Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (5 page)

Abe Socolow packed his briefcase, stopped by
the defense table, gave me a friendly pop on the shoulder, and
said, “Go figure, huh, Jake?” That was as close to a compliment as
I would get.

“
I figure it was a
compromise,” I told him. “Some wanted to acquit them both, some
wanted to convict them both. You made Hornback look bad on cross,
and they remembered that. Blinky never testified, so the lingering
image was Hornback fidgeting on the stand. Just reinforces my
long-standing rule against letting defendants testify.”

Socolow smiled grimly. “You
mean letting
guilty
defendants testify.”

“
Let’s just say I don’t
want a client to testify if he’s subject to impeachment on
cross.”

“
You got a way with words,”
Socolow said, hoisting his briefcase toward the door.

The rest of us sat there, the four horsemen
of the defense, H. T. Patterson and his unhappy client, Blinky
Baroso and little old me.

“
I don’t believe this
shit.” It was Hornback, his handsome face flushed. He got to his
feet and was leaning over Blinky. “You owe me, man. You coulda
gotten me off if you’d pleaded out.

“
Kyle, Kyle baby,” Blinky
said, in the same soothing voice I imagined he used when selling
swampland to rubes from the Midwest. “You know I couldn’t do that.
I’m on probation. I woulda done time.”

It was true. Two years ago, Blinky was
convicted in the Dumpster Diver scam. Police found him up to his
elbows in trash behind a rental car agency near the airport. One
good dive, and he could come up with a dozen discarded rental
contracts complete with credit card numbers. Then he’d order
stereos, televisions, and battery-powered dildos from home shopping
networks.

Hornback raised his voice. “Yeah, well maybe
you’ll still do time if I cut a deal.” He swung to face his lawyer.
“How ‘bout it, Mr. Patterson? You think the prosecutor still wants
to talk?”

H.T. placed a calming hand on his client’s
arm. “I, too, am confounded and confused. However, now is not the
time to discuss such weighty matters. After a good night’s sleep,
we’ll pursue every avenue, explore every venue ...”

“
Climb every mountain,” I
added, helpfully.

“
It’ll be okay, Kyle,”
Blinky said. “I’ll take responsibility.”

Hornback snorted a mirthless laugh. “Yeah,
will you do my time?”

“
Kyle, we stand together.
That was the plan.”

“
Me getting convicted was
not the plan. You said we’d both be acquitted or only you would be
convicted. You never said nothing about this.”

Blinky shrugged. “I didn’t think it would
turn out this way. Did you, Counselor?”

I shook my head. “You can never tell with a
jury.”

“
Well, I can tell you one
thing,” Kyle Hornback said, his face hardening. “I get time, I’ve
got some things to say to the state attorney. I got stories to
tell. I got—”

“
Kyle, that’s enough!”
Blinky tried to look tough. It didn’t work.

“
I’ll tell them about the
tunnels in the mountains and what’s in them, and what’s not,”
Hornback said, his voice rising. “You sold stock across state
lines, so it’s federal. They’ll send you to Marion where some hard
cases will pass you around like a volleyball.”

“
It’s a perfectly
legitimate venture, and you don’t know anything about it,” Blinky
announced with such conviction and a flapping of eyelashes I was
sure he told two lies in one sentence.

“
I see there’s no honor
among thieves,” Josefina Jovita Baroso said, sneaking up behind us,
the same way she did in the Gaslight. She turned to me. “I suppose
I should congratulate you, Jake. You hoodwinked the jury, so they
convicted the lesser of two evils. That is the hallmark of the
defense lawyer, is it not, to obfuscate the facts until the jury
can only guess?”

“
Funny, I thought my job
was to force the state to prove its case. Abe didn’t do it, so your
brother goes free. That’s the way the game is played.”

“
That’s what it is to you,
isn’t it, a game?”

“
Sure, it’s got rules, like
any other game. You can’t bang into the receiver when the ball’s in
the air. You can’t admit hearsay, even if it’s the
truth.”

“
The rules are intended to
do justice, not thwart it.”

“
Yeah, well justice doesn’t
enjoy an intimate relationship with the law, and you damn well know
it.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she lowered her
voice. “I didn’t realize it before, but you’re just like all the
rest of them.”

“
Them?”

“
Silver-tongued shysters
who can rationalize their every act. It must come with the
territory, with the briefcase full of tricks and the amusing
stories about bamboozling judges and juries.”

“
Give me a break, Josie.
Some of us just plod along, doing our jobs. We all can’t be as
saintly as you.”

Josefina Jovita Baroso turned on her heel
and stormed out. I started to say something, but Blinky was
stirring next to me. “Let her go. You can’t win an argument with
her.”

I sat there a moment while Patterson and his
client headed out of the courtroom. As he got to the door, Kyle
Hornback shot us a look over his shoulder. “I’m warning you,
Baroso. You’ve got to make good to me.”

Patterson took his client by the arm and
hustled him into the corridor, leaving just Blinky and me, unless
you count the portraits of long-deceased judges with fine crops of
chin whiskers.

“
He’s full of shit,” Blinky
said. “Don’t worry about anything, Jake.”

“
Me? Why should I
worry.
You’re
the
one he’s threatening.”

“
He’s a con man. I ought to
know. I taught him the trade.”

I packed my trial bag, and Blinky started
down the aisle without waiting for me. “Well, I guess that’s it,
Jake,” he called back to me. “Thanks for a great job.”

“
There’s one more thing,” I
said.

Blinky stopped by the door, poking his head
back at me, resembling a rabbit sniffing the air for danger.
“What’s that, Jake?”

“
There’s the matter of the
fee.”

Chapter 4

Sweets and
Poisons

We were fishing in the saltwater flats off
Key Largo, baking in the heat of a cloudless, still June morning.
More accurately, Granny Lassiter was fishing, Doc Charlie Riggs was
reminiscing, a skinny, towheaded kid whose name I didn’t catch was
pouting, and I was poling the skiff through the shallow water,
simultaneously working up a sweat, a headache, and a sunburn.

“
Jake, you look a tad green
around the gills,” Granny said. “You’re not coming down with the
grippe, are you?”

I grunted a negative response, and Granny
announced, “Boy always took ill at the worst times. Made me miss a
billfish tournament once when he caught the flu.”

“
I was only eight, Granny.
I didn’t do it on purpose.”

Charlie Riggs cleared his throat. “Have I
told you two about the case of the poisoned nasal spray?”

“
Not recently,” I
said.

“
Oh hush up, Jake,” Granny
admonished me. “I’d rather listen to Doc’s yarns than hear about
criminals you’ve helped keep on the streets.”

Ouch. Why’s everyone on my case these days?
Now there were two of us pouting.

Charlie gnawed on a cold meerschaum pipe,
waiting for a break in the Lassiter family banter. He had been
county coroner for twenty-five years, and in retirement, his
interests had expanded from corpses to virtually every bit of
knowledge worth knowing and a lot that wasn’t. Doc Riggs was a
short, bandy legged, bushy-bearded cherub with bright brown eyes
behind eyeglasses that were slightly cockeyed, probably because one
of the hinges was held together with a bent fishhook where a screw
had long since dropped out. Charlie was wearing green work pants
cut off at the knees, an army camouflage T-shirt, and a Florida
Marlins cap. His nose was smeared with gooey, white sun block.

“
C’mon, Charlie, I was only
kidding. What’s your story about?’’

Charlie shot me a look over
his shoulder. “The moral might have been summed up by Horace when
he wrote ‘
Ira furor brevis
est
.’”

“
Horace had such a way with
words,” I agreed.

‘
Anger is brief madness,’
“Charlie translated. “Two biologists at a research laboratory were
bitter rivals, and when one received a government grant and the
other did not, professional jealousy erupted into—”

“
Poisoned nasal spray?” I
asked, digging the pole into the shallow water, and pushing us
silently across the flats.

“
Precisely. One biologist
injected beta-propiolactone into the spray the other used for his
sinusitis. The drug is quite useful in sterilizing body parts prior
to transplant, but I wouldn’t recommend ingesting it. We ran a
day’s worth of tests on the stuff before we could even identify it
over at the old morgue. You remember that place, Jake?”

“
Sure. That’s before the
county built you the Taj Mahal on Bob Hope Road.” It was true.
Those unfortunate victims of shoot-outs and knife fights—most of
whom had lived in squalor—spent a few posthumous days in a splendid
brick building with the ambience of a decent hotel. “The nasal
spray, Charlie. Did it kill the rival?”

“
Dei gratia,
by the grace of God, no. The chemical in the
nasal spray changed the properties of the beta-propiolactone. Stung
like the devil but didn’t cause permanent damage. The assailant, it
turns out, had suffered a mental breakdown, and was given a
suspended sentence with intensive psychiatric therapy.”

“
I like that story, Doc,”
Granny said. “For once, nobody got killed, and justice was
done.”

“
He must have made it up,”
I suggested.

Doc Riggs harrumphed at me, baited a hook
for himself, and launched into a lengthy and graphic description of
determining time of death by the extent of larvae growth in the
corpse. The story seemed to make Granny hungry, because she grabbed
a strand of Jamaican jerk chicken from a waterproof bag.

I didn’t spend as much time with Granny as I
used to, and now I studied her a moment. She was a tough old bird
in khaki shorts, an “Eat ‘em Raw” T-shirt from a Key West oyster
bar, and a canvas hat. Her legs and bare feet were tanned the color
of mahogany bark and were just as soft. As she listened to Doc
Riggs spin his tales, Granny watched the water, squinting into the
morning sun, occasionally giving me directions by pointing her
fishing rod in a direction her instincts or her failing eyesight
dictated. She let fly a cast, grimaced, and allowed the line to
drift in the placid water. “You gotta lay the hay down where the
goats can git it. Jake, you see the tails of any bonefish
a-wiggling?”

“
Only thing I see are
snails dancing across my eyelids,” I said.

“
Too much of Granny’s
moonshine last night,” Doc Riggs told me, as if I didn’t know.
“We’re all liable to be blind by tonight.”

Granny Lassiter wasn’t even my grandmother,
but there was some relationship on my father’s side. Great-aunt or
distant cousin or something. She raised me after my father, a Key
West shrimper, was killed in a barroom brawl, and my mother ran off
to Oklahoma with a roughneck. I called her Granny, and so did
everybody else. Well, nearly everybody else. There was the sailor
in the bar who called her Skunky, a reference to the white streak
that creases her jet-black hair. He only called her that once, a
whack across the ankle from a four-foot tarpon gaff ending the
nickname then and there.

Charlie was going on about how posthumous
stench attracts blowflies. It’s just like an engraved invitation to
colonize a cadaver, I think he said. Granny was still chewing the
jerk chicken, washing it down with beer from the cooler. I kept
poling, watching for fish, occasionally looking at the towheaded
kid Granny had brought along. She was always feeding stray cats and
little boys.

“
How about you, son,” I
asked. “You try any of Granny’s white lightning last
night?”

“
I’m not your son,” the kid
said, matter-of-factly and accurately.

“
And we’re both thankful
for that,” I responded. I am generally able to hold my own in
repartee with eleven-year-olds, though I don’t have much
practice.

“
Kip drank his weight in
Granny’s mango milk shakes,” Charlie said. “Gave him an orange
mustache.”

Kip. That’s right. I’d heard Granny call out
“Kippers” a couple of times, but I thought she was looking for some
salted herring.

“
Mangifera indica,
such a delectable fruit,” Charlie was saying.
“Though it tastes like a cross between a peach and a pineapple, the
mango actually is related to the cashew nut, and heaven help me,
poison ivy. Isn’t that strange, the relationship between a sweet
and a poison?”

“
Reminds me of the women
Jake’s been sniffing around all these years,” Granny said. “Except
for that one who became the lawyer, they were a bunch of Jezebels
in miniskirts.”

“
Non semper ea sunt quae
videntur,”
Charlie said. “Things are not
always what they seem.”