Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (7 page)

In the black leather bucket seat next to me
was this lemon-haired, string bean of a kid who Granny had informed
me was my kin, to use her word. I studied him. He had blue eyes
with long, pale lashes, fair skin with a faint blue vein showing
just over the left temple. His straight, lank hair fell into his
eyes. He would be considered cute, and when he filled out and
reached his mid-teens, the girls would probably consider him a stud
or a fox, or whatever the word of the day might be.

Granny said he was my half sister’s son.

Which was double news to me. I didn’t know I
had a sister, whole or fractioned, and obviously, I didn’t know
about a son. It all had to do with my no-account mother—Granny’s
phrase again—who ran off to Oklahoma with a man she didn’t marry, a
man who left after fathering a daughter, Janet by name.

My mother had spent her last half-dozen
years in an alcoholic fog, living alone in a third-floor walk-up
apartment in Tulsa. Although the roughneck was long since gone,
dear old Mom never came back to Florida, which is a euphemistic way
of saying, she never saw me after dropping me off at Granny’s on
her way out of state and out of mind. Still, she always sent a card
at Christmas and on my birthday, sometimes with a few dollars or a
shirt that was hopelessly small.

I know a psychologist would say I’m into
heavy denial, but I don’t remember missing her, and when she died
in my junior year in high school, it didn’t mean that much. I still
had Granny, and now apparently, so did Kip, son of unknown,
unmarried, half sister Janet, who was in drug rehab in Houston or
Phoenix or Albuquerque, those cities tending to merge in Granny’s
mind.

“
How come you’re not in
school?” I asked Kip, as we roared north, passing a Winnebago with
mushy tires on the two-lane road lined with conch shell stands and
ticky-tack motels.

“
It’s summer vacation,” he
answered, giving me a pitying look.

“
Right. I knew
that.”

We both studied the double
white line a moment, and he said, “You ever see
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
?”

“
Must have missed
it.”

“
It was so cool. Sean Penn
is this dweeb named Spicoli, who orders pizza delivered to his
homeroom.”

“
Cool,” I
agreed.

I stayed quiet a while, sneaking peeks at
the kid’s profile as the wind blasted his hair back off his face.
Okay, maybe there was some resemblance. He would be more finely
chiseled than his roughly hewn uncle, and just now he seemed so
fragile that something within me, something buried in the genetic
material we shared, made me want to protect him. Trouble was, I had
precious little experience with children, and I didn’t know where
to begin.

“
I did see
Blackboard Jungle
,” I
said, “but that was before your time.”

“
Yeah, it’s been on the
classics channel. Sidney Poitier and Vic Morrow were totally
awesome, and the music over the credits was way cool.”

“
Way cool,” I agreed
again.

I gunned the convertible around a rental
Ford Taurus whose occupants had slowed to stare at an osprey nest
lodged on top of a telephone pole. “The song you liked was ‘Rock
Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets.”

Granny had asked me to teach the kid some
things. I wasn’t sure what I could do, unless he wanted to know
some of the history of rock and roll, or maybe how to get by an
offensive tackle with the swim move. In the meantime, there was
work to do.

“
Kip, I have to ask you
some questions to get ready for the hearing tomorrow.”

“
Yeah.”

“
Why’d you do
it?”

“
Who said I did? There’s a
presumption of innocence, and if the state can’t prove its case,
the judge has to dismiss it, just like Paul Winfield did when
Harrison Ford was charged with murder in
Presumed Innocent
.”

Most clients who try to teach me the law are
jailhouse lawyers. Now I had a kid with a J.D. from HBO. “Listen
up, Kip. I’m your lawyer, so you tell me the truth without being a
smartass. Got it?”

“
Are you a good lawyer or a
goofball like Joe Pesci in
My Cousin
Vinnie
?”

To our left, the sun was setting over a
swampy field of saw grass. Three web-footed terns dipped and cawed,
scanning the shallow water for dinner. I gunned the Olds to pass a
Jeep hauling a Boston Whaler on a shimmying trailer and said,
“Granny gave me the A-form, so I know what the cops say you did.
I’m assuming you spray-painted the wall since you were caught with
blue paint on your pants, and there’s a witness who saw you chuck
the can through a display window. If that’s not enough, you
admitted everything to the cop who came to the scene.”

“
He didn’t read me my
rights. Not even like Mel Gibson in
Lethal
Weapon 3
, when he knocks the bad guy
unconscious, then says, ‘You have the right to remain
silent.’

“
But they’ll testify they
did. They always do. Besides, the physical evidence and the
eyewitness are enough to convict, even without the confession. So,
bottom line, little guy, tell me what was going through that mind
of yours.”

“
What’s the big deal?
Timothy Hutton did the same thing in
Turk
182
as a protest. That’s where I got the
idea.”

I hit the brakes and the old car groaned and
whinnied as we stopped on the edge of a ditch filled with water,
weeds, and probably alligators. We were just south of the Card
Sound Bridge, and the traffic was slowing down to watch a flock, or
is it a gaggle, of herons heading for the water.

Turning to the kid who allegedly shared my
blood, I said, “I don’t care about movies, okay, and I want you to
stop showing off. I know you’re bright. I know you wrap yourself in
the movies because you don’t have a real family, and you’ve been
bounced around so much, you don’t have any real friends, either.
But I’m here for you. Do you understand what I’m saying?

“
You’re my
lawyer.”

“
I’m your
friend
and . . .” I took
a deep breath as an eighteen-wheeler roared by, kicking up dust.
“I’m family, too.’’

He looked at me skeptically.

“
Look, Kip, neither one of
us knows exactly what to do. You don’t know how to be a nephew, and
I don’t know how to be an uncle. So, we’ll learn together. When the
hearing’s over, I’ll take you back to Granny’s if they don’t send
you off to Raiford.”

He gave me a funny look, like I’d hurt his
feelings, but he wasn’t going to let it show.

“
I’ll come down and visit
you,” I added quickly, “and you can come to Miami and visit me.
I’ll try to do the uncle things like buying you ice cream, taking
you fishing—”

“
Or to the
movies.”

“
Right. And you’ll do the
nephew things like ...” What the hell were nephew things? “Like
cutting the grass, changing the oil in the Olds, and waxing down
the sailboards.”

“
You’ll have to show me
how,” he said happily, seeming to welcome the opportunity to work
up a sweat.

“
It’s a deal,” I responded,
and we exchanged high fives.

“
Can we go to the movies
tonight?” he asked.

“
No. I have to meet a
client.”

“
A murderer, like Jeff
Bridges in
Jagged Edge
?”

“
Nobody ever mistook Blinky
Baroso for Jeff Bridges,” I said. “Danny DeVito, maybe.”

I pushed the clutch to the floor, grabbed
the chrome ball on the stick shift, eased out the clutch while
giving it some gas— leaded, high-octane—and tore up gravel, then
burned rubber getting back onto the road. I figured the first
lesson in nephew training was safe driving, which I sum up as
follows: If you’ve got three hundred fifty cubic inches, use them
all.

***

I live in a coral rock house between
Poinciana and Kumquat in Coconut Grove. The house is a two-story
pillbox that has withstood sixty years of hurricanes, a number of
Super Bowl parties, and many years of benign neglect. Just after
nine p.m., I pulled the Olds under a chinaberry tree that serves as
a carport and showed Kip how to put up the canvas top. He seemed to
like helping. Then I grabbed the duffel bag with all his worldly
belongings and led him to the front door, which I opened by banging
my good shoulder into the humidity-swollen wood. The door yielded
with a groan, or was that me?

Inside was dark and stuffy. I turned on the
ceiling fan to stir the soggy air and opened the blinds to let in
the green phosphorescent glare of the neighborhood’s sodium vapor
anti-crime lights. I cleared some beer bottles from the sailboard
that is propped between two concrete blocks and serves as a
cocktail table. Then I sat down, put my feet up, and tried to
figure out what to do next.

My house is furnished in
Early Locker Room. There’s a tasteful lamp made of a Dolphins
helmet with an orange and aqua shade. There’s a rusted scuba tank
leaning against a planter filled with parched dirt and the
fossilized remains of a rubber plant. There are newspapers and
magazines and assorted volumes of
Florida
Statutes Annotated
and a few paperbacks by
John D. MacDonald.

Kip looked around, surveying my palace.
“What a dump!” he proclaimed, and before he could tell me, I said
it was a pretty fair Bette Davis. The kid looked sleepy. It hadn’t
occurred to me earlier, but now I was getting some vague idea about
children’s bedtimes. I had been planning to haul him with me to
meet Blinky Baroso on South Beach. Now, I saw the kid couldn’t make
it.

I told Kip the bathroom was on the second
floor to the left and he scampered up the stairs. I followed him up
and put some fresh sheets on the bed in the spare room, a place
former teammates crash when they hit town to check into Mount Sinai
for a knee replacement or drug rehab.

I tried calling Blinky Baroso to tell him to
come over to the house, instead of meeting me at our usual spot on
South Beach, but all I got was a recording. Damn, he must have left
already. I didn’t even know why he wanted to meet. He hadn’t said
much on the phone when he set up the meeting. People were watching
him, or me, or both, and we needed to talk. He probably wanted to
tell me about his latest scheme to turn horseshit into gold, and I
was growing irritated that he was dragging me out of the house and
away from my kid.

Whoa, my kid?

Is this what fatherhood—or uncledom—does to
a man? Was I finally getting domesticated?

I changed into my client conference attire,
a clean tank top to match my cutoffs, deck shoes without socks,
then came back downstairs. Maybe I could tuck Kip in bed and ask
one of the neighbors to stop by. But it was Sunday night, and
Phoebe, a thrice-divorced redhead across the street, was hosting
one of her swingers’ parties, complete with bobbing for apples (and
what not) in the Jacuzzi. I could do without a herd of her sopping
wet friends traipsing through my house, corrupting my nephew.

My neighbors are a fine lot, though not
necessarily baby-sitter material in a Newt Gingrich world of family
values. Besides Phoebe, there’s Geoffrey, who works nights cruising
the expressways looking for fiery car crashes to videotape, and
Mako, who lives in a wooden treehouse on the other side of the
limeberry shrubs. To visit, you have to climb a rope ladder,
something that discourages process servers. Mako trades his
custom-made hammocks for crawfish with Homer Thigpen, a lobster pot
poacher who lives in the first house on Poinciana. I helped Homer
beat a federal charge that could have cost him his boat under the
forfeiture laws, and ever since, and I’ve been knee-deep in Florida
lobster, some of them even corralled in season. I haven’t felt so
warm and fuzzy about the majesty of the legal system since I walked
a parking meter thief who paid my fee in quarters and dimes.

I heard the water running upstairs and
yelled at Kip to make sure he brushed his teeth. “Up and down
strokes,” I ordered.

I was feeling uneasy about
leaving him alone in a strange house. He was a good kid. Okay, so
he smashed a window and spray-painted the South Miami Cineplex with
a pretty fair drawing of Arnold Schwarzenegger holding a shotgun.
“
Hasta la vista, baby
,” Arnold was saying in a cartoon bubble of iridescent blue
paint.

It was an understandable
protest by a kid who had ridden the bus from Islamorada to
see
Casablanca
on
the big screen only to discover that the theater had, without
notice, substituted
Revenge of the Nerds
III
. I thought the theater manager
overreacted in reporting the incident as a terrorist act, and when
Kip asked, I assured him he wouldn’t get the chair like Jimmy
Cagney in
Angels with Dirty
Faces
.

I was thinking about the juvenile court
hearing when Kip came back down the stairs. He had changed into his
pajamas, I thought at first, but then I saw he was wearing an old
Dolphins jersey than hung down past his knees. “I found this in the
closet,” he said. “Okay if I wear it to sleep?”

He turned around, modeling it. Across his
back, the lettering said LASSITER. Below was the number,
fifty-eight. “Looks great on you,” I said. “It’s yours.”