by Paul Levine
Then, just before he stomped my hand, he said something that wasn’t a question at all. “Stay out of my affairs, lawyer! Stay out of my affairs, or you’re a dead man.”
Just like in school, my memory was pretty good, but I wasn’t great at following instructions.
***
It was a five-minute walk from the courthouse to the arcade, where I picked up a juvenile delinquent who was banging away at a video game where steroid-pumped wrestlers removed each other’s spines. I dragged him out, and he responded by saying I was a “goober-throwing major tude,” which I took as a compliment and thanked him.
“ Where we going?” Kip asked. “I was just about to pin the Mountain Man.”
“ We’re going to visit a cowboy.”
“ Oh, the one who stole your babe.”
“ I beg your pardon.”
“ Granny told me. When you were spaced out on the medicine, Granny told me about the lady lawyer you’ve got the hots for, but this dude swooped her away. So, when you said we were coming out here and you were going to switch courses, I knew the babe figured into it.”
“ You’re a pretty bright kid, aren’t you?” I asked, as we reached our car, parked in front of a shop where mannequins in mink coats smiled regally at us from the display window.
“ It runs in the family,” he said.
No wonder I liked this kid.
We got in, and I aimed the rental convertible northwest on Route 82. The air was cool and dry. The sun was shining, plump white clouds were scudding by, and the meadows were filled with bright wildflowers. It seemed like a fine day to see if Mr. K.C. Cimarron was as good as his word.
CHAPTER 16
FOOL ME TWICE
There were red bluffs along the winding dirt road that led ^k from the entrance to the ranch house. There were rolling fields of scrawny cattle. Along the road, a narrow stream gurgled and tumbled over black and brown boulders. But as far as I could tell, there was no canyon at the Red Canyon Ranch.
A short, swarthy woman in a starched white dress and a red apron opened the door. She was wiping flour from her hands onto the apron. “?Lo puedo ajudar?”
“ Por favor se encuentra el Se n or Cimarron,” I said, exhausting my extensive Spanish vocabulary.
Behind her, I could see a foyer of red Mexican tile. A buffalo head was mounted on the far wall, and beneath it, two crossed rifles with a vaguely antique look were enclosed in a glass case. Just off the foyer was a living room with a brick fireplace and a bearskin rug in front of a sofa carved from heavy logs. A nice place if you’re into southwestern postmodern macho.
“ Se n or Cimarron, esta en el establo, ” she said, indicating the direction with a tilt of the head.
She spoke deliberately, either because she figured me for the gringo I was, or because Mexican Spanish is slower than what I’m used to in Little Havana.
I gave her my best gracias, then Kip and I walked along a flagstone path from the main house to the barn, a huge weathered structure up a small incline. Twenty yards away, I heard what sounded at first like a muffled gunshot. Instinctively, I moved in front of Kip, shielding him with my body. “Get real, Uncle Jake,” he said, darting by me.
Another muffled whomp, and then two more at regular intervals, maybe three seconds apart. A whinnying horse, then another whomp, whomp.
A door wide enough to accommodate a tractor trailer was open, and we walked in. Smells of moist hay and creosote, the tang of molasses feed mixed with manure. A buzz of horseflies, a bank of stalls, horses pawing the dirt floor, tails swishing. Weathered saddles, harnesses, and saddlebags hung from wooden pegs in the walls. Blankets and feed bags were stacked in neat piles. A ladder led to a loft sagging with bales of hay. And on a wooden stepladder against one wall, a man with his back to me, a man in boots, dirt-stained jeans, a wide leather belt, a red plaid shirt with sleeves rolled up the elbows. A man who, on the third step of the ladder, looked about ten feet tall and as wide…well, as wide as the broad side of a barn.
With his left hand, he was bracing a four-by-eight-foot piece of three-quarter-inch plywood against a window frame. With his right hand, he was holding a stud gun. Maybe it wasn’t as impressive a feat as say, tossing a shotput with one hand and dunking a basketball with another, but it showed strength and a certain agility. Whomp. Another nail jolted into the plywood and wall beneath. The stud gun did not seem to recoil, but stayed firmly planted in his meaty right hand.
With his back still to me, he said, “You’re Lassiter, aren’t you?”
“ Guilty as charged,” I said.
He turned around and we studied each other. He had a bushy mustache that reminded me of Buck Buchanan, an old defensive lineman for Kansas City. His hair was long and gray and swept straight back, falling over his ears, and curling up slightly at the nape of his neck. The overall impression was of a gunfighter from the old West, Kirk Douglas maybe, but twice as big.
Our chemistry was as immediate as the mongoose and the snake. We hated each other. He had inflicted a great deal of pain on me. This morning, in the early chill, my hand had been stiff, a reminder as sure as a dueling scar of the searing eternity of personal violence. This man, this towering menace of a man, had bruised and dented me.
Which was also why I was here, I now knew. Sure, clearing my name had something to do with it, and so did coming after Jo Jo. But there was something else too. I needed to prove to myself that he hadn’t broken me. So I stood there in khaki slacks and Top-Siders without socks and an old Penn State sweatshirt looking at this big galoot who happened to be holding a lethal weapon, making me wonder why I chose a day when he was nailing instead of painting.
“ Ever use a stud gun, Lassiter?”
“ Nah. I usually just drive nails with my forehead.”
“ I don’t doubt it.” He turned away and resumed working, but it didn’t keep him from talking. “When my daddy built this barn, he framed the first floor with concrete beams. Not concrete blocks, mind you, but solid poured concrete. That’s how my daddy was, and that’s how I am. Do you follow me?”
“ Sure, some guys got shit for brains. You got concrete.”
“ You trying to rile me?”
“ No, I’m trying to insult your intelligence, but it’s a daunting task.”
He was still on the ladder, so I couldn’t get a precise idea of his height, but he had to go six seven, maybe six eight. As for his weight, it probably wasn’t more than your average side of beef. If you want to judge a man’s mass, look at his wrists or ankles. It’ll tell you the size of the frame. I couldn’t see his ankles, but the wrists were telephone poles attached to forearms cabled with veins, forearms bigger than most men’s biceps. The shoulders were no larger than a double-wide mobile home, the chest a rain barrel. He had the look of brawny muscle built by hard work, not by pumping iron. The only thing that detracted from the look of complete physicality was his belly. It had grown over the top of his silver-and-turquoise belt buckle. Grown big, not soft. There is a difference.
If I were to guess, I would say that ten years ago, he was an extremely fit and dangerous two hundred eighty pounds, and now he was about three ten, and still dangerous.
Whomp.
“ Damn,” he muttered. “Out of bullets. Now, you got your stud guns that work off an air compressor and a clip that holds forty or fifty nails. But like I said, this is solid concrete, so I use the gun powered by, 27-caliber bullets. Clip only holds ten bullets, and you got to put each nail in separately, but I don’t mind. Whatever it takes, however long it takes, do the job right. That’s how I live my life, Lassiter. How do you live yours?”
“ One day at a time.”
He gestured in Kip’s direction. “Who’s this, your bodyguard?’ ‘
“ My nephew,” I said.
“ When you grow up, you gonna be a piss-ant lawyer like your uncle?” he asked.
“ No,” Kip answered, “I’m going to be an entertainment lawyer. Beats the hell out of being a shit-kickin
g cowboy.”
Now where did he learn to talk like that? I’d have to bring it up with Granny.
Cimarron slipped a clip of bullets into the stud gun, took a nail from his pocket and shoved it into the barrel. “Josefina told me I should be expecting you. Said you’d cause trouble but that I shouldn’t start anything. I promised her I wouldn’t unless you asked for it.”
“ Where is she?”
“ In town at the music festival. Spends all day there. They got more concerts in that little town than a dog’s got fleas.”
Cimarron turned back to the plywood, whipping the heavy nail gun as if it were a revolver, and added a whomp, either for extra stability or to deliver a message. “Damned hailstorm broke three windows, scared the shit out of the cattle and the summer tourists. Not that it bothers me when the tourists get caught in the rain or avalanches for that matter. Are you one of those assholes who straps boards on his feet, races down the mountain, then waits for a ride back up so he can do it all over again?”
“ I was, until my third knee operation.”
He came down from the ladder and walked toward us, the nail gun still in his hand. “Skiers!” He spit into a stall and an Appaloosa gave him a dirty look. I tried to imagine Jo Jo with this guy, but it just didn’t compute.
“ What a waste of time, what a piss-poor use of our resources,” he was saying. “You know what’s under the ski slopes on Ajax, what you tourists call Aspen Mountain?”
“ Shafts and tunnels,” I said, displaying my knowledge so recently gained. “Silver mines crisscrossing under the town from one mountain to the other.”
He nodded and seemed surprised. “Right. That’s our history, the history of the West. Mines and small towns grown big with gold and silver. Now what do we have, million-dollar condos and music tents and jugglers and little red wagons selling crepes with cinnamon and bananas, and traffic jams because assholes from Miami and Beverly Hills have taken over.”
“ The Silver Queen,” I said. “That’s part of your past, too.”
His eyes narrowed just a bit. “What do you know about it?”
“ Enough. You spent some money trying to find her, a statue that disappeared from a World’s Fair a hundred plus years ago. It was made from a pure chunk of silver that weighed over a ton.”
“ The nugget was taken from the Mollie Gibson on Smuggler Mountain. Hell, it was more like a boulder, weighed twenty-one hundred fifty pounds and assayed out at ninety-six percent pure. Never been anything like it ever, before or since. The town fathers commissioned the statue for the Chicago World’s Fair as part of a lobbying effort to keep Congress from demonetizing silver, but it didn’t work. The Sherman Act was passed, and that was the end of the silver boom. So the Silver Queen is the perfect symbol of a lost era. Can you understand that?”
“ Sure, what I don’t understand is you. I didn’t figure you for a historical society type.”
“ There’s a lot you don’t understand.” He put the nail gun on a table of plywood supported by two sawhorses. “How about the two of us have a drink and talk?”
***
It wasn’t quite noon, but Cimarron was pouring bourbon from a cut-glass decanter into crystal tumblers. “What’s the little tyke want?”
“ Gimme a viskey, ginger ale on the side, and don’t be stingy, bay-bee,” the little tyke answered.
“ What?”
I gave Kip the crossed-arms signal for declining a penalty. “He doesn’t care for your Garbo, kid, so play it straight.”
“ Okay, Liberty Valance, gimme a Grolsch,” Kip ordered.
We had taken the stone path back to the house, walked through the foyer past the buffalo and the antique rifles, through the living room, around the bearskin rug, and were in a room with a green felt pocket billiards table, and old, cracked leather chairs.
“ Will a root beer do?” the big man asked.
Kip grimaced. “If that’s all you’ve got, bartender, make it a double.”
I took a hit on the warm bourbon. Cimarron didn’t offer ice, and I didn’t ask. He racked the balls, offered me a choice of cues and games. I chose eight ball.
“ What should we play for,” I asked, “money, stock…Jo Jo?”
“ She said you make lousy jokes, and she was right. Or maybe I don’t have much of a sense of humor. I don’t joke about Josefina.”
“ What do you joke about?”
“ There isn’t much I find funny.”
“ Maybe you should loosen up,” Kip said.
“ What’s that supposed to mean?” Cimarron asked. We were double-teaming him. If it got rough, maybe Kip could bite him in the ankle.
“ Nothing,” Kip said, trying to suppress his malicious grin, “except you’re so tight, if you stuck a piece of coal up your ass, in two weeks, you’d have a diamond.”
“ What the hell!”
“ It’s from a movie,” I explained.
“ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Kip said.
Cimarron was shaking his head. Then he looked at me. “I know all about you. You’re a trivial man. You couldn’t appreciate a woman of substance like Josefina. “
“ Yeah, so what happened to the two of you?”
“ That is none of your concern, but the life I can give her is of far greater significance than what you can do. For most of your life, you played a game, a game! Do you even have a philosophy?’’
“ Sure. I try to go through life doing the least damage possible. Having fun without hurting anyone, maybe doing a little good along the way, but without taking myself too seriously.”
“ Having fun! I don’t know what Josefina ever saw in you…”
Funny, that’s what I was thinking about him, but now, he was starting to sound like her. Maybe they had more in common than I thought.
“…unless it was the chance to reform you, make you over, but it didn’t work, and you ended up in cahoots with her worthless brother.”
He chalked a cue stick, leaned over the table and broke, sending balls ricocheting with a crack like a rifle shot. The fourteen ball plopped into a corner pocket.
“ High balls,” Cimarron said, a little like the way we played the game at home. Without looking at me, he knocked in the ten, fifteen, and nine, the last on a nifty bank shot that threaded the four and the seven. He lifted his head from the table and gestured with the cue stick toward a black-and-white photo on the far wall. “There she is, part of our legacy.”
I walked over to the wall and studied the Silver Queen. The lady wore a crown and looked a little like the Statue of Liberty, but she was riding in a chariot with giant wheels. The front of the chariot resembled the prow of a ship, and two little Greek god types ran alongside, wearing what looked like diapers. They carried cornucopias that seemed to be overflowing with coins. The queen held a scepter topped by a star and a gigantic silver dollar. Under the photo was a glass-enclosed clipping from the Aspen Times dated March 1893. It was a review of the sculpture. “A noble work of art, majestic in proportions…”
I turned around in time to see Cimarron whack the thirteen ball into a side pocket, stopping the cue ball just short of dropping in.
“ It’s big,” I said, after a moment. “Big and gaudy. It would be hard to say beautiful.”
“ Victorian style, a symbol of the end of that era, too,” he explained, patiently. “Eighteen feet high. The face, bust, and arms are of solid silver. The drapery is studded with precious stones. Her hair is glass. The chariot is finished in stripes of dark minerals and crystals. The two winged gods represent Plutus, carrying riches. One horn overflows with gold, the other silver. The pillars are made of burnished silver, crystals, and a mosaic of minerals.”
“ What’s it worth?”
Cimarron laughed, bent low over the table, and sent the eleven ball careening into the four-one of mine-which ended in a side pocket. “Damn.”
I chalked a cue stick while he talked. “Who knows what it’s worth? Who cares? It’s the history of this town, this
state, and I wanted to find it, preserve it.”
I hit the cue ball too high and knocked it and the six into a corner pocket. “How could it disappear from the World’s Fair?”
“ It didn’t. That’s one of the misconceptions. The Queen came back from the fair and was put on display at the Mineral Palace in Pueblo, which was eventually torn down. Nobody knows what happened to the silver lady. She just disappeared.”
Cimarron ran out the rest of the high balls and was focusing on the eight.
“ I still don’t get you,” I said. “I mean, what are you doing as partners with Blinky Baroso?”
He lifted his head and looked at me with one eye squinted shut. “What are you doing as his lawyer?”
“ That’s different.”
“ Hah!” He nailed the eight on a line and clunked it into a corner pocket.
Kip made a sucking sound on the straw in his root beer. “You shoot a mean game of pool, fat man.”
Cimarron turned toward him, either puzzled or angry, I couldn’t tell which.
“ Paul Newman,” Kip explained.
“ My first deal with Baroso was strictly legitimate,” Cimarron said, turning back to me. “Sunken treasure in the Keys. There was no need to oversubscribe the stock. Hell, I’d been the majority shareholder in the company that had located the wrecks. I’d been to the old naval library in Madrid, had examined the manifests of the ship. I knew every gold bar on her, every piece of jewelry. But we ran out of cash before we could salvage. It was so damn foolish of Baroso, but he just didn’t believe we’d find her. I would have never done business with him again if I hadn’t gotten involved with Josefina.”
Funny. I probably would have stopped representing Blinky except for her. “She encouraged you?”
“ Josefina thought I could straighten him out, just like she thought you could.”
“ That was a long time ago.”
“ Maybe so, but I went back to Baroso when I needed to raise cash for the new operation up here. I’ve got land, and I’ve got maps and claims, but I needed the start-up money. I told him, no funny business, and he said not to worry, he’d get his lawyer to handle the money. He wouldn’t make a move without his lawyer, good old reliable Jake Lassiter, that’s what he said.”