can’t pay the freight, which I can’t, if it’s someone who charges my rates?”
“ Why’d you hang up the phone, Jake? You knew it was me on the other end, didn’t you? Why’d you do something stupid like that?”
Two could play this game. “Why were you calling here?” I asked.
“ My secretary got an anonymous call, male voice she didn’t recognize, giving her the number and saying for me to call if I wanted to break the Hornback case.”
“ Me, too. I mean, Cindy got a call from Blinky, at least she thought it was Blinky, telling me to come out here.”
Socolow regarded me skeptically. “Did she now?”
“ Call her, find out.” Socolow was giving me a look that was supposed to make me break down and confess to all manner of felonies and misdemeanors. “Don’t you see, Abe, someone’s setting me up? Someone wanted me out here to make it look like I killed Blinky.”
Socolow smiled his gotcha smile. “Who said anything about Blinky being killed?”
“ Ah c’mon, Abe, don’t play cop games with me.”
“ I’m not playing, Jake. I’m dead serious. You know anything about a corpse you want to tell us?”
He looked in the direction of the woods. My mind flashed a picture of Blinky’s body half covered by branches, a handful of my business cards clutched in a death grip.
“ Like I said before, I came here to meet Blinky. I stood around maybe ten minutes. The phone rang. I went to answer it, saw the blood, heard your voice, froze, and hung up. I don’t know why, I just did it.”
“ Uh-huh.”
“ It’s the truth. Look, Blinky’s been skulking around because he’s afraid someone’s trying to kill him. Maybe he was right, but that someone wasn’t me.”
“ Uh-huh.”
“ C’mon, Abe, you can smell a setup. Somebody wanted me out here. Somebody called the cops, somebody called you. Can’t you see what’s going on? I don’t have a motive for killing Blinky.” I was rambling now, doing just what I tell clients not to do. But it was understandable. I had a fool for a client, and my lawyer wasn’t much better. “Maybe Blinky was mugged. Maybe he’s lying in the bushes somewhere. Maybe the blood isn’t even his.”
“ Oh, I’ll bet it is. I’ll give you three to one it’s type O, weasel. As for your motive, it’s tied up with Hornback and whatever you had cooked up with Baroso in the West.”
“ That’s bullshit, Abe. Blinky was using me. How about looking for this Cimarron character?” I stood up and brushed sand from my navy blue suit pants. “Now, if you don’t have any other questions, I think I’ll go home. See you in court, Abe.”
“ As lawyer or defendant?” Abe Socolow asked.
Chapter 11
There was a no trespassing sign at the front gate, which hung open. I kept the Olds in second gear and churned up dust on the dirt driveway that wound through the trees. Josefina Baroso lived in what used to be a caretaker’s cottage on a tropical fruit plantation just off Old Cutler Road. No one had worked the place for years, and the trees-lychee, Key lime, Surinam cherry, and black sapote-were overgrown with weeds. Gnarled and stunted mango trees surrounded the cottage, the ground covered with rotting fruit, the air heavy with the sickly sweet scent of decay.
It was late afternoon, and gray thunderheads were forming over the Everglades to the west, building into their daily gully washers. I parked in the driveway under a guanabana tree and walked to the front steps. The cracker-style building had walls of Dade County pine, a slanted tin roof with eaves spouts and a brick chimney poking through the top. On the northern, shaded side, there was a small porch, screened to keep out the mosquitoes, fruit flies, and no-see-um gnats. In front was a screen door, latched from inside, a heavy wood door closed behind it.
I knocked on the screen door, and in a moment, the heavy door opened, and Jo Jo Baroso stood there looking at me.
“ We need to talk,” I said through the screen, her face darkened by cross-hatched shadows.
Silently, she unlatched the door, stood back and let me in. It was a small, cool, quiet place furnished in subtle earth tones. She motioned me to a sofa of Haitian cotton, and our eyes met with a knowing memory. The sofa had followed her from that first apartment so long ago. We had lain there in the darkness and exchanged whispers long into the night. We had teased and played and made love there, our limbs locked around each other. And now the faded photographs of memory came back.
Jo Jo broke eye contact first, asked whether I wanted some limeade. I did, remembering she made it with so little sugar it could bring tears to your eyes. She disappeared into the kitchen, a tall, dark, barefoot beauty in pleated, white cotton shorts and orange tank top.
She returned carrying two glasses and a pitcher of limeade on a tray, and I said, “Something may have happened to your brother.”
“ I know. Abe called me.”
“ They haven’t found a body. I mean, there’s no way of telling
…”
She poured for both of us, handed me a glass, and sat at the far end of the sofa, curling her legs under her. “He’s gone. I can feel it, Jake, an emptiness spreading inside me.”
There was sorrow in her voice. My look shot her a question.
“ He’s still my brother, el es mi unica familia.” She stopped, and we both thought our private thoughts about her brother.
“ You know I wouldn’t hurt Blinky,” I said. It was more of a question than a statement.
“ Of course, Jake. I told Abe that, but so far, you’re his only lead. Abe has that cop mentality. A shaky case is better than none.”
Distancing herself from Abe Socolow, showing affection for Blinky, trusting me, what was happening here?
“ I wish everything were different,” she said. “With Luis, with you, with me. I wish I could turn back the clock.”
Her eyes were moist. It was so unlike her, at least unlike the Jo Jo Baroso of the past decade. How long had it been since I’d seen her display any emotion, other than total indifference tinged with antipathy?
“ I tried to change the world and change you, and I couldn’t do either one,” she said.
“ You reminded me of an assistant coach who wanted to move me from linebacker to fullback, even though I couldn’t hang onto the ball.”
“ I don’t blame you for leaving me, not anymore.”
“ At the time, you called me a commitment-phobic coward.”
“ I was impossible. What we had was real.”
Was it?
I didn’t know, because I always cut and ran from what was real. Real symbolized a mortgage and a pension plan, a morning commute, and evening meetings with the civic beautification committee. Real was for suckers, not for me, a guy who could leap tall linemen in a single bound.
As I thought back now, it was such a brief slice of our lives, and our playback equipment shows the past through a soft focus. Days were sunny, winds were cool, a young woman loved me, and the future was without limits. In a sailboat anchored off Elliott Key, we shared a bottle of wine. I remembered the slipitty-slap of water against the hull and the scent of salt in the air. I remembered Jo Jo saying she loved me, so why didn’t it work?
“ Our timing was off,” I said. “We always had different goals, or maybe I didn’t have any.”
“ You had potential, Jake.”
