Fool Me Twice

CHAPTER 29

Have I ever told you about the time a Hialeah city commissioner walked out of his house to check his mail and found a human skull staring at him from inside the mailbox?”

Doc Riggs is a whiz at openers in conversation.

“ Not recently, Charlie,” I said.

“ Hush, Jake,” Granny cautioned me. “Listen to Doc, and you may learn something, and while you’re at it, don’t cut the squid so big. It would take a whale to swallow that bait.”

“ Orca or Moby Dick?” Kip asked.

We were anchored in about eighty feet of water near Spanish Harbor Key, a bit south of the seven-mile bridge. In the winter, just off the reef, it’s a decent place to catch yellowtail snapper, which unlike their suspicious cousins, red and mangrove snapper, are more likely to bite lines with visible leaders and are less likely to hide in caves. We came down in Charlie’s pickup, the one that nearly ran down a process server. In Islamorada, we hitched up Granny’s trailer with the twenty-foot Boston Whaler and headed past Lower Matecumbe Key, Conch Key, and Burnt Point, stopped for cold beer in Marathon, then took the bridge to Bahia Honda Key where we put the boat in the water, and nearly did the same with the pickup.

I know the Keys are commercialized and overpopulated, and you can’t go a mile on U.S. 1 without passing tacky strip shopping centers with your convenience stores, T-shirt shops, and souvenir stands, but they’re still the Keys where the sun rises in the Atlantic and sets in the Gulf, and you can sometimes exchange whispers with a pelican or spot a deer hightailing it across the highway. God’s stepping-stones, local sportswriter Edwin Pope describes these sandy spits of coral, and that’s good enough for me.

“ Anyway,” Charlie said, “here’s the commissioner and in his mailbox is this skull, and a coconut split in two, and a decapitated chicken, and fourteen pennies wrapped in a white cloth.”

“ An unusual campaign contribution,” I said, “but maybe not in Hialeah. Probably violates postal rules, too.”

“ Some weird voodoo,” Granny contributed.

“ Sounds like Black Sabbath with Boris Karloff,” Kip said.

Charlie let his bait drift to the bottom on a one-ounce sinker. He didn’t like to fish nearly as much as he liked to talk. “In a way, you’re all correct. It was a Santeria ceremony, a fascinating combination of African rituals and Catholicism. They consider one of their gods, Babalu-Aye, to be the embodiment of Saint Lazarus, Oggun is Saint Peter, and so on. A santero was using black magic to cast a spell on the commissioner, who had voted against allowing animal sacrifices within city limits.”

“ Now I remember,” I said. “Later the Supreme Court ruled the church had the same rights to kill chickens as Colonel Sanders. But what about the human skull?”

“ Excellent question, in fact, the only question as far as the authorities were concerned, since it’s not illegal to cast a spell on your antagonists.”

“ Remind me the next time I try a case against Abe Socolow.”

Charlie harrumphed and kept going. “Anyway, a lot of skulls and human bones began showing up at the Santeria ceremonies, and the police suspected the worst.”

“ Human sacrifices,” I said, trying a sidearm cast with my spinning rod, the only way I could do it with a mending hole in my shoulder. Earlier, from the foredeck, I tried to cast left-handed and nearly put a 1/0 hook in Granny’s ear. The hook was tied to the end of a thirty-pound leader on twelve-pound spinning tackle. Yellowtail don’t have great choppers, but I use the leader to keep from breaking the line on coral.

“ That’s what our local constabulary suspected because they had no experience with this sort of thing. As it turned out, there were plenty of dead chickens and goats, but no humans. The human bones were stolen from cemeteries.”

“ Wow, Night of the Living Dead,” Kip chipped in.

“ Metro kept delivering packages to the morgue marked ‘unknown human remains.’ We identified some from corpses whose coffins and tombs had been desecrated. Very upsetting to the families.”

“ I suppose so, if Uncle Harry’s femur turned up in a witches’ brew.”

We all thought about that for a while, then I dropped a frozen chunk of chum over the side in an effort to entice reluctant snapper out of the reef.

Granny held her nose and called out, “Whooee! What’d you put in that, some of Doc’s old chickens and goats?”

“ It’s my own recipe, Granny, and I’m not telling.”

“ I don’t blame you. Ye gads, it smells toxic, or maybe radioactive.”

“ Radioactivity doesn’t smell,” Kip informed us.

Charlie reeled in an empty line and said, “I don’t mind the smell of chum.”

“ Of course not!” Granny yelled at him. “After ten thousand autopsies, fish guts would smell like roses.”

“ What did you put in that?” Charlie asked, sniffing the breeze.

I gave in and disclosed my secret sauce. “Equal parts dolphin entrails, grunt heads, and ballyhoo so old the fish market threw them in the Dumpster a week ago. Chopped everything into a slurry that looks like Granny’s blueberry pancake batter, then froze it all in milk cartons.”

“ Chopped how?” Granny asked. “You didn’t use my blender again?”

I didn’t answer.

“ Damn, boy, that’s for making frozen margaritas. I got a meat grinder in the pantry, you know.”

“ I know, but it takes twice as long, and it hurts my shoulder to crank it.”

“ Pantywaist,” she said. “You know, Doc, the boy could never handle pain…”

“ Granny!”

“ Or women…”

“ C’mon.”

“ Or a real job.”

We bantered for a while longer, then the talk turned to fishing. Granny claimed she pulled a seven-pound yellowtail from this very spot a week before, so it must be my chum that was chasing the fish to Omaha or somewhere. Nobody had a bite, but we were all enjoying the warmth of the winter sun. The sky was a Caribbean blue. Not as deep as a Colorado blue sky, but with a hint of turquoise. The breeze was soft, and the temperature an even eighty degrees. I was wearing cutoffs and was barefoot. My shoulder was healing, and so was my reputation.

Granny squinted at me and said, “That persecutor fellow called when you were gassing up the boat this morning.”

“ Socolow, and he’s a prosecutor.”

“ Same difference.”

“ What’d he say?”

“ Said you’d want to know he squashed the indictment for the murder of that phony-baloney salesman.”

“ Quashed,” I told her, but she paid me no mind.

“ Then, not ten minutes later, like it was all planned, the persecutor fellow from Colorado called.”

“ McBain.”

“ That’s him. Dismissed all charges up there, plus he said to make sure to tell you he’s impinging all records of your arrest.”

“ Expunging,” I said.

“ Whatever.”

It had been a good week in the squashing and impinging departments. I also had received a letter from Tallahassee dropping disbarment proceedings, and Judge T. Bone Coleridge called to tell me he had tossed out the child neglect case and also asked my opinion of the recently concluded college bowl games. So, with the Colorado records expunged, it was still 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. That made me think of Josefina Jovita Baroso, because she hated it when I said that.

“ I always thought there was something strange about that gal,” Granny said, sadly.

Strange the way that happens, you’re thinking of something, and someone else puts words to it. Of course, Granny had raised me since I was a pup, to use her expression, and we’re often on the same wavelength. I wonder if that’s the way with a husband and wife, and if I’ll ever get the chance to find out.

“ I’m not saying I thought she was a killer,” Granny continued, “but there was always something a little cold about her. Gives me the willies, just thinking about it now.”

I tossed another icy block of chum into the water and cut more squid for bait. Kip had put down his gear and was napping on the aft cushions. Charlie’s eyes were closed and his hat, made of green palm fronds, was pulled down over his face. The water will calm you, or as Granny says, peacify you.

“ Who would have thought she’d be a whatchamacallit, a serial killer?” Granny asked.

“ I think you probably have to kill at least three people to earn that title,” I said.

“ Number three would have been you.”

That gave me some pause.

“ What was wrong with that gal?” Granny asked, still gnawing at the thought.

“ She had an inability to feel the emotions that most of us have,” I said. “Even her brother, a lifelong criminal, never could have killed a man. With Jo Jo, people were just objects, like a table or chair.”

“ A sociopathic personality,” said the voice from under the palm frond hat. And I thought he’d been snoozing. “Used to use the term ‘moral imbecility’ referring to antisocial, morally irresponsible behavior. All the normal emotions of lust, anger, and greed are still there but without the tempering restraint of conscience.”

“ Greed,” Granny repeated, shaking her head.

“ Indeed,” Charlie said. “As Virgil asked, ‘ Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, auri sacra fames? ’”

“ Good question,” I admitted.

Charlie translated, “What lengths is the heart of man driven to by this cursed craving for gold?”

“ That reminds me,” I said. “When the shoulder heals, I’m going up to Colorado for a while.”

“ Skiing?” Granny asked.

“ Not exactly.”

“ Ice climbing in Box Canyon?” Charlie guessed.

“ No, getting too old for that.”

I let it hang there a moment, like a tern hovering in the breeze.

“ So just why does the craving for gold remind you that you’re going to Colorado?” Granny asked suspiciously.

“ In the mine, when the Silver Queen collapsed, I jumped off the top of the Silver Queen just before the Explosion.”

“ I know,” Granny said. “You blabbed about that more times than Doc tells about the land crabs that stole a ring from a corpse in the mangroves.”

“ When I hit the ground, I put my arm down to brace myself, and my hand went inside the queen’s head and touched something…I don’t know, kind of mushy or spongy.”

“ So?”

“ Well, both Cimarron and Blinky both said the head and torso were carved from this massive chunk of pure silver. A year before the statue was made, miners dug a nugget-more like a boulder-out of the Mollie Gibson mine on Smuggler Mountain that weighed twenty-one hundred and fifty pounds. The purest silver ever mined, the largest nugget ever found. For a hundred years, the story has been that the statue was carved from the nugget, but if that were true, the head wouldn’t have been hollow.”

Granny pushed her sunglasses up on her head and eyeballed me. “I’m still listening, but I don’t know what that has to do with you going back to Colorado.”

“ When they let me out of the hospital, I did some research. In the library, all the newspaper clippings of the time say just what I told you, the pure one-ton nugget, the statue, the whole shebang. But in the county historical society, there are handwritten notes from the artisans who made the Silver Queen, and they kept track of all the materials used, including three hundred eighty pounds of papier-mache.”

“ So what?” Granny asked.

“ That’s what I stuck my hand in. They filled that big mama with papier-mache and coated her with a thin layer of silver!”

“ So write a story for the National Geographic. What’s it got to do with you?”

“ The one-ton nugget has never been accounted for. I searched all the records. Every big event in the mines was duly recorded. It would have been major news if the nugget had been melted down or sold or put on display, but it simply dropped off the face of the earth.”

“ Or back into someone’s mine,” Charlie offered.

“ Exactly. Maybe the same someone who filched the Silver Queen from the museum put the nugget back in that mine, too. Or maybe it’s in the Mollie Gibson, or who knows where.”

Granny had reeled in and found her hook missing its chunk of squid. “Don’t tell me you’re going to go look for it. Not after all you’ve been through.”

“ I’ve got the maps, the charts, the old mining logs,” I said.

“ How’d you manage that?”

“ Bought ‘em. Bought Cimarron’s stock actually.”

“ Of all the damn fool…”

“ No, listen, Granny. The court divided the company’s cash up among all the investors, about thirty cents on the dollar. Cimarron’s stock passed to Jo Jo, who owned it at the time of her death.”

“ You mean she killed her husband and gets his assets?” Granny demanded, her sense of justice offended.

“ She got them and never lost them because she wasn’t prosecuted for killing Cimarron. The probate court in Colorado put the stock up for sale. Nobody wanted it, so I bought it-seventy percent of the company-for a hundred bucks. I already had ten percent.”

“ You’re not serious, Jacob. What do you want it for? It’s cursed.” Granny only called me by my given name when she was perturbed.

“ Hey, it’s not for the money. It’s like a game, a scavenger hunt. You have these old maps and diaries from a hundred years ago, and you know somewhere under the ground is this treasure. Well, it just starts to take hold of you.”

“ Uh-huh,” she said, not sounding convinced.

“ So I thought maybe Kip would come up there with me. He already feels comfortable in school there, and who knows, maybe we’ll find the nugget just like Cimarron found the Silver Queen.”

Granny and Charlie seemed to chew it over for a while. Then Granny said, “No use trying to talk Jacob out of anything. Boy’s got a stubborn streak inherited from Lord knows who.”

Charlie took off his hat, cleared his throat, and pulled a pipe out of a pocket on his fishing vest. He tamped cherry tobacco into the bowl and struggled to keep a match lit in the breeze. “What about the other twenty percent?”

“ Blinky’s share,” I said. “It’s being held in trust by the court until he’s declared dead. There was no way to find his body in the rubble.”

“ Uh-huh.”

When Charlie’s brain cells are cranked up, he usually stays quiet a while. Off the bow, an osprey dive-bombed the water just off the reef and came up with a parrot fish.

After a moment, Charlie said, “Other than Kip here, you doing this treasure hunting by yourself?”

“ I might find some help.”

“ From whom?”

“ I thought I should get someone with a little experience.”

“ There’s something you’re not telling us.”

I put on my innocent face. “Like what?”

“ Where’s Baroso?”

Granny growled at that one. “Dead, ain’t he? If he was shot in the leg, he never could have gotten out of the cavern, and even if he did, he couldn’t have climbed all the way up. Isn’t that right, Jake?”

“ That’s the way I figure it,” I said.

Granny nodded her approval.

“ Unless he took the elevator,” I added.

They both gave me a look.

“ Blinky had this old elevator working off a couple of twelve-volt batteries. I missed it on the way in, but I found it on the way out, just before I got to the stone ladder. It’s the way I got back to the top.”

“ You left that part out.”

“ Not when I told the cops. That’s how I explained the blood.”

Again, the look from both of them.

“ There were fresh drops inside the cage. I added a few with my bleeding shoulder. The cops had no reason to test it because they figured it was all mine, and I mostly told the truth: The last time I saw Blinky he was in the cavern, and a couple of seconds later, it was a tomb.”

Charlie made a tsk-tsking sound. “Misleading the police, I’m surprised at you.”

“ I didn’t mislead them. I just didn’t go out of my way to help them.”

“ Where’d he go?” Granny asked. “How’d he get away?”

“ When I got out of the tunnel, Jo Jo’s pickup was still there, but the Jeep was gone.”

“ So he contacted you,” Granny said, prompting me to continue.

“ In a manner of speaking,” I said.

“ Jacob, don’t be difficult.”

“ When I got to my rental car, I almost missed it, but on the windshield, somebody had used a finger to write a note in the fresh snow.”

“ Lordy, do go on!” Granny shouted, excitedly.

“ Please do,” Charlie pleaded.

I didn’t answer.

“ Jacob!” Granny demanded.

I still didn’t answer.

Kip joined the chorus. “C’mon, Uncle Jake. What’d he say? I’ll bet it wasn’t ‘Rosebud.’ “

“ You know, the three of you are the only people in the world I love with all my heart,” I said.

“ So?” Granny demanded.

“ So, I m sorry.”

“ What in hell’s fire is that supposed to mean?”

“ Attorney-client privilege,” I said, and then I felt a tug on my line.