Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (20 page)

“
Like a shyster behind an
ambulance.”

“
On Monday, June
fourteenth, Mr. Hornback was scheduled to appear before the state
attorney to give a statement that would have implicated Mr.
Lassiter’s client in a fraudulent investment scheme. That client
has now disappeared, and based on evidence obtained from his
vehicle, he may also have been killed. The only person known to
have been at that scene is Mr. Lassiter, who answered a phone call
from the state attorney, then hung up without identifying himself,
and apparently was intent on fleeing at the time officers
arrived.”

“
Is that it?”

“
Not quite. A witness, a
ranch owner from Colorado named K.C. Cimarron is prepared to
testify that Mr. Lassiter’s client, apparently with Mr. Lassiter’s
advice, knowledge, and assistance, engaged in a scheme to defraud
investors of a closely held company called Rocky Mountain
Treasures, Inc. Mr. Cimarron claims that at least one hundred fifty
thousand dollars in corporate funds are missing, and Mr. Lassiter
has no explanation for a seventy-five-thousand-dollar deposit to
his bank account last week. Additionally, the stock subscription to
the company was apparently sold several times over.

“
Mr. Cimarron is the last
living witness who can testify to these matters. About five minutes
ago, Mr. Lassiter threatened to shoot Mr. Cimarron in the kneecaps.
About two weeks ago, Mr. Lassiter threatened to tear out his heart.
The remark was made to the retired coroner and repeated innocently
to the state attorney, as the retired coroner was afraid for Mr.
Lassiter’s well-being, and also allowed as how his old friend was
acting strangely.”

“
Hey, Abe. I once punched
out a tight end for the Jets. Drew a fifteen-yarder for
unsportsmanlike conduct. Why not introduce that to the grand
jury?”

“
This isn’t a
joke.”

“
You’re telling me. Abe,
listen for a minute. I’m going to confess. I confess to hating K.
C. Cimarron, and you’re right, if I see him again, I may just tear
him apart. But I didn’t steal from him or anybody else, and if you
don’t know that, I’m really disappointed in you.”

“
Not half as disappointed
as I am in you. Jake, I’m not

going to insult you by telling you I’m only
doing my job, because it’s never been just a job to me, and you
know it. If you’re dirty, I take it as a personal affront. I take
it as a rejection of everything I stand for, and it makes you the
lowest of the low. I’m champing at the bit to get a piece of you,
fellow, but I’m gonna play it by the book. If the grand jury thinks
we submitted enough evidence to establish probable cause, you’ll be
indicted for the murder of Kyle Hornback. Maybe you’ll be convicted
and maybe you won’t. That’s not for me to say. As for Baroso, we
don’t have a body, and the state can only fry you once,
anyway.”

“
Anything else, Abe, or
should I get my papers ready to sue you for malicious prosecution?
You’re going to look like a fool, Abe. I’m going to end your
career, old buddy.”

“
I’ll ignore that for now.”
He paused and the line buzzed with static. “One more thing. Don’t
leave town. If they indict, I won’t send out the deputies. You can
come in with your lawyer, and I’ll handle the booking
myself.”

I placed the phone down on the desk.

“
Jake.” I heard the voice,
faint now, as I slipped my suit coat on. “Jake, are you
there?”

I always keep an overnight bag in my office.
It contains a toiletry kit, a pair of jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt,
and a warm-up suit. I grabbed the bag from behind the credenza.

“
Jake.” Barely audible now.
“Did you hear me? No tricks, no funny stuff.”

And then I was gone.

Chapter 14

Continental
Divide

I grabbed Kip from the conference room and
told him we were taking a little trip. He’d been pestering me about
going to Universal Studios near Disney World, so he figured we were
headed to Orlando. I reluctantly promised we would another time,
and on the way to the airport, gave him my sermon about the paving
over of Central Florida, a land of motels, alligator shows, pancake
houses, shell shops (with imported shells), go-cart tracks,
miniature golf courses, T-shirt shops, and medieval castles made of
plastic. Call me a curmudgeon, but I just don’t go for
pre-packaged, no-surprise, sterilized “attractions.” I’d rather
take the kid fishing.

So I told Kip where we were going and added
that he’d better tie the laces of his high-top sneakers, and he
began asking the first of six hours of questions. “But why are we
going out west, and why couldn’t we get my clothes first?”

“
We’re going because the
state attorney here thinks I killed someone, and a dangerous guy
there thinks I double-crossed him.”

“
Broly! Just like
North by Northwest
.”

“
Huh?”

“
The cops think Cary Grant
killed this guy at the UN, but it was really an assassin hired by
James Mason, who thinks Cary Grant is someone else,
and—”

“
Kip, this is real
life.”

“
I know, but you can learn
things from the movies.”

“
Yeah? Like
what?”

“
Like, if you see a crop
duster flying real low, you better duck.”

“
Okay, got it. As for your
clothes, I’ll get you duded up when we get there.”

He made a face. “Duded up? Uncle Jake,
that’s totally geekified. I mean, nobody talks like that, not even
Pee Wee Herman .’’

On the expressway, just before the airport
exit, a blond woman in a red Porsche cut me off, changing lanes. I
gave her a friendly honk-honk, and she responded with the middle
finger of her left hand. A bumper sticker on the Porsche read: “I
still miss my ex, but my aim is improving.”

From a phone on Concourse E, I called
Charlie Riggs to tell him what I was doing. “Are you going because
of the girl or to get yourself out of a jam?” he asked.

“
I don’t know,” I answered,
honestly.

At the other end of the line, Charlie seemed
to think it over. After a moment, he cleared his throat with his
genial harrumph. “Plautus probably said it best.”

“
He usually did,” I
agreed.

“
Ubi mel ibi
apes
. Honey attracts bees.”

“
I know what you’re saying,
Charlie. Be careful of that other bee, the one with size-sixteen
cowboy boots.”

“
Surely, but be careful of
the honey, too, my friend.”

***

The flight to Denver was uneventful, unless
you count the look the flight attendant gave me when Kip asked
whether they had Dutch beer instead of that canned piss supposedly
made from Rocky Mountain spring water. I made a mental note to
watch my language in front of the lad, maybe get some advice from
Granny, who would probably hoot and offer us both some
moonshine.

I tried to nap, but my hand, out of its
cast, began throbbing, maybe from the cabin pressure, maybe from
the task of opening all those little brown bottles with Mr.
Daniel’s name on them.

We had ice-cream cones at the new Denver
airport, and I bought Kip a Broncos sweatshirt, which matched his
Day-Glo shorts and his orange sneakers. We rented a Mustang
convertible, and top down, headed west on Interstate 70, the summer
sun hotter than in Miami.

“
Where’s the snow?” Kip
asked.

“
Off yonder,” I said,
pointing straight ahead at the unseen mountains.

I told him everything I knew about Colorado,
which wasn’t much. Just before I retired from pro football, which
sounds better than saying I was put on waivers and twenty-five
other teams didn’t notice, I had gotten friendly with three of the
Packers defensive players. They kept bugging me to come skiing at
the end of the season. When I finally gave in, I discovered that
skiing was a lot like windsurfing, the combination of recklessness
and gracefulness, although I always had a lot more of the
former.

After that, I’d meet the guys each January,
usually during Super Bowl week, so we could forget we weren’t
there. We’d team up with a few guys from the Vikings and Bears,
rent a couple of houses within snowball range of each other in
Aspen or Crested Butte or Vail or Telluride, ski all day and play
poker and drink bourbon most of the night. One of our number
eventually made it to the Hall of Fame—football, not skiing—and all
of us gathered in Canton, Ohio, for the ceremonies. Nobody, least
of all the honoree, was sober, which may explain his emotional
speech, which began, “I want to thank everyone responsible for my
being indicted.”

Our gang was not the most skilled of skiers,
what with creaky knees wrapped and braced against the torque, and
our penchant for dueling with ski poles on the way down the slopes.
We wore torn jeans and mismatched gloves and women’s stockings over
our heads instead of ski masks, and we grossed out everyone with
our sweatshirts, which had cute slogans, including, “Who Farted?”
and “How’s My Skiing—Call 1-800 EAT SHIT.”

We didn’t always follow etiquette on the
slopes or in the coffeehouses, tearooms, and chichi, wood-beamed
creeping-ferned restaurants that abound in such places, and in
general, we were as welcome as a Christmas week thaw. We did manage
to avoid arrest and deportation, but not for lack of trying. We
were remarkably unsuccessful with women, especially in the tonier
places like Aspen where they talk about après ski, causing me to
coin any number of phrases, such as “Après ski, I’m gonna take a
crap.”

I had never been here in the summer, and I
had never chased a woman here, if that’s what I was doing now. I
thought about it. The grand jury would have already met, and the
foreman would have signed an indictment with my name on top. Sure,
Charlie, I was here for Jo Jo, but I was here for me, too.

I was squinting into the late-afternoon sun,
and the air was getting cooler. We passed Vail and got off the
interstate to head south on U.S. 24 to Leadville, the old silver
mining town. Kip had fallen asleep, and I woke him so he could see
Mount Elbert and Mount Massive, both over fourteen thousand feet.
Kip thanked me by growling and curling up again, his head in my
lap.

We kept going south along the Arkansas
River, then hung a right at Twin Lakes and up two-lane Route 92
toward Independence Pass. By now, it was downright cold. The top
was up, and Kip was awake, reading the fine print on a tourist
brochure we picked up at a gas station. We wound up the mountain
road, slowed to near stops on a variety of hairpin turns, and below
us, where we had been, was now a darkened, faraway valley.

“
When they were looking for
gold, the first miners traveled on burros in the winter over
Independence Pass,” Kip informed me, reading aloud in the dying
light. “They went through thirty-foot snowdrifts.” He looked out
the window. “Hey! There’s snow! Stop the car!”

I did, and Kip got out. Just before dusk,
and the wind was howling. Bright wildflowers, blues and reds and
yellows, grew out of a moist topsoil, and nearby was a patch of
wet, melting snow tinted reddish-brown by the blowing dust. Kip
leaned down, gathered up a handful, and patted himself a soggy,
misshapen snowball.

“
Hit me with that,” I said,
“and you can take a burro over the pass yourself.”

He aimed at a road sign but didn’t come
close. “I never saw snow before. Bitchin’ stuff!”

“
Totally,” I
agreed.

He grabbed his video camera from the trunk
and began recording the flowers, the snow, and every rock and shrub
within eyesight. Then, we both started shivering, so I hustled him
into the car. In a few moments, we passed the lookout point,
driving through low-hanging clouds, a fine mist glistening in the
headlights.

“
That’s the Continental
Divide,” I told my nephew, spotting a tourist information sign, but
sounding as if I were an old Rocky Mountain hand.

“
I know,” he said. “It’s a
movie with John Belushi as a newspaperman who doesn’t like nature
‘till he gets out here.”

We began the long descent into the next
valley, and just then the mist turned to rain, and in a moment,
chunks of ice fell from the sky, pinging off the hood and plopping
onto our canvas top.

“
Jeez! What’s that?” Kip
was wide-eyed.

“
Hail, my boy. And not
little pebbles, either.”

“
What a racket.
Yikes!”

I rounded a curve a bit too fast, then hit
the brakes, just like you’re not supposed to do. The Mustang’s rear
end skidded toward the darkness of a sheer drop-off. I let up on
the brakes and swung the wheel back the other way. Too hard. We
fishtailed toward the mountain side, nearly slamming into a boulder
the size of a house. Again, I whipped the wheel the other way, and
we skidded toward the black abyss. This time, I gave it some gas,
tugged the wheel gently toward the mountain, and we straightened
out, but I was in the left-hand lane, and a Jeep was headed toward
me, headlights flashing, horn honking. I spun the wheel once more,
and we skidded onto the gravel on the mountain side.

A long-lost word popped
into my head.
Makua
, the Hawaiian word meaning “toward the mountain.” It came
from a trip to Maui, and a deadly drive down Crater Road on the
slopes of Haleakala. I’d gone after a woman then, too. What was the
other word?
Makai
,
“toward the sea.” If you’re going to go off a mountain road, choose
the
makua
side.
Always take a ditch or even a boulder over a two-thousand-foot
drop.