Fool Me Twice

Chapter 15

An owl sat on a fence post eating a skunk.

The owl’s legendary eyesight is apparently keener than its sense of smell.

“ Kip, that’s a great horned owl,” I said, with authority, having been told as much by the fellow at the front desk of the Lazy Q ranch.

“ Yuck. I think I’m gonna blow chunks.”

“ Whoo,” said the owl, between bites. The skunk didn’t say a thing.

I didn’t want to stay at any of the hotels in town. If Abe Socolow thought about it, he probably would figure I followed Jo Jo or Cimarron, or both. So the Hotel Jerome, the Little Nell, and the Ritz-Carlton were out, it being damn near impossible to check into a decent hotel under a phony name these days. Having to surrender your credit card takes care of that.

I hate credit cards. I hate leaving a trail of where I’ve been, what I’ve eaten, how I’ve shopped. A credit history these days is a life story. Where would divorce lawyers and other snoops be without the computer printouts of hotel rooms, jewelry stores, and weekend flights to Nassau when the business meeting was in Tampa? Government at every level, companies that employ you and companies that choose not to, every school you’ve attended, and every liquor store you’ve frequented maintain a cradle-to-grave digital trail of facts and figures about you. The data-some mundane, some striking at the core of intimate privacy-is never discarded and never fades into yellow clippings. Ask not for whom the computer chimes. It chimes for thee.

I chose a ranch located just off Maroon Creek Road outside Aspen. It had nine wooden cottages that were a tad too primitive even to be called rustic. My skiing buddies and I had stayed here once after we’d been thrown out of an Aspen condo complex for staging diving contests into the swimming pool.

In January.

The pool was filled with five feet of powdery snow, and nobody got hurt, but the building manager was screaming about his insurance rates until I dragged him up the three-meter board and tossed him in. His belly flop sounded like a whale breaching.

The lodge of the Lazy Q was an A-frame made of logs with a Ben Franklin stove, a moth-eaten bearskin rug, and what I took to be the antlered head of a deer on the knotty pine wall, but it could have been an elk or an orangutan for all I knew.

Behind the counter was a skinny clerk in faded jeans, scuffed boots, greasy hair with long sideburns, and a cigarette jammed into the corner of his mouth.

“ Dork thinks he’s Harry Dean Stanton,” Kip whispered to me.

“ Hush.” I shooed the kid away, and he wandered around the one-room lodge, pausing in front of a wall calendar featuring cowgirls wearing nothing but boots and hats. When he was done with July, he studied August and September, too.

The clerk said his name was Rusty or maybe Dusty. He handed over a key to number seven and told me about the great horned owl that called the fence post home.

“ Got a golden eagle, too, in the blue spruce trees out back. Come daylight, you’ll get a gander at him if you want. Got a set of talons could tear your head off. Son of a gun dives after mice. Clocked that sucker with a radar gun at a hundred fifty miles an hour in his dive. Can you beat that?”

“ Not on my best day,” I said.

“ Got a couple little falcons out there, too. Called kestrels around here. They’ll eat whatever the eagle misses. Raptors, that’s what the fellow called them. Birds of prey, flesh eaters.” He studied me a moment. “Will you be wanting binoculars, or you got your own?”

I didn’t know what he meant.

“ We got people come out here to ride the horses, some to see the birds. Which is it with you, Mr. Lassiter?”

I might have been bleary-eyed and muscle-cramped from the trip. I might have had jet lag and a sour stomach, but I knew the answer. “The raptors,” I said. “I came for the birds of prey.”

“ I’m ow-dee,” Kip said.

“ Huh?”

“ Ow-dee, like outta here.” Kip gestured around the small cottage. “What’s missing from this picture?”

I looked around. Two single beds whose springs had sprung. A nightstand with a two-bulb reading lamp. A couple of ersatz Frederic Remington prints of cowboys busting broncos and branding steers. A porcelain sink stained orangish-brown under the faucet, a shower and toilet tucked behind a partition.

“ I don’t know, Kip. I’m going to sleep.”

“ A TV! Uncle Jake, there’s no TV!”

I was already peeled down to my Jockey shorts and was stripping a paper-thin brown blanket off the bed. “We’ve had enough entertainment for one day. Lights out, Kip. Go to bed.”

“ Without a TV! Without dinner! I’m hungry, Uncle Jake. We haven’t eaten anything since the pork rinds and root beer at the gas station.”

“ There’s a machine with peanut butter crackers at the lodge. If that’s not enough, ask the horned owl to share his dinner with you.”

He said something to me, probably some eleven-year-old sassified backtalk, but I was falling toward the squashed pillow, already drifting off to dreams of mice and falcons, wondering which I was.

The Pitkin County Courthouse is a hundred-year-old red-brick building that sits formidably on Main Street. Courthouse architecture is intended to represent strength and permanence and a certain majesty of the law that mortar and stone can convey better than the weak-willed Homo sapiens who ply their trade therein. This one was a solid building that would be considered squat, if not for a faintly baroque tower that might have been the battlement of a castle. The American and Colorado flags flew atop the tower, crackling in the early-morning breeze.

Rosebushes crept up a knee-high iron fence that surrounded the building, and spruce and aspen trees provided a measure of shade. On the lawn was the obligatory statue honoring local lads who died in various wars, and above the entrance was Lady Justice.

Inside were plaques naming 4-H champions, old black-and-white photos of cowboys, miners, and farmers at work. The local police and county sheriff s offices were in the basement, the county treasurer, the county commission, and tax assessor’s offices were on the first floor. Hardwood stairs with a polished balustraded railing led to the courtroom on the second floor, but my business wasn’t there.

I went into the tax assessor’s office where a pleasant young woman in jeans and a cotton sweater hoisted a ledger book off a shelf for me. The book had the musty smell of age and the heft of a decent-sized barbell. The walls were decorated with framed deeds from the 1800s, plat maps, and the other official memorabilia of the town.

Before opening the book, I studied a framed map of what looked like the town maybe a hundred years ago. There was the courthouse, just where it is now, at the corner of Main and Galena. But there was something odd.

“ What are those lines going through the streets?” I asked the woman, who sat nearby, using a fountain pen to make entries in another ledger.

She followed my gaze to the framed map. “Mines.”

I read some of the names aloud. “‘Durant, Little Nell, Enterprise, Little Mack, Pride of the Hills, Mollie Gibson, Copperopolis, Esperanza.’ I thought the mines were in the mountains, but some of the tunnels go right under Main Street.”

“ That’s right,” she said. “The shafts generally were up on the slopes of the mountains, but once they got as deep as they were going to go, the tunnels started branching in all directions, like the streets of a town that hasn’t been planned too well. We’ve got some right below the courthouse here. Some old-timers say you could get from Smuggler Mountain over to Aspen Mountain and never see the light of day. Just go down the Mollie Gibson shaft, take the right tunnels and come up the Compromise. The skiers on Aspen Mountain don’t know it, but underneath all that snow are dozens of shafts and tunnels. They’re still there, maybe some filled with water, some with rotting timbers, but there are locals hereabouts who own the claims and are just waiting for the price of silver to rise.”

“ And if it does?”

“ Well, wouldn’t it be interesting if the ski companies could make more money leasing the land to miners, instead of hitting up tourists for fifty bucks a day for the lift?”

While I pondered that, I opened the plat book and thumbed some pages until I found K. C. Cimarron’s parcel, all properly described in the arcane language of metes and bounds and “running thence” of the property rolls. This little side excursion might not have been necessary if I hadn’t botched it with the clerk at the ranch this morning. While Kip was eating some dry corn flakes from the box, I asked the skinny clerk, who must have worked all night, if he’d ever run across my buddy, Kit Carson Cimarron.

“ You a friend of that big ole hoss?” he asked, dropping ashes from his cigarette onto the scarred counter.

His tone was neutral, giving nothing away. Cimarron could have been his cousin or someone he hated, or both.

I put on my amiable, out-of-towner face. “Yeah, I met him back in my skiing days.”

He exhaled a puff of smoke at me. “Never heard of him skiing. Horses, sure. ‘Course, ole Kit needs one about the size of an elephant.”

Ole Kit. Maybe these two guys skinned mules together, whatever the hell mule skinning was.

“ No, I was skiing. He was ranching and, as I recall it, always talking about buried treasure, or some such stuff.”

That loosened up his face a bit. “Yeah, that’s ole Kit. The dreamer, that’s what we call him. Spent a fortune, hell two fortunes, on wild-goose chases. Years ago, I remember the town offered a five-thousand-dollar reward for anyone who could find the Silver Queen. Ole Kit musta spent a hundred thousand hunting for her, but the damn thing hadn’t been seen since the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. I could understand it if ole Kit could profit from it, but hell, she would have gone to the town.”

“ The Silver Queen,” I said. It was more of a question, but what I was really thinking about was the clanging dissonance of Kit Carson Cimarron, the civic booster and historical preservationist, and Kit Carson Cimarron, the coldly efficient mugger and partner of Blinky Baroso.

“ A statue made of silver from the biggest damn nugget ever found,” the clerk continued, “more than a ton, damn near a hundred percent pure. The mining folks got together and made this silver lady, had some gold and diamonds in her too, and some crystals and precious stones for her eyes, the way I hear tell. Anyway, they took her to the World’s Fair, but she disappeared, and ever since, the town wants her back.”

“ Sounds like some wise guys may have melted her down for the metals and stones.”

“ Sure does, and everybody in these parts knows it, except ole Kit. That’s what I mean, a dreamer.”

“ Yeah, that’s him,” I agreed. “Anyway, I don’t see his name in the phone book, and I was wondering where I could find him.”

The clerk squinted at me. If Kip hadn’t been scarfing down a second box of corn flakes, he would have said ole Rusty / Dusty was into his Clint Eastwood mode. “Same place as always,” the clerk allowed.

“ Same place as always,” I repeated, as if savoring rich memories. “The old ranch, I suppose.”

“ Well, not the old ranch off Frying Pan Road just over the Eagle County line. That was Kit’s daddy’s, and they lost that, oh hell, thirty years ago.”

“ Well, the new ranch, then,” I said.

“ It ain’t hardly new,” he corrected me.

“ Not hardly,” I acknowledged.

“ Nice piece of property though, what with Woody Creek and all.”

“ Mighty nice,” I concurred.

I stopped asking questions, and he stopped not answering them, and then I came to the courthouse, dropping off Kip in a video arcade in the middle of the town. I had checked a map and found Woody Creek, the town, plus Woody Creek, the creek, plus two other streams, Little Woody Creek and Dry Woody Creek. Which is why I needed to see the property records.

And there it was. K. C. Cimarron, the fee simple owner of the Red Canyon Ranch, about six hundred acres not far from where Woody Creek and the Roaring Fork River meet. He was up to date on his taxes, and checking the lien ledgers, I saw he owned the land free and clear. In another office, I found he was a registered voter, independent, and hadn’t missed an election in over ten years.

An upstanding citizen, this K. C. Cimarron. At least in these parts. But we know differently, don’t we, ole Kit? I forced myself to remember everything about him. I didn’t get a good look at Cimarron on that dark, dreadful night, but I remembered the mass of him, the sheer raw tonnage. And I remembered his voice.

“ Where is he? Where’s Baroso?” That’s what he said first, and I remembered the deep, gravelly tone of a big man with a deep chest. It was a voice that demanded attention, and attention was surely paid to such a man.

I had answered that I didn’t know, and then he had asked Jo Jo the same question. Which meant Socolow was right about something. Either Cimarron didn’t kill Blinky, or he was going to a lot of trouble to make it look like he didn’t.

Then, just before he stomped my hand, he said something that wasn’t a question at all. “Stay out of my affairs, lawyer! Stay out of my affairs, or you’re a dead man.”

Just like in school, my memory was pretty good, but I wasn’t great at following instructions.

It was a five-minute walk from the courthouse to the arcade, where I picked up a juvenile delinquent who was banging away at a video game where steroid-pumped wrestlers removed each other’s spines. I dragged him out, and he responded by saying I was a “goober-throwing major tude,” which I took as a compliment and thanked him.

“ Where we going?” Kip asked. “I was just about to pin the Mountain Man.”

“ We’re going to visit a cowboy.”

“ Oh, the one who stole your babe.”

“ I beg your pardon.”

“ Granny told me. When you were spaced out on the medicine, Granny told me about the lady lawyer you’ve got the hots for, but this dude swooped her away. So, when you said we were coming out here and you were going to switch courses, I knew the babe figured into it.”

“ You’re a pretty bright kid, aren’t you?” I asked, as we reached our car, parked in front of a shop where mannequins in mink coats smiled regally at us from the display window.

“ It runs in the family,” he said.

No wonder I liked this kid.

We got in, and I aimed the rental convertible northwest on Route 82. The air was cool and dry. The sun was shining, plump white clouds were scudding by, and the meadows were filled with bright wildflowers. It seemed like a fine day to see if Mr. K.C. Cimarron was as good as his word.