Shoveling Smoke (24 page)

The next morning Pulaski was late
for the deposition. We sat in the courtroom waiting for him, Stroud next to Bevo at the defendant’s table. Stroud hummed his tuneless song and winked at the court reporter, a young woman who would not smile back at him. Stroud looked a little worn but was still in high spirits from the night before. It certainly had been an interesting evening. Shortly after the roof of Stroud’s cabin collapsed, Sheriff Nye had arrived on the scene. He de-deputized the whole smoldering troop of ex-pilots and threw them in jail around ten p.m. “Those boys will be walking softly around us for a long time to come,” Wick had said that morning as the three of us drove into Mule Springs. “Gill had to use higher math to explain to Nye the kind of lawsuit we could file against the city.”

Wick was the picture of health and energy, his ruby throat swelling above a crisp collar and a striking silk tie. “Nothing like a little nighttime jamboree to clear out the cobwebs,” he whispered.

Vincenzo Laspari, the Stromboli company representative, was seated at the plaintiff’s table cultivating a look of genteel boredom. Next to him sat Warren Jacobs, cool and collected. Jacobs’s self-possession worried me. How could he look so calm if his case was in shreds? I voiced my concern to Wick, who shrugged and looked uneasy, too.

“So you’re from Naples, Mr. Laspari,” Stroud said.

“Yes,” returned Laspari.

“What sort of weather they having out there?”

“It is very hot.” Laspari gave Stroud a half-millimeter smile and a slight nod of dismissal, as if to signal the end of their conversation.

But Stroud would not be shaken off. “Hotter than here?” he asked.

“No...Perhaps as hot.”

“What about the humidity?”

“The...?”

“You know, the water in the air. They must have humidity in Naples.”

“Ah,
l’umidità.
It can be bad.”

Stroud nodded at the Italian, and there was a moment of silence.

“Too bad it’s falling into the sea,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I say it’s too bad Naples is falling into the sea.”

“You are thinking of Venice, Signore Stroud.”

“You’re right, Mr. Laspari. My apologies.”

The baiting continued, Stroud rattling off skewed snippets of tourist lore, Laspari correcting him, his Continental reserve beginning to fray a little. finally Pulaski arrived, to the relief of all in the room. A tall, broad-shouldered man with a distinguished head of amber hair going picturesquely gray at the sideburns, he resembled Stewart Granger in one of his African movies, right down to the khaki safari jacket.

Stroud saw him first, leaped to his feet, and walked up the aisle to shake his hand. “Stan-the-Man,” he said, conducting Pulaski to the chair placed for him in front of the judge’s dais. “How’s it hanging?”

Stroud’s joviality seemed to confuse Pulaski, who sat down slowly in the chair. He looked around the room until his eyes fell on Warren Jacobs.

“Mr. Jacobs,” Pulaski said in a low voice, leaning toward the SWAT lawyer, “might I have a word with you?”

“Okay if we start, gentlemen?” Stroud asked, making a show of looking at his wristwatch. “We’ve already been here awhile.”

“By all means,” Jacobs replied.

“Warren,” said Pulaski, rising from his chair, “I need to speak to you.”

There was an edge in Pulaski’s voice that escaped Jacobs’s notice. “I don’t think we should keep these good people any longer than we already have, Stan,” Jacobs replied.

Pulaski sat back down. “Very well, I have an announcement to make.” He spoke disdainfully, as if angry at everyone in the room. “Last night my house was broken into. Whoever did it took a number of items, including all my notes on Mr. Rasmussen’s horses.”

“Burglars?” said Stroud. “My, my. That’s a shame, Stan. But you still have your report, I trust?”

“That’s another thing,” Pulaski said. “They—the burglars—took my report, too.”

“They took your report?” asked Stroud. “But you must have copies, Stan.”

“The burglars took all the copies.”

“All the copies?” Stroud asked. “How could that be?”

Pulaski shrugged. “I’d collected them all together. That’s how.”

“But Mr. Jacobs read to me from a copy of the report yesterday,” Stroud said. “What happened to that copy?”

“If you will recall, Mr. Stroud,” interrupted Jacobs, “I told you I was not reading from the Rasmussen report. I had meant to—”

“Oh, that’s right, Warren. You picked up the wrong report by mistake. You’re working on so many, you just got a little careless.”

“That is correct,” Jacobs replied, coloring deeply. “I gave my copy back to Dr. Pulaski yesterday afternoon, so that he could check it for errors.” Jacobs looked at Pulaski. “Are you saying, Stan, that my copy is stolen, too?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Pulaski said. “All gone.”

Stroud walked up to Pulaski’s chair, cocked his head in disbelief. “You’re telling us, Dr. Pulaski, that thieves broke into your home and stole a
pathology report?”

“That’s not all they took, of course,” Pulaski said. “They got my stereo, my VCR, my fax machine—”

“But why would they take a pathology report?” Stroud interrupted.

Pulaski swallowed. “It was in a very expensive briefcase. I assume the burglars were after the case.”

“Was it a leather case, Mr. Pulaski?” asked Stroud.

“Yes.”

“What kind of leather, do you recall?”

“Ostrich.”

Stroud walked back to the table. He winked at me.

“We’re wasting time, Gill,” Jacobs said. “In view of this unfortunate event, may I suggest that Dr. Pulaski be allowed to reconstruct—”

“My
suggestion, Warren,” said Stroud, “is that Signore Laspari contact his employers in Naples to tell them to drop their lawsuit and pay my client the full amount of the claim.”

“Now, hold on, Counselor,” Jacobs said, rising to his feet. “The break-in is a tragedy, to be sure, and we sympathize with Dr. Pulaski. But losing the documents is no more than a minor inconvenience as far as our case is concerned. I’m sure Judge Tidwell will give us time to reconstruct the pathology report.”

“Reconstruct the report?” said Stroud. “You mean rewrite it? After all this time has passed since the fire? How could anyone, even the immensely talented Stanislaus Pulaski, reconstruct it? I don’t know, Warren, sounds fishy to me.”

“It should be a simple matter,” Jacobs continued. “After all, Dr. Pulaski still has the physical evidence, the remains of the horses. That should be enough, in Dr. Pulaski’s capable hands, to establish the necessary facts, cause of death, and so forth.”

Pulaski cleared his throat. “I don’t have the physical evidence,” he said, looking down at his feet.

“I’m sorry, Stan,” Stroud said, “I didn’t hear you. Would you repeat that?”

“I said, I don’t have the physical evidence.” He raised his eyes and met Jacobs’s shocked gaze. “It was stolen, too.”

“All of it?” Jacobs asked.

“Yes, of course, all of it. It was all in one box. The thieves took the box. It’s gone.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Any other bright ideas, Warren?” Stroud asked.

“Just a moment,” Jacobs said. “I need to confer with Dr. Pulaski.”

“I’ll tell you what you need to do, Warren,” said Stroud. “You need to think about the doctrine of spoliation. What’s worse, your fumble-fingered expert here cannot possibly hope to make a credible reconstruction of the fire. Then you need to think about the counterclaim I’m going to file against you and your client as soon as we get out of here today.”

Stroud walked toward the plaintiff’s table, behind which Laspari sat, eyeing the old man in horror. “The facts are, Signore Laspari, that your company dragged my client into this protracted and expensive litigation without a single piece of physical evidence on which to base their case. Your company has failed to deal with its own customer in any semblance of good faith. Thanks to the cost of defending himself against your spurious charges, my client has lost his house and its furnishings. The mental anguish he has endured has been intense. We’re talking really bad faith, something folks down here don’t like to see. Something that used to make them itchy for a rope.”

Stroud hovered over Laspari like the angel of death. “Pay my client what you owe him, Signore Laspari, or I’ll file a claim for bad faith settlement practices that will make you think twice about ever setting foot in the New World again!”

Wick had cranked up the stereo
in his office and was dancing down the hallways, singing along in a gravelly rhythm-and-blues grunt. He stopped in front of my door. “Catch, Clay,” he said, tossing me a dripping bottle of Chihuahua beer. The bottle slipped through my fingers, thumped on the desktop, but didn’t break. He tossed an opener next to the bottle.

“There’s pâté in my office,” he said, bobbing like a buoy in rough seas. “It’s Mexican, made from the livers of geese fed on grain soaked in mescal. Eat and you will see visions.”

“I’m seeing one now,” I replied, watching him gyrate.

It was only twelve-thirty, but we had closed the office following Laspari’s capitulation in the Rasmussen suit. The vision of Stroud in the courtroom that morning, looming over him with lightning in his eyes, had proved too much for the dapper Italian. Against Jacobs’s white-faced protest, Laspari agreed to file a motion to dismiss Stromboli’s lawsuit and to pay Bevo the face value of his policy, $1.2 million. Stroud pressed Laspari into agreeing to send a certified check, made out to Chandler and Stroud as trustees for Bevo, that very afternoon by courier, an unprecedented move.

“The sooner the better,” Wick had told Laspari, “considering the wrong done to our client.”

“Nice doing business with you, Warren,” Stroud had called to Jacobs as the SWAT lawyer hurried from the courtroom, hot on the trail of Stan Pulaski, who had slipped out ahead of him.

The firm’s fee for the settlement would come to $360,000. Not bad, considering that a day earlier we had not had a prayer of winning the case.

“It was a religious experience,” Wick had said as we drove out of the Mule Springs parking lot, “like beating a full house with two deuces and a cat turd.” He sat silent on our drive home, stunned, I think, by the victory. But as soon as I’d parked in front of the office, he came alive.

Now, in my office doorway, he shuffled through a flab-punishing disco lounge breakdown. “I’m happy as a dog with two dicks!” he hollered, his shirt buttons threatening to pop. As Molly Tunstall edged by him with some files in her hand, he caught her and danced her down the hall.

I was working on some papers for another case; in the last few days the pile of documents in the basket on my desk had grown. What with the bass throbbing through the walls and Wick shaking the foundations of the building, I was having a hard time concentrating. I picked up the bottle of beer and rolled it across my forehead. The cold felt good.

“It works better if you flip that little silver thing off the top and stick the end in your mouth.” It was Sally, sitting in the client’s chair. She reached over the desk, took the beer out of my hand, popped the cap, and after the shaken beer had spewed half its contents on my rug, took a long, slow swallow.

“That’s how you do it,” she said. “What are you looking at?”

“You are the most beautiful administrative judicial district coordinator ever to drink a beer in my office during work hours.”

“Hey, I’m on my lunch break,” she asked. “Cut me some slack.”

“Have I got a story for you,” I said, getting up and coming around the desk.

She set the beer bottle on the desk and stood up. “Wick’s trying to get me to dance with him out there. I thought I’d come in here and see if I might get you to show me how they do the two-step in Houston. That is, if you can dance with bad feet.”

“Let’s see if I can,” I said, putting my arm around her. We two-stepped around the desk.

“So, Counselor,” she said, “how does it feel to win your first case in the country?”

“I didn’t have much to do with it,” I replied. “A little breaking and entering, a little burglary, that was it.” As we danced I told her a bit about what had happened last night at Pulaski’s house and then at Gill’s snake-shooting retreat.

“So how do you feel about all these backwoods antics?” she asked. “I wonder if life in the country is agreeing with you.”

“I’m dancing, aren’t I?”

We two-stepped until Wick cut in on me. Then he and Sally danced, then Sally and Stroud, until Sally’s lunch hour was all danced away, and she drove back to Wyman.

About two o’clock Bevo showed up at the office, dressed in a new shark-skin suit and driving a Lexus that resembled the one Antoine Duett had been driving when I tried to tail him from the Dairy Queen two days earlier.

“What do you think?” he asked, dragging us all out to look at the car. “Don’t it show me off to perfection?” He smiled. One tooth winked in the afternoon sun.

“I see you got your diamond back,” Stroud said.

“They just bonded it back on, no problem. Wealth sticks to me.”

“The settlement hasn’t even come in yet, Bevo,” I said, “and you’re already spending it?”

“This ain’t as frivolous as it looks,” Bevo replied. “This is my company car.” He handed all of us business cards with an engraved picture of a big shaggy bird, and words that read:

—FREEBIRD ENTERPRISES—
The Wings of Emus

“You know, gentlemen, emus are the future of East Texas.”

“If that’s the case,” muttered Wick, looking at the card, “I’m moving.”

“You couldn’t do better with that three hundred thou I just made for you than invest it in this little enterprise right here.”

We were saved from the rest of Bevo’s sales pitch by the arrival of a small red car out of which came the messenger, a young man in the uniform of his carrier service. Stroud signed a paper on a clipboard, and the messenger handed him an envelope and left.

“I wasn’t sure Laspari would come through,” Stroud mused.

“After your performance this morning?” Wick replied. “You could have doubled the settlement.”

“Come on, come on,” said Bevo. “Open her up.”

Stroud opened his penknife and, with a flourish, slit the edge of the envelope. He pulled out a folded piece of blank paper, out of which a check fell on the sidewalk. The old man picked it up.

“Amazing grace!” he said, turning the slip of paper around in his hand so we could read it. It was a $1.2 million check, made out to Hardwick Chandler and Gilliam Stroud, trustees for Bevo Rasmussen, signed by Vincenzo Laspari.

“No shit,” said Bevo, snatching the check from Stroud. “Amazing grace.”

The actual arrival of the check proved an anticlimax after the office party. Stroud showed no inclination to burst into song, and Wick declined to dance. There was talk of what to do with the check. Bevo wanted to cash it immediately and take his share. Wick tried explaining to him that there wasn’t that much money in both of Jenks’s banks put together. But Bevo insisted that Chandler and Stroud accompany him to the bank to see what could be done. To my surprise, they agreed.

“Maybe it’ll get him out of our hair,” Wick told me. Molly had joined us outside the office, and she and I watched the three of them walk across the street to the first National Bank of Jenks.

“Have we ever settled a case this big before?” I asked Molly.

“Never a single one this big,” she said. Then she added, giving me her odd near-smile, “Maybe you’ve brought us some luck.”

Molly went inside, but I sat on the fender of Bevo’s Lexus and watched the Jenks traffic go by. A cloud had obscured the sun momentarily, tempering the glare, and the heat felt good after several hours of office air-conditioning. From the trees wafted the billowing song of the locusts. A pickup went by with a middle-aged couple in it, both wearing baseball caps. They waved at me as they passed. I waved back and found it a pleasant thing to do.

I might have sat on Bevo’s fender for the rest of the afternoon, communing with the locusts and solidifying my new position as the waving lawyer of Jenks, but the front door of the first National Bank burst open and Bevo, Wick, and Stroud sprinted out of it. Bevo reached the car first, yanked open the driver’s door, and leaped inside.

“Get off!” he hollered at me. Chandler and Stroud reached the car and climbed in. I scrambled into the backseat just as the car lurched backward out of its parking slot. With a screech of the tires, we were heading out of town.

Winded from his run to the car, Stroud was sprawled in the seat next to me, his chest wheezing like an antique furnace. Pulling his inhaler from his pocket, he gave himself two jolts of medicine.

“Goddamn,” he gasped, glassy-eyed and pale, “goddamn.”