seemingly insignificant. I’ll take notes, but you might want to write everything down yourself. It helps jog the memory.” He looked at Granny and Kip. “You two will have to take a walk.”
“ No,” I told him. “They stay.”
“ The privilege, Jake. We lose it if-”
“ I know, I know, and I don’t care. They stay.”
So I rehashed it, everything I could remember. Jo Jo Baroso’s pleas for me not to come to the barn, my trotting out there anyway like a good little puppy.
“ Women!” Granny huffed. “Following a woman will get you in Dutch every time.”
I told Patterson of Jo Jo’s puffy eyes and bruised face, and then Cimarron dropping in. “At first, we sparred, mostly. He slung me into the walls a few times to see whether my head was harder than his lumber. Then he dropped me into a pile of horseshit. Once he chased Kip out, it was just the two of us.”
“ And Ms. Baroso,” H.T. reminded me.
“ Yeah, and Ms. Baroso. At first she was in the loft, but she came down to join the fun.”
Patterson turned to my nephew. “And where did you go, young man?”
“ Out toward the main house, along a stone path. I was yelling for help, but there wasn’t anyone around. I came back when I heard the nail gun. It’s so loud, I thought it was a real gun.”
“ It is,” Patterson said. He thumbed through some documents the state gave him in pretrial discovery. “Powered by a. 27-caliber charge, it can drive a carbon-steel nail through solid concrete.”
“ Or a mushy brain,” I added.
Patterson gave me a raised eyebrow.
“ I wasn’t trying to kill him,” I said.
Now he arched both eyebrows.
“ Okay, I went there meaning to do him some serious harm, but after Jo Jo accused me of assaulting her, I realized she was lying about being beaten by Cimarron. That took the stuffing out of me. But by then, I didn’t have a choice. Cimarron wanted to maim me and was doing a pretty good job. At first, I just wanted to defend myself, so I went into a Wing Chun defense because Cimarron was bigger than me.”
“ Just like Bruce Lee did to Chuck Norris in Return of the Dragon ,” Kip added, helpfully.
“ What gets me,” I said, “is how Jo Jo played me for a fool. I thought her brother was a great con artist, but you should have seen her. She fooled me, and then she fooled Cimarron. She had me hating him, and then had him hating me, and when he hates…”
I let it drift off, realizing he isn’t hating anymore.
“ Why would she have done it?” Patterson asked. “What’s her motive?”
“ I’ve been lying awake nights on that one. Only thing I can figure out is that she wanted me dead.”
“ What makes you say that?”
“ Are you kidding, H.T.? She set me up so Cimarron would kill me.”
“ But that isn’t what happened, is it?”
“ No, I killed him. So?”
“ So what makes you think that is not precisely what Ms. Baroso intended?”
CHAPTER 21
Summer became fall, and the aspen trees turned their shimmering gold. Football season began, and locals at a basement sports bar saluted the Broncos’ early success, all the while bitching about how they would fold in the playoffs.
Trial was set for the first week of December. Patterson had completed his pretrial discovery and arranged his documents in color-coded files. Unlike Florida, Colorado law did not give us the right to take pretrial depositions, a severe handicap in trying to peck away at a criminal case. Although we didn’t have a chance to cross-examine their witnesses before the trial, we knew what they would say on direct examination. The state gave us their sworn statements and grand jury testimony, and so far, no one, including Josefina Jovita Baroso, had a kind word to say about me.
I was in a daze.
I tried to focus on the trial but felt like I was swimming through Jell-O.
My concentration was off. My nerves were shot. I consumed too much Grolsch, and when that left me without a buzz, I switched to Finlandia straight out of the freezer. Kippis, as they say in Helsinki, which made me think of Eva-Lisa Haavikko, a good woman who died needlessly, but that, too, is another story.
Occasionally, I came up with slightly inebriated ideas for my defense, and I shared them all with H.T. Patterson. Sometimes, just after Jay Leno didn’t put me to sleep, I called Patterson with strategy for impeaching Jo Jo’s testimony. With the two-hour time difference, it was two-thirty a.m. or so in Miami, and I would awaken H.T. from a sound sleep, but he never complained.
“ You interrupted a dream,” he mumbled groggily one early morning.
“ That some day all men will be brothers?” I inquired.
“ No, that Gwendolyn was taking me to her bosom.”
“ Gwendolyn, from Jamaica? Judge Ferguson’s secretary?”
“ One and the same, a woman of charm and grace, intelligence and beauty, righteousness and rectitude.”
“ So what’s she doing with you, Henry Thackery?”
“ She’s not, my felonious friend. It was, after all, a dream.”
Lawyers hate for clients to call them at home. There is always an emergency that, in the client’s mind, cannot wait until morning. By the harsh light of day, the crisis will be shown to have existed solely in the client’s mind. But H. T. Patterson tolerated my late-night calls because he was a friend. And he understood. No, check that. He nearly understood. Until you are asked to rise in the courtroom and identify yourself as the defendant, you cannot understand. Send in the cliches, which are cliches, after all, because they are true: A lawyer is a mouthpiece, a hired gun; have briefcase, will travel; have mouth, will argue; another day, another dollar.
But if you’re the defendant, it is different. It is real, and it is forever. Win, lose, or draw, the lawyer will walk out of the courthouse and enjoy supper with family and friends. The day may end for the defendant with the echo of a steel door clanking shut with absolute finality.
A chill bit through the air. It rained and became colder, and the trees lost their leaves. Snow began to fall. H. T. Patterson had flown up for a pretrial conference with the judge, and Granny asked him to stay for Thanksgiving dinner. Granny cooked a turkey with chestnut stuffing, wild rice with bacon and brandy, and corn pudding. She baked a pumpkin pie and an apple pie, there being a scarcity of mangoes and Key limes in the Rocky Mountains. She prowled through the kitchen of her double-wide, more cantankerous than usual, grumbling about the altitude as she tried to bake honey wheat bread.
“ Yeast rises quicker here than a skeeter draws blood. Ye gods, I’ll never get used to this. Water boils at a lower temperature, so you got to boil longer, increase heat for baking, use more liquids but decrease the baking powder and sweeteners. What a damn fool place.”
The bread turned out to be soggy, and Granny said to hell with it, we could have eggnog with bourbon if we wanted. I told her to skip the first half of the recipe.
After the last slice of pumpkin pie, served hot with vanilla ice cream, and ample quantities of liquid refreshment, my lawyer and I took a walk. Snow flurries whipped around our bare heads as we trudged along a muddy trail that would soon be used for cross-country skiing. In the distance, the snow-covered peak of Mount Sopris rose high above the valley.
“ Jake, you ever represent any lawyers?”
