Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (9 page)

I drained my beer while Kip sipped at his,
making a face.

Then I had another, sitting on a stool at
the kitchen counter, feeling my pulse rate subside. I needed to
think, to consider what I knew and what I didn’t. There were a
hundred questions, but they all boiled down to two.

What was Kyle Hornback doing in my house,
and who killed him?

To answer those two, I
needed to consider what Charlie Riggs called the threshold question
in any unsolved crime.
Cui
bono
? Who stands to gain? If I couldn’t
figure that one out, Abe Socolow would be the first to tell me.
First, though, he’d probably ask me something I’d been wondering
ever since I cut down the body.

Where the hell was Blinky Baroso?

***

Two detectives showed up first, an Anglo
major near retirement age and a young Hispanic who didn’t give his
rank. The older cop had tired eyes and wore a lightweight brown
suit with shiny black shoes. The younger one wore a short-sleeved
white shirt and a blood-red tie. He had the sloping shoulders and
bulging arms of a weight lifter. I had known the major from my days
as an assistant public defender, but we’d never had a case
together. The young one was a stranger to me.

Abe Socolow walked in five minutes later.
After they convinced themselves that there was indeed a death not
from natural causes, they called the assistant medical examiner
lucky enough to be on weekend duty. Socolow spent the next ten
minutes chewing me out for contaminating the scene, as he put it.
Then the younger detective flexed his triceps and called the
station, asking for what used to be called the crime scene boys,
who turned out to be an African-American woman and an
Asian-American woman. They arrived, toting their cameras, tape
measures, fingerprint kits, and assorted technological doodads.

Kip followed them around
for a while, eyes wide, mouth closed, except when he asked the
difference between the Glock nine-millimeters city cops carried and
the Beretta used by Mel Gibson in the
Lethal Weapon
movies.

I was sitting on the battered sofa with the
two detectives in mismatched chairs at slight angles to me. Abe
Socolow paced in front of me. He wore his trademark black suit,
white shirt, and black tie, but it being a Sunday night, the tie
was loosened at the neck.

The major asked all the right questions, and
I had none of the answers. No, I didn’t expect Kyle Hornback here.
That’s right, I leave the front door unlocked, preferring burglars
to walk in, rather than busting up the place. Besides, unless you
know to batter the door, it’s stuck shut by the humidity.

Where was I earlier in the evening? On South
Beach. That’s right, I left the youngster here alone.

The crime scene investigators had shooed Kip
away while they photographed the body, and now the lad joined me,
moving close on the sofa, where I put my arm around him. Even under
the paddle fans, it was about eighty degrees in the house, so the
goose bumps on Kip’s arms couldn’t have been from the temperature.
Maybe it was starting to sink in. Maybe it was becoming real.

The major asked Kip what he saw, and he ran
through the story. Footsteps, his door opening and closing, someone
in my bedroom . . .

“
That’s when they must have
taken my tie,” I chimed in.

“
Shut up, Jake,” Socolow
said, still pacing.

Voices downstairs, Kip continued, furniture
moving, the front door closing again. He sneaked down the landing,
saw the body spinning, tossing shadows across the moonlit room, ran
back upstairs and climbed out his window. Same story he told me
with no embellishments.

“
Good try, Abe,” I said,
“but I don’t think the kid killed him, even though he doesn’t have
an alibi.”

“
What about you, Jake?
What’s your alibi?”

“
What’s that supposed to
mean?”

“
Hey, Jakie, let’s get
something straight here. This is a murder investigation, so I
ask—”

“
The questions,” Kip
interrupted. “Or if you want, we can finish this
downtown.”

I hushed the kid with what passes for a
stern look. “Go ahead, Abe. Fire away.”

“
Where’s your client?” Abe
Socolow asked.

“
Which one? I’ve got two or
three, you know.”

“
Jake, don’t jerk me
around. Where’s Louie Baroso?”

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

“
When’s the last time you
saw him?”

“
Three days
ago.”

I could have added, “in my
office,” but the question was
when
, not
where
, and I preach to my clients
just to answer the question, no more, no less.

“
Where?” Socolow
asked.

“
In my office.”

“
What was he doing
there?”

“
The usual, dropping ashes
on the carpet, flirting with my

secretary.”

Socolow gave me a pained look. “Did he
mention Kyle Hornback?”

“
Yeah, he asked if he could
use my house to kill Kyle, maybe add him to the living room
furnishings along with the beanbag chair and lava lamp.”

The muscular young detective looked up. “He
said that?”

The major rubbed his forehead as if he had a
migraine, and Abe stopped pacing and squarely faced me. “Jake,
don’t fuck with me, okay?”

“
Yeah,” Kip said in his
tough-guy voice, or at least as tough as his eleven-year-old tenor
could make it. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way, it’s
up to you, pal.”

“
What is it with you two?”
Socolow demanded, scowling.

Just then, Kip leaned over
and whispered something to me. I patted him on his goose-bumped
arm, held his hand, and whispered something back. Abe Socolow’s
dark eyes shot me a question, so I answered. “He said you remind
him of Frank Sinatra in
The First Deadly
Sin
.”

“
Yeah?”

“
And I told him Sinatra
wore a better toupee.”

“
I don’t wear a
toupee.”

“
Really? No one can
tell.”

The major cleared his throat and said, “Mr.
Lassiter, were you expecting any visitors here tonight?”

“
No,” I said,
softly.

“
Why did you leave the
house?”

“
Like I said before, I had
to meet someone.” When possible, I like telling cops the
truth.

“
Someone?”

“
Call it a date if you
like.” Okay, okay, so it wasn’t the whole truth and nothing but the
truth.

“
What was the lady’s
name?”

“
I didn’t say she was a
lady.” True enough. I also didn’t say she was a she.

Socolow couldn’t stand it. “Jake, what’s her
name, for chrissakes. We gotta establish your whereabouts, you know
that.”

“
That could be
embarrassing,” I said. Still true. I should get a Boy Scout badge
for this.

“
Why? She
married?”

I gave my best bashful grin. “You said it,
Abe, not me.”

I felt Kip’s hand squeeze mine, but he
didn’t flinch, didn’t say a word. What a trooper the kid was, and
what a role model his old uncle Jake. In just a few hours, the kid
learned how to drive recklessly, witnessed a grisly murder scene,
drank his first beer, and watched his blood kin mislead the cops.
And poor Granny was worried about a little spray-paint graffiti. If
the kid hung out with me much longer, he’d be knocking off Wells
Fargo trucks before he hit puberty.

Abe Socolow was prowling again. “When Baroso
was in your office on Thursday ...”

Socolow let it hang there, but if he thought
I’d start a narrative like some motor-mouth witness, he had a long
wait. After a moment, he continued, “...what did you talk
about?”

“
C’mon, Abe. That’s
privileged, and you know it.”

“
Not if Baroso disclosed a
plan to kill Kyle Hornback, it isn’t.

“
Hey, Abe. We’ve known each
other a long time. If that had happened, don’t you know I would
have stopped him one way or another?”

“
Yeah, I like to think
so.”

“
Besides, Blinky Baroso
isn’t a killer. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t have the physical
ability to . . .” I gestured to a corner of the room, where the
crime lab cops were taking the body temperature of the corpse.
“Hornback must go about one eighty, one eighty-five,” I continued.
“Blinky couldn’t benchpress a breadstick, much less strangle the
guy and hoist him to the ceiling. You’re looking for someone bigger
and stronger, someone who’s good with his hands.”

“
You’re right,” Socolow
said, softly, “someone like you.”

***

I made coffee for my guests while they
waited for the assistant medical examiner, who either was lost or
had other customers.

Take a number, there were three other
homicide scenes ahead of ours, according to the younger
detective.

While we waited, the female crime scene cops
were smoking cigarettes, talking to each other about overtime and
the supervisor who calls them babes. The detectives were scribbling
in their little notebooks and whispering. Abe Socolow’s face was
set into its usual frown with an occasional glare thrown in for
variety. “I suppose you know Hornback wanted to cut a deal before
sentencing,” he said.

“
I figured.”

“
He was supposed to come in
tomorrow with his lawyer. He had something to trade about your
client, something that could make a bigger case, maybe involve the
feds.”

“
Uh-huh.”

“
What do you know about it,
Jake?”

“
Nothing,” I answered,
which for once was entirely accurate. “I heard Hornback and Baroso
exchange words in the courtroom at the end of the trial, and that’s
all I know. Blinky has another deal going out west, but I don’t
know the details, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. Besides, he
assured me it’s legitimate.”

“
And you believed
him?”

“
I’ve been trying to get
him into something straight for years.”

“
I know that, Jake. You see
the glimmer of good that’s in all these jerkoffs. It’s your flaw,
your weakness. Can’t you get it through your head that you can’t
make a citizen out of a wise guy? You can’t change a lifetime of
habits. Jeez, you’d think your days as a public defender would have
taught you some

cynicism.’’

“
They did. They made me
cynical about cops, judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and
defendants. They made me distrust the system and everyone in it.
But I’m a cynic with hope.”

“
Me, too,” he said, after a
moment. “My hope is bigger prisons, longer sentences, fewer
paroles.”

I was willing to spar a
couple more rounds with Abe, but my attention was distracted.
Someone was pounding at the front door. It groaned, shuddered, and
opened with a
thud
. The cops looked up excitedly, as if their suspect would
walk into the room and surrender.

“
Deus
miseratur
!” Charlie Riggs proclaimed. “Now
where’s the
corpus
delicti
?”

Chapter 7

The Bates Motel

The State of Florida versus Sylvester
Houston Conklin,” the bailiff announced. “Adjudicatory
hearing.”

“
C’mon,” Kip said, nudging
me. “That’s us.”

I gave him a look.

“
My mom loves Sly
Stallone,” he explained. “I was born in Houston, and best she
knows, my dad’s name was Conklin.”

The bailiff called out the case again,
louder this time, and we hustled from the small gallery toward the
bench. Earlier that morning, I had told Kip, or Sylvester Houston,
to put on his Sunday best, which he interpreted to mean his Reebok
high tops without socks, jeans with holes in the knees, and a
T-shirt that celebrated “The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh.” I wore a
seersucker suit in a half-successful effort to look like a Southern
gentleman.

We were in the courtroom of the Honorable T.
Bone Coleridge, longtime Dade County Juvenile Court judge and Bull
Gator in the University of Florida Alumni Society. He was, as far
as I knew, the only judge in the state to wear orange and blue
robes. His chambers were festooned with autographed footballs,
photos of His Honor with various coaches and athletes, and
memorabilia ranging from shoulder pads and helmets to the jockstrap
Steve Spurrier wore the day he clinched the Heisman Trophy.

The Juvenile Courthouse, a concrete block
affair with open walkways surrounding a cheerless concrete
courtyard, sits on northwest Twenty-seventh Avenue in what police
maps used to call the Central Negro District. It is a neighborhood
of pawnshops and used car lots, lumberyards, and hubcap bazaars.
About a block away is a gun shop with a pass-through window, like a
hoagie stand in South Philadelphia. I had parked in a public lot
surrounded by a razor-wire-topped fence. I took Kip by the hand,
which felt small and moist, and led him through the maze of
administrative buildings into the courthouse.

“
Afternoon, numbah
fifty-eight,” the judge greeted me, in homage to my short but
unspectacular career on the football field. “Don’t see you much in
kiddie court.”