Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (23 page)

“
One day at a
time.”

He gestured in Kip’s direction. “Who’s this,
your bodyguard?’ ‘

“
My nephew,” I
said.

“
When you grow up, you
gonna be a piss-ant lawyer like your uncle?” he asked.

“
No,” Kip answered, “I’m
going to be an entertainment lawyer. Beats the hell out of being a
shit-kicking cowboy.”

Now where did he learn to talk like that?
I’d have to bring it up with Granny.

Cimarron slipped a clip of bullets into the
stud gun, took a nail from his pocket and shoved it into the
barrel. “Josefina told me I should be expecting you. Said you’d
cause trouble but that I shouldn’t start anything. I promised her I
wouldn’t unless you asked for it.”

“
Where is she?”

“
In town at the music
festival. Spends all day there. They got more concerts in that
little town than a dog’s got fleas.”

Cimarron turned back to the
plywood, whipping the heavy nail gun as if it were a revolver, and
added a
whomp
,
either for extra stability or to deliver a message. “Damned
hailstorm broke three windows, scared the shit out of the cattle
and the summer tourists. Not that it bothers me when the tourists
get caught in the rain or avalanches for that matter. Are you one
of those assholes who straps boards on his feet, races down the
mountain, then waits for a ride back up so he can do it all over
again?”

“
I was, until my third knee
operation.”

He came down from the ladder and walked
toward us, the nail gun still in his hand. “Skiers!” He spit into a
stall and an Appaloosa gave him a dirty look. I tried to imagine Jo
Jo with this guy, but it just didn’t compute.

“
What a waste of time, what
a piss-poor use of our resources,” he was saying. “You know what’s
under the ski slopes on Ajax, what you tourists call Aspen
Mountain?”

“
Shafts and tunnels,” I
said, displaying my knowledge so recently gained. “Silver mines
crisscrossing under the town from one mountain to the
other.”

He nodded and seemed surprised. “Right.
That’s our history, the history of the West. Mines and small towns
grown big with gold and silver. Now what do we have, million-dollar
condos and music tents and jugglers and little red wagons selling
crepes with cinnamon and bananas, and traffic jams because assholes
from Miami and Beverly Hills have taken over.”

“
The Silver Queen,” I said.
“That’s part of your past, too.”

His eyes narrowed just a bit. “What do you
know about it?”

“
Enough. You spent some
money trying to find her, a statue that disappeared from a World’s
Fair a hundred plus years ago. It was made from a pure chunk of
silver that weighed over a ton.”

“
The nugget was taken from
the Mollie Gibson on Smuggler Mountain. Hell, it was more like a
boulder, weighed twenty-one hundred fifty pounds and assayed out at
ninety-six percent pure. Never been anything like it ever, before
or since. The town fathers commissioned the statue for the Chicago
World’s Fair as part of a lobbying effort to keep Congress from
demonetizing silver, but it didn’t work. The Sherman Act was
passed, and that was the end of the silver boom. So the Silver
Queen is the perfect symbol of a lost era. Can you understand
that?”

“
Sure, what I don’t
understand is you. I didn’t figure you for a historical society
type.”

“
There’s a lot you don’t
understand.” He put the nail gun on a table of plywood supported by
two sawhorses. “How about the two of us have a drink and
talk?”

***

It wasn’t quite noon, but Cimarron was
pouring bourbon from a cut-glass decanter into crystal tumblers.
“What’s the little tyke want?”

“
Gimme a viskey, ginger ale
on the side, and don’t be stingy, bay-bee,” the little tyke
answered.

“
What?”

I gave Kip the crossed-arms signal for
declining a penalty. “He doesn’t care for your Garbo, kid, so play
it straight.”

“
Okay, Liberty Valance,
gimme a Grolsch,” Kip ordered.

We had taken the stone path back to the
house, walked through the foyer past the buffalo and the antique
rifles, through the living room, around the bearskin rug, and were
in a room with a green felt pocket billiards table, and old,
cracked leather chairs.

“
Will a root beer do?” the
big man asked.

Kip grimaced. “If that’s all you’ve got,
bartender, make it a double.”

I took a hit on the warm bourbon. Cimarron
didn’t offer ice, and I didn’t ask. He racked the balls, offered me
a choice of cues and games. I chose eight ball.

“
What should we play for,”
I asked, “money, stock…Jo Jo?”

“
She said you make lousy
jokes, and she was right. Or maybe I don’t have much of a sense of
humor. I don’t joke about Josefina.”

“
What do you joke
about?”

“
There isn’t much I find
funny.”

“
Maybe you should loosen
up,” Kip said.

“
What’s that supposed to
mean?” Cimarron asked. We were double-teaming him. If it got rough,
maybe Kip could bite him in the ankle.

“
Nothing,” Kip said, trying
to suppress his malicious grin, “except you’re so tight, if you
stuck a piece of coal up your ass, in two weeks, you’d have a
diamond.”

“
What the hell!”

“
It’s from a movie,” I
explained.

“
Ferris Bueller’s Day
Off
,” Kip said.

Cimarron was shaking his head. Then he
looked at me. “I know all about you. You’re a trivial man. You
couldn’t appreciate a woman of substance like Josefina. “

“
Yeah, so what happened to
the two of you?”

“
That is none of your
concern, but the life I can give her is of far greater significance
than what you can do. For most of your life, you played a game,
a
game
! Do you
even have a philosophy?’’

“
Sure. I try to go through
life doing the least damage possible. Having fun without hurting
anyone, maybe doing a little good along the way, but without taking
myself too seriously.”

“
Having fun! I don’t know
what Josefina ever saw in you…”

Funny, that’s what I was thinking about him,
but now, he was starting to sound like her. Maybe they had more in
common than I thought.

“
...unless it was the
chance to reform you, make you over, but it didn’t work, and you
ended up in cahoots with her worthless brother.”

He chalked a cue stick,
leaned over the table and broke, sending balls ricocheting with
a
crack
like a
rifle shot. The fourteen ball plopped into a corner
pocket.

“
High balls,” Cimarron
said, a little like the way we played the game at home. Without
looking at me, he knocked in the ten, fifteen, and nine, the last
on a nifty bank shot that threaded the four and the seven. He
lifted his head from the table and gestured with the cue stick
toward a black-and-white photo on the far wall. “There she is, part
of our legacy.”

I walked over to the wall and studied the
Silver Queen. The lady wore a crown and looked a little like the
Statue of Liberty, but she was riding in a chariot with giant
wheels. The front of the chariot resembled the prow of a ship, and
two little Greek god types ran alongside, wearing what looked like
diapers. They carried cornucopias that seemed to be overflowing
with coins. The queen held a scepter topped by a star and a
gigantic silver dollar. Under the photo was a glass-enclosed
clipping from the Aspen Times dated March 1893. It was a review of
the sculpture. “A noble work of art, majestic in proportions
...”

I turned around in time to see Cimarron
whack the thirteen ball into a side pocket, stopping the cue ball
just short of dropping in.

“
It’s big,” I said, after a
moment. “Big and gaudy. It would be hard to say
beautiful.”

“
Victorian style, a symbol
of the end of that era, too,” he explained, patiently. “Eighteen
feet high. The face, bust, and arms are of solid silver. The
drapery is studded with precious stones. Her hair is glass. The
chariot is finished in stripes of dark minerals and crystals. The
two winged gods represent Plutus, carrying riches. One horn
overflows with gold, the other silver. The pillars are made of
burnished silver, crystals, and a mosaic of minerals.”

“
What’s it
worth?”

Cimarron laughed, bent low over the table,
and sent the eleven ball careening into the four—one of mine—which
ended in a side pocket. “Damn.”

I chalked a cue stick while he talked. “Who
knows what it’s worth? Who cares? It’s the history of this town,
this state, and I wanted to find it, preserve it.”

I hit the cue ball too high and knocked it
and the six into a corner pocket. “How could it disappear from the
World’s Fair?”

“
It didn’t. That’s one of
the misconceptions. The Queen came back from the fair and was put
on display at the Mineral Palace in Pueblo, which was eventually
torn down. Nobody knows what happened to the silver lady. She just
disappeared.”

Cimarron ran out the rest of the high balls
and was focusing on the eight.

“
I still don’t get you,” I
said. “I mean, what are you doing as partners with Blinky
Baroso?”

He lifted his head and looked at me with one
eye squinted shut. “What are you doing as his lawyer?”

“
That’s
different.”

“
Hah!” He nailed the eight
on a line and clunked it into a corner pocket.

Kip made a sucking sound on the straw in his
root beer. “You shoot a mean game of pool, fat man.”

Cimarron turned toward him, either puzzled
or angry, I couldn’t tell which.

“
Paul Newman,” Kip
explained.

“
My first deal with Baroso
was strictly legitimate,” Cimarron said, turning back to me.
“Sunken treasure in the Keys. There was no need to oversubscribe
the stock. Hell, I’d been the majority shareholder in the company
that had located the wrecks. I’d been to the old naval library in
Madrid, had examined the manifests of the ship. I knew every gold
bar on her, every piece of jewelry. But we ran out of cash before
we could salvage. It was so damn foolish of Baroso, but he just
didn’t believe we’d find her. I would have never done business with
him again if I hadn’t gotten involved with Josefina.”

Funny. I probably would have stopped
representing Blinky except for her. “She encouraged you?”

“
Josefina thought I could
straighten him out, just like she thought you could.”

“
That was a long time
ago.”

“
Maybe so, but I went back
to Baroso when I needed to raise cash for the new operation up
here. I’ve got land, and I’ve got maps and claims, but I needed the
start-up money. I told him, no funny business, and he said not to
worry, he’d get his lawyer to handle the money. He wouldn’t make a
move without his lawyer, good old reliable Jake Lassiter, that’s
what he said.”

“
Good old reliable
Nathan…Nathan, Nathan Detroit,” Kip sang out.

“
Well, that’s news to me,”
I told Cimarron, ignoring Kip. “I defended Blinky in his criminal
cases, but I never had anything to do with the business. You could
have called me. You could have checked it out.”

“
Sure I could have done a
lot of things, but I wanted the deal. I told myself I did it for
the money he could raise, but lately I think I did it for Josefina.
Anyway, that’s what happened. I checked you out with her, and she
said you were all right. I didn’t even mind the fact that the two
of you had a past. With me, business comes first. Anyway, my
lawyers here set everything up, reasonable finder’s fees for the
promoters, stock subscription agreements, two million dollars’ key
man life insurance on Baroso and me, restrictions on selling any of
our shares, except to each other. Everything was in
order.”

“
For what, to find buried
treasure? To chase stories told by drunks and braggarts. If your
maps were real, these mountains would be crawling with technicians
from major companies. The place would be swarming with helicopters
and laser beams.”

“
Are you calling me a
fool?” His voice had lost its hospitality.

“
No, I just think when you
stumbled over a bag of twenty-dollar gold pieces, it addled your
brain. This new project will turn out just like the Silver Queen.
These poor slobs who bought shares would lose their money either
way, whether Blinky stole it or not.”

“
You know, once in a bar
down in Carbondale, a man called me crazy. I was standing there
having a beer, minding my own business, and this fellow—drove a
semi for a living—came up to me. ‘You’re that big bastard chasing
after Coronado’s gold, ain’t you?’ I just ignored him, but he kept
coming after me, pointing at me, telling his friends I was the
biggest fool in the county. He was about your size, maybe a little
smaller through the shoulders. Finally, I just picked him up by the
collar and lifted him off his feet. Had a ceiling fan in there, and
it bashed him across the ear. ‘Course the blades stopped then, so I
let him down, then hoisted him back up, about a dozen times till he
had blood running out his nose and each of his ears.”