by Paul Levine
NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY
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.
The entrance to the tunnel was framed by three wooden timbers, two vertical, and one horizontal connecting at the top. Rusty nails held a metal sign to the horizontal timber. Silver Queen, Tunnel No. 3, 1888.
I expected to see the tracks of a woman’s stylish high-heeled boots in the snow, but the imprints were of wide, plebeian work boots. The tracks went from Jo Jo Baroso’s pickup straight into the tunnel. Okay, she had changed shoes. Always prepared, that Jo Jo. It wouldn’t surprise me if she had a hard hat, a flashlight, and a pickax, too.
I headed into the mine. Bare electric light bulbs were strung along the rocky ceiling, laced to old timbers. Canvas air chutes ran along the walls. The bulbs were lighted, and even after the tunnel took a gentle, rounded turn to the right, cutting off light from the entrance, visibility was fine. It was warmer inside, probably in the fifties, but dank. Water dripped down walls of rock stained purple and yellow from whatever minerals had been locked inside by volcanic explosions a thousand millennia ago.
I had walked maybe half a mile when the tunnel opened into a cavern, a ballroom-sized chamber with fifty-foot ceilings. Inside, where I imagined a thick, rich vein of silver was found, now were only empty ore carts and wooden crates that may have once held dynamite or tools. On the ground, a broken bottle of thick, brown glass, the remnants of a miner’s beer break. I took off my topcoat and tossed it into one of the ore carts and kept going. At one end of the chamber, there was a ladder of steps cut into the mountain itself. It only went one way, down.
I started the descent, slowly at first, the way lit by the overhead bulbs. Timbers stained black from thousands of hands provided a railing. Perhaps fifty feet below, another horizontal tunnel connected with the downward shaft. I kept going. Another tunnel connection, then another. Deeper still, I paused and listened. The steady thumpeta-thumpeta of machinery, a pump maybe. It came from below. I descended farther, counting eleven tunnels at different intervals before running out of ladder in a narrow, darkened tunnel. I paused on the last step. No lights here, but the sound of the machinery was louder. A steady whirring and a combustion induced chugging, joined the thumpeta-thumpeta machine.
I took the last step and splashed into a puddle of icy, black water. At least I thought it was a puddle. I slogged two steps into the darkness. Then two steps more. It wasn’t a puddle. More like a river. The floor of the tunnel was covered by a foot of water. I was sweating, but my feet were freezing.
I had no idea how far I had descended. Five hundred feet, a thousand? I waited a moment for my eyes to get adjusted to the light. They didn’t, because there wasn’t any.
I started my way along the wall in the direction of the sound. I was moving away from the mountain and back toward the town. If I walked far enough, I’d probably be right under the courthouse.
Ouch! My forehead cracked hard into an overhead timber. I’ll bet miners a century ago weren’t six feet two.
Now, I hunched forward and scuttled along, my hand trailing over the ragged walls. Ahead of me, a sound of rushing water, like the rapids on a shallow, rocky stream. I kept wondering where the sound was coming from until my foot stepped into space and I fell forward into the torrent. The drop-off was only two feet or so, but the landing was hard, facedown. I tumbled ahead, water pouring over me from the ledge I just stepped off. Soaking and freezing, I got up, spitting out cold, filthy water, feeling for sensation in my right shoulder. It
still had a stainless steel pin inside, and it didn’t take kindly to surprises.
I kept going, splashing along until I saw the light, a yellow glow from an opening at the side of the tunnel. I cautiously inched ahead. Suddenly, a blinding flash turned the black water a bright orange, illuminating stalactites overhead-or stalagmites-who the hell can remember the difference? The flash was followed by a dull thudding explosion, and a wave of dust rolled down the tunnel from the direction of the light. Overhead, timbers creaked and groaned.
With the explosion still bonging in my ears, I hurried my pace. If I couldn’t hear my splashing, I figured no one else could, either. In twenty seconds, I was at the opening. It was a rough rectangle in the limestone walls, perhaps four by six feet, beginning a few feet off the floor of the tunnel. Three steps were cut into the rock wall and ended in a ledge, which led directly through the opening and into another cavern, higher and drier than the tunnel. From inside, voices echoed off the walls. I crept closer.
As dust rolled out of the opening, I heard a man cough. “ Jesus Cristo! Too much dynamite. We’ll be buried here along with this silver-dollar puta.”
Blinky’s voice, no mistaking it.
“ How else do you propose we get it out?” Jo Jo Baroso asked.
“ The same way they got the bitch in if we could find the old shaft.”
I lay flat on the ledge and peered through the opening, trying to keep out of view. Inside, a gasoline generator chugged away, powering spotlights mounted on two aluminum poles. One of the lights shone directly in my eyes, and I couldn’t make out my favorite team of siblings.
“ There isn’t time.” She sounded exasperated. “There wasn’t before, and there surely isn’t now. I’ll be lucky if I’m not charged with perjury. If you’re found, you’ll be charged with murder.”
The sound of a shovel scraping against rock, then gravel clattering against metal.
“ Like I told you before,” Blinky said, from somewhere behind the glare, “Jake bluffed you, and you fell for it. The prints will never match up, ‘cause I never touched the barrel. All they can prove is that I was in the barn, but that’s no case for murder. And when’s the last time anybody got prosecuted for perjury. I’m sorry you got embarrassed, Josie, me da mucha pena, pero, I’m glad Jake’s gonna be okay. He never fucked with me, and I didn’t want to sandbag him this way.”
“ Thanks for the testimonial, Blinky.” Shielding my eyes from the glare of the spotlights, I slid off the ledge and into the cavern, my wet shoes squishing on the hard rock. Blinky wore a red plaid shirt under coveralls and a hard hat and was tossing a shovel full of rocks into an ore cart. Next to him was Jo Jo Baroso with rubberized boots sticking out incongruously from her long, fur-trimmed coat. “What are you doing, kids, building a clubhouse?”
“ Jake, mi amigo, I’ve missed you so much.” Blinky leaned on the shovel and smiled at me. He seemed genuinely, weirdly, happy to see me. “You got no idea what it’s like to go underground. Hey, that’s a pun, isn’t it?” He allowed himself a short chuckle. “You give up all your friends, you gotta move around. Hell, I even gave some blood, which you found in the Range Rover. What a pain in the ass. Never again.”
“ Blinky, you’ll forgive me if I don’t throw my arms around you, but I’m-”
“ Don’t say it, Jake. We did you wrong. We never should have set you up. I said to Josie, let’s cut Jake in for a full share, let him figure out a way to just steal the maldita compania from Cimarron, but she said, no, you’d never go along with it. She was right. I knew that as soon as you raised a stink when we left a few things out of the prospectus. You just didn’t want to play the game.”
“ Not your game, Blinky. Not the con.”
“ Yeah, well this wasn’t a con. For once it was real. Really real and really big. That’s why we had to get Rocky Mountain Treasures back from Cimarron. Why give seventy percent to that condenado? Was that fair? Hell, if I hadn’t raised the money, he never could have found her. I asked him to renegotiate, but he said no and called me a door-to-door salesman in patent leather loafers. Hey, Jake, I never sold door to door, and you know it. This was his life, he said, everything he’d worked for, and a deal’s a deal, so I was stuck. So the little sister and me, we decided to get the company back, but that cowboy was smarter than-”
“ Shut up, Luis!” Jo Jo was glaring at him.
“ Hermanita, I’m gonna do the talking for once. Jeez, she even bosses me around down here. I learned this shit from Cimarron. How to drill the holes in a round pattern, put different length fuses on the dynamite so it explodes just right and the rock falls the way you want it. There’s a science to it, if you want to knock a hole in the rock without blowing yourself up. Jake, you wouldn’t believe it, but I like this shit. I really found myself down here.”
“ I’m not surprised. You’ve got a great future breaking rocks.”
“ C’mon, Jake, don’t be pissed. It’s time to make amends.”
Next to him was a wooden crate with sticks of dynamite poking out of the top. A fuse was attached to each stick.
“ Okay, Blinky, so now you’ve gone straight. You’re a miner, right?”
“ Yeah, sort of, and Josie thinks she’s the foreman of the crew. Some things never change, right? I always put up with it because she gave me the skinny on the state’s cases against me and my friends. She’d tell me when investigators were sniffing around, and we’d close up shop and head to another jurisdiction. When I got arrested, she’d pull stuff out of the files. Why do you think you had so much success on my cases, Jake? It wasn’t just buena suerte.”
I turned toward Jo Jo. “So it was always an act, how much you detested your brother?”
She didn’t answer, and for a moment, the only sound was the whirring generator and the thumping pump.
“ Nah,” Blinky said, waving his shovel. “She still ain’t president of the Louis Baroso fan club, but blood is thicker than water. At first, she tried to get me to go straight, but then, I started carving out a piece of each deal for her. Hey, the state attorney’s office pays peanuts. Pretty soon, she’s my partner. Hey, Jake, I learned a long time ago it’s easier to get an honest person to steal than to get a thief not to. Anyway, where was I?”
“ Something about how smart Cimarron was,” I helped out.
Blinky used the back of his sleeve to wipe streaks of dirt-stained sweat from his forehead. “Yeah, smart enough to know when he’s getting taken for a ride. He was pressuring Kyle Hornback, who didn’t know jackshit about the oversubscription of stock, but had some photocopies of bank transfers that would have told Cimarron everything I didn’t need him to know.
Cimarron was in town and was gonna see Hornback when Socolow was done with him.”
“ Why’d you try to pin it on me?”
“ Josie’s idea, entirely.”
“ Luis!”
Blinky shrugged. “Well, it’s true, and I suppose it had to be done. Cimarron had to think you were in on the scam, that you were stealing from the company, and you were banging Josie, too. If he didn’t hate you, it would never have worked.”
Jo Jo Baroso had turned away so that I could only see her in profile under the glare of the spotlights. “So that’s what it was from day one, Jo Jo. Including that night in your house. The only reason I was in your bed was to bait the trap.”
“ Don’t tell me you’re hurt, Jake,” she said, still not looking me in the eye. “Don’t give me that sophomoric how-could-you-do-this-to-me-when-I-really-cared-for-you bullshit.’’
“ But I did!”
“ You dropped me, Jake. You dumped me. Do you know what that’s like?”
“ Is that what this is about, you getting even with me for that?”
“ No, it was just business,” Jo Jo said.
I shivered, either because I was soaking wet, or from her cold-bloodedness.
“ C’mon, Jake, don’t be sore,” Blinky said, annoyed that I objected to being set up for murder. “It isn’
t like we knew what was going to happen. In the beginning, we didn’t even plan on killing Cimarron.”
“ What did you plan?”
“ We wanted him to come after you, but we knew you wouldn’t kill him. That night in the house, we sort of hoped you’d kick some butt, soften him up, and then we’d renegotiate from different positions. It hurts a man’s pride to be beaten.”
“ I know.”
“ But anyway, he stomped you pretty good, and that shot the plan all to hell. Then, everything got out of hand. I mean, Josie said she was afraid Cimarron was going to kill you, and I said too bad it can’t be the other way around, what with me being the beneficiary of his life insurance and Josie as the sole heir of the estate. So we kept talking about it. What if, this. What if, that. How can we get all of her? Finally, it was a no-brainer. After all, if Cimarron died, we’d get her all. I figured you’d follow Josie up here, and I knew you’d come to the rescue if you saw Josie all black and blue.”
I turned to Jo Jo. “But Cimarron did beat you, didn’t he? You weren’t lying about that.”
“ Yes,” Jo Jo answered. “I told him I saw you at the music tent, and you wanted me to come back to Miami with you. He hit me, Jake. Time and again, just enough to cause pain without knocking me unconscious or leaving scars. He was a master at it. Can you blame me for wanting him dead?”
“ No, but I blame you for setting me up.”
Blinky leaned on his shovel as if it were a cane. “We figured you’d be so mad about what he did to Josie, and remembering what he did to you that you’d grab a pitchfork and make shish kebab out of him. At first, we planned to have Josie back you up, claim it was self-defense, keep you from ever getting charged.”
“ Why didn’t you, Jo Jo? Even after killing Cimarron, you could have told the truth, that I was defending myself. It would have been justifiable homicide if I had killed him.”
She didn’t answer, but Blinky did. “Once we had to give you a little help in the barn, the script changed. Josie got worried. What with her history with you, it would have looked like the two of you conspired to kill him. It was a close call. Hell, we almost went that way, but in the end, we figured the truth wouldn’t wash, and you’d both be indicted. Trying to get you off would make her look like a two-timing slut, but blaming you made her look like a grief-stricken widow, at least that’s the way we figured it.”