Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (29 page)

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.”