Fool Me Twice

Chapter 10

When corpses are found out of doors undergoing putrefaction,” Doc Charlie Riggs said, sitting erect on the witness stand, “it’s quite common to find insect infestation.

“ But in a funeral home?” I asked.

Doc Riggs leaned toward the jury box. “Should never happen. Never.”

“ So in this case, Dr. Riggs, at an open-casket memorial service

…” I paused for effect just the way they do on TV.

“ Where mourners saw worms crawling out of the eyes of the late Peter Cooper-”

“ Maggots,” Charlie corrected me. “Pupa, too. Some intact, some broken, indicating hatched flies.”

“ Yes, indeed. Maggots. From these maggots crawling out of the eyes of the late Peter Cooper, are you able to form an expert opinion as to the degree of care exercised by the Eternal Rest Funeral Home?”

At the plaintiffs table, from which I had recently risen, my client, Mrs. Brenda Cooper, was sobbing at just the proper decibel level. I always tell my clients that sniffles and whimpers are okay. Wails and shrieks are not, unless I want the jury distracted from the testimony, in which case, caterwauling to the heavens is permitted.

“ Prima facie negligence, no doubt about it,” Doc Riggs announced with authority.

“ On what do you base your conclusion?”

That’s the lawyer’s way of asking “why,” but a lawyer will never use one word when seven will do. Charlie Riggs stroked his beard and looked directly at the jury. “Not just from the maggots, alone. No sir. Maggots can emerge from blowfly eggs just a few hours after death. That wouldn’t be enough to assign negligence to the funeral home. But as I said before, there were pupa shells, and it should take at least a week for the maggots to go through the stages of larval growth to produce newly hatched blowflies. So obviously, there was complete inattention to Mr. Cooper’s body.”

As if on cue, Brenda Cooper’s sobs grew louder.

Charlie didn’t miss a beat. “The eggs would have been clearly visible in his eyes and the corners of his mouth. They sort of look like grated cheese, so I don’t know how the attendants missed them.”

In the jury box, a woman nervously cleared her throat.

“ As I say,” Charlie continued, “ prima facie negligence.”

I sat down and let Charlie take care of himself on cross-examination. No one could do it any better.

I was sipping a Cuban coffee in the Gaslight Lounge down the street from the county courthouse, and Charlie was slurping a double order of rice pudding with cinnamon, having already polished off a three-egg western omelet. Testifying about putrefied corpses always made him hungry.

“ What’s bothering you?” he asked.

“ Besides being a murder suspect, not much, unless you count having my name linked to one of Blinky Baroso’s schemes, and being forced to revisit my past courtesy of his sister.”

“ Josefina,” Charlie said. “A splendid young woman, though a tad tightly wound, I always thought.”

“ She says I had a dysfunctional upbringing, what with you and Granny as my role models.”

“ Do you believe it?”

“ I don’t know, Charlie. Granny always told me to choose right over wrong, and you taught me how to tell one from the other. If I’ve failed, it’s not Granny’s fault or yours.”

“ For what it’s worth, we don’t think you’ve failed. As for your other problems, I don’t believe for one minute that you killed Kyle Hornback, and neither does Abe Socolow. He’s just trying to pressure you into bringing Baroso in.”

“ Yeah, maybe, but it’s no fun.” I looked at my watch. “I gotta go. While you were mesmerizing the jury, Blinky left a message with Cindy that he had something that would blow the Hornback case wide open.”

Charlie used his napkin to pry a grain of rice from his beard. “Do you believe him?”

“ What a strange question. Why else would he-”

“ Your client is a con man, is he not?”

“ Yeah. To the world in general.”

“ Mundus vult decipi. The world wants to be deceived. But what about you, Jake?”

I put the top down on the old convertible and swung onto I-9S from the downtown ramp. I passed over the poinciana trees on South Miami Avenue, then swung off the Twenty-fifth Road exit to the Rickenbacker Causeway. Blinky had told me to meet him on Virginia Key, a secluded beach near the Seaquarium on the way to Key Biscayne.

Virginia Key is really just a spit of sand with some pine trees for shade. Because the beach faces due east and there’s a reef about a mile offshore to cut down the rollers, it’s a great place for windsurfing. To the north is Fisher Island, million-dollar condos surrounded by a moat to keep out the riffraff. Nearby is Government Cut where the cruise ships head toward open water. To the east is the Gulf Stream, Bimini, and the wide expanse of the Atlantic. To the south is Bear Cut, an open channel through the causeway, and to the west is the city sewage plant. That’s right. The city fathers chose an island of unspoiled beauty on which to lace the salt-laden wind with the trenchant scent of human waste. In a way I can’t fully explain, Virginia Key seems a metaphor for Miami.

There was a rusted-out Jeep Cherokee up to its hubcaps in the sand. Nearby, an Isuzu Trooper with roof racks and a fine collection of custom-made sailboards was being unloaded by two lean, muscular guys in their twenties. On the water, half a dozen boardsailors were jumping the chop, headed on a broad reach in about eighteen knots of northeasterly breeze. Perfect lines of waves were breaking on the reef, what surfers call “corduroy to the horizon.”

I spotted Blinky’s green Range Rover parked in the shade about fifty yards from the beach. Long needles, green and fragrant, floated into my convertible from the candles of a slash pine tree.

I got out of the car, leaned on the fender and watched the boardsailors. Even from here, I could hear the sails crackling in the wind. Blinky wasn’t around.

I waited five, maybe six, minutes.

Still no Blinky.

Maybe he was collecting pinecones or trying to sell stock in a gold mine to some beach bums.

I looked back at the water, relaxing.

Not thinking anything was wrong.

Why should I?

The ringing phone jarred me. It sounded so out of place here that for a moment I didn’t know what it was. It was coming from Blinky’s Range Rover. I hustled over and found the driver’s door unlocked. Inside, on the passenger’s side of the front seat, a cellular phone was ringing, its LCD display reading “CALL” with a blinking insistence.

But I was looking at something else.

A deep black-red stain on the upholstery on the driver’s side.

About the size of a salad plate. Still wet.

A spiderweb crack in the front windshield.

But no Blinky.

And still the phone rang and blinked at me. I picked it up and groped for the right button. “Hello,” I said, my voice strained.

“ Who is this?” A man’s voice, strangely familiar.

“ Blinky? Is that you?”

“ No. Who’s this?”

It was coming to me. I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say a word.

“ Jake,” he said. “Jake Lassiter? What the fuck are you-”

But I had hung up.

Now, why did I do that? Why did I feel guilty about being there just now, and why was I wiping my fingerprints off the telephone? I hadn’t killed anyone. No one was even dead, right. I mean there wasn’t a body. Blinky would be coming out of the woods in a minute.

C’mon, Blinky. Where the hell are you?

I touched the red stain. Still wet. I wiped my hand on the seat but only managed to smear the blood. I opened the glove compartment. There was nothing there, not even gloves.

I was thinking about getting the hell out of there when another noise startled me.

The overlapping whine of sirens. My ass was half out of the Range Rover when three police cars swerved onto the beach, spitting up sand, lights whirling. As they skidded to impressive, cop-style stops, I could no longer see the bright sails or hear the crackling of the wind.

It took Abe Socolow twenty minutes to get there. By that time, a crime scene van was parked in the shade, and a pot-bellied cop was taking plaster impressions of the Range Rover’s tires. When he finished, he hauled his little black bag into the van and gathered blood samples, dusted for prints, and used tweezers and a tiny whisk broom looking for who knows what. He had already been through my car, with my consent, since I didn’t feel like waiting around for them to bring a warrant. Two uniformed cops were trying to interview the boardsailors, most of whom didn’t want to leave the water. When the wind is up, neither shark sightings nor murder scenes will get hardcore boardheads to shore.

I sat under a pine tree whose branches swayed gently in the wind. Three cops stood around me asking questions I wouldn’t answer if I could, but they parted when his eminence, the prosecutor, pulled up in his state-owned four-door Chrysler.

“ Where the hell is he?” Abe Socolow asked.

I stayed sitting, my back against a tree. Abe looked down at me, his courtroom pallor giving him a sickly look in the open air. “Who?” I answered.

“ Don’t jerk me around, Jake. Your sleazy client.”

“ Which one?” I asked, thinking we’d played this scene before, maybe twice.

“ I’m losing patience with you. What were you doing here?”

“ Waiting for Baroso, or maybe Godot.”

“ What were you doing in his car?”

I wanted to stand up so I could look down at Socolow who now towered over me, but I sat still, my arms across my knees. I was pulling pine needles off a branch, one by one, a child’s refrain popping into my head. She loves me, she loves me not. “Aren’t you supposed to advise me of my right to counsel and even provide one if I can’t pay the freight, which I can’t, if it’s someone who charges my rates?”

“ Why’d you hang up the phone, Jake? You knew it was me on the other end, didn’t you? Why’d you do something stupid like that?”

Two could play this game. “Why were you calling here?” I asked.

“ My secretary got an anonymous call, male voice she didn’t recognize, giving her the number and saying for me to call if I wanted to break the Hornback case.”

“ Me, too. I mean, Cindy got a call from Blinky, at least she thought it was Blinky, telling me to come out here.”

Socolow regarded me skeptically. “Did she now?”

“ Call her, find out.” Socolow was giving me a look that was supposed to make me break down and confess to all manner of felonies and misdemeanors. “Don’t you see, Abe, someone’s setting me up? Someone wanted me out here to make it look like I killed Blinky.”

Socolow smiled his gotcha smile. “Who said anything about Blinky being killed?”

“ Ah c’mon, Abe, don’t play cop games with me.”

“ I’m not playing, Jake. I’m dead serious. You know anything about a corpse you want to tell us?”

He looked in the direction of the woods. My mind flashed a picture of Blinky’s body half covered by branches, a handful of my business cards clutched in a death grip.

“ Like I said before, I came here to meet Blinky. I stood around maybe ten minutes. The phone rang. I went to answer it, saw the blood, heard your voice, froze, and hung up. I don’t know why, I just did it.”

“ Uh-huh.”

“ It’s the truth. Look, Blinky’s been skulking around because he’s afraid someone’s trying to kill him. Maybe he was right, but that someone wasn’t me.”

“ Uh-huh.”

“ C’mon, Abe, you can smell a setup. Somebody wanted me out here. Somebody called the cops, somebody called you. Can’t you see what’s going on? I don’t have a motive for killing Blinky.” I was rambling now, doing just what I tell clients not to do. But it was understandable. I had a fool for a client, and my lawyer wasn’t much better. “Maybe Blinky was mugged. Maybe he’s lying in the bushes somewhere. Maybe the blood isn’t even his.”

“ Oh, I’ll bet it is. I’ll give you three to one it’s type O, weasel. As for your motive, it’s tied up with Hornback and whatever you had cooked up with Baroso in the West.”

“ That’s bullshit, Abe. Blinky was using me. How about looking for this Cimarron character?” I stood up and brushed sand from my navy blue suit pants. “Now, if you don’t have any other questions, I think I’ll go home. See you in court, Abe.”

“ As lawyer or defendant?” Abe Socolow asked.