Fool Me Twice jl-6

by Paul Levine

  “ Simmy?”

  “ It doesn’t fit at all. I mean, he’s as big as the side of a barn, but I thought I detected a gentle side to him. I was wrong. He’s an egotistical manipulator and a master operator. He makes my brother look like the pope. In fact, Simmy is what Luis always wanted to be.”

  “ What about Rocky Mountain Treasures?”

  “ It’s Simmy’s deal. He brought my brother in on it.”

  “ Blinky told me it was legitimate.”

  Jo Jo laughed. “Only in the sense that neither one is likely to go to jail. It’s a great, legal scam. You’ve seen the prospectus. It’s got all the exculpatory language: ‘Be advised this investment is highly risky, and you may lose part or all of your capital investment.’

  “ That ought to keep people out.”

  I felt her hair swishing across my chest as if she was shaking her head. “You’d be shocked how many people read those clauses and still put money into oil wells filled with sand and mountaintop property with no access roads. People are greedy and gullible. When I prosecuted consumer frauds, I was constantly amazed how easy it was to separate people from their money with a great sales pitch.”

  “ Which is where your brother fits into the deal.”

  “ Exactly. And something I learned from Luis, the more outlandish the promises, the easier the sale.”

  “ I don’t get it.”

  “ Either do I, but it’s true. Buried treasure is easier to sell than bushels of apples.”

  “ Wait a second,” I said. “Back up. Does Cimarron own these mines or not?”

  “ Sure, he’s got mineral rights to thousands of acres. He bought up hundreds of leases over the past fifteen years or so. He tried mining for gold and copper and silver, and he lost his shirt. Not that he couldn’t find the minerals. He could, but the price of excavation and smelting or refining exceeds market price. At the same time, Simmy was always a nut about the old West. He collects the stories-legends really-about the lost gold mines and buried treasures. He can sit around a campfire and tell twenty different stories. There’s the Lost Padre in California, the Lost Dutchman in Arizona, the Lost Pitchblende in Colorado. Everything’s lost, but none of it’s ever found.”

  “ Never?”

  “ Well, not exactly never. When Simmy was barely out of his teens, he stumbled onto a cache of double eagles. That’s what got him started.”

  “ Whoa. Double eagles?”

  “ Twenty-dollar gold pieces, San Francisco mint, about three thousand of them, worth about one-point-five million today. And he wasn’t even looking for them. He was camping out on Devil’s Head Mountain in Colorado. He didn’t know it then, but there was a legend about a gang that robbed a government train near there in the 1870s. They were chased by a posse and buried the loot at the foot of a towering spruce tree. They marked the tree by sticking a long knife into it, then took off on horseback. Winter came, and the next spring the gang tried to find the tree, but couldn’t. After all, the forest probably had fifty thousand spruce trees that looked just alike. They kept looking through the summer. Then a thunderstorm started a forest fire and burned most of the trees to the ground.”

  “ So what happened to the gold?”

  “ A hundred years or so went by, and Simmy was riding the backcountry by himself, hunting and camping out. The way he tells the story, he was pounding some stakes into the ground to pitch a tent when he hit a rotting old saddlebag that had been brought to the surface by erosion. The wonderful thing is that gold doesn’t rot. The eagles polished up just fine, and Simmy had his first nest egg.”

  “ No wonder he believes in secret treasures.”

  “ The worst thing that ever happened to him. He got a taste of treasure, and he became obsessed. He was always dabbling in mining, but for the next twenty years, it was buried gold, not mined gold, that consumed him.”

  “ And you don’t believe treasure exists.”

  “ Look, I’ve done some reading. Simmy’s personal library has just about everything ever written about buried treasure in the West. Four hundred years ago, Coronado set out with five hundred conquistadors and a thousand Indians from Mexico looking for the Seven Cities of Cibola. What they found were Zuni Indians growing corn in a dusty village in what is now New Mexico. Then an Indian guide tells Coronado of the fabulous city of Quivera where the streets were paved with gold, and a marble palace was hung with golden bells, and the royal canoes had oarlocks of solid gold.”

  “ Gold seems to be the operative word.”

  “ Right. It drives men mad. All Coronado had to do was take his men north, the Indian tells him. Of course, the Indian just wanted to get Coronado the hell out of New Mexico where he was taking slaves and doing the traditional macho conquistador stuff. So Coronado falls for it and sets out with his army in plumes and shining armor with a thousand mules to carry back the loot.”

  “ That’s optimism.”

  “ Verdad, or stupidity. Anyway, they get all the way to Kansas, and all they see are hot, dusty plains. But Coronado believed till the day he died that there were cities of gold out there somewhere.”

  “ And Cimarron does, too. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “ Who knows? He studies mining claims and trappers’ maps as if they’re holy works. He’s bought diaries from the families of frontiersmen and borrowed family Bibles with crude drawings of mines and graveyards. He’s scoured the files of newspapers from western towns that don’t even exist anymore. He’s spent months in museums, and he’s filled a hundred notebooks with his plans. He’s not willing to admit he’s chasing legends. He figures if one in twenty is legitimate, it’s still worth the search.”

  “ So he believes in Rocky Mountain Treasures. To Cimarron, it’s not a scam.”

  “ Either way, it’s a good deal for Simmy. He’s got all these leases, and other than the ranch, that’s about all he’s got left. It doesn’t make any sense to dig for gold that costs more to extract than to sell. But they can form a company with suckers’ money, take fees as consultants and managers, and sell Simmy’s maps to the company at a price they set. If they find the Caverna de Oro of Marble Mountain, then everybody’s happy. If not, Blinky and Simmy still make money. Unlike Coronado, it’s a no-lose situation.”

  ***

  I was dreaming of conquistadors in heavy armor and helmet plumes when I awoke suddenly without knowing why. Next to me, Jo Jo was breathing deeply, a slight whistling sound accompanying each exhalation of warm breath. Outside, crickets made their night music, and overhead, a lone jet made its way toward the airport. I looked at the digital clock and watched 3:13 magically become 3:14.

  Before we turned in, I had called Cindy, my loyal secretary, and asked if she would extend her baby-sitting through the night. She whined and said she was meeting Dottie the Disco Queen at a South Beach bar, and I told her to take Kip along but make sure he got home by one a.m., because I promised he could watch Burt Lancaster in The Killers on the all-night classics channel. How’s that for parental guidance?

  Now I was awake, and Burt Lancaster had long since been plugged by William Conrad, and I hoped Kip was sleeping soundly and Cindy was sleeping alone.

  I lay there a moment, wondering why I had awakened. No indigestion, despite putting away three plates of Jo Jo’s picadillo. Cooking was not a skill passed down from her mother. Jo Jo dried out the ground beef, and the raisins were as moist as BBs. The flan was fine. It came from a local bakery.

  And then I remembered why I woke up. The groan of the pine floor planks did all the remembering for me.

  Someone was in the house, someone besides the sleeping woman and me.

  In the depths of sleep, I had heard a noise, and there it was again. Or was it? Old houses are full of sounds. Pipes clang, walls moan, floors…

  Creak.

  Again, the sound. It seemed louder, or was it my imagination?

  I swung out of bed, my bare feet touching the cool floor. The rest of me was bare, too, and it did not inspire
the fighting parts-arms and legs, hands and feet-to know that another part of me was exposed to the air, useless and vulnerable. I tried to take a step without making a sound, but it didn’t work. The floor gave under my feet, too, with what sounded to me like a wail, but was probably no louder than a yawn.

  I stopped and listened again.

  Silence.

  Except for me. My breathing chugged like a locomotive. My heart was running a marathon.

  I tiptoed toward the closed bedroom door. No light shone from beneath it. The night had cleared, and moonlight streamed in from outside the window, casting my shadow across the floor and up the door. I took another step toward the door, heard a sound from the other side…

  I spun backward.

  Not of my own accord. The door had opened with a rush, catching me across the shoulder, surprising me, bouncing me, hop-skip-lurch toward the window. My knee sideswiped the dresser, and when I was off-balance, teetering like a drunk, an anvil caught me on the side of the head, just above the right ear. Okay, so it wasn’t an anvil, but a fist that felt like iron, and it dropped me to the floor.

  I yelled something unintelligible, and Jo Jo woke up screaming, and then I tried to get to my feet, but a knee came up and just missed my dimpled chin and caught me on the shoulder. It did no damage, but set me down again.

  I came off the floor, adrenaline flowing. Before I could get off a punch, he threw a looping left hook. I blocked it with my right forearm, and he came at me with a right. Now I was in the defensive position of the double forearm block, sort of like Floyd Patterson’s peek-a-boo defense. His punches kept coming, landing like concrete blocks on my triceps and forearms, and so far, I hadn’t even swung.

  I backed up a step and tossed a jab. So did he, and his reach exceeded mine. He peppered my face with two more stinging straight lefts. I wanted to get a clear shot at him, but unlike almost any brawl I’d ever been in, he was bigger and stronger, and for all I knew, could beat me in the forty-yard dash.

  I feinted with the left, came across the top with a right and hit him on the side of the nose. I heard cartilage splinter, and I was showered with blood. His eyes would be closed and watering now, so I came in close, tucked my head into his chest, and shot upward, butting him under the chin. I heard a snap and hoped I broke his jaw. He grunted and gagged.

  I took a step back and went for his chin again, this time with a long left hook. I had a lot of hip behind it, but I was too slow. Story of my life.

  He stepped to his left and hit me squarely in the solar plexus with a short right I never saw. I doubled over and fell to the floor, gasping for breath that wouldn’t come. I dipped a shoulder and rolled into him just as he lifted a foot to kick me. The foot was encased in pointed burgundy cowboy boots that shimmered in the moonlight. The toe skimmed the top of my skull, and the heel slammed me in the forehead. Still, the weight of my body pinned his other foot to the floor. I kept rolling, trying to hyperextend his knee and tear his anterior cruciate ligaments into strands of spaghetti. It would have worked, too, if he hadn’t had the legs of an ox.

  I weigh two hundred twenty-two pounds, and I didn’t budge him. This left me at his feet. He locked his hands and brought them down hard on the back of my neck, and I saw the Milky Way and Orion, with Betelgeuse particularly bright. I reached into the dazzling light to fight my way into the next galaxy, but just floated for a while. I tried to grab him behind one knee and buckle his leg, but I couldn’t have squeezed the breath out of a kitten.

  I heard Jo Jo screaming.?Que demonios haces aqui? Vete ahora mismo! ” She came off the bed at him, but he lifted her effortlessly and tossed her across the room.

  I was on my knees, now, vaguely aware of a voice above me and warm blood dripping onto me. “Where is he?”

  I was dazed and didn’t get it. “Who he?”

  He grabbed me by the hair and pulled my head back. “Where’s Baroso? Where’s the little son of a bitch?”

  “ I don’t know. Hurt, dead, I don’t know.”

  He yanked harder on my hair. “The two of you screwed me good, didn’t you, lawyer?”

  “ I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He dropped my head and called out, “Josefina, where’s that low-life brother of yours?”

  She was huddled on the bed, crying. “I don’t know. Leave us alone.” She gathered herself up and threw a pillow at him. It did about as much good as my left jabs. I was on all fours now, trying to get up, expecting another blow, but it didn’t come. From above me, a booming voice: “Stay out of my affairs, lawyer! Stay out of my affairs, or you’re a dead man. Do you understand?”

  I must not have, because he lifted up a foot and stomped my right hand. I heard the knuckles fracture-the sound of a cue ball on a break-long before I felt the pain.

  Chapter 12

  A BUMPY NIGHT

  Kip watched in silent fascination as Doc Charlie Riggs mixed water with plaster for the cast.

  “ Does it hurt much?” Kip asked, gently touching my swollen hand.

  “ Only when I play ‘Dueling Banjos.’

  “ Out of the way, Kip,” Charlie advised, approaching with a strip of gauze soaked in dripping plaster, some of which had become affixed to his bushy beard. I was sprawled on the sofa in the pit-not a conversation pit, just a pit-of my living room, my arm slung onto the sailboard coffee table.

  “ You ever do this before?” I asked the doc, who was leaning over me, squinting through his lopsided eyeglasses.

  He harrumphed. “You’ll be my first patient who lived.”

  “ Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

  Kip leaned close as Charlie began wrapping my hand. “What’s AMAL YNOT?” the kid asked.

  I peered at the back of my hand through a nearly closed eye. The hand disappeared under the wet gauze. “The lasting impression of a Tony Lama boot, size sixteen, quadruple E.”

  “ Bummer,” Kip said. “The dude went ballistic, huh?” He ran a finger over bruises the color of ripe eggplants on my bare arms.

  “ Third and fourth metacarpals fractured, ligaments stretched, but not torn,” Charlie Riggs announced. “Tylenol with codeine for the pain.” He studied me a moment. “How do you feel?”

  “ Like I was blindsided by a Mack truck. Next time I run into that cowboy, I’m going to tear his heart out.”

  Charlie gave my hand a gentle squeeze and a jolt of electricity shot up my arm. “Not for a long time, my friend.”

  Charlie poked around for a while, shining a light in my eyes to check pupil dilation, taking my blood pressure, pinching and poking this part and that. When he was done, Kip nudged me and whispered, “You didn’t thank the doc.”

  He was right. I was beginning to take my friend for granted, another of my failings, right up there with my inability to ward off bedroom attackers. My self-esteem was taking a beating, along with my body. “Thanks, Charlie. You’re always there for me, and sometimes I don’t show my appreciation.”

  He dismissed the idea with a wave of a pudgy hand. “ Tacent satis laudant. Silence is praise enough.”

  ***

  Codeine took the pain away with a drowsy, cloudy half sleep. I awoke with a throbbing hand and a head filled with bowling balls that rolled whichever way I tilted. It was dark outside, and the mockingbird in the chinaberry tree was whistling for a mate.

  Which made me think of Jo Jo Baroso. What did it mean, the friction of body parts and remembrance of old times, so rudely interrupted? I took two pills and started to drift off again, vaguely aware that Kip kept opening my bedroom door, looking in at me, during breaks between TV movies.

  “ Want to split a beer, Uncle Jake?” he asked during one of my periods of semi-consciousness. The aroma of home-delivery pizza entered the room with him. I thought he was doing well in the self-sufficiency department. Kids left on their own somehow manage. I ought to know.

  I shook my head, and the effort made my head pound with a pain that kept time with my heartbeat. Kip came o
ver and put a hand on my forehead, and for some reason I couldn’t explain, tears came to my eyes and then sleep overtook me.

  ***

  “ You look like death warmed over.” She opened the blinds with an irritating clackety-clack, and bright sun slanted through the window and across the bed. “Lord-y, you look even worse in the daylight.”

  I pried my eyes open and squinted into the glare, finding a silhouette of Granny Lassiter leaning over me. “Good morning to you, too, Florence Nightingale.”

  Granny clucked her disapproval and began straightening up the room, picking up perfectly clean T-shirts that happened to be crumpled into piles on the floor. She rearranged my stylish collection of Dolphins commemorative Super Bowl ashtrays, ran a finger over a chest of drawers, leaving a trail in the dust. “Brought you some white lightning,” she said, hoisting a wicker picnic basket onto the bed. She pulled out a mason jar filled with a liquid that could power a Saturn rocket. “It’ll stop the pain dead in its tracks.”

  “ So will a coma,” I said.

  I took a sip and grimaced. Granny slipped downstairs into the kitchen, and at lunchtime reappeared with a bowl of steaming conch chowder and some grouper fillets cooked in coconut milk and lime juice. I ate, then dozed off again, just after she told me she was going to give Kip a haircut since I apparently hadn’t thought about it.

  It was late afternoon when two more visitors squeezed into my little bedroom. One had been there before. They both wore navy blue business suits, but the lady looked better in hers.

  “ Hello, Jo Jo,” I said. “Abe, what brings you here? Find another corpse in my house?”

  “ Nah, but if you looked any worse…”

  Just then, Kip stuck his court-ordered video camera through the open door. “I told John Law he couldn’t come in without a warrant, but Granny said it was okay. Did I do right, Uncle Jake?”