Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (14 page)

I lay on my back, naked,
listening to the
whompeta-whompeta
of the fan harmonizing with the
chugita-chugita
of the
washing machine, feeling the sweat trickle down my chest. I dozed,
dreaming a pastiche of unrelated scenes. An unshaven cowboy in a
poncho silently rode a black horse across the high plains. Jo Jo
Baroso sat on the black divan in her mother’s den, laughing gaily,
but the laugh turned sinister and suddenly it was Abe Socolow
laughing with all the charm of the Doberman pinscher he
resembled.

Somebody said something,
but who was it? Somebody complaining.
You
gotta do something about jour door, Jake
.
Sure, sure. I rolled onto my side and tried to chase the dreams.
Somebody was smoking a cigarette. Dreaming now in
smell-a-rama.

Suddenly, it was daytime, or was it? No,
dawn doesn’t break with a hundred-fifty-watt blast in the face. I
squinted into the glare.

“
You gotta start locking
your door,’’ the voice said. The light clicked off. “Sorry to wake
you, but I’m only out at night.’’

“
Blinky? Is that
you?’’

Through a haze of cigarette smoke, a rotund
form was backlit by the sodium vapor lights from outside my open
window. “It ain’t Dracula,” Blinky Baroso said.

“
You son of a bitch,” I
said. “You ungrateful, selfish son of a bitch. After all I’ve done
for you ...”

“
Hey, I said I’m sorry. Go
back to sleep.”

“
I don’t care about your
waking me up. What the hell were you doing using my name for that
treasure company?”

“
Jeez, Jake, you’re pissed
about that?” he whined, sounding hurt. Like a lot of manipulators,
Blinky had the ability to make his victim contrite for hurting his
feelings. “Are you going to hold that against me now? I kind of
thought you’d be flattered.”

“
Next time, flatter someone
else.”

“
I meant to tell you, Jake,
I really did. We needed to dress up the paperwork a little. I
borrowed your good name, that’s all.”

“
Yeah, I want it
back.”

“
C’mon, Jake, we’ll amend
the papers, it’s no big deal.”

“
Maybe not to you, but the
SEC and the Florida Bar might see it differently. To say nothing of
Abe Socolow.”

He crushed out the cigarette in a
commemorative Super Bowl VIII ashtray and sat on the edge of my
bed, moving close to me. “Jake, I need help.”

“
Yeah, me too. Socolow
thinks you had me kill Kyle Hornback, or maybe it was my own idea.
I can’t even follow his reasoning.”

“
You’re joking.”

“
I’m not, and Abe never
does.”

“
Jeez, you mean I’m a
suspect.”

As usual, Blinky’s concerns were about
number one. “That’s usually what happens when somebody runs from a
murder scene,” I said. “What the hell were you doing here last
night?”

“
I tried to get here before
you left for the beach. See, I figured my phone was tapped, and
whoever was listening would think we’d be on the wall over on Ocean
Drive. I started that way, did a U-turn on the Venetian, and came
to your place, but I was running late, and you’d already
left.”

“
Who’s tapping your phone?
What’s it all about?”

“
I don’t know, but before
Hornback was killed, I was being followed. I’m sure of
it.”

In the darkness, I sensed Blinky tremble.
“Anyway, I got in, just like now, by putting my weight against the
front door. It was dark inside, but I could see something spinning
around. I didn’t know what the hell it was, so I turned on a light.
Jesus Cristo, I nearly fainted. Then I nearly puked. I’ve never
seen anything like that, ever. I turned off the light and ran out.
I thought the killer might be in the house, might be after me. I
went home, grabbed some things, and got out of there. Last night, I
slept in the Rover out on Virginia Key.”

He leaned closer on the bed, giving me a
whiff of cigarette breath mixed with stale sweat. “Jake, who would
have done such a thing?”

“
Whoa. Back up. What was
Kyle doing here?”

“
Dunno, exactly. Maybe he
was killed someplace else and dumped there, like to implicate
us.”

“
No. A neighbor saw him
arrive by taxi. Whoever killed him drugged him first with a
fast-acting barbiturate, then strangled him and strung him
up.”

I got out of bed and pulled on a pair of
faded blue gym shorts with the Penn State logo. Then I moved toward
the window and inhaled the night air. It was heavy with jasmine,
which was an improvement.

“
What was Kyle doing here?”
I asked for the second time. “Was he coming to see you or me? Did
he know you were going to be here, and who else knew?”

“
A lot of
questions.”

“
And the big one, who
wanted him dead?”

“
Besides me?” Blinky asked
softly.

I let it sink in a moment before responding.
“No, let’s start with you.”

“
Sure, I thought about it,
acing him, but it was just wishful thinking, of course.”

“
Of course.”

“
I mean, he was going to
rat. He had an appointment to see Socolow today, did you know
that?”

“
I did, but how did
you?”

“
Kyle told me.”

Ah. “When?”

“
Yesterday
morning.”

Blinky seemed to want to say more, but he
stopped. Maybe he wanted me to drag it out of him. “Yesterday
morning,” I said. Sometimes, if you repeat a witness’s statement,
it’s like priming the pump, and the words will just start
flowing.

“
Yeah,” Blinky said. “I was
home reading the Sunday papers when he called. He told me he was
going in first thing in the morning to see Socolow unless he could
get some satisfaction from me.”

“
Satisfaction meaning
bucks.”

“
Mucho bucks. Five hundred
thousand of them.”

I let out a whistle. “To which you
said?”

“
I asked him if he’d take a
check. Then I told him, ‘
¡Chingate!
Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.’ After I
calmed down, I told him I’d get back to him with something, you
know, a counteroffer, after I had a chance to think about
it.”

“
And talk to your lawyer,”
I said, filling in the gaps.

“
Yeah.”

“
And you told him you were
seeing me that evening.”

Blinky paused before
nodding yes. He pulled another cigarette from somewhere and lit it,
the tip glowing in the darkened room. “Yeah, I told him. But I
never said where, and I never invited him over for espresso
and
pastelitos
.”

I cocked my head in what is supposed to be
an inquisitive, if not accusing, look.

“
Honest, Jake. Why would I
want him around? I needed to talk to you. Hell, I figured Kyle
would be wired the next time he saw me. They’d try to bust me for
subornation of perjury or obstruction of justice if I bought him
off. I needed some advice from you before talking to
him.’’

We both stayed quiet a
moment, and I thought about it. Who wanted Kyle Hornback
dead?
Besides
Blinky. And who wanted to frame Blinky and maybe me? The
ceiling fan continued its endless circles, slashing the plumes of
cigarette smoke like a whirling saber. The washing machine had long
since ended its cycles, and outside my window, a mockingbird was
singing its early-morning song in the mulberry bush.

“
Who’s Kit Carson
Cimarron?” I asked.

In the gun-metal gray light of a new day,
Blinky was smiling a rueful smile. “Now that,” he said, “is a long
story.”

***

A pink glow was spreading
in the eastern sky as we reconvened in the kitchen. I made
Blinky
café

con leche
and squeezed some fresh grapefruit juice for
myself. He asked me to scramble four eggs, and I told him
secretary-treasurers of major corporations do no such thing. But I
made rye toast, which he wolfed down with cream cheese and guava
preserves that Granny had made, or “put up,” as she would say. I
microwaved last night’s spaghetti and meatballs for my
breakfast.

“
Kit Carson Cimarron,”
Blinky said, chewing his toast, seeming to enjoy the sound of the
name. “You know how you dumped Josie?”

“
That’s a little strong,” I
said. “We split up, that’s all.”

“
Yeah, yeah, you broke up.
Well, I was there. You dropped her like a bad habit, not that I
blame you. Afterward, she moped around for a year.”

“
Okay, have it your way.
What’s that got to do with Cimarron?”

“
You ought to ask
Josie.”

“
She knows him? When
Socolow mentioned Cimarron’s name, Jo Jo didn’t blink an
eye.”

“
Yeah, well she isn’t about
to admit that she was almost Mrs. K. C. Cimarron of Pitkin County,
Colorado.”

“
What!”

“
Left her at the altar, or
the stable actually, since they were going to get married on his
ranch. Broke her heart, Jake, or would have, if she had one. You
know, the only two men I ever introduced to my sister are you and
Cimarron, and from each of you, she got nothing but
pain.”

“
That sounds like something
she would say.”

“
Verdad
. I’m just repeating her words.”

“
Tell me more about
him.”

“
He was rich, but leveraged
up to his ten-gallon hat in oil-and gas-drilling loans in the
eighties, and when the bottom fell out of the market, he lost
everything, except his ranch in Colorado. Anyway, he’d dumped her
by then, and there hasn’t been anyone else in her life
since.”

“
You introduced them,” I
said, which was really a question.

“
We’d done some business,”
Blinky continued, “when he still had a seven-figure line of credit.
He picked up the financing on the salvage operation in the Keys.
Paid for the equipment, the divers, the marketing. I was the
brains, he was the bank.”

I was about to insult the intelligence of
the banker, but Blinky kept talking, “Shit, you should have seen
him. He comes down to Sugarloaf Key wearing those hand-stitched
cowboy boots and a silver belt buckle must have weighed twenty
pounds. He’s even bigger than you, and he’s got on a black cowboy
hat with a feather stuck in it, so with the boots and the hat, he’s
about seven feet tall, and he’s buying the crew drinks with
hundred-dollar bills off a wad he carries in his boots.”

“
Jo Jo fell in love with
this guy?” I said in disbelief.

“
El amor es
ciego
. Love is blind, my
friend.”

“
You got sued in the Keys
deal.”

“
Right, but not indicted,
thanks to Kit. He saved my ass.”

“
What happened?”

Blinky shook his head sadly. “On the Grand
Bahama Bank, we found three Spanish galleons loaded to the gunwales
with coins and artifacts. Seven million wholesale auction value
after expenses.”

“
What’s wrong with
that?”

“
I had twenty percent of
the company, gave Cimarron twenty percent and sold the
rest.”

“
I still don’t get
it.”

“
The sixty percent I
sold…well, I sold it about four times.”

“
Oh shit.”

“
Yeah, I had to give up all
the promoters’ portions to the investors, and Cimarron had to make
up the shortfall, about eight hundred thousand, to keep us out of
jail. “Blinky laughed in disbelief at his own bad fortune at
striking it rich. “Who would ever have thought we’d have found the
stuff? It was the first deal I ever did that actually
worked.”

From behind me, a voice.
“Just like
The Producers
.”

I turned and there was Kip in his Jockey
shorts, his face still puffy with sleep. “Zero Mostel produces this
Broadway show he’s sure will flop, so he sells it over and over to
investors, and when it makes money, he’s really fucked.”

“
Don’t say ‘fucked,’ “I
told my ward.

“
Right,” Blinky said. “Say
‘screwed.’ ‘Fucked’ has no class, and to succeed in business, kid,
you gotta have class.”

“
Anyway,” Kip said,
“Mostel’s bummed out and he says to Gene Wilder, ‘I was so careful.
I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast. Where
did I go right?’

“
That’s good,” Blinky said.
“The kid’s a regular actor. I could put him into sales.”

Kip grabbed a box of cereal from the
cupboard and sat at the kitchen counter, listening. If he paid
close attention, he wouldn’t need an MBA from Wharton.

“
Rocky Mountain Treasures
was really Cimarron’s idea,” Blinky said, turning to me. “Back in
the good days, he bought up mineral leases all over
Colorado.”

“
But how can he finance it?
You said he was tapped out.”

“
He is. That’s why I’m out
there selling limited partnership interests. The investors will
fund the exploration. But listen, Jake, this isn’t a mining
operation. Shit, with the price of gold and silver where it is, you
can’t extract enough to justify the costs. Plus, the environmental
rules will tie you up for years before you turn your first spadeful
of dirt. But we’re after something else. Gold and silver that’s
already been mined. It’s there, Jake, sunk in old mine shafts,
hidden in caves, buried under mountains. We’ve got maps. We’ve got
satellite photographs you can buy from the government. We’ve got
sophisticated sensors and state-of-the-art equipment, and either
way, we can’t lose.”