Shoveling Smoke (7 page)

Hardwick Chandler talked
all the way back to town. His words came fast and high-pitched, with the vowels hemorrhaging in all directions, East Texas fashion. Talking was breathing to him; topic after topic tumbled out of him, each one dying away with the end of a breath, to be replaced by a new one unrelated to whatever had come before. He asked me questions about myself, my career, my law school days—we had both attended Baylor Law, though he had gone before me—and gave me no time to answer. He loved sports cars, he said, and expressed admiration for the Austin Healey, into whose passenger seat he was barely able to stuff his amazing bulk. He fiddled with all the instruments and ornaments he could reach, hunting with quicksilver fingertips for ways to unscrew or unsnap them. He offered to buy the car if I would name him a price, but before I could do so, he was asking me about the restaurants in Houston. He announced that he was a gourmet and loved a good meal almost as much as he loved the ladies. And that brought him back to his one recurring topic. Women.

“Women,” he explained, “are my sole reason for living, my raison d’être. God help me, I love ’em. I love every single goddamn
part
of them.” He turned toward me in his seat. “You ever noticed the backs of their knees? The
backs,
not the fronts. I love the backs of a woman’s knees. I’ve never met a woman who wasn’t ticklish there.” He stuck his head into the slipstream and gave a rousing whoop.

“That Deirdre,” he said, thumping the outside of the car door, “she could have been a contortionist!”

Gilliam Stroud was right: Wick Chandler was hooked on nookie. I tried to ask him about the other woman, the one on the phone with the razor, but he got in ahead of me with a joke. Had I heard about the old boy who went to the costume party naked on roller skates and said he was a pull toy?

What a contrast he was, with his rapid-fire speech and manic movements, to his partner Stroud, whose every utterance and gesture seemed carefully crafted, even when he was drunk. The only thing the two men’s conversation seemed to have in common was the ring of insincerity. They were both born liars. Perhaps that was what had drawn them together.

Wick got onto the subject of ostriches. “You ever eat ostrich meat?” he asked. I told him that I had not. “It tastes a lot like roast beef, but it’s got only a fraction of the cholesterol of chicken meat. There’s not much about an ostrich that you can’t use. You can make boots out of their skin, clothes out of their feathers. They’re a fucking miracle.”

Right now, according to Wick, it was a breeder’s market, because there weren’t any sizable herds. But one day there would be herds of ostriches bigger than any buffalo herd of the past. “Look out there, Clay,” he said. “Imagine those hills black with ostriches.”

It was difficult to picture.

“You can sell a live, fertile ostrich egg for almost a thousand dollars,” Wick said. “A pair of breeding chicks can go for upwards of three thousand. Takes money to set up an ostrich farm. Emus are getting to be pretty big, too, though I can’t see why, the shaggy bastards.”

Wick explained that ostriches had become the preferred currency of the drug trade. “It’s true, Clay,” he insisted. “Look here, you’re a tax lawyer. What happens to any transaction involving more than ten thousand dollars in cash?”

“A little bell rings at the IRS,” I said.

“That’s right. And that little bell can also wake up the FBI, the DEA, and lots of other alphabet police. So instead of handing your connection a big pile of dirty bills that can be traced, you give him a pair of ostriches. It’s a weird world, isn’t it? They’re nasty creatures, ostriches. Bad-tempered sons of bitches. You ever seen anybody kicked by an ostrich?”

I had not.

“You don’t want to, either. An ostrich can work you over like a prizefighter. I saw a guy take a kick one time like to have broken his pelvis. And he was holding a big flat board like a shield between him and the bird. I don’t know how that ostrich got around the board. They only have two toes on their feet, and one of them has a nail on it that can open a man up like he’s got a built-in zipper. You see that farm over there?” He pointed to another field fenced with chain link. This field was sectioned into long walkways, like in a kennel for show dogs. One of the birds was standing in a walkway, looking at that distance like a butler in gray livery. “That’s Deirdre’s farm. Well, it’s Mike’s farm. Deirdre and Mike Starns.”

“So Deirdre is married?”

“Mike is the guy I saw get kicked. He doesn’t really like the birds anymore, not after he found out how mean-spirited they are. He sold most of his ostriches and put the money into emus because they’re not so testy. But even emus can kick the shit out of you. He spends a lot of time out of town now,” Wick said. “He likes to fish. I go with him sometimes. Then sometimes, when he goes on one of his trout safaris, Deirdre calls me up, and we have our own safari.”

“One of our clients introduced me to emu jerky this morning,” I told him.

“Bevo Rasmussen,” he said. “So you’ve met him already. Christ. He thinks he’s going to become the emu czar of Texas.”

“If that’s what he wants, then why did he buy a bunch of horses?” I asked.

“The horses were a way to make money to buy the birds. It’s a complicated plan, which he’ll tell you in great detail if you ask. My advice is, don’t ask. Bevo Rasmussen is a fucking snake. God almighty, I wish he’d never walked through our door.”

I told Wick that the little man seemed more pathetic to me than deadly.

“Bevo isn’t his real name,” Wick said. “He got that name from stealing the big steer down in Austin. You know, the university’s mascot.” The University of Texas football team is named the Longhorns, and their mascot is a longhorn steer named Bevo. From time to time a rival university tries to steal the steer before a big game as a prank. For this reason, Bevo the steer is heavily guarded during football season.

“He did it on a bet,” Wick said. “Some smart-ass Aggies down in College Station put him up to it. But he didn’t just steal the steer. He took it to a butcher down in College Station and had it cut up into steaks and served to the A&M football team!”

“That’s right!” I said. “I remember hearing something about that. About eight years ago? So that was Bevo?”

“Yep. The Aggies thought eating the Longhorns’ steer would be a motivator, you know, get the juices flowing. Turns out that the UT fans were so mad over it, there was a riot at the game, and some people got hurt. The Longhorns beat the shit out of the Aggies that year. So I guess you could say the prank backfired. Most of Bevo’s pranks do. Disaster follows that boy around.”

“That makes him a jerk,” I said, “not the devil incarnate.”

“I suppose you’ve noticed that problem he’s got with his arm, how it moves kind of funny?”

“I’ve noticed,” I said.

“He got that in a knife fight outside a bar in Dallas with a Mexican that tried to run out on a coke sale. The Mexican outweighed Bevo by a good sixty pounds. He was one mean son of a bitch, but Bevo called him on the trick and had it out with him.”

“It looks like Bevo got the rough end of it,” I said.

“He got torn up, all right,” Wick replied, “but the Mexican got himself dead. Bevo’s a tough customer. He carries a razor in his sock.”

I told Wick that I had seen it.

“How do you know so much about Bevo Rasmussen?” I asked.

“We’ve represented him a time or two before,” Wick replied. “That Mexican murder? Gill walked him.”

“But he did it?” I asked. Wick nodded.

“Listen,” Wick said, “Bevo will probably talk to you, try to get you to do something for him.”

“What kind of thing?”

“I don’t know. Something. Anything. But don’t do it. Don’t listen to him. Everything the man tells you is a lie. And never turn your back on him.”

“I take it you think Bevo burned his horses?” I asked.

“As sure as I’m sitting here,” he replied.

I asked him if he knew about the screwup with the interrogatories in Rasmussen’s case. He nodded.

“No problem,” he said. “We can still petition the court to allow us to answer the interrogatories. All we have to do is come up with a good enough reason why we didn’t take care of them in the first place.”

“Have you got a reason?” I asked.

“Well, there was Gill’s heart attack about nine months ago. We could use that.”

“Stroud had a heart attack?” I asked.

“He did if we need him to.”

“You mean, he
didn’t
have a heart attack?”

“It depends,” he replied.

“Either he did or he didn’t, Wick.”

“We can get old Doc Jessup to corroborate. Gill’s gotten him off so many DWIs that the man would swear Gill died and came back from the dead if we asked him to.”

“We would
lie
to the court?”

“Lie? Never. We just put our pre-existing condition in the worst possible light, to borrow a phrase from the insurance defense boys.”

“You can’t lie to the court, Wick.”

“You’re not listening, Clay.” He grinned at me, but then he saw that I was not amused. “Clay, this is not tax-form bingo in Houston. You’re an advocate, and you’re in the country, boy. Things have their own way of getting done out here. Trust me. We can finesse this fuckup. In fact, there aren’t many fuckups we can’t finesse.”

“Even if that means putting our licenses on the line?”

“Nobody’s gonna take your license. Look, we don’t misrepresent the law, we don’t ignore it. We massage it. We fondle it, we squeeze it. We goose it and grease it till it fits.” His plump, ring-laden fingers moved in the air, fondling the law. “Whatever works,” he said with a shrug. “That’s the motto of our firm. Whatever works.”

I didn’t much like that motto and told him so.

“If it’s any consolation to you,” he said, “Gill really does have heart problems. He could go at any minute.” Wick snapped his fingers. “Like that.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” I said. I told him about bailing Stroud out of jail the day before.

“You don’t know him, Clay,” Wick said. “Not yet. He was a great lawyer once. Hell, he’s still a great lawyer. He’s the greatest man I’ve ever known. And he’s got more ethical scruples than Billy Graham.” I thought of Stroud’s attempt to pass me off as a medical expert in front of a judge yesterday and glanced at Chandler to see just how I was expected to absorb this testament to the old man’s probity. To my astonishment, there were tears standing in his eyes. He may not have been convincing me, but he seemed to be convincing himself.

“Stroud’s the reason you’re here, Clay,” he said. “I didn’t say anything about this during our phone talks. I couldn’t. But I’m counting on you to help me with him. I hired you to help me get him back on his feet.”

“What?”

“We’ve got to get him off the sauce. You’re here to help me do that.”

This I found interesting. Wick was giving me the same line about Stroud that Stroud had given me about him! So I was hired to be a nurse, not a lawyer. Stroud was hiring me to rehabilitate Chandler, and Chandler was hiring me to rehabilitate Stroud. I told Wick of Stroud’s duplicate plan.

Wick shook his head, smiling. “You see what I mean?” he said. “That man is always thinking of somebody else. I’m telling you, Clay, he can seem like a prize son of a bitch, but he’s got a heart of gold.”

“I think you’re both bananas, Wick,” I told him. “I think the two of you are out of control.”

“You’re right, Clay. We’re out of control. That’s why we need you. We need a city lawyer to straighten us out. We’ve gone a bit loco lately, but we’re not over the hill. You’re young, you’re smart, you’ve got energy. You could set us on the right track.”

“There’s nothing in my job description about conducting rehab for the partners,” I told him.

“It won’t be too hard, Clay, I promise. We both know we need to reform. We’ll work at it. You show us what to do. Whip us into shape!”

I could not see either Stroud or Chandler letting himself be whipped into shape.

“Don’t worry about Gill,” Wick said. “He’s got some good years left in him. If you could only see him in front of a jury.”

“I have,” I replied. “I assisted in the Hardesty murder trial yesterday.”

“The Hardesty trial?” Wick said. He looked at his watch. “What day is it?”

I told him.

“Jesus,” he said. “That Deirdre.”

“Did you know we go to trial in the Rasmussen case in eight days?”

That spooked him.

“Eight days?” he said. “That’s a pisser.”

“How are you going to finesse that?” I asked.

“Well,” he said after a moment’s thought, “Gill could always have another heart attack.”

It was after eleven
and blisteringly hot when we got back to town. Wick asked me to drop him at his home, and I drove him to a low-slung redbrick house set well back on a weedy lawn only a couple of blocks from the office. There were two cars in the gravel driveway, a Dodge Ram truck and an old black Corvette convertible. When I pulled up to the curb in front of the house, Wick told me he had an idea how I could spend my first afternoon in the office. He had some client appointments that, thanks to his tryst in the woods with Deirdre, he no longer had time to meet. These were the clients whose files Molly Tunstall had stacked in the basket on my desk. Wick called them basket cases.

“We got a load of ’em,” he said. “People get cranky when their world goes bad, and East Texas is just about played out. I’d handle them, but I’ve got work to do here. There’s nothing really tough about the cases. Why don’t you take my appointments, introduce yourself to some of the clients?”

“I’ll do it if you’ll go back through the Rasmussen case file so we can talk about it tomorrow,” I replied.

“No problem,” he said, straining to pull himself out of the car. “Leave Bevo’s file with Molly, and I’ll pick it up this evening. See, Clay? I’m starting to reform already. I’ll find us a miracle.”

“find us one that does not require anyone in the firm to have a heart attack,” I said.

At the office Molly told me my first basket case was scheduled for one-thirty, which was two hours away. I asked her to get me the phone number for the office of the administrative coordinator for the Northeast Texas judicial district.

“So, city boy, how’s the new job going?” Sally Dean asked when I got her on the phone.

“I need some legal advice,” I told her. “Where’s the best place for a lawyer to get some lunch in this county?”

“There’s a pretty good place over here,” she said, “but from what I saw of your sense of direction yesterday evening, I’m not sure you could find it.”

“Perhaps if you loaned me your horse, he could lead me to it.”

“Be here in twenty minutes,” she said. “I’ll have Ed saddled and waiting.”

Sally’s office was in Wyman, fifteen miles north of Jenks. I got directions from Molly and in twenty minutes parked the Austin Healey on a downtown street in Wyman, which looked pretty much like Mule Springs, Jenks, and most of the other East Texas towns I had seen. A two-story yellow-brick building housed the state and county legal services. The Judicial District Administrative Coordinator’s Office, on the second floor, was impressive: cherry wood paneling, lush green carpet, expensive prints on the wall. Sally sat in a blaze of sunlight coming from the windows behind her and reflecting off the rich wood of the desktop. She was on the phone with someone who, I could tell, wanted to be very nice to her.

“How kind of you to think of me, Judge Howell,” Sally said, motioning me into the room. “I’ll see you this afternoon, then.” She hung up the phone.

“Friends in high places?” I asked, taking a seat in a gigantic leather chair that threatened to swallow me whole.

“Judge Howell has been fishing in Alaska,” she replied, “and he wants to bring me some salmon.” She came around the desk and sat on its edge, close to me. The country girl of yesterday was gone: Sally was wearing a tailored business suit—sleek double-breasted jacket and short skirt in a black-and-white hound’s tooth—black stockings, and high heels. Her black hair was pulled back and bound with a simple bow at her neck. She would have been at home in any boardroom in Houston.

“He’s still fishing,” she said.

“Hoping to catch you?” I asked.

“fishing is Judge Howell’s reason to live. His next trip is to some river in Africa. It would be a shame if the safari had to leave without him because he couldn’t get a replacement to take his place on the bench.”

“I’ve heard of people trying to bribe judges, but never the other way around.”

She shrugged. “Half the judges I deal with want to take off their robes for a while, and the other half, the retired ones, want to put them back on. This office handles the whole show.”

“But you can’t just accept a gift from a judge, can you? Isn’t that tampering or bribery or something?”

“A few fish from an old friend?” She idly pushed against the arm of my chair with the toe of her shoe, the muscles in her calf flexing in an interesting pattern. Her perfume had redefined itself from the evening before. Very subtly, I was enveloped in a scent that made me think of mangoes and Caribbean islands and sunlight sizzling on the brown skin of native girls. “Haven’t you ever been slipped a few fish from an old friend, Counselor?” she asked, smiling.

“I didn’t see Ed downstairs.”

“That lazy horse, he must have run off.”

“Then who’ll show me the way to lunch?” I asked.

We crossed the street and entered an old-fashioned diner with red linoleum tabletops and little jukeboxes sitting on the table in every booth. As out of place as Sally looked in the joint—a high-gloss Wall Street ballbuster in a dusty luncheonette—she obviously felt herself at home. She exchanged greetings with the dozen or so small-town types and worn farmers in the other booths as if they were cousins. She introduced me to the clientele as the new man at Chandler and Stroud. That drew a round of whistles and some laughter. “New meat!” I heard someone say, and a wizened little man in a madras jacket and alpine hat stood up from a booth to make me an elaborate salute.

“From whatever frying pan you was in,” he said, “I welcome you to the fire.”

“Is everybody in East Texas a comic?” I asked Sally as we slid into a booth.

“I think you’ve impressed them,” she said. “You’ve given them a new topic to keep them busy. They’ll be figuring out whether you’re brave or just crazy.”

A waitress came over, and Sally ordered chicken salad sandwiches, the house specialty, for both of us.

“How many new guys have Chandler and Stroud had?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” Sally replied. “Four, since I’ve known the boys. No, five. But that last fellow hardly counted. He only survived about thirty-six hours.”

“Why, Sally? What makes it so hard for the new guy?”

She gave me a long, appraising look. “Let me tell you a little story about your employers. Some years ago, when Gill was in a little better health, he was the high district attorney of this very county. Wick Chandler was the assistant DA. One week, God knows why, they decided to break a record for court appearances. In that week, they tried eleven jury trials and brought twenty-one cases to the bench. That’s a total of thirty-two cases, all tried in one week.”

“Amazing,” I said. “Weird but amazing. What a train wreck that must have been.”

Sally pointed a cautionary finger at me. “Wait a minute. Out of those thirty-two cases they got a total of thirty-one convictions. It would’ve been thirty-two, but one of the witnesses had a heart attack and died while testifying. The boys also broke the total-years record.”

“The total-years record?”

“A court reporter figured this one out. You add up the total number of years in all the sentences handed down in the cases that you prosecute. During their week, the boys racked up a total of almost three thousand years for the thirty-one people they sent to Huntsville. That’s a statewide record. During the same week, they drank almost as many bottles of Jack Daniel’s as they sent people to the penitentiary. Ask Molly Tunstall if you don’t believe me. She took out the bottles.”

“You want me to believe they tried all those cases drunk?” I asked.

“Totally shitfaced. I think that’s the only way they could have gotten through so many trials. Drink seems to speed Wick Chandler up—in more ways than one. You should also know that during that week Wick was assaulted twice, on the steps of that same courthouse right over there, by jealous husbands.”

I shook my head, laughing. “You’re good, Sally, but that’s over the top.”

Sally did not crack a smile. “The second husband had a gun. He shot at Wick but missed and hit their new associate in the thigh. This fellow had been with them for only about two months. He came close to losing his leg. As soon as he could walk again, he quit.”

I stared at her hard, looking for a trace of her customary irony. “This is true?” I asked.

“Around here, it’s called the week of Jack Daniel’s justice. Ask anyone over in the courthouse about it. But you asked me why the new guys have always failed. I think it’s a question of balance. Their gyroscopes just couldn’t handle it. They couldn’t find the right rhythm. They never learned when to duck.” Now a smile crept into her eyes. “How’s your rhythm, Counselor?”

“Better than my sense of direction, I hope.”

The sandwiches came, and while we ate we made small talk. I found out that she was a local girl, having grown up in small East Texas towns; her mother was dead, and her father had a horse ranch a few miles outside Jenks.

“Why don’t you stable Ed at your father’s ranch?”

“Ed stays at Gill’s farm, on the other side of town.”

“How many horses does he keep?” I asked. It was hard to imagine the drunken old man taking care of a horse.

“Just one,” she said. “Just Ed. He’s part of a reclamation project I’m working on. I’m a closet do-gooder.”

“You’re trying to rehabilitate Stroud?” I asked.

“No, I’m trying to rehabilitate Ed. That horse has a terrible drinking problem.”

Sally explained that she had placed Ed with Stroud, her former boss, in order to give the old man something to do out on the farm. “He gets morbid if he sits alone on his porch too long. And he starts to drink. Having Ed to look after keeps him on an even keel.”

“He wasn’t on a very even keel yesterday,” I said, telling her about his arrest.

“How was he in court?”

“He was awesome,” I admitted.

“You will never see him drunk when he’s working,” Sally said.

“I thought you said he spent Jack Daniel’s justice week drunk.”

“That was before he met Ed.”

“You realize that there’s a kind of father/daughter sound to all of this,” I said.

“I guess I don’t mind telling you,” she said after a moment. “Gill helped me out a couple of years ago when he hired me. To qualify to become a judicial district coordinator, I had to have at least six months’ job experience in a law office. The rules didn’t say what kind of experience. I just had to work in a firm. I really wanted to be a coordinator, so I went looking for someone to hire me. Chandler and Stroud was the first firm I applied to. They hired me on the spot. Gill has been a mentor to me ever since. We keep each other sharp.”

“That’s right,” I said, “you bet on Stroud’s trials. What sort of wager did you two make on the Hardesty trial, if I may ask?”

“You may not.”

“So that’s how Stroud helped you out, by offering you a job?”

“It’s a little more than that. I was sort of a rehabilitation job myself at the time. I don’t want to go into it. Let’s just say Gill gave me moral support at a time when I really needed it. He taught me a lesson or two about responsibility. Let’s leave it at that.”

“Gilliam Stroud taught you about responsibility?” I asked. It was my turn to sound ironic.

Sally finished her sandwich and wiped her mouth with her napkin. “You haven’t been here very long, Mr. Parker,” she said. “May I ask you to do me a favor?”

“Of course.”

“Don’t judge Gill Stroud too soon. That’s what the other new guys did. You don’t know him yet. Give him a little time.”

“What about Hardwick Chandler?” I asked. “Will I have to give him a little time, too?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Maybe more than a little,” she replied.

“So, let me get this straight,” I said. “That sleeping-your-way-to-the-top remark you made last night, that was just a joke, right?”

“It depends on which of the local idiots you ask,” she said. “Some folks will tell you that I slept with Gill Stroud to get my job. Others will tell you I slept with Wick Chandler. How sleeping with either of those two could have made me a district coordinator is something maybe you can figure out and explain to the rural population.”

“So who
did
you sleep with to get your job?” I asked.

She laughed. “I can see we’re going to have fun with you, Counselor.”

Then it was her turn. She asked me questions about my life in Houston, my marriage, my reasons for choosing Jenks to start over. I did my best to answer them.

“So you’re rehabilitating yourself,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“And you’re looking for your lost ethics.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“In East Texas.”

“You think it’s the wrong place to look?” I asked.

“I think it’s the wrong
way
to look. I don’t think you’re going to find them in a
place.
It’s not like they’ve tumbled out of your brain and are hiding from you out in the back forty.”

“So you think I’m crazy?” We were crossing the street, heading back to her office.

She looked at me, smiling. “Maybe a little bit. But not enough to show out here.”

I said good-bye to her at the door to her building and turned to go.

“Do you like salmon, Mr. Parker?” she asked.

“Why won’t you call me Clay?” I asked.

“Do you like salmon, Clay?”

“I like salmon.”

“How about contraband salmon?”

“That’s the only kind,” I replied.

“See you around.” She smiled, disappearing into the doorway.