Fool Me Twice

Chapter 2

We all have our little rituals. On the morning of the last day of trial, I always slice a mango and a papaya for breakfast, then toss two paperback books into my briefcase. You never know how long the jury will be out, and reading keeps me from replaying the case in my mind, second-guessing myself and cursing the decision to go to law school instead of doing something productive like bulking up on steroids and joining the World Wrestling Federation.

An hour after the jury disappeared into its tomblike room, Blinky Baroso and I headed down the street to the Gaslight Lounge, where many a lawyer has washed away the memories of judges and juries in rivers of icy gin. The lounge was dark and windowless with red Naugahyde barstools. Even half empty, the place reverberated with the pleasant clink of ice against glass.

I don’t chitchat when the jury is out, so I sat there, sipping a Samuel Adams draft, reading Nelson DeMille’s The Gold Coast, a tale of an honest lawyer who is compromised by a charming Mafioso, when Blinky Baroso started his chatterbox routine.

Some clients clam up when waiting for a verdict. They become pale, withdrawn. Maybe they’re apologizing to their Maker, making silent promises to go straight if only they’re given a second (or fifth or sixth) chance. Other clients become nonstop motor mouths.

Nerves.

Blinky Baroso, his face flushed, his pudgy hands gesticulating, was keeping his mind occupied and mine distracted with a loud soliloquy retracing the many stages of his misspent life. Plopped onto his barstool, he used a nail file to amputate the filters of an endless chain of Marlboros, which he occasionally smoked, the ashes dropping into his lap as he told his tales. He interrupted himself every few minutes to ask, “That right, Jake?” which was probably intended to determine whether I was listening.

“ Maybe I should go to Russia,” Blinky said, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “There’s no more free-enterprise system in this country. Too many controls. Too many regulations. I remember when I started selling waterfront homesites. We made a killing for what, eighteen months. Then those rubes from Tallahassee came clown here in their Sears sports coats and short-sleeve shirts. Restraining orders, permanent injunctions, cease and desist orders. Jeez, all the profits went to the attorneys. That right, Jake?”

I drained my beer and put down the book. “The homesites weren’t waterfront, Blinky. They were under water. You were selling swampland in the Everglades.” I had been listening. He brushed me off with a wave of his hand, his diamond pinky ring sparkling, even in the muted light. I must be slipping. Rule number one for trial: no gold chains, no flashy rings, no dark glasses. The trick is make a hoodlum look like a choirboy.

I ordered my second beer and Blinky went into a loud lament about the demise of his precious metals business. “Who would think you could sell gold bullion on the phone? Who the hell thought that farmers in Iowa would give their credit card numbers on the basis of cold calls? Jake, it was a thing of beauty. The world headquarters of Million-Dollar Minerals Inc. was just up the road in Lauder-damn-dale. You should have seen it Jake, thirty salesmen, twenty-five hundred calls a day.”

Actually, I saw it the day the state padlocked the doors. Blinky’s world headquarters was a boiler room operation where they sold pieces of paper attesting to the ownership of precious minerals. Blinky swears he would have delivered the gold, too, if he hadn’t presold the stuff at twenty dollars an ounce less than it would have cost to buy. Like smoking, breaching contracts was a nasty habit for Blinky.

“ The market was moving. If the damn bureaucrats had given me time, I could have come back. That right, Jake?”

Before I had a chance not to answer, I became aware of a presence just behind me at the bar. My first thought was that Ernie Cartwright, the ninety-year-old asthmatic bailiff, was there to inform me that the verdict was in, but we still had time for a round together if I was paving. My second thought was that Ernie Cartwright doesn’t wear Panther perfume.

“ Well, well,” our visitor said, malice in her voice, “the shyster and the grifter.”

“ Gimme a break, Josie,” Blinky responded, blowing a cloud of smoke toward his sister.

She stood there a foot from me, her head cocked, her hip shot, her look challenging look. I had seen it plenty of times before, but it had been years since I stared into those dark eyes from this distance. She was standing, and I was sitting, and she looked down at me from a position of geographical and moral superiority. I looked back with my crooked grin that had been good enough for several busloads of cheerleaders, flight attendants, and dental hygienists.

She shook her head, seeming to dismiss me. Looking at her brother, she said, “Thanks to your smooth-talking friend here, you’ve had more breaks than you deserve.”

“ C’mon, Jo Jo,” I said. “Why not call me ‘Jake’? Smoothtalking friend sounds so impersonal.”

Her eyes glinted at me and her dark complexion seemed to glow. Josefina Jovita Baroso was a self-confident woman with what my granny would call gumption. She reminded me of Dashiell Hammett’s “lanky brunette with a wicked jaw.”

“ You’re looking good, Jo Jo,” I told her.

“ Don’t change the subject,” she said.

“ I didn’t know there was one, except that old standard, my many personal failings.”

Blinky nudged me. “Join the club. Nobody’s as perfect as Josie.

She narrowed her eyes at me, or maybe it was the noxious cigarette smoke blinding her. “Just like old times, isn’t it? Luis is in trouble, and Jake is here to help.”

“ I know it doesn’t rank with feeding starving children or even prosecuting shoplifters, but it’s my job. And for what it’s worth, your brother is my friend.’’

Without an invitation, she swiveled a hip onto the barstool next to mine and gave me a little smile. A very little smile. “My brother,” she said, rolling the words on her tongue to see how they tasted, “is a major embarrassment. My brother is a lazy, cowardly criminal, and you are his mouthpiece.”

“ Blinky’s not lazy,” I said, in my client’s partial defense.

“ I don’t have to listen to this garbage.” Blinky slid off his barstool. “I’m gonna take a leak.”

I turned my attention to Josefina. Her mouth was wide, the lips full, the face oval with prominent cheekbones.

“ Look, Jo Jo, I could give you the standard spiel about how every client deserves the best representation possible, but I won’t. I won’t apologize for defending your brother because I like him. I’d like him even more if he went straight, and maybe he will. I once got him a job selling time-share condos in Sarasota.”

“ I know all about it. When sales were slow, he stripped the units. Everything from the microwave and VCR right down to the copper wiring.”

“ That was never proved,” I said, sounding like a shyster, even to myself. “Blinky wasn’t even charged.”

“ Thanks to you,” she said with some bitterness. “Look, Jake, you may not believe me, but this isn’t personal.”

“ Really, do you chase down every defense lawyer to criticize his character, or just the ones you’ve slept with?”

Unlike her brother, she didn’t blink. “That was beneath you, Jake. You weren’t always like that, but I suppose that’s what comes from hanging around the Justice Building, spending every day with sociopaths.”

“ Some of the judges are okay.”

“ You’re not funny, Jake. Not to me, anyway. You’re just an aging jock who’s never grown up.”

“ Is this the part I’m not supposed to take personally?”

She sighed. “Okay, you’re right. I’m disappointed in you. You had such potential, but you never explored it. You never reached higher. You were a second-rate football player, but maybe you couldn’t help that. You went to a second-rate law school, and maybe that’s the best you could have done, too. Now you have a second-rate practice, and you seem happy with it, and that’s what disappoints me so much. You don’t strive anymore. You take pride in negatives, like that stupid line you always say, you’ve never been this, you’ve never been that…”

“ It’s true. I’ve never been disbarred, committed, or convicted of moral turpitude, and the only time I was arrested, it was a case of mistaken identity. I didn’t know the guy I hit was a cop.”

She didn’t laugh or even crack a smile. “I don’t blame you for the way you are, Jake. You were raised without a family, and it made you a loner. You’re really dysfunctional when it comes to relationships.”

“ I hate words like ‘dysfunctional.’ It’s right up there with ‘prioritize’ in bullshit quotient. Besides, I had a family. I had my granny.”

“ That’s what I mean. You were raised on moonshine whiskey by an old woman who’s half loco. You had no parents, no siblings, and it shows. Where do you hang out? The morgue! Dios mio! Who’s your best friend? A retired coroner who still does autopsies for fun! When you picked me up on Saturday nights, you smelled of formaldehyde.”

She was shaking her head. I seem to have depressed her.

Then she reached over and took a sip of my beer, leaving a faint impression of lipstick on the glass. It was the most intimate gesture she’d shared with me in years.

“ You know what Abe Socolow says about you?” she asked, sliding the beer in front of me.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“ That you’re not as bad as most defense lawyers. Is that how you want to be known?”

“ Abe’s a good man. A bit rigid, haughty, and self-righteous, but what prosecutor isn’t?” I smiled and hoisted my diminishing beer in her direction.

“ You mean me, don’t you? You think I’m rigid and haughty.”

“ And self-righteous,” I added, in case she had forgotten.

She seemed to think about it, little vertical lines creasing her forehead. If she didn’t dislike me so much, and if I wasn’t such an enlightened man of the nineties, I would have mentioned just how fetching she looked just now. Okay, if she didn’t dislike me so much, I would have mentioned it.

“ Maybe I am,” she admitted, “and maybe those aren’t such bad traits.”

“ I agree. They’re just what I’d look for in an executioner.”

“ And what about you? What are your character traits, Jake?”

Her voice was growing softer. Was there a touch of wistfulness there or was I imagining it?

“ Me? I’m humble, honest, and congenial, not to mention sexy.

She let the bait drift across the water. After a moment, she said, “We could have had something, Jake. We really could have.”

“ If only I’d been different, right?”

“ That’s your way of attacking me, isn’t it, Jake. You’re saying it was wrong of me to try and make something out of you.

“ No one can make anyone else anything,” I said. “I can’t make your brother into Albert Schweitzer, and you can’t make me…whatever it is you wanted me to be. I can’t live up to your schoolgirl image of me.”

“ Is that what you think it was?”

“ Yeah. I think if we’d met when you were older, maybe you would’ve been more realistic, a little less idealistic.”

“ You never knew how much I cared for you,” she said, her voice a whisper.

“ I thought I did. I thought I knew precisely how much.”

“ You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you? Well, you’re wrong. I loved you once.”

Why did once sound so achingly long ago?

There were a lot of things I wanted to say, and if I had twenty minutes or so, I could have come up with something meaningful and sensitive. Instead, I stood up, steady as a newborn calf on spindly legs. But I had nowhere to go, so I sat back down again, feeling foolish. I didn’t say a word, and in a moment, Mickey Cumello, the bartender, asked Ms. Josefina Jovita Baroso, prosecutor, judge, jury, and woman, if she’d care for a drink of her own.

“ Absolut Citron on the rocks, just a splash of soda,” she said.

“ Don’t have the Citron,” Mickey replied, politely, a clean white towel draped across a shoulder. He was a bartender of the old school, white shirt, black bow tie, hair combed straight back. “We have Absolut, and I could drop a twist into it.”

Jo Jo wrinkled her mouth into a frown. “How about a San Pellegrino, no ice?”

“ Club soda okay?” Mickey asked, his eyes shifting to me. We both knew he had San Pellegrino, but he’s entitled to some fun, too.

She shook her head. “Sodium. No can do.”

Life can be so difficult.

She started to ask about chardonnay by the glass, and I was still thinking about my possible reply to her belated professions of ardor, but just then the front door opened, letting in a blast of sunlight. Ernie Cartwright, the ninety-year-old bailiff, stood just inside the door, squinting in the darkness, calling my name.