by Paul Levine
Jo Jo Baroso was wearing jeans and a long-sleeve green cotton blouse covered by a red Mexican serape. She wore no makeup, and her dark hair was pulled straight back. She would have looked about eighteen years old, but there were dark circles under her eyes and her face, even in quiet repose, seemed to convey a profound sadness.
I slid into the seat next to her. “I’m partial to violas, how about you?”
A tremor seemed to go through her body. She reached for my hand, the healing one, and pressed it to her cheek, which was cool to the touch. She just held my hand there, letting it gently caress her face. In a moment, twin tears slid down her granite cheekbones. She lowered my hand, leaned close to me, and softly kissed me on the cheek.
“ Oh, Jake,” she whispered, now grasping my hand with both of hers. “I’m frightened. So much is happening. Simmy has flipped out over all of this. I just don’t know what to do.”
“ Go home with me. Help me prove I didn’t kill anybody.”
“ Is that all?”
“ No. Be with me.”
“ I want to, at least I think I do.”
From behind us, a loud shush.
“ Go now, please,” she whispered. “I’ll call you later and tell you everything.”
“ Call me? Why don’t we meet somewhere?”
“ No, Simmy’s watching me like a hawk. I ride every night before dinner. I’ll call you from the barn just before dark. Please, trust me.”
I told her where we were staying and promised to be in the room for her call. Then I gathered up Kip, who was dozing peacefully just as the violin, or maybe it was the viola, got to one of those parts of didactic, etudelike virtuosity.
***
I was sitting in the little cottage at the Lazy Q, waiting.
Thinking.
Worrying.
I thought I heard the floorboards creak on the front step. I opened the door and looked outside.
Nothing.
Getting paranoid.
I shouted to Kip, who was across the road in a grassy field with two kids from a neighboring cottage. Kip was fooling around with the video camera, trying to get some shots of the golden eagle. He waved to me, one of those I’m-having-fun, I’m-not-hungry, don’t-bother-me kind of waves.
I went back into the cottage and sat on the sagging bed. Something was nagging at me, something besides the fact I was wanted for Murder One, to say nothing of transporting a juvenile delinquent across state lines. There was an itch I couldn’t scratch, a feeling of dread I couldn’t contain or even describe.
I had made a mistake with Blinky Baroso. I had gotten too close to him, forgetting he was just another client, and let’s face it, a born loser. I had let my guard down because he was Jo Jo’s brother.
Pathetic.
Such bad judgment.
Jo Jo had been right about him all along. And right about me, too, I suppose. Just what was the social utility of keeping that crumb out of jail. What was my thanks, anyway, getting set up for murder?
Louis X. Baroso. What a waste. He could have been successful in a legitimate business, but that held no thrill for him. Risking it all and losing it, that was Blinky’s style. He was like the slots player who hates to hit the jackpot because it takes so long to put the quarters back in.
Now, who had killed him? If he really was dead. Socolow had told me the blood in the Range Rover was Blinky’s, but they never found a body or a trace of other evidence. None of the surf bums saw or heard a thing. Blinky had disappeared, bloodied but seemingly invisible.
And here I was, trying to figure it all out, coming up empty, but filled with a sense of foreboding.
The phone rang, startling me. It took two rings for me to even realize what it was. Get hold of yourself, boy.
“ Oh, Jake! Thank God you’re there.” Her voice was desperate.
“ What is it? What’s happened?”
“ He hit me. Oh God, just like before. He used to knock me around, Jake. He’s got such anger in him. I thought it was my fault then, and finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. That’s why I left him, but he’s changed, or I thought he had.”
The fury began as a ball of fire in the pit of my stomach and moved up, thickening my chest, constricting my throat. I could barely speak. “Did he hurt you?”
“ No. He just does it to inflict pain, to humiliate me. If he ever let loose, I’d be dead.”
“ Where are you?”
“ In the barn. Somebody saw us together at the concert. Either that, or he’s having me followed, because he knew I kissed you. It set him off. He threw me across the barn. Jake, I must have flown thirty feet. Thank God for the hay, or I would have broken my neck. Then he lifted me up and slapped me, back and forth, again and-”
“ I’m coming over. Wait there.”
“ No! Please, Jake! I don’t want you to see me like this. My face is puffy, and I’m…I’m so filthy.”
“ What?”
“ Oh, darling, I didn’t want to tell you. He forced me. He tore off my clothes, just ripped them to shreds with his hands. He was crazed, his eyes wild like a rabid animal. He took me, then left me here, filthy and naked and freezing.” She started to say something else but was racked with sobs. I waited, the heat spreading to the back of my neck, sweat pouring off me. “Oh, Jake, I feel so stupid, so ashamed.”
“ Wait there! Don’t move. I’m coming over.”
“ No, don’t!”
“ Jo Jo, I swear I’m going to tear him apart, and when the doctors put him back together, we’re going to prosecute.”
“ Jake, no! You don’t understand. It’s more complicated than you realize.”
“ I know. You said that before. You said you hadn’t told me everything, you were sorry Blinky got me involved in it, and you hoped I would forgive you. When I get there, you can tell me everything.”
“ I’ll tell you now, darling, but you’ve got to calm down. I’ll be all right. You can’t come out here. Simmy’s in the house. If he-”
“ Don’t move,” I told her again. “Wait for me.”
I flew out the door, running for the car. Kip was videotaping a mangy dog urinating against a tree. I don’t know what I looked like, but Kip turned, at first puzzled, then fearful as he watched me. He left the dog there and raced toward the car.
“ Uncle Jake, what’s wrong? Your face is all angered up.”
“ Huh?”
“ That’s what Granny says about you. That you’re sweet as mother’s milk, but watch out if you ever get all angered up. “
From the neighboring cottage, the father of the two boys wandered out, pulling up suspenders over plaid Bermuda shorts.
“ Kip, I’m in a hurry, and I don’t have time to explain. Stay here.’’
I hopped in the car, and as I started the engine, Kip tossed the camera in, then vaulted over the passenger door, just like I taught him. “Nothin’ doin’, pardner. Granny also told me that when you’re like this, you don’t think clearly. You make mistakes, and my job is to help you stay cool.”
“ C’mon, Kip, out! This is serious.”
The car was moving, and Kip was buckling his shoulder harness. “I’m not letting you head into Shinbone all by your lonesome. I’m riding shotgun, Uncle Jake.” was aware of Bermuda Shorts watching us argue. “Kip, this isn’t a movie. Now, for the last time, get out!” I started to unbuckle him.
“ I’ll scream child abuse,” Kip said, “so you might as well gun it before knock-knees there throws himself in front of the car.
“ Kip!”
“ You promised never to leave me alone again. Last time-”
“ I remember last time,” I said, hitting the gas.
We tore up clouds of dust as we headed toward the Red Canyon Ranch and what would be my third and final meeting with the last living witness.
CHAPTER 18
A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH
Granny taught me right from wrong.
I didn’t have a father or a mother around, and I didn’t
pay a lot of attention to teachers, ministers, or United Nations ambassadors. I hung around Key Largo and Islamorada with the kids from the trailer parks. Their idea of fun was to throw rocks at tourists’ cars coming down U.S. 1, maybe jimmy Coke machines in their spare time. Their dads-the ones who had them-worked on shrimp boats or road crews, if they worked at all.
For a mentor, it was either Granny or the guys who loafed at the 7-Eleven on Little Pine Road, the place I started drinking beer when I was about Kip’s age.
Thank God it was Granny.
She taught me not to cheat, not to steal, and not to hit anyone who hadn’t hit me first. She taught me to avoid cruelty in words and deeds. She taught me that black and brown folks were as good as white folks, and many times, a damn sight better.
And when I was a little older, she taught me never to raise a hand to a woman. “Only the lowest kind of trash hits his woman, and don’t you fergit it. Only a sniveling weakling, a bottom-feeding gutter rat will ever strike a woman, and no Lassiter ever done it or ever will. You understand?”
I told her I did, and if I ever saw a man abusing a woman, I’d step in and put an end to it right then and there.
“ Another thing, too, Jacob. No real man ever forces a woman to do what she don’t want to do. A woman who don’t want to be touched is not to be touched.”
I understood that, too. The thought of a man doing violence to a woman, any woman, is repellent to me. The thought of it happening to Jo Jo Baroso filled me with rage.
Another memory came back to me on the drive past Woody Creek. In my first year as an assistant public defender, I was handling domestic violence cases. One of my first clients was a grinning yahoo who had tossed a frying pan filled with sizzling bacon at the woman who lived with him. The grease left a ridge of scar tissue from one eye diagonally across her nose to her upper lip.
“ Bitch deserved it,” he told me, a cigarette flapping out of the corner of his mouth. “If I told her once, I told her a hundred times to have two six-packs in the fridge, cold and ready. A man comes home from pouring tar on roofs in August, a man is thirsty. She’s there making BLTs and she says, ‘Sorry, honey, there’s only one can left, but you took the car, and I couldn’t carry beer, what with the eggs and bread and what all.’ So I chugged the can, smashed the empty on her forehead. Bitch just smiled at me, so hell, I picked up the frying pan.”
Then he grinned, looking for approval from his state-appointed counsel. Just a couple of guys who understand you have to smack them around once in a while, let them know who’s boss.
I’m not real proud of what I did. He was small and wiry and sun-browned from his outdoor work, with a creased face and dumb, blank eyes. He was expecting to cop a plea, maybe get probation, go out drinking with the boys, brag about teaching the bitch a lesson. He wasn’t expecting his lawyer to be crazed on the subject of men beating women.
“ I’d like you to put out your cigarette,” I told him.
He looked around. “Don’t see no ashtray.”
“ I want you to swallow it,” I said, placidly.
He gave a nervous little smile, wondering if I was joking. I let him wonder a moment, then came around my desk and yanked him out of his chair by the scruff of his neck. The cigarette fell from his mouth, but I caught it, remembering even now the singe of hot ash in the palm of my hand. His eyes were wide and fearful. I let go of his neck, and with one hand, pinched his jawbone hard, forcing his mouth open. Then, I jammed the cigarette in, hit him under the chin to close his mouth, and yanked back on his neck to tilt his head toward the ceiling.
“ Swallow!” I yelled at him. “Swallow, you worthless piece of slime.”
I watched his Adam’s apple work the butt down his throat, then I let go of him.
The punk filed a complaint, and I was suspended for a month without pay, forced to undergo psychiatric testing, then counseling, then a program called Alternatives to Violence, which, ironically, was intended for abusive husbands and boyfriends. When I came back to work, I was reassigned to zoning cases, where I defended a Santeria priest for sacrificing live goats in neighborhoods usually reserved for drug deals.
It was years later in private practice that I crossed paths with another of those cowardly cretins. This one was a yellow-haired, blue-eyed devil in a padded-shoulder, double-breasted suit, a guy Granny would say considered himself the last Coke in the desert. He was a rich man’s son, driving a Porsche, living in a high rise on the Intracoastal, sharing his chrome and glass bachelor pad with a flight attendant who eventually grew tired of his two-timing. When she moved out, the blond boy’s ego was hurt, and he asked her to return his Christmas presents. She thought he was joking-the presents were the crowns on her front teeth-but he took them back anyway. With pliers.
“ Can we, like pay a fine, and go home?” he asked, slouching in the cushioned client chair in my office.
I couldn’t help it, but I kept looking at his smile. “You have nice teeth.”
“ Huh?”
“ They all real?”
“ Yeah, sure. What of it?” He self-consciously licked his lips and forced the smile closed.
“ Does it bother you when I look at your teeth?”
He shook his head and shot nervous glances around the office. Except for a full-size cardboard cutout of Joe Paterno, we were alone.
“ Nice teeth,” I repeated.
I riffled some papers, finding the A-form and the dentist’s report. “Two incisors, two canines, upper and lower. Eight in all. That right?”
“ Huh?”
“ The crowns you repossessed.”
“ Yeah, I guess. I dunno. What difference does it make? I mean, how much is it going to cost?”
“ Eight teeth,” I said, and then I counted aloud from one to eight, trying to imagine the pain and the terror he had caused. He watched me as if he had a lunatic for a lawyer. He did.
“ Stand up, shithead!” I ordered him.
“ What?” Confusion. The beginning of fear.
“ A tooth for a tooth.”
He bolted from the chair and started for the door. I jumped up, danced around my desk, caught him by a shoulder and spun him around. He screamed before I could slug him, and the sound, a high-pitched girlish squeal, threw me off. I swung high, glancing an overhand right off his nose, which nonetheless squirted blood and closed his eyes. The next shot was on target. I came up from below with a left that connected flush on his mouth, splitting his upper lip and breaking off two incisors right at the gum line. I felt a stinging in my hand and looked down to find the teeth embedded in my knuckles. I still have tiny scars to prove it.
He was wailing, blood pouring from his nose and gurgling from his mouth, and looking far worse than he was.
“ Six more to go,” I told him, but by now, my office door had flown open, and crowding inside were three of my partners, my secretary, a paralegal, and, mouth agape, the general counsel of an insurance company we were trying to woo. I decided to regain some sense of decorum, so I chose that moment to extract the two teeth from my knuckles and toss them into my wastebasket where they ping-pinged to the bottom.
“ My client,” I said to the crowd, as if that somehow explained everything. Then I turned to the insurance company lawyer, trying to salvage the moment. “You ought to see what we do to the opposition.”
So it was not without some history that I approached the ranch of K. C. Cimarron this cool summer night in the high country.
***
Light spilled across the countryside from a three-quarter moon. Cattle stood motionless in fenced fields, and as we slowed for a curve, a deer bolted in front of our headlights, prancing out of our way. We followed the dirt road as it wound toward the Red Canyon Ranch. I parked the car outside the gate, pulling off the road into some sagebrush, where we began walking the mile or so to the barn. By daylight, the barn was a faded red. At night, it was the black maroon of dried blood.
“ Kip, there’s a lesson about life I need to give y
ou now, I hope you’ll remember as you get older.”
“ Oh brother.”
“ Listen up. You never strike a girl. Never. You never touch-
“ I know, Uncle Jake. Granny told me all that.”
“ Already?”
“ Yeah, plus, I shouldn’t cheat or steal or say nasty stuff.”
“ You got the whole course. Anyway, I’m glad you’re here. I want you to videotape Jo Jo.”
“ For my movie?”
“ No, for evidence. I’ll interview her on tape. I want visible proof of her injuries. It’ll help prosecute Cimarron and might help in my defense if he claims I assaulted him.”
“ Are you going to pick a fight?”
“ I’m going to tear him into little pieces.”
“ Uncle Jake.”
“ Yeah?”
“ He’s too big. He’s the only man I know who’s bigger and stronger than you, and in the mean department, he’s got it all over you.”
“ Don’t underestimate your uncle when he’s all angered up,” I told him.
***
The barn door was open, and inside, in the darkness, I could make out the shadows of horses in their stalls, a saddle sitting astride a railing, bales of hay silhouetted against a corncrib by the moonlight streaming in a window. Kip reached for my hand and stayed close. I was aware of the sound of my breathing, of the rumbling exhalation of one of the horses, the caw of a nighttime bird in the distance.
“ Nobody’s here, Uncle Jake,” Kip whispered. “Shhh.”
A few more steps. Then, “Jake. Is that you?”
It was her voice, coming from above.
“ In the loft. Up here.” She flicked on one of those lanterns that runs off a nine-volt battery but is made to look like an old kerosene lamp.
I scrambled up the ladder to the loft, Kip right behind me. Jo Jo was huddled in a corner, wrapped in a blanket. Her face was smudged with tear-streaked dirt. Her eyes were puffy. The beginning of a bruise was apparent on one cheek, and an angry red scratch was visible on her neck.