Fool Me Twice

CHAPTER 9

Sylvester Houston Conklin fell asleep in front of the television, watching Clint Eastwood blast five bad guys in a San Francisco diner. Earlier, Kip had put away a double portion of spaghetti and meatballs and a protein shake. Carbs and protein, I was bulking him up. Yesterday, it was brown rice, broiled fish, and raw vegetables for the fiber. I did the cooking, and he ate it all. As a reward, we split a sixteen-ounce Grolsch.

Now he was sacked out on the sofa, so I carried him upstairs to the second bedroom, his body warm in my arms. I tucked him in, pulling the sheet up under his chin, and pushed the blond bangs out of his eyes. I was starting to feel avuncular, if not downright fatherly.

Kip stirred, half opened his eyes, and said, “Did you really threaten to jam a cane up the state attorney’s ass?”

“ Guilty.”

“ He’s such a dweeb.”

“ A major dweeb,” I agreed. “You should have seen him prancing around with that cane, putting on a show.”

“ Like Raymond Burr in A Place in the Sun or Everett Sloane in The Lady from Shanghai.” He reached out from under the sheets and gave my arm a squeeze. “I really like your bedtime stories, Uncle Jake.”

“ And I really like having you here. Now it’s lights out.”

His eyes were closing again, and as they did, he pointed his index finger at me, as if holding a gun.

“ Go ahead,” he said, “make my day.”

“ Good night, Kip.”

He nodded off, and I puttered around in his room, gathering a pile of his shorts, socks, and T-shirts that had been balled up in a corner. Then I padded out, closing the door without a sound. I tossed the clothes into the washer and poured in a double dose of the detergent that is supposed to nuke grass stains into bright, sanitary molecules. Apparently, Kip had accomplished what none of a series of bright and attractive young women could manage: He had civilized me.

Even with the ceiling fan on high and a gentle breeze filtering through the open windows, it was sweltering in my subtropical bedroom. Most nights, I fall asleep to the muted slap of palm fronds against masonry and the occasional blare of a police siren just up Douglas Road in Coconut Grove. I am darn near the last Miamian without central air-conditioning, and I like it that way. The old coral rock house just off Kumquat sits in a neighborhood of delectable street names. Loquat, Avocado, and Cocoanut are just around the corner. My house is positioned on the tiny lot to take advantage of southeasterly winds and is shaded by live oak, chinaberry, and poinciana trees, but still, summer nights are hot and sticky.

I lay on my back, naked, listening to the whompeta-whompeta of the fan harmonizing with the chugita-chugita of the washing machine, feeling the sweat trickle down my chest. I dozed, dreaming a pastiche of unrelated scenes. An unshaven cowboy in a poncho silently rode a black horse across the high plains. Jo Jo Baroso sat on the black divan in her mother’s den, laughing gaily, but the laugh turned sinister and suddenly it was Abe Socolow laughing with all the charm of the Doberman pinscher he resembled.

Somebody said something, but who was it? Somebody complaining. You gotta do something about jour door, Jake. Sure, sure. I rolled onto my side and tried to chase the dreams. Somebody was smoking a cigarette. Dreaming now in smell-a-rama.

Suddenly, it was daytime, or was it? No, dawn doesn’t break with a hundred-fifty-watt blast in the face. I squinted into the glare.

“ You gotta start locking your door,’’ the voice said. The light clicked off. “Sorry to wake you, but I’m only out at night.’’

“ Blinky? Is that you?’’

Through a haze of cigarette smoke, a rotund form was backlit by the sodium vapor lights from outside my open window. “It ain’t Dracula,” Blinky Baroso said.

“ You son of a bitch,” I said. “You ungrateful, selfish son of a bitch. After all I’ve done for you…”

“ Hey, I said I’m sorry. Go back to sleep.”

“ I don’t care about your waking me up. What the hell were you doing using my name for that treasure company?”

“ Jeez, Jake, you’re pissed about that?” he whined, sounding hurt. Like a lot of manipulators, Blinky had the ability to make his victim contrite for hurting his feelings. “Are you going to hold that against me now? I kind of thought you’d be flattered.”

“ Next time, flatter someone else.”

“ I meant to tell you, Jake, I really did. We needed to dress up the paperwork a little. I borrowed your good name, that’s all.”

“ Yeah, I want it back.”

“ C’mon, Jake, we’ll amend the papers, it’s no big deal.”

“ Maybe not to you, but the SEC and the Florida Bar might see it differently. To say nothing of Abe Socolow.”

He crushed out the cigarette in a commemorative Super Bowl VIII ashtray and sat on the edge of my bed, moving close to me. “Jake, I need help.”

“ Yeah, me too. Socolow thinks you had me kill Kyle Hornback, or maybe it was my own idea. I can’t even follow his reasoning.”

“ You’re joking.”

“ I’m not, and Abe never does.”

“ Jeez, you mean I’m a suspect.”

As usual, Blinky’s concerns were about number one. “That’s usually what happens when somebody runs from a murder scene,” I said. “What the hell were you doing here last night?”

“ I tried to get here before you left for the beach. See, I figured my phone was tapped, and whoever was listening would think we’d be on the wall over on Ocean Drive. I started that way, did a U-turn on the Venetian, and came to your place, but I was running late, and you’d already left.”

“ Who’s tapping your phone? What’s it all about?”

“ I don’t know, but before Hornback was killed, I was being followed. I’m sure of it.”

In the darkness, I sensed Blinky tremble. “Anyway, I got in, just like now, by putting my weight against the front door. It was dark inside, but I could see something spinning around. I didn’t know what the hell it was, so I turned on a light. Jesus Cristo, I nearly fainted. Then I nearly puked. I’ve never seen anything like that, ever. I turned off the light and ran out. I thought the killer might be in the house, might be after me. I went home, grabbed some things, and got out of there. Last night, I slept in the Rover out on Virginia Key.”

He leaned closer on the bed, giving me a whiff of cigarette breath mixed with stale sweat. “Jake, who would have done such a thing?”

“ Whoa. Back up. What was Kyle doing here?”

“ Dunno, exactly. Maybe he was killed someplace else and dumped there, like to implicate us.”

“ No. A neighbor saw him arrive by taxi. Whoever killed him drugged him first with a fast-acting barbiturate, then strangled him and strung him up.”

I got out of bed and pulled on a pair of faded blue gym shorts with the Penn State logo. Then I moved toward the window and inhaled the night air. It was heavy with jasmine, which was an improvement.

“ What was Kyle doing here?” I asked for the second time. “Was he coming to see you or me? Did he know you were going to be here, and who else knew?”

“ A lot of questions.”

“ And the big one, who wanted him dead?”

“ Besides me?” Blinky asked softly.

I let it sink in a moment before responding. “No, let’s start with you.”

“ Sure, I thought about it, acing him, but it was just wishful thinking, of course.”

“ Of course.”

“ I mean, he was going to rat. He had an appointment to see Socolow today, did you know that?”

“ I did, but how did you?”

“ Kyle told me.”

Ah. “When?”

“ Yesterday morning.”

Blinky seemed to want to say more, but he stopped. Maybe he wanted me to drag it out of him. “Yesterday morning,” I said. Sometimes, if you repeat a witness’s statement, it’s like priming the pump, and the words will just start flowing.

“ Yeah,” Blinky said. “I was home reading the Sunday papers when he called. He told me he was going in first thing in the morning to see Socolow unless he could get some satisfaction from me.”

“ Satisfaction meaning bucks.”

“ Mucho bucks. Five hundred thousand of them.”

I let out a whistle. “To which you said?”

“ I asked him if he’d take a check. Then I told him, ‘?Chingate! Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.’ After I calmed down, I told him I’d get back to him with something, you know, a counteroffer, after I had a chance to think about it.”

“ And talk to your lawyer,” I said, filling in the gaps.

“ Yeah.”

“ And you told him you were seeing me that evening.”

Blinky paused before nodding yes. He pulled another cigarette from somewhere and lit it, the tip glowing in the darkened room. “Yeah, I told him. But I never said where, and I never invited him over for espresso and pastelitos.”

I cocked my head in what is supposed to be an inquisitive, if not accusing, look.

“ Honest, Jake. Why would I want him around? I needed to talk to you. Hell, I figured Kyle would be wired the next time he saw me. They’d try to bust me for subornation of perjury or obstruction of justice if I bought him off. I needed some advice from you before talking to him.’’

We both stayed quiet a moment, and I thought about it. Who wanted Kyle Hornback dead? Besides Blinky. And who wanted to frame Blinky and maybe me? The ceiling fan continued its endless circles, slashing the plumes of cigarette smoke like a whirling saber. The washing machine had long since ended its cycles, and outside my window, a mockingbird was singing its early-morning song in the mulberry bush.

“ Who’s Kit Carson Cimarron?” I asked.

In the gun-metal gray light of a new day, Blinky was smiling a rueful smile. “Now that,” he said, “is a long story.”

A pink glow was spreading in the eastern sky as we reconvened in the kitchen. I made Blinky cafe con leche and squeezed some fresh grapefruit juice for myself. He asked me to scramble four eggs, and I told him secretary-treasurers of major corporations do no such thing. But I made rye toast, which he wolfed down with cream cheese and guava preserves that Granny had made, or “put up,” as she would say. I microwaved last night’s spaghetti and meatballs for my breakfast.

“ Kit Carson Cimarron,” Blinky said, chewing his toast, seeming to enjoy the sound of the name. “You know how you dumped Josie?”

“ That’s a little strong,” I said. “We split up, that’s all.”

“ Yeah, yeah, you broke up. Well, I was there. You dropped her like a bad habit, not that I blame you. Afterward, she moped around for a year.”

“ Okay, have it your way. What’s that got to do with Cimarron?”

“ You ought to ask Josie.”

“ She knows him? When Socolow mentioned Cimarron’s name, Jo Jo didn’t blink an eye.”

“ Yeah, well she isn’t about to admit that she was almost Mrs. K. C. Cimarron of Pitkin County, Colorado.”

“ What!”

“ Left her at the altar, or the stable actually, since they were going to get married on his ranch. Broke her heart, Jake, or would have, if she had one. You know, the only two men I ever introduced to my sister are you and Cimarron, and from each of you, she got nothing but pain.”

“ That sounds like something she would say.”

“ Verdad. I’m just repeating her words.”

“ Tell me more about him.”

“ He was rich, but leveraged up to his ten-gallon hat in oil-and gas-drilling loans in the eighties, and when the bottom fell out of the market, he lost everything, except his ranch in Colorado. Anyway, he’d dumped her by then, and there hasn’t been anyone else in her life since.”

“ You introduced them,” I said, which was really a question.

“ We’d done some business,” Blinky continued, “when he still had a seven-figure line of credit. He picked up the financing on the salvage operation in the Keys. Paid for the equipment, the divers, the marketing. I was the brains, he was the bank.”

I was about to insult the intelligence of the banker, but Blinky kept talking, “Shit, you should have seen him. He comes down to Sugarloaf Key wearing those hand-stitched cowboy boots and a silver belt buckle must have weighed twenty pounds. He’s even bigger than you, and he’s got on a black cowboy hat with a feather stuck in it, so with the boots and the hat, he’s about seven feet tall, and he’s buying the crew drinks with hundred-dollar bills off a wad he carries in his boots.”

“ Jo Jo fell in love with this guy?” I said in disbelief.

“ El amor es ciego. Love is blind, my friend.”

“ You got sued in the Keys deal.”

“ Right, but not indicted, thanks to Kit. He saved my ass.”

“ What happened?”

Blinky shook his head sadly. “On the Grand Bahama Bank, we found three Spanish galleons loaded to the gunwales with coins and artifacts. Seven million wholesale auction value after expenses.”

“ What’s wrong with that?”

“ I had twenty percent of the company, gave Cimarron twenty percent and sold the rest.”

“ I still don’t get it.”

“ The sixty percent I sold…well, I sold it about four times.”

“ Oh shit.”

“ Yeah, I had to give up all the promoters’ portions to the investors, and Cimarron had to make up the shortfall, about eight hundred thousand, to keep us out of jail. “Blinky laughed in disbelief at his own bad fortune at striking it rich. “Who would ever have thought we’d have found the stuff? It was the first deal I ever did that actually worked.”

From behind me, a voice. “Just like The Producers.”

I turned and there was Kip in his Jockey shorts, his face still puffy with sleep. “Zero Mostel produces this Broadway show he’s sure will flop, so he sells it over and over to investors, and when it makes money, he’s really fucked.”

“ Don’t say ‘fucked,’ “I told my ward.

“ Right,” Blinky said. “Say ‘screwed.’ ‘Fucked’ has no class, and to succeed in business, kid, you gotta have class.”

“ Anyway,” Kip said, “Mostel’s bummed out and he says to Gene Wilder, ‘I was so careful. I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast. Where did I go right?’

“ That’s good,” Blinky said. “The kid’s a regular actor. I could put him into sales.”

Kip grabbed a box of cereal from the cupboard and sat at the kitchen counter, listening. If he paid close attention, he wouldn’t need an MBA from Wharton.

“ Rocky Mountain Treasures was really Cimarron’s idea,” Blinky said, turning to me. “Back in the good days, he bought up mineral leases all over Colorado.”

“ But how can he finance it? You said he was tapped out.”

“ He is. That’s why I’m out there selling limited partnership interests. The investors will fund the exploration. But listen, Jake, this isn’t a mining operation. Shit, with the price of gold and silver where it is, you can’t extract enough to justify the costs. Plus, the environmental rules will tie you up for years before you turn your first spadeful of dirt. But we’re after something else. Gold and silver that’s already been mined. It’s there, Jake, sunk in old mine shafts, hidden in caves, buried under mountains. We’ve got maps. We’ve got satellite photographs you can buy from the government. We’ve got sophisticated sensors and state-of-the-art equipment, and either way, we can’t lose.”

“ Either way?”

“ We hit paydirt, everybody wins and wins big. We don’t, Cimarron and I still get management fees from investors’ funds. And best of all, it’s legit.”

I was watching Kip carefully slice an orange into quarters and nibble at it. “Uh-huh.”

“ Okay, so we puffed a little bit where you were concerned, and maybe we didn’t give every twist and turn in my biography, but I’m telling you, the business is for real. Honest, Jake. Believe me.”

I thought about believing him, but I was having trouble with it. Sometimes in closing argument, when I’m telling a jury to be cautious of a prosecution witness who’s been given immunity in return for his testimony, I tell a little story. I tell about the farmer who found a rattlesnake in the middle of the winter. “Please don’t kill me,” the snake says. “I’m nearly frozen. Take me back to the farmhouse and warm me up and save my life.” But the farmer is worried. “If I warm you up, you’ll bite me.” The snake wiggles its head and says, “I promise not to bite you.” So the farmer takes the snake home, warms it up, and lo and behold, the snake bites him. As he’s dying the farmer moans: “How could you do this to me. You promised…”

In the story, this is where I pause and give the jurors my steady gaze. “Yes,” the snake says, “but when I promised, you knew I was a snake.”

Now I looked uneasily at my reptilian client.

“ C’mon, Jake, don’t you believe me?”

“ I believe you,” I said, wanting it to be true. “So what did Hornback have on you? What was he going to tell Socolow?”

“ It was a bluff. He was selling shares for me, so he just assumed it was a scam. Hell, why wouldn’t he? Anyway, he threatened to squeal, but he had nothing.”

“ You know what I do with squealers?” Kip said, a malicious grin on his sweet young face.

“ Huh?” Blinky seemed startled.

Kip curled his upper lip into a sneer. “I let ‘em have it in the belly so they can roll around for a long time thinking it over.”

“ What the fuck?”

“ Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death,’ Kip explained, “and don’t say ‘fuck.’”