Shoveling Smoke (4 page)

On the way back into town
I quizzed Molly about the scene we had just witnessed. She told me the girl’s full name: Sally Dean. Otherwise, she was not forthcoming.

“Well, what’s the story, Molly? Is she his wife?”

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No.”

“They don’t live together?”

“No.”

“She just shows up and rides his horse from time to time?”

“It’s her horse. She just stables it at the farmhouse.”

“Is she some sort of nurse?”

“That’s not her job,” Molly said.

“Then why was Stroud so scared that she’d catch him drunk?” I asked.

Molly thought for a moment before answering. “I guess you could say that she kind of nurses Mr. Stroud. He kind of looks at her as a daughter.”

“Is that a bad thing?” I asked, because her tone suggested that maybe it was. Molly Tunstall struck me as the kind of person who didn’t like to say anything bad about someone else, but also as a person who would never lie. And there was something about Sally Dean that she didn’t want to say.

“All I know is Mr. Stroud hasn’t come to the end of his drinking days. Until he does, nobody can help him.”

“And Sally Dean is trying to help him?”

Molly shrugged. “Sally is a sweet girl. She’s just got a long way to go.” I could not get her to elaborate.

When we reached Main Street, I dropped Molly off in front of the law office.

“You know how to get to your house?” she asked me. One of the perks of the job was that I was to be given the use of a house, free of charge, for the first year of my stay, with an option to buy at the end of the year.

I recited the directions that Hardwick Chandler had given me over the phone.

“That ought to get you there,” she said. She reached into the briefcase, which she was still carrying, and handed me a small envelope. “Here are the keys. The movers brought your boxes yesterday. They’re stacked in the house.”

“Thanks, Molly,” I said. “Day one has been some day.”

“A good day,” she replied.

“Do you think it was the shoes?” I asked. “Maybe they’re lucky. I could always wear them when we go to trial.”

She smiled. “There’s no such thing as luck. Just grace, and the work you do.”

“Well,” I said, shifting the car into gear, “we’ll hit it for real tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Molly said. She reached back into the briefcase, then handed me a thick manila file with the name
Rasmussen
scrawled across it. “Speaking of hitting it for real, do you think you could look this case over before tomorrow? Mr. Chandler wants to talk to you about it as soon as possible. You might keep your lucky flip-flops on while you read,” she added.

“Are we in trouble on this one?” I asked.

“I think so,” she said. “Just about anything to do with Bevo Rasmussen is trouble.”

“Bevo?”

“That’s his name.” I took the file from her, promising to read it that evening, and drove off to find my house.

I failed. After ten minutes of crisscrossing the same set of streets half a dozen times, I pulled over to the curb in a neighborhood of giant oak trees and tiny houses built of planks and shingles, shifted out of gear, and put on the brake. I was lost, but it was okay. I had expected to get lost. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had tattooed Hardwick Chandler’s instructions to my inner eyelid, I would still not have been able to find the house. I was born without a sense of direction. The gene for finding places does not reside in my DNA chain.

The wind had died away, and the early evening was still deadeningly hot. I got out of the car, unsnapped the Austin Healey’s convertible top, pulled it down, took off my suit coat, and climbed back in. I would sit here by the side of the road, whistling for a breeze, until the voice inside me railing at my navigational incompetence—the usual voice, my oldest companion—died down, as it would eventually do. And then I would drive off and try again. As long as I could remember, this had been my pattern. I began silently repeating to myself the mantra that I learned to say in such moments: Enough wrong turns will get you where you’re going. It was the way I had arrived in Jenks that morning. It was the way I had gotten to Houston, years ago. It was how I had found my way into and out of my marriage and my career as a tax lawyer. And I knew that it would be the way I would find my house.

“Lost?” said a voice beside me. I turned, and my nose bumped against the damp muzzle of a big gray horse standing beside the car. I was startled—for an instant I had the notion that the horse itself had addressed me—and then I heard deep laughter, woman’s laughter, from the rider. “Sorry about Ed’s manners,” she said. “He likes to sneak up on people when he gets the chance.”

“He does a fine job,” I replied, squinting up past the horse’s head. In the glare of the dying sun all I could see was a slender silhouette.

“Ms. Dean?” I said.

“Mr. Parker,” she replied. “It’s good to meet you. The boys have been expecting you.”

“The boys?”

“Wick and Gill. Chandler and Stroud. The pillars of our legal community. So tell me, are you looking for your new house, or are you casing the town?”

“I’m just lost.”

“What do you say, Ed,” she said to her mount, “shall we help get the city boy home?”

I idled the Austin Healey slowly along beside her as she turned the horse into the neighborhood from which I had just emerged. Sally Dean was wearing jeans and a red-and-white checked shirt tied at the waist. A country girl out for a ride.

“I suppose little towns can be confusing to urbanites,” she said. “No freeway exit signs to help you find your street.” Her voice had a sardonic edge to it, a kind of challenge, but what kind, I couldn’t tell. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy the leisurely pace.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Day one has been anything but leisurely.”

“You sat in on the Hardesty trial,” she said. “I heard. Gill must have put on a real show.”

“He sure did.”

“Damn,” Sally Dean said. “I lose again.”

“You and Stroud make bets on his trials?” I asked.

“We have ever since I worked for the firm.”

This was something Molly Tunstall hadn’t told me. “You were an associate of the firm?”

She smiled down at me. “I was a gofer. I got things for them. But I learned a lot from them, too.”

Ed’s back end had come even with my seat, and I took a flick from the big horse’s tail in my face. It made my left eye sting.

“What breed of horse is Ed?” I asked, rubbing horse dust out of my eye.

“Ed’s an Appaloosa,” she replied. “Do you know anything about horses, Mr. Parker?”

“Not much,” I said, looking up at Ed’s glistening gray bulk. “Aren’t Appaloosas supposed to be spotted?”

“Ed didn’t spot,” she explained. “If he had spotted, he’d have been a show horse, and he wouldn’t be out here with us today. Also his name would have been something else: Mama’s Little Goldmine or The Sheik of the Seven Veils.”

“I take it spots make an Appaloosa more valuable.”

“To some people,” she said. “But Ed does okay without his spots, don’t you think?”

“So long as he finds my house,” I replied.

We made an odd little parade, a girl on horseback leading a broken-down sports car, but the house, it turned out, was only two blocks away. I had passed it on my search.

“Voilà,”
said Sally Dean when we got there.

On the phone two days earlier Hardwick Chandler had spoken proudly about the housing part of the job package, reminding me how unusual it was for a law firm to provide its new lawyers with free lodgings. It was a two-story frame house, recently painted an agreeable shade of green, with yards in both the front and back, a couple of huge, shady pecans, and a screened-in porch running along the side of the house next to the driveway. Not bad.

I climbed out of the car, thanked Sally Dean for helping me find the place, and invited her inside for a drink of water.

“No, thanks,” she said, “but Ed could use something.” She threw a leg over her horse and slid off. She was riding bareback. “He likes the heat, but it’s been a little hotter this afternoon than he expected.”

There was a garden hose coiled under a faucet at the side of the house. “Do you mind?” Sally asked, handing me the reins. I took them and she went to the faucet and uncoiled the hose. When she turned on the water, the horse came over to her—leading me—and lapped at the nozzle. When the horse finished drinking, Sally spritzed water over his back. Ed put his head down as the water ran over him. We were enveloped in the acrid odor of wet horse.

“Gill told me a little about you,” she said. “You’re a tax lawyer?”

“I
was
a tax lawyer,” I corrected her.

“In a big Houston firm. Then you burned out, and your wife bailed.”

“Stroud’s got the facts out of order,” I said, “but that’s about right.” I was not pleased that my new boss was entertaining folks with my life story.

“So now you’re going to be a jack-of-all-trades country lawyer?”

“I’ll be whatever the firm needs me to be, Ms. Dean,” I said.

She laughed. “You may be surprised to find out just what all that is. Sorry about your feet, by the way. Bromohydrosis? I’ll get you the name of a good podiatrist.”

“So you heard about that, too,” I said.

“A lawyer in Armani and beach sandals? That sort of news travels fast.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my feet,” I said, dangling a sandal off the tips of my toes, and I explained the real reason behind my sartorial courtroom gaffe.

“Nice socks,” she said.

“What about you?” I asked. “You say you used to work for the firm. What do you do now?”

“I’m the administrative coordinator for the Northeast Texas judicial district,” she said, and watched for my reaction.

“Wow,” I said, impressed. “That’s quite a step up for a former office gofer.”

“Yes,” she replied, “it is.”

The district coordinator, usually called the D.C., helps to arrange schedules for all the judges who sit in a particular district. When a sitting judge wants to go on vacation or simply does not want not to hear a particular case, usually for political reasons, it is up to the D.C. to find a replacement judge. The coordinator keeps a list of available visiting judges, most of whom have either retired from the bench or been voted out of office. From this list the coordinator picks replacement judges.

It would not be a strenuous job, especially in a district as sparsely populated as the one in which Jenks sat, but it would be an important one. By being able to pick and choose visiting judges in the district, Sally Dean, onetime office assistant for Chandler and Stroud, had a major say in how business got conducted at the courthouses in the district.

“Where I’m from, there’s usually pretty stiff competition for the coordinator’s job,” I said.

“It’s the same here,” she said. “And yet I got the job after working with Chandler and Stroud for only six months.” She shook her head and looked at me quizzically. “Now, how ever did a law firm lackey rise to such heights so quickly?”

“Perhaps she was in the right place at the right time?” I suggested.

She smiled. “I suppose that’s it. Or maybe she slept her way into the job?”

“I suppose we’ll never know,” I said. Whatever sort of chip this girl had on her shoulder, I found that I really didn’t want to knock it off. Not tonight, anyway. “So what’s the administrative coordinator for the Northeast Texas judicial district doing riding the range on a steamy August evening?” I asked.

“Right now she’s giving her horse a bath,” she replied.

I watched the big horse let himself be doused, but mostly I watched Sally Dean. She was tall and slim with richly tanned skin, incandescent now with a slight sheen of water from the hose. There was a kind of dark light about her that made it hard not to stare. In a moment I determined that at least part of my fascination came from a slight asymmetry in her face: her eyes, deep green and widely spaced, were not quite level above the short thin bridge of her nose, and her smile tended to pull her mouth slightly to one side, as if she were savoring some paradox that had escaped you. There was an amused light in her eyes that flickered from a depth, like heat lightning. Her black hair, falling in curls to her shoulders, glistened. I made her out to be twenty-five, maybe twenty-six years old. All in all, not your run-of-the-mill judicial district coordinator.

“Some horses don’t like this,” she said as she played the water over the horse’s flanks. “Ed loves it.” She turned the hose straight up so that the spray flowered for a moment over her. “Oh,” she said as the water hit her, “I can see why.” She smiled at me. “How about it, Mr. Parker? You look like you could use a good spray.” Before I could answer, she flicked her wrist, and icy pinpricks scattered across my face and shoulders.

“Hey!” I gasped. I grabbed her hand to stop her from spraying me again.

“Don’t like it? It’s spring water, Mr. Parker. Something you can’t get in Houston, except out of plastic bottles with designer labels.” There was that smile again, and that irritating little curl in her voice.

“I take it you have something against Houston,” I said, letting go of her hand in order to rub water out of my eyes.

Sally turned off the faucet and rewound the hose. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t get a chance to flirt with city boys very often.”

I had not been flirted with in a long time, and it was having an effect. Sally came close to me, and a new scent cut through the odor of damp dirt that came from Ed. This one had something of the tropics in it, mingled with the smell of rain just before it falls.

She took the reins out of my hand. “How about a boost?” she asked. I cupped my hands and she stepped into them, lifting herself into place on the horse’s back. She goosed Ed with her heels, and the big horse lumbered slowly off toward the street. I walked beside her.

“Call me Sally, by the way,” she said, “unless it’s business. Then Ms. Dean is fine.”

“Do you think we’ll be having business dealings?” I asked.

“There are lots of different kinds of business out here in the country.” She looked down at me and winked. “You’ll do all right, Clay.”