Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (6 page)

Charlie went on like that for a while,
waxing philosophical about plants, animals, and the human
condition. I watched the kid, who was still pouting.

“
Kip,” I called out in my
let’s-be-pals voice, “how ‘bout some fishing? Want to chase the
wily bonefish with a fly rod?”

“
I hate fishing,” the kid
said.

“
Fair enough,” I responded.
“How ‘bout a swim? I could toss you overboard and chum for
sharks.”

“
Jake!” Granny warned
me.

“
Just like
Lifeboat
,” Kip said,
nonchalantly.

I stopped poling. “Huh?”

Kip looked at me with the air of superiority
kids use when dealing with an adult who’s never learned their
games. “The movie. After a shipwreck, there isn’t room for
everyone. Some are thrown overboard so others can live.”

“
Sounds like plea
bargaining in a case with multiple defendants,” I said.

“
It was filmed during World
War Two,” Kip continued, “a parable for what was going on in
Europe.”

“
A parable,” I repeated,
impressed.

“
Yes, that means you can
take it literally or—”

“
I know what it means,
kid.”

“
Jake, don’t stifle
Kippers,” Granny ordered, keeping her eyes on the water. “Movies
are very important to him.”

I turned back to the
precocious pouter. “I’ll bet you even know who directed this
Lifeboat
.”

The towheaded kid gave me
another look of youthful disdain. “
Everybody
knows Hitchcock was the
director.”

Granny dropped a cast near some green
floating gunk.

“‘
Bout all Kippers does is
sit home watching movies on the cable. Makes me want to take the
twelve-gauge and blast a hole in that damn satellite dish.” She
turned and peered at me from under the canvas hat. “I was hoping
maybe you could get the lad more interested in the
outdoors.”

“
I could use him to pull
weeds in my backyard,” I offered, generously.

Granny reeled in a stringy mess of seaweed
and cleaned off her line. “That’s not what I had in mind. Maybe you
could toss the football with him. I told Kippers you used to play
for the Dolphins.”

“
I looked you up in my card
book,” the kid said.

I grunted an acknowledgment. Little boys are
always impressed by athletes, even second-stringers.

“
Your rookie card is only
worth twenty-five cents.’’

“
You don’t
say.’’

“
That’s the minimum,” he
reminded me.

“
Sounds like a good
investment,” Charlie chimed in, though nobody asked him to. Then
Charlie launched into a soliloquy on the depressed international
art market, mainly due to economic woes in Japan, when the kid
interrupted him: “Most football movies are yucky.”

“
Yucky?” I asked
him.

“
The Longest Yard
was okay. I mean, Burt Reynolds was pretty good.
He played at Florida State, you know ...”

I knew.

“
Then he did
Semi-Tough
where he
played a running back. Boy, what a stinker. In
Everybody’s All-American,
I thought
Dennis Quaid’s legs were too skinny to be a real football player.”
So did I.

“
Now,
North Dallas Forty
was pretty decent,
though a little dark,” Kip said. He gave the appearance of
furrowing his brow in serious contemplation, but with his long
blond bangs, it was hard to tell. “I give it three stars.” The kid
studied me a moment, shading his eyes from the sun. “You know, you
look a little like Nick Nolte.”

“
Thanks.”

“
But he’s more
handsome.”

My head was throbbing again. “Hey, Granny,”
I called out. “Did you pack a real lunch, or do we have to start
eating the passengers?”

“
Just like
Soylent Green
,” Kip said,
showing off some more.

“
Granny, how do you turn
off Siskel and Ebert here?”

“
Edward G. Robinson’s last
movie,” the kid concluded, finally cracking a smile.

***

We were back at Granny’s place on the Gulf
of Mexico side of Islamorada. I had lived there, too, in the old
Cracker house of cedar planks and tin roof, eaves spouts that
collected rainwater in barrels and a sturdy wooden porch with a
swing, awning, and rocking chair. Charlie was snoozing in the
rocker, the kid was watching TV in the Florida room, and I was
keeping Granny company in the kitchen. She was squeezing lime juice
over a mess of mullet we had caught when the bonefish proved too
elusive.

“
So what’s bothering you,
Jake? You’ve had a burr under your saddle ever since you got down
here.”

“
Nothin’.”

“
Uh-huh.”

Outside, plump gray clouds were building
over the Gulf. The temperature was dropping, and the air smelled of
rain.

“
Granny, do you think I’m a
silver-tongued shyster?”

“
You’re not
silver-tongued,” she answered, proving that sarcasm runs in the
family. Granny dipped the mullet fillets in flour and poured some
oil into a frying pan. She was from the old school, and broiled
fish just didn’t have enough taste for her. “You got that
burned-out feeling again?” she asked.

“
Not exactly.” I picked up
a Key lime and sucked on it, bringing tears to my eyes. “You
remember Blinky Baroso?”

“
Fat fellow who sells stuff
he don’t own.”

“
That’s him.”

“
Now, he’s
silver-tongued.”

“
Yeah, well anyway, I just
walked him in a fraud case, and now, it’s one of those times of
self-examination.”

The wind had picked up, and fronds from a
coconut palm were slapping against the side of the house. Heavy
raindrops began pinging off the roof. I used to fall asleep to that
noise, just down the hall and to the right.

“
You didn’t cheat, did
you?” Granny asked.

I shook my head. “I just did my job.”

“
Then, what’s the problem?
You’re a lawyer, a hired gun. You can’t be judge and jury,
too.”

“
I know. I keep telling
myself that, but it sounds like a rationalization for what I’m
doing, which, let’s face it, has no social utility.”

She dropped a chubby white fillet into the
sizzling oil. “Social utility? Are you the same Jacob Lassiter who
used to cut school to go frogging in the ‘Glades? Are you the same
boy who’d rather hit a blocking sled than study for finals?”

“
C’mon, Granny, I’ve grown
up.”

She regarded me skeptically. “Is there a
woman behind this?”

“
Whadaya mean?” Even the
dimmest witness knows how to avoid a question by asking one of his
own.

“
Men generally don’t do any
self-examining unless they get criticized by someone else first. As
far as I know, the only people whose opinions matter to you are
Charlie and me, and we both love you no matter what you do. So I
figure there’s gotta be a woman.”

“
Now you’re playing
psychologist.” Another delaying tactic, shifting the focus to the
questioner.

“
Okay, if you don’t want to
talk about it . . .” She let it hang and returned to her cooking.
When the fillets were golden brown, she removed them from the pan,
strained the oil, added some flour, lime juice, tomato sauce,
garlic, pepper, thyme, and a pinch of pepper and salt for the
sauce. Outside the window, lightning flashed across the Gulf, and
the rain slanted in silver sheets along the beach. “Well, at least,
I hope that sleazebag paid you a bundle.”

“
You know my rule, Granny.
Get paid up front.”

“
Did you?”

I ignored the question and
kept going. “Because if you don’t and you lose, you never see the
money. The client says, ‘What good did you do? I could have been
convicted
without
a lawyer.’

And if you win, he says, ‘What’d I need you
for? I was innocent.

“
So did you get paid up
front?”

“
Not exactly,” I
admitted.

“
Afterward?”

“
Sort of.”

“
I hope you didn’t take a
check from that bum. He writes checks on banks that closed in
twenty-nine.”

“
Not a check,
either.”

“
Cash? Did you check to see
if all the serial numbers were the same?”

“
Not cash,
either.”

“
What then?”

“
Stock.”

“
Huh?”

“
Blinky gave me a hundred
shares in Rocky Mountain Treasures, Inc. It’s incorporated in
Colorado, licensed to do business in Florida.”

Granny was looking at me as if she’d raised
a fool. “What makes me think this so-called corporation is not one
of the Fortune 500?” she asked.

“
Probably because Blinky is
the incorporator, the president, and the sole director.”

“
And he gave you the stock
instead of a fee.”

“
He’s tapped out. Look,
Granny, I know what you’re thinking, but there’s one person in the
world Blinky wouldn’t stiff, and that’s me. Now, it may turn out
that company doesn’t make any money and the stock could be
worthless. I know that. But, for once, it’s a legitimate
enterprise.”

“
What’s this Rocky Mountain
corporation do?”

“
Sort of geological
research,” I mumbled.

“
What’s that,
mining?”

“
Not exactly.”

“
C’mon, Jake.”

“
They look for
things.”

“
What sort of
things?”

“
Buried treasure,” I said,
staring out the window at the rippling Gulf, slate gray in the
storm.

“
Oh Lordy, Jake. Get me a
mason jar. I need a drink.”

“
Look, lots of lawyers take
stock in lieu of fees: Imagine if I’d represented Microsoft ten
years ago.”

“
Microsoft didn’t try to
sell chunks of a condemned condo as pieces of the Berlin Wall, did
it?”

I had forgotten about that scheme. Just
then, somebody behind me said, “Gregory Peck would have taken
vegetables, instead of worthless pieces of paper.”

I turned around. Kip was barefoot and wore
torn jeans and a faded T-shirt.

“
Vegetables?” I asked
him.

“
In
To Kill a Mockingbird
, he takes
collard greens as his attorney’s fee when a client can’t pay. At
least you can eat them.”

“
Thanks for the advice,
kid. Why don’t you see if Judgment at Nuremberg is on? It’ll keep
you busy for three and a half hours.”

The kid pouted and backed out of the
kitchen. In a moment, I heard him clicking through the channels in
the other room. Now Granny was scowling at me. “Jake, I want you to
be nice to Kippers.”

“
Okay, okay.”

“
And I want you to
represent him.”

“
He needs a lawyer? What
happened, did they fail to deliver his TV Guide?”

“
It’s a little problem in
Juvenile Court. I’d rather let Kippers tell you about
it.”

“
Let him hire Gregory Peck.
He works cheap.”

“
Jake!”

I stuck an index finger into the sizzling
lime-tomato concoction and burned myself. “Holy blazes,” I said,
repeating a phrase I’d learned from Granny in my youth. I sucked on
my finger and turned the heat down on the burner. After a moment, I
said, “Okay, I’ll get the little brat off, even if he poisoned the
nasal spray of the entire PTA.”

Granny gave me a smile. She still had all
her own teeth, despite fifty years of opening beer bottles without
an opener. Then she took a wooden spoon that was older than me and
started stirring the sauce. “Good. You’ve got to promise me you’ll
treat him like family.”

“
Like family?
Why?”

“
Because he’s your nephew,”
Granny Lassiter said, never looking up from the simmering
sauce.

Chapter 5

One of Us Was
Dead

I thought I heard a faint knock in the
engine of my canary yellow Olds 442. Like its owner, the
convertible is beginning to show its age, which is only natural,
since it is vintage 1968. The Olds doesn’t have a tape deck, a CD
player, a cellular phone, or a fax machine. It does have a radio,
but no FM band. Three hundred fifty cubic inches under the hood, a
four-barrel carburetor, a black canvas top, and a five-speed stick,
it is—again, like its owner—a throwback.

On this warm, humid Monday
morning, my ancient but amiable chariot, its top down, was growling
north on Useless 1, the old highway that runs from Maine to Key
West. The radio was tuned to a sports talk show at the low end of
the dial, but every time a cloud passed over, the speaker crackled
with static, and Fidel Castro or one of his cousins came on the air
yelling about the
imperialistas
. It made me miss the
latest report on which Dolphin free agents signed multiyear,
mega-bucks contracts, and which University of Miami players had
failed their drug tests.