“ You wouldn’t, so she must deny the sexual interlude ever took place.”
“ Well, I’ll say it did,” I said, somewhat petulantly.
“ Did Josefina ever tell Socolow that Cimarron rousted you from her bed?”
“ No, I don’t think so.”
“ Did you?”
“ No. I don’t kiss and tell, but I figured he knew what was going on.”
“ Yet, he cannot dispute her testimony, can he?”
I didn’t answer, so he asked another question. “How did Cimarron get into the house?”
“ I don’t know. I was asleep at the time. There was no sign of forced entry.”
“ Well then, I’ll tell you,” Patterson said. “He had a key. Always did. Had it on his key chain the night he died. As you know, he owned the house in Miami. Josefina knew he was in town. He was, after all, staying there with her. Now, you’re going to ask the jury to believe she invited you to spend the night when she knew her husband would be coming home.”
“ So what the hell was I doing there?”
“ According to Josefina, discussing Blinky and Rocky Mountain Treasures, waiting for Cimarron to show up for a meeting.”
“ That’s crap! We were fastened onto each other like-”
“ Jake!” Granny gave me her steely stare, “There’s tender ears on the premises.”
“ Where?” Kip asked. “Hey, Granny, I saw Basic Instinct where Sharon Stone crosses her legs and puckers up-”
“ Hush!” Granny commanded.
Patterson drained his margarita. “Jake, it doesn’t matter what the two of you did because I can’t prove it. You want to testify that you bedded her down in Miami, you’ll come off as a boorish lout who’s accusing the grieving widow of infidelity.”
“ Infidelity? Who gives a flying fandango? She’s accused me of murder!”
“ And I’m trying to keep you from proving her case.”
I took a hit on the tequila straight out of the bottle. It was intended to make me think more clearly, but it made my lips feel like rubber worms. Still, the outline of a thought was forming. “H.T., maybe it’s starting to make sense, now.”
“ What is?”
“ What you were saying the other day. She set me up, all right, starting with that night in the cottage.”
“ Keep talking,” he said.
“ At the time, I thought she craved my body. Desire under the mangoes.”
“ Elms,” Kip corrected me. “Sophia Loren and Anthony Perkins.”
“ Boy am I stupid!”
“ Don’t state the obvious,” Patterson said. “Get on with it.”
“ Just like you said, she knew Cimarron was coming over. Coming home, in fact. She wanted me in her bed when he showed up. She wanted me to fight him. Who knows, maybe
Cimarron would be carrying a gun and one of us would buy the farm right there. If not, there’s always a second chance after she got me to chase her to Colorado. H.T., you’ve been right all along.”
“ I have been, as surely as God makes little brown babies, but what am I to do with it? I can’t prove a word of it. I guarantee you that no member of the jury will buy it.”
Here I was getting pumped up, and my lawyer’s defeatist attitude rankled me. “Hey, Counselor, whose side are you on?”
Patterson looked hurt.
And must have been.
He didn’t ask for a refill. He just grabbed his wool ski cap, put on his orange parka, and headed for the door. “We’re all a little tired, Jake. I’ll see you in court.”
I didn’t tell him good night.
Now Granny was scowling at me. “You know, Jake, you’re a fine specimen of a man.”
“ What’s that supposed to mean?”
“ Well, you got about an acre of shoulders, a bushy head of hair, all your own teeth, and a by-God full allotment of mouth.”
“ Okay, okay, I was a little tough on H.T., but I’m getting so frustrated, I feel like hitting someone.”
“ Don’t worry, Uncle Jake,” Kip said, his upper lip coated with a chocolate stripe. “If that woman’s saying bad things about you, no one will believe her. No one could believe you did anything bad.”
“ Kip, I love you, do you know that?”
“ Sure.”
“ I’m sorry I haven’t been able to spend much time with you.”
“ It’s okay. I like it here. The snow and all, it’s like Dr. Zhivago.”
“ You been making any movies?”
“ Can’t.” He looked into his bowl of melting ice cream.
Granny said, “He’s been afraid to tell you. In all the commotion, moving around and all, he lost the camera.”
“ I’m sorry, Uncle Jake. I just don’t know where-”
“ Hey, it’s okay. When’s the last time you had it?”
“ That night in the barn. Maybe the cops took it.”
“ I don’t remember it on the inventory,” I said, consigning the information to the repository in my brain where I store odds and ends that don’t fit anywhere else.
“ I know this sounds ridiculous,” Josefina Baroso said, “but to this day, I don’t know if it was rape. It’s so difficult to explain. Jake forced himself on me, but…I didn’t fight back. He hit me. He had before, so that was nothing new. He tore at my clothes. He told me he would have me whether I wanted it or not. He used to get like that, so full of anger, so violent. He just wore me down, and I let him. I just let him.”
With that, a tear tracked down a sculpted cheekbone. I felt my face heat up. The jurors were riveted to their chairs. No darting eyes, no coughs, no fidgeting. They just watched Josefina Baroso with empathy and concern for this brave woman. She was so damn good. She gave the appearance of trying to be fair. No, she can’t call it rape. Of course not, she never told the cops she’d been raped. A physical exam would have disproved that lie.
It was a flaw in her story, at least until she explained it away with her sob story about not knowing whether it was rape at all. Still, Patterson could cross-examine as to why she didn’t tell the cops the whole story.
McBain anticipated the question on cross-examination and defused it. “Ms. Baroso, you never told Sergeant Crawford that the defendant forced you to submit to sex, did you?”
“ No…I couldn’t. I was so ashamed. I blamed myself for it. Maybe I should have fought back, but I was afraid Simmy would hear. I was afraid someone would get killed.”
Josefina Baroso had spent four years on the sexual assault team in the state attorney’s office, and it showed. She knew what worked, and what didn’t, and when she spouted cliches, they sounded heartfelt.
“ Now, Ms. Baroso, what happened after the defendant forced you to submit to him?”
“ I was lying there crying, and Simmy came into the barn looking for me. Jake said something about wanting to thank him.”
“ Thank him?”
“ Yes. He turned to Simmy and smiled, a really vicious smile, and said, ‘Thanks, cowboy, for your money and your wife.”
In the jury box, it looked like 12-0 for stringing me up right there.
“ Then what happened?” McBain asked.
“ I was crying, but somehow I told Simmy what happened. He stayed calm. He was breathing hard, and he told Jake to leave or he’d take him apart. Jake laughed and said, ‘Try it.’ Simmy came at him, I’m not going to deny that. He wanted to throw him out of there so he could take care of me. But Jake was on him so quickly, tossing him into the wall, hitting his head. Jake is very strong, and even though Simmy was big, he wasn’t quick enough.”
Then she told the story, blow by blow, and it matched everything the jury had already heard. So warm and comforting for the finders of fact. They’d heard the story in McBain’s opening statement. They’d heard it again from the three police officers. Now, the eyewitness tells it one more time. Anticlimactic but reassuring. Lawyers like to say they tell jurors what they’re going to hear, then tell them, then tell them what they’ve told them. That’s what McBain was doing, and he’d recap it in closing argument.
So I sat at the defense table, a miscreant with curved horns and hairy ears, as my hellish deeds were recounted. I heard how I slammed Simmy around, stabbed him with a pitchfork, laughed in the face of the bull whip, tackled him in the corncrib, and eventually put a nail through his head. I heard every agonizing, perjurious detail, hoping for inconsistencies, but there were none.