“ Who is this?” A man’s voice, strangely familiar.
“ Blinky? Is that you?”
“ No. Who’s this?”
It was coming to me. I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say a word.
“ Jake,” he said. “Jake Lassiter? What the fuck are you-”
But I had hung up.
Now, why did I do that? Why did I feel guilty about being there just now, and why was I wiping my fingerprints off the telephone? I hadn’t killed anyone. No one was even dead, right. I mean there wasn’t a body. Blinky would be coming out of the woods in a minute.
C’mon, Blinky. Where the hell are you?
I touched the red stain. Still wet. I wiped my hand on the seat but only managed to smear the blood. I opened the glove compartment. There was nothing there, not even gloves.
I was thinking about getting the hell out of there when another noise startled me.
The overlapping whine of sirens. My ass was half out of the Range Rover when three police cars swerved onto the beach, spitting up sand, lights whirling. As they skidded to impressive, cop-style stops, I could no longer see the bright sails or hear the crackling of the wind.
It took Abe Socolow twenty minutes to get there. By that time, a crime scene van was parked in the shade, and a pot-bellied cop was taking plaster impressions of the Range Rover’s tires. When he finished, he hauled his little black bag into the van and gathered blood samples, dusted for prints, and used tweezers and a tiny whisk broom looking for who knows what. He had already been through my car, with my consent, since I didn’t feel like waiting around for them to bring a warrant. Two uniformed cops were trying to interview the boardsailors, most of whom didn’t want to leave the water. When the wind is up, neither shark sightings nor murder scenes will get hardcore boardheads to shore.
I sat under a pine tree whose branches swayed gently in the wind. Three cops stood around me asking questions I wouldn’t answer if I could, but they parted when his eminence, the prosecutor, pulled up in his state-owned four-door Chrysler.
“ Where the hell is he?” Abe Socolow asked.
I stayed sitting, my back against a tree. Abe looked down at me, his courtroom pallor giving him a sickly look in the open air. “Who?” I answered.
“ Don’t jerk me around, Jake. Your sleazy client.”
“ Which one?” I asked, thinking we’d played this scene before, maybe twice.
“ I’m losing patience with you. What were you doing here?”
“ Waiting for Baroso, or maybe Godot.”
“ What were you doing in his car?”
I wanted to stand up so I could look down at Socolow who now towered over me, but I sat still, my arms across my knees. I was pulling pine needles off a branch, one by one, a child’s refrain popping into my head. She loves me, she loves me not. “Aren’t you supposed to advise me of my right to counsel and even provide one if I can’t pay the freight, which I can’t, if it’s someone who charges my rates?”
“ Why’d you hang up the phone, Jake? You knew it was me on the other end, didn’t you? Why’d you do something stupid like that?”
Two could play this game. “Why were you calling here?” I asked.
“ My secretary got an anonymous call, male voice she didn’t recognize, giving her the number and saying for me to call if I wanted to break the Hornback case.”
“ Me, too. I mean, Cindy got a call from Blinky, at least she thought it was Blinky, telling me to come out here.”
Socolow regarded me skeptically. “Did she now?”
“ Call her, find out.” Socolow was giving me a look that was supposed to make me break down and confess to all manner of felonies and misdemeanors. “Don’t you see, Abe, someone’s setting me up? Someone wanted me out here to make it look like I killed Blinky.”
Socolow smiled his gotcha smile. “Who said anything about Blinky being killed?”
“ Ah c’mon, Abe, don’t play cop games with me.”
“ I’m not playing, Jake. I’m dead serious. You know anything about a corpse you want to tell us?”
He looked in the direction of the woods. My mind flashed a picture of Blinky’s body half covered by branches, a handful of my business cards clutched in a death grip.
“ Like I said before, I came here to meet Blinky. I stood around maybe ten minutes. The phone rang. I went to answer it, saw the blood, heard your voice, froze, and hung up. I don’t know why, I just did it.”
“ Uh-huh.”
“ It’s the truth. Look, Blinky’s been skulking around because he’s afraid someone’s trying to kill him. Maybe he was right, but that someone wasn’t me.”
“ Uh-huh.”
“ C’mon, Abe, you can smell a setup. Somebody wanted me out here. Somebody called the cops, somebody called you. Can’t you see what’s going on? I don’t have a motive for killing Blinky.” I was rambling now, doing just what I tell clients not to do. But it was understandable. I had a fool for a client, and my lawyer wasn’t much better. “Maybe Blinky was mugged. Maybe he’s lying in the bushes somewhere. Maybe the blood isn’t even his.”
“ Oh, I’ll bet it is. I’ll give you three to one it’s type O, weasel. As for your motive, it’s tied up with Hornback and whatever you had cooked up with Baroso in the West.”
“ That’s bullshit, Abe. Blinky was using me. How about looking for this Cimarron character?” I stood up and brushed sand from my navy blue suit pants. “Now, if you don’t have any other questions, I think I’ll go home. See you in court, Abe.”
“ As lawyer or defendant?” Abe Socolow asked.
Chapter 11
There was a no trespassing sign at the front gate, which hung open. I kept the Olds in second gear and churned up dust on the dirt driveway that wound through the trees. Josefina Baroso lived in what used to be a caretaker’s cottage on a tropical fruit plantation just off Old Cutler Road. No one had worked the place for years, and the trees-lychee, Key lime, Surinam cherry, and black sapote-were overgrown with weeds. Gnarled and stunted mango trees surrounded the cottage, the ground covered with rotting fruit, the air heavy with the sickly sweet scent of decay.
It was late afternoon, and gray thunderheads were forming over the Everglades to the west, building into their daily gully washers. I parked in the driveway under a guanabana tree and walked to the front steps. The cracker-style building had walls of Dade County pine, a slanted tin roof with eaves spouts and a brick chimney poking through the top. On the northern, shaded side, there was a small porch, screened to keep out the mosquitoes, fruit flies, and no-see-um gnats. In front was a screen door, latched from inside, a heavy wood door closed behind it.
I knocked on the screen door, and in a moment, the heavy door opened, and Jo Jo Baroso stood there looking at me.
“ We need to talk,” I said through the screen, her face darkened by cross-hatched shadows.
Silently, she unlatched the door, stood back and let me in. It was a small, cool, quiet place furnished in subtle earth tones. She motioned me to a sofa of Haitian cotton, and our eyes met with a knowing memory. The sofa had followed her from that first apartment so long ago. We had lain there in the darkness and exchanged whispers long into the night. We had teased and played and made love there, our limbs locked around each other. And now the faded photographs of memory came back.
Jo Jo broke eye contact first, asked whether I wanted some limeade. I did, remembering she made it with so little sugar it could bring tears to your eyes. She disappeared into the kitchen, a tall, dark, barefoot beauty in pleated, white cotton shorts and orange tank top.
She returned carrying two glasses and a pitcher of limeade on a tray, and I said, “Something may have happened to your brother.”
“ I know. Abe called me.”
“ They haven’t found a body. I mean, there’s no way of telling