Blinky shook his head sadly. “On the Grand Bahama Bank, we found three Spanish galleons loaded to the gunwales with coins and artifacts. Seven million wholesale auction value after expenses.”
“ What’s wrong with that?”
“ I had twenty percent of the company, gave Cimarron twenty percent and sold the rest.”
“ I still don’t get it.”
“ The sixty percent I sold…well, I sold it about four times.”
“ Oh shit.”
“ Yeah, I had to give up all the promoters’ portions to the investors, and Cimarron had to make up the shortfall, about eight hundred thousand, to keep us out of jail. “Blinky laughed in disbelief at his own bad fortune at striking it rich. “Who would ever have thought we’d have found the stuff? It was the first deal I ever did that actually worked.”
From behind me, a voice. “Just like The Producers.”
I turned and there was Kip in his Jockey shorts, his face still puffy with sleep. “Zero Mostel produces this Broadway show he’s sure will flop, so he sells it over and over to investors, and when it makes money, he’s really fucked.”
“ Don’t say ‘fucked,’ “I told my ward.
“ Right,” Blinky said. “Say ‘screwed.’ ‘Fucked’ has no class, and to succeed in business, kid, you gotta have class.”
“ Anyway,” Kip said, “Mostel’s bummed out and he says to Gene Wilder, ‘I was so careful. I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast. Where did I go right?’
“ That’s good,” Blinky said. “The kid’s a regular actor. I could put him into sales.”
Kip grabbed a box of cereal from the cupboard and sat at the kitchen counter, listening. If he paid close attention, he wouldn’t need an MBA from Wharton.
“ Rocky Mountain Treasures was really Cimarron’s idea,” Blinky said, turning to me. “Back in the good days, he bought up mineral leases all over Colorado.”
“ But how can he finance it? You said he was tapped out.”
“ He is. That’s why I’m out there selling limited partnership interests. The investors will fund the exploration. But listen, Jake, this isn’t a mining operation. Shit, with the price of gold and silver where it is, you can’t extract enough to justify the costs. Plus, the environmental rules will tie you up for years before you turn your first spadeful of dirt. But we’re after something else. Gold and silver that’s already been mined. It’s there, Jake, sunk in old mine shafts, hidden in caves, buried under mountains. We’ve got maps. We’ve got satellite photographs you can buy from the government. We’ve got sophisticated sensors and state-of-the-art equipment, and either way, we can’t lose.”
“ Either way?”
“ We hit paydirt, everybody wins and wins big. We don’t, Cimarron and I still get management fees from investors’ funds. And best of all, it’s legit.”
I was watching Kip carefully slice an orange into quarters and nibble at it. “Uh-huh.”
“ Okay, so we puffed a little bit where you were concerned, and maybe we didn’t give every twist and turn in my biography, but I’m telling you, the business is for real. Honest, Jake. Believe me.”
I thought about believing him, but I was having trouble with it. Sometimes in closing argument, when I’m telling a jury to be cautious of a prosecution witness who’s been given immunity in return for his testimony, I tell a little story. I tell about the farmer who found a rattlesnake in the middle of the winter. “Please don’t kill me,” the snake says. “I’m nearly frozen. Take me back to the farmhouse and warm me up and save my life.” But the farmer is worried. “If I warm you up, you’ll bite me.” The snake wiggles its head and says, “I promise not to bite you.” So the farmer takes the snake home, warms it up, and lo and behold, the snake bites him. As he’s dying the farmer moans: “How could you do this to me. You promised…”
In the story, this is where I pause and give the jurors my steady gaze. “Yes,” the snake says, “but when I promised, you knew I was a snake.”
Now I looked uneasily at my reptilian client.
“ C’mon, Jake, don’t you believe me?”
“ I believe you,” I said, wanting it to be true. “So what did Hornback have on you? What was he going to tell Socolow?”
“ It was a bluff. He was selling shares for me, so he just assumed it was a scam. Hell, why wouldn’t he? Anyway, he threatened to squeal, but he had nothing.”
“ You know what I do with squealers?” Kip said, a malicious grin on his sweet young face.
“ Huh?” Blinky seemed startled.
Kip curled his upper lip into a sneer. “I let ‘em have it in the belly so they can roll around for a long time thinking it over.”
“ What the fuck?”
“ Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death,’ Kip explained, “and don’t say ‘fuck.’”
Chapter 10
When corpses are found out of doors undergoing putrefaction,” Doc Charlie Riggs said, sitting erect on the witness stand, “it’s quite common to find insect infestation.
“ But in a funeral home?” I asked.
Doc Riggs leaned toward the jury box. “Should never happen. Never.”
“ So in this case, Dr. Riggs, at an open-casket memorial service
…” I paused for effect just the way they do on TV.
“ Where mourners saw worms crawling out of the eyes of the late Peter Cooper-”
“ Maggots,” Charlie corrected me. “Pupa, too. Some intact, some broken, indicating hatched flies.”
“ Yes, indeed. Maggots. From these maggots crawling out of the eyes of the late Peter Cooper, are you able to form an expert opinion as to the degree of care exercised by the Eternal Rest Funeral Home?”
At the plaintiffs table, from which I had recently risen, my client, Mrs. Brenda Cooper, was sobbing at just the proper decibel level. I always tell my clients that sniffles and whimpers are okay. Wails and shrieks are not, unless I want the jury distracted from the testimony, in which case, caterwauling to the heavens is permitted.
“ Prima facie negligence, no doubt about it,” Doc Riggs announced with authority.
“ On what do you base your conclusion?”
That’s the lawyer’s way of asking “why,” but a lawyer will never use one word when seven will do. Charlie Riggs stroked his beard and looked directly at the jury. “Not just from the maggots, alone. No sir. Maggots can emerge from blowfly eggs just a few hours after death. That wouldn’t be enough to assign negligence to the funeral home. But as I said before, there were pupa shells, and it should take at least a week for the maggots to go through the stages of larval growth to produce newly hatched blowflies. So obviously, there was complete inattention to Mr. Cooper’s body.”
As if on cue, Brenda Cooper’s sobs grew louder.
Charlie didn’t miss a beat. “The eggs would have been clearly visible in his eyes and the corners of his mouth. They sort of look like grated cheese, so I don’t know how the attendants missed them.”
In the jury box, a woman nervously cleared her throat.
“ As I say,” Charlie continued, “ prima facie negligence.”
I sat down and let Charlie take care of himself on cross-examination. No one could do it any better.
I was sipping a Cuban coffee in the Gaslight Lounge down the street from the county courthouse, and Charlie was slurping a double order of rice pudding with cinnamon, having already polished off a three-egg western omelet.
