by Paul Levine
As it turned out, I had a three-Grolsch wait, and still no Blinky. I found a pay phone and called his apartment. “Hello, this is Baroso Enterprises, Inc. Please leave a message at the tone, and…”
It was nearly eleven, so I said to hell with it and walked back to my car, which still had its aerial, hubcaps, and AM radio intact. It occurred to me that Blinky might have gotten mixed up. Ever since the trial, he had been in a daze. He might be at my house, probably waiting on the front porch, cursing me. Hitting seventy on the brief stretch of the interstate, I was back on Kumquat Street in the Grove in fourteen minutes.
I parked under the chinaberry tree, same as always. The moon was higher in the sky now, the night warm and muggy, no trace of an oceanfront breeze here. I listened for the warbling of my mockingbird. He is my bird the way the raccoon who knocks over my garbage cans is my raccoon. But the mocker usually is perched in my marlberry bush, singing nighttime songs. Mimus polyglottos, Doc Riggs calls him, mimic of many tongues. He’s not much to look at, sort of a battleship gray with white wing patches, but like the bobwhite, nighthawk, and whippoorwill, he’s got a voice.
As I approached the front porch, I heard a sound from the hibiscus hedge, or maybe I sensed movement there. It could have been a variety of nighttime animals, including Peifidus nocturnus, who might be waiting to mug an honest citizen such as myself. I’m as brave as the next guy, and I don’t mind a fair fight, but a punk kid with a semiautomatic could tattoo a ring around my heart before I got off a punch, so I hurried to the front door.
The sound was barely more than a squeak. “Uncle Jake.”
I turned and ran back to the hedge. Huddled in the dirt, hidden by leaves and floppy red flowers was the boy in the Dolphins jersey. I reached down to him, and he crawled into my arms. “Uncle Jake, you’re home.”
He was crying, his tears tracking down grimy cheeks.
I was stunned. “What the hell’s going on?”
He pointed toward the house, his hand shaking. “I woke up and heard voices downstairs. Then, somebody came up the steps. Slow, like he was listening for something. I got so scared, I crawled under the bed. Somebody opened my door, looked in, and closed it. Then he went into your bedroom. I heard sounds in there, but I just stayed under the bed. He went downstairs again, and I heard voices, real soft, then a noise like furniture being moved. Uncle Jake, I was so scared ...”
I squeezed him in my arms. “Kip, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left you. I’ll never do it again, but you were dreaming, that’s all. No one was in the house. You’ve seen too many of those movies where maniacs with razors go after the kids.”
He was shaking his head. “Honest, Uncle Jake. You gotta believe me. After a while, I heard the front door close, so I sneaked to the stairs. Then I saw it. Even though it was dark, I knew what it was.”
“What?”
Again, he pointed at the house with a shaky hand. “I didn’t want to go out through the front. I just couldn’t go into the room, so I ran back to my bedroom, climbed out the window, and crossed the roof to the tree in back.”
“You came down the tree? Why?”
He started crying again.
“Hey, Kip. Everything’s okay. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll go in the house together.”
He shook his head and squeezed me tighter.
“Okay, Kippers, I’ll go in. Will you wait for me?”
He nodded and wiped his nose on the sleeve of my old jersey. I carried him to the car and put him in the front seat. He sat there, rocking back and forth, hugging his knees. I went back to the porch, hit the front door with a solid shoulder and barged in. Moonlight slanted through the windows and lit the room in ashen grays. It was silent, except for the whompeta-whompeta of the ceiling fan. Which seemed to whomp slower than usual.
I saw it then, or sensed it.
A shadow, a shape, a movement.
I looked up. A dark silhouette flew just over my head.
A whirling, twirling, unidentifiable mass.
My first impression was that someone had leapt off the landing of the stairs at me, like a cowboy in a Western. I ducked and head-rolled on the old pine floor, coming up in a crouch, adrenaline pumping, knees bent, legs spread, fists clenched.
My second impression was different. There were two of us in the room, all right, but one of us was dead.
***
He was suspended from the ceiling fan and looked like one of those circus performers on the high rings, spinning dizzying circles. The body swung at a forty-five-degree angle from the ceiling, circling above me in endless, hypnotic motion. The legs were straight out, the arms flung back from the centrifugal force. In the moonlight, the shadow danced crazily across the floor and up the wall.
A jumble of emotions. On South Beach, I had the strange sensation that something was wrong. Blinky was usually late, but he always shows. Tonight he had been afraid of something, someone. What, who?
I felt my heart beating and beating hard. I tried to calm myself down and think. What to do first? Cut him down, call the police, take care of Kip? They don’t train you for this stuff, not in three-a-day practices in August, and not in night law school in September.
Now my mind was tearing along at a speed I couldn’t control. Flashes of overlapping thoughts and unanswered questions kept jolting me with each spin of the body. Who killed Blinky Baroso and why, and had the killer been looking for me? I said a silent prayer of thanks that Kip was unhurt.
I duck-walked out from under the body and got to the wall, reaching for the light switch. Overhead, three spots flashed on. I squinted through the glare and saw how he was fastened to the motor housing of the fan. What looked like a bolt of colorful silk cloth was digging into his neck and tied to something, a wire coat hanger maybe, that was attached to the fan.
In the brightness, I could see his eyes were bulging open, and his tongue, black and swollen, stuck out the side of his mouth. And I could see something else, too.
It wasn’t Blinky Baroso.
Chapter 6
My Alibi
I called Charlie Riggs first, getting a recording that informed me he had gone fishing, telling all his friends, “Vive valeque.” I should have figured he was still in the Keys. Granny never complained when I headed north early, leaving Charlie behind to keep her company. I think it was Father Andrew Greeley, with the aid of the Gallup Poll, who determined that couples in their sixties have the best sex. Something to look forward to.
Granny answered on the second ring, and I pictured her rolling over in bed and handing the phone to my old friend. Charlie said he’d get here in an hour-fifteen if his old Chew pickup didn’t throw a rod.
Next, I called Miami Homicide where I am known, but not necessarily liked. A woman with a faint Cuban accent took down the information, calmly checking the address three times, and politely asking me not to leave the premises. From her tone, she might have been taking an order for a pizza with anchovies, but that’s the way cops act, particularly in a city where homicides are as plentiful as mosquitoes. Next I called Abe Socolow at home, figuring if I hadn’t, the cops would have, and Abe’s the kind of guy who remembers the small stuff.
At first, I tried not to touch anything, having been educated by television that I might foul up the crime scene with my fingerprints. Once every hundred years or so, a crime will be solved by finding an unknown assailant’s fingerprints at the scene. Usually, fingerprints merely corroborate what everyone already knows: Three witnesses in the liquor store identify the gunman, and a fingerprint specialist confirms his prints are on the gun dropped at the scene.
Then, I remembered Kip was still in the car. I didn’t want him to see the body a second time, so I hit the switch for the fan, went into the kitchen, hauled out a high stool, and climbed up until I was looking straight into the face of a dead man. A thin copper wire circled his neck and was looped through the motor housing of the fan. But that’s not what killed him. The bright splash of cloth was an imported silk tie kn
otted by someone unfamiliar with the double Windsor. The knot dug deeply into the neck, just below the Adam’s apple.
The tie was a palette of blues and reds and would have looked swell with a dark suit and a white oxford cloth shirt. In fact, it always looked swell just that way.
I should know. It was my tie.
I climbed down and went into the kitchen where I found a knife I use for cleaning fish. Up again, and this time, I hoisted the body with one hand placed under his chin and sawed through the copper wire. He dropped like a tree, banging the floor. I got down, covered the body with an old beach towel, and went out to the car.
I hustled Kip inside, told him he had been right, apologized for doubting him, and said everything would be okay, the cops would be here soon. I turned on the TV to distract him from the lump in the corner of the room, but in what must have been a first, he wasn’t interested. It took about ninety seconds, but he wasn’t scared anymore. He began babbling excitedly, asking questions, wanting to help, telling me how totally awesome and off-the-Richter it was to have a murder in the house, and did it happen often, and was somebody trying to set me up, like Gene Hackman did to Kevin Costner in No Way Out, which was a remake of The Big Clock with Charles Laughton and Ray Milland, in case I didn’t know, which I didn’t. He asked if we could keep the body a while, like the boys did in Weekend at Bernie’s. I told him to calm down, but he kept chattering away, and I finally figured that it wasn’t quite real to him. Just another movie.
I was trying to concentrate, to figure it out, but Kip was carrying on about murder plots, so I led him to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and popped the porcelain top on a sixteen-ounce Grolsch. I found two glasses that didn’t appear to carry contagious diseases and poured half into one and half into the other.
“How ‘bout a beer, Kip?” I asked, handing him a glass.
“Wow, that’s completely broly of you, Uncle Jake,” Kip said, which I took as well-deserved praise of my child-rearing skills.
I drained my beer while Kip sipped at his, making a face.
Then I had another, sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, feeling my pulse rate subside. I needed to think, to consider what I knew and what I didn’t. There were a hundred questions, but they all boiled down to two.
What was Kyle Hornback doing in my house, and who killed him?
To answer those two, I needed to consider what Charlie Riggs called the threshold question in any unsolved crime. Cui bono? Who stands to gain? If I couldn’t figure that one out, Abe Socolow would be the first to tell me. First, though, he’d probably ask me something I’d been wondering ever since I cut down the body.
Where the hell was Blinky Baroso?
***
Two detectives showed up first, an Anglo major near retirement age and a young Hispanic who didn’t give his rank. The older cop had tired eyes and wore a lightweight brown suit with shiny black shoes. The younger one wore a short-sleeved white shirt and a blood-red tie. He had the sloping shoulders and bulging arms of a weight lifter. I had known the major from my days as an assistant public defender, but we’d never had a case together. The young one was a stranger to me.
Abe Socolow walked in five minutes later. After they convinced themselves that there was indeed a death not from natural causes, they called the assistant medical examiner lucky enough to be on weekend duty. Socolow spent the next ten minutes chewing me out for contaminating the scene, as he put it. Then the younger detective flexed his triceps and called the station, asking for what used to be called the crime scene boys, who turned out to be an African-American woman and an Asian-American woman. They arrived, toting their cameras, tape measures, fingerprint kits, and assorted technological doodads.
Kip followed them around for a while, eyes wide, mouth closed, except when he asked the difference between the Glock nine-millimeters city cops carried and the Beretta used by Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies.
I was sitting on the battered sofa with the two detectives in mismatched chairs at slight angles to me. Abe Socolow paced in front of me. He wore his trademark black suit, white shirt, and black tie, but it being a Sunday night, the tie was loosened at the neck.
The major asked all the right questions, and I had none of the answers. No, I didn’t expect Kyle Hornback here. That’s right, I leave the front door unlocked, preferring burglars to walk in, rather than busting up the place. Besides, unless you know to batter the door, it’s stuck shut by the humidity.
Where was I earlier in the evening? On South Beach. That’s right, I left the youngster here alone.
The crime scene investigators had shooed Kip away while they photographed the body, and now the lad joined me, moving close on the sofa, where I put my arm around him. Even under the paddle fans, it was about eighty degrees in the house, so the goose bumps on Kip’s arms couldn’t have been from the temperature. Maybe it was starting to sink in. Maybe it was becoming real.
The major asked Kip what he saw, and he ran through the story. Footsteps, his door opening and closing, someone in my bedroom . . .
“That’s when they must have taken my tie,” I chimed in.
“Shut up, Jake,” Socolow said, still pacing.
Voices downstairs, Kip continued, furniture moving, the front door closing again. He sneaked down the landing, saw the body spinning, tossing shadows across the moonlit room, ran back upstairs and climbed out his window. Same story he told me with no embellishments.
“Good try, Abe,” I said, “but I don’t think the kid killed him, even though he doesn’t have an alibi.”
“What about you, Jake? What’s your alibi?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Hey, Jakie, let’s get something straight here. This is a murder investigation, so I ask—”
“The questions,” Kip interrupted. “Or if you want, we can finish this downtown.”
I hushed the kid with what passes for a stern look. “Go ahead, Abe. Fire away.”
“Where’s your client?” Abe Socolow asked.
“Which one? I’ve got two or three, you know.”
“Jake, don’t jerk me around. Where’s Louie Baroso?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, truthfully.
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“Three days ago.”
I could have added, “in my office,” but the question was when, not where, and I preach to my clients just to answer the question, no more, no less.
“Where?” Socolow asked.
“In my office.”
“What was he doing there?”
“The usual, dropping ashes on the carpet, flirting with my
secretary.”
Socolow gave me a pained look. “Did he mention Kyle Hornback?”
“Yeah, he asked if he could use my house to kill Kyle, maybe add him to the living room furnishings along with the beanbag chair and lava lamp.”
The muscular young detective looked up. “He said that?”
The major rubbed his forehead as if he had a migraine, and Abe stopped pacing and squarely faced me. “Jake, don’t fuck with me, okay?”
“Yeah,” Kip said in his tough-guy voice, or at least as tough as his eleven-year-old tenor could make it. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way, it’s up to you, pal.”
“What is it with you two?” Socolow demanded, scowling.
Just then, Kip leaned over and whispered something to me. I patted him on his goose-bumped arm, held his hand, and whispered something back. Abe Socolow’s dark eyes shot me a question, so I answered. “He said you remind him of Frank Sinatra in The First Deadly Sin.”
“Yeah?”
“And I told him Sinatra wore a better toupee.”
“I don’t wear a toupee.”
“Really? No one can tell.”
The major cleared his throat and said, “Mr. Lassiter, were you expecting any visitors here tonight?”
“No,” I said, softly.
“Why did you leave the
house?”
“Like I said before, I had to meet someone.” When possible, I like telling cops the truth.
“Someone?”
“Call it a date if you like.” Okay, okay, so it wasn’t the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
“What was the lady’s name?”
“I didn’t say she was a lady.” True enough. I also didn’t say she was a she.
Socolow couldn’t stand it. “Jake, what’s her name, for chrissakes. We gotta establish your whereabouts, you know that.”
“That could be embarrassing,” I said. Still true. I should get a Boy Scout badge for this.
“Why? She married?”
I gave my best bashful grin. “You said it, Abe, not me.”
I felt Kip’s hand squeeze mine, but he didn’t flinch, didn’t say a word. What a trooper the kid was, and what a role model his old uncle Jake. In just a few hours, the kid learned how to drive recklessly, witnessed a grisly murder scene, drank his first beer, and watched his blood kin mislead the cops. And poor Granny was worried about a little spray-paint graffiti. If the kid hung out with me much longer, he’d be knocking off Wells Fargo trucks before he hit puberty.
Abe Socolow was prowling again. “When Baroso was in your office on Thursday ...”
Socolow let it hang there, but if he thought I’d start a narrative like some motor-mouth witness, he had a long wait. After a moment, he continued, “...what did you talk about?”
“C’mon, Abe. That’s privileged, and you know it.”
“Not if Baroso disclosed a plan to kill Kyle Hornback, it isn’t.
“Hey, Abe. We’ve known each other a long time. If that had happened, don’t you know I would have stopped him one way or another?”
“Yeah, I like to think so.”
“Besides, Blinky Baroso isn’t a killer. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t have the physical ability to . . .” I gestured to a corner of the room, where the crime lab cops were taking the body temperature of the corpse. “Hornback must go about one eighty, one eighty-five,” I continued. “Blinky couldn’t benchpress a breadstick, much less strangle the guy and hoist him to the ceiling. You’re looking for someone bigger and stronger, someone who’s good with his hands.”