Shoveling Smoke (13 page)

When Sally got through with me
in the chair, she phoned the police and told them there was a break-in in progress at my house. My hollering at her to hang up only added sound effects to the call. I pleaded with her to untape me before she left. “I’ve lost all feeling in my hands and feet,” I complained.

She surprised me with a long, passionate kiss, then reached down between my legs and gave me a tweak. “Don’t worry, boss,” she said, “that there’s the only organ that counts.” She walked out of the bedroom with her clothes in her hand.

The two policemen who showed up at my bedroom door five minutes later took one look and immediately misconstrued the scene.

“I’ve heard about this,” said the younger one, a skinny farm kid, as he ripped the tape off me. “They do this sort of thing to each other so they can get off.”

The paunchy, middle-aged patrolman curled his upper lip in disgust. “All that yelling they do about wanting to be treated like normal human beings. We should just turn San Francisco into a big frigging jail and ship ’em all there.”

“Look at my leg, Officers,” I said. “That man was torturing me.”

“I heard they do that, too,” said the kid.

Neither one of the patrolmen would talk directly to me. I never quite convinced them that Ball Cap and I weren’t lovers whose tryst had gotten out of hand, but I did get them to run the big man in, dragging him, groggy and still taped, downstairs to their patrol car. They called a doctor, who came over, gave me a tetanus shot, and told me that whoever treated my leg had done a good job. Though it was midnight, the doctor was dressed as if he were about to set off on a bass fishing weekend, right down to the utility vest and the floppy hat decorated with fishhooks. He was a crinkled little man with amused eyes.

“You and your boyfriend might want to lay off the sadomasochism for a while,” he told me. “You don’t want to hit an artery when you go stabbing each other.”

I tried explaining that the police were wrong about what had happened, but I doubt I got through. He nodded, gave me some pills he said were painkillers, and left.

The painkillers did not kill much pain, and at seven o’clock the next morning, after a sleepless night, I sat in a booth at the Dairy Queen, looking at the chicken-fried breakfast biscuit Lu-Anne had talked me into trying. Wick Chandler walked in. He flirted for a moment with Lu-Anne, ordered a cup of coffee, and joined me in my booth.

“So,” he said, “did you get your circulation back yet?”

“Who told you?”

“This is a small town, partner. When our police go out on a call and find a big, nasty burglar all trussed up next to a naked guy taped to a chair, well, that sort of news tends to get around. What did Sally hit him with?”

“How did you know Sally was involved?” I asked. I had refused to give the police the name of the woman who phoned in the call.

Wick heaved a gigantic sigh. “I didn’t. You told me just now. The dispatcher said it was a woman’s voice on the phone. I took a guess.”

Lu-Anne came over to bring Wick his coffee and fill my cup. She smiled at me, and I felt my face flame with embarrassment as she walked away. News gets around in a small town, Wick had said. Did Lu-Anne, my only friend in this godforsaken place, know about last night, too?

“So,” Wick said mournfully, after Lu-Anne had left, “you and Sally.”

“Let’s not talk about it, Wick.” I asked if he thought Stroud had heard anything about my little adventure.

“If he hasn’t yet, he will,” Wick replied. “He might not figure out about Sally, though. Nobody else knows about her. You may get lucky. He may just think you’re gay.”

“Not funny.”

“That tape thing,” he said, “it looks like it would hurt.” He had the notion that Sally and I had been experimenting with the tape before Ball Cap arrived, and he wanted a play-by-play.

“Forget it,” I said.

“I won’t pretend I’m not hurt,” he said, “after all the time and effort I put in on that girl.” So the look of concern on his face was there because Sally would screw the new guy and not him. “I wonder if she’s playing some sort of mind game with me,” he mused.

“That’s it, Sherlock,” I said, “Sally’s fucking me to get to you.”

“Jesus Christ, Clay, and you’ve been telling me to keep
my
pants buttoned.”

“Let it drop, Wick.” I told him one other thing that I had not told the police last night, that Ball Cap had thought I was Bevo Rasmussen.

“That fits,” he said. “The police got a report on your boyfriend. They found his name on his driver’s license and ran a check. His name is Kirby Nutter, and he’s a damned nasty sort of guy.”

Nutter was a Houston thug who had fallen in and out of jail since his late teens, usually for selling drugs but occasionally for assault and battery. Recently he had moved to Dallas, where authorities thought he was working as an enforcer for a local drug dealer named Deck Willhoit.

“Now, why would a Dallas drug lord be after Bevo Rasmussen?” Wick mused.

“I’ve got a more immediate question,” I said. “What should I do about Kirby Nutter?”

Wick suggested I let him go, refuse to swear out a complaint against him.

“The guy was going to perforate my kneecaps, Wick!”

“He thought you were someone else,” Wick reminded me.

“So I should let him get away with sticking pins in me because he’s a moron?”

“Okay,” he replied, “file charges. And you can testify in court about how Sally Dean saved your ass, and that means Sally, our district coordinator, will have to testify about what you and she were doing at your house at that time of night.”

Wick had a point. And after the anger and humiliation I had stirred up in her the night before, the last thing I wanted to do was drag her into court and jeopardize her job.

“You boys look down in the dumps,” said Lu-Anne, returning with the coffeepot. “You need some caffeine.”

“When are you going to let me make you a will, Lu-Anne?” asked Wick. “Everybody needs a will. You have assets that I’ll bet you don’t even know about. I would be happy to find them for you.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Chandler,” the girl said, pouring. “You got so many new lawyers, I may just let one of them do it.”

“We’ve only got the one new man, Lu-Anne,” Wick replied. “Mr. Parker here is not interested in drawing up wills for beautiful girls. He’s got himself a girlfriend.”

“What about that other one?” Lu-Anne said. “The one that’s been coming in here in the afternoons.”

I asked Wick if he knew of any law office opening up in town. He did not.

“What makes you think this new guy works for us, Lu-Anne?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I just figured he was with you guys because of the way him and that Bevo Rasmussen carry on.”

“Bevo and another lawyer?” Wick asked.

“They’re funny about it. He comes in and drinks coffee until Bevo Rasmussen shows up and orders coffee at another table, then they leave without talking to each other. They get in their cars and head out of town. It’s like some spy movie. They’ve done it four or five times over the last few weeks. The last time was yesterday. I’m glad the guy don’t work for you. If he thinks he’s putting something over on me, he’s too stupid to be much good in a courtroom.”

Wick and I looked at each other. “You know about this?” I asked him. He shook his head. “Lu-Anne, did you ever talk to this fellow? You don’t know his name, by any chance?”

“No, sir.”

We asked her to describe the man.

“He’s about five-ten, real nice suits, beautiful shoes. Maybe forty-five, forty-seven years old. Dark skin, like he’s been laying in the sun. Real curly hair. He don’t quite look American, if you know what I mean. Like he might speak some other language.”

“Lu-Anne,” I said, “you should work for the police.”

“Come in and I’ll do you a will for free,” said Wick.

“Maybe I will,” she replied. “I can count my own assets, though.”

“What in hell is Bevo up to?” Wick asked after Lu-Anne left. “I bet the little shitbrain is already working on a malpractice suit against us.”

“Wick, we don’t know who this guy is,” I said. “He’s probably not a lawyer. Maybe he’s a drug contact. Maybe he’s Bevo’s uncle.”

“You can ask him tonight on your way to Dallas,” Wick said.

“Shit, I forgot about that. I’m not feeling much like having a night out on the town with Bevo Rasmussen,” I said, flexing my wounded leg.

“It would be a good time to find out about this unknown guy, Clay,” Wick said. “Why don’t you go?”

Wick talked me into going with Bevo. For the good of the firm.

I went down to the jail
to turn Nutter loose. Before I signed the nonprosecution affidavit, however, I asked to see him alone. When he was led into the tiny conference room, he was still wearing his overalls and his Colorado Rockies cap and seemed none the worse for his night in jail, except for a bandage peeking out from under the cap where Sally had hit him. He didn’t seem glad to see me; in fact, his face showed no emotion at all, unless you could call sleepiness an emotion. He looked as if he had just been awakened from a nap.

Before the attending officer left the room, I stopped him. “Officer,” I asked, “do you know Bevo Rasmussen?”

It was the farm boy from the night before. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“Am I Bevo Rasmussen?”

The boy frowned, as if trying to make up his mind. “No, sir, you are not Bevo Rasmussen.”

“To your knowledge, have I ever been Bevo Rasmussen?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

I thanked the policeman and let him go. If Nutter understood that the exchange had been for his benefit, he gave no acknowledgment. He sat sleepily, eyes half-closed, his elbows on the tabletop and his chin in his hands.

“I know you’re dying to apologize for breaking in on the wrong man and sticking a pin through his leg,” I said. There was no response. I sat down on the other side of the table from him. He had not yet looked at me directly.

“There might be a way you could get out of this, Kirby,” I told him. “Without your boss in Dallas knowing anything about it. Interested?”

There was a flicker in Nutter’s eyes, a slight nod of the head.

“Tell me why you were after Bevo Rasmussen.”

Nutter snorted, shook his head as if to clear sleep out of it. He wasn’t about to spill any company secrets.

I explained to him that I was working on a case involving Bevo Rasmussen, that I was in fact a lawyer in Rasmussen’s employ, and that I had a good idea what last night had been about. I told Nutter that if he could confirm my idea, I would let him go without pressing charges. I stretched the truth a bit, explaining that any details he gave me would be privileged information about a client, and therefore I could not divulge it to anyone without being disbarred. Still no response.

“What will Deck Willhoit think of you getting taken down by a girl in the middle of the night while torturing the wrong man?” That took a moment to sink in. Then Kirby looked straight at me for the first time. I tried to find a clue in his eyes to the kind of hatred or insanity or psychopathy that would allow one man to split the kneecap of another—a stranger, who had done him no harm—with a steel needle. All I saw was a cloudy, bovine stolidity, as if the capacity to remember were missing. In a moment, Kirby shrugged.

“It’s money,” he said.

It was what Wick and I had guessed. Bevo owed the drug people eighty thousand dollars. Not a lot of money by drug-lord standards, but enough for a collection agent to visit. Hence Kirby Nutter’s trip to Jenks.

“So Bevo has been dealing dope for you boys?” I asked.

“Hell, no,” said Nutter. “He’s too smart for that. He’s been helping us out with a little cash flow problem.”

Bevo had been laundering money for Deck Willhoit, the drug dealer. He was supposed to have used the drug money to buy cows, then sell the cows and put the proceeds in a bank account in Valley View. But Willhoit’s money men had connections with the Valley View bank and were able to determine that the account balance was lower than it should have been. Suspecting a double cross, Willhoit called Bevo up to demand an amount of money that Bevo should have had readily available. Bevo stalled, was still stalling.

“What do you think Bevo did with the money?” I asked.

“I don’t get paid to think,” Nutter replied.

I let that pass. “Okay, what does your boss think?”

“He don’t think about it, either. He’s a very scientific man. He don’t think unless he’s got the data in front of him.”

“Does your boss ever make guesses?”

“Oh, all the time. He guesses Bevo spent the money. He guesses Bevo fucked up.”

That was my guess, too. Bevo was ambitious enough to use laundered drug money to finance his new career as a horse breeder. It took a certain amount of craziness to risk annoying the sort of guy that Deck Willhoit must have been, but Bevo had craziness to spare.

The strangest part of my conversation with Kirby Nutter came next: I found myself trying to argue him into getting his boss to give Bevo a little more time. I explained about Bevo’s horse-breeding scheme, speculating that Bevo had intended to use the million-dollar insurance payoff on his horses to reimburse Kirby’s boss. If the man in Dallas would hold off until Bevo’s case was wrapped up, I said, it might be that he could recoup his money then.

“That’s if you win the case,” Kirby said.

“Check.”

“And if you don’t,” the big man continued with a sigh, “I guess I get to visit this goddamn town again.”

“We’ll win, Mr. Nutter,” I replied, doing my best to sound like I believed it.

As I spoke I tried to figure out why I was working to save Bevo Rasmussen, a man whom Kirby Nutter, for all I cared, could turn into a human pincushion with his steel needles. I realized that I was defending Bevo not because he was innocent, but because he was my client and I was his lawyer. My talk with Kirby Nutter was not much different from talks I used to have with IRS officers on behalf of desperate clients. The stakes seemed pretty much the same, and so, in a way, did the penalties. In fact, certain punitive methods used by the IRS made Kirby Nutter’s ventilating procedure seem like Christian charity.

I thanked Kirby for his information and told him I would clear him with the police. As I rose to leave, I must have grimaced from the pain in my leg, which was still slightly swollen.

“Does it hurt much?” Kirby asked, showing real interest for the first time.

“A bit. It’s getting better.”

“Would you say it’s a sharp pain, or more of an ache?”

I stared at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The fact is, I only just started using them needles. It’s easier on me than hitting a guy with my fists.” He held up his left hand, clenched into a loose fist. “Three of these knuckles are broke,” he said, prodding them with his finger. “They feel funny.”

“I don’t want to know how you broke them,” I said.

“No,” he replied, “you don’t.”