dumpster behind the joint, looking for any leads, but came up empty, except for his own stained trousers and a stink he carried into my office.
    I’d also spent twenty seconds researching Aeroflot Flight 100 because of what Gorev had said to Nadia, moments before he was killed:
    “Did they ask you about Aeroflot 100?”
    “They ask nothing. I say nothing. I know nothing.”
    Aeroflot 100 was a daily nonstop flight from Moscow to New York. Leaves at 10:15 a.m., Moscow time, gets into JFK just before noon, eastern time. I figured that was Nadia’s route to the US but didn’t know what it had to do with any criminal investigation.
    “I have an idea for getting inside the club without too much muss and fuss,” I told Granny.
    “Don’t be busting no heads. The state Bar’s warned you about that.”
    Granny was right. I’ve been given “private reprimands,” a kind of double-secret probation, which is better than having the Florida Supreme Court deliver a “public reprimand” while you stand, head bowed, in front of the bench in Tallahassee.
    I’m embarrassed about some of the things I’ve done in the practice of law. Realizing that, I’ve probably been too hard on Solomon. He’s still young, and if he’s not spending life in prison, he’ll mature, just as I have. So who am I to preach about rectitude? When I was a young lawyer, I was always being held in contempt. In one of my first trials, a judge warned me:
    “Keep going, Mr. Lassiter, and I’ll send you to a place you’ve never been.”
    “Already been to jail, Your Honor.”
    “Not talking about jail. I’m gonna send you to law school!”
    T hese days, I try to act with integrity, but I’m a trial lawyer, damn it. In the legal system, not everything is black-and-white. I make my living in the gray.
    There’s an inherent conflict in trial lawyers’ jobs. The Ethical Rules state: “As an advocate, the lawyer zealously asserts the client’s position under the rules of the adversary system.”
    Zealously!
    But where do you draw the line between zealousness and chicanery? Go ask some law professor. All I know, when you have an innocent client, it’s easier to slide into that gray area without falling into the quicksand of self-loathing. So I was prepared to chop-block the state, to hit the