Shoveling Smoke (10 page)

“Yep,” said Wick. “Burl Weeks caught it for us up around Quitman. We picked it up this morning.”

“Evil-looking critter,” said Stroud.

The Range Rover slowed when it reached the suitcase, then drove on by.

“Shit and damnation,” said Wick.

“Wait a bit,” Stroud said. A hundred feet down the road, the car stopped and, after a moment, began to back up.

“Hell,” said Wick. “I forgot the camcorder.”

“A client I had once played a trick like this on his wife’s boyfriend,” Stroud said. “There’s something about a suitcase sitting all by itself on the side of the road makes it hard to ignore. Of course, that fellow put six rattlesnakes in his suitcase. And the wrong party picked it up, a couple of college boys from out of state. Ugly mess.”

“You said you were dispensing moral instruction,” I reminded him. “What’s moral about this?”

“Any truth, son, is a moral truth,” said Stroud dryly. “It is a moral truth that bobcats still frolic in these woods. Captain Jack needs to learn that truth.”

The Rover stopped beside the suitcase. A door opened, and the suitcase disappeared. The Rover zoomed away.

“But they’ll know it was you!” I said. “This Captain Jack will remember your conversation in the bar. They’ll know!”

“I was under the impression that you were a lawyer, Mr. Parker,” said Stroud. “There’s a mighty big gulf between knowing and
proving.”

“This is the stupidest thing I have ever seen two grown men do!” I protested.

“Three,” said Stroud, mocking me with a sly grin. “Three grown men.”

Suddenly the Range Rover went into a skid and stopped, blocking both lanes of the Old Platte Road. All four doors blew open, and five camouflaged men tumbled out. One of them fell onto the asphalt surface, jumped up, and ran screaming into the grass on our side of the road. Two of the men had rifles and started shooting at the car. Sustained bursts of gunfire chewed up the sides of the Rover, shattering windows and blowing out a tire.

“See there,” said Wick, “I told you they had automatic weapons!”

Another man started yelling at the riflemen, waving at them to stop shooting.

“That would be Captain Jack,” Wick said. “It’s his car.” As soon as the rifle fire stopped, a small shape bolted from the front seat of the car and into the grass near where the screaming man had disappeared. One of the riflemen fired a burst after it but missed. The man who had run into the grass came running out, screaming at the rifleman. There was a fistfight on the roadside, which eventually involved four of the ex-pilots.

“I’ve seen enough,” said Stroud. “Let’s go get some barbecue.”

As we climbed down, Wick asked his partner, “Do you think Captain Jack knew it was a bobcat?”

“I think he knew it wasn’t a field mouse,” Stroud replied. We reached the Lincoln, and Stroud got into the driver’s seat. Wick and I pushed the car the few feet from the grass to the dirt road, which sloped enough for the car to run along a couple of hundred yards without power. We did not want the ex-pilots to hear us making our getaway.

“We’d better call Burl to come and trap the cat again,” said Wick as we glided down the dirt road without power. “It might eat an ostrich.”

“You promised you were going to reform,” I reminded him.

“I know,” he said sheepishly. “I guess I’d better start over.”

Stroud seemed to have sobered up
a little during his vigil in the duck blind, but his hold on the road was still pretty loose.

“Can we talk about the Rasmussen case?” I asked, hoping to steady him. “What are we going to do? We’ve only got seven days until the trial.”

“Fourteen days,” Stroud said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“We have fourteen days until the trial.”

“The file says seven,” I said.

“The file is not up to date,” Stroud said. “SWAT asked for an extension, claiming scheduling problems. We have fourteen days.”

“That’s a relief,” said Wick.

“Not much of one,” I countered. “Tell me, Mr. Stroud, is the file out of date in any other ways? Did you, perhaps, remember to send answers to the SWAT interrogatories and neglect to enclose a copy in the files?”

“No,” Stroud replied. “The interrogatories are a problem.”

“You aren’t planning to plead a fake heart attack to get more time, are you?” I asked him.

Stroud glared at Wick. “I told you, Hard-dick. Never again!”he said.

“It was just a thought,” Wick replied.

“I wonder what kind of scheduling problems SWAT had that made them ask for a delay?” I asked.

“They wanted an extra week to sharpen their axes,” Wick said. “They plan to chop us into lawyer pâté.”

A couple of minutes later Stroud pulled the big car into a gravel parking lot, next to a shack with a roof sagging under a buzzing, spitting neon sign that read The Singing Pig. It was a little after two o’clock, and the only occupants of the Singing Pig were the owner and his wife, Boo and Betty, a leathery little couple who looked as if they’d been smoked in their own smokehouse. Wick Chandler bellowed a greeting at them, and Stroud limped up to Betty, took her hand, and asked in his deepest, most splendid voice if he could compare her to a summer’s day.

“You can tell me what you want to eat,” she suggested in a dry voice, but there was an amused light in her eye. “The only way I’m like a summer’s day is I’m hot and dusty.”

While they bantered with Boo and Betty, I watched my employers from a seat at the lunch counter. They were a study in contrasts: Gilliam Stroud, cadaverous in his dusty, hollow black suit, swept through the tiny diner like an ancient king; Hardwick Chandler, a bloated lounge lizard in tight silk shirt, sport jacket, and glittering gold, bustled like a cartoon steam engine. They were as odd a pairing as I had ever seen, yet they seemed to share some wavelength that coordinated their behavior. Boo’s was pretty much a self-serve eatery, and I watched Chandler and Stroud set up a table for the three of us, fetching tableware, napkins, bowls of condiments, squeeze bottles of sauce, with a perfect economy of motion. All the while Stroud crooned courtly endearments to Mrs. Boo, and Chandler, a sheen of sweat glimmering on his rosy jowls, interrogated Boo about the state of his beef and the likelihood of a customer’s bringing home from the Singing Pig something worse than a stomach-ache after eating the pork ribs. It was as if Stroud and Chandler, king and fool, were two halves of a single intelligence.

When it was time to order, Stroud gave me a canny look and asked, “What will it be, Mr. Parker, beef or pork?”

“Pork,” I said.

“Hah!” shouted Hardwick Chandler, who slapped the counter and ordered pork himself and beers for all of us.

Stroud ordered beef. Later, at the table, he told me that barbecued pork was how the South lost the Civil War. “Trichinosis destroyed the army of Virginia,” he explained.

Waiting for our food, we sipped our beers and brainstormed the Rasmussen case. The wording of the Stromboli petition required SWAT to prove that Bevo had killed his own horses. According to Stroud, Bevo claimed to have an airtight alibi for his presence on the night the horses burned. He was in Tyler, spending the night at the ranch of Nyman Scales, the breeder who sold Bevo the horses. Sally Dean’s father.

“We will depose Nyman Scales,” Stroud said. “I have already arranged with all parties to meet with Scales at his ranch in Tyler on Monday morning.”

“I’ve always wanted to see Scales’s ranch,” said Wick. “I’ve heard it’s a land unto itself.”

“This Nyman Scales,” I said, “I take it he’s a big operator?”

“The biggest,” replied Wick.

“And he’s really Sally Dean’s father?”

“Did she tell you that?” Stroud asked.

“Bevo mentioned it.” I told them a little bit about my morning chat with Bevo. A very little bit. From the way the old man’s eyebrows had lowered like thunderheads, I gathered that now was not the time to discuss Bevo Rasmussen’s peculiar theory about the Scaleses’ father-daughter relationship.

“That’s right,” said Stroud, “Scales is Ms. Dean’s father. What of it?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Coincidence, I guess.”

“It might be more than that,” Wick said with a note of wistfulness, turning to his partner. “It just might save our asses, if only you’d ask her to—”

“Stop right there!” the old man said. “Nobody’s asking Ms. Dean to do anything that even looks like a breach of ethics. Do you understand me, Wick?”

“But there’s nothing unethical about it, Gill,” Wick argued. “Hell, the judges themselves do it all the time, cozying up to her to ask for assignments. I don’t see why we can’t turn it around and ask her to help us out just this once. After all we’ve done for her.” He turned to me. “Tell him, Clay. There’s nothing wrong with simply asking if the district coordinator can influence which judge handles a particular trial, is there? In the interests of fair play?”

“I don’t understand this sudden delicacy on your part, Mr. Stroud,” I said. “It’s not as if you never ask Sally for favors.”

“What do you mean by that?” Stroud snapped.

I told him what Sally had said about the bet she had made with him over the Hardesty trial and how losing it had required her to act as a one-woman hospitality committee for the new guy. I didn’t say anything about the Cajun house exorcism or the willies-prevention ceremony, but Stroud eyed me suspiciously, anyway.

“I may have asked her to check on you, Mr. Parker, but only as a professional courtesy,” he said. “My request had nothing to do with any wager—and it sure as hell didn’t break any rules of the court.”

“So Sally Dean was lying to me about the bet?” I asked.

“Ms. Dean has a whimsical sense of humor,” Stroud said. “Perhaps she was simply amusing herself.”

I’ll say, I thought to myself.

“There is no way Ms. Dean can replace a judge who doesn’t want to be replaced, short of breaking a chair over his head and stuffing him in a closet,” said Stroud. “Not that it wouldn’t do most of them a world of good.”

Wick sighed. “I’m sorry, Gill. I guess I’m going crazy with this thing. If only we hadn’t drawn Judge Tidwell for the case.”

The food arrived, three immense platters, along with another round of beers.

“Well, it’s Tidwell, all right, so suck up and live with it.”

Wick sighed. “Wrong Tit Tidwell,” he said, shaking his head and biting into a huge, dripping pork rib.

“Wrong Tit?” I said.

“I told you, Gill,” said Wick through a mouthful of pork. “I told you it would catch up with us, and now it has.”

“What has caught up with us?” I asked.

Stroud and Chandler looked at each other.

“Never mind,” replied Stroud. “Let’s just say Judge Tidwell won’t mourn as we go down the tubes.”

We ate in silence for a while. Wick was right about Boo’s barbecue. It may have been the best in Texas.

“Okay,” I said, “so we’ll get no help from the judge on the interrogatories. Which means we can’t call any witnesses. Nyman Scales can swear himself blue in the face that he was with Bevo on the night the barn burned, and the jury will never hear it. So why are we deposing him?”

Stroud glared at me. “We are going to depose anybody we damn well please. Nobody can stop us from asking questions, and there are reasons, Mr. Parker, why we must do so.”

“What are they?” I asked.

“For one thing,” said Stroud, “we may uncover information that would allow us to prove gross misconduct by SWAT. If we do that, we can threaten the bastards with an ethical complaint to the bar, or even criminal prosecution. We may get them to back down.”

“There’s a one-in-a-million chance of that happening in a SWAT case, and you know it,” I told him. “You’re grasping at straws.”

Fury flushed the old man’s face. “All right then, goddamn it, we’re going to depose people because that’s all we
can
do. I prefer to fiddle while Rome burns. Satisfied, Mr. Parker?”

“No, Mr. Stroud, I’m not satisfied,” I said, “but I am glad to be back in the real world.”

“Where’s the pathologist’s report?” asked Wick. “At least we could see what kind of physical evidence they have.”

Stroud told us that SWAT had not provided a report yet from the horse pathologist who investigated the scene of the fire. That was odd. Perhaps it was the reason they had asked for a delay. I wondered if maybe there would be an irregularity in the pathologist’s report that we could exploit.

“No chance,” Stroud replied, without looking up from his plate. “They’re using Pulaski as their pathologist.”

“Oh, man,” Wick groaned, shoving his plate away from him on the table. “This just gets worse and worse.”

“Stan Pulaski?” I asked.

A horse pathologist who specialized in arson cases, Pulaski was known by lawyers all over the world as the Sherlock Holmes of horse pathology. He had testified in hundreds of trials, and only a handful of his opinions had ever been successfully contested. I had read articles about him in the Houston papers and remembered comments from Rita Humphrey, my old office-mate, who characterized Pulaski as brilliant and detestable, an arrogant bastard completely convinced of his own infallibility. I knew that Pulaski often worked for SWAT and that, according to Rita, he fit right in. That was the worst thing Rita could say about anybody—that he or she fit right in at SWAT.

“He lives not too far west of here,” said Wick. “Maybe an hour away. Has his own lab out in the country and a landing strip. He’s always flying off to study dead horses. He’s got his own plane.”

Stroud told me that he had cross-examined Pulaski several times and didn’t care for the job. “The son of a bitch is hard to crack,” the old man said. “I have never done a proper job of it.”

“Looks like you’re going to get another chance, partner,” said Wick.

“What if we get our own pathologist?” I asked. They both looked at me. “Right,” I said, “we can’t call any witnesses of our own. All we can do is cross-examine the plaintiff’s witnesses.”

“Wrong Tit Tidwell and Stan-the-Man Pulaski,” said Wick, shaking his head. “Goddamn it, Gill, you fucked up bad this time.”

Stroud handed his steak knife to Wick, and with both hands pulled his shirt open, pushing his tie aside, to reveal a yellowing undershirt and a sliver of pale, silver-haired skin. “Go ahead,” said the old man, “plunge it in to the hilt. Perhaps my life’s blood will erase my guilt.”

“For Christ’s sake,” said Wick.

“Could Bevo have been set up?” I asked. “He told me there was a conspiracy out to get him. Maybe somebody else did burn his horses.”

“It’s possible,” Wick said. “Bevo only has about five hundred folks who hate him. And those are the ones we know about.”

“How can this scrawny little loser stir up so many people?” I asked.

“Don’t let his size or his manner fool you, Mr. Parker,” said Stroud. “There is not a nastier son of a bitch in the state of Texas than our Bevo.”

“You sound like you know him pretty well,” I said.

“Better than I’d like to,” Stroud replied.