“ 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.