Shoveling Smoke (19 page)

It was a moonless, humid night.
Wick had underestimated the time it would take me to reach the turnoff in the Austin Healey. On my way there I scanned the road ahead and behind, looking for any vehicle that might be looking for me, but the countryside was deserted. I turned onto the dirt road, which disappeared into the woods, and switched off my lights. The world went black. This wasn’t going to work; I could not keep the car on the road in such total darkness, so I turned on the parking lights and crept forward.

“Wick!” I whispered out the open window.

Something flitted across the dim glow of the parking lights. It looked like a giant piebald bat with a horribly distended stomach. With a leathery flapping of its wings the creature pulled desperately at the passenger door.

“For God’s sake, unlock it!” the figure cried. Its face was masked. I reached over and let it into the car. “Jesus, Clay, are you trying to get us caught?” Wick was wearing black bikini briefs, a black cape, and a glittering black mask, and that was all. His snow hill of a stomach heaved as he fought to get air into his lungs. I could see scratches on his pale skin, some of them bleeding.

“What the hell?”

“Go!” Wick yelled. “Go, go, go!” I hit the accelerator and took off down the dirt road.

“There’s a crossroads in half a mile that’ll take us back to the main road,” said the big bat in the passenger seat.

“Are you all right, Wick?” I asked.

“Maybe he didn’t see me,” Wick gasped. “Thank God Deirdre’s got better hearing than me. She had me out the back door with seconds to spare. She threw me the phone and locked the door. I just wish to hell she’d thrown me my pants.”

“So you don’t know for sure if Mike Starns is looking for you?” I asked. “Jesus, Wick, he’ll know your car!”

“It’s at home. Deirdre drove last night. But he’s got to be out here, Clay,” Wick said. “He’s not very smart, but, hell, my clothes are all over the house, and the way Deirdre’s made up...”

We turned left onto another dirt road and found ourselves driving alongside a tall chain-link fence.

“Are those headlights?”
Wick cried, looking behind us.

“I can’t see anything,” I told him. Wick panicked. He reached over, switched off the parking lights, and grabbed the steering wheel.

“Faster, Clay!” he yelled as we fought for the wheel. The little car left the road and bounced through grass at maybe fifty miles an hour. I slammed my foot down on the brake, and the car fishtailed to the left, smashing into something springy that yielded to the weight of the car, snapping and singing like a piano hitting pavement after a seven-story drop. The engine died as the car came to a stop. I found myself crumpled in the floorboard, gasping for breath, with a terrific pain in my ribs. We were upright, though canted at a steep angle.

“You okay?” I asked. There was no answer. I looked over and saw that Wick was gone, his door open. He must have been thrown out of the speeding car, and as I struggled for breath, my mind formed a terrible picture of Wick Chandler sprawled in the grass, dying, in his Batman outfit. Then I heard the sounds of a scuffle. I raised up painfully and peered through the windshield. Two shadowy figures were wrestling in the starlit meadow. One, the bat, seemed to be getting pummeled pretty badly. I heard blow after blow landing on soft flesh, and Wick’s panicked voice raining curses.

“I’m coming, Wick!” I hollered, afraid Mike Starns would beat him to death before I could pull myself out of the car. My door would not open, so I began to climb across to the passenger side, when it occurred to me to flip on the car’s lights. I did so, and for an instant both antagonists froze in the headlights’ glare. Then Wick’s assailant disappeared, jumping straight up, out of the light, with a rustle of its shaggy wings. There was a thump as it landed on the car’s hood, and then the big bird was loping down the dirt road, kicking up little puffs of dust in the heavy night air.

“Where’d he go?” asked a dazed and battered Wick. He sank to the grass and ran his hands over his face. “Jesus,” he said, “he kicked the shit out of me.”

“Congratulations, Batman,” I said, “you just got beaten up by an emu.” I climbed out of the passenger door, gasping against the pain in my ribs, and helped Wick to his feet. We inspected the car, which had smashed into the fence circling Starns’s ostrich farm and was now sitting on a fallen stretch of chain link. Aside from a crumpled rear fender and a jammed door, the Austin Healey seemed okay. When I crawled back in and turned the key in the ignition, the engine started up. Wick limped around and got in, and we rolled off the chain link.

“Do you think we could travel for a while without the lights, Clay?” Wick asked. I told him to shut up, and neither of us opened our mouths, except to groan, until we reached town.

Fearful that Mike Starns might be waiting for him at his place, Wick asked if he could sleep on my sofa. I drove us to my place, found him sheets and a pillow, and went into the bathroom to take a look at my ribs. There was a purplish shadow under my arm that hurt when I prodded it, but in general the pain was subsiding, and I could breathe without difficulty. When I came out of the bathroom, Wick was sitting on the sofa, putting a Band-Aid over a particularly nasty scratch on his forearm.

“I almost pulled my goddamn arm off in a thicket,” he told me. In his bedraggled cape and briefs, he looked like a parody of a comic-book crime fighter. He was terribly skinned up from running through the woods, and his arms and legs were a mottled mass of bruises.

“Well, Wick,” I said, “so much for reform.”

“I think it has something to do with my thyroid,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to get it checked.”

Gathering up the pages of the Rasmussen file, I dropped them next to him on the couch.

“I’ll go over it before I go to sleep,” he promised.

“Sleep light tonight, Wick,” I said. “There’s an emu stalking you.”

I went to bed and drifted off to sleep, wondering if a phone call would summon me to the jail before dawn to bail out my other boss.

A saffron haze blanketed the fields
early the next morning as I drove Chandler and Stroud out to the Scales ranch for the deposition. We were in Stroud’s Lincoln. The old man had made it back from the Claymore County bars the night before without incident, so far as he remembered. Now he lay in the backseat with his battered briefcase on his chest and his knees in the air. He looked like a corpse squeezed into a coffin too short for him.

Wick Chandler slumped against the passenger door in the front seat about three-quarters dressed: His suit was on him, but nothing was buttoned or zipped. Earlier that morning, after I had driven him to his house to clean himself up, he discovered that various parts of his body were so swollen with pain from his night in the woods that he could not fasten his clothes. “You’re going to have to cinch up when we get to Scales’s ranch,” I told him as we drove.

“I’ll be dead from pain and shame before we reach Tyler,” he replied. “I am already losing feeling in my extremities.” It was like driving an ambulance full of crash victims who were slipping away.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “we need to talk about our client.” I told them about Bevo’s Dairy Queen assignations with Antoine Duett, the SWAT dirty tricks man. “Bevo’s talking with the enemy,” I said. “Anybody know why?”

“I wish I could die right now,” Wick moaned. “I wish this door would open and I would fall out on the road and die.”

A spindly leg wobbled over the seat-back, the toe of its shoe feeling along the passenger-side window above Wick’s head. “If I can reach the latch with my foot, I’ll accommodate you,” Stroud said.

Wick swatted the shoe wavering in the air over his head. “That’s right, ridicule a man in pain,” he whined.

I told them about Bevo’s second career as a receiver of stolen electronics.

“Bevo’s got stolen goods out at my cabin?” Stroud said, sitting up in the backseat.

“This isn’t good,” said Wick.

“What do you think would happen if Officer Meachum were to stumble on Bevo’s illegal warehouse?” I asked. “It could mean jail time for you, Gill.”

“Clay’s right, Gill,” said Wick. “Deirdre says the ex-pilots are up to something. What if they’re planning to raid the cabin?”

“How would Deirdre-of-the-emus know what the ex-pilots are doing?” I asked.

“Her husband, Mike, pals around with them when he’s not out fishing or cursing his birds. Deirdre sometimes passes me information. That Deirdre’s a good old gal.”

“I hope things didn’t go too rough for her last night,” I said.

“Deirdre can handle Mike,” Wick replied. “She kicks harder than those damn birds.”

“One crisis at a time, gentlemen,” said Stroud. “Let’s concentrate on the Rasmussen case, shall we? We’ve got Scales to depose this morning, and tomorrow we depose Pulaski in Mule Springs.”

“Maybe we should have hired our own pathologist,” I said. “Maybe Pulaski missed something.”

“That’s entirely possible,” replied Wick. “I’ll tell you something not everybody knows about our Mr. Pulaski. Stan-the-Man writes a mean report, and he reads it like he’s Orson Welles playing Sherlock fucking Holmes. He oozes confidence on the stand. But the fact is, Stan Pulaski is an idiot.”

“That son of a bitch needs his bag split and his leg run through it,” grumbled Stroud.

“You see, Clay,” said Wick, “Pulaski didn’t get his reputation as a hot-shot pathologist by being brilliant, but by being for hire. You can’t testify in over four hundred cases and always be right. Pulaski is as crooked as Nyman Scales, or Bevo Rasmussen, for that matter. You can bet he slants his reports.”

“Then why hasn’t he been caught?” I asked.

Wick laughed. “Why isn’t Nyman Scales in jail?” he replied. “Why is Paul Primrose allowed to prosecute cases? Why is Tidwell a judge? Because that’s the way things work, Clay. The system takes care of itself. I thought you would know that, coming from Houston.”

“Even if Pulaski missed something and we caught him on it, the jury wouldn’t care,” said Stroud. “I’ve never seen a jury that didn’t love Pulaski. He flashes them his big shit-eating smile, and they buy his report just because he’s so goddamned smooth.”

“Suppose we had gotten a pathologist,” Wick said. “We couldn’t get him on the stand. The interrogatories, remember?”

“And there’s no chance of help from the judge?” I asked.

Wick shook his head. “Not for us. Not from Wrong Tit Tidwell.”

“All right,” I said as we rolled through the fields toward Tyler, “tell me how Tidwell got that nickname.”

Wick explained, “A few years ago we handled a divorce for a woman who had just given birth to twins.”

“Moe and Flo,” said Stroud. “Ugliest little stumps I have ever seen. I believe the parents were related.”

“Anyway,” said Wick, “the parents had separated before the children were born, and right after the birth, the mother filed for divorce.”

“Irreconcilable differences,” Stroud said.

“There was a custody fight over the twins,” said Wick, “and it was complicated by the fact that both of them were allergic to cow’s milk. The mother was breast-feeding them every three hours or so, one on each side. Gill went to court to get temporary custody for the mother until the divorce could be heard.”

“A. C. Tidwell, the presiding judge, considers himself a mental giant,” Stroud explained. “Most of our judges consider themselves mental giants. There should be a home for mental giants out here.”

“Here’s the kicker, Clay,” said Wick. “Tidwell awarded the boy to the father and the girl to the mother. He split them up.”

“So the boy wouldn’t be able to be nursed by his mother,” I said. “Wouldn’t he have died?”

“Yep,” said Wick. “Either from malnutrition or an allergic reaction to store-bought milk.”

“The wisdom of Solomon,” said Stroud, cackling in the backseat. “Of course, I filed an appeal. I also contacted La Leche. Know who they are?”

“Aren’t they an action group for breast-feeding women?” I asked.

“That’s right,” Wick replied. “They’re a national organization, you know. They showed up by the hundreds at the appellate court when Gill argued the appeal. The appellate court reversed the decision of the trial court and sent the case back to Tidwell.”

“That’s where the court of appeals judges made their mistake,” Stroud said. “They should have spelled out in plain English what they wanted Tidwell to do. But they didn’t, and old A.C. took the reversal to mean he’d given each kid to the wrong parent. So to fix things, he reversed his own ruling, gave the little girl to her daddy and the boy to the mother.”

“You’re joking,” I said.

“Gospel truth,” Stroud said. “I appealed again, on an emergency basis. This all happened in less than thirty-six hours, you understand. This time the breast-feeding folks took the story to the networks.”

“The
Today
show sent a crew down here,” said Wick. “Tidwell wouldn’t talk to them.”

“A.C. got reversed again, of course,” said Stroud. “This time around, the court told him to let both kids stay with their mother.”

“I don’t believe Flo or Moe actually missed a meal,” said Wick. “Anyway, from then on, old A.C. was known far and wide as Wrong Tit Tidwell.”

“Our relationship with him soured after that,” Stroud said.

“You shouldn’t have called him a syphilitic idiot on national television, Gill,” said Wick. “I think that’s why he’s so down on us.”

“That could have something to do with it,” Stroud agreed.

A few minutes later
we topped a rise, and the vast green roofs of the Ninth-Man Ranch spread out below us.

“Mother dog, that’s a big place,” said Wick.

The Ninth-Man was the size of Jenks and much better organized. Giant hangarlike buildings sat amid neat rows of stables. On all sides were rolling pastures, some divided into exercise fields, some into neat little pens, each with a corrugated tin sunroof, for individual horses. Wood fences ran out past the pastures, securing even more land beyond. The whole ranch was painted a bucolic green, and the paint looked fresh. On the roof of the largest building was painted a complicated stick figure, in white. “I take it that’s the ninth man,” I said.

“Check out the torso,” Wick said. The long, squarish body of the figure was composed of lines making up the roman numeral IX.

“Nyman Scales was the ninth of nine children,” Wick explained. “Apparently it was a litter of boys, and the parents ran out of names after number eight. Nyman’s real name is Ninth-Man Scales. Over the years, it’s gotten rubbed down to Nyman.”

“Weird,” I said.

“Yes,” said Wick, “but functional.”

People were bustling among the buildings, trucks unloading, forklifts buzzing in and out of storage sheds, men leading horses along the graveled roadways that surrounded and connected the buildings. Little green golf carts hummed down the gravel roads.

To one side of the wrought-iron gate leading into the compound stood a statue of a colossal rearing stallion, perhaps three stories high. The stallion was built of red brick and framed by a huge golden horseshoe, with the name of the ranch stamped on its arch.

“This must be horse heaven,” said Wick as we drove past the brick horse. Behind it sat a wood-frame Victorian-style house that would have seemed enormous anyplace but here. I parked the Lincoln in front of the house; we walked up onto the porch and rang the bell. An attractive young woman in jeans and a checked workshirt greeted us, saying that we were expected, and that Mr. Scales was waiting for us in the laboratory. She took us outside to one of the green golf carts and drove us past several of the big barns to a one-story brick building with a picture on its side of a cartoon cow smiling and saying “Moooooove over, Mother Nature!”

“What do they do in here?” I asked the girl.

“It used to be a dairy genetics lab,” she said. “Now we work on horses.”

“Better horses for better living,” said Wick.

She let us off at the front door. I knocked, and the door was opened by a tall, wiry man in frayed overalls, workshirt, and a short-brimmed felt hat badly faded from wear. He looked like one of those lean-faced, desperate men in photographs from the Dust Bowl of the thirties, with pale-blue eyes haunted by hunger and mad visions. The ninth man. Stroud shook hands with him.

“Gilliam Stroud,” said Scales. “We meet again.”

“Long time between drinks, Nyman,” replied Stroud.

Scales shook hands with Wick. “Mr. Chandler,” he said, “I understand you are interested in pricks.”

“Only those I represent,” said Wick. “Aside from my own, of course.”

“Bevo tells me you just lost a favorite wall ornament down in Dallas.” Scales took from behind the door a smaller version of the corkscrewed stick that I had given to Deck Willhoit in order to keep Bevo intact. “I’m afraid this one is not as long as the one you lost. It’s from a bull, not a whale. But I would like you to accept it as a gift, with my compliments.”

The pizzle was intended to be a walking stick: A flap on one end was shaped into a handle. Wick balanced the stick in his hand, gave a couple of slashes with it through the air.

“Thank you, Nyman,” he said. “It’s a fine replacement.”

Bevo had told the truth about Scales’s mastery of the preacher-boy
s.
Every word he spoke was carefully crafted and uttered with the intimate sincerity of a country parson comforting a stricken parishioner.

“We’re all friends here,” said Scales, flashing a scruffy smile. There was a feral quality to it that reminded me of Bevo’s smile, but I saw no diamonds in any of Scales’s teeth.

Wick introduced me to Scales, and we shook hands. It was like sticking my hand in a trash compactor.

“Bevo has mentioned you to me. He says you and my daughter are getting to be friends. You might tell her to pay her old man a visit one of these days.” Scales winked at me.

A chill crept up my spine.

“This way, gentlemen,” Scales said, conducting us down a hallway.

The secretary’s office that we entered was crowded with people sitting on folding chairs, drinking coffee. We shook hands with the court reporter, a ferret-eyed little woman who clutched her stenographer’s machine and kept eyeing the door. Scales introduced us to Vincenzo Laspari, a representative of Associazione Stromboli, who had flown in from Naples for the deposition. Laspari, a trim little man in an Italian suit, gave me a chill smile and a formal handshake that, together with his silence, served to increase the cultural distance between us. The man seated next to Laspari, and rising now to meet us, was Warren Jacobs, counsel for the plaintiff. Jacobs was maybe forty-five, tall and rangy, with wisps of sandy hair combed across his forehead. He looked exactly like Rita Humphrey once described the typical SWAT lawyer: a vampire who played a lot of racquetball.

We shook hands with Jacobs, whose every movement seemed spring-loaded with confidence. He professed it an honor to meet Gilliam Stroud. “Mr. Wortmann of our firm asked me to convey his regards. He speaks very highly of you. He says you taught him everything he knows about tort law.”

“Jimmy Wortmann,” said Stroud. “Do you remember him, Mr. Chandler?”

“I believe I do,” said Wick.

The old man gave Jacobs a suspicious look. “You’re telling me Jimmy Wortmann made
good?”

Jacobs cleared his throat. “He is one of the senior partners of our firm, sir.”

Stroud turned to Wick. “You hear that, Mr. Chandler?” he said. “Jimmy Wortmann made good.”

Wick held out his palm. “Pay up, Mr. Stroud.”

Stroud pulled a crumpled five-dollar bill out of a pocket and handed it to Wick. “Who’d ever have thought that kid would have amounted to a rat’s ass?”

“I did,” Wick said, pocketing the bill. “I had Jimmy Wortmann pegged for a rat’s ass the minute I met him.”

They had worked the joke so smoothly that it took Jacobs a moment to catch on. His eyes narrowed, then he smiled at Stroud. “Mr. Wortmann told me to watch out for you. I can see why.”

Scales unfolded chairs for us, and we sat down. Our arrival had interrupted a chat, which now resumed, about the many ways in which horses were murdered for profit.

“A fellow up near Gainesville stuffed Ping-Pong balls into the nostrils of his horse,” said Scales. “You may not know, Mr. Parker, that a horse cannot breathe through its mouth.”

“I didn’t know that,” I replied.

“The horse died, all right, but the owner hadn’t thought up a way to explain how it could have died by asphyxiation in an open field.” Scales chuckled. “He tried to argue that the horse was so badly scared by a crop duster plane, it forgot to breathe. I swear, some of these old boys aren’t as smart as the horses they kill.”

There was another knock at the door, and Paul Primrose, the Mule Springs district attorney, walked into the room, along with a uniformed policeman.

“Howdy, folks,” said Primrose in his high-pitched whine. “What have you got going here, Mr. Scales, a prayer meeting?”

“Holy shit,” said Wick.