by Paul Levine
As if on cue, Brenda Cooper’s sobs grew louder.
Charlie didn’t miss a beat. “The eggs would have been clearly visible in his eyes and the corners of his mouth. They sort of look like grated cheese, so I don’t know how the attendants missed them.”
In the jury box, a woman nervously cleared her throat.
“As I say,” Charlie continued, “prima facie negligence.”
I sat down and let Charlie take care of himself on cross-examination. No one could do it any better.
***
I was sipping a Cuban coffee in the Gaslight Lounge down the street from the county courthouse, and Charlie was slurping a double order of rice pudding with cinnamon, having already polished off a three-egg western omelet. Testifying about putrefied corpses always made him hungry.
“What’s bothering you?” he asked.
“Besides being a murder suspect, not much, unless you count having my name linked to one of Blinky Baroso’s schemes, and being forced to revisit my past courtesy of his sister.”
“Josefina,” Charlie said. “A splendid young woman, though a tad tightly wound, I always thought.”
“She says I had a dysfunctional upbringing, what with you and Granny as my role models.”
“Do you believe it?”
“I don’t know, Charlie. Granny always told me to choose right over wrong, and you taught me how to tell one from the other. If I’ve failed, it’s not Granny’s fault or yours.”
“For what it’s worth, we don’t think you’ve failed. As for your other problems, I don’t believe for one minute that you killed Kyle Hornback, and neither does Abe Socolow. He’s just trying to pressure you into bringing Baroso in.”
“Yeah, maybe, but it’s no fun.” I looked at my watch. “I gotta go. While you were mesmerizing the jury, Blinky left a message with Cindy that he had something that would blow the Hornback case wide open.”
Charlie used his napkin to pry a grain of rice from his beard. “Do you believe him?”
“What a strange question. Why else would he—”
“Your client is a con man, is he not?”
“Yeah. To the world in general.”
“Mundus vult decipi. The world wants to be deceived. But what about you, Jake?”
***
I put the top down on the old convertible and swung onto I-9S from the downtown ramp. I passed over the poinciana trees on South Miami Avenue, then swung off the Twenty-fifth Road exit to the Rickenbacker Causeway. Blinky had told me to meet him on Virginia Key, a secluded beach near the Seaquarium on the way to Key Biscayne.
Virginia Key is really just a spit of sand with some pine trees for shade. Because the beach faces due east and there’s a reef about a mile offshore to cut down the rollers, it’s a great place for windsurfing. To the north is Fisher Island, million-dollar condos surrounded by a moat to keep out the riffraff. Nearby is Government Cut where the cruise ships head toward open water. To the east is the Gulf Stream, Bimini, and the wide expanse of the Atlantic. To the south is Bear Cut, an open channel through the causeway, and to the west is the city sewage plant. That’s right. The city fathers chose an island of unspoiled beauty on which to lace the salt-laden wind with the trenchant scent of human waste. In a way I can’t fully explain, Virginia Key seems a metaphor for Miami.
There was a rusted-out Jeep Cherokee up to its hubcaps in the sand. Nearby, an Isuzu Trooper with roof racks and a fine collection of custom-made sailboards was being unloaded by two lean, muscular guys in their twenties. On the water, half a dozen boardsailors were jumping the chop, headed on a broad reach in about eighteen knots of northeasterly breeze. Perfect lines of waves were breaking on the reef, what surfers call “corduroy to the horizon.”
I spotted Blinky’s green Range Rover parked in the shade about fifty yards from the beach. Long needles, green and fragrant, floated into my convertible from the candles of a slash pine tree.
I got out of the car, leaned on the fender and watched the boardsailors. Even from here, I could hear the sails crackling in the wind. Blinky wasn’t around.
I waited five, maybe six, minutes.
Still no Blinky.
Maybe he was collecting pinecones or trying to sell stock in a gold mine to some beach bums.
I looked back at the water, relaxing.
Not thinking anything was wrong.
Why should I?
The ringing phone jarred me. It sounded so out of place here that for a moment I didn’t know what it was. It was coming from Blinky’s Range Rover. I hustled over and found the driver’s door unlocked. Inside, on the passenger’s side of the front seat, a cellular phone was ringing, its LCD display reading “CALL” with a blinking insistence.
But I was looking at something else.
A deep black-red stain on the upholstery on the driver’s side.
About the size of a salad plate. Still wet.
A spiderweb crack in the front windshield.
But no Blinky.
And still the phone rang and blinked at me. I picked it up and groped for the right button. “Hello,” I said, my voice strained.
“Who is this?” A man’s voice, strangely familiar.
“Blinky? Is that you?”
“No. Who’s this?”
It was coming to me. I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say a word.
“Jake,” he said. “Jake Lassiter? What the fuck are you—”
But I had hung up.
Now, why did I do that? Why did I feel guilty about being there just now, and why was I wiping my fingerprints off the telephone? I hadn’t killed anyone. No one was even dead, right. I mean there wasn’t a body. Blinky would be coming out of the woods in a minute.
C’mon, Blinky. Where the hell are you?
I touched the red stain. Still wet. I wiped my hand on the seat but only managed to smear the blood. I opened the glove compartment. There was nothing there, not even gloves.
I was thinking about getting the hell out of there when another noise startled me.
The overlapping whine of sirens. My ass was half out of the Range Rover when three police cars swerved onto the beach, spitting up sand, lights whirling. As they skidded to impressive, cop-style stops, I could no longer see the bright sails or hear the crackling of the wind.
***
It took Abe Socolow twenty minutes to get there. By that time, a crime scene van was parked in the shade, and a pot-bellied cop was taking plaster impressions of the Range Rover’s tires. When he finished, he hauled his little black bag into the van and gathered blood samples, dusted for prints, and used tweezers and a tiny whisk broom looking for who knows what. He had already been through my car, with my consent, since I didn’t feel like waiting around for them to bring a warrant. Two uniformed cops were trying to interview the boardsailors, most of whom didn’t want to leave the water. When the wind is up, neither shark sightings nor murder scenes will get hardcore boardheads to shore.
I sat under a pine tree whose branches swayed gently in the wind. Three cops stood around me asking questions I wouldn’t answer if I could, but they parted when his eminence, the prosecutor, pulled up in his state-owned four-door Chrysler.
“Where the hell is he?” Abe Socolow asked.
I stayed sitting, my back against a tree. Abe looked down at me, his courtroom pallor giving him a sickly look in the open air. “Who?” I answered.
“Don’t jerk me around, Jake. Your sleazy client.”
“Which one?” I asked, thinking we’d played this scene before, maybe twice.
“I’m losing patience with you. What were you doing here?”
“Waiting for Baroso, or maybe Godot.”
“What were you doing in his car?”
I wanted to stand up so I could look down at Socolow who now towered over me, but I sat still, my arms across my knees. I was pulling pine needles off a branch, one by one, a child’s refrain popping into my head. She loves me, she loves me not. “Aren’t you supposed to advise me o
f my right to counsel and even provide one if I can’t pay the freight, which I can’t, if it’s someone who charges my rates?”
“Why’d you hang up the phone, Jake? You knew it was me on the other end, didn’t you? Why’d you do something stupid like that?”
Two could play this game. “Why were you calling here?” I asked.
“My secretary got an anonymous call, male voice she didn’t recognize, giving her the number and saying for me to call if I wanted to break the Hornback case.”
“Me, too. I mean, Cindy got a call from Blinky, at least she thought it was Blinky, telling me to come out here.”
Socolow regarded me skeptically. “Did she now?”
“Call her, find out.” Socolow was giving me a look that was supposed to make me break down and confess to all manner of felonies and misdemeanors. “Don’t you see, Abe, someone’s setting me up? Someone wanted me out here to make it look like I killed Blinky.”
Socolow smiled his gotcha smile. “Who said anything about Blinky being killed?”
“Ah c’mon, Abe, don’t play cop games with me.”
“I’m not playing, Jake. I’m dead serious. You know anything about a corpse you want to tell us?”
He looked in the direction of the woods. My mind flashed a picture of Blinky’s body half covered by branches, a handful of my business cards clutched in a death grip.
“Like I said before, I came here to meet Blinky. I stood around maybe ten minutes. The phone rang. I went to answer it, saw the blood, heard your voice, froze, and hung up. I don’t know why, I just did it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s the truth. Look, Blinky’s been skulking around because he’s afraid someone’s trying to kill him. Maybe he was right, but that someone wasn’t me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“C’mon, Abe, you can smell a setup. Somebody wanted me out here. Somebody called the cops, somebody called you. Can’t you see what’s going on? I don’t have a motive for killing Blinky.” I was rambling now, doing just what I tell clients not to do. But it was understandable. I had a fool for a client, and my lawyer wasn’t much better. “Maybe Blinky was mugged. Maybe he’s lying in the bushes somewhere. Maybe the blood isn’t even his.”
“Oh, I’ll bet it is. I’ll give you three to one it’s type O, weasel. As for your motive, it’s tied up with Hornback and whatever you had cooked up with Baroso in the West.”
“That’s bullshit, Abe. Blinky was using me. How about looking for this Cimarron character?” I stood up and brushed sand from my navy blue suit pants. “Now, if you don’t have any other questions, I think I’ll go home. See you in court, Abe.”
“As lawyer or defendant?” Abe Socolow asked.
Chapter 11
Gold Doesn’t Rot
There was a no trespassing sign at the front gate, which hung open. I kept the Olds in second gear and churned
up dust on the dirt driveway that wound through the trees. Josefina Baroso lived in what used to be a caretaker’s cottage on a tropical fruit plantation just off Old Cutler Road. No one had worked the place for years, and the trees—lychee, Key lime, Surinam cherry, and black sapote—were overgrown with weeds. Gnarled and stunted mango trees surrounded the cottage, the ground covered with rotting fruit, the air heavy with the sickly sweet scent of decay.
It was late afternoon, and gray thunderheads were forming over the Everglades to the west, building into their daily gully washers. I parked in the driveway under a guanabana tree and walked to the front steps. The cracker-style building had walls of Dade County pine, a slanted tin roof with eaves spouts and a brick chimney poking through the top. On the northern, shaded side, there was a small porch, screened to keep out the mosquitoes, fruit flies, and no-see-um gnats. In front was a screen door, latched from inside, a heavy wood door closed behind it.
I knocked on the screen door, and in a moment, the heavy door opened, and Jo Jo Baroso stood there looking at me.
“We need to talk,” I said through the screen, her face darkened by cross-hatched shadows.
Silently, she unlatched the door, stood back and let me in. It was a small, cool, quiet place furnished in subtle earth tones. She motioned me to a sofa of Haitian cotton, and our eyes met with a knowing memory. The sofa had followed her from that first apartment so long ago. We had lain there in the darkness and exchanged whispers long into the night. We had teased and played and made love there, our limbs locked around each other. And now the faded photographs of memory came back.
Jo Jo broke eye contact first, asked whether I wanted some limeade. I did, remembering she made it with so little sugar it could bring tears to your eyes. She disappeared into the kitchen, a tall, dark, barefoot beauty in pleated, white cotton shorts and orange tank top.
She returned carrying two glasses and a pitcher of limeade on a tray, and I said, “Something may have happened to your brother.”
“I know. Abe called me.”
“They haven’t found a body. I mean, there’s no way of telling ...”
She poured for both of us, handed me a glass, and sat at the far end of the sofa, curling her legs under her. “He’s gone. I can feel it, Jake, an emptiness spreading inside me.”
There was sorrow in her voice. My look shot her a question.
“He’s still my brother, el es mi única familia.” She stopped, and we both thought our private thoughts about her brother.
“You know I wouldn’t hurt Blinky,” I said. It was more of a question than a statement.
“Of course, Jake. I told Abe that, but so far, you’re his only lead. Abe has that cop mentality. A shaky case is better than none.”
Distancing herself from Abe Socolow, showing affection for Blinky, trusting me, what was happening here?
“I wish everything were different,” she said. “With Luis, with you, with me. I wish I could turn back the clock.”
Her eyes were moist. It was so unlike her, at least unlike the Jo Jo Baroso of the past decade. How long had it been since I’d seen her display any emotion, other than total indifference tinged with antipathy?
“I tried to change the world and change you, and I couldn’t do either one,” she said.
“You reminded me of an assistant coach who wanted to move me from linebacker to fullback, even though I couldn’t hang onto the ball.”
“I don’t blame you for leaving me, not anymore.”
“At the time, you called me a commitment-phobic coward.”
“I was impossible. What we had was real.”
Was it?
I didn’t know, because I always cut and ran from what was real. Real symbolized a mortgage and a pension plan, a morning commute, and evening meetings with the civic beautification committee. Real was for suckers, not for me, a guy who could leap tall linemen in a single bound.
As I thought back now, it was such a brief slice of our lives, and our playback equipment shows the past through a soft focus. Days were sunny, winds were cool, a young woman loved me, and the future was without limits. In a sailboat anchored off Elliott Key, we shared a bottle of wine. I remembered the slipitty-slap of water against the hull and the scent of salt in the air. I remembered Jo Jo saying she loved me, so why didn’t it work?
“Our timing was off,” I said. “We always had different goals, or maybe I didn’t have any.”
“You had potential, Jake.”
“Granny always used to say I’d grow old having potential.”
It had grown dark outside the windows. The first thunder rumbled in the distance. Jo Jo trembled at the sound. “I wanted you to reach for the stars, and you ...”
“Short-armed it,” I said, using the disparaging term for chickenhearted wide receivers.
She moved closer to me on the sofa, closing time as well as space. “You cared for me, Jake, I know that. But something inside of you tightened up when it came time to show it. Maybe you were afraid that if you cared too much and lost me, you’d be hurt again, like when you lost your father and mother.
”
Maybe she was right, I didn’t know. I’ve always found introspection to be painful, and analysis from someone else is downright excruciating.
“Why did you leave me?” she asked.
I thought about it. Really thought. And it was agonizing. But in the reflected glare of intermittent flashes of lightning I looked at her face and tried to remember what it had been like.
After a moment, I said, “I was a fool. I hadn’t grown up. You were right about me, and I didn’t like hearing the truth.”
“Oh, Jake!” She breathed the words, and in that graceful way women move, she was in my arms. I don’t remember turning toward her. I don’t remember putting my arms around her, but I held her close, my face pressed to her neck, inhaling the scent of warm flesh, and in a moment, I felt a warm tear trickle from her cheek to mine.
Then, it was just like the old times, or was it? Could it have been, when each of us had traveled so far. Her breath was warm and sweet as I kissed her, cradling her head in my hands. Her full lips parted, and we kissed again. She delicately rubbed her face against mine, catlike, and nipped at my earlobe, then ran a hand through my hair, tugging at it. In a moment, she slipped out of her halter and her shorts, and it was all so familiar. Had it really been all these years?
Her nimble fingers unbuttoned my shirt, and she ran her hands over my chest, tracing figure eights with her nails. Then she unbuttoned my pants, and I fumbled with my shoes, kicking them off, as she tugged at my belt. My hands explored the slopes and curves of her, and she whispered something in Spanish.
A bolt of lightning, followed by the crackle of nearby thunder, lit up the sky and rattled the windowpanes. We changed positions on the sofa, and she emerged on top. The rest was a blur of mouths and hands, the fullness of her breasts, the ripeness of her hips. Again, we tumbled over one another, and this time she was beneath me, our bodies pressed together. When she spoke, her voice was low, the words throaty, “Quiereme, te necesito!”
