Fool Me Twice

CHAPTER 20

Jail food is to food as military music is to music.

Hard biscuits and fatty bacon and greasy meats. Maybe the idea was to induce cardiac arrest and save taxpayers money. The jailer was a potbellied, slack-jawed man of sixty who looked as if he’d been eating the jail hash for thirty years. He was a football fan, and when I told him I had chased the oblong spheroid for a living, he treated me with kindness and respect and brought me pizza and beer. Then I made the mistake of telling him I was now a lawyer. He shook his head sadly, spat on the floor, and said no wonder I ended up here.

Or was I a lawyer?

The Florida Bar had begun disbarment proceedings.

Judge T. Bone Coleridge had ordered me to show cause why Kip shouldn’t be transferred to the custody of the state H.R.S., and when I didn’t appear in court (having been unavoidably detained, as they say, in Colorado), he adjudged me in contempt of court. Actually, contempt was too mild a word for how I felt about the courts.

I was under indictment in Miami for first-degree murder of Kyle Hornback, local securities dealer. Yeah, that’s what the paper called him. It sounded better than con man, flimflam artist, swindler, extortionist, or racketeer. In death, we are all judged more kindly. The crueler the death, the kinder the obit.

I was under indictment in Aspen for second-degree murder in the brutal slaying of Kit Carson Cimarron, ranch owner and civic activist, according to the local weekly.

Civic activist? I suppose they’d call Bonnie and Clyde interstate bankers.

Completing the list of my legal troubles, I was also being dunned by a record club for three CDs I had never ordered. I wrote a couple of letters telling them what they could do with The Best of Jim Nabors , but their computer kept threatening my credit rating, heaven forbid.

Okay, so I was a little bitter, sitting in the Pitkin County Jail. Florida and Colorado were drawing straws to see who had the pleasure of providing me with room and board for the next twenty-five years or so, and in Florida’s case, maybe causing a brief power shortage in the immediate vicinity of Raiford Prison. Right now, Colorado had dibs on me under the ancient legal maxim, possession is nine tenths of the law. This was a matter of great consternation to Abe Socolow, who pointed out to a Colorado judge in typical lawyerly fashion that (a) I committed my vile deed in Florida prior to coming to Colorado; (b) Florida had charged me with an even more serious crime; and (c) Florida had indicted me first.

He really said a-b-c while making his argument. Lawyers tend to argue in threes, building to dramatic conclusions. Some lawyers get confused and say a-b-3. Once in a while, just to see if a judge is listening, I’ll sing out do-re-mi.

But now, I was just a spectator, wearing jail coveralls, sitting on a hard bench in the county courthouse, trying to listen to words like venue and jurisdiction and equity and conservation of judicial resources.

Florida, said Abe Socolow, representing the people of that great state.

Colorado, said Mark McBain, prosecutor in these here parts.

Florida versus Colorado. It sounded like an old Gator Bowl between the runners-up in the SEC and Big 8. I wouldn’t have minded being sent back to Florida. After all, I hadn’t killed Hornback, and I did kill Cimarron. At least, I thought I did, though I didn’t have a recollection of actually rocketing a nail straight into his right ear and out his skull just above the left ear, spraying bone and blood and gray matter over a fine English riding saddle that was now marked state’s exhibit twenty-three. In fact, the last thing I remembered, the stud gun didn’t fire. I think.

When I woke up in the hospital with my ankle shackled to a bed, a sadist posing as a doctor was shining a light into my eyes and poking me here and there. My ears were ringing, and he was saying something about a concussion, some tenderness in the area of the liver and minor internal injuries that reminded him of a head-on car crash. In the next twenty-four hours, I discovered the rest without any help. Bruised ribs on the left side where Cimarron had hooked me, welts on my forehead, scratches and scrapes on my face where I landed squarely against the side of the barn, red blisters every place the bull whip kissed me, plus a collection of abrasions and contusions just about everywhere else.

Still, I seemed to be doing better than K. C. Cimarron. A cop whose name I didn’t catch sauntered in and told me Cimarron was dead and that anything I said might be used against me. Did I want a lawyer. Hell no, I didn’t even want to be a lawyer.

I was bleary and had a splitting headache but was semi-happy to be alive, and when local prosecutor McBain strolled into my hospital room, brown leather satchel in hand, I didn’t have the presence of mind to clam up. When he turned on his tape recorder and asked whether I wanted to make a statement about splattering Cimarron’s brains on the barn wall, I told him it was the first time I ever drove a nail straight in my life. McBain nodded appreciatively at such candor and asked how many men I had killed over the years, and I decided it might be a good idea to either get counsel or plead insanity on the spot.

Jail time.

Except for the food, it wasn’t so bad. I had my own cell, part of the status derived from being a crazed killer.

I wasn’t bored. Not with the parade of local lawyers who were itching to represent me. There was one barrister who was a part-time ski instructor, another a part-time wilderness guide, yet a third who was a part-time white-water rafter. There was a woman lawyer who piloted hot-air balloons in her spare time and another who took off Wednesdays to ride in amateur rodeos in Snowmass. I’m all for Renaissance men and women, but at the moment, I wanted a hard-boiled, do-or-die, go-for-the-jugular lawyer who would bleed for me, not leave me naked and alone in the dock on the first day of trout season.

One day, a local chap named DeWitt Duggins stopped in to see me. We sat across an old wooden table from each other in the visitors room. He was a short, trim man in his mid-thirties with shaggy brown hair and John Denver granny glasses. He had just finished a case in Mesa County in which his client pleaded guilty to killing three elk, and like lawyers everywhere, he wanted to tell war stories.

“ Caused quite a stir over in Grand Junction,” Duggins said, proudly, impressed with the enormity of it all. “After all, three slaughtered elk.”

“ A serial poacher,” I responded gravely.

“ A first-spike bull, a five-spiker, and a cow.”

“ Get him a good deal?” I asked, hopefully.

“ Nine-thousand-dollar fine, ten years.”

“ Probation?”

“ Prison.”

“ Ten years in prison! What do they do if you kill a human up here?”

“ Don’t get that many murder trials. They’re treated rather special, I’m sorry to say.”

“ Okay, let’s say I hire you. How would you handle my case?

“ Holistically,” said DeWitt Duggins.

“ What are you, a chiropractor?”

He took off his glasses, one wire temple at a time, and breathed on the lenses. “Entities are really more than the sum of their parts.”

“ What?”

“ Gandhi was a holistic lawyer, you know. He once wrote that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder.”

“ Sounds like law for the wimp. I want a lawyer with buckskin and cowboy boots, someone who’ll spit in the eye of the prosecution.”

“ That may be what you want, but introspection is what you need. Healing inner conflict.”

Duggins wiped his glasses on his red plaid shirt, put them back on, and pulled a stick of sugarless gum from his pocket. He unwrapped it, slowly, ever so slowly, giving the impression that holistic lawyers aren’t real busy. He popped the gum into his mouth, carefully folded the wrapper into a little square, which he put back in his pocket.

“ Gonna recycle that?” I asked him.

“ Confrontation solves nothing. Perhaps I could have suppressed the evidence of the elk carcasses. Sure, I could have cross-examined the game officer, tried to establish he was lying about the carcasses being in plain view in my client’s pickup.”

“ And you didn’t?”

“ What would it have solved? My client might have gone free, but would he have dealt with his inner demons? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“ Sure, you want me to plead guilty.”

“ It would be your first step to recovery.”

“ Your first step is out of here before they indict me for a second murder. Or actually a third.”

“ Peace,” he said, smiling pleasantly and wisely leaving.

Outside my jailhouse windows, green Aspen leaves fluttered in the wind. White puffy balls from cottonwood trees tumbled along the gutter, gathering at storm drains into globs the size of pillows.

Two weeks went by, and the judge served up a dose of home cooking, ordering the first trial in Colorado. Kip spent three nights in the custody of state welfare workers until Granny arrived, wearing lace-up army boots, a Mexican poncho, and cussing out every government official in the county. She brought me a basket of Key limes, carambolas, and guanabanas, told me I looked penitentiary pale, and wondered aloud if I’d come down with rickets or scurvy. She rented a double-wide trailer downvalley and said she was staying for the duration, come hell, high water, or first snow.

More lawyers trooped in, and I sent them home. Wearing a backpack and looking like a Boy Scout, Kip took a bus to visit me. He brought a mango nut cake Granny had baked. It was made with walnuts, and I half expected to find a file inside.

“ I’d really like to see your cell,” Kip said. “Is it really funky, like Spencer Tracy’s in Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing?”

“ Kip, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about reading more, and watching fewer movies.”

He took a folded newspaper from the backpack. “I’ve been reading this.”

It was the local paper, and it must have been the Kit Carson Cimarron memorial edition, because the entire front page was devoted to his life and tales of his forebears. The story continued on page three, and altogether, I counted eleven photos, though my favorite was one of Cimarron astride a white horse. Cimarron wore weathered chaps and a red bandanna was slung around his neck, and he was smiling from beneath his bushy mustache. The horse looked like it was about to have a stroke.

The story detailed the long history of the Cimarron family in Pitkin and Eagle counties. Kit’s great-grandfather worked the Montezuma silver mine in Ashcroft and later the Spar and Galena on Aspen Mountain. He toiled at all the dirty jobs, driller and mucker, trammer and timberman, cageman and nipper. Saving his money, he filed his own claims, working them alone.

He found silver, but not long after he did, the crash of 1893 gutted his claims. Luckily for future generations of Cimarrons, he believed in land as well as holes in the ground. He had bought, free and clear, six thousand acres near Basalt. His son had tried ranching, farming, and apparently drinking, and the third generation-K.C.’s father-lost the spread to unpaid taxes. K.C. ended up with the more modest digs near Woody Creek.

I read aloud to Kip. “‘Mr. Cimarron died apparently without leaving a will. So far, no one has claimed to be the intestate beneficiary, and no living relatives are known to authorities. If none are found, Cimarron’s assets, including the ranch and mining claims, escheat to the state.’

“ So what?” Kip asked.

“ Cui bono? Who stands to gain? That’s what Charlie Riggs always asks when someone is killed. But the estate doesn’t give us any answers.”

I skimmed more of the story, then read aloud again. “‘Although prosecutors refuse to confirm it, well-placed sources indicate that Mr. Cimarron was killed attempting to protect Ms. Josefina Baroso from sexual assault. Ms. Baroso, an assistant state attorney in Miami, Florida, was Mr. Cimarron’s houseguest, and the pair were frequent companions at local social events several years ago. Ms. Baroso is expected to be the key prosecution witness. Her whereabouts are currently as big a secret as the location of the Lost Dutchman’s Mine.’

A little local wit there, I suppose.

Sexual assault. That would make me real popular with the local jury pool. In my experience, jurors don’t mind murderers all that much, but rapists and child molesters are dog meat.

“ If I were you, Uncle Jake, I’d go into that newspaper office and kick some butt. You remember Paul Newman in Absence of Malice?”

“ Hush. I’m still reading.”

There were some pictures of old smelters and railway cars filled with ore and a brief recitation of Cimarron’s collection of mining claims and maps of supposedly buried treasure. The head of the historical society had fond memories of the late Mister Cimarron, who would sit for hours in the library poring over old diaries, family Bibles, maps, and deeds. I learned more than I needed to know about the Treasure Mountain hoard, millions in gold buried near the top of Wolf Creek Pass. If a man could only find a grassy mound and stand on it at six o’clock on a September morning, he could dig for the gold buried under the shadow of his head.

Then there were the prospectors who used a cave near Dead Man’s Creek to wait out a blizzard in 1880. Inside the cold, dank cavern, they found five human skulls and hundreds of gold bars hidden in the rocks. After the storm, they took five bars back to their camp and returned with wagons, hoping to bring the rest out. But they never found the cave entrance again.

“ Hey, Kip, get a load of this. ‘K. C. Cimarron was a larger than life romantic figure, a man of vision, a combination of Indiana Jones and Errol Flynn.’ “

“ Errol Flynn was a Nazi, Uncle Jake.”

“ Good point.”

The newspaper story concluded by calling Cimarron a “throwback to Pioneer days, a big, hearty son of the West.”

Son of a bitch was more like it.

At the bottom of page three was a sidebar in a box. There was a photo of a mean-looking lug with a threatening scowl. He had two black eyes, a swollen lip, and a thoroughly disagreeable countenance. Wait! That was me. The photo was taken in the hospital at a time I was not prepared to receive guests. In fact, all I was prepared to receive was codeine.

The alleged killer of Saint Cimarron, according to the story, was one Jacob Lassiter, a Miami lawyer facing disbarment, a man accused of a second murder in Florida. Then they repeated the “sexual assault” on the angelic Ms. Baroso.

“ Hey, Kip, get a load of this. It says here I’m facing additional charges for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

“ It ain’t true,” he said. “I was a delinquent before I met you.

“ With all this pretrial publicity, maybe I should ask for a change of venue.”

“ Yeah, like to Samoa.”

I needed help. Granny could only do so much. Charlie Riggs wrote me inspirational letters with moral support. Britt Montero called from the Miami Daily News, either to wish me well or to get an exclusive interview, I couldn’t tell which. We went out a couple of times years ago, but Britt always found triple homicides more interesting than my description of a bull rush past the offensive tackle.

At the moment I needed a lawyer more than friendly chitchat. So when Kip headed back for his bus, his eyes wet as I hugged him good-bye, I used the jail phone to make a collect call to an old friend and sometimes adversary.

H. T. Patterson was in Aspen the next day and had a bond request filed the day after that. The state attorney worked up a sweat arguing against any bond, but the judge set it at a cool million dollars. Granny and Doc Charlie Riggs pledged all their assets, as did I, but we were still short, and not even close at that. One more phone call and Gina Florio came up with the rest, only her name was Gina de la Torre now, married for the time being to Carlos de la Torre, sugar baron. When I knew her, she was a Dolphin Doll, shaking her booty for fifteen bucks a game, and we lived together for a while, but that’s another story. Thanks to Gina, we had enough collateral to spring me, and as long as I showed up at trial, they’d get their money back, minus ten percent which I promised to repay, even if it was out of my prison salary. I was ordered not to leave the county or attempt any contact with Ms. Baroso, or bond would be revoked.

The day I got out, I assembled my team. Granny, Kip, H. T. Patterson, and I met at the Woody Creek Tavern. Granny had bourbon, H.T. an iced tea, and Kip and I split a Coors, the world’s most overrated beer.

“ You sure you want me to try the case?” H.T. asked. He was wearing a blue denim suit with red piping and red leather cowboy boots so new he must have bought them at the Denver airport. He looked like a very short and very black John Wayne.

“ Why wouldn’t I? You’re a real lawyer. You got bond issued in the blink of an eye.”

“ I merely pointed out your clean record of never having been convicted of a felony, though you do seem to have a history of contempt citations and occasional misdemeanor assault. But the fact remains that I am not…shall we say, demographically correct for this case?”

“ Why?”

“ This ain’t exactly Malcolm X country. You’re not likely to get even one dark complexion on the jury, unless it’s pasted on at the tanning salon.”

“ I don’t care. I need you. I’m facing a lifetime of sleeping with a cork up my ass-”

“ But you’re innocent,” Granny interrupted. I didn’t correct her.

“ Guilt or innocence isn’t always black or white,” I said in my lecture tone I must have learned from Doc Riggs. “It’s more of a continuum. Somewhere in the middle is not-so-guilty bucking up against not-so-innocent. The state has to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Apparently, they can prove I fired a nail through Cimarron’s brain. Hell, I can’t even deny it, ‘cause I don’t remember. But it was justifiable if I was acting in self-defense. The problem is that Jo Jo Baroso is going to weave a web for the jury that makes me the attacker. That’s why I need you, H.T.”

“ You think I can break her?”

“ I don’t know, but you’re a great lawyer. Hell, when we oppose each other, you always convince me you’re right.”

“ Jake, I’ve never known you so accommodating and amiable, so considerate and cooperative as when you’re under indictment. In any event, I thank you for the gracious compliment.”

“ I mean it. You remind me of Bum Philips’s line about Don Shula. ‘He can beat your’n with his’n or his’n with your’n.’ H.T., I’d take you on either side of a case.”

“ Well then, let’s get to work,” Patterson said. “Start by telling me everything that happened that night. Take it slowly, try to remember every word spoken, every move made. Don’t leave out anything, no matter how seemingly insignificant. I’ll take notes, but you might want to write everything down yourself. It helps jog the memory.” He looked at Granny and Kip. “You two will have to take a walk.”

“ No,” I told him. “They stay.”

“ The privilege, Jake. We lose it if-”

“ I know, I know, and I don’t care. They stay.”

So I rehashed it, everything I could remember. Jo Jo Baroso’s pleas for me not to come to the barn, my trotting out there anyway like a good little puppy.

“ Women!” Granny huffed. “Following a woman will get you in Dutch every time.”

I told Patterson of Jo Jo’s puffy eyes and bruised face, and then Cimarron dropping in. “At first, we sparred, mostly. He slung me into the walls a few times to see whether my head was harder than his lumber. Then he dropped me into a pile of horseshit. Once he chased Kip out, it was just the two of us.”

“ And Ms. Baroso,” H.T. reminded me.

“ Yeah, and Ms. Baroso. At first she was in the loft, but she came down to join the fun.”

Patterson turned to my nephew. “And where did you go, young man?”

“ Out toward the main house, along a stone path. I was yelling for help, but there wasn’t anyone around. I came back when I heard the nail gun. It’s so loud, I thought it was a real gun.”

“ It is,” Patterson said. He thumbed through some documents the state gave him in pretrial discovery. “Powered by a. 27-caliber charge, it can drive a carbon-steel nail through solid concrete.”

“ Or a mushy brain,” I added.

Patterson gave me a raised eyebrow.

“ I wasn’t trying to kill him,” I said.

Now he arched both eyebrows.

“ Okay, I went there meaning to do him some serious harm, but after Jo Jo accused me of assaulting her, I realized she was lying about being beaten by Cimarron. That took the stuffing out of me. But by then, I didn’t have a choice. Cimarron wanted to maim me and was doing a pretty good job. At first, I just wanted to defend myself, so I went into a Wing Chun defense because Cimarron was bigger than me.”

“ Just like Bruce Lee did to Chuck Norris in Return of the Dragon ,” Kip added, helpfully.

“ What gets me,” I said, “is how Jo Jo played me for a fool. I thought her brother was a great con artist, but you should have seen her. She fooled me, and then she fooled Cimarron. She had me hating him, and then had him hating me, and when he hates…”

I let it drift off, realizing he isn’t hating anymore.

“ Why would she have done it?” Patterson asked. “What’s her motive?”

“ I’ve been lying awake nights on that one. Only thing I can figure out is that she wanted me dead.”

“ What makes you say that?”

“ Are you kidding, H.T.? She set me up so Cimarron would kill me.”

“ But that isn’t what happened, is it?”

“ No, I killed him. So?”

“ So what makes you think that is not precisely what Ms. Baroso intended?”