by Paul Levine
“ And you didn’t?”
“ What would it have solved? My client might have gone free, but would he have dealt with his inner demons? Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“ Sure, you want me to plead guilty.”
“ It would be your first step to recovery.”
“ Your first step is out of here before they indict me for a second murder. Or actually a third.”
“ Peace,” he said, smiling pleasantly and wisely leaving.
***
Outside my jailhouse windows, green Aspen leaves fluttered in the wind. White puffy balls from cottonwood trees tumbled along the gutter, gathering at storm drains into globs the size of pillows.
Two weeks went by, and the judge served up a dose of home cooking, ordering the first trial in Colorado. Kip spent three nights in the custody of state welfare workers until Granny arrived, wearing lace-up army boots, a Mexican poncho, and cussing out every government official in the county. She brought me a basket of Key limes, carambolas, and guanabanas, told me I looked penitentiary pale, and wondered aloud if I’d come down with rickets or scurvy. She rented a double-wide trailer downvalley and said she was staying for the duration, come hell, high water, or first snow.
More lawyers trooped in, and I sent them home. Wearing a backpack and looking like a Boy Scout, Kip took a bus to visit me. He brought a mango nut cake Granny had baked. It was made with walnuts, and I half expected to find a file inside.
“ I’d really like to see your cell,” Kip said. “Is it really funky, like Spencer Tracy’s in Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing?”
“ Kip, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about reading more, and watching fewer movies.”
He took a folded newspaper from the backpack. “I’ve been reading this.”
It was the local paper, and it must have been the Kit Carson Cimarron memorial edition, because the entire front page was devoted to his life and tales of his forebears. The story continued on page three, and altogether, I counted eleven photos, though my favorite was one of Cimarron astride a white horse. Cimarron wore weathered chaps and a red bandanna was slung around his neck, and he was smiling from beneath his bushy mustache. The horse looked like it was about to have a stroke.
The story detailed the long history of the Cimarron family in Pitkin and Eagle counties. Kit’s great-grandfather worked the Montezuma silver mine in Ashcroft and later the Spar and Galena on Aspen Mountain. He toiled at all the dirty jobs, driller and mucker, trammer and timberman, cageman and nipper. Saving his money, he filed his own claims, working them alone.
He found silver, but not long after he did, the crash of 1893 gutted his claims. Luckily for future generations of Cimarrons, he believed in land as well as holes in the ground. He had bought, free and clear, six thousand acres near Basalt. His son had tried ranching, farming, and apparently drinking, and the third generation-K.C.’s father-lost the spread to unpaid taxes. K.C. ended up with the more modest digs near Woody Creek.
I read aloud to Kip. “‘Mr. Cimarron died apparently without leaving a will. So far, no one has claimed to be the intestate beneficiary, and no living relatives are known to authorities. If none are found, Cimarron’s assets, including the ranch and mining claims, escheat to the state.’
“ So what?” Kip asked.
“ Cui bono? Who stands to gain? That’s what Charlie Riggs always asks when someone is killed. But the estate doesn’t give us any answers.”
I skimmed more of the story, then read aloud again. “‘Although prosecutors refuse to confirm it, well-placed sources indicate that Mr. Cimarron was killed attempting to protect Ms. Josefina Baroso from sexual assault. Ms. Baroso, an assistant state attorney in Miami, Florida, was Mr. Cimarron’s houseguest, and the pair were frequent companions at local social events several years ago. Ms. Baroso is expected to be the key prosecution witness. Her whereabouts are currently as big a secret as the location of the Lost Dutchman’s Mine.’
A little local wit there, I suppose.
Sexual assault. That would make me real popular with the local jury pool. In my experience, jurors don’t mind murderers all that much, but rapists and child molesters are dog meat.
“ If I were you, Uncle Jake, I’d go into that newspaper office and kick some butt. You remember Paul Newman in Absence of Malice?”
“ Hush. I’m still reading.”
There were some pictures of old smelters and railway cars filled with ore and a brief recitation of Cimarron’s collection of mining claims and maps of supposedly buried treasure. The head of the historical society had fond memories of the late Mister Cimarron, who would sit for hours in the library poring over old diaries, family Bibles, maps, and deeds. I learned more than I needed to know about the Treasure Mountain hoard, millions in gold buried near the top of Wolf Creek Pass. If a man could only find a grassy mound and stand on it at six o’clock on a September morning, he could dig for the gold buried under the shadow of his head.
Then there were the prospectors who used a cave near Dead Man’s Creek to wait out a blizzard in 1880. Inside the cold, dank cavern, they found five human skulls and hundreds of gold bars hidden in the rocks. After the storm, they took five bars back to their camp and returned with wagons, hoping to bring the rest out. But they never found the cave entrance again.
“ Hey, Kip, get a load of this. ‘K. C. Cimarron was a larger than life romantic figure, a man of vision, a combination of Indiana Jones and Errol Flynn.’ “
“ Errol Flynn was a Nazi, Uncle Jake.”
“ Good point.”
The newspaper story concluded by calling Cimarron a “throwback to Pioneer days, a big, hearty son of the West.”
Son of a bitch was more like it.
At the bottom of page three was a sidebar in a box. There was a photo of a mean-looking lug with a threatening scowl. He had two black eyes, a swollen lip, and a thoroughly disagreeable countenance. Wait! That was me. The photo was taken in the hospital at a time I was not prepared to receive guests. In fact, all I was prepared to receive was codeine.
The alleged killer of Saint Cimarron, according to the story, was one Jacob Lassiter, a Miami lawyer facing disbarment, a man accused of a second murder in Florida. Then they repeated the “sexual assault” on the angelic Ms. Baroso.
“ Hey, Kip, get a load of this. It says here I’m facing additional charges for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”
“ It ain’t true,” he said. “I was a delinquent before I met you.
“ With all this pretrial publicity, maybe I should ask for a change of venue.”
“ Yeah, like to Samoa.”
I needed help. Granny could only do so much. Charlie Riggs wrote me inspirational letters with moral support. Britt Montero called from the Miami Daily News, either to wish me well or to get an exclusive interview, I couldn’t tell which. We went out a couple of times years ago, but Britt always found triple homicides more interesting than my description of a bull rush past the offensive tackle.
At the moment I needed a lawyer more than friendly chitchat. So when Kip headed back for his bus, his eyes wet as I hugged him good-bye, I used the jail phone to make a collect call to an old friend and sometimes adversary.
***
H. T. Patterson was in Aspen the next day and had a bond request filed the day after that. The state attorney worked up a sweat arguing against any bond, but the judge set it at a cool million dollars. Granny and Doc Charlie Riggs pledged all their assets, as did I, but we were still short, and not even close at that. One more phone call and Gina Florio came up with the rest, only her name was Gina de la Torre now, married for the time being to Carlos de la Torre, sugar baron. When I knew her, she was a Dolphin Doll, shaking her booty for fifteen bucks a game, and we lived together for a while, but that’s another story. Thanks to Gina, we had enough collateral to spring me, and as long as I showed up at trial, they’d get their money back, minus ten percent which I promised to repay, even if it was out of my prison salar
y. I was ordered not to leave the county or attempt any contact with Ms. Baroso, or bond would be revoked.
The day I got out, I assembled my team. Granny, Kip, H. T. Patterson, and I met at the Woody Creek Tavern. Granny had bourbon, H.T. an iced tea, and Kip and I split a Coors, the world’s most overrated beer.
“ You sure you want me to try the case?” H.T. asked. He was wearing a blue denim suit with red piping and red leather cowboy boots so new he must have bought them at the Denver airport. He looked like a very short and very black John Wayne.
“ Why wouldn’t I? You’re a real lawyer. You got bond issued in the blink of an eye.”
“ I merely pointed out your clean record of never having been convicted of a felony, though you do seem to have a history of contempt citations and occasional misdemeanor assault. But the fact remains that I am not…shall we say, demographically correct for this case?”
“ Why?”
“ This ain’t exactly Malcolm X country. You’re not likely to get even one dark complexion on the jury, unless it’s pasted on at the tanning salon.”
“ I don’t care. I need you. I’m facing a lifetime of sleeping with a cork up my ass-”
“ But you’re innocent,” Granny interrupted. I didn’t correct her.
“ Guilt or innocence isn’t always black or white,” I said in my lecture tone I must have learned from Doc Riggs. “It’s more of a continuum. Somewhere in the middle is not-so-guilty bucking up against not-so-innocent. The state has to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Apparently, they can prove I fired a nail through Cimarron’s brain. Hell, I can’t even deny it, ‘cause I don’t remember. But it was justifiable if I was acting in self-defense. The problem is that Jo Jo Baroso is going to weave a web for the jury that makes me the attacker. That’s why I need you, H.T.”
“ You think I can break her?”
“ I don’t know, but you’re a great lawyer. Hell, when we oppose each other, you always convince me you’re right.”
“ Jake, I’ve never known you so accommodating and amiable, so considerate and cooperative as when you’re under indictment. In any event, I thank you for the gracious compliment.”
“ I mean it. You remind me of Bum Philips’s line about Don Shula. ‘He can beat your’n with his’n or his’n with your’n.’ H.T., I’d take you on either side of a case.”
“ Well then, let’s get to work,” Patterson said. “Start by telling me everything that happened that night. Take it slowly, try to remember every word spoken, every move made. Don’t leave out anything, no matter how seemingly insignificant. I’ll take notes, but you might want to write everything down yourself. It helps jog the memory.” He looked at Granny and Kip. “You two will have to take a walk.”
“ No,” I told him. “They stay.”
“ The privilege, Jake. We lose it if-”
“ I know, I know, and I don’t care. They stay.”
So I rehashed it, everything I could remember. Jo Jo Baroso’s pleas for me not to come to the barn, my trotting out there anyway like a good little puppy.
“ Women!” Granny huffed. “Following a woman will get you in Dutch every time.”
I told Patterson of Jo Jo’s puffy eyes and bruised face, and then Cimarron dropping in. “At first, we sparred, mostly. He slung me into the walls a few times to see whether my head was harder than his lumber. Then he dropped me into a pile of horseshit. Once he chased Kip out, it was just the two of us.”
“ And Ms. Baroso,” H.T. reminded me.
“ Yeah, and Ms. Baroso. At first she was in the loft, but she came down to join the fun.”
Patterson turned to my nephew. “And where did you go, young man?”
“ Out toward the main house, along a stone path. I was yelling for help, but there wasn’t anyone around. I came back when I heard the nail gun. It’s so loud, I thought it was a real gun.”
“ It is,” Patterson said. He thumbed through some documents the state gave him in pretrial discovery. “Powered by a. 27-caliber charge, it can drive a carbon-steel nail through solid concrete.”
“ Or a mushy brain,” I added.
Patterson gave me a raised eyebrow.
“ I wasn’t trying to kill him,” I said.
Now he arched both eyebrows.
“ Okay, I went there meaning to do him some serious harm, but after Jo Jo accused me of assaulting her, I realized she was lying about being beaten by Cimarron. That took the stuffing out of me. But by then, I didn’t have a choice. Cimarron wanted to maim me and was doing a pretty good job. At first, I just wanted to defend myself, so I went into a Wing Chun defense because Cimarron was bigger than me.”
“ Just like Bruce Lee did to Chuck Norris in Return of the Dragon ,” Kip added, helpfully.
“ What gets me,” I said, “is how Jo Jo played me for a fool. I thought her brother was a great con artist, but you should have seen her. She fooled me, and then she fooled Cimarron. She had me hating him, and then had him hating me, and when he hates…”
I let it drift off, realizing he isn’t hating anymore.
“ Why would she have done it?” Patterson asked. “What’s her motive?”
“ I’ve been lying awake nights on that one. Only thing I can figure out is that she wanted me dead.”
“ What makes you say that?”
“ Are you kidding, H.T.? She set me up so Cimarron would kill me.”
“ But that isn’t what happened, is it?”
“ No, I killed him. So?”
“ So what makes you think that is not precisely what Ms. Baroso intended?”
CHAPTER 21
ACCURATE LIES
Summer became fall, and the aspen trees turned their shimmering gold. Football season began, and locals at a basement sports bar saluted the Broncos’ early success, all the while bitching about how they would fold in the playoffs.
Trial was set for the first week of December. Patterson had completed his pretrial discovery and arranged his documents in color-coded files. Unlike Florida, Colorado law did not give us the right to take pretrial depositions, a severe handicap in trying to peck away at a criminal case. Although we didn’t have a chance to cross-examine their witnesses before the trial, we knew what they would say on direct examination. The state gave us their sworn statements and grand jury testimony, and so far, no one, including Josefina Jovita Baroso, had a kind word to say about me.
I was in a daze.
I tried to focus on the trial but felt like I was swimming through Jell-O.
My concentration was off. My nerves were shot. I consumed too much Grolsch, and when that left me without a buzz, I switched to Finlandia straight out of the freezer. Kippis, as they say in Helsinki, which made me think of Eva-Lisa Haavikko, a good woman who died needlessly, but that, too, is another story.
Occasionally, I came up with slightly inebriated ideas for my defense, and I shared them all with H.T. Patterson. Sometimes, just after Jay Leno didn’t put me to sleep, I called Patterson with strategy for impeaching Jo Jo’s testimony. With the two-hour time difference, it was two-thirty a.m. or so in Miami, and I would awaken H.T. from a sound sleep, but he never complained.
“ You interrupted a dream,” he mumbled groggily one early morning.
“ That some day all men will be brothers?” I inquired.
“ No, that Gwendolyn was taking me to her bosom.”
“ Gwendolyn, from Jamaica? Judge Ferguson’s secretary?”
“ One and the same, a woman of charm and grace, intelligence and beauty, righteousness and rectitude.”
“ So what’s she doing with you, Henry Thackery?”
“ She’s not, my felonious friend. It was, after all, a dream.”
Lawyers hate for clients to call them at home. There is always an emergency that, in the client’s mind, cannot wait until morning. By the harsh light of day, the crisis will be shown to have existed solely in the client’s mind. But H. T. Patterson tolerated my late-night calls because he was a friend. An
d he understood. No, check that. He nearly understood. Until you are asked to rise in the courtroom and identify yourself as the defendant, you cannot understand. Send in the cliches, which are cliches, after all, because they are true: A lawyer is a mouthpiece, a hired gun; have briefcase, will travel; have mouth, will argue; another day, another dollar.
But if you’re the defendant, it is different. It is real, and it is forever. Win, lose, or draw, the lawyer will walk out of the courthouse and enjoy supper with family and friends. The day may end for the defendant with the echo of a steel door clanking shut with absolute finality.
***
A chill bit through the air. It rained and became colder, and the trees lost their leaves. Snow began to fall. H. T. Patterson had flown up for a pretrial conference with the judge, and Granny asked him to stay for Thanksgiving dinner. Granny cooked a turkey with chestnut stuffing, wild rice with bacon and brandy, and corn pudding. She baked a pumpkin pie and an apple pie, there being a scarcity of mangoes and Key limes in the Rocky Mountains. She prowled through the kitchen of her double-wide, more cantankerous than usual, grumbling about the altitude as she tried to bake honey wheat bread.
“ Yeast rises quicker here than a skeeter draws blood. Ye gods, I’ll never get used to this. Water boils at a lower temperature, so you got to boil longer, increase heat for baking, use more liquids but decrease the baking powder and sweeteners. What a damn fool place.”
The bread turned out to be soggy, and Granny said to hell with it, we could have eggnog with bourbon if we wanted. I told her to skip the first half of the recipe.
After the last slice of pumpkin pie, served hot with vanilla ice cream, and ample quantities of liquid refreshment, my lawyer and I took a walk. Snow flurries whipped around our bare heads as we trudged along a muddy trail that would soon be used for cross-country skiing. In the distance, the snow-covered peak of Mount Sopris rose high above the valley.
“ Jake, you ever represent any lawyers?”
