Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (15 page)

“
Either way?”

“
We hit paydirt, everybody
wins and wins big. We don’t, Cimarron and I still get management
fees from investors’ funds. And best of all, it’s
legit.”

I was watching Kip carefully slice an orange
into quarters and nibble at it. “Uh-huh.”

“
Okay, so we puffed a
little bit where you were concerned, and maybe we didn’t give every
twist and turn in my biography, but I’m telling you, the business
is for real. Honest, Jake. Believe me.”

I thought about believing him, but I was
having trouble with it. Sometimes in closing argument, when I’m
telling a jury to be cautious of a prosecution witness who’s been
given immunity in return for his testimony, I tell a little story.
I tell about the farmer who found a rattlesnake in the middle of
the winter. “Please don’t kill me,” the snake says. “I’m nearly
frozen. Take me back to the farmhouse and warm me up and save my
life.” But the farmer is worried. “If I warm you up, you’ll bite
me.” The snake wiggles its head and says, “I promise not to bite
you.” So the farmer takes the snake home, warms it up, and lo and
behold, the snake bites him. As he’s dying the farmer moans: “How
could you do this to me. You promised ...”

In the story, this is where I pause and give
the jurors my steady gaze. “Yes,” the snake says, “but when I
promised, you knew I was a snake.”

Now I looked uneasily at my reptilian
client.

“
C’mon, Jake, don’t you
believe me?”

“
I believe you,” I said,
wanting it to be true. “So what did Hornback have on you? What was
he going to tell Socolow?”

“
It was a bluff. He was
selling shares for me, so he just assumed it was a scam. Hell, why
wouldn’t he? Anyway, he threatened to squeal, but he had
nothing.”

“
You know what I do with
squealers?” Kip said, a malicious grin on his sweet young
face.

“
Huh?” Blinky seemed
startled.

Kip curled his upper lip into a sneer. “I
let ‘em have it in the belly so they can roll around for a long
time thinking it over.”

“
What the fuck?”

“
Richard Widmark in
Kiss of Death
,’ Kip
explained, “and don’t say ‘fuck.’”

Chapter 10

Dead Serious

When corpses are found out of doors
undergoing putrefaction,” Doc Charlie Riggs said, sitting erect on
the witness stand, “it’s quite common to find insect
infestation.

“
But in a funeral home?” I
asked.

Doc Riggs leaned toward the jury box.
“Should never happen. Never.”

“
So in this case, Dr.
Riggs, at an open-casket memorial service ...” I paused for effect
just the way they do on TV.

“
Where mourners saw worms
crawling out of the eyes of the late Peter Cooper—”

“
Maggots,” Charlie
corrected me. “Pupa, too. Some intact, some broken, indicating
hatched flies.”

“
Yes, indeed. Maggots. From
these maggots crawling out of the eyes of the late Peter Cooper,
are you able to form an expert opinion as to the degree of care
exercised by the Eternal Rest Funeral Home?”

At the plaintiffs table, from which I had
recently risen, my client, Mrs. Brenda Cooper, was sobbing at just
the proper decibel level. I always tell my clients that sniffles
and whimpers are okay. Wails and shrieks are not, unless I want the
jury distracted from the testimony, in which case, caterwauling to
the heavens is permitted.

“
Prima facie negligence, no
doubt about it,” Doc Riggs announced with authority.

“
On what do you base your
conclusion?”

That’s the lawyer’s way of asking “why,” but
a lawyer will never use one word when seven will do. Charlie Riggs
stroked his beard and looked directly at the jury. “Not just from
the maggots, alone. No sir. Maggots can emerge from blowfly eggs
just a few hours after death. That wouldn’t be enough to assign
negligence to the funeral home. But as I said before, there were
pupa shells, and it should take at least a week for the maggots to
go through the stages of larval growth to produce newly hatched
blowflies. So obviously, there was complete inattention to Mr.
Cooper’s body.”

As if on cue, Brenda Cooper’s sobs grew
louder.

Charlie didn’t miss a beat. “The eggs would
have been clearly visible in his eyes and the corners of his mouth.
They sort of look like grated cheese, so I don’t know how the
attendants missed them.”

In the jury box, a woman nervously cleared
her throat.

“
As I say,” Charlie
continued, “
prima facie
negligence.”

I sat down and let Charlie take care of
himself on cross-examination. No one could do it any better.

***

I was sipping a Cuban coffee in the Gaslight
Lounge down the street from the county courthouse, and Charlie was
slurping a double order of rice pudding with cinnamon, having
already polished off a three-egg western omelet. Testifying about
putrefied corpses always made him hungry.

“
What’s bothering you?” he
asked.

“
Besides being a murder
suspect, not much, unless you count having my name linked to one of
Blinky Baroso’s schemes, and being forced to revisit my past
courtesy of his sister.”

“
Josefina,” Charlie said.
“A splendid young woman, though a tad tightly wound, I always
thought.”

“
She says I had a
dysfunctional upbringing, what with you and Granny as my role
models.”

“
Do you believe
it?”

“
I don’t know, Charlie.
Granny always told me to choose right over wrong, and you taught me
how to tell one from the other. If I’ve failed, it’s not Granny’s
fault or yours.”

“
For what it’s worth, we
don’t think you’ve failed. As for your other problems, I don’t
believe for one minute that you killed Kyle Hornback, and neither
does Abe Socolow. He’s just trying to pressure you into bringing
Baroso in.”

“
Yeah, maybe, but it’s no
fun.” I looked at my watch. “I gotta go. While you were mesmerizing
the jury, Blinky left a message with Cindy that he had something
that would blow the Hornback case wide open.”

Charlie used his napkin to pry a grain of
rice from his beard. “Do you believe him?”

“
What a strange question.
Why else would he—”

“
Your client is a con man,
is he not?”

“
Yeah. To the world in
general.”

“
Mundus vult decipi.
The world wants to be deceived. But what about
you, Jake?”

***

I put the top down on the old convertible
and swung onto I-9S from the downtown ramp. I passed over the
poinciana trees on South Miami Avenue, then swung off the
Twenty-fifth Road exit to the Rickenbacker Causeway. Blinky had
told me to meet him on Virginia Key, a secluded beach near the
Seaquarium on the way to Key Biscayne.

Virginia Key is really just a spit of sand
with some pine trees for shade. Because the beach faces due east
and there’s a reef about a mile offshore to cut down the rollers,
it’s a great place for windsurfing. To the north is Fisher Island,
million-dollar condos surrounded by a moat to keep out the
riffraff. Nearby is Government Cut where the cruise ships head
toward open water. To the east is the Gulf Stream, Bimini, and the
wide expanse of the Atlantic. To the south is Bear Cut, an open
channel through the causeway, and to the west is the city sewage
plant. That’s right. The city fathers chose an island of unspoiled
beauty on which to lace the salt-laden wind with the trenchant
scent of human waste. In a way I can’t fully explain, Virginia Key
seems a metaphor for Miami.

There was a rusted-out Jeep Cherokee up to
its hubcaps in the sand. Nearby, an Isuzu Trooper with roof racks
and a fine collection of custom-made sailboards was being unloaded
by two lean, muscular guys in their twenties. On the water, half a
dozen boardsailors were jumping the chop, headed on a broad reach
in about eighteen knots of northeasterly breeze. Perfect lines of
waves were breaking on the reef, what surfers call “corduroy to the
horizon.”

I spotted Blinky’s green Range Rover parked
in the shade about fifty yards from the beach. Long needles, green
and fragrant, floated into my convertible from the candles of a
slash pine tree.

I got out of the car, leaned on the fender
and watched the boardsailors. Even from here, I could hear the
sails crackling in the wind. Blinky wasn’t around.

I waited five, maybe six, minutes.

Still no Blinky.

Maybe he was collecting pinecones or trying
to sell stock in a gold mine to some beach bums.

I looked back at the water, relaxing.

Not thinking anything was wrong.

Why should I?

The ringing phone jarred me. It sounded so
out of place here that for a moment I didn’t know what it was. It
was coming from Blinky’s Range Rover. I hustled over and found the
driver’s door unlocked. Inside, on the passenger’s side of the
front seat, a cellular phone was ringing, its LCD display reading
“CALL” with a blinking insistence.

But I was looking at something else.

A deep black-red stain on the upholstery on
the driver’s side.

About the size of a salad plate. Still
wet.

A spiderweb crack in the front
windshield.

But no Blinky.

And still the phone rang and blinked at me.
I picked it up and groped for the right button. “Hello,” I said, my
voice strained.

“
Who is this?” A man’s
voice, strangely familiar.

“
Blinky? Is that
you?”

“
No. Who’s
this?”

It was coming to me. I didn’t know what to
say so I didn’t say a word.

“
Jake,” he said. “Jake
Lassiter? What the fuck are you—”

But I had hung up.

Now, why did I do that? Why did I feel
guilty about being there just now, and why was I wiping my
fingerprints off the telephone? I hadn’t killed anyone. No one was
even dead, right. I mean there wasn’t a body. Blinky would be
coming out of the woods in a minute.

C’mon, Blinky. Where the hell are you?

I touched the red stain. Still wet. I wiped
my hand on the seat but only managed to smear the blood. I opened
the glove compartment. There was nothing there, not even
gloves.

I was thinking about getting the hell out of
there when another noise startled me.

The overlapping whine of sirens. My ass was
half out of the Range Rover when three police cars swerved onto the
beach, spitting up sand, lights whirling. As they skidded to
impressive, cop-style stops, I could no longer see the bright sails
or hear the crackling of the wind.

***

It took Abe Socolow twenty minutes to get
there. By that time, a crime scene van was parked in the shade, and
a pot-bellied cop was taking plaster impressions of the Range
Rover’s tires. When he finished, he hauled his little black bag
into the van and gathered blood samples, dusted for prints, and
used tweezers and a tiny whisk broom looking for who knows what. He
had already been through my car, with my consent, since I didn’t
feel like waiting around for them to bring a warrant. Two uniformed
cops were trying to interview the boardsailors, most of whom didn’t
want to leave the water. When the wind is up, neither shark
sightings nor murder scenes will get hardcore boardheads to
shore.

I sat under a pine tree whose branches
swayed gently in the wind. Three cops stood around me asking
questions I wouldn’t answer if I could, but they parted when his
eminence, the prosecutor, pulled up in his state-owned four-door
Chrysler.

“
Where the hell is he?” Abe
Socolow asked.

I stayed sitting, my back against a tree.
Abe looked down at me, his courtroom pallor giving him a sickly
look in the open air. “Who?” I answered.

“
Don’t jerk me around,
Jake. Your sleazy client.”

“
Which one?” I asked,
thinking we’d played this scene before, maybe twice.

“
I’m losing patience with
you. What were you doing here?”

“
Waiting for Baroso, or
maybe Godot.”

“
What were you doing in his
car?”

I wanted to stand up so I
could look down at Socolow who now towered over me, but I sat
still, my arms across my knees. I was pulling pine needles off a
branch, one by one, a child’s refrain popping into my head.
She loves me, she loves me not
. “Aren’t you supposed to advise me of my right to counsel
and even provide one if I can’t pay the freight, which I can’t, if
it’s someone who charges my rates?”

“
Why’d you hang up the
phone, Jake? You knew it was me on the other end, didn’t you? Why’d
you do something stupid like that?”

Two could play this game. “Why were you
calling here?” I asked.

“
My secretary got an
anonymous call, male voice she didn’t recognize, giving her the
number and saying for me to call if I wanted to break the Hornback
case.”

“
Me, too. I mean, Cindy got
a call from Blinky, at least she thought it was Blinky, telling me
to come out here.”

Socolow regarded me skeptically. “Did she
now?”

“
Call her, find out.”
Socolow was giving me a look that was supposed to make me break
down and confess to all manner of felonies and misdemeanors. “Don’t
you see, Abe, someone’s setting me up? Someone wanted me out here
to make it look like I killed Blinky.”