Shoveling Smoke (18 page)

Sally drove east out of the yard
along a road that was nothing more than a couple of wheel ruts running through knee-high grass. The little car did not have much road clearance, and it crested the waves of grass like a speedboat. I realized it was a good thing that we hadn’t taken my car, because the Austin Healey would have surely run aground.

“Nice car,” I said.

“If a girl takes care of herself in this line of work, she can make some money.”

“Look, Sally I want to—” A bump in the road bounced me up against the car’s roof, and I bit my tongue hard enough for pain to ring like a bell in my mouth.

“You better buckle up,” Sally said. “I’d hate to bring you back with a broken neck. Bad for business.”

We bucked on for about five minutes, sometimes through fields with no wheel ruts at all, until we arrived at a brick-and-shingle cabin sitting beside a large pond.

“Is this Stroud’s shooting spot?” I asked.

“It used to be.”

Though badly run down, Stroud’s cabin was a pretty sophisticated piece of work, with a fireplace, a garage, and a screened-in porch running the length of the cabin’s front. Square holes bordered with elaborate wooden frames had been let into the screen at a variety of heights.

“The holes are for shooting at snakes in the pond,” Sally explained. Bevo’s Seville was not in sight, nor were any of the other cars he claimed to own. We walked across the porch, knocked, got no answer.

“Does Stroud know Bevo is living in his cabin?” I asked.

“Bevo’s a real entrepreneur. Cows, horses, whores. There’s a connection there, don’t you think?”

“You left out emus,” I said.

“He’s branching out into the big birds?” she replied. “That little man is full of surprises.”

Sally told me that Bevo had been a hanger-on at her father’s ranch back when she used to crash there. “He thought he was hot stuff because he was selling invisible cows.” She shook her head. “When he found out who I was, he made a dozen different kinds of moves on me, all of them hopeless. He was like a mangy puppy rubbing up against my leg. But he wasn’t really after me. He was after Nyman. He wanted Nyman to turn him into a big-time horse dealer. I left the ranch about the time Nyman started noticing him. It surprised me to learn that Nyman had sold Bevo some horses. Bevo always seemed like such a lightweight.”

“They’re big pals now,” I said. I told her that Bevo was counting on Nyman to save him at tomorrow’s deposition out at the Scales ranch.

Sally shook her head. “Nyman used to be a better judge of scum.”

I tried the door. It was unlocked, and we went inside. The front room of the cabin was a mess of strewn clothes, half-eaten TV dinners, and bedsheets. It looked like Bevo had been sleeping on the couch. There was a big table that stood not quite chest high with some odd-looking machines on it, some of them clamped to the table’s edge.

“Are these for drugs?” I asked, pointing to the machines.

“They’re not Bevo’s,” Sally said. “They’re Gill’s. They’re for loading bullet casings. He and Wick used to make their own bullets.” She pointed under the table to a huge plastic sack of what looked like black sand.

“Gunpowder?” I asked.

“Walk lightly, city boy,” she said, “that stuff is pretty old. You don’t want to set it off.”

“Sally, tell me about you and Stroud.”

She sat on the stool in front of the loading table and took a brass casing out of a paper sack. “Gill showed me how to do this once,” she said. “Let’s see if I can work it without blowing us both up.” She fitted the casing into a recess in one of the machines clamped to the edge of the table.

“It’s a simple story,” she said. “Gill rehabilitated me. After I graduated from college I went into a tailspin. I think I was having an allergic reaction to being Nyman Scales’s daughter, though I didn’t know that’s what it was.” She took some gunpowder out of a small crock and filled a metal funnel on the top of the machine. “I had an apartment in Mule Springs, but I was out at the ranch all the time. Nyman had me change my name legally. It was all part of a scam to fool the government about who owned his dairy. I didn’t care. I was into drugs, antidepressants mostly, mixing them with whatever I could find in the liquor cabinet. Nyman didn’t notice. He still saw me as his trained pony. At the time, I still was. I would listen to him, knowing everything coming out of his mouth was a lie, and yet I would nod and smile and do what he told me to do.” She shook her head. “What makes people do things like that, Counselor? How can a person just consign herself to hell?”

“He’s your father, Sally,” I said. She put up a hand as if to bat the words away.

“The judicial coordinator’s job came open, and Nyman thought it would be great having someone he could use in the office, someone to feed him inside information. So he found out what the requirements were—college degree, six months of work in a law office, the ability to count to ten. He told me to go get a job with some lawyers. I remembered the time Gill got me out of jail, so I went there. He hired me on the spot. God knows why. I looked like a reanimated corpse with the shakes. But then, so did Gill. He hired me, and Wick went along with it.”

“And Stroud straightened you out?” I asked.

“Let’s just say that Gill Stroud did not treat me like a trained pony. He was the first man I ever met who dealt with me like I was a human being.”

“And then he fell in love with you?” I asked.

“That’s one version.”

“What’s your version?” I asked.

Sally turned a crank on the side of the machine and sent a small amount of powder into the casing. She set a cone of lead in another fitting in the machine and used a lever to stuff the cone into the top of the casing. She tossed me the bullet.

“That’s for a .38 special,” she said. “It’ll fit the gun that the boys gave you last night and which you forgot when you went home, I assume because Wanda Sue Lovell had got you thinking about dental hygiene.”

“Sally.”

“My relationship with Gill Stroud is my business. Mine and Gill’s. Can you accept that, Counselor?”

“I guess I’ll have to,” I replied. “But after you straightened out, you took the district coordinator’s job, anyway.”

“That’s right. I let Nyman pull the strings, and I got the job.”

“Why?”

“I figured doing an honest job in that office was the best way to show my father that he’d better train another pony, because this one had gotten away from him.”

“And you haven’t been helping him out?”

Sally looked at me in exasperation. “No, Counselor, I have not been helping Nyman. He’s asked, all right, lots of times, and every single time I’ve shut him down. Daddy’s little girl isn’t Daddy’s little girl anymore. What’s more, if I ever get proof—solid proof—that he has killed an animal for money, I’ll go after him any way I can.”

I remembered Stroud thundering at Wick in Boo’s barbecue shack that there was no evidence of wrongdoing on Sally’s part as judicial district coordinator, and I felt one of the knots in my gut begin to loosen. The old man was right about Sally—and I suddenly realized that she was the one thing in the world I had most wanted the lying old charlatan to be right about.

“And yet,” I said, moving toward her, “here you are, whoring for Bevo Rasmussen.”

She stared at me for a moment—just long enough to see that, for the first time, I had gotten the jump on her. She shrugged, a faint smile on her lips. “I guess it’s my bad blood,” she said. “What can I do?”

“I think you need a lawyer,” I said. She got off her stool, backed slowly along the table as I approached.

“Why would I need a lawyer?” she asked, letting me back her against the wall.

“Legal services,” I replied. “Maybe something to do with duct tape.” I reached to kiss her, but as my lips brushed hers she pushed me away.

“No, damn it,” she said, “I’m mad at you.” She poked me in the chest, and it was my turn to be backed along the wall. “I cooked you dinner, I exorcised your house, I saved your kneecap, I provided you with truly amazing sex, and you called me a whore. Jesus, I get crazy just thinking about it. No, sir, I’ve got no more pity for the poor city boy.”

“Pity?” I said. “You left me taped to the goddamned chair!”

“You deserved it,” she replied. She started to say something else, then her gaze went past me into the room beyond.

I turned and looked into the room. It was packed to the ceiling with boxes. I switched on the light and saw that the boxes were for electronic equipment of all sorts—television sets, stereo amplifiers, speakers, CD players, phone answering machines, faxes. There must have been a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of boxed goods, all stacked neatly as if in a warehouse.

“Bevo is fencing stolen goods,” Sally said. She began to laugh. “Like I said, the little shit is full of surprises.”

Sally drove me back to Stroud’s,
and I ran upstairs to tell the old man about the stolen goods warehoused in his cabin. They would create quite an embarrassment if the police found them. And as of tomorrow, the police would include among their ranks an ex-pilot with revenge on his mind. I yelled Stroud’s name.

“Be careful,” Sally called after me.

The old man wasn’t in his room. He wasn’t in the house.

“Damn,” said Sally. “That means he’s headed for the county line.”

Jenks was dry, and the nearest bars were in Claymore County. According to Sally, Stroud often slipped out and drove himself to the Claymore County line, coming home hours later in a lolling, weaving tour that had made him infamous in the small towns along State Highway 11. “Folks down there call him the road warrior,” Sally said.

“He wouldn’t get drunk tonight,” I said, “not with a deposition tomorrow.”

Sally shook her head. “I’ve seen him drink himself half to death the night before a murder trial.” And so had I, it occurred to me: The morning before the Clifton Hardesty trial, Stroud had been boiling drunk when I helped Molly Tunstall bail him out for DWI.

“He says drinking helps him see things he wouldn’t see sober,” Sally explained. “The finer points of the law are hiding at the bottom of the glass, he says.”

I phoned Wick Chandler’s home and got no answer. “Damn it,” I said to Sally, “Wick is supposed to be going over Bevo’s case file.”

“Wick Chandler is going over Deirdre Starns,” Sally replied. “Or maybe Joyce Littler or Bobbie June Gilroy. Inch by inch.”

I got in my car and headed back to town, miffed that neither of my colleagues seemed to be taking their looming courtroom disaster seriously. On the way home I stopped at the office to pick up the file that Wick Chandler had told me he was going to review. To my surprise, Molly Tunstall was at her desk working on the computer.

“On a Sunday, Molly?” I said, standing in the doorway to her office.

“It’s this new word processor,” she explained. “I don’t have time during the week to figure it out.” She sat hunched in front of the keyboard, frowning at the screen.

“It’s too bad your bosses don’t have your dedication,” I told her. There must have been a good deal of disgust in my voice.

“Mr. Chandler and Mr. Stroud tend to do business in funny ways,” she said, “but the business gets done. If Mr. Stroud has a big trial coming up, he might go fishing for a couple of days before it starts.”

“Or go drinking,” I said.

“Mr. Chandler usually hunts up some female companionship. It may look to you like they’re just not paying attention to the case at hand, but it’s always on the back burner. Sometimes the back burner is better than the front burner.”

“Sometimes?” I asked.

The lines around Molly’s mouth and chin tightened. “It doesn’t always work.”

“Is it going to work for Bevo Rasmussen?” I asked.

She looked mournfully up at me. “I couldn’t say.”

“How long have you been with the firm, Molly?”

“About eight years.”

“Has it always been like this? Have they always flown by the seat of their pants?”

She thought for a moment. “There have always been ups and downs, I suppose. Things might have been a little smoother when Sally Dean worked here. She really was a help. I think Mr. Stroud tended to drink less back then. At least when he came in to work he was in better shape.”

“He cleaned himself up for her?” I asked.

Molly nodded. “When she left, the drinking got a lot worse. Then Sally started spending time at the farm. She moved her horse up there. It seems to have done Mr. Stroud some good.”

“So you don’t dislike Sally?”

Molly looked at me for a long moment. I could tell she was trying to make up her mind about telling me something.

“My husband and I had a farm out west of town. This was before I came to work here. One afternoon Roy came back from a stock sale down in Pickton with a milk cow he’d bought from a teenaged girl. He had paid a little more than we had agreed on for the cow. He was a bit embarrassed about that. But he said he had done a good deed. The girl needed the money. He said I’d have been proud of him. The next week, the sheriff came out to tell us that the sale hadn’t gone through. The cow was really owned by a farmer out toward Mule Springs, and the ownership paper the girl had was fraudulent. We wound up losing the cow and the money Roy had paid. It made a hole in our budget for quite a while.”

“I take it the girl was Sally?”

“I didn’t know who she was at the time. Three years later, after Roy had died and the farm was up for sale, I got a knock at the door. It was a girl, asking if I was Mrs. Tunstall and wanting to see Roy. When I told her Roy was gone, she handed me an envelope with cash in it, told me she had come to make restitution for the cow, and started to leave. I asked her to stay and made some tea. We had a nice talk. That was how I met Sally Dean.”

“She paid you back for the cow,” I said.

“Every dime. I’m not sure, but I think she paid everybody back that she had cheated. She impressed me back then as somebody on a mission. She didn’t know me from Adam, but she stepped right up and admitted what she did and apologized for it. I liked the way she took responsibility for herself. In this office you don’t see a lot of people who are willing to do that.”

“True,” I said.

“I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that I don’t like Sally. That isn’t true.”

“It’s okay, Molly,” I said. “I’m sorry about Roy.”

“Me, too.”

I got Molly to give me Sally’s home number, and after I drove home I called her but got no answer. I left a message asking her to let me buy her dinner, and then went to work rereading the Rasmussen file. I had found it at the office—Wick had not touched it—and for three hours I studied the documents again: the bills of sale for the horses; the declaration sheets for each horse, physical descriptions of the horses on which Stromboli based the insurance policies; the three-way barrage of letters from Bevo, Stromboli, and Stroud; Stromboli’s petition against Bevo; and, of course, SWAT’s unanswered interrogatories.

I noticed that a new document had been added: On Friday Stroud had filed a motion addressed to the Honorable A. C. Tidwell, presiding judge in the case, asking that the deadlines for answering and for requesting answers for interrogatories be extended. The ground Stroud gave for the request was gross incompetence on the part of the lawyer of record—himself. So he had not used the heart attack. What a lot of pride he must have swallowed to draft that motion. I hoped the judge was the sort of man who could rise above personal animosity and grant relief.

I went to sleep on the couch reading the file. Sally never called me back.

At three a.m. my phone rang.

“You’ve got to help me, Clay.” It was Wick, whispering and out of breath. There was a lot of static on the line.

“I can barely hear you,” I told him.

There was shuffling, and when he spoke again, the static had cleared a little. “Clay, do you remember that little house where you picked me up the other day?”

“The house where your girlfriend handcuffed you to the bed?”

“There’s a dirt road about fifty yards beyond the house. I need you to drive down that road about a hundred feet and stop the car. Do you think you could do that?”

“Tonight?” I asked.

“Now!”

“So Mike Starns came home from his fishing trip a little early, did he?”

“Listen, it’ll take you maybe twenty-five minutes to reach that spot. I’ll be waiting for you there. One more thing, Clay.”

“What?”

“When you turn down the dirt road, would you switch off your headlights?”

“Jesus, Wick, is he after you?”

“In a big way, partner,” he said, and the line went dead.