One-thousand-eight.
The Cimarron dummy’s head was leaning, chin down, on the Lassiter dummy’s chest. I leaned over and jammed the muzzle of the stud gun into its ear.
One-thousand-nine. I pulled the trigger.
Whomp. The sound shuddered through the courtroom.
Whomp. More muffled perhaps, but the same sound on tape.
The nail tore through the dummy’s head, traveled on an upward path, and embedded in the wall of the courtroom just below a photograph of an 1890s judge with full chin whiskers.
“ Mr. Lassiter!” The judge rose from his chair. I stifled him with a “shusssh.”
The tape was still running.
The only sound in the courtroom was sand trickling onto the floor from what had been the dummy’s plastic skull. “Shit.”
Who said that? The jurors were confused. No one in the courtroom had said a word.
“ Shit,” again on the tape. It was Jo Jo, and the jurors knew it. They looked at her. Not accusing. Not yet. Just intense curiosity. Shit is fine if you’ve hit your thumb with a hammer, but it isn’t the most eloquent lament for a lover slain. She sounded exasperated. Not angry, not mournful.
“ That’s not the way it was supposed to go,” she said.
Now the jurors looked at each other. Who was she talking to?
“ No.” It was a male voice, and it hadn’t been heard on the tape before. “ No, seguro que no. Jeez, I hate violence.”
“ For a while,” Jo Jo said, “I couldn’t decide which way it would go. I thought Jake could handle him. I mean, either way, it would work, though this way is better.”
“ Much better,” the man said. “Besides, Jake’s not a killer. He doesn’t have it in him.”
“ Funny, that’s what he said about you.”
“ Yeah, and he thought you were too good for him.”
“ Jake’s always been a lousy judge of character,” Jo Jo said, and they both laughed.
I nodded, and Patterson stopped the tape.
“ Mrs. Cimarron, who was that man?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. Her eyes were closed, and she rocked slowly back and forth.
“ If you wish,” I suggested, “we could run voiceprints on the tape and compare them with your brother’s early radio commercials for the gold bullion business.”
Still no answer.
“ Or we could ask Abe Socolow to fax your brother’s fingerprints up here and draw a comparison to the unidentified latent on the gun barrel.”
She was sobbing now.
“ Isn’t it true that the man in the barn was your brother, Louis Baroso, and that the two of you conspired to murder your husband and did, in fact, kill him?”
She didn’t answer.
“ Which one of you killed him?” I asked.
“ I didn’t kill Simmy,” she said through trembling lips.
“ Even though he beat you?”
Again, she didn’t answer.
“ What you told me in the barn was true, wasn’t it? He had beaten you.”
Her head slumped forward.
McBain was on his feet. “Your Honor. Perhaps…”
“ Sit down,” the judge commanded.
“ He began hitting me just after we married,” she said. “That’s why I left him. So many times, he begged me to come back. So many times I thought I could change him. He could be so wonderful, but he could be someone else, too, someone violent and evil.”
“ You could have divorced him.”
“ He would have killed me. He threatened to, and he boasted that no jury in Pitkin Country would convict him. He let me move away, but he wanted me back. That’s why he came to Miami in June. I just couldn’t go back to that. Jake, you saw what he did to me…”
“ You thought I’d kill him, didn’t you? You thought I’d kill him because he broke my hand and beat you up?”
Silence except for her sobs.
“ You set me up to kill him, and when I didn’t or couldn’t, you and your brother finished the job.”
“ Luis was right. You don’t have it in you to kill a man.”
“ He was right about something else, too. I’m a lousy judge of character.”
CHAPTER 28
I was the first one out the door. Ignoring protocol, taking advantage of the confusion and cacophony, I raced from the courtroom, ran down the carpeted stairs and out the front door beneath old Lady Justice and onto Main Street. I jogged to the parking garage on cleanly shoveled sidewalks, got the rental, its fenders caked with dirty snow, and headed east toward Smuggler Mountain.
The last two minutes in the courtroom had been chaos. H. T. Patterson pounded the table and demanded the state immediately dismiss all charges, and if not, he beseeched the court to do the job. “In the name of Jefferson and Madison, in the memory of Marshall and Brandeis, for the reasons blood was spilled at Gettysburg and Bull Run, Iwo Jima, and Normandy, this man should be set free without further ado
…”
I was all for skipping the ado.
“…Let the state move to right its wrong. Let this man pick up the pieces of his shattered reputation, and let him do it with dispatch. Let the bells of equity and justice toll for him. Yea, if liberty be thy name, let justice be done.”
It was good to hear Patterson preaching again, his voice hitting the high notes with that Holy Roller cadence.
The prosecutor pleaded with the judge to delay a ruling until he had a chance to meet with Ms. Baroso and determine if her testimony was simply the product of posttraumatic stress syndrome and whether she could be rehabilitated on redirect.
Translation: I just got run over by a cement truck. Give me till morning to count the broken bones.
Pretty fair ad-libbing, I thought. I admire lawyers who, like captains of sinking ships, refrain from leaping overboard, but instead appear on deck in their dress whites with the polished brass buttons. Judge Witherspoon listened stoically, occasionally banging his gavel at the spectators whose behavior was worse than New York Jets’ fans at old Shea Stadium.
As the door closed behind me, the judge declared a recess until nine the next morning, when he expected the prosecutor to announce whether he wished to proceed. If he did, the judge broadly hinted, a defense motion for a directed verdict would be looked upon with favor once the state rested.
“ Mrs. Cimarron,” the judge said. “You are free to go, but I admonish you against leaving Pitkin County pending the outcome of tomorrow’s hearing.”
I didn’t think Jo Jo was leaving town. Not just yet. I figured she was keeping her brother apprised of each day’s events. Today would be a hell of a briefing.
I’d love to be there. In fact, I was doing everything I could to be there.
It took just a few minutes to find the road where she lost me the day before. I coaxed the rental car around the turn I had missed, then pulled as far off the road as I could without sliding into a snowdrift. The branches of a fir tree weighted with snow hung low and shielded my car from view. Especially from someone with a lot on her mind.
I didn’t have long to wait.
The Dodge Ram dual-wheel pickup roared past me and headed up the road. I eased out from under the tree and hung back, catching sight of the pickup’s taillights as it took the fork that led up the mountain. Yesterday, I took the wrong turn. Today, I just followed her. From here, it was easy. Unless she doubled back, she was headed straight to the top.
I stopped the car along the road at the last bend, got out and walked the rest of the way, a quarter mile or so. It was one of those bright, cold, dry winter days, the sun glaring off the snow, the temperature in the high twenties.
There was a chicken-wire fence around the property. Fastened to an iron gate with an unlocked rusty latch were two signs, your standard hardware store no trespassing and a piece of rotting wood crudely painted danger, blasting, which was older than Granny.
I opened the latch and walked through the gate. The pickup was parked a hundred yards up the hill. Next to it was a Jeep Wrangler with a canvas top. Narrow-gauge railway tracks emerged from a tunnel cut into the rock and led to a small building of unpainted wood with a tin roof. The building had a wooden chute that emptied into a railway car twenty feet below. Other sheds in various states of disrepair sagged into snow-covered piles of dirt and debris. An elevator cage of rusted iron stood idle and filled with snow. All around the site, like the fossils of dinosaurs, the evidence of extinction. A fallen building of charred timbers, rusted boilers and compressors, winches and furnaces. I pictured the scene a century ago, the sky blackened with fires from sawmills and smelters. I thought of Cimarron’s great-grandfather and the other drillers and muckers, a mountainside crawling with grim-faced, wiry men whose hands would never scrub clean.