Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (42 page)

“
Mr. Lassiter!” The judge
rose from his chair. I stifled him with a “shusssh.”

The tape was still running.

The only sound in the courtroom was sand
trickling onto the floor from what had been the dummy’s plastic
skull. “Shit.”

Who said that? The jurors were confused. No
one in the courtroom had said a word.

“
Shit,” again on the tape.
It was Jo Jo, and the jurors knew it. They looked at her. Not
accusing. Not yet. Just intense curiosity. Shit is fine if you’ve
hit your thumb with a hammer, but it isn’t the most eloquent lament
for a lover slain. She sounded exasperated. Not angry, not
mournful.

“
That’s not the way it was
supposed to go,” she said.

Now the jurors looked at each other. Who was
she talking to?

“
No.” It was a male voice,
and it hadn’t been heard on the tape before. “
No, seguro que no
. Jeez, I hate
violence.”

“
For a while,” Jo Jo said,
“I couldn’t decide which way it would go. I thought Jake could
handle him. I mean, either way, it would work, though this way is
better.”

“
Much better,” the man
said. “Besides, Jake’s not a killer. He doesn’t have it in
him.”

“
Funny, that’s what he said
about you.”

“
Yeah, and he thought you
were too good for him.”

“
Jake’s always been a lousy
judge of character,” Jo Jo said, and they both laughed.

I nodded, and Patterson stopped the
tape.

“
Mrs. Cimarron, who was
that man?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. Her eyes were closed, and
she rocked slowly back and forth.

“
If you wish,” I suggested,
“we could run voiceprints on the tape and compare them with your
brother’s early radio commercials for the gold bullion
business.”

Still no answer.

“
Or we could ask Abe
Socolow to fax your brother’s fingerprints up here and draw a
comparison to the unidentified latent on the gun
barrel.”

She was sobbing now.

“
Isn’t it true that the man
in the barn was your brother, Louis Baroso, and that the two of you
conspired to murder your husband and did, in fact, kill
him?”

She didn’t answer.

“
Which one of you killed
him?” I asked.

“
I didn’t kill Simmy,” she
said through trembling lips.

“
Even though he beat
you?”

Again, she didn’t answer.

“
What you told me in the
barn was true, wasn’t it? He had beaten you.”

Her head slumped forward.

McBain was on his feet. “Your Honor. Perhaps
...”

“
Sit down,” the judge
commanded.

“
He began hitting me just
after we married,” she said. “That’s why I left him. So many times,
he begged me to come back. So many times I thought I could change
him. He could be so wonderful, but he could be someone else, too,
someone violent and evil.”

“
You could have divorced
him.”

“
He would have killed me.
He threatened to, and he boasted that no jury in Pitkin Country
would convict him. He let me move away, but he wanted me back.
That’s why he came to Miami in June. I just couldn’t go back to
that. Jake, you saw what he did to me ...”

“
You thought I’d kill him,
didn’t you? You thought I’d kill him because he broke my hand and
beat you up?”

Silence except for her sobs.

“
You set me up to kill him,
and when I didn’t or couldn’t, you and your brother finished the
job.”

“
Luis was right. You don’t
have it in you to kill a man.”

“
He was right about
something else, too. I’m a lousy judge of character.”

CHAPTER 28

NO WAY TO TREAT A
LADY

I was the first one out the door. Ignoring
protocol, taking advantage of the confusion and cacophony, I raced
from the courtroom, ran down the carpeted stairs and out the front
door beneath old Lady Justice and onto Main Street. I jogged to the
parking garage on cleanly shoveled sidewalks, got the rental, its
fenders caked with dirty snow, and headed east toward Smuggler
Mountain.

The last two minutes in the courtroom had
been chaos. H. T. Patterson pounded the table and demanded the
state immediately dismiss all charges, and if not, he beseeched the
court to do the job. “In the name of Jefferson and Madison, in the
memory of Marshall and Brandeis, for the reasons blood was spilled
at Gettysburg and Bull Run, Iwo Jima, and Normandy, this man should
be set free without further ado ...”

I was all for skipping the ado.

“
...Let the state move to
right its wrong. Let this man pick up the pieces of his shattered
reputation, and let him do it with dispatch. Let the bells of
equity and justice toll for him. Yea, if liberty be thy name, let
justice be done.”

It was good to hear Patterson preaching
again, his voice hitting the high notes with that Holy Roller
cadence.

The prosecutor pleaded with the judge to
delay a ruling until he had a chance to meet with Ms. Baroso and
determine if her testimony was simply the product of posttraumatic
stress syndrome and whether she could be rehabilitated on
redirect.

Translation: I just got run over by a cement
truck. Give me till morning to count the broken bones.

Pretty fair ad-libbing, I thought. I admire
lawyers who, like captains of sinking ships, refrain from leaping
overboard, but instead appear on deck in their dress whites with
the polished brass buttons. Judge Witherspoon listened stoically,
occasionally banging his gavel at the spectators whose behavior was
worse than New York Jets’ fans at old Shea Stadium.

As the door closed behind me, the judge
declared a recess until nine the next morning, when he expected the
prosecutor to announce whether he wished to proceed. If he did, the
judge broadly hinted, a defense motion for a directed verdict would
be looked upon with favor once the state rested.

“
Mrs. Cimarron,” the judge
said. “You are free to go, but I admonish you against leaving
Pitkin County pending the outcome of tomorrow’s
hearing.”

I didn’t think Jo Jo was leaving town. Not
just yet. I figured she was keeping her brother apprised of each
day’s events. Today would be a hell of a briefing.

I’d love to be there. In fact, I was doing
everything I could to be there.

It took just a few minutes to find the road
where she lost me the day before. I coaxed the rental car around
the turn I had missed, then pulled as far off the road as I could
without sliding into a snowdrift. The branches of a fir tree
weighted with snow hung low and shielded my car from view.
Especially from someone with a lot on her mind.

I didn’t have long to wait.

The Dodge Ram dual-wheel pickup roared past
me and headed up the road. I eased out from under the tree and hung
back, catching sight of the pickup’s taillights as it took the fork
that led up the mountain. Yesterday, I took the wrong turn. Today,
I just followed her. From here, it was easy. Unless she doubled
back, she was headed straight to the top.

I stopped the car along the road at the last
bend, got out and walked the rest of the way, a quarter mile or so.
It was one of those bright, cold, dry winter days, the sun glaring
off the snow, the temperature in the high twenties.

There was a chicken-wire
fence around the property. Fastened to an iron gate with an
unlocked rusty latch were two signs, your standard hardware
store
no trespassing
and a piece of rotting wood crudely painted
danger, blasting
, which
was older than Granny.

I opened the latch and walked through the
gate. The pickup was parked a hundred yards up the hill. Next to it
was a Jeep Wrangler with a canvas top. Narrow-gauge railway tracks
emerged from a tunnel cut into the rock and led to a small building
of unpainted wood with a tin roof. The building had a wooden chute
that emptied into a railway car twenty feet below. Other sheds in
various states of disrepair sagged into snow-covered piles of dirt
and debris. An elevator cage of rusted iron stood idle and filled
with snow. All around the site, like the fossils of dinosaurs, the
evidence of extinction. A fallen building of charred timbers,
rusted boilers and compressors, winches and furnaces. I pictured
the scene a century ago, the sky blackened with fires from sawmills
and smelters. I thought of Cimarron’s great-grandfather and the
other drillers and muckers, a mountainside crawling with
grim-faced, wiry men whose hands would never scrub clean.

The entrance to the tunnel
was framed by three wooden timbers, two vertical, and one
horizontal connecting at the top. Rusty nails held a metal sign to
the horizontal timber.
Silver Queen,
Tunnel No. 3, 1888.

I expected to see the tracks of a woman’s
stylish high-heeled boots in the snow, but the imprints were of
wide, plebeian work boots. The tracks went from Jo Jo Baroso’s
pickup straight into the tunnel. Okay, she had changed shoes.
Always prepared, that Jo Jo. It wouldn’t surprise me if she had a
hard hat, a flashlight, and a pickax, too.

I headed into the mine. Bare electric light
bulbs were strung along the rocky ceiling, laced to old timbers.
Canvas air chutes ran along the walls. The bulbs were lighted, and
even after the tunnel took a gentle, rounded turn to the right,
cutting off light from the entrance, visibility was fine. It was
warmer inside, probably in the fifties, but dank. Water dripped
down walls of rock stained purple and yellow from whatever minerals
had been locked inside by volcanic explosions a thousand millennia
ago.

I had walked maybe half a mile when the
tunnel opened into a cavern, a ballroom-sized chamber with
fifty-foot ceilings. Inside, where I imagined a thick, rich vein of
silver was found, now were only empty ore carts and wooden crates
that may have once held dynamite or tools. On the ground, a broken
bottle of thick, brown glass, the remnants of a miner’s beer break.
I took off my topcoat and tossed it into one of the ore carts and
kept going. At one end of the chamber, there was a ladder of steps
cut into the mountain itself. It only went one way, down.

I started the descent,
slowly at first, the way lit by the overhead bulbs. Timbers stained
black from thousands of hands provided a railing. Perhaps fifty
feet below, another horizontal tunnel connected with the downward
shaft. I kept going. Another tunnel connection, then another.
Deeper still, I paused and listened. The steady
thumpeta-thumpeta
of machinery, a
pump maybe. It came from below. I descended farther, counting
eleven tunnels at different intervals before running out of ladder
in a narrow, darkened tunnel. I paused on the last step. No lights
here, but the sound of the machinery was louder. A steady whirring
and a combustion induced
chugging
, joined the
thumpeta-thumpeta
machine.

I took the last step and splashed into a
puddle of icy, black water. At least I thought it was a puddle. I
slogged two steps into the darkness. Then two steps more. It wasn’t
a puddle. More like a river. The floor of the tunnel was covered by
a foot of water. I was sweating, but my feet were freezing.

I had no idea how far I had descended. Five
hundred feet, a thousand? I waited a moment for my eyes to get
adjusted to the light. They didn’t, because there wasn’t any.

I started my way along the wall in the
direction of the sound. I was moving away from the mountain and
back toward the town. If I walked far enough, I’d probably be right
under the courthouse.

Ouch! My forehead cracked hard into an
overhead timber. I’ll bet miners a century ago weren’t six feet
two.

Now, I hunched forward and scuttled along,
my hand trailing over the ragged walls. Ahead of me, a sound of
rushing water, like the rapids on a shallow, rocky stream. I kept
wondering where the sound was coming from until my foot stepped
into space and I fell forward into the torrent. The drop-off was
only two feet or so, but the landing was hard, facedown. I tumbled
ahead, water pouring over me from the ledge I just stepped off.
Soaking and freezing, I got up, spitting out cold, filthy water,
feeling for sensation in my right shoulder. It still had a
stainless steel pin inside, and it didn’t take kindly to
surprises.

I kept going, splashing along until I saw
the light, a yellow glow from an opening at the side of the tunnel.
I cautiously inched ahead. Suddenly, a blinding flash turned the
black water a bright orange, illuminating stalactites overhead—or
stalagmites—who the hell can remember the difference? The flash was
followed by a dull thudding explosion, and a wave of dust rolled
down the tunnel from the direction of the light. Overhead, timbers
creaked and groaned.

With the explosion still bonging in my ears,
I hurried my pace. If I couldn’t hear my splashing, I figured no
one else could, either. In twenty seconds, I was at the opening. It
was a rough rectangle in the limestone walls, perhaps four by six
feet, beginning a few feet off the floor of the tunnel. Three steps
were cut into the rock wall and ended in a ledge, which led
directly through the opening and into another cavern, higher and
drier than the tunnel. From inside, voices echoed off the walls. I
crept closer.