Shoveling Smoke (17 page)

“God almighty,” said Wanda. She tried to move in for a closer look, but Deirdre grabbed her arm and yanked her back down.

“You are a scandal,” Deirdre scolded.

“The silver isn’t really silver,” said Wick. “It’s white gold. It’s his wedding band, and his wife’s. I asked him why he did that, why he would make such a godawful trinket, and he told me something strange. He said his little accident with the gun—he called it an accident—taught him the last lesson he ever had to learn. He said he had already learned that other people could die, but he hadn’t believed it of himself. He said his little accident taught him that he could die, too. Now he blows his whistle to teach his lesson to others.”

He turned to me. “That’s why he calls it the trumpet of doom, Clay. He says it’s an intimation of mortality. He says the sound it makes is death laughing at us, laughing at us through his toe bones, laughing inside our skulls. It’s death, saying life is short. He says he’s taught his lesson to all the dogs in the county and now he’s working on the humans.”

“That’s the saddest thing I ever heard,” said Deirdre, her eyes welling with tears.

“I think it’s a crock,” Wanda said. “I think you’re yanking our chains, Wick Chandler.”

Wick shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, “I can’t hear a thing when he blows it. I guess that means I’m going to live forever.”

The snoring stopped, and Stroud’s head jerked upright. “Sally!” he cried, coming out of his sleep. His eyes focused slowly. He saw us all sitting at his feet, looking up at him.

“What happened to the party?” he asked.

“I think it’s about played out, Gill,” replied Wick.

“Well then,” said Stroud, “we need a benediction.” He raised the whistle to his lips and blew. The girls hunched their shoulders, my mind flapped like a window shade in a gale, and from all points of the compass came the mournful howling of dogs.

About eleven o’clock
I said good-bye to Wanda Sue and the other partygoers and drove home in fragile condition from the beer-and-whiskey combination. As I left, Wanda kissed me on the cheek and offered to clean my teeth for free anytime. On Sunday I slept until almost noon. I got up, with my head thundering, and called Wick to remind him that we were to pick up Stroud at eight o’clock the next morning and drive out into the country to depose Nyman Scales at his ranch. Wick was groggy on the phone. I had woken him up.

“I’m pretty wrung out,” he said. “That Deirdre.”

I reminded him of his promise to reform. He did not want to be reminded. I asked him if there had been any word on Stroud’s attempt to get relief from the judge on our failure to answer the interrogatories.

“Not as of last night,” Wick said, yawning. “There won’t be any relief, Clay. Not from Wrong Tit Tidwell. There’s bad blood between him and Gill going way back. It was Gill that gave him his nickname.”

“I don’t want to hear about it,” I said. “Jesus, Wick, is there anybody in the East Texas judicial system that you guys haven’t pissed off?”

“Maybe a few court clerks here and there,” he said.

I suggested that he get out of bed and do something to try to save his law firm.

“What is there to do, Clay?” he asked. “We haven’t seen a single piece of evidence from the plaintiff; we haven’t even got that goddamn Pulaski’s pathology report. We have a client who won’t listen to us and lies every time he opens his mouth. And now we’re deposing people who won’t be allowed to testify, either in person or by deposition, for God’s sake. You tell me what I can do, Clay, and I’ll do it.”

“I don’t know. Would you comb back through the file? Maybe we missed something we can use.”

Wick promised to review the file as soon as his head stopped pounding. I hung up and called Stroud but got no answer. We had not gone over the questions that he would ask Scales at tomorrow’s deposition, but I supposed that was okay. According to Bevo, there was only one question that mattered—his whereabouts at the time of the fire—and Scales already knew what to say about that.

I was not looking forward to the deposition, although Wick had told me that Nyman Scales’s operation was worth seeing, a state-of-the-art horse ranch, complete with a genetics lab. Also, it would be our first look at the other side’s hired guns, the trial lawyers from SWAT.

A deposition is a pretty formal affair. Both parties to the action have to be present, as do their counsel and the court reporter. Only the judge and jury are missing, but the testimony from a deposition can be used in evidence at the trial, subject to objections. I did not relish the prospect of sitting there watching the SWAT people smirking at us while Gilliam Stroud asked his useless questions. So what if Scales could place Bevo at his place on the night of the fire? Scales was not going to get the chance to testify, and the judge wouldn’t let us use the deposition. And even if he did, all Scales’s testimony would show was that Bevo did not actually start the fire. SWAT might—and probably did—have evidence linking Bevo to whoever lit the match. Bevo could have helped us by giving us the names of his accomplices, but he continued to proclaim his innocence, despite the fact that no one, not even his lawyers, believed him.

The sad fact was, we didn’t know what SWAT had on him. Since Stroud had never sent over his own interrogatories, SWAT was under no obligation to send us any information on their case. We had no idea what sort of evidence they would present. It would be the O.K. Corral, with SWAT as the Earps and us as the Clantons. The only significant difference was that, in the real gunfight, the Clantons got to use live ammunition. We would be firing blanks.

I tried to think of something to do on the case, but Wick was right, there was nothing else, except get braced for what SWAT would do to us. My brain had still not worked its way out from under the rock I seemed to have set on it the night before, so I took some aspirin and tried to go back to sleep. At three o’clock I showered and went down to the Dairy Queen for a late lunch. As I was parking the Austin Healey, a man came out of the restaurant who matched the description Lu-Anne had given us of the “lawyer” who had been meeting secretly with Bevo. He got into a big black Lexus and pulled out of the DQ parking lot as I walked in.

“That’s him,” Lu-Anne said, “your competition. You missed Bevo by about four minutes. You ask me, I think they’re heading out of town to meet somewhere.”

I ran back out to my Austin Healey and took off after the Lexus. The car was too far ahead for me to see it, but it had left a fine haze of dust hanging in the air east along Main Street, heading out of town. I lost the trail at the last asphalt cross street before the roads turned to dirt. There was too much dust in the air to make a guess as to which road the Lexus had taken.

“Too fast for you?” Lu-Anne asked as I walked back in the DQ.

“If I’d taken you along, we wouldn’t have lost them,” I replied.

There were no other customers. Lu-Anne explained that I had missed the Sunday lunch crunch and was too early for the after-Sunday-night-church crowd. I told her to surprise me with something good to eat and slid into a booth.

I had seen that man before. In Houston, although I could not remember exactly where or in what context. Lu-Anne was right: He looked like a lawyer. He was a lawyer. But who the hell was he?

I figured it out just as Lu-Anne came to my table with my lunch. As she put the plate down, I jumped out of the booth.

“It’s just chicken fried steak,” Lu-Anne said.

“Antoine Duett,” I said.

“What?”

I sat back down and tried to eat the lunch Lu-Anne had brought me, but my appetite was gone.

This was serious news. Antoine Duett was indeed a Houston lawyer. I remembered my old colleague Rita Humphrey introducing us once in the lobby of the building where our firm had its offices. He was not one of Rita’s favorite people, she told me later. More a dirty-tricks operator than a practicing lawyer, Duett performed nasty little jobs for other law firms. He tracked down reluctant witnesses, encouraged unreluctant witnesses to change their minds, and helped with the general shuffling of opinion and evidence that often goes on behind the scenes of a trial and can sometimes shake up even the most open-and-shut cases. People like Duett are the CIA and the KGB of the big firms. Some lawyers see them as a necessary evil. Some would like to round them all up and stick them in a gulag.

I knew one other thing about Antoine Duett of Houston. Although he kept no legal connection with any firm, he had an office in the same building as Slaven, Wortmann, Applegate, and Tice. Bevo was holding secret meetings with the enemy.

I drove to Wick’s home,
rang the doorbell, then beat on the door with my fist. No Wick. When I got to Stroud’s farmhouse, about four-thirty, Sally’s blue Mercedes was parked in the yard, and Sally was out in the stable, going over Ed with a brush. She was wearing jeans and a workshirt tied at her waist. A country girl again.

I went into the stable and stood awhile, watching Sally work the brush methodically down the horse’s side, and tried to think of something to say. “Hot day,” was what I came up with.

“I want to thank you,” she said, without looking at me, “for not turning me in to the police.”

“There’s no law against refusing to untape a man from a chair.”

“There’s one against prostitution,” she replied. “You could have shut me down, and I’d have had to fall back on my day job.”

So it was going to be like that.

“I’m looking for Bevo,” I said. “Do you know where he is?”

She shrugged. “You could ask Gill, but he’s probably still asleep.”

“Maybe I’ll wake him up.”

“You might try, but I should warn you, he sleeps with a loaded gun. I know, because my daddy pays me to service him from time to time, just like I do you.”

I went up to her, took the brush out of her hand, and spun her around. “How long are you going to keep this up?” I asked. There was a sharp, painful tug at my waist: Ed had clamped his teeth on my belt and was apparently trying to expel me from the stable. I pulled free, and he showed me a grin full of gigantic teeth.

“This is Ed’s hour,” Sally said, “not yours. You’re lucky he didn’t get you by the tenders.”

I handed the brush back, and she continued grooming the horse.

“I saw Deck Willhoit in Dallas a couple of nights ago,” I said. “He told me to tell you your father misses you. I guess you’d better check in.”

The only sound for a while was the rasp of the brush as it moved down Ed’s flank. “Deck is my uncle,” she said at last. “Not by blood, but by business. He and Nyman were partners years ago. They probably still are, in ways that would interest the FBI if they only knew where and how to look.”

She moved around the horse and began to work Ed’s other side. “I’ve been trying for a couple of years now to decide whether or not to have a talk with the feds, see if I couldn’t point them in the right direction. Selling out your own father is a harder thing than you might think, even for the daughter of Nyman Scales. But you and your idiotic guesswork the other night have just about made up my mind for me.”

“You’ve kept up with your father’s business activities?” I asked.

“According to you and Bevo, I
am
one of my father’s business activities.” She laughed. “You and Wick and Bevo and Gill, half the judges in the county, and my father, too, old crafty Nyman. You’re all working so hard to come up with an angle on me. I can see the gears running behind your eyes. It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.”

“Come on, Sally.”

“This may surprise you, Counselor, but I’ve never known
exactly
what my father is up to. Oh, I’ve known for years that he was up to no good, and God knows, I did some odd things for him when I was young. But he always kept me as much in the dark as possible. And he never told me the truth. He doesn’t know how. Even when I was busted for fraud—I was fourteen at the time—and Gill got the charges dropped, Nyman insisted to me there had been a terrible mistake. For a while he said he was working up a lawsuit against the county for arresting his little girl. Keeping quiet might have been his way of protecting me, but more likely it was because he didn’t want anyone, even his daughter, to have enough on him to cause him to worry. So, no, I haven’t kept up with him. But lately I’ve been doing a little checking. From the questions he asks me about my judges’ schedules, I think I’ve figured out which of the bastards he’s bought. That information might be of help to some DA. I’m beginning to think that I could put Nyman away.”

She kept working on the horse, methodically, carefully. “Did you ever have a pet, Counselor? Did your mommy and daddy ever get you a dog or a cat or some little rodent, or maybe a turtle?”

“I had a dog,” I replied.

“When I was young, Nyman used to give me pets. Not dogs or cats. Larger animals. Sometimes a calf, sometimes a half-grown horse. He usually did it after he’d been away from home for a couple of weeks or a month, with Mama wondering where he was, cursing him under her breath. She really was a Cajun witch. I think she tried spells on Daddy. Maybe they are what made him such a son of a bitch. Maybe they kept him from being worse than he is. Or maybe they just annoyed him; there is a rumor that he killed her.”

“I’ve heard it,” I said.

“It’s a lie,” she said flatly. “Who told you, anyway? Wick Chandler?” She laughed. “He’s been sore at me ever since I refused to do with him what I never should have done with you.”

“Sally—”

“Anyway, Daddy would finally show up after one of his absences, with an animal in tow, and he’d sit me down and give me a big hug and make a show of giving me a pet. 'It’s all yours, baby,’ he’d say. 'You can name her and raise her as your own.’ And I’d do it every time. I’d feed them and brush them and do whatever else it took to keep them healthy. But I learned never to get too involved with my pets, because I knew that someday I’d come home after school and my colt or my calf would be gone. It had run away, Nyman said. He had looked everywhere for it. He thought maybe someone had stolen it.”

She sighed. “It took me two or three years to figure out what was happening. My father was giving me his special stock, those animals he was saving for some particular scheme, some get-rich-quick experiment. When I was a little older, I would try to find out what happened when my pet-of-the-moment disappeared. Usually it had been sold—I found where Nyman kept his bills of sale—but sometimes it had had an accident. Little Buttercup had run into barbed wire or gotten struck by lightning.”

“I’m sorry, Sally,” I said.

“You’d think a man as clever as Nyman would be smarter about his own child. He seemed to think I would never catch on to what he was doing. Or maybe that I just wouldn’t care. Well, I did care. I just didn’t know what to do about it. You see, Counselor, in a way, you and Bevo were right about me. I was the most special stock of all. I could do tricks without having to be maimed or killed first. Nyman taught me a lot of them. It was petty thievery mostly, in the beginning, but it got more complicated after Mama died. Nyman said it wasn’t wrong because it’s every man for himself out there. 'It’s a fallen world,’ he’d say. 'But we don’t have to fall along with it.’”

“Sally, you don’t have to tell me any of this.”

“You asked me once why I keep Ed here instead of at Daddy’s place. Do you think you can figure out why now?”

“I guess, maybe, an unspotted Appaloosa wouldn’t have much value to Nyman,” I said.

“Except as tinder,” she replied. “Well, Ed is going to live into old age. Gill and I are going to see to that.” She put the brush on a shelf and washed her hands at a faucet. “Do you really need to see Bevo?” she asked.

“I have a few questions that need answering.”

“Come on, then. I’ll take you to his hideout.” She walked out of the stable and climbed into her Mercedes.

“So you know where he lives?” I asked as I got into the passenger seat.

She switched on the engine. “A girl always has to know the whereabouts of her pimp.”