Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (16 page)

Socolow smiled his
gotcha
smile. “Who said
anything about Blinky being killed?”

“
Ah c’mon, Abe, don’t play
cop games with me.”

“
I’m not playing, Jake. I’m
dead serious. You know anything about a corpse you want to tell
us?”

He looked in the direction of the woods. My
mind flashed a picture of Blinky’s body half covered by branches, a
handful of my business cards clutched in a death grip.

“
Like I said before, I came
here to meet Blinky. I stood around maybe ten minutes. The phone
rang. I went to answer it, saw the blood, heard your voice, froze,
and hung up. I don’t know why, I just did it.”

“
Uh-huh.”

“
It’s the truth. Look,
Blinky’s been skulking around because he’s afraid someone’s trying
to kill him. Maybe he was right, but that someone wasn’t
me.”

“
Uh-huh.”

“
C’mon, Abe, you can smell
a setup. Somebody wanted me out here. Somebody called the cops,
somebody called you. Can’t you see what’s going on? I don’t have a
motive for killing Blinky.” I was rambling now, doing just what I
tell clients not to do. But it was understandable. I had a fool for
a client, and my lawyer wasn’t much better. “Maybe Blinky was
mugged. Maybe he’s lying in the bushes somewhere. Maybe the blood
isn’t even his.”

“
Oh, I’ll bet it is. I’ll
give you three to one it’s type O, weasel. As for your motive, it’s
tied up with Hornback and whatever you had cooked up with Baroso in
the West.”

“
That’s bullshit, Abe.
Blinky was using me. How about looking for this Cimarron
character?” I stood up and brushed sand from my navy blue suit
pants. “Now, if you don’t have any other questions, I think I’ll go
home. See you in court, Abe.”

“
As lawyer or defendant?”
Abe Socolow asked.

Chapter 11

Gold Doesn’t Rot

There was a
no trespassing
sign at
the front gate, which hung open. I kept the Olds in second gear and
churned

up dust on the dirt driveway that wound
through the trees. Josefina Baroso lived in what used to be a
caretaker’s cottage on a tropical fruit plantation just off Old
Cutler Road. No one had worked the place for years, and the
trees—lychee, Key lime, Surinam cherry, and black sapote—were
overgrown with weeds. Gnarled and stunted mango trees surrounded
the cottage, the ground covered with rotting fruit, the air heavy
with the sickly sweet scent of decay.

It was late afternoon, and gray thunderheads
were forming over the Everglades to the west, building into their
daily gully washers. I parked in the driveway under a guanabana
tree and walked to the front steps. The cracker-style building had
walls of Dade County pine, a slanted tin roof with eaves spouts and
a brick chimney poking through the top. On the northern, shaded
side, there was a small porch, screened to keep out the mosquitoes,
fruit flies, and no-see-um gnats. In front was a screen door,
latched from inside, a heavy wood door closed behind it.

I knocked on the screen door, and in a
moment, the heavy door opened, and Jo Jo Baroso stood there looking
at me.

“
We need to talk,” I said
through the screen, her face darkened by cross-hatched
shadows.

Silently, she unlatched the door, stood back
and let me in. It was a small, cool, quiet place furnished in
subtle earth tones. She motioned me to a sofa of Haitian cotton,
and our eyes met with a knowing memory. The sofa had followed her
from that first apartment so long ago. We had lain there in the
darkness and exchanged whispers long into the night. We had teased
and played and made love there, our limbs locked around each other.
And now the faded photographs of memory came back.

Jo Jo broke eye contact first, asked whether
I wanted some limeade. I did, remembering she made it with so
little sugar it could bring tears to your eyes. She disappeared
into the kitchen, a tall, dark, barefoot beauty in pleated, white
cotton shorts and orange tank top.

She returned carrying two glasses and a
pitcher of limeade on a tray, and I said, “Something may have
happened to your brother.”

“
I know. Abe called
me.”

“
They haven’t found a body.
I mean, there’s no way of telling ...”

She poured for both of us, handed me a
glass, and sat at the far end of the sofa, curling her legs under
her. “He’s gone. I can feel it, Jake, an emptiness spreading inside
me.”

There was sorrow in her voice. My look shot
her a question.

“
He’s still my
brother,
el es mi única
familia
.” She stopped, and we both thought
our private thoughts about her brother.

“
You know I wouldn’t hurt
Blinky,” I said. It was more of a question than a
statement.

“
Of course, Jake. I told
Abe that, but so far, you’re his only lead. Abe has that cop
mentality. A shaky case is better than none.”

Distancing herself from Abe Socolow, showing
affection for Blinky, trusting me, what was happening here?

“
I wish everything were
different,” she said. “With Luis, with you, with me. I wish I could
turn back the clock.”

Her eyes were moist. It was so unlike her,
at least unlike the Jo Jo Baroso of the past decade. How long had
it been since I’d seen her display any emotion, other than total
indifference tinged with antipathy?

“
I tried to change the
world and change you, and I couldn’t do either one,” she
said.

“
You reminded me of an
assistant coach who wanted to move me from linebacker to fullback,
even though I couldn’t hang onto the ball.”

“
I don’t blame you for
leaving me, not anymore.”

“
At the time, you called me
a commitment-phobic coward.”

“
I was impossible. What we
had was real.”

Was it?

I didn’t know, because I
always cut and ran from what was real.
Real
symbolized a mortgage and a
pension plan, a morning commute, and evening meetings with the
civic beautification committee. Real was for suckers, not for me, a
guy who could leap tall linemen in a single bound.

As I thought back now, it
was such a brief slice of our lives, and our playback equipment
shows the past through a soft focus. Days were sunny, winds were
cool, a young woman loved me, and the future was without limits. In
a sailboat anchored off Elliott Key, we shared a bottle of wine. I
remembered the
slipitty-slap
of water against the hull and the scent of salt
in the air. I remembered Jo Jo saying she loved me, so why didn’t
it work?

“
Our timing was off,” I
said. “We always had different goals, or maybe I didn’t have
any.”

“
You had potential,
Jake.”

“
Granny always used to say
I’d grow old having potential.”

It had grown dark outside the windows. The
first thunder rumbled in the distance. Jo Jo trembled at the sound.
“I wanted you to reach for the stars, and you ...”

“
Short-armed it,” I said,
using the disparaging term for chickenhearted wide
receivers.

She moved closer to me on the sofa, closing
time as well as space. “You cared for me, Jake, I know that. But
something inside of you tightened up when it came time to show it.
Maybe you were afraid that if you cared too much and lost me, you’d
be hurt again, like when you lost your father and mother.”

Maybe she was right, I didn’t know. I’ve
always found introspection to be painful, and analysis from someone
else is downright excruciating.

“
Why
did
you leave me?” she
asked.

I thought about it. Really thought. And it
was agonizing. But in the reflected glare of intermittent flashes
of lightning I looked at her face and tried to remember what it had
been like.

After a moment, I said, “I was a fool. I
hadn’t grown up. You were right about me, and I didn’t like hearing
the truth.”

“
Oh, Jake!” She breathed
the words, and in that graceful way women move, she was in my arms.
I don’t remember turning toward her. I don’t remember putting my
arms around her, but I held her close, my face pressed to her neck,
inhaling the scent of warm flesh, and in a moment, I felt a warm
tear trickle from her cheek to mine.

Then, it was just like the old times, or was
it? Could it have been, when each of us had traveled so far. Her
breath was warm and sweet as I kissed her, cradling her head in my
hands. Her full lips parted, and we kissed again. She delicately
rubbed her face against mine, catlike, and nipped at my earlobe,
then ran a hand through my hair, tugging at it. In a moment, she
slipped out of her halter and her shorts, and it was all so
familiar. Had it really been all these years?

Her nimble fingers unbuttoned my shirt, and
she ran her hands over my chest, tracing figure eights with her
nails. Then she unbuttoned my pants, and I fumbled with my shoes,
kicking them off, as she tugged at my belt. My hands explored the
slopes and curves of her, and she whispered something in
Spanish.

A bolt of lightning,
followed by the crackle of nearby thunder, lit up the sky and
rattled the windowpanes. We changed positions on the sofa, and she
emerged on top. The rest was a blur of mouths and hands, the
fullness of her breasts, the ripeness of her hips. Again, we
tumbled over one another, and this time she was beneath me, our
bodies pressed together. When she spoke, her voice was low, the
words throaty, “
Quiereme, te
necesito!
”

I obliged, and she wrapped
her long legs around me. We lay there, rocking in perfect harmony
on the sofa like a sailboat in gentle seas, and she exhaled several
short gasps, then opened her eyes long enough to let them roll back
in her head. “Jake,
te
amo
,” she said finally.
“
Siempre te he amado
.”

Fat raindrops were plopping off the tin roof
now, and driven by the gale, pounding into the windows. Tree
branches strained, whined, then snapped and fell against the house.
We listened to the wind and the echoing thunder as the storm sat
above us. “Thunder and lightning, clouds and rain,” she said.

“
Are you giving a weather
report?”

“
With you, Jake, I feel the
lightning and the thunder. Then I drift above the earth in the
clouds and the rain.”

Later, as the storm moved on, we lay there,
limbs still entwined, and she said, “I didn’t know how much I
missed you. We could have been so much to each other, Jake. We
could have changed each other’s lives.”

“
Maybe we still can,” I
said, smoothing her dark hair from her face, not knowing just how
true that was.

***

We were snuggled into a bed a bit too short
for me when I said, “Tell me about Kit Carson Cimarron.”

I felt her body stiffen.

“
What do you want to
know?”

“
Everything.

In the darkness of the small bedroom, she
sighed. Outside the pounding rain had let up, and a light drizzle
pinged against the roof. I was on my back, and she lay with one
knee over my leg, her head on my chest, breathing in time with my
heartbeat. “It was so stupid of me that I’m embarrassed by it, even
now. I was so alone then, and he seemed so attentive, so caring.
Simmy’s a powerful man, very determined, very strong. It’s quite a
combination, Jake, and I just fell for it, very hard.”

“
Simmy?”

“
It doesn’t fit at all. I
mean, he’s as big as the side of a barn, but I thought I detected a
gentle side to him. I was wrong. He’s an egotistical manipulator
and a master operator. He makes my brother look like the pope. In
fact, Simmy is what Luis always wanted to be.”

“
What about Rocky Mountain
Treasures?”

“
It’s Simmy’s deal. He
brought my brother in on it.”

“
Blinky told me it was
legitimate.”

Jo Jo laughed. “Only in the sense that
neither one is likely to go to jail. It’s a great, legal scam.
You’ve seen the prospectus. It’s got all the exculpatory language:
‘Be advised this investment is highly risky, and you may lose part
or all of your capital investment.’

“
That ought to keep people
out.”

I felt her hair swishing across my chest as
if she was shaking her head. “You’d be shocked how many people read
those clauses and still put money into oil wells filled with sand
and mountaintop property with no access roads. People are greedy
and gullible. When I prosecuted consumer frauds, I was constantly
amazed how easy it was to separate people from their money with a
great sales pitch.”

“
Which is where your
brother fits into the deal.”

“
Exactly. And something I
learned from Luis, the more outlandish the promises, the easier the
sale.”

“
I don’t get
it.”

“
Either do I, but it’s
true. Buried treasure is easier to sell than bushels of
apples.”

“
Wait a second,” I said.
“Back up. Does Cimarron own these mines or not?”

“
Sure, he’s got mineral
rights to thousands of acres. He bought up hundreds of leases over
the past fifteen years or so. He tried mining for gold and copper
and silver, and he lost his shirt. Not that he couldn’t find the
minerals. He could, but the price of excavation and smelting or
refining exceeds market price. At the same time, Simmy was always a
nut about the old West. He collects the stories—legends
really—about the lost gold mines and buried treasures. He can sit
around a campfire and tell twenty different stories. There’s the
Lost Padre in California, the Lost Dutchman in Arizona, the Lost
Pitchblende in Colorado. Everything’s lost, but none of it’s ever
found.”