Shoveling Smoke (2 page)

Three minutes later,
I was driving Stroud’s Lincoln Continental out of Jenks. Molly Tunstall sat on the passenger side, and the old man slouched in the backseat, staring at me in the rearview mirror, tufts of fine white hair floating over his skull. He had rheumy blue eyes that burned brightly despite the rheum.

“Clayton Parker,” he said, the syllables rumbling like boulders down a mountainside. “I suppose people call you Clay?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Do I have to call you Clay?”

“Is there something you don’t like about my name?” I asked.

He laughed and shook his head.

“Mr. Stroud,” I said, swinging the car onto State Highway 69, “if there’s something about me that you don’t like, say so.” I looked in the rearview mirror to give him back stare for stare, but he had disappeared from the mirror. He had fallen over as I turned the car.

“Is he all right, Molly?” I asked.

“He’ll be fine,” she said.

“I’m guessing from the look of him that he does this all the time.”

“Oh, no,” she replied. “You see, it’s Tuesday, and Monday nights he likes to get out of the house.” The little secretary explained that Jenks is in a dry county, so when Mr. Stroud wished to visit a bar, he usually drove to one of the three or four that sat on the other side of the county line. For that reason, Molly said, the local constabulary tended to watch for him.

“Where the hell is Hard-dick?” Stroud asked from the backseat.

“He means Mr. Chandler,” Molly explained. “Hard-
wick
Chandler.”

I heard terrible wheezing from the backseat. Molly showed no trace of alarm. “He’s laughing?” I asked. She nodded. In another moment, he began to snore.

The big car lumbered down the two-lane highway. “He asked a good question,” I said. “Where is Mr. Chandler?” I wanted to know why the founder of the firm wasn’t cleaning up after his partner, why it had fallen to Molly and me to do it on my first day on the job.

“Mr. Chandler is out of pocket,” she said. Something about the way she said it gave me the feeling she wanted to say more, but she didn’t.

“Will Mr. Chandler meet us in Mule Springs?” I asked.

“I doubt it,” she said. “No, it’s just us.” She reached into the backseat floorboard, pulled up a worn leather briefcase stuffed with papers, and rummaged through it.

“I don’t see how Mr. Stroud can function in a trial, drunk as he is.”

“He’s not drunk. He tends to tipple on the weekends, like I told you. But he’s as sober right now as you or I.” Molly pulled out of the briefcase a spray can of air freshener—Garden Mist—and made two or three passes with the can over her sleeping boss. The car became filled with the fresh, sweet scent of dewy flowers on a spring morning. Stroud continued to snore.

On the outskirts of Mule Springs, Molly had me pull into a Texaco station so that I could change into my suit in the men’s room. I have always packed a complete outfit into a garment bag, and in this case, anticipating my first day in a new law firm, I had brought standard dress for the sort of lawyer I had, until recently, been: an associate in one of Houston’s more prestigious firms. Imagine my surprise when the pair of Cole Haan oxfords that I thought I remembered slipping into the shoe compartment of the garment bag failed to be there. I had forgotten my shoes. It shouldn’t have surprised me. Considering the state I had been in during the months since my fall from grace in Houston, it was a wonder I had remembered as much of my ensemble as I did. This lapse left me dressed in a black pin-striped Armani, a Canali tie, and flip-flops over my socks. Mortified, I walked out and got into the Lincoln.

“We have to stop at a shoe store before we go to the courthouse,” I told Molly Tunstall as I started the car. She looked at her watch.

“I’m afraid we don’t have time,” she said. “We’ve got to be there in six minutes.”

“We have to do something,” I said, pulling the Lincoln onto the street.

“At least you’ve got socks,” Molly said. “We’ll be okay.”

“Look, Ms. Tunstall, there’s no way I’m walking into a courtroom dressed—”

“We can’t be late, Mr. Parker,”
Molly said. “This is not a forgiving judge. And it’s a murder trial.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said, my state of mind ratcheting up from mortification to panic.

To tell the truth, my experience as a trial lawyer was a little thin. Years earlier, when I went to work in Houston, I experimented with the trial branch of my firm and found I didn’t have the knack for winning over a jury. I had the sweaty-palm problem, galloping drizzles, stage fright, call it what you will. Trial law is a performance art, like acting or playing the cello, except the stakes are a hell of a lot higher. Blow it once in front of a jury or a judge, and fortunes can be lost, lives destroyed. And it is so easy to screw up. All it might take is a nervous swallow or a scratchy throat or a joke that doesn’t quite come off. During the few trials I actually worked, I became an insomniac, a zombie-eyed burden to my then-wife and my friends and, I feared, to my clients as well. Thank God I was good with figures, and my firm let me transfer to tax law.

When Hardwick Chandler called to offer me the job in Jenks, I remember a doubt floating momentarily before my eyes. I thought of asking him about the amount of trial work I might be expected to undertake. But I didn’t. I needed a change, after all. I wanted to get out in the country, and I figured I could handle anything that Jenks, Texas, threw at me.

And now here I was, walking into my first murder trial. In flip-flops.

Molly filled me in on the case that, in a few minutes, Gilliam Stroud would have to be woken up to try. To make things even crazier than they had already been that morning, it was hell’s own case. One spring afternoon three months earlier, on the poor side of Mule Springs, what they call “the acre,” Jolene Biggs had watched as her husband, Lanier Biggs, was shot to death in his own yard by a man named Clifton Hardesty, Stroud’s client. Hardesty had driven his pickup into Biggs’s driveway, called Biggs out of the house, and then emptied both barrels of a shotgun into Biggs at point-blank range. Biggs had been unarmed and, for that matter, mostly undressed, wearing only a pair of shorts. Jolene had seen the whole thing from the front porch, not ten feet away. Biggs had bled to death on his own sidewalk.

After shooting Biggs, Clifton Hardesty had driven immediately to the police station and confessed. The district attorney was going for first-degree murder, premeditated, cold-blooded evil. Clifton Hardesty was guilty
in fact
of shooting Lanier Biggs.

Nevertheless, as was his right, Clifton Hardesty had pleaded not guilty.

The trial had started yesterday, and today Jolene Biggs, wife of the murdered man, was scheduled to testify.

Mule Springs looked a lot like Jenks, except there was a town square with one of those ornate, castellated redbrick courthouses in the center. I pulled the Lincoln into the courthouse parking lot and switched off the ignition.

“Molly, I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can be of much help in this case. I haven’t read it, I don’t know any of the testimony.”

“Mr. Parker,” Molly said, “I’m not sure what Mr. Stroud will want you to do, but whatever it is, you don’t have to worry about it.
He’s
trying the case.” She turned to the backseat and said, “We’re here, Mr. Stroud. It’s time to go to court.”

Gilliam Stroud sat up, smiled at Molly Tunstall, and winked a red-rimmed eye at me. “Let’s get ’em,” he said, and climbed out of the car.

The courtroom was one of those
old-fashioned, high-ceilinged outfits with a balcony and whitewashed walls and a giant Texas flag hanging above the judge’s bench. There were maybe twenty-five onlookers, dwarfed in the wide, high emptiness of the room. As I followed Stroud and Molly down the center aisle, I noticed that Stroud walked with a slight limp but had lost all trace of the unbalanced swagger that had made getting him into his car difficult earlier that morning.

Stroud noticed my shoes. “Mr. Parker,” he said, “you’re not a member of any sort of sect, are you? Some outfit with its own dress code?”

Before I could answer we reached the defense table, where the defendant was already sitting. Clifton Hardesty was a scrawny, middle-aged man with a blond ducktail and deep pockmarks on his face. He was wearing what I assumed were his best clothes, a deeply wrinkled plaid sport coat, an orange pullover shirt, and jeans.

Molly Tunstall had brought the briefcase with her and now began to lay out stacks of papers and files on the table.

“Where’ve you been, Mr. Stroud?” Hardesty whispered.

“I have been rounding up experts to aid in your defense,” Stroud replied in a loud voice, placing his hand on my shoulder. “Mr. Hardesty, allow me to introduce Dr. Clayton Parker. Please don’t be alarmed by his choice of shoes. He is afflicted with a ter-rible case of athlete’s foot and has to air his toes.”

“Pleased to meet you, Dr. Parker,” said Hardesty, who stood and offered me his hand, which was cold and limp. “Sorry about your toes.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. At that moment the jury filed in, followed by the judge, and everyone in the courtroom stood. I tried to back away from the defense table and take a seat next to Molly in the first row of the audience, but Stroud clutched my arm and, as the judge seated himself, guided me into the chair between himself and Hardesty.

“I’m not a doctor, and I don’t have athlete’s foot,” I whispered to the old man.

“My mistake,” he whispered back. “We’ll sort it out later.”

I noticed that a slender, hunched man sitting at the prosecutor’s table in a Western-cut suit and bolo tie was staring at me. Stroud nodded at the man, who acknowledged the nod with one of his own. “Our prosecutor,” Stroud whispered to me. “Nasty little prick.”

As soon as the clerk had called the court to session, the prosecutor stood, pointed at me, and said to the judge in a reedy whine, “Your Honor, I wonder if we could have this gentleman identified. He may be a potential witness, and the State has invoked the Rule.”

“Mr. Stroud,” said the judge, “the State has invoked the Rule of Witnesses, so potential witnesses have to remain outside, out of the presence and hearing of the other witnesses.”

Stroud rose, smiling. “Surely the Court will exempt an expert who must listen to the State’s witness in order to rebut that testimony? He can’t talk about what he hasn’t heard, Your Honor.”

I felt my throat going dry. Stroud was implying to the Court and the jury that I was a medical expert, a doctor of some kind. We were defrauding the Court! We were going to be disbarred! The judge, an elderly, rumpled man who seemed to be trying to shake off the effects of a nap, looked me over. When his gaze reached my feet, he woke up all at once.

“Mr. Stroud,” he said, “can you explain to me why your expert is not wearing proper shoes in my courtroom?”

“Bromohydrosis, Your Honor,” Stroud said gravely. “It’s a condition of the lower extremities. My colleague has been stricken with a serious case of it. His podiatrist insists on constant ventilation. I assure you we meant no disrespect to the Court.”

The judge gave me a hard look, then shrugged and bid the prosecutor call his first witness.

“Bromohydrosis?” I whispered to Stroud as he sat down.

“A serious case,” he replied.

I shook my head and started to tell him what I thought about feeding lies to a judge, when the old man shoved some black-and-white photos in front of me that choked my protest in my throat. The photos revealed a large man, naked except for boxers, lying facedown in an inky puddle.

“When you shake your head in front of the jury, be sure you’re looking at these,” the old man whispered. “And look concerned! You may be up in a moment. Don’t piss in the on-deck circle, Tiger.”

The State called Jolene Biggs, widow of the deceased. Mrs. Biggs took the stand and was sworn in, a large, doughy woman wearing a shiny green dress, her bright red hair unraveling from a bun on the top of her head. As the prosecutor coached her through her rehearsed testimony, Stroud slid a manila file over to me. In it were photos of Lanier Biggs, the dead man, on the coroner’s table. They were shocking, not so much for the two terrible shotgun wounds in the man’s stomach as for all the old, healed wounds. Smears of scar tissue, some waxen and smooth, some badly puckered, covered the body. It looked like Lanier Biggs had carried a scar for every day of his life. The body was big and well muscled, the face appallingly brutal: one eyebrow shredded by scars, a broken nose, a huge, truculent jaw. Lanier Biggs was nobody I would have wanted to meet in an alley.

“Why do you suppose our prosecutor hasn’t offered these photos in evidence?” Stroud whispered.

By the time the prosecuting attorney turned Jolene Biggs over to the defense for cross-examination, she had explained, in a calm, disaffected tone, how she had watched Hardesty shoot her unarmed husband twice with a shotgun and then drive away. The prosecutor, giving a tug to the ends of his string tie, nodded to Stroud and said, “Pass the witness.”

Stroud climbed to his feet, shuffled through some papers on his desk, picked up a blank sheet of paper and studied it. He walked, with the slight limp I had noticed earlier, to the center of the courtroom, trailing after him the vaporous, rainy-sweet scent of Garden Mist air freshener. He gave the witness a dignified bow.

“Mrs. Biggs, I am sorry for your loss.”

That seemed to confuse the woman on the stand. “Beg pardon?” she replied.

“I’m referring to your loss of Mr. Biggs, the deceased. You must have loved him very much.”

“Oh, yes, sir. He was my husband.”

“Mrs. Biggs, were you ever afraid of your husband?” At this the prosecutor objected, saying it had no bearing on the case at hand.

Stroud withdrew the question. “Now, Mrs. Biggs, you have testified that you saw the defendant, Clifton Hardesty, drive into Lanier Biggs’s driveway shortly before the shooting occurred, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Mr. Biggs went outside to speak to Mr. Hardesty, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Mr. Biggs, your husband, made it very clear to Mr. Hardesty that he wasn’t glad to see him, didn’t he?”

The prosecutor objected, saying the question was not relevant to the facts of the case. Stroud explained to the judge that he was merely following the line of inquiry that the prosecutor himself had opened up, trying to reconstruct as thoroughly as possible the events leading up to and following the shooting. The judge overruled the objection.

In the next ten minutes there were to be several more objections from the prosecution, each more strident than the last, as Stroud coaxed facts from Jolene Biggs that the prosecutor had left untouched. It is customary for a lawyer to stick to yes-or-no questions when cross-examining a hostile witness, since an open-ended question might give the witness a chance to say something damaging. Stroud flicked his questions like a champion fisherman plays a fly.

“I take it,” he said, “that your husband was angry with Clifton Hardesty for stealing from him?”

“No, sir,” replied Jolene Biggs.

“Well, then, I suppose your husband was mad at Clifton for calling him names?”

“No, sir, nobody called Lanier any names.”

“Then my guess is that Lanier got mad at Clifton Hardesty for beating him through the streets with a buggy whip?”

Jolene Biggs let out a surprised laugh. “Nobody hit Lanier with a buggy whip. That ain’t why Lanier was mad.”

“Then why was your husband mad?” asked Stroud, taking a chance.

“He was mad because it was his street.”

The old man raised an eyebrow.
“His
street? What do you mean?”

The woman shrugged. “That’s what he said. He always said it was his street, and anybody wanting to drive it better watch out.”

Stroud had hit pay dirt. According to Jolene Biggs, her husband had appropriated two blocks of Jimpson Street in south Mule Springs as his own personal roadway. He had a habit of running with a baseball bat after cars that ventured down the street. Lanier had been especially angry with Clifton Hardesty, whom he had known since childhood. Mrs. Biggs was unable to say why, except that it had something to do with the shape of Hardesty’s head.

“Lanier called it a walnut head,” Jolene explained to Stroud. “He used to say you can’t trust people with a head shaped like a walnut. It got him real mad sometimes.”

“Mrs. Biggs, didn’t your husband talk about doing violence to Clifton Hardesty?”

“Yes, sir. He said he was going to split that walnut head open, let the evil out.”

“But Clifton Hardesty wasn’t the only one whose head Lanier meant to open, was he?”

“No, sir. Lanier, he threatened everybody. All the time. He said there was lots of walnut heads in this town. Every day he saw more of them.”

“Most people ran from Lanier, didn’t they?”

“Yes, sir. Except those he hit with a bat.”

“But Clifton Hardesty didn’t run, did he?”

“No, sir.”

“Clifton even pulled his shotgun down off the rack in his truck, didn’t he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Lanier Biggs, standing by the truck, saw that gun, just as clearly as you did from ten feet away, didn’t he?”

“Yes, sir. He couldn’t miss it. It was sticking out at him. Clif was trying to make Lanier stand still and talk, but Lanier didn’t care. He cussed Clif, said he’s going to kill him dead. And Clif was holding that shotgun on him. Lanier said for him to just wait there while he went and got his own gun so’s he could kill him.”

It was amazing. Stroud had found the right button to push, and the words tumbled out of Jolene Biggs.

“So Hardesty’s shotgun didn’t frighten your husband?”

“Oh, no, sir. Lanier had been shot before.”

I watched the woman on the stand, trying to imagine what her life with this bullet-scarred maniac had been like. Stroud continued his cross-examination by leading Mrs. Biggs through what she had done after Hardesty had shot her husband and driven away. She revealed that Lanier Biggs, though gravely wounded, was still conscious and lying on the sidewalk, unable to move, shouting curses at the departing truck.

“And did you go to him, Mrs. Biggs?” Stroud asked.

“I asked him what should I do. He took a swipe at me, told me to go get an ambulance. So I got the car keys and drove off for the hospital.”

“Did you take your husband with you?”

“No, sir. He was too angry for me to move him.”

“So you left him and drove for the hospital, is that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You must not have a phone in your house.”

“No, sir. The power company cut it off.”

“And nobody else on your block has a phone?”

“Well, sir, I suppose so.”

“But you didn’t go to anybody else’s house to call the ambulance?”

“No, sir, I never thought of that.”

“But you could tell that your husband was hurt, couldn’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And hurt bad?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you went straight to the hospital, is that right?”

There was a pause before Jolene Biggs answered. “Well, no, sir.”

“No, you didn’t,” confirmed Stroud. “In fact, you went somewhere else, did you not?”

“Well, I saw the 7-Eleven at Pine Street, a couple of blocks away, and I saw I needed some gas, so I pulled in.”

“You stopped to get some gas?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And while you were stopped, did you use the phone to call for an ambulance?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you tell anybody at the store about your wounded husband? Did you ask for help?”

“No, sir.”

“Didn’t think of it, Mrs. Biggs?”

Jolene shrugged. “No, sir. I didn’t think of it, I guess.”

“So you pumped some gas and paid for it. Did you then drive to the hospital?”

“No, sir.”

“No, you stayed in the store a while longer, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why did you stay in the store?”

“Well, I was getting hungry.”

“You were hungry?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you bought something to eat?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell the jury what you bought, Jolene.”

“A burrito.”

“A burrito?”

“Yes, sir. A green chili burrito.”

“A green chili burrito.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any onions in it?”

“No, sir. I don’t like onions.”

“Neither do I. I assume the burrito you bought was frozen?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you had to heat it in the microwave?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you eat the burrito?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where did you eat it?”

“In the store.”

“I bet it was hot.”

“Yes, sir, it was.”

“Did you have to wait a bit for it to cool down?”

“Yes, sir, some.”

“Do you remember how long you had to wait for the burrito to cool?”

“No, sir. Maybe a couple of minutes.”

“Biting into a burrito that’s too hot can really mess up your tongue, can’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did it fill you up, Jolene?”

“Pretty good. I didn’t have no breakfast that day.”

“Did you get a doughnut, too?”

She bristled at that. “No, sir. I did not get a doughnut.”

“There was no time for doughnuts, was there, Jolene? Not while your husband was bleeding to death.”

Jolene Biggs glared at Stroud. “No, sir.”

“You had to get right to the hospital, isn’t that it, Mrs. Biggs?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But first came the gas.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then the burrito.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But you passed up the doughnut.”