Fool Me Twice

CHAPTER 25

My brain trust couldn’t agree whether to lather the margarita glasses with salt, so how could I expect coherent advice on cross-examining Josefina Baroso? We were in the kitchenette of Granny’s double-wide, the four of us scrunched onto stools at the Formica counter.

“ That girl’s lying through her teeth,” Granny said, as she squeezed limes the old-fashioned way, in her clenched fists. “She never got hitched to that cowboy, or Jake would know about it.”

“ McBain showed me the marriage certificate,” Patterson said, glumly. “A civil ceremony in Nevada six years ago. Uh, no salt on mine, please. Watching my blood pressure.”

Granny growled and kept squeezing. “Six years! Criminy, Jake, you been sniffing after a married woman.” Now she poured tequila into the juice. “You like yours with a dash of Triple Sec or Cointreau?”

“ The bottle of tequila will do just fine, Granny, and I broke up with her before she met him. It just beats me why she kept the marriage a secret.”

“ Maybe the cowboy was already married,” Granny said conspiratorially.

“ Yeah,” Kip chimed in, digging into a bowl of chocolate ice cream. “Maybe he was a bigamist, like Clifton Webb in The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker.

“ Nothing so sinister,” Patterson said. “He wanted to live out west and dig for Coronado’s gold. She wanted to prosecute criminals in Miami. They tied the knot but didn’t tell anybody. She kept her name and her job. For the first couple of years, they’d fly back and forth every few weeks, but that got old. They began to see each other less. I suppose you could say they separated, except they did that right after the honeymoon. But they kept getting back together over the years. Essentially, what you had were two strong-willed people who were drawn to each other, but neither one would budge on geography or lifestyle.”

“ So why’d she invite me to her bed in Miami six months ago?

“ It never happened,” Patterson said.

“ I need that tequila, right now, Granny.” I turned back to my lawyer. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“ When the widow lady testified today, did you hear anything about her exchanging bodily fluids with you?”

“ No, she just said I was at her house, and Cimarron and I had a conversation. Then I hit him but lost a fistfight, something like that.”

“ And you want me to get her to admit on cross that she was in bed with you when Cimarron broke in?”

“ Of course I do, and for lots of reasons starting with destroying her credibility. She’s going to testify I sexually assaulted her in the barn, right?”

“ About a dozen hours from now.”

“ Well, why would I have to attack her if she was a willing bedmate?’’

“ You wouldn’t, so she must deny the sexual interlude ever took place.”

“ Well, I’ll say it did,” I said, somewhat petulantly.

“ Did Josefina ever tell Socolow that Cimarron rousted you from her bed?”

“ No, I don’t think so.”

“ Did you?”

“ No. I don’t kiss and tell, but I figured he knew what was going on.”

“ Yet, he cannot dispute her testimony, can he?”

I didn’t answer, so he asked another question. “How did Cimarron get into the house?”

“ I don’t know. I was asleep at the time. There was no sign of forced entry.”

“ Well then, I’ll tell you,” Patterson said. “He had a key. Always did. Had it on his key chain the night he died. As you know, he owned the house in Miami. Josefina knew he was in town. He was, after all, staying there with her. Now, you’re going to ask the jury to believe she invited you to spend the night when she knew her husband would be coming home.”

“ So what the hell was I doing there?”

“ According to Josefina, discussing Blinky and Rocky Mountain Treasures, waiting for Cimarron to show up for a meeting.”

“ That’s crap! We were fastened onto each other like-”

“ Jake!” Granny gave me her steely stare, “There’s tender ears on the premises.”

“ Where?” Kip asked. “Hey, Granny, I saw Basic Instinct where Sharon Stone crosses her legs and puckers up-”

“ Hush!” Granny commanded.

Patterson drained his margarita. “Jake, it doesn’t matter what the two of you did because I can’t prove it. You want to testify that you bedded her down in Miami, you’ll come off as a boorish lout who’s accusing the grieving widow of infidelity.”

“ Infidelity? Who gives a flying fandango? She’s accused me of murder!”

“ And I’m trying to keep you from proving her case.”

I took a hit on the tequila straight out of the bottle. It was intended to make me think more clearly, but it made my lips feel like rubber worms. Still, the outline of a thought was forming. “H.T., maybe it’s starting to make sense, now.”

“ What is?”

“ What you were saying the other day. She set me up, all right, starting with that night in the cottage.”

“ Keep talking,” he said.

“ At the time, I thought she craved my body. Desire under the mangoes.”

“ Elms,” Kip corrected me. “Sophia Loren and Anthony Perkins.”

“ Boy am I stupid!”

“ Don’t state the obvious,” Patterson said. “Get on with it.”

“ Just like you said, she knew Cimarron was coming over. Coming home, in fact. She wanted me in her bed when he showed up. She wanted me to fight him. Who knows, maybe

Cimarron would be carrying a gun and one of us would buy the farm right there. If not, there’s always a second chance after she got me to chase her to Colorado. H.T., you’ve been right all along.”

“ I have been, as surely as God makes little brown babies, but what am I to do with it? I can’t prove a word of it. I guarantee you that no member of the jury will buy it.”

Here I was getting pumped up, and my lawyer’s defeatist attitude rankled me. “Hey, Counselor, whose side are you on?”

Patterson looked hurt.

And must have been.

He didn’t ask for a refill. He just grabbed his wool ski cap, put on his orange parka, and headed for the door. “We’re all a little tired, Jake. I’ll see you in court.”

I didn’t tell him good night.

Now Granny was scowling at me. “You know, Jake, you’re a fine specimen of a man.”

“ What’s that supposed to mean?”

“ Well, you got about an acre of shoulders, a bushy head of hair, all your own teeth, and a by-God full allotment of mouth.”

“ Okay, okay, I was a little tough on H.T., but I’m getting so frustrated, I feel like hitting someone.”

“ Don’t worry, Uncle Jake,” Kip said, his upper lip coated with a chocolate stripe. “If that woman’s saying bad things about you, no one will believe her. No one could believe you did anything bad.”

“ Kip, I love you, do you know that?”

“ Sure.”

“ I’m sorry I haven’t been able to spend much time with you.”

“ It’s okay. I like it here. The snow and all, it’s like Dr. Zhivago.”

“ You been making any movies?”

“ Can’t.” He looked into his bowl of melting ice cream.

Granny said, “He’s been afraid to tell you. In all the commotion, moving around and all, he lost the camera.”

“ I’m sorry, Uncle Jake. I just don’t know where-”

“ Hey, it’s okay. When’s the last time you had it?”

“ That night in the barn. Maybe the cops took it.”

“ I don’t remember it on the inventory,” I said, consigning the information to the repository in my brain where I store odds and ends that don’t fit anywhere else.

“ I know this sounds ridiculous,” Josefina Baroso said, “but to this day, I don’t know if it was rape. It’s so difficult to explain. Jake forced himself on me, but…I didn’t fight back. He hit me. He had before, so that was nothing new. He tore at my clothes. He told me he would have me whether I wanted it or not. He used to get like that, so full of anger, so violent. He just wore me down, and I let him. I just let him.”

With that, a tear tracked down a sculpted cheekbone. I felt my face heat up. The jurors were riveted to their chairs. No darting eyes, no coughs, no fidgeting. They just watched Josefina Baroso with empathy and concern for this brave woman. She was so damn good. She gave the appearance of trying to be fair. No, she can’t call it rape. Of course not, she never told the cops she’d been raped. A physical exam would have disproved that lie.

It was a flaw in her story, at least until she explained it away with her sob story about not knowing whether it was rape at all. Still, Patterson could cross-examine as to why she didn’t tell the cops the whole story.

McBain anticipated the question on cross-examination and defused it. “Ms. Baroso, you never told Sergeant Crawford that the defendant forced you to submit to sex, did you?”

“ No…I couldn’t. I was so ashamed. I blamed myself for it. Maybe I should have fought back, but I was afraid Simmy would hear. I was afraid someone would get killed.”

Josefina Baroso had spent four years on the sexual assault team in the state attorney’s office, and it showed. She knew what worked, and what didn’t, and when she spouted cliches, they sounded heartfelt.

“ Now, Ms. Baroso, what happened after the defendant forced you to submit to him?”

“ I was lying there crying, and Simmy came into the barn looking for me. Jake said something about wanting to thank him.”

“ Thank him?”

“ Yes. He turned to Simmy and smiled, a really vicious smile, and said, ‘Thanks, cowboy, for your money and your wife.”

In the jury box, it looked like 12-0 for stringing me up right there.

“ Then what happened?” McBain asked.

“ I was crying, but somehow I told Simmy what happened. He stayed calm. He was breathing hard, and he told Jake to leave or he’d take him apart. Jake laughed and said, ‘Try it.’ Simmy came at him, I’m not going to deny that. He wanted to throw him out of there so he could take care of me. But Jake was on him so quickly, tossing him into the wall, hitting his head. Jake is very strong, and even though Simmy was big, he wasn’t quick enough.”

Then she told the story, blow by blow, and it matched everything the jury had already heard. So warm and comforting for the finders of fact. They’d heard the story in McBain’s opening statement. They’d heard it again from the three police officers. Now, the eyewitness tells it one more time. Anticlimactic but reassuring. Lawyers like to say they tell jurors what they’re going to hear, then tell them, then tell them what they’ve told them. That’s what McBain was doing, and he’d recap it in closing argument.

So I sat at the defense table, a miscreant with curved horns and hairy ears, as my hellish deeds were recounted. I heard how I slammed Simmy around, stabbed him with a pitchfork, laughed in the face of the bull whip, tackled him in the corncrib, and eventually put a nail through his head. I heard every agonizing, perjurious detail, hoping for inconsistencies, but there were none.

She took the better part of the day, stopping several times to wipe the tears. As the afternoon wore on, the windowpanes of the courtroom shuddered with an approaching storm. Outside, the sky darkened, and snow cascaded from the sky. Inside, it was stuffy and the air so dry, the skin on my knuckles was splitting. I longed for the heat and humidity of home, for a gentle easterly, warm as a baby’s breath, as it crossed the Gulf Stream.

What was I doing here? I fought the urge to stand and run, the courtroom door banging behind me. My arms tensed. Would the bailiff stop me? No, he was asleep, waiting for his Social Security check.

Where would I go? An island, maybe. Barbados, Aruba, Curacao. I yearned for sunny days and wide beaches, and most of all, freedom. How far would I get? They would hunt me down. They would compare me to Ted Bundy, who crawled out a window in this very courthouse, before going on a rampage of rape and murder in Florida.

I’m not sure what my face showed, but Patterson put a calming hand on my shoulder. I forced myself to concentrate on a spot on the wall just above a line of old photographs of judges who presided here. And I thought about where we were and where we had to go.

McBain had done his job, and Jo Jo had done hers. It was all wrapped up neatly and tied with a bow, an early Christmas present for the jury. I was jotting down notes as the prosecutor was winding down his questioning.

“ Ms. Baroso, please forgive me for asking this, but did you love your husband?”

“ So very much. It was an unconventional arrangement, I know, but it worked for us. He had his ranch and his dreams of buried treasure. He was out here, in the country he loved. I had my career, contributing to society in the best way I could. In my heart, I know we loved each other as much as any other couple.”

“ Did you intend the defendant to follow you to Colorado?”

“ No. I didn’t even tell him I was coming here. He admitted to me he broke into my house and listened to my answering machine to find me.” A look of sadness for the pathetic, obsessed stalker seemed to cross her face. “I thought he had gotten over me, but once he began representing my brother again, something happened. It started all over again, and he began pursuing me.”

The poor woman. How could anyone blame her for all this?

“ So, in summary, Ms. Baroso, the defendant followed you to Colorado without your knowledge or consent, confronted you in the barn on your husband’s property, struck you and forced you to submit to sexual intercourse…”

I tugged at my lawyer’s sleeve, but he waved me off.

“…and when your husband found you, disheveled and beaten, the defendant taunted him, beat him, and finally shot a nail through his brain, killing him?”

“ Objection, leading,” Patterson said, quietly.

“ Granted. The jury will disregard the question…”

It didn’t matter if they disregarded the question. They already knew the answer.

“ Mr. McBain,” the judge said, “do you have anything further, because the bailiff tells me the weather is deteriorating, and I believe I’m going to let these good folks go home early today.”

“ Just about finished, Your Honor.”

“ Ms. Baroso, is there anything else you wish to say, anything you’ve left out?”

She didn’t even have to think about it. You don’t have to when you’ve rehearsed the closing line. “If only you could have known him,” she said, turning toward the jury. “Such a fine, decent man, so full of life. I loved him, and I miss him so.”

The judge cleared his throat and banged his gavel, telling everyone to be back at nine in the morning.

My eyes were still on Josefina Jovita Baroso, as she walked gallantly out of the courtroom. I thought about what Kip had said this morning, that nobody would believe her. My lovable nephew was wrong.

I can read their faces, Kipper. I can read their minds.

They believed her and were ready to convict. Hell, if I’d been on the jury, I would have convicted me, too.