Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (39 page)

The house was quiet and dark, no cars
outside. Wherever Josefina was staying, it wasn’t here. That was
smart. She might have figured I’d come looking for her.

But that wasn’t why I had come to the Red
Canyon Ranch.

I hadn’t known it while driving here, but I
knew it now. I came because it was time to act more like a lawyer
and less like a client. As a lawyer, I always visited the site,
whether it was an auto accident or a murder scene. Sure, I used
investigators, and in discovery, I’d get the state’s evidence. But
there is no substitute for being there, even if you’ve been there
before. After I hired H. T. Patterson, we came here under the
watchful eyes of a police escort. I had walked him through it, but
now, cold and alone, I would do it again. Instead of a briefcase, I
carried a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

The barn door was unlocked. I flipped on the
lights. The horses were still in their stalls, oats freshly poured.
Muddy footprints led to the feed bags and back to the stalls. A
neighboring rancher must have been helping out. I said hello to the
horses, and one of them said something back, his breath visible in
the cold.

I retraced my steps of that night. The night
in question, as lawyers like to say.

Up the ladder to the loft. I remembered Jo
Jo flicking on a lantern, the shadows creeping up the wall. What
had she said?

Oh, Jake, you shouldn’t have
come. How true.
What else? Think now. How
did she look? Remember that face. She had seemed surprised Kip was
with me. And upset about it.

The boy shouldn’t be here.

Why not?

Because she didn’t want him, or anyone else
to witness what would happen. Right, but how did she know what
would happen? What was her plan? That I kill Cimarron? That he kill
me? And why?

Motive, motive, motive.

I walked the circumference of the loft,
making a trail in the straw. Snowflakes drifted through the wall
where the plank had been removed. I looked around, but I didn’t
know for what. I saw the railing, or what was left of it, where I
had broken through before landing in a stall.

I went down to the first floor, but this
time took the slow route of the ladder. Accurately re-creating the
scene has its limits. I opened the Appaloosa’s stall, walked
inside, and my shoes squished in a steaming pile of what had been
oats only a day before. The horse seemed to smile at me.

I left the stall, straw sticking to my
shoes. For a while, I fiddled around, tinkering with this and that,
touching the rough wood planks, trying to divine some message that
had to be there. I went into the corn crib, still overflowing with
ears that had tumbled down the silo. I stepped out of the crib and
wandered in a circle, first clockwise, then counterclockwise. I
kicked at bales of hay and feed bags.

What was missing? A saddle with an embedded
nail, a plank from the wall with Cimarron’s hair embedded in it.
The bridle and bit I had used to get Cimarron off me. The nail gun.
Now all tagged and marked as state’s exhibits.

I took a hit of the bourbon to fend off the
chill and kept looking. There were no surprises. No revelations. No
clues, at least none I could see. Just the crisp air and sweet
smells of horse feed mixed with the musky tang of manure. Just a
nondescript barn where a man had died a gruesome death.

I pulled two blankets from
a railing and put them around my shoulders. I sat down in the straw
and made myself comfortable. I sneezed, maybe from the dust, or
maybe from the cold. For medicinal purposes, I guzzled some more
bourbon, liquid
aurum
to warm the throat. I leaned back and tried to concentrate on
words like “evidence” and “proof’ and “reasonable doubt,” but my
mind was a battery running out of juice. I couldn’t concentrate and
after a while, I didn’t even try. I listened to the snorts of the
horses and the shuffling of their hooves. Outside, an owl hooted. I
hummed a song to myself and dug deeper into the straw, a babe in
the manger, finally closing my eyes and burying myself under the
warm velvet blanket of sleep.

***

I don’t know if it was the
morning sun or the cold that woke me. The sun slanted through the
open slat in the wall and struck me squarely in the eyes. Dust
motes floated in the light, and the cold bit through me to the
bone. I tried to stand, but every joint was locked into place. I
felt like the tin man in
The Wizard of
Oz
. It took several moments to work out
the knots and kinks in my back. I felt an urgent need to pee and a
secondary need to brush my teeth. A cup of coffee and a Danish
wouldn’t have hurt anything, either.

I needed to get back to my apartment, shower
and change for court. I started walking out when something caught
my eye. The shaft of sunlight crossed the barn floor and ended
barely two feet from where I had slept. There, in a depression I
had made in the straw, the sunlight caught the reflection of a
wedge of glass that twinkled back at me. I followed the sunlight
four paces, bent down and dug into the straw. Up came Kip’s video
camera, lens pointed to the sun.

***

It was clear and cold, the sky a bottomless
blue. Light snow was falling, puffy, dry flakes unlike what I was
used to in the five winters I spent as a student-athlete in the
hills of central Pennsylvania. Yeah, that’s right. It took five
years, but I got my degree. I remember those ice storms, including
one during a game against Notre Dame. The referee fell on his ass
flipping the coin, and the rest of us could barely break a huddle
without skating like Dorothy Hamill on LSD. My fingers were numb by
the end of the first quarter, but I refused to wear gloves or a
second pair of socks. Let the sissy wide receivers keep their
pinkies toasty. I played with short sleeves and a cutoff jersey
that stopped right above my navel. After missing a tackle on the
opening kickoff, I slid halfway across the field on my belly and
ice water sloshed down my jock. I can’t remember if we won or lost,
but I seem to recall spending Sunday through Thursday in the
infirmary with the flu.

That was then. This is now.

Here the snow was dry and powdery, just like
the travel posters show, and the roads were already clear, snow
piled high alongside. I wasn’t as polite driving back into town as
I had been getting out. I honked at tortoiselike tourists. I
skidded around one corner and ignored every posted speed limit I
could find.

Back in town, I stood ten minutes in the
doorway waiting for the camera store to open. The female clerk gave
me a curious look. Maybe it was the wildness in my eyes, maybe the
smell of straw and manure. After a moment, she found the battery I
needed and an earphone, took my cash, and watched me leave, the
bell attached to the front door tinkling merrily.

***

When I had picked up the camera in the barn,
I muttered a private prayer to whatever God protects the
semi-honest man who doesn’t strangle kittens or litter in public
parks. The prayer was answered when I found the on button engaged.
The battery, of course, would be dead. It was. So far, so good.

A silent thank-you.

Through the Plexiglas cover, I saw the tape
was three-quarters unwound. A couple of hours had been recorded
before the battery gave out. With any luck, it would all be
there.

Not the video, of course,
once Kip left the loft. The camera had been buried in the straw.
But the sound. The audio would be there. What had Kip told
me?
This baby can pick up a rat farting at
fifty yards
.

***

I was back in the car, parked at the curb,
engine running, heater on, my heart thumping as the tape rewound.
It was one of those Super-8 formats you don’t need a separate VCR
to show on your TV. I rewound to the beginning of the tape,
fighting the urge to see the middle first. I attached the earphone
jack to the camera and watched through the viewfinder as I hit the
play button.

The first shot was a speck against the sky.
The lens zoomed. A bird. The frame jumped around as Kip tried to
steady the camera. “Lord of flight,” Kip said into the microphone.
“A golden eagle. Last of a breed. Mighty predator.” Kip went on for
a while, sounding like a pint-size Marlin Perkins. The bird
disappeared into some spruce trees and Kip said, “Shit, where’d he
go?”

Next, a shot of the kids from the
neighboring cabin at the Lazy Q. Then, a dog urinating against a
tree. Then, there it was: a darkened room, growing lighter as the
lens opened wider. The nine-volt lantern cast half of Jo Jo’s face
in a white, bleaching light, the other half in darkness, but I saw
her, huddled under a blanket.

“
No, Jake, please. I’m so
ashamed. The boy shouldn’t be here.”

The camera jiggled and seemed to adjust
itself to the light. “Uncle Jake, please, you’re cutting off the
angle. I want to zoom from medium close up to extreme close
up.”

He did, and Jo Jo’s face filled the screen,
tear-streaked cheeks and puffy eyes. But close up, the eyes
revealed something else altogether. That blazing intelligence, that
quick mind, that total control.

Her forehead was wrinkled in thought. She
wasn’t in shock. She wasn’t in fear. Her brain was in overdrive.
Why didn’t I see it at the time?

“
Jake, no! Haven’t you done
enough to me already?” She buried her head in her hands.

I didn’t say, “What’s that supposed to
mean?” I didn’t say, “What the hell are you talking about?” I
didn’t say anything. But then, I thought she was talking about old
times, or that she was confused. Hell, I don’t know what I was
thinking, but I sure didn’t think she had it all figured out, that
the prosecutor lady knew the tape might just pop up as evidence and
it might be nice to show the All-Pro pervert had a kid videotaping
his evil deeds.

“
Okay,” I said on the tape.
“Kip. Cut! I’ve got enough.”

Was it my imagination, or was there an
unnecessary harshness to my voice. The screen faded to black.

Oh, Jo Jo, you are one bright, evil-hearted
woman.

The screen flashed on again. Too dark to
make out anything. Then, the lantern came on, and Kip’s voice:
“That’s better. Natural light just wasn’t doing it.”

I shooed him out again, and the screen went
dark. But I knew there would be more.

The camera would be off now. No telling how
long.

The screen lightened, then
twirled upside down. A rustling sound through the earphone.
An
oomph
that
might have come from Kip. “Put me
dow-nk
.”

The camera must have been dropped or thrown,
Kip’s thumb plopping the record button. The auto focus was trying
to sharpen the picture, but all I could see were fuzzy, thickened
pieces of straw, now covering the lenses. The camera had
fallen.

Show time. Again, I said a prayer.

Another muffled
oomph
, fading away. Kip
was being carried up the ladder, a hand over his mouth.

The voices were indistinct from the loft.
But the footsteps pounding the boards were picked up clearly. Heavy
feet. Soft words, “Quiet down, boy.”

Then, my voice calling out to Kip, when I
thought he was playing games again. “Kip! You’re starting to bug
me. I’ve got some business to finish with the lady.”

Was that me? It sounded not like the fellow
I know so well, but the goat-man I’d heard described all week in
court. Another moment passed, then the unmistakable voice of Kit
Carson Cimarron, “Fool me twice, and you’re dead.”

The audio was clear. Better than I could
have hoped. I kept listening.

“
Simmy, he forced
me.”

Damn. Even her lies are consistent.

“
He hit me, just like he
used to do. He tore off my clothes and just forced me.”

Then Cimarron’s voice, calm and
dispassionate. “You knew what he was like. You told me
yourself.”

I heard myself shout, “This is crazy!”

But who would believe me? Don’t all
criminals deny their crimes?

Cimarron’s voice grew louder. “First you
steal from me. Then you trespass on my land, and now you violate my
woman.”

Why don’t I just hand the tape to McBain? He
can play it for his closing argument. What else does he need?

When Cimarron started flinging me into the
walls, the audio captured every thud.

“
No, Simmy! You’ll kill
him! Don’t!”

She seemed to mean it. But then, if H. T.
Patterson was right, she wanted me to kill him.

A
cr-ack
, the rail splitting, and the
noise of the horse snorting and stomping its feet as I landed on
its back and slid into its stall.

“
C’mon out, lawyer. I’m not
through with you.”

No, he wasn’t. I listened
to the rest, so familiar and yet so unreal. There was Kip crying
out he was Spartacus, Cimarron taking away the pitchfork, Kip
dashing out of the barn. There was the first shot from the nail
gun, then Cimarron telling Jo Jo to reload a clip for him. The
muffled
whomp
of
another shot and then another. The noise from the corncrib, the
sounds of two big men crashing into each other and whatever else
got in the way. More
whomps
of steel into wood, and finally, after a pause,
the last shot straight into the meat of a man’s brain.

I hit the stop, then rewound to the
beginning and played it again. Something was bothering me, but
what? I listened more carefully when I knew it was near the end,
but still, it seemed out of sync. The timing of the last shot was
off. I needed to count the seconds.