Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (24 page)

“
You’re partial to ceiling
fans, aren’t you, Cimarron? You ever tell Abe Socolow that
story?”

“
What’s that supposed to
mean?”

“
Kyle Hornback.”

“
You think I killed
him?”

“
Well I know
I
didn’t.”

“
Think about it, Lassiter.
Hornback came clean with me. Admitted they’d been selling the same
stock three or four times. Why would I kill him?”

“
That’s
why.”

“
No, you got me wrong. I
was indebted to him. By nature, I’m not a violent man.”

“
You could have fooled me.
What the hell were you doing in Jo Jo’s house when you tap-danced
on my forehead?”

He didn’t answer for a moment. “Have you
ever been so angry you could have killed someone?”

I didn’t think he wanted an answer, so I
didn’t disappoint him.

“
Anger beyond anything
you’d ever known,” he continued. “I was enraged at Baroso, at
Josefina, at you, a man I’d never seen. And at me, too. I’d been
taken by that slippery son of a bitch the second time. You know the
expression ‘fool me once, shame on you.’

“
Fool me twice, shame on
me,” I said.

“
No. Fool me twice, you’re
dead. I’d been made a fool by Baroso and you, and there you were
with Josefina. Like I said, Hornback told me what they’d been up
to, and I advised him to go to the authorities. Send Baroso to
jail, let the chips fall where they may.”

“
So who killed
him?”

“
I figured you did. You’re
the guy who cooked the books. Your dick was on the chopping
block.”

“
Cimarron, let me try this
one time in simple, straightforward English. I’m Blinky’s lawyer,
that’s all. I didn’t cook the books, hoodwink the investors, or
steal the money. And I sure as hell didn’t kill
anybody.”

“
So you say, but your
client sold the outside stock three times over, and the money is
missing. There’s a hundred fifty thousand in money I put up that
was taken from the company account the day before Baroso
disappeared. Socolow tells me half that amount showed up in your
bank account in Miami.”

“
Like I told Socolow, I
don’t know anything about the deposit, except I didn’t make
it.”

“
Who did?”

“
Probably Blinky, but if
he’s dead, we may never know.”

“
I’d bet you a hundred head
of Hereford he’s sitting by a swimming pool somewhere with about
one-point-nine million of investors’ money. I figure the two of you
plan to split it.”

“
You’re wrong again,” I
told him.

“
That’s what Josefina tells
me, and so far, I’ve been listening. That’s why I didn’t throw you
in the Roaring Fork when you showed up here. I’ve been listening
real good ‘cause I love that woman and respect her, too. I’ll be
honest with you. She doesn’t know what to do. She’s been sleeping
in the guest room, and we’ve been like brother and sister since she
got back. She wanted to see if we could be friends first, then
lovers again. But she’s got you on her mind.”

“
I knew her before you
did.”

“
You lost her. She came to
me. She’s mine.”

I laughed at him, and he didn’t like it. I
didn’t care. “Maybe the word hasn’t gotten all the way to the
Rockies, but a woman’s not a mining claim. You don’t own her.”

“
She belongs here just like
my heifers and my horses, and I’m not going to lose
her.”

“
Hey, pal, that’s her
choice, not yours.”

“
That’s right, but she’s
going to make that choice without any interference from
you.”

“
What’s the matter, can’t
stand the competition?”

“
Lassiter, I promised
Josefina I wouldn’t hurt you if you showed up here, even though you
stole my money and tried to steal my lady.”

“
Hey, I didn’t—”

“
Shut up, lawyer, or
football player, or skier, or whatever other fool thing you are.
I’ve fulfilled my promise. I told Josefina I’d offer you a drink
and have a little chat and not muss up your hair, though if you
must know, I’ve got an itch to kick your face in. Now, here’s the
way it is. You’re going to get the hell off my property, and out of
Pitkin County, and out of the state of Colorado
because—”

“
This territory ain’t big
enough for the two of us,” Kip chimed in.

“
Because if you don’t,”
Cimarron said evenly, “I’m going to bust you up.”

“
If that’s supposed to
scare me, you better try again,” I said. “We’re all going to die,
and soon, in a celestial blink of an eye, so there’s no use being
scared. You come at me, and I’ll do what I have to do. I’ll chop
you in half with an ax if I have to.”

“
I’m only going to tell you
this once, Lassiter. You come sniffing around Josefina, I mean if
you’re in the same area code, I’m going to break you like a
twig.”

With that, he split his pool cue in two. He
didn’t break it across his knee or muscle it with two hands. He
just held it in one hand, his thumb straight up the shaft, and he
snapped it clean in two.

Like a twig.

CHAPTER 17

ALL ANGERED UP

I’m confused.”

“
Why, Uncle
Jake?”

“
Coming up here, I thought
Cimarron was either a thief or a killer or both.”

“
Yeah?”

“
Well, he’s rough around
the edges, all right, and he’s got a temper. But he’s not the thug
I thought he was. He’s Kiwanis man of the year or something, and he
really believes this buried treasure stuff.”

“
So?”

“
Whoa! Is this thing
rocking or what?”

“
Take it easy, Uncle Jake.
It’s just the wind.”

“
There it goes again. Hey,
I even close my eyes on a ski lift.”

We were riding to the top of Aspen
Mountain—or Ajax, if you prefer—on the Silver Queen gondola. Yeah,
that’s the name, in case I wasn’t already dwelling on Cimarron’s
stories. Suspended from a cable, our enclosed car was a good fifty
feet above the top of a strand of healthy spruce trees that were a
good eighty feet tall themselves. Strong wind gusts pushed us from
side to side. Below, some hikers took the hard way, straight up the
steep face of the ski slopes, now green with thick grass and
spotted with yellow sunflowers. Behind us, the town of Aspen faded
away. To our left were the snowcapped mountains leading to the
Continental Divide.

“
We should have gotten some
aerobic exercise by hiking up,” I said, gripping the handrail with
whitened knuckles.

“
Uncle Jake, are you afraid
of heights like Jimmy Stewart in
Vertigo
?”

“
I wouldn’t say afraid.
More like concerned. I’m concerned about heights.”

We were slowing down,
approaching the port at the top of the mountain. “Something else,
too. Cimarron
really
thinks I conspired with Blinky to defraud him.”

“
How do you
know?”

“
I can tell, Kippers. This
is what I do for a living. I ask questions and listen to the
answers, and I watch. Boy, do I watch. There are some very good
liars and some people who can delude themselves into believing
anything they want. They’re hell on polygraphs, juries, and
spouses. But this guy didn’t tell a fib, not one I could
catch.”

The gondola bucked into a V-shaped catching
device, slowed down, and the door automatically slid open. We
stepped out, and a middle-aged couple bundled into ski jackets
climbed in. It had been sunny and in the mid-seventies in town. It
was still sunny up here, but a stiff wind was blowing, and the
temperature had plummeted twenty degrees.

I followed Kip, who can sense the proximity
of food, and we headed to the snack bar where he ordered a hot
chocolate and a cheeseburger. We sat at an outdoor table, looking
down into the valley.

“
The other thing, unless
he’s the world’s greatest actor, Cimarron really thinks I killed
Hornback.”

“
So what? You didn’t, did
you, Uncle Jake?”

“
Of course not. But what it
means is that Cimarron didn’t kill him, either.”

“
So who did? And what
happened to Mr. Baroso?”

“
Kip my boy, that’s what
we’re going to find out.”

While Kip was chomping his burger, I found a
pay phone and dialed a familiar number, putting the charge on a
credit card. When he answered, barking his last name, I said,
“Hello, Abe, coerce any confessions today?”

“
Jake! Jake, goddamnit,
where are you? No, strike that. I know where you are. You’re
harassing my witness. Cimarron called me less than an hour ago.
What do you think you’re doing?”

“
Seeking the truth, Abe,
just like Charlie Riggs always taught me.”

“
No, you’re not. You’re a
fleeing felon, evading arrest, surreptitiously departing the
jurisdiction after I cut you a break. You’re obstructing justice
and threatening witnesses.”

“
That’s bull.”

“
Yeah, on this very day,
did you or did you not threaten to take a hatchet to my last living
witness?”

“
I think I said
ax.”

“
Damn you! Do I have to put
guards around Cimarron?”

“
Nah, he does a pretty good
job of protecting himself. “

Socolow snorted, the wet sound of a dolphin
clearing its blowhole. “Jake, you know I’m sitting on a sealed
indictment, naming you for the murder of Kyle Hornback.”

“
I figured.”

“
I can courier it to the
Aspen police. We’d have you extradited in a week.”

“
Give me a couple of days,
Abe. I’ll call you.”

“
What! You think this is
like scheduling lunch? You’ve been indicted for murder one, a
capital fucking crime. It took the grand jury about fifteen
minutes. Can you get that through your thick skull?”

“
Listen to me, Abe. I’m
standing on top of a mountain at maybe eleven thousand feet. In the
winter, it’s one of the best ski slopes in the country. In the
summer, it’s filled with hikers and picnickers. Abe, have you ever
seen a columbine?”

“
A what?”

“
A wildflower that grows up
here. Some are yellow, like buttercups. Some are lavender. Anyway,
the mountain is blazing with wildflowers now. In the winter,
there’s six feet of snow, and under the ground, winter or summer,
under my feet right now are mine shafts and tunnels. Dozens of
them, hell, hundreds of them, and there’s still silver in there,
and maybe buried treasure and who knows what?”

“
Jake, what the hell are
you talking about?”

“
I don’t think Cimarron
killed Hornback.”

“
Neither do I. Neither do
twenty-three members of the grand jury. So now, it’s
unanimous.”

“
But it’s so screwy, Abe.
Cimarron’s the one who had the motive. Hornback and Blinky cheated
him, and the guy’s got a fearsome temper. I’ve got a couple of
mending metacarpals to prove it. Blinky cheated him twice, and
Cimarron told me he’d kill a man for that. Something else, Abe.
Cimarron and Blinky had two-million-dollar key man insurance
policies on each other’s lives. That would just about cover the
amount of money Cimarron thinks Blinky stole.”

“
What are you saying, that
Cimarron didn’t kill Hornback, but he killed Baroso?”

“
He had the motive, but I
still don’t think so. I just have this feeling about Cimarron, that
he really sees himself as the victim and Blinky and me as the bad
guys. I don’t think he killed anyone.”

“
You’re not helping your
case any. If Cimarron didn’t do it, who did?”

“
I don’t know, but
whoever’s setting me up has got to be the one ...”

A thought was racing around the perimeter of
my brain. I struggled to get a rope around it and bring it in.

“
...Abe, that deposit into
my account, where’d it come from?”

“
Wire transfer from the
Rocky Mountain corporate account at Florida Southern
Bank.”

“
Who authorized
it?”

“
You did, dummy! That’s the
nail in the coffin.”

“
I didn’t. I couldn’t have.
I had no signatory powers over the account. I never even knew what
bank it was in.”

“
Nice try, Jake, but you
filled out a signature card when the account was opened, and the
signature on the wire transfer request matched.”

“
Abe, I’m telling you I
never signed any card or transfer request or anything. If they
match, it’s only because the same forger did them both. I was set
up the day the Rocky Mountain Treasures bank account was
opened.”

“
Pretty farfetched,
Jake.”

“
Who opened the corporate
account?”

I heard a rustling of papers at the other
end of the line. “Louis X. Baroso, last December nineteenth.”