Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope) (10 page)

BOOK: Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope)
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“That’s right.”

“He can sue the estate, of course, but if there are no meaningful assets in it, what would be the point?”

“That’s good reasoning,” I said.

“Do you think Mr. Burrill would be willing to
keep
his damn farm and settle for the four thousand?”

“I have no idea. But I’m sure that once your attorney makes him familiar with the facts—”

“Which, by the way, is something
else
Erik and I talked about. He was wondering—since you’ve put in so much work on this already, and since he’s really not familiar with either Mr. Burrill
or
his attorney—do you think you could?”

“Could what?”

“Represent me in this matter? As though you were still representing Jack?”

“Well...yes, I’d be happy to.”

“You sound hesitant. If it presents any difficulty for you...”

“No, I was simply wondering whether there’d be any ethical problems, but I can’t imagine any. Yes, I’d be delighted to represent you.”

“Well, good,” she said. “Then that’s settled. I hate loose ends.”

“I’ll call Loomis...”

“Loomis?”

“Mr. Burrill’s attorney. To ask whether his client might consider settling for the four thousand. In fact, if I can call him from here, maybe I can stop by to see him this afternoon.”

“You can use the phone in my office,” she said.

I went into her office. The large desk there was strewn with papers and back issues of a magazine called
The Florida Cattleman
. What I had learned was a Hereford cow—brown and white-faced—stared out at me from the cover of the October issue. Hanging on the wall behind the desk were framed plaques of appreciation from the Cattleman’s Association, all of them looking like law degrees, their ornate Old English script citing Drew McKinney for this or that outstanding achievement or service. I dialed information and asked for Harry Loomis’s number in Ananburg. I dialed the number and waited. Across the room, hanging on the wall, there was an oil painting of a brown-eyed, black-haired man who looked a lot like an older version of Jack McKinney; I assumed he was Jack’s father, the late Drew McKinney. He was smiling out of the painting, his dark eyes crinkled, his black mustache overhanging a mouth tilted in a lopsided grin. He was wearing the same sort of pearl-buttoned shirt my cowboy friends Charlie and Jeff had been wearing. He looked like Clark Gable. Or, to update the version, he looked like my daughter’s current movie-star flame, Tom Selleck.

“Attorney-at-law,” a brisk female voice said.

I told the woman who I was and asked to talk to Mr. Loomis. When he came onto the line, I explained that I was here with Jack McKinney’s mother, and was wondering if he might have a little time to see me, since I was so close to Ananburg and all. He told me to come by at three o’clock.

Veronica McKinney was standing near the huge fireplace when I came out into the living room again. In her right hand she was holding a tall drink with a lime floating in it. A young man sat in the green-cushioned wicker chair I had occupied earlier. They were not in conversation. In fact, Veronica’s back was turned to him.

“This is Jackie Crowell,” she said, gesturing toward him with the hand that held the glass. “My daughter’s friend,” she said. It
seemed to me she punched home the word
friend
, as though she found it, and by extension the boy himself, distasteful. “Jackie,” she said, “this is Mr. Hope.”

Crowell rose from the chair and walked toward me, his hand extended. Bloom had described him as a pimply-faced “twerp,” but he was in fact as tall as I was, and much huskier, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist, and bulging biceps showing where his denim vest ended. His complexion, as far as I could tell in the light streaming through the windows, was entirely free of any acne whatever. He looked, in fact, like your average, healthy, all-American boy, clean-scrubbed (and even smelling faintly of soap) with dark hair and dark eyes, and a pleasant smile.

“Nice to meet you,” he said.

We shook hands.

“Sunny should be down in a minute,” Veronica said, and dismissed him abruptly. “Did you reach Loomis?” she asked me.

“On my way to see him now,” I said.

“Good luck,” she said, and raised her glass in a dubious toast. She took a quick sip, placed the glass on the fireplace mantel, and showed me to the door. As I stepped outside, I heard Sunny’s voice calling, “Jackie? Are you
here
already?”

It was blisteringly hot outside. A white Chevette was parked alongside my Ghia. I assumed it was Crowell’s. I drove up the long, rutted road without passing another vehicle. The main gate to the ranch was still wide open. As I made the right turn toward Ananburg, it occurred to me that never once in my conversation with Veronica McKinney had she expressed the slightest grief over her son’s death.

3

Y
OU DID
not have to drive very far past the Sawgrass River State Park to realize how important cows were to Florida’s economy. The McKinney ranch was still within the confines of Calusa County, some twenty miles from the center of town, and only one of a handful of ranches before you crossed the border into De Soto County. No sign marked the dividing line between the two counties. Nothing said
WELCOME TO DE SOTO COUNTY
. But you knew at once that this was true cow country, and the moment you drove through Manakawa, the only town on the way to Ananburg, you felt you’d crashed through some sort of geographic time warp to find yourself in what appeared to be a mixture of Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana—the deep South blending imperceptibly with the Southwest.

The regional dialects in Calusa were largely Midwestern tourist, harsh and flat and somewhat abrupt, with here and there an off-American dollop of Canadian English thrown in. But here in the boonies the accent was pure Dixie, and the inhabitants looked
like anyone you might find on a dusty back road in Georgia. The men wore bib overalls here, and boots and straw hats, and they chewed tobacco and rolled their own cigarettes. The women wore those patterned cotton things my mother used to call house-dresses. The roadside restaurants in Manakawa featured “home cooking,” which invariably meant country ham and black-eyed peas, green beans and fatback, hominy and collard greens, corn bread and fried catfish. Forsaking the restaurants offering down-home fare, I found a greasy spoon across the street from what appeared to be a courthouse, ordered a hamburger, a side of fries, and a cold beer, and was on the road again at two-thirty.

Ananburg was only forty-four miles from downtown Calusa, but by comparison it looked like
The Last Picture Show
, a shabby, sunburned town with a wide main street flanked by palm-lined sidewalks and wooden two-story buildings that appeared temporary, as if they were part of a movie set that would be torn down and stored as soon as the showdown gunfight was shot at high noon. This was the heart of central west Florida’s cow country, and the home of the annual All-Florida Championship Rodeo, which took place every January. There were a lot of cowboys in town. They clattered along the dusty sidewalks, bowlegged in their boots and jangling spurs, straw ten-gallon hats shading leathery brown faces, hand-rolled cigarettes dangling from sun-cracked lips. They called each other “Clem” and “Luke” and “Shorty,” and they slapped each other on the back a lot, and they had pint-size whiskey bottles in brown paper bags stuffed into the back pockets of their tight, faded jeans. This was Charlie-and-Jeff country, and I felt a certain amount of uneasiness as I walked up the main street looking for the address Harry Loomis had given me.

The wooden shingle read
HARRY R. LOOMIS, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW
, and a pointing dismembered hand painted onto the lower left-hand corner of the sign indicated a flight of wooden steps
that led to the second story of the shingled building. The steps were narrow and many of the treads were either loose or entirely broken. I wondered if Harry Loomis was a good negligence lawyer; it seemed to me he might need one if someone fell and broke a leg on his rickety staircase. There was only one door on the second floor, the name
HARRY R. LOOMIS
hand-lettered in black on a frosted glass panel in its upper part. I opened the door and stepped into a small waiting room.

In the one and only telephone conversation I’d had with Avery Burrill, he’d informed me that his attorney ran “a one-man operation, just him an’ the girl answers the phone.” The “girl” sitting behind the desk just inside the entrance door had to be in her late fifties, approximately the same age as Veronica McKinney, but there all similarity ended. Where Veronica was tall and slender and blonde, the woman who peered at me over her rimless glasses was short and squat, with hair the color of iron. Where Veronica wore clothes that were casual and youthful, this woman wore a tailored blue pinstriped suit that looked as if its father had been a getaway car. Veronica’s smile could melt a glacier. This woman’s tightly set mouth could turn a desert to glass. Veronica’s voice was soft and breathless and a bit ragged. This woman’s voice, when at last she spoke, was fired from a secret concrete silo somewhere in Siberia.

“What is it?” she snapped.

“I’m Attorney Hope,” I said. “Mr. Loomis is expecting me.”

“Oh
yes
,” she said, and wrinkled her nose as though mere mention of my name had recalled aromas of dead rats decomposing under attic eaves. “You’re late,” she said. “Sit down, if you like. I’ll tell him you’re here.” The tone of her voice indicated that if I accepted her invitation to sit, I did so at my own peril. In any case, the only unoccupied chair in the small room seemed to have been carved from the same inhospitable oak as her face. I chose
to stand. She picked up the phone and informed Mr. Loomis that “the lawyer from Calusa’s here.” She held the phone to her ear a moment longer, and then crashed it down on the cradle like the cutting edge of a guillotine blade. I thought suddenly of the squeeze chute on the McKinney ranch. “Go on in,” she said. I almost answered, “Yes, sir.”

Harry Loomis looked like a hanging judge in a fifties Western movie. He was wearing a dark winter-weight suit, a white shirt, and a black string tie, and—I will swear to this in a court of law—he was chewing tobacco. In fact, he spat a wad of it at what appeared to be a porcelain chamber pot the instant I came into the office. His face was the color of the tobacco juice that arced across the room and missed the chamber pot, adding another stain to those already on the wall. The wall was papered with what appeared to be a design of flattened locusts. Harry Loomis’s college diploma, his law degree, and his license to practice in the state of Florida were hanging in black frames against the squashed-bug pattern. I did not recognize the names of either of the schools he’d attended. I
thought
that the ornate Old English script on his law degree read
University of the Virgin Islands
, but surely I was mistaken. Harry Loomis kept looking at me from behind black-rimmed spectacles that magnified his watery blue eyes. He kept chewing tobacco. I hoped he would not spit again. I hoped he was in a better mood than his “girl” had been. I hoped I would never have to see him again after today.

“Let’s make this short and sweet, Mr. Hope,” he said, “I’m a busy man.” His voice was sassafras and molasses with a dash of castor oil thrown in for body and flavor. His eyebrows, I noticed, resembled the squashed bugs on the wallpaper. He was either growing a scraggly pepper-and-salt beard, or else he simply hadn’t bothered to shave for the past several days. He cleared his throat, brought up a great dollop of gloppy brown juice, and fired at the
chamber pot again. This time he scored a perfect ten, and grinned in satisfaction. His teeth were the color of cow dung. “State your case,” he said.

I told him that so far as we’d been able to determine, Jack McKinney had left no will. I told him that according to Florida’s intestate-succession statutes, whatever estate he’d left would go to his mother. I told him, however, that a police check in Calusa, Bradenton, and Sarasota had turned up no bank accounts and that the only assets in McKinney’s estate were his personal belongings and a three-year-old Ford Mustang automobile. I started to tell him that considering the—

“What about that thirty-six thousand?” Loomis said. “The cash he was supposed to come up with at the closing?”

“Assuming he was actually in possession of that amount,” I said. “It has not yet been found.”

“Who looked for it?” Loomis said.

“I just told you. The police.”

“Where?”

“In his apartment. And, as I told you, they ran a routine check on all the banks in—”

“Did they try the banks here in Ananburg? Or Manakawa? Or Venice? Or—”

“Well,” I said, “how about the banks in New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles? It doesn’t seem likely that McKinney would have kept his money where it wouldn’t be convenient for withdrawal. Ananburg and—”

“You don’t know that for a fact,” he said. He pronounced the word “fack.”

“In any case,” I said, “assuming for the moment that the only estate—”

“I don’t assume nothin’ till it’s a proven fact,” Loomis said. Again the word came out as “fack.”

I was tempted to tell him to go fack himself. Instead, and patiently, I said, “Well, if we can show—to your satisfaction, of course—that in essence there’s no estate, would you be willing—”

“I won’t be satisfied till you’ve turned over every grain of sand in Florida,” he said. “The man signed a piece of paper said he had thirty-six thousand dollars in cash waiting on the closing. That piece of paper is
a fact
, Mr. Hope, signed by both parties, and it tells me there
is
an estate of at
least
thirty-six thousand dollars. I don’t know what you’re tryin’ to pull now, but it looks to me—”

“No one’s trying to ‘pull’ anything,” I said, “and I resent the accusation. We’re convinced there’s no substantial estate. Assuming we can convince—”

“Here we go
assumin’
again,” Loomis said.

BOOK: Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope)
6.28Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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