Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (43 page)

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 compa
ñí
a
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.”

“
So I was just a fall guy
to get the insurance and the stupid treasure claims?”

“
Not so stupid,” Blinky
said. “Not when you’re talking about all of her.”

“
Her? That’s the third time
you’ve talked about getting all of her. The mine?”

“
No, the Silver
Queen.”

“
That’s what I said, the
mine.”

Blinky was puzzled. Then he figured it out.
“No, not that silver queen. This one.” He grabbed one of the light
poles and swung it around, tossing the beam to a position directly
behind him. It illuminated a lady of silver nearly twenty feet
high. She looked a little like the Statue of Liberty, except this
lady sat on a throne in a half chariot, half ship.

“
Ain’t she something?”
Blinky asked. “I been studying up on her. I read all of Cimarron’s
newspaper clippings from a hundred years ago.” Blinky lowered his
voice into a Miami con man’s imitation of a Lowell Thomas newsreel.
“‘The queen reclines with the voluptuous grace of a Cleopatra in
her Egyptian barge.’

I walked over for a closer look. The chariot
sat on a pedestal trimmed with a drapery of silver, gold, and what
looked like ebony. Leading to the throne were steps inlaid with
silver dollars. On the risers, the words “Silver Queen” were raised
in letters of solid silver. The background was a mass of brilliant
colored minerals, and the borders were white crystals. The words
“Aspen, Colorado” appeared on a lower panel of the pedestal. The
letters were formed from broken pieces of silver on a background
that looked like pure white sugar. I moved closer for a better
look.

“
Diamond dust,” Blinky
said.

Six pillars of burnished silver and crystals
inlaid with mosaics of different ores rose from the pedestal and
supported the throne. The wheels of the chariot were four feet high
and made of solid silver. A canopy of minerals and crystals covered
the queen’s head. Her hair was made of glass, and the drapery
across her Ruben-esque bosom was adorned with bright minerals I
couldn’t identify. In her hand, she held a silver scepter that must
have been ten feet long. It was topped with a silver dollar a foot
across and a five-pointed silver star. Two Greek gods ran alongside
the chariot carrying cornucopias filled with gold and silver
coins.

“
Her head and body are
carved from the biggest, purest silver nugget ever mined,” Blinky
said, “more than a ton, and it came from this mountain.” There was
a note of pride in his voice, as if he had made the damn thing.
“What do you think of her, Jake?”

“
Let me try to find the
word. How about tacky? Gauche? Overblown? Laughable? Kitschy, if
there is such a word.”

“
Yeah, well I know it ain’t
too subtle. Cimarron called it one of the last purely Victorian
pieces, but who gives a shit if it ain’t a da Vinci? See, Cimarron
figured it out. It’s got historical value plus the value of the
minerals and the fact there’s never been anything like it, before
or since. After the World’s Fair, the lady had been sitting there
at the museum over in Pueblo, but they were going to tear down the
place. The guys who owned the mines and contributed the minerals
were mighty pissed and wanted her back, but the museum guys were
going to send her to the Smithsonian or maybe New York, so the
mining guys just stole the damn thing. Brought her here on a
freight car and lowered her back into the ground from whence she
came. The mine was petered out by then, and the bottom tunnel
flooded. They wanted to put the lady on display for the local
folks, but they had lost their minerals claims to the banks, and
they had more to worry about than museums and such. Luckily for the
lady, she sat up here where you see her, good as new, or she will
be once we polish her up. We got the patents and the mineral rights
to this mine, and the big queen is made of minerals found
herein.”