by Paul Levine
That was then. This is now.
Here the snow was dry and powdery, just like the travel posters show, and the roads were already clear, snow piled high alongside. I wasn’t as polite driving back into town as I had been getting out. I honked at tortoiselike tourists. I skidded around one corner and ignored every posted speed limit I could find.
Back in town, I stood ten minutes in the doorway waiting for the camera store to open. The female clerk gave me a curious look. Maybe it was the wildness in my eyes, maybe the smell of straw and manure. After a moment, she found the battery I needed and an earphone, took my cash, and watched me leave, the bell attached to the front door tinkling merrily.
***
When I had picked up the camera in the barn, I muttered a private prayer to whatever God protects the semi-honest man who doesn’t strangle kittens or litter in public parks. The prayer was answered when I found the on button engaged. The battery, of course, would be dead. It was. So far, so good.
A silent thank-you.
Through the Plexiglas cover, I saw the tape was three-quarters unwound. A couple of hours had been recorded before the battery gave out. With any luck, it would all be there.
Not the video, of course, once Kip left the loft. The camera had been buried in the straw. But the sound. The audio would be there. What had Kip told me? This baby can pick up a rat farting at fifty yards.
***
I was back in the car, parked at the curb, engine running, heater on, my heart thumping as the tape rewound. It was one of those Super-8 formats you don’t need a separate VCR to show on your TV. I rewound to the beginning of the tape, fighting the urge to see the middle first. I attached the earphone jack to the camera and watched through the viewfinder as I hit the play button.
The first shot was a speck against the sky. The lens zoomed. A bird. The frame jumped around as Kip tried to steady the camera. “Lord of flight,” Kip said into the microphone. “A golden eagle. Last of a breed. Mighty predator.” Kip went on for a while, sounding like a pint-size Marlin Perkins. The bird disappeared into some spruce trees and Kip said, “Shit, where’d he go?”
Next, a shot of the kids from the neighboring cabin at the Lazy Q. Then, a dog urinating against a tree. Then, there it was: a darkened room, growing lighter as the lens opened wider. The nine-volt lantern cast half of Jo Jo’s face in a white, bleaching light, the other half in darkness, but I saw her, huddled under a blanket.
“ No, Jake, please. I’m so ashamed. The boy shouldn’t be here.”
The camera jiggled and seemed to adjust itself to the light. “Uncle Jake, please, you’re cutting off the angle. I want to zoom from medium close up to extreme close up.”
He did, and Jo Jo’s face filled the screen, tear-streaked cheeks and puffy eyes. But close up, the eyes revealed something else altogether. That blazing intelligence, that quick mind, that total control.
Her forehead was wrinkled in thought. She wasn’t in shock. She wasn’t in fear. Her brain was in overdrive. Why didn’t I see it at the time?
“ Jake, no! Haven’t you done enough to me already?” She buried her head in her hands.
I didn’t say, “What’s that supposed to mean?” I didn’t say, “What the hell are you talking about?” I didn’t say anything. But then, I thought she was talking about old times, or that she was confused. Hell, I don’t know what I was thinking, but I sure didn’t think she had it all figured out, that the prosecutor lady knew the tape might just pop up as evidence and it might be nice to show the All-Pro pervert had a kid videotaping his evil deeds.
“ Okay,” I said on the tape. “Kip. Cut! I’ve got enough.”
Was it my imagination, or was there an unnecessary harshness to my voice. The screen faded to black.
Oh, Jo Jo, you are one bright, evil-hearted woman.
The screen flashed on again. Too dark to make out anything. Then, the lantern came on, and Kip’s voice: “That’s better. Natural light just wasn’t doing it.”
I shooed him out again, and the screen went dark. But I knew there would be more.
The camera would be off now. No telling how long.
The screen lightened, then twirled upside down. A rustling sound through the earphone. An oomph that might have come from Kip. “Put me dow-nk.”
The camera must have been dropped or thrown, Kip’s thumb plopping the record button. The auto focus was trying to sharpen the picture, but all I could see were fuzzy, thickened pieces of straw, now covering the lenses. The camera had fallen.
Show time. Again, I said a prayer.
Another muffled oomph, fading away. Kip was being carried up the ladder, a hand over his mouth.
The voices were indistinct from the loft. But the footsteps pounding the boards were picked up clearly. Heavy feet. Soft words, “Quiet down, boy.”
Then, my voice calling out to Kip, when I thought he was playing games again. “Kip! You’re starting to bug me. I’ve got some business to finish with the lady.”
Was that me? It sounded not like the fellow I know so well, but the goat-man I’d heard described all week in court. Another moment passed, then the unmistakable voice of Kit Carson Cimarron, “Fool me twice, and you’re dead.”
The audio was clear. Better than I could have hoped. I kept listening.
“ Simmy, he forced me.”
Damn. Even her lies are consistent.
“ He hit me, just like he used to do. He tore off my clothes and just forced me.”
Then Cimarron’s voice, calm and dispassionate. “You knew what he was like. You told me yourself.”
I heard myself shout, “This is crazy!”
But who would believe me? Don’t all criminals deny their crimes?
Cimarron’s voice grew louder. “First you steal from me. Then you trespass on my land, and now you violate my woman.”
Why don’t I just hand the tape to McBain? He can play it for his closing argument. What else does he need?
When Cimarron started flinging me into the walls, the audio captured every thud.
“ No, Simmy! You’ll kill him! Don’t!”
She seemed to mean it. But then, if H. T. Patterson was right, she wanted me to kill him.
A cr-ack, the rail splitting, and the noise of the horse snorting and stomping its feet as I landed on its back and slid into its stall.
“ C’mon out, lawyer. I’m not through with you.”
No, he wasn’t. I listened to the rest, so familiar and yet so unreal. There was Kip crying out he was Spartacus, Cimarron taking away the pitchfork, Kip dashing out of the barn. There was the first shot from the nail gun, then Cimarron telling Jo Jo to reload a clip for him. The muffled whomp of another shot and then another. The noise from the corncrib, the sounds of two big men crashing into each other and whatever else got in the way. More whomps of steel into wood, and finally, after a pause, the last shot straight into the meat of a man’s brain.
I hit the stop, then rewound to the beginning and played it again. Something was bothering me, but what? I listened more carefully when I knew it was near the end, but still, it seemed out of sync. The timing of the last shot was off. I needed to count the seconds.
Again, I rewound the tape and listened. This time I closed my eyes and saw the scene. I was on my back, my hand curling around the nail gun and lifting it toward his chest. I remembered his hand grabbing it and my pulling the trigger, hoping for the blast and hearing nothing but a…
Click.
Then the sound of my own head being snapped against the floor by Cimarron’s fist.
A thud like a baseball smacking into the catcher’s mitt.
Followed quickly by a grunt.
I couldn’t place the sounds. I would have been already close to unconsciousness. Seconds passed. What was happening?
Whomp.
Silence.
I stopped the tape, rewound just a bit, and played the last few moments yet again.
I counted, a-thousand-one, a-thousand-two, a-thousand-three.
From the time I was hit, three seconds, then the thud and grunt. Seven more seconds until the final whomp.
Ten seconds from the time I was hit! I couldn’t have fired it. At the time, I was drifting toward dreamland, having been battered into a fair-to-middling concussion.
I tried to figure it out.
Ten seconds.
What happened when I was sailing somewhere between pain and coma?
I was still thinking about it as the tape ran on. This time, I didn’t stop it.
Then I heard the voice. And I knew.
CHAPTER 27
A LOUSY JUDGE OF CHARACTER
I didn’t have time to shower and change. I rushed to the sheriff s department in the basement of the courthouse and found Detective Racklin at his desk. I told him what I needed. “A dummy?” he asked.
“ Two dummies, like they use in the crash tests.”
“ What for?”
“ Come to court, and you’ll see.”
***
I barged through the courtroom door carrying a brown paper sack from the City Market, and everyone turned toward me. Why were they looking at me that way? H. T. Patterson stood at the lectern, peering over his shoulder. Jo Jo Baroso was on the witness stand, and the jurors were in their places. The clock said nine-forty.
“ Ah, here you are,” Judge Witherspoon announced from the bench. “I was about to issue a bench warrant, but if you’ll take your seat, Mr. Lassiter, perhaps we can continue. Next question, Mr. Patterson.”
“ No!” I called out, plowing through the gate that separates the spectators from the gladiators.
“ I beg your pardon,” the judge said.
“ I mean, no, Your Honor. Respectfully, may we approach the bench?”
“ We, as in the lawyers and you?”
“ Yes, Your Honor. I’m an attorney duly admitted to the Florida Bar, attorney number 163327. Additionally, I believe I have a constitutional right to be heard in my own defense. I wish to be associated as co-counsel.”
Patterson hustled over and grabbed me just above the elbow. He had a good grip for a little guy. “Jake,” he whispered, “what the hell are you doing?”
“ Trust me.”
“ Trust you? You have straw in your hair, you look like you slept on a park bench…and what’s that on your shoes?”
I looked down. Oops. Never wear wing tips in the morgue or a horse barn.
“ Gentlemen,” the judge called out, a note of irritation creeping into his voice. “Would you please step forward?”
I put my paper sack on the defense table and joined Patterson, McBain, and the stenographer on the side of the bench away from the jury.
“ Your Honor,” I began, “I wish to take over the cross-examination of Ms. Baroso.”
The judge wrinkled his forehead. “Surely you know the old saw about a man representing himself having a fool for a client.”
“ This is different, Your Honor.”
“ Why?”
“ Because there are only two people in this courtroom who know what happened in the barn that night. One is sitting on the witness stand, and the other is me, and I only learned it this morning.”
“ That’s not good enough. The client always knows more than the lawyer about the case. I’ll give you fifteen minutes to consult with Mr. Patterson, then we continue.”
“ No, Your Honor. I have to do it myself. I’m the only one who can.”
The judge studied me a moment, his jaw muscles tightening. “I am cognizant of your right to defend yourself, but I have a duty to protect defendants from themselves.” He seemed to ponder the question of my competence, then sniffed the air, before turning to the clerk. “What is that godawful smell? Would someone ask the bailiff to check on the furnace?”
H. T. Patterson cleared his throat. “For the record, Your Honor, I have no objection to Mr. Lassiter joining as co-counsel, although I do not join in his motion.”
In other words, don’t blame jour lawyer if you screw it up.
“ What about you, Mr. McBain, any objection?” the judge asked.
“ Yes, sir. Yes, indeed. Cheap theatrics and a trick for the appellate court. Mr. Lassiter sees which way the wind is blowing, and he’s trying to build error into the record. He’s going to take over, and when he’s convicted, claim ineffective assistance of counsel. If he loses the appeal, he’s got a federal constitutional claim for habeas corpus. It’s all a ruse, Judge, a slick ploy.”
“ But if I deny the request, that’s an issue for appeal, too,” the judge mused, smiling ruefully.
He thought it over some more, and I remembered one of my first clients in the P.D.’s office. He insisted on representing himself, but he had no legal training, so the judge appointed me to sit as co-counsel and offer advice, none of which was taken. The client was cross-examining a man he supposedly mugged in a dark alley. “How can you identify me when I knocked you cold from behind?” the budding barrister asked.
Finally, Judge Witherspoon shrugged and said, “Well, I’m going to let you have a go at it, though I wonder if you might show the court some respect by pulling your tie up to your collar before you address the witness.”
I grabbed a yellow pad and a pen just to look official, adjusted my tie, ran a hand over a two-day growth of beard and got as close to the witness stand as I could without asking for permission to get closer.
“ Good morning, Jo Jo,” I said.
“ Good morning, Mr. Lassiter,” she replied.
“ Mr. Lassiter. Yesterday, it was Jake. And a few months ago in Miami, it was mi angel, was it not?”
“ No. That was a long time ago.”
I gave her a little smile. “It must have been before I started stealing, raping, and killing?”
“ I don’t know when your life swerved off its path.”
“ Nor I, yours.”
“ Objection, argumentative!” McBain stayed on his feet. He didn’t want to waste time leaping up for the next objection.
“ Sustained. Mr. Lassiter, you know better than that. I caution you to adhere to the rules of evidence, or you may resume your seat.”
“ Ms. Baroso, or should I say, Mrs. Cimarron?”
“ Either one.”
“ But you obviously prefer Ms. Baroso, correct?”
“ That’s what I go by.”
“ In fact, you never told anyone you were married, isn’t that right?”
She paused, then nodded and said, “That’s right.”
“ Except your brother, Luis, who prefers to be called Louis, and is known affectionately throughout the justice system as Blinky?”
I was smiling at her confidently, and for the first time, her look changed. Just the first hint of apprehension. She knew me well enough to know my sarcasm usually preceded the baiting of a trap. Her look seemed to ask: What does he know?
“ Let me think,” she said.
“ Think? You need to think whether you told your only sibling you were married?”
“ I believe I did tell Luis,” she said, a bit too quickly.
“ So you did tell someone?”
“ Yes, I suppose I did.”
“ Then a moment ago you were mistaken when you said you never told anyone?”
“ I suppose I was.”
“ Ever tell anyone else?”
“ No.”
“ So you never told me, did you?”
After all of that, she had to say no.
“ No,” she said. “I never told you.”
“ Not when you and I were alone in your house in Miami last June?”
“ No.”
“ Not when your husband showed up that night?”
“ No.”
“ And not when you say I attacked you in the barn?”
“ No.”
“ You didn’t say, ‘Jake, please, I’m a married woman, and my husband is in the house over yonder?’ “No.”
“ You didn’t think that information was important?”
“ I didn’t t
hink it would stop you.”
Ouch. I had committed the cardinal sin on cross, one question too many. It was the equivalent of the “why” that will always burn you with a smart, hostile witness. Time to move on.
“ Mrs. Cimarron, what were the terms of your late husband’s will?”
“ Objection,” McBain said, still standing at the prosecution table. “Irrelevant.”
“ He wouldn’t say that if I was the beneficiary,” I told the judge. “Relevant to the issue of who wanted the decedent dead.”
Motive, motive, motive.
“ Overruled, but move it along, Mr. Lassiter.”
“ Simmy left no will,” Jo Jo said. “He died intestate.”
“ So as the surviving spouse, you receive one hundred percent of the estate, free and clear of all federal taxes?”
“ I really don’t know the law in that area.”
“ Oh come now, Mrs. Cimarron, you’re a lawyer.”
“ I’ve spent my entire career prosecuting criminals, not writing wills.”
Gonna wing it now. “But surely you have retained probate counsel and have prepared to file the appropriate papers with the state.”
Her eyes flickered almost imperceptibly. “Yes, I’ve retained a local probate lawyer.”
“ Who explained to you that you were the sole beneficiary and would receive one hundred percent of the estate, free and clear of federal taxes?”
