Such bad judgment.
Jo Jo had been right about him all along. And right about me, too, I suppose. Just what was the social utility of keeping that crumb out of jail. What was my thanks, anyway, getting set up for murder?
Louis X. Baroso. What a waste. He could have been successful in a legitimate business, but that held no thrill for him. Risking it all and losing it, that was Blinky’s style. He was like the slots player who hates to hit the jackpot because it takes so long to put the quarters back in.
Now, who had killed him? If he really was dead. Socolow had told me the blood in the Range Rover was Blinky’s, but they never found a body or a trace of other evidence. None of the surf bums saw or heard a thing. Blinky had disappeared, bloodied but seemingly invisible.
And here I was, trying to figure it all out, coming up empty, but filled with a sense of foreboding.
The phone rang, startling me. It took two rings for me to even realize what it was. Get hold of yourself, boy.
“ Oh, Jake! Thank God you’re there.” Her voice was desperate.
“ What is it? What’s happened?”
“ He hit me. Oh God, just like before. He used to knock me around, Jake. He’s got such anger in him. I thought it was my fault then, and finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. That’s why I left him, but he’s changed, or I thought he had.”
The fury began as a ball of fire in the pit of my stomach and moved up, thickening my chest, constricting my throat. I could barely speak. “Did he hurt you?”
“ No. He just does it to inflict pain, to humiliate me. If he ever let loose, I’d be dead.”
“ Where are you?”
“ In the barn. Somebody saw us together at the concert. Either that, or he’s having me followed, because he knew I kissed you. It set him off. He threw me across the barn. Jake, I must have flown thirty feet. Thank God for the hay, or I would have broken my neck. Then he lifted me up and slapped me, back and forth, again and-”
“ I’m coming over. Wait there.”
“ No! Please, Jake! I don’t want you to see me like this. My face is puffy, and I’m…I’m so filthy.”
“ What?”
“ Oh, darling, I didn’t want to tell you. He forced me. He tore off my clothes, just ripped them to shreds with his hands. He was crazed, his eyes wild like a rabid animal. He took me, then left me here, filthy and naked and freezing.” She started to say something else but was racked with sobs. I waited, the heat spreading to the back of my neck, sweat pouring off me. “Oh, Jake, I feel so stupid, so ashamed.”
“ Wait there! Don’t move. I’m coming over.”
“ No, don’t!”
“ Jo Jo, I swear I’m going to tear him apart, and when the doctors put him back together, we’re going to prosecute.”
“ Jake, no! You don’t understand. It’s more complicated than you realize.”
“ I know. You said that before. You said you hadn’t told me everything, you were sorry Blinky got me involved in it, and you hoped I would forgive you. When I get there, you can tell me everything.”
“ I’ll tell you now, darling, but you’ve got to calm down. I’ll be all right. You can’t come out here. Simmy’s in the house. If he-”
“ Don’t move,” I told her again. “Wait for me.”
I flew out the door, running for the car. Kip was videotaping a mangy dog urinating against a tree. I don’t know what I looked like, but Kip turned, at first puzzled, then fearful as he watched me. He left the dog there and raced toward the car.
“ Uncle Jake, what’s wrong? Your face is all angered up.”
“ Huh?”
“ That’s what Granny says about you. That you’re sweet as mother’s milk, but watch out if you ever get all angered up. “
From the neighboring cottage, the father of the two boys wandered out, pulling up suspenders over plaid Bermuda shorts.
“ Kip, I’m in a hurry, and I don’t have time to explain. Stay here.’’
I hopped in the car, and as I started the engine, Kip tossed the camera in, then vaulted over the passenger door, just like I taught him. “Nothin’ doin’, pardner. Granny also told me that when you’re like this, you don’t think clearly. You make mistakes, and my job is to help you stay cool.”
“ C’mon, Kip, out! This is serious.”
The car was moving, and Kip was buckling his shoulder harness. “I’m not letting you head into Shinbone all by your lonesome. I’m riding shotgun, Uncle Jake.” was aware of Bermuda Shorts watching us argue. “Kip, this isn’t a movie. Now, for the last time, get out!” I started to unbuckle him.
“ I’ll scream child abuse,” Kip said, “so you might as well gun it before knock-knees there throws himself in front of the car.
“ Kip!”
“ You promised never to leave me alone again. Last time-”
“ I remember last time,” I said, hitting the gas.
We tore up clouds of dust as we headed toward the Red Canyon Ranch and what would be my third and final meeting with the last living witness.
CHAPTER 18
Granny taught me right from wrong.
I didn’t have a father or a mother around, and I didn’t pay a lot of attention to teachers, ministers, or United Nations ambassadors. I hung around Key Largo and Islamorada with the kids from the trailer parks. Their idea of fun was to throw rocks at tourists’ cars coming down U.S. 1, maybe jimmy Coke machines in their spare time. Their dads-the ones who had them-worked on shrimp boats or road crews, if they worked at all.
For a mentor, it was either Granny or the guys who loafed at the 7-Eleven on Little Pine Road, the place I started drinking beer when I was about Kip’s age.
Thank God it was Granny.
She taught me not to cheat, not to steal, and not to hit anyone who hadn’t hit me first. She taught me to avoid cruelty in words and deeds. She taught me that black and brown folks were as good as white folks, and many times, a damn sight better.
And when I was a little older, she taught me never to raise a hand to a woman. “Only the lowest kind of trash hits his woman, and don’t you fergit it. Only a sniveling weakling, a bottom-feeding gutter rat will ever strike a woman, and no Lassiter ever done it or ever will. You understand?”
I told her I did, and if I ever saw a man abusing a woman, I’d step in and put an end to it right then and there.
“ Another thing, too, Jacob. No real man ever forces a woman to do what she don’t want to do. A woman who don’t want to be touched is not to be touched.”
I understood that, too. The thought of a man doing violence to a woman, any woman, is repellent to me. The thought of it happening to Jo Jo Baroso filled me with rage.
Another memory came back to me on the drive past Woody Creek. In my first year as an assistant public defender, I was handling domestic violence cases. One of my first clients was a grinning yahoo who had tossed a frying pan filled with sizzling bacon at the woman who lived with him. The grease left a ridge of scar tissue from one eye diagonally across her nose to her upper lip.
“ Bitch deserved it,” he told me, a cigarette flapping out of the corner of his mouth. “If I told her once, I told her a hundred times to have two six-packs in the fridge, cold and ready. A man comes home from pouring tar on roofs in August, a man is thirsty. She’s there making BLTs and she says, ‘Sorry, honey, there’s only one can left, but
