by Paul Levine
“Well, we can’t have him painting up the town every time they change the double feature at the mall, can we?”
It is difficult to respond to a complete non sequitur, so I didn’t try.
“Jake,” the judge said, his face lighting up with an idea, “do you mind if Ah ask the lad a question?”
I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t the question that worried me, but the answer. Besides, I wanted to give my closing argument, telling the judge how graffiti has been around since ancient Rome. But all I said was, “Go ahead, Your Honor.”
“Son,” the judge asked, looking at Kip, “do you remember having done this terrible act?”
“I remember every detail,” Kip said. “The Germans wore gray. You wore blue ...”
“Your Honor, that’s from Casablanca!” I bellowed.
“...and orange,” Kip continued, looking at the judge’s two-tone robes.
“Judge Coleridge,” I said, intending to filibuster, just to keep the kid quiet, “it’s apparent Dr. Kornblum is correct. The child is bewildered by life and confused by the movies. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He’s—”
“Clam up, Jake! Now, son, look me in the eye. Help me out here, ‘cause Ah don’t know what to do with you. Ah could put you on home detention or in community control. Ah could put you in the Crossroads program or in intensive control. Ah could enroll you in the marine institute or maybe the alternative assistance program. Lord knows, we got more programs than a dog’s got fleas.”
Kip just stood there, a faint smile on his face.
“Son, do you have anything to say to the court?”
Oh no.
“Yeah, Judge. Are you eating a tomato or is that your nose?
The few spectators, mostly distraught parents, laughed. My eyes pleaded with Kip for a credit line.
“Charlie McCarthy to W. C. Fields in You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man,” he said.
“You see, Your Honor!” I shouted, stepping in front of Kip, as if to shield him from harm. “He can’t help it. These words just keep popping out.”
Judge T. Bone Coleridge rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, then spun around in his high-backed chair. When he spoke, it was to the wall behind him. “The question for the court is, should this boy be in Youth Hall, where he can learn some discipline and maybe get therapy from left-wing, pot-smoking county-payrolled, thumb-sucking shrinks, or should he be on the streets?”
“Someday,” Kip piped up from behind me, “a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”
“What’d you say?” the judge demanded, spinning his chair back toward his supplicants.
“All the animals come out at night,” Kip said, a faraway look in his eyes. “Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies.”
“Your Honor,” I leapt in. “I’m sure there’s an explanation.” I looked at Kip, who rewarded me with a maniacal grin.
“DeNiro in Taxi Driver,” he said.
“Of course it is!” I shouted triumphantly to the judge, as if Kip had just revealed a major discovery in theoretical physics.
“Skunk pussies?” the judge said, shaking his head.
Thankfully, Kip didn’t elaborate. The judge asked if I had anything more to present before he announced his ruling. I declined, and Kip started to say something. I tried to clamp my hand over his mouth, but he wriggled away from me. “Just one thing, Judge. My lawyer’s my uncle. He’s my uncle Jake.”
“What movie’s that from?” T. Bone Coleridge asked, wearily.
“None,” I admitted. “It’s true. Sylvester Houston Conklin is my nephew, my half sister’s son.”
“Why’nt you say so, first thing, Jake?” the judge demanded. “Hell’s bells, where’s that low-rent shrink of yours?”
“Right here,” Dr. Kornblum called out from the gallery, knowing when his number had been called.
“Did Ah hear you say something about this boy needing a strong male figure, someone to look up to?”
“Exactly, in lieu of a father, he needs ...”
I knew where this was going, and so did Kip. He was grinning, but I wasn’t.
“Your Honor,” I said, “if you’re thinking that I—”
“Don’t tell me what Ah’m thinking. Ah’ll tell you, Jake. It’s like this. It’s either Youth Hall or your house. You heard it yourself, from your very own witness. Ah’m remanding the boy to your custody. You’re blood kin, after all. You’ll file monthly reports, and if there’s any problem, you’ll both be back in here.” T. Bone cleared his throat, the sound of a shovel digging into gravel, and turned to the young miscreant. “How ‘bout it, son? You want to bunk with your uncle Jake?”
“Sure, Judge,” Kip responded. “It’s like living at the Bates Motel.”
“Then it’s a done deal. Now, we’ve got to find a way to keep you out of trouble. You got any hobbies, besides all that movie watchin’?”
Kip shook his head
“Well, how would you like to play some Pee Wee League football? Your uncle can show you a thing or two.”
No again.
“What do you want to do, son?”
“Make movies,” Kip said.
T. Bone thought about it a second, then turned to me. “Buy the boy one of those video cameras, and turn him loose. In my day, a boy was rotten, we locked him up and strapped him. Now, we try to let him express himself. Who knows, maybe this’ll work. Strappin’ never did. Maybe the rapscallion will turn out to be one of your Hollywood moguls.”
The judge gave himself a satisfied look. Then he banged his gavel, declared a recess and bolted through the rear door to his chambers, blue and orange robes flapping behind him.
Now what? I hadn’t gotten the hang of being an uncle, and I was going to be a father. I looked down at Kip, confused and embarrassed. He had heard me try to weasel out of taking responsibility for him. He was biting his lip.
“Kip. It’s not that I don’t want you around. It’s just that—”
“It’s okay, Uncle Jake. Never apologize and never explain. It’s a sign of weakness.”
I didn’t ask, but he told me anyway.
“John Wayne,” Kip said, taking my hand and lacing his fingers through mine.
Chapter 8
Motive, Opportunity and Means
After court, or après cour, as one of my worldly partners insists on saying, I was back in the office, not answering my mail, when Abe Socolow called on my direct line. He barked out his usual greeting, which consisted of my last name in an accusing tone, then told me to get my ass over to Blinky Baroso’s apartment. I told him I’d do better than that: I’d bring all of me.
So I abandoned my stacks of opposing lawyers’ testy correspondence that begged for even more obnoxious responses. It is a game we play, scrivening abusive letters, insulting the other’s client in increasingly harsh terms until one or the other files suit. Once, in a petty dispute over a property line, H. T. Patterson wrote a twelve-page letter, accusing my client of everything from deceit, deception, and duplicity to being on the grassy knoll in Dallas. Pressed for time, I responded simply, “Fuck you; strong reply to follow.” As Goethe said, or was it Shula, “When ideas fail, words come in very handy.”
Before leaving, I checked on Kip who was installed in the conference room, a splendid place of dark wood, tinted glass and marble, all paid for by grateful, or at least, intimidated clients. Word had gotten back to me that the lad had been videotaping all the female employees in the office, telling them he was the casting director for Porky’s IV. No one seemed to mind until he asked the receptionist to take off her blouse for her audition. So I grounded him for the day, which he didn’t seem to mind, inasmuch as television came with the punishment.
My secretary, Cindy, and two young female paralegals were making a fuss over my ward, who sat in one of the leather swivel chairs, sneakers propped on the marble slab of a conference table, watching a black-and-white movie on the TV tastefully recessed into a teak wall unit. The
women were feeding him doughnuts and sodas from the office kitchen and cooing about his blond hair and blue eyes.
“This nephew of yours is the sweetest little thing,” said Cindy, who, like her boss, will do anything to avoid sitting at her desk. “He’s going to be a real lady killer.”
“James Cagney, 1933,” the kid said, his mouth covered with powdered sugar.
“Huh?” Cindy looked confused. It was not an entirely unfamiliar expression. She’d been my secretary back in the P.D.’s office and was a tad unconventional for a downtown law firm with offices thirty-two stories above Biscayne Bay. She wore miniskirts and orange lipstick and had three-inch fingernails painted different colors with sparkles embedded in the polish. Her typing sounded like a chef chopping vegetables at a Japanese steak house.
“Look, Cindy, I gotta go. If it’s not too much trouble, how ‘bout typing some pleadings this afternoon? I’ll be back later for Little Lord Fauntleroy.”
“Freddie Bartholomew,” Kip said, without taking his eyes from the set. “Ricky Schroder in the TV remake.”
***
The Olds was right where I left it, which is always a fifty-fifty proposition in a county where a hundred cars are stolen each day. Some are stripped for parts, some are taken by freighter for sale in the islands, and some turn up, repainted, as local taxicabs. I had parked next to a powder blue SL 300, the Mercedes convertible. My lead gas—guzzling monster made the little German car look feminine and petite.
I eased out of the parking garage and onto Biscayne Boulevard. It’s our showcase downtown street, running along the bay. There’s a wide median with towering palm trees where hookers, muggers, and transvestites gather, though they’re generally shooed out of there just before the Orange Bowl Parade. The boulevard intersects with Flagler Street, which runs due west past the county courthouse and provides an entertaining walk among street peddlers, panhandlers, and tourists chattering in a dozen languages, none of them English.
Today, I had a short drive north past Bayfront Park, where the multimillion-dollar Claude and Mildred Pepper Fountain sits idle and dry because the city can’t pay for the electricity to run it. Just past the park is Bayside, an outdoor mall of T-shirt shops and rum-punch booths. On the west side of the boulevard used to be the Coppertone sign with the dog pulling down the little girl’s swimsuit. It’s gone, now, along with the old library they knocked down to redo the park. Gone too are the Columbus and McAllister hotels that were bought by some Saudis, then flattened, and a few other local institutions, including The Miami News, Eastern Airlines, and Pan Am. Things change, but seldom for the better.
In four minutes I was on the Venetian Causeway, the bridge across the man-made islands to Miami Beach. Blinky lived on the first island past the tollgate in one of those step-back high rises that looks like a pre-Columbian pyramid. I had been there before, but never with a police escort. Two uniformed Miami cops were in the lobby. Another stood by the elevator and pushed number ten for me. Yet another opened the door to the apartment and ushered me inside.
The apartment was done in white and black. White walls with postmodern paintings, white marble floor, black furniture. Blinky was smart enough not to decorate it himself, or it would have tended toward heavy red velvet.
Abe Socolow and his buddy, the Anglo homicide detective, were sitting on a black leather sofa in the living room. Through an open sliding glass door, I saw a woman standing on the balcony, her back to me. I recognized the long, dark hair and angular frame of Josefina Jovita Baroso.
No one was talking. They had been here for a while. It gave off the feel of a homicide scene, and I was sure I’d be ushered into another room for a gander at Blinky’s body. The air-conditioning was turned up high, and I shivered in my seersucker suit. Cops sometimes try to chill down homicide scenes. They’re not immune to the smells any more than the rest of us. But I didn’t detect the sticky-sweet scent of fresh blood or the rot of decaying flesh, and Blinky, I remembered, kept his thermostat at sixty, lest he sweat through his silk undershorts.
Abe Socolow motioned for me to sit down, or maybe recline, in an uncomfortable black plastic chair shaped like a tilde. On a glass coffee table were three stylish candles of different lengths, propped in rough-hewn holders that looked like black granite. Next to the candles was a heavy art book that I was sure had never been opened by Blinky, unless he had started selling fake van Goghs. I eased into the chair without slipping a disk, and Socolow said, “So where the hell is he?”
“Blinky?”
“No, Judge Crater.”
“He’s not here? He’s not dead?”
“I’m going to ask you again. Where is he?”
“Abe, I think we’ve had this conversation before.”
“Yeah, except you left something out.” He tossed a leather-bound pocket calendar on the coffee table, then flipped it open. “Go ahead, look at it.”
There it was, in Blinky’s scrawl, on Sunday, June 26. Yesterday. 10-ish. Meet Jake.
“Ten-ish,” I said aloud. “Sounds like Andre Agassi with a lisp.”
“C’mon, Jake. You can do better than that.”
Actually, I couldn’t. “What’re you driving at?”
“You told us you hadn’t seen Baroso since Thursday.”
“It’s the truth.”
Socolow cleared his throat. He sounded like a hungry pit bull. “You also told us you weren’t expecting anyone last night.”
“I wasn’t. Not at home, anyway.”
The detective stirred on the sofa. “We could bust you right now for obstruction.”
“What good would that do?” I asked.
Neither one answered me. They both wanted my help, and jerking me around wasn’t going to get it. The detective said, “We sent a squad car over here last night after you called in. No one was home. The security guard says Baroso pulled out of the garage sometime around eight or eight-thirty in his green Range Rover and comes back maybe three hours later. A little while after that, Baroso leaves again, burning rubber pulling out of the garage, nearly sideswiping a car pulling in. We got a search warrant this morning, and here we are.”
“What’s the charge,” I asked, “reckless driving?”
Socolow ignored the crack and said, “Here’s how I see it. Baroso and Hornback come to your house, hoping you’ll mediate a dispute. Baroso knows Hornback’s set to give a statement and he’s prepared to pay to keep him quiet. But without you around to referee, the negotiations don’t go so well, and Baroso ends up slipping Hornback a Mickey, then strangling him. After stringing him up, Baroso comes back here, gathers whatever he needs and flees.”
“Flees,” I repeated, because the word always sounded silly to me.
“Take a look around,” Socolow said, seeming to wonder if I was mocking him. “Dirty dishes still in the sink. Bedroom’s a mess, clothes tossed from the closet, one suitcase opened but not packed. Toiletries are gone from the bathroom, drawers with underwear and shirts mostly empty. And the pocket calendar left behind. Nobody does that unless they’re in a hell of a hurry.”
“You’re too much,” I said. “A guy’s a messy packer, and that’s your proof of murder. Unless you’ve got a witness who eyeballed Blinky at my house, you’ve got nothing, and you know you’ve got nothing. I’m surprised a judge even gave you a search warrant on all that speculation.”
I watched the undertaker’s smile form at the corner of Socolow’s mouth. He was thumbing through his notes. “You have a neighbor named Phoebe Gethers at the intersection of Kumquat and Solana. That’s right across the street from you, isn’t it, Jake.”
He knew very well it was.
“At about a quarter to ten,” the detective said, “she’s sitting on her front porch, and a taxi drops off a man at your house. She didn’t get a look at him, but we check the cab companies, and a Haitian driver with no work permit positively ID’s Hornback from a mug shot. A few minutes later, your neighbor gets some houseguests and goes inside. More guests arrive, and s
he’s back at the front door, letting them in. She puts the time between ten and ten-fifteen, and now there’s what she calls a Jeep sitting in front of your house. We show her some pictures, and she ID’s it as a dark green or black Range Rover. By the time you show up around eleven-thirty, the Range Rover’s gone, and Hornback’s strung up with your tie. Basing it on body temperature of the stiff, rigor mortis and livor mortis, the M.E. puts time of death between nine and eleven p.m. Hornback was rendered unconscious with barbiturates, then strangled.”
“So where was Blinky between eight and ten?” I asked.
Socolow grunted. “Who knows and who cares! He was at your house when it counted.”
“I care because Blinky’s not a murderer.”
“Jake’s right, for once.” It was Jo Jo Baroso, coming through the balcony door. Behind her, one of the cruise ships was headed out Government Cut toward the Caribbean. My brother is not emotionally or physically capable.”
The sister to the rescue, I didn’t expect it.
“As I see it,” she continued, “Luis brought some muscle with him. When Kyle wouldn’t agree to whatever deal Luis wanted to cut, the muscle did the dirty work.”
Oh boy, with a sister like this, who needs a prosecutor? But then, the sister is a prosecutor. I looked back at Socolow and said, “Okay, I get the picture. After ten minutes of detective work, it’s the collective wisdom of the police and the state attorney’s office that this case is solved.”
“Hey, Jake,” Socolow said, with a smile I now recognized as a sneer in sheep’s clothing, “it wasn’t that hard. You know the three elements of every prosecution, don’t you?”
“Sure. Perjury, coercion, and pure dumb luck.”
“Motive, opportunity, and means,” Socolow corrected me. “Baroso knew Hornback was going to flip. There’s the motive. We can tie the two of them together in your house, at least circumstantially. That’s the opportunity. As Josefina suggests, the means were undoubtedly provided by hired muscle.”
“Undoubtedly,” I said, with as much sarcasm as possible. “Of course, your security guard didn’t see a third party with Blinky, and Phoebe didn’t report another car at my house, and even if it was Blinky’s Range Rover, you have no one eyeballing him, and the three of you are so far off base about the kind of person Blinky Baroso is that I don’t even know why I’m arguing with you.”