Lassiter 03 - False Dawn by Paul Levine Read Free Book Online

anything fishy?” Marvin the Maven whispered to Saul the Tailor.
    “Vad you say?” asked Saul, fingering the part in his steel gray toupee and cupping a hand around his ear.
    “The smell,” Marvin repeated, tapping his nose. “You can still smell, can’t you?”
    Saul the Tailor sniffed the air and nodded. “Somethin’ ain’t kosher in Denmark.”
    H. T. Patterson carried a brown bag to the clerk’s table and pulled out your everyday supermarket chicken. In the pale fluorescent light of the courtroom, the dead bird was pasty white. “At this juncture, without further ado,” Patterson began, in his hypnotic singsong, “the plaintiff wishes to offer demonstrative evidence,
ipso facto
, the deboning of a deceased fowl in order to facilitate the jury’s understanding of Professor Pennywhistle’s testimony.”
    Translation: A farmer with a Ph.D. was gonna cut up a dead chicken.
    “Time out, Your Honor!” I was on my feet. “We’ve had no notice of this. They’re going to perform—”
    “A simple demonstration,” Patterson interrupted.
    “An autopsy is more like it. It serves no purpose, none at all.
    Either Chicken Prince has the exclusive right to use the term ‘Chickee Tender,’ or it doesn’t. The anatomy doesn’t matter.”
    “Objection overruled,” said Judge Bricklin. “Let’s see what they’ve got, but move it along, Mr. Patterson.”
    The clerk, a young Cuban woman with dyed red hair and three-inch fingernails, wrinkled her nose and tied an exhibit tag—plaintiff’s number twenty-seven—around the deceased’s drumstick. The bailiff opened the door to the corridor and ushered the witness down the aisle. Professor Clyde Pennywhistle toddled to the witness stand. He was a fifty-year-old cherub, portly and round-faced with a small mouth curved in a perpetual smile. His hair was a 1950’s flattop gone gray. He wore bifocals, and his eyes were slightly crossed behind the lenses.
    H. T. Patterson ran sonorously through the professor’s background, all the way from working on a pig farm as a kid to professor of poultry science at Purdue. Patterson opened a gunnysack and pulled out a stainless steel instrument that looked like an upside-down funnel. “The deboning cone,” he told the jury gravely, as if it were the Holy Grail. On cue, the professor stepped down and walked to the clerk’s table, just a few feet from the jury box. With a sharp knife and a deftness that Charlie Riggs would admire, the professor made an incision down the back, peeled the skin off, and started carving away.
    “This will just take a moment,” the professor said, expertly slicing through the shoulder joint, then pulling at the wing to tear the carcass apart. Then, with small precise movements, he pared some more, removing the breast. He held up a piece of the meat. “The
pectoralis major
, often called the chicken fillet …” Next he sliced off a strip of muscle, maybe an inch wide and six inches long.
    The high-ceilinged courtroom was hot and stuffy, the ancient air-conditioning wheezing just to stir the soggy air. Even without decaying flesh on the premises, the courthouse usually smelled like a locker room after three-a-day practices in August.
    I thought the professor made a mistake when he moved the deboning cone and the eviscerated chicken from the clerk’s table to the rail of the jury box. Juror Number Two, a Coral Gables housewife, seemed to be leaning backward, increasing what Dr. Les Weiner would call her horizontal zone from the professor and the poultry. Number Three, a commercial fisherman, didn’t seem to mind, but Number Five, an accountant in a three-piece suit, looked a tad green around the gills.
    “The tenderloin, or
pectoralis minor
, pulls the wings down when the bird tries to fly,” Professor Pennywhistle explained.
    Wafting across the courtroom along with the tepid air was the unmistakable smell of rotting tissue, and some of the spectators began to leave. Behind me, Marvin the