Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice by Paul Levine Read Free Book Online Page B

she asked.
    “ Probably because Blinky is
the incorporator, the president, and the sole director.”
    “ And he gave you the stock
instead of a fee.”
    “ He’s tapped out. Look,
Granny, I know what you’re thinking, but there’s one person in the
world Blinky wouldn’t stiff, and that’s me. Now, it may turn out
that company doesn’t make any money and the stock could be
worthless. I know that. But, for once, it’s a legitimate
enterprise.”
    “ What’s this Rocky Mountain
corporation do?”
    “ Sort of geological
research,” I mumbled.
    “ What’s that,
mining?”
    “ Not exactly.”
    “ C’mon, Jake.”
    “ They look for
things.”
    “ What sort of
things?”
    “ Buried treasure,” I said,
staring out the window at the rippling Gulf, slate gray in the
storm.
    “ Oh Lordy, Jake. Get me a
mason jar. I need a drink.”
    “ Look, lots of lawyers take
stock in lieu of fees: Imagine if I’d represented Microsoft ten
years ago.”
    “ Microsoft didn’t try to
sell chunks of a condemned condo as pieces of the Berlin Wall, did
it?”
    I had forgotten about that scheme. Just
then, somebody behind me said, “Gregory Peck would have taken
vegetables, instead of worthless pieces of paper.”
    I turned around. Kip was barefoot and wore
torn jeans and a faded T-shirt.
    “ Vegetables?” I asked
him.
    “ In To Kill a Mockingbird , he takes
collard greens as his attorney’s fee when a client can’t pay. At
least you can eat them.”
    “ Thanks for the advice,
kid. Why don’t you see if Judgment at Nuremberg is on? It’ll keep
you busy for three and a half hours.”
    The kid pouted and backed out of the
kitchen. In a moment, I heard him clicking through the channels in
the other room. Now Granny was scowling at me. “Jake, I want you to
be nice to Kippers.”
    “ Okay, okay.”
    “ And I want you to
represent him.”
    “ He needs a lawyer? What
happened, did they fail to deliver his TV Guide?”
    “ It’s a little problem in
Juvenile Court. I’d rather let Kippers tell you about
it.”
    “ Let him hire Gregory Peck.
He works cheap.”
    “ Jake!”
    I stuck an index finger into the sizzling
lime-tomato concoction and burned myself. “Holy blazes,” I said,
repeating a phrase I’d learned from Granny in my youth. I sucked on
my finger and turned the heat down on the burner. After a moment, I
said, “Okay, I’ll get the little brat off, even if he poisoned the
nasal spray of the entire PTA.”
    Granny gave me a smile. She still had all
her own teeth, despite fifty years of opening beer bottles without
an opener. Then she took a wooden spoon that was older than me and
started stirring the sauce. “Good. You’ve got to promise me you’ll
treat him like family.”
    “ Like family?
Why?”
    “ Because he’s your nephew,”
Granny Lassiter said, never looking up from the simmering
sauce.
     
     
     
    Chapter 5
     
    One of Us Was
Dead
     
    I thought I heard a faint knock in the
engine of my canary yellow Olds 442. Like its owner, the
convertible is beginning to show its age, which is only natural,
since it is vintage 1968. The Olds doesn’t have a tape deck, a CD
player, a cellular phone, or a fax machine. It does have a radio,
but no FM band. Three hundred fifty cubic inches under the hood, a
four-barrel carburetor, a black canvas top, and a five-speed stick,
it is—again, like its owner—a throwback.
    On this warm, humid Monday
morning, my ancient but amiable chariot, its top down, was growling
north on Useless 1, the old highway that runs from Maine to Key
West. The radio was tuned to a sports talk show at the low end of
the dial, but every time a cloud passed over, the speaker crackled
with static, and Fidel Castro or one of his cousins came on the air
yelling about the imperialistas . It made me miss the
latest report on which Dolphin free agents signed multiyear,
mega-bucks contracts, and which University of Miami players had
failed their drug tests.
    In the black leather bucket seat