trying to listen to words like venue and jurisdiction and equity and conservation of judicial resources.
Florida, said Abe Socolow, representing the people of that great state.
Colorado, said Mark McBain, prosecutor in these here parts.
Florida versus Colorado. It sounded like an old Gator Bowl between the runners-up in the SEC and Big 8. I wouldn’t have minded being sent back to Florida. After all, I hadn’t killed Hornback, and I did kill Cimarron. At least, I thought I did, though I didn’t have a recollection of actually rocketing a nail straight into his right ear and out his skull just above the left ear, spraying bone and blood and gray matter over a fine English riding saddle that was now marked state’s exhibit twenty-three. In fact, the last thing I remembered, the stud gun didn’t fire. I think.
When I woke up in the hospital with my ankle shackled to a bed, a sadist posing as a doctor was shining a light into my eyes and poking me here and there. My ears were ringing, and he was saying something about a concussion, some tenderness in the area of the liver and minor internal injuries that reminded him of a head-on car crash. In the next twenty-four hours, I discovered the rest without any help. Bruised ribs on the left side where Cimarron had hooked me, welts on my forehead, scratches and scrapes on my face where I landed squarely against the side of the barn, red blisters every place the bull whip kissed me, plus a collection of abrasions and contusions just about everywhere else.
Still, I seemed to be doing better than K. C. Cimarron. A cop whose name I didn’t catch sauntered in and told me Cimarron was dead and that anything I said might be used against me. Did I want a lawyer. Hell no, I didn’t even want to be a lawyer.
I was bleary and had a splitting headache but was semi-happy to be alive, and when local prosecutor McBain strolled into my hospital room, brown leather satchel in hand, I didn’t have the presence of mind to clam up. When he turned on his tape recorder and asked whether I wanted to make a statement about splattering Cimarron’s brains on the barn wall, I told him it was the first time I ever drove a nail straight in my life. McBain nodded appreciatively at such candor and asked how many men I had killed over the years, and I decided it might be a good idea to either get counsel or plead insanity on the spot.
Jail time.
Except for the food, it wasn’t so bad. I had my own cell, part of the status derived from being a crazed killer.
I wasn’t bored. Not with the parade of local lawyers who were itching to represent me. There was one barrister who was a part-time ski instructor, another a part-time wilderness guide, yet a third who was a part-time white-water rafter. There was a woman lawyer who piloted hot-air balloons in her spare time and another who took off Wednesdays to ride in amateur rodeos in Snowmass. I’m all for Renaissance men and women, but at the moment, I wanted a hard-boiled, do-or-die, go-for-the-jugular lawyer who would bleed for me, not leave me naked and alone in the dock on the first day of trout season.
One day, a local chap named DeWitt Duggins stopped in to see me. We sat across an old wooden table from each other in the visitors room. He was a short, trim man in his mid-thirties with shaggy brown hair and John Denver granny glasses. He had just finished a case in Mesa County in which his client pleaded guilty to killing three elk, and like lawyers everywhere, he wanted to tell war stories.
“ Caused quite a stir over in Grand Junction,” Duggins said, proudly, impressed with the enormity of it all. “After all, three slaughtered elk.”
“ A serial poacher,” I responded gravely.
“ A first-spike bull, a five-spiker, and a cow.”
“ Get him a good deal?” I asked, hopefully.
“ Nine-thousand-dollar fine, ten years.”
“ Probation?”
“ Prison.”
“ Ten years in prison! What do they do if you kill a human up here?”
“ Don’t get that many murder trials. They’re treated rather special, I’m sorry to say.”
“ Okay, let’s say I hire you. How would you handle my case?
“ Holistically,” said DeWitt Duggins.
“ What are you, a chiropractor?”
He took off his glasses, one wire temple at a time, and breathed on the lenses. “Entities are really more than the sum of their parts.”
“ What?”
“ Gandhi was a holistic lawyer, you know. He once wrote that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder.”
“ Sounds like law for the wimp. I want a lawyer with buckskin and cowboy boots, someone who’ll spit in the eye of the prosecution.”
“ That may be what you want, but introspection is what you need. Healing inner conflict.”
Duggins wiped his glasses on his red plaid shirt, put them back on, and pulled a stick of sugarless gum from his pocket. He unwrapped it, slowly, ever so slowly, giving the impression that holistic lawyers aren’t real busy. He popped the gum into his mouth, carefully folded the wrapper into a little square, which he put back in his pocket.
“ Gonna recycle that?” I asked him.
“ Confrontation solves nothing. Perhaps I could have suppressed the evidence of the elk carcasses. Sure, I could have cross-examined the game officer, tried to establish he was lying about the carcasses being in plain view in my client’s pickup.”
“ And you didn’t?”
“ What would it have solved? My client might have gone free, but would he have dealt with his inner demons? Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“ Sure, you want me to plead guilty.”
“ It would be your first step to recovery.”
“ Your first step is out of here before they indict me for a second murder. Or actually a third.”
“ Peace,” he said, smiling pleasantly and wisely leaving.
Outside my jailhouse windows, green Aspen leaves fluttered in the wind. White puffy balls from cottonwood trees tumbled along the gutter, gathering at storm drains into globs the size of pillows.
Two weeks went by, and the judge served up a dose of home cooking, ordering the first trial in Colorado. Kip spent three nights in the custody of state welfare workers until Granny arrived, wearing lace-up army boots, a Mexican poncho, and cussing out every government official in the county. She brought me a basket of Key limes, carambolas, and guanabanas, told me I looked penitentiary pale, and wondered aloud if I’d come down with rickets or scurvy. She rented a double-wide trailer downvalley and said she was staying for the duration, come hell, high water, or first snow.
More lawyers trooped in, and I sent them home. Wearing a backpack and looking like a Boy Scout, Kip took a bus to visit me. He brought a mango nut cake Granny had baked. It was made with walnuts, and I half expected to find a file inside.
“ I’d really like to see your cell,” Kip said. “Is it really funky, like Spencer Tracy’s in Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing?”
“ Kip, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about reading more, and watching fewer movies.”
He took a folded newspaper from the backpack. “I’ve been reading this.”
It was the local paper, and it must have been the Kit Carson Cimarron memorial edition, because the entire front page was devoted to his life and tales of his forebears. The story continued on page three, and altogether, I counted eleven photos, though my favorite was one of Cimarron astride a white horse. Cimarron wore weathered chaps and a red bandanna was slung around his neck, and he was smiling from beneath his bushy mustache. The horse looked like it was about to have a stroke.
The story detailed the long history of the Cimarron family in Pitkin and Eagle counties. Kit’s great-grandfather worked the Montezuma silver mine in Ashcroft and later the Spar and Galena on Aspen Mountain. He toiled at all the dirty jobs, driller and mucker, trammer and timberman, cageman and nipper. Saving his money, he filed his own
