Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (19 page)

Now what was Socolow doing? He was a real
pro who wouldn’t let old times get in the way of a case. He could
bring me bagels one day and have me tailed the next.

And on the third day, maybe get a warrant to
tap my phones.

And on the fourth day, get the grand jury to
indict me for murder.

And so on until he rested. At which time I’d
have to present my case.

So here I was sinking into paranoia,
shooting glances at my rearview mirror, listening for buzzes on my
phone line. There is no worse fear for a defense lawyer than to
believe the government is listening to his telephone calls. Well,
maybe one. A few years ago, the feds tried to seize lawyers’ fees
on the theory they were clients’ ill-gotten gains, something that
shook the defense bar down to its Gucci loafers. The lawyers
weren’t concerned about their fees, of course. No, not at all. As I
recall the high-falutin’ argument, my brethren were all lathered up
about the government tampering with the constitutional right of
counsel. And if you believe that, I’ll sell you some of Blinky
Baroso’s waterfront property.

The state has awesome powers when it decides
to use them, and right now, it was using the power of intimidation.
I wouldn’t talk to my clients on the phone, except to remind them
of the importance of testifying truthfully.

Even when clients came to the office, I was
worried they might be wired. A carelessly misspoken line could be
interpreted as suborning perjury or obstructing justice.

So I was testy, suspicious, and tweaked out,
to use Kip’s phrase. Mostly, though, I couldn’t focus. It didn’t
help that Jo Jo Baroso failed to return my phone calls for a week.
When I tried the state attorney’s office, I got her voice mail. At
her cottage, the answering machine kept picking up.

On a hunch, I had Cindy
call
The Miami Herald
as one Josefina Jovita Baroso, asking why her paper hadn’t
been delivered. Because, the circulation clerk said, the computer
said you stopped the paper indefinitely three days ago.

Okay, she has a right not to read the
paper.

Or to leave town.

Maybe a quick vacation. And what right do I
have to complain, just because we had a quick roll in the sack?

I kept telling myself these things. Then I
asked Cindy to run to the courthouse and check out the property tax
rolls, a task that conflicted with an appointment to dye her hair
the color of blue steel .38. She came back with information on a
twenty-seven-acre parcel just off Old Cutler Road that years ago
was a tropical fruit plantation and now is zoned for three-acre
homesites, though the only building is a former caretaker’s
cottage. The owner, according to the computer printout, is one K.
C. Cimarron, Roaring Fork Road, Basalt, Colorado.

Oh.

So the tough guy is her landlord.

And former lover.

Who wants her back.

And she’s gone to who knows where.

I left the office and put the top down on
the Olds 442. In late afternoon, the sun was slanting hard from a
cloudless summer sky, and the breeze was a blast furnace of noxious
fumes. I headed down U.S. 1 to LeJeune, took a left, passed Merrie
Christmas Park, rounded the circle with the statue honoring the
Barefoot Mailman, and drove under an umbrella of banyan trees down
Old Cutler Road, a winding two-lane strip of asphalt that hugs the
shoreline of Biscayne Bay.

I got to the plantation around six o’clock.
The same No trespassing sign at the front gate, the same stunted
trees and rotting fruit, the same cottage, this time dark and
empty.

I went around to the back and tried the
porch door. Nothing doing. I circled the cottage, nudging the
windows. Still nothing. The screen door in front was locked with a
simple hook from the inside.

Strange.

That could only be done if you’re in the
house. Once you leave, the screen door stays unlocked.

My first thought was one of sheer terror.
Images of the strangled Kyle Hornback, the missing Blinky, the
attack by Cimarron.

A dozen deadly thoughts ricocheted through
my mind. Jo Jo must be inside the house, her body broken and
bloodied. What a fool I had been. I hadn’t protected her from
Cimarron, and now I was overcome with equal portions of dread,
grief, and guilt.

I yanked open the screen door, tearing the
hook out of the soft wood. My hand was still in the cast, but my
shoulder was fine, except for old scar tissue. I knocked the door
off its hinges in three tries.

Inside it was hot, stuffy, and silent,
except for a lone horsefly that buzzed and banged against a window.
There were women’s magazines on the wicker coffee table. In the
kitchen, a clean cup and saucer sat in a drying rack in the sink.
In the small bedroom, all was neat and tidy, the bed made, the
pillows fluffed.

There was no body, of course.

The porch door was locked. I knew that. I
had tried it from the outside. I looked out the window at the tire
tracks in the brown grass in the shade of a Key lime tree. That’s
where Jo Jo parked her car. I knew that, too. But I had forgotten,
or hadn’t put it all together. A stupid little mistake, leaping to
conclusions. Jo Jo left the house by the porch door, leaving the
front screen door locked. What was wrong with me, anyway? I was
jumpy, irrational, using bad judgment.

I was getting ready to leave, figuring I
could call a carpenter to replace the door, when I saw the
answering machine with its little green light. Seven calls,
according to the digital message counter. I hit the playback
button.

Three from me, the first one and the last
two.

Two from the state attorney’s office: Call
your secretary.

One from a solicitor for a charity.

And one from Gables Travel, the second
message, which I figured to have come three or four days ago. “Your
ticket will be waiting at the Continental desk at the airport
tomorrow. Flight four-fifty-eight, Miami to Denver. Open
return.”

***

I slept restlessly, dreaming of snow-covered
mountains filled with buried treasure. I awoke early, squeezed a
Key lime onto a fresh mango for breakfast, then drove to the
office. I called my loyal secretary into my office, something that
interfered with the filing of her three-inch stiletto-blade
fingernails.

“
Cindy, help
me.”

She waited. “It’s Jo Jo.”

Cindy stopped chewing her gum and twirled a
finger through a knot of hair. “A cool customer. She was always one
step ahead of you, but maybe that’s not saying much.”

“
What would it mean if,
after she and I…ah…re-acquainted ourselves—”

“
You mean you jumped her
bones, boss. C’mon, everybody knows you two were playing hide the
sausage when her ex-dude showed up from the O.K.
Corral.”

“
Yeah. Anyway, what would
it mean if she doesn’t return my calls and then leaves
town.”

“
She tell you where she
went?”

“
No.”

“
She make any effort to
hide where she went?”

“
Not exactly.”

“
Then it’s a toss-up.
Either she doesn’t want anything to do with you, or she wants you
to follow her.”

“
No. She told me not to
follow her. I didn’t even know she was going anywhere, but that’s
what she said. ‘Don’t follow me.

Cindy laughed. “That’s the clincher. She
wants you on her trail. Otherwise, why would she say not to, I
mean, you wouldn’t have known to follow her, unless she told you
not to.”

“
I don’t get it. I really
don’t.”

“
You don’t have to, just
trust me.”

“
Look, Cindy, she must have
gone back to Cimarron. So what you’re saying doesn’t make any
sense. She wouldn’t want me around if she’s with him.”

“
Jefe
, what you don’t know about women would fill Biscayne Bay.
Women don’t communicate the same way as men, but of course, men
don’t communicate at all. Even strong career women like Josefina
Baroso don’t necessarily come out and say what they
mean.”

“
Cindy, that’s downright
sexist of you.”

“
No, it’s not. We’ve been
taught how to act and how to speak. If we’re too direct, we’re
ballbusters. If we don’t say a word, we don’t get anything. And
where relationships are concerned, a woman falls back on her
feminine wiles. If she just said, ‘Jake, I love you, I want you
forever,’ what would you do?’’

“
Did you say
‘forever?’”

“
That’s what I mean. Your
palms start to sweat. But if she let you know she was going back to
an ex-lover, somebody you thought was bad news, what
then?”

“
You tell me, Cindy. You’re
the one who takes the tests in
Cosmo
when you’re supposed to be typing writs of
replevin.”

“
Well, either you’d go home
and drink a six-pack of that Dutch beer and maybe put your fist
through the plaster, or you’d hop the first plane to go get
her.”

“
How does she know which it
is?”

“
She doesn’t. It’s a test.
For both of you. She may be headed back to the cowboy, but she’s
not sure about it. She wants you to go up there and drag her out by
the hair. She wants you to stop her, to fight for her.”

“
I did that once and got my
bell rung.”

“
You know what I mean. If
the cowboy is professing his love, maybe she wants you to do the
same thing, then she can choose.”

“
If that’s it, why not just
say—”

Just then, the phone rang on my private
line. Abe Socolow got right to the point. “We found Cimarron.”

The way he said it, my first thought was
another body. There I go again. Why was I so morbid these days?

“
He’s sitting fat and happy
on his ranch,” Socolow continued.

“
Great. Have him
arrested.”

“
Yeah, well, the sheriffs
deputies up there didn’t serve the arrest warrant. They just called
him up and told him about it. Seems he’s a big deal in town.
Anyway, he picked up the phone and called me. Says he’ll gladly
face assault charges, or if you want, Jake, maybe go another couple
of rounds.”

“
To hell with that. Next
time, I’ll just shoot him in the kneecaps.”

“
Uh-huh. Well, he says he
wants to file a complaint against you with my office.”

“
What for? I scuff his
boots with my head?”

“
Grand larceny. Claims you
and Blinky conspired to defraud him and the third-party investors
in that treasure company. Something about selling the stock three
or four times. Diluted his stock, claims Hornback was going to blow
the whistle on both of you.”

“
I don’t know anything
about it, Abe. If you’ve got proof, go ahead, take your best
shot.”

“
Nah. I don’t believe it.
Just want you to know. I figure you can explain
everything.”

I didn’t like the way he said ‘everything.’
“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“
You still bank at Southern
Federal, right?”

“
Yeah, what about
it?”

“
We served a subpoena on
their records custodian about an hour ago, so I gotta ask you about
a cash deposit of seventy-five grand to your account last
week.”

“
That’s got to be a
mistake.”

“
Hey, Jackie, I’m looking
at a photocopy of the deposit slip. Seventy-five thousand in cash
last Thursday.”

“
Abe, stop and think about
it. If the money was dirty, would I put it in the bank?”

“
How should I know? The
only times I ever saw seventy-five grand in cash, it came from bad
guys. Drug dealers, bookies, tax evaders. But maybe you’re only
half-bad, Jake. Maybe you were going to declare taxes on it, claim
it was a legal fee, so why not put it in the bank? Besides, I long
ago gave up figuring out why you guys do what you do . .
.”

You guys?

“
...We’ve still got
burglars going into tented homes being fumigated. Come morning,
they’re just as dead as the termites. Last week, another
Seven-Eleven robber shot himself in the dick. You’d think by now,
these wise guys would stop shoving their guns down the front of
their pants when they get outside. You know how much pressure it
takes on the trigger to fire a cocked nine-millimeter?” Socolow
barked his unpleasant laugh. “Is that what you did, Jakie. Shoot
yourself in the dick?”

“
Abe, we’ve known each
other a long time. You ever know me to steal anything?”

“
Don’t pull any of
that
auld lang syne
shit on me. It doesn’t work.”

“
You didn’t answer my
question.”

The line hummed, and I pictured Socolow
scowling into the phone, his feet propped on his state-issued,
green metal desk. “No, Jake. I’ve never known you to steal. Up till
now. Or to kill, either, for that matter.”

“
What’s that supposed to
mean?”

“
The grand jury meets this
afternoon on the Hornback case.” He dropped his voice to a whisper.
“You didn’t hear it from me, but here’s the evidence that’ll be
presented. On Sunday, June thirteenth, Kyle Lynn Hornback, a white
male, age twenty-seven, was found swinging from a ceiling fan in a
house belonging to one Jacob Lassiter, who reported the crime. From
body temperature, livor mortis and rigor mortis, the medical
examiner places the time of death between nine and eleven p.m. Mr.
Lassiter was home early in the evening, but cannot account for his
presence between ten and eleven-thirty, having claimed to be on
Ocean Drive during that time, but there are no alibi witnesses, not
even Kato Kaelin. Cause of death was asphyxiation as Mr. Hornback
was strangled with a silk tie belonging to Mr. Lassiter. Toxicology
showed a substantial quantity of phenobarbs in Mr. Hornback’s
blood, and he may have been unconscious when strangled. The methyl
methacrylate test revealed latent fingerprints on the face, neck,
and arms of the decedent, and the latents matched those of Mr.
Lassiter. You follow me, Jake?”