Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (8 page)

He smiled, stifled a yawn with a dainty
fist, and came up to me. I didn’t know what he wanted, but I
figured it out after a second. I gave him a good-night hug, then on
impulse, scooped him into my arms. We went up the stairs that way,
his legs curled around me, and I dropped him into bed and pulled up
the sheet to his chin.

“
Good night,
Kip.”

“
Good night, Uncle Jake,”
he said, his eyes half closed, his face a tranquil reflection of
childlike innocence.

***

I took Douglas Road up to Grand Avenue, hung
a right and headed into downtown Coconut Grove. To avoid the teeny
boppers cruising Cocowalk on a Sunday night, I swung onto Oak and
then by Tigertail going north. I turned left on Seventeenth Avenue,
picked up I-95 to hook up with the MacArthur Causeway and drove
east across the bay to Miami Beach. I found a parking spot next to
a Dumpster behind a sushi bar and walked to the coral rock wall
that runs along the east side of Ocean Drive.

A three-quarter moon was hanging above the
ocean, spreading a creamy glow across the black water. A warm
breeze from the southeast swirled sand across the sidewalk and into
the street. Lovers of every persuasion strolled by the sidewalk
cafes across the street, and the usual collection of models,
photographers, would-be actors, wannabe trendies, and assorted
semi-hipsters crowded the sidewalk, pausing long enough to be ogled
by patrons sipping decaf cappuccino under Campari umbrellas. This
season’s color seemed to be black. Billowing black silk pants,
square-cut black jackets with shoulder pads over white T-shirts.
And those were the men. The women wore black minis and black
fishnet stockings.

As is my custom, I was on time. It is a
harmless obsession. I don’t like to be kept waiting, and it’s only
fair to return the favor. So I sat on the low wall, watching the
parade of characters go by on foot, in limos, on choppers, and
occasionally on Rollerblades. I thought about Jo Jo and Blinky, the
beauty and the bullshit artist. In my life, there had been women
before Jo Jo, and women after her, but she was unique. Always
pushing me. Reach high, be the best. She reminded me of a
recruiting pitch for the Army.

I had cared for her, but I went on without
looking back. I’m not proud of that, but it’s the way I am.
Introspection is not my strong suit. I am an ox, head down, plowing
ahead to newer, if not greener, pastures. So when I am forced to
revisit my past, I am confused. I do not see the present clearly
because the past is still misty. I have not resolved old issues.
Hell, I didn’t even know they were issues at the time.

Now I waited for Blinky. If I smoked, which
I don’t, I would have struck a match. If I drank, which I do, I
would have strolled across the street and sat at the News Cafe,
watching for Blinky at the wall. So I did, at an outdoor table,
ordering a Grolsch, the fine Dutch beer, in the sixteen-ounce
bottle with the porcelain top.

As it turned out, I had a three-Grolsch
wait, and still no Blinky. I found a pay phone and called his
apartment. “Hello, this is Baroso Enterprises, Inc. Please leave a
message at the tone, and…”

It was nearly eleven, so I said to hell with
it and walked back to my car, which still had its aerial, hubcaps,
and AM radio intact. It occurred to me that Blinky might have
gotten mixed up. Ever since the trial, he had been in a daze. He
might be at my house, probably waiting on the front porch, cursing
me. Hitting seventy on the brief stretch of the interstate, I was
back on Kumquat Street in the Grove in fourteen minutes.

I parked under the
chinaberry tree, same as always. The moon was higher in the sky
now, the night warm and muggy, no trace of an oceanfront breeze
here. I listened for the warbling of my mockingbird. He is
my
bird the way the
raccoon who knocks over my garbage cans is my raccoon. But the
mocker usually is perched in my marlberry bush, singing nighttime
songs.
Mimus polyglottos,
Doc Riggs calls him, mimic of many tongues. He’s
not much to look at, sort of a battleship gray with white wing
patches, but like the bobwhite, nighthawk, and whippoorwill, he’s
got a voice.

As I approached the front
porch, I heard a sound from the hibiscus hedge, or maybe I sensed
movement there. It could have been a variety of nighttime animals,
including
Peifidus
nocturnus
, who might be waiting to mug an
honest citizen such as myself. I’m as brave as the next guy, and I
don’t mind a fair fight, but a punk kid with a semiautomatic could
tattoo a ring around my heart before I got off a punch, so I
hurried to the front door.

The sound was barely more than a squeak.
“Uncle Jake.”

I turned and ran back to the hedge. Huddled
in the dirt, hidden by leaves and floppy red flowers was the boy in
the Dolphins jersey. I reached down to him, and he crawled into my
arms. “Uncle Jake, you’re home.”

He was crying, his tears tracking down grimy
cheeks.

I was stunned. “What the hell’s going
on?”

He pointed toward the house, his hand
shaking. “I woke up and heard voices downstairs. Then, somebody
came up the steps. Slow, like he was listening for something. I got
so scared, I crawled under the bed. Somebody opened my door, looked
in, and closed it. Then he went into your bedroom. I heard sounds
in there, but I just stayed under the bed. He went downstairs
again, and I heard voices, real soft, then a noise like furniture
being moved. Uncle Jake, I was so scared ...”

I squeezed him in my arms. “Kip, I’m sorry.
I shouldn’t have left you. I’ll never do it again, but you were
dreaming, that’s all. No one was in the house. You’ve seen too many
of those movies where maniacs with razors go after the kids.”

He was shaking his head. “Honest, Uncle
Jake. You gotta believe me. After a while, I heard the front door
close, so I sneaked to the stairs. Then I saw it. Even though it
was dark, I knew what it was.”

“
What?”

Again, he pointed at the house with a shaky
hand. “I didn’t want to go out through the front. I just couldn’t
go into the room, so I ran back to my bedroom, climbed out the
window, and crossed the roof to the tree in back.”

“
You came down the tree?
Why?”

He started crying again.

“
Hey, Kip. Everything’s
okay. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll go in the house
together.”

He shook his head and squeezed me
tighter.

“
Okay, Kippers, I’ll go in.
Will you wait for me?”

He nodded and wiped his nose on the sleeve
of my old jersey. I carried him to the car and put him in the front
seat. He sat there, rocking back and forth, hugging his knees. I
went back to the porch, hit the front door with a solid shoulder
and barged in. Moonlight slanted through the windows and lit the
room in ashen grays. It was silent, except for the
whompeta-whompeta of the ceiling fan. Which seemed to whomp slower
than usual.

I saw it then, or sensed it.

A shadow, a shape, a movement.

I looked up. A dark silhouette flew just
over my head.

A whirling, twirling, unidentifiable
mass.

My first impression was that someone had
leapt off the landing of the stairs at me, like a cowboy in a
Western. I ducked and head-rolled on the old pine floor, coming up
in a crouch, adrenaline pumping, knees bent, legs spread, fists
clenched.

My second impression was different. There
were two of us in the room, all right, but one of us was dead.

***

He was suspended from the ceiling fan and
looked like one of those circus performers on the high rings,
spinning dizzying circles. The body swung at a forty-five-degree
angle from the ceiling, circling above me in endless, hypnotic
motion. The legs were straight out, the arms flung back from the
centrifugal force. In the moonlight, the shadow danced crazily
across the floor and up the wall.

A jumble of emotions. On South Beach, I had
the strange sensation that something was wrong. Blinky was usually
late, but he always shows. Tonight he had been afraid of something,
someone. What, who?

I felt my heart beating and beating hard. I
tried to calm myself down and think. What to do first? Cut him
down, call the police, take care of Kip? They don’t train you for
this stuff, not in three-a-day practices in August, and not in
night law school in September.

Now my mind was tearing along at a speed I
couldn’t control. Flashes of overlapping thoughts and unanswered
questions kept jolting me with each spin of the body. Who killed
Blinky Baroso and why, and had the killer been looking for me? I
said a silent prayer of thanks that Kip was unhurt.

I duck-walked out from under the body and
got to the wall, reaching for the light switch. Overhead, three
spots flashed on. I squinted through the glare and saw how he was
fastened to the motor housing of the fan. What looked like a bolt
of colorful silk cloth was digging into his neck and tied to
something, a wire coat hanger maybe, that was attached to the
fan.

In the brightness, I could see his eyes were
bulging open, and his tongue, black and swollen, stuck out the side
of his mouth. And I could see something else, too.

It wasn’t Blinky Baroso.

Chapter 6

My Alibi

I called Charlie Riggs
first, getting a recording that informed me he had gone fishing,
telling all his friends, “
Vive
valeque.”
I should have figured he was
still in the Keys. Granny never complained when I headed north
early, leaving Charlie behind to keep her company. I think it was
Father Andrew Greeley, with the aid of the Gallup Poll, who
determined that couples in their sixties have the best sex.
Something to look forward to.

Granny answered on the second ring, and I
pictured her rolling over in bed and handing the phone to my old
friend. Charlie said he’d get here in an hour-fifteen if his old
Chew pickup didn’t throw a rod.

Next, I called Miami Homicide where I am
known, but not necessarily liked. A woman with a faint Cuban accent
took down the information, calmly checking the address three times,
and politely asking me not to leave the premises. From her tone,
she might have been taking an order for a pizza with anchovies, but
that’s the way cops act, particularly in a city where homicides are
as plentiful as mosquitoes. Next I called Abe Socolow at home,
figuring if I hadn’t, the cops would have, and Abe’s the kind of
guy who remembers the small stuff.

At first, I tried not to touch anything,
having been educated by television that I might foul up the crime
scene with my fingerprints. Once every hundred years or so, a crime
will be solved by finding an unknown assailant’s fingerprints at
the scene. Usually, fingerprints merely corroborate what everyone
already knows: Three witnesses in the liquor store identify the
gunman, and a fingerprint specialist confirms his prints are on the
gun dropped at the scene.

Then, I remembered Kip was still in the car.
I didn’t want him to see the body a second time, so I hit the
switch for the fan, went into the kitchen, hauled out a high stool,
and climbed up until I was looking straight into the face of a dead
man. A thin copper wire circled his neck and was looped through the
motor housing of the fan. But that’s not what killed him. The
bright splash of cloth was an imported silk tie knotted by someone
unfamiliar with the double Windsor. The knot dug deeply into the
neck, just below the Adam’s apple.

The tie was a palette of blues and reds and
would have looked swell with a dark suit and a white oxford cloth
shirt. In fact, it always looked swell just that way.

I should know. It was my tie.

I climbed down and went into the kitchen
where I found a knife I use for cleaning fish. Up again, and this
time, I hoisted the body with one hand placed under his chin and
sawed through the copper wire. He dropped like a tree, banging the
floor. I got down, covered the body with an old beach towel, and
went out to the car.

I hustled Kip inside, told
him he had been right, apologized for doubting him, and said
everything would be okay, the cops would be here soon. I turned on
the TV to distract him from the lump in the corner of the room, but
in what must have been a first, he wasn’t interested. It took about
ninety seconds, but he wasn’t scared anymore. He began babbling
excitedly, asking questions, wanting to help, telling me how
totally awesome and off-the-Richter it was to have a murder in the
house, and did it happen often, and was somebody trying to set me
up, like Gene Hackman did to Kevin Costner in
No Way Out
, which was a remake
of
The Big Clock
with Charles Laughton and Ray Milland, in case I didn’t know,
which I didn’t. He asked if we could keep the body a while, like
the boys did in Weekend at Bernie’s. I told him to calm down, but
he kept chattering away, and I finally figured that it wasn’t quite
real to him. Just another movie.

I was trying to concentrate, to figure it
out, but Kip was carrying on about murder plots, so I led him to
the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and popped the porcelain top
on a sixteen-ounce Grolsch. I found two glasses that didn’t appear
to carry contagious diseases and poured half into one and half into
the other.

“
How ‘bout a beer, Kip?” I
asked, handing him a glass.

“
Wow, that’s completely
broly of you, Uncle Jake,” Kip said, which I took as well-deserved
praise of my child-rearing skills.