Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (46 page)

“
Expunging,” I
said.

“
Whatever.”

It had been a good week in the squashing and
impinging departments. I also had received a letter from
Tallahassee dropping disbarment proceedings, and Judge T. Bone
Coleridge called to tell me he had tossed out the child neglect
case and also asked my opinion of the recently concluded college
bowl games. So, with the Colorado records expunged, it was still
true. I’ve never been disbarred, committed, or convicted of moral
turpitude, and the only time I was arrested, it was a case of
mistaken identity—I didn’t know the guy I hit was a cop. That made
me think of Josefina Jovita Baroso, because she hated it when I
said that.

“
I always thought there was
something strange about that gal,” Granny said, sadly.

Strange the way that happens, you’re
thinking of something, and someone else puts words to it. Of
course, Granny had raised me since I was a pup, to use her
expression, and we’re often on the same wavelength. I wonder if
that’s the way with a husband and wife, and if I’ll ever get the
chance to find out.

“
I’m not saying I thought
she was a killer,” Granny continued, “but there was always
something a little cold about her. Gives me the willies, just
thinking about it now.”

I tossed another icy block of chum into the
water and cut more squid for bait. Kip had put down his gear and
was napping on the aft cushions. Charlie’s eyes were closed and his
hat, made of green palm fronds, was pulled down over his face. The
water will calm you, or as Granny says, peacify you.

“
Who would have thought
she’d be a whatchamacallit, a serial killer?” Granny
asked.

“
I think you probably have
to kill at least three people to earn that title,” I
said.

“
Number three would have
been you.”

That gave me some pause.

“
What was wrong with that
gal?” Granny asked, still gnawing at the thought.

“
She had an inability to
feel the emotions that most of us have,” I said. “Even her brother,
a lifelong criminal, never could have killed a man. With Jo Jo,
people were just objects, like a table or chair.”

“
A sociopathic
personality,” said the voice from under the palm frond hat. And I
thought he’d been snoozing. “Used to use the term ‘moral
imbecility’ referring to antisocial, morally irresponsible
behavior. All the normal emotions of lust, anger, and greed are
still there but without the tempering restraint of
conscience.”

“
Greed,” Granny repeated,
shaking her head.

“
Indeed,” Charlie said. “As
Virgil asked, ‘
Quid non mortalia pectora
cogis, auri sacra fames?
’”

“
Good question,” I
admitted.

Charlie translated, “What lengths is the
heart of man driven to by this cursed craving for gold?”

“
That reminds me,” I said.
“When the shoulder heals, I’m going up to Colorado for a
while.”

“
Skiing?” Granny
asked.

“
Not exactly.”

“
Ice climbing in Box
Canyon?” Charlie guessed.

“
No, getting too old for
that.”

I let it hang there a moment, like a tern
hovering in the

breeze.

“
So just why does the
craving for gold remind you that you’re going to Colorado?” Granny
asked suspiciously.

“
In the mine, when the
Silver Queen collapsed, I jumped off the top of the Silver Queen
just before the Explosion.”

“
I know,” Granny said. “You
blabbed about that more times than Doc tells about the land crabs
that stole a ring from a corpse in the mangroves.”

“
When I hit the ground, I
put my arm down to brace myself, and my hand went inside the
queen’s head and touched something ...I don’t know, kind of mushy
or spongy.”

“
So?”

“
Well, both Cimarron and
Blinky both said the head and torso were carved from this massive
chunk of pure silver. A year before the statue was made, miners dug
a nugget—more like a boulder—out of the Mollie Gibson mine on
Smuggler Mountain that weighed twenty-one hundred and fifty pounds.
The purest silver ever mined, the largest nugget ever found. For a
hundred years, the story has been that the statue was carved from
the nugget, but if that were true, the head wouldn’t have been
hollow.”

Granny pushed her sunglasses up on her head
and eyeballed me. “I’m still listening, but I don’t know what that
has to do with you going back to Colorado.”

“
When they let me out of
the hospital, I did some research. In the library, all the
newspaper clippings of the time say just what I told you, the pure
one-ton nugget, the statue, the whole shebang. But in the county
historical society, there are handwritten notes from the artisans
who made the Silver Queen, and they kept track of all the materials
used, including three hundred eighty pounds of
papier-mâché.”

“
So what?” Granny
asked.

“
That’s what I stuck my
hand in. They filled that big mama with papier-mâché and coated her
with a thin layer of silver!”

“
So write a story for
the
National Geographic
. What’s it got to do with you?”

“
The one-ton nugget has
never been accounted for. I searched all the records. Every big
event in the mines was duly recorded. It would have been major news
if the nugget had been melted down or sold or put on display, but
it simply dropped off the face of the earth.”

“
Or back into someone’s
mine,” Charlie offered.

“
Exactly. Maybe the same
someone who filched the Silver Queen from the museum put the nugget
back in that mine, too. Or maybe it’s in the Mollie Gibson, or who
knows where.”

Granny had reeled in and found her hook
missing its chunk of squid. “Don’t tell me you’re going to go look
for it. Not after all you’ve been through.”

“
I’ve got the maps, the
charts, the old mining logs,” I said.

“
How’d you manage
that?”

“
Bought ‘em. Bought
Cimarron’s stock actually.”

“
Of all the damn fool
...”

“
No, listen, Granny. The
court divided the company’s cash up among all the investors, about
thirty cents on the dollar. Cimarron’s stock passed to Jo Jo, who
owned it at the time of her death.”

“
You mean she killed her
husband and gets his assets?” Granny demanded, her sense of justice
offended.

“
She got them and never
lost them because she wasn’t prosecuted for killing Cimarron. The
probate court in Colorado put the stock up for sale. Nobody wanted
it, so I bought it—seventy percent of the company—for a hundred
bucks. I already had ten percent.”

“
You’re not serious, Jacob.
What do you want it for? It’s cursed.” Granny only called me by my
given name when she was perturbed.

“
Hey, it’s not for the
money. It’s like a game, a scavenger hunt. You have these old maps
and diaries from a hundred years ago, and you know somewhere under
the ground is this treasure. Well, it just starts to take hold of
you.”

“
Uh-huh,” she said, not
sounding convinced.

“
So I thought maybe Kip
would come up there with me. He already feels comfortable in school
there, and who knows, maybe we’ll find the nugget just like
Cimarron found the Silver Queen.”

Granny and Charlie seemed to chew it over
for a while. Then Granny said, “No use trying to talk Jacob out of
anything. Boy’s got a stubborn streak inherited from Lord knows
who.”

Charlie took off his hat, cleared his
throat, and pulled a pipe out of a pocket on his fishing vest. He
tamped cherry tobacco into the bowl and struggled to keep a match
lit in the breeze. “What about the other twenty percent?”

“
Blinky’s share,” I said.
“It’s being held in trust by the court until he’s declared dead.
There was no way to find his body in the rubble.”

“
Uh-huh.”

When Charlie’s brain cells are cranked up,
he usually stays quiet a while. Off the bow, an osprey dive-bombed
the water just off the reef and came up with a parrot fish.

After a moment, Charlie said, “Other than
Kip here, you doing this treasure hunting by yourself?”

“
I might find some
help.”

“
From whom?”

“
I thought I should get
someone with a little experience.”

“
There’s something you’re
not telling us.”

I put on my innocent face. “Like what?”

“
Where’s
Baroso?”

Granny growled at that one. “Dead, ain’t he?
If he was shot in the leg, he never could have gotten out of the
cavern, and even if he did, he couldn’t have climbed all the way
up. Isn’t that right, Jake?”

“
That’s the way I figure
it,” I said.

Granny nodded her approval.

“
Unless he took the
elevator,” I added.

They both gave me a look.

“
Blinky had this old
elevator working off a couple of twelve-volt batteries. I missed it
on the way in, but I found it on the way out, just before I got to
the stone ladder. It’s the way I got back to the top.”

“
You left that part
out.”

“
Not when I told the cops.
That’s how I explained the blood.”

Again, the look from both of them.

“
There were fresh drops
inside the cage. I added a few with my bleeding shoulder. The cops
had no reason to test it because they figured it was all mine, and
I mostly told the truth: The last time I saw Blinky he was in the
cavern, and a couple of seconds later, it was a tomb.”

Charlie made a tsk-tsking sound. “Misleading
the police, I’m surprised at you.”

“
I didn’t mislead them. I
just didn’t go out of my way to help them.”

“
Where’d he go?” Granny
asked. “How’d he get away?”

“
When I got out of the
tunnel, Jo Jo’s pickup was still there, but the Jeep was
gone.”

“
So he contacted you,”
Granny said, prompting me to continue.

“
In a manner of speaking,”
I said.

“
Jacob, don’t be
difficult.”

“
When I got to my rental
car, I almost missed it, but on the windshield, somebody had used a
finger to write a note in the fresh snow.”

“
Lordy, do go on!” Granny
shouted, excitedly.

“
Please do,” Charlie
pleaded.

I didn’t answer.

“
Jacob!” Granny
demanded.

I still didn’t answer.

Kip joined the chorus. “C’mon, Uncle Jake.
What’d he say? I’ll bet it wasn’t ‘Rosebud.’ “

“
You know, the three of you
are the only people in the world I love with all my heart,” I
said.

“
So?” Granny
demanded.

“
So, I m sorry.”

“
What in hell’s fire is
that supposed to mean?”

“
Attorney-client
privilege,” I said, and then I felt a tug on my line.

THE END

About the Author

The author of 14 novels,
Paul Levine won the John D. MacDonald fiction award and was
nominated for the Edgar, Macavity, International Thriller, and
James Thurber prizes. A former trial lawyer, he also wrote more
than 20 episodes of the CBS military drama “JAG” and co-created the
Supreme Court drama “First Monday” starring James Garner and Joe
Mantegna. The critically acclaimed international bestseller “To
Speak for the Dead” was his first novel. He is also the author of
the “Solomon vs. Lord” series and the thriller “Illegal.” His next
novel, “Lassiter,” will be published in hardcover—and as an
e-book—by Bantam in Fall 2011. Visit Paul Levine on the Web
at
http://www.paul-levine.com
.

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