Shoveling Smoke (25 page)

“There was a hold on the check,”
Wick panted, fighting for breath in the front seat. “Notice of forfeiture. Primrose did it.”

“The DA seized the check?” I asked.

“I’ll kill him,” Bevo said. “I’ll cut his fucking heart out.”

“That pious cocksucker,” said Wick. “He’s looking for a way to screw us out of the money.”

“How can he do that?” I asked.

“RICO,” Stroud replied.

“Oh, shit,” I said. “All right, Bevo, what have you been up to?”

“Me? I ain’t done nothing, goddamn it. I’m pure as a newborn.”

“Save it,” said Stroud as the car tore down the road to Mule Springs. “We’ll know when we get there.”

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act allows the government to confiscate anything suspected of having been either used or obtained by a criminal during the commission of a crime or as a result of a crime. A man suspected of driving the getaway car in a robbery could find his car taken away from him and sold. Simply put, RICO is a way for the government to steal from people who may or may not turn out to be guilty of a crime. The federal version of the act proved such a smashing revenue bonanza that many states set up their own RICO acts. The money forfeited goes into private “law enforcement” budgets, and district attorneys can tap into the money without having to account for it to the public.

Now it seemed that Paul Primrose, the DA of Claymore County, was using the Texas RICO act to confiscate Bevo’s insurance settlement. All Primrose had to do was think up a way to implicate Bevo and his settlement in a crime that had taken place within his jurisdiction. Since Bevo’s horses had died in Claymore County, Primrose would not have had to work very hard at sketching a case.

Bevo was out of the car almost before it careened to a halt in the courthouse parking lot. We ran after him into the building, rode an elevator to the office of the district attorney. Bevo had taken the stairs and beaten us. When we arrived he was leaning over the DA’s desk, ranting and shaking his fist in Primrose’s colorless face. Stroud swept into the room, grabbed the back of Bevo’s collar, and yanked him into a chair.

“Thanks, Gill,” said Primrose in his dry whine. “I thought for a moment I was a goner.” He adjusted his bolo tie coolly, nodded at us. “Good afternoon, Mr. Parker, Wick. I was sort of expecting you boys.”

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Primrose,” said Stroud, “but I hope you keep it up.”

“I appreciate your support,” Primrose replied. “It’s always gratifying when good works are recognized.”

“I hope you keep it up, because I would sort of like to own this courthouse, and that is exactly what I’ll do after I get through suing you for violating my client’s civil rights.”

Primrose pushed a button on his intercom. “Helen? See if you can get Clyde to step in here for a minute, will you? I think he’s in the basement.” He leaned back in his chair. “Why don’t you boys all have a seat?” There was only one other chair in the room besides the one Bevo was in. I tried to steer Stroud into it, but he shrugged me off, so I took it.

“Mr. Primrose,” I asked, “what is your legal basis for seizing the Rasmussen settlement money?”

“I’d have thought a big-city attorney like you would know the answer to that, Mr. Parker,” the DA replied. “RICO, of course. We have reason to believe that Mr. Rasmussen here is guilty of fraud, and the settlement being the fruit of his criminal activity, we’re confiscating it.”

“There’s not a case you can make against Bevo,” Wick said. “This is stealing, Primrose, pure and simple.”

Primrose’s mouth was hidden by his drooping dishwater mustache, but his eyes were crinkling in a smile. It was the smile of the righteous. “No, Mr. Chandler,” Primrose replied, “these are the wages of sin. We are relieving your client of the wages of sin.”

“Bullshit,” Stroud said. “It’s not going to work, Paul. You’ve got nothing on Bevo, and unless you release the check right now, you will soon have less than that. Not only are you not going to be able to keep the money, but I’m going to grind your pompous dick in the dirt. I will take you to court and crucify you worse than Jesus Christ had it done to him. I’ll take your name off this door and put my own on it. We’ll have bingo in the courtroom every Wednesday night.”

A deputy in a tall white Stetson appeared at the door. “Hey, Paul,” he said.

“Hey, Clyde,” said Primrose. “Wick, Gill, I think you both know Clyde. Mr. Parker, this is Clyde Fortinbras, our sheriff. Clyde, that fellow in the chair over there is Bevo Rasmussen. Have you got something for him?”

“I surely do,” said Clyde. He handed Bevo a couple of papers, which Bevo squinted at before handing them to me. One was a copy of the notice of forfeiture that had prevented Bevo from claiming his money. The other one was an arrest warrant.

“Mr. Rasmussen,” said Fortinbras, “you’re under arrest. The charge is racketeering. I need you to come with me, sir.”

The fury I had seen once or twice before in Bevo’s eyes was there again. His hand slipped down toward his ankle, but before he could reach the razor, I took hold of his wrist. “That’s not going to do you any good,” I said, slipping the razor out of his sock.

“What did I tell you, Mr. Parker?” said Bevo. “It’s a fucking conspiracy.” The sheriff tapped him on the shoulder, and we both stood.

“You’d better get started back to Jenks, Gill,” said Primrose, “if you want to get bail money before the bank closes. Too bad the forfeiture includes your fee, or you could dip into that.”

“P.P., are you sure you are a saved man?” asked Stroud. “Are you certain you have been washed in the blood?”

“Why, yes, Gill, I am a Christian.”

“Well, gird up your loins, because you are about to walk through the valley of the shadow.” He turned, and the whole troupe of us was filing through Primrose’s door, when the DA stopped us.

“You might enjoy this as you drive home,” he said, placing a small tape recorder on his desk and flicking it on. It was a taped conversation between two men, one of whom was unmistakably Bevo, and the other, I realized in a moment, had to have been Antoine Duett, the SWAT dirty-tricks lawyer with whom Bevo had tried to make a secret deal. It was a very clear recording—the wire Duett had been wearing must have been very high-tech—and Bevo’s voice, oozing self-importance, filled the room.

“...flipped the switch and that horse starting sparking and shimmying like Christmas. I never saw anything like it. Smoke coming out its ears. I thought it might buck itself clear, but it just stood there shaking, and then it fell over. The worst part was the smell, of course. It ruined my clothes. Remember to stand upwind. But I got to tell you, there’s better ways to manage a lightning strike.”

We stood transfixed, listening to the tape, until Primrose switched it off.

“The Lord giveth,” he said, “and the Lord taketh away.”

“Son of a bitch,
you can’t trust nobody!” said Bevo. “None of it’s true, Mr. Stroud, I swear! I was just shooting the shit, was all. I never zapped no horse.”

“Where did you get that tape?” Stroud demanded of Primrose. The DA tossed a manila envelope on the desk. Stroud picked it up and examined it. There was no return address, no mark of any kind.

“My secretary found that envelope taped to the door when she came in this morning,” said Primrose. “There was nothing inside it except the tape. I just assumed it was left by a concerned citizen doing his part to clean the riffraff out of our county.” He said he did not recognize the other voice on the tape, but that he would begin searching for him in the foreseeable future. “Unless you would like to tell me who he is,” the DA said to Bevo.

All heads turned to our client, whom the sheriff had just cuffed. “Well,” said Stroud, “are you going to tell him?”

“Mr. Stroud, I was just shooting the shit with the guy, honest. It’s a fucking conspiracy to get me.”

“From the tape it sounds to me like you got yourself, Mr. Rasmussen,” said Primrose.

“Maybe we can cut a deal,” Bevo suggested. “What’ll you do for me if I name the man on the tape, Mr. District Attorney?”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said Primrose. “I’ll give you the best cell in the basement. Now, how’s that?”

“Bevo, it’s no skin off his ass if you don’t talk,” Stroud said. “He’s not after the other guy, unless that guy’s got a million dollars he can be screwed out of, too, right, P.P.?”

“You want a deal, Bevo?” Primrose asked. “I have one for you. Don’t fight the seizure. Let the court take the money. Hell, there’s a good chance we’d get it, anyway. You do that, and this tape may just get lost.”

“That’s extortion!” thundered Stroud. “Highway robbery! We piss on your offer.”

“Why don’t you let your client talk for himself, Gill?” Primrose suggested.

“Because I’m his lawyer, you moron,” Stroud snorted.

But Bevo was thinking. “You’re saying if I give up the insurance money, I walk?”

“No, Bevo,” Wick replied. “He’s saying you
might
walk. It’s possible you could give up the money and still wind up in jail.”

“Is that true?” Bevo asked Primrose.

Primrose arched his eyebrows. “I doubt that would happen.”

“See?” said Wick. “You don’t want to trust him.”

But Bevo, standing next to the sheriff in handcuffs, was crumbling. “This is fucking unreal,” he said. “I can’t do time, guys.”

“Our client needs to sleep on your offer,” I told Primrose.

The DA shrugged. “fine with me, Counselor. I’ll give him twenty-four hours. If he doesn’t give up his little friend by then, the deal’s off.”

The sheriff took Bevo downstairs and put him in the same cell he had been in the day before. Bevo was pacing again, kicking at the bars each time he got to the end of his brief circuit. Chandler, Stroud, and I sat on the bed.

“So what do I do, boys?” he asked. “You’re my fucking lawyers. How do I get out of this?”

“The thing that burns my chops is that this is just for spite,” said Wick. “SWAT didn’t have to do this. The case was over. Warren Jacobs just didn’t want us to get the money.”

“Bevo,” I said, “why in hell were you telling Duett about electrocuting a horse? You deliberately incriminated yourself in front of a SWAT lawyer!”

“I don’t know. It just kind of happened. I was dealing dirt on Nyman Scales, you know, trying to cut a deal on the Stromboli case....Hey, that’s right! Most of the stuff on that tape is about shit that Scales done. Why don’t they go after him? I was just doing my patriotic duty, helping ’em get the goods on a low-life horse thief.”

“I promise you, Bevo,” said Stroud, “you didn’t tell them anything about Scales they haven’t already heard. Scales has beaten those raps before. No evidence, remember?”

“Then why’d they come after me?” he cried. “I was just blowing air, Mr. Stroud, honest. None of that shit happened. I was just trying to make that lawyer think I was hot stuff. You know how you get when you start spinning tales? That’s what I was doing. And he was eating it up. Duett thought I was Jesse James.”

“So he just sort of coaxed that story about electrocuting the horse out of you?” I asked.

“That’s what’s so bad!” cried Bevo, close to hysterics.
“I
never electrocuted no horse. That was Nyman Scales that done that. I just sort of stole that story and put me in it.” He took hold of the bars, and his whole body sagged. “And now I’m gonna go to jail over shit that Nyman Scales done!” He whirled to look at us. “You said they got no evidence on Scales for that stuff, right? Well, they got no evidence on me, either!”

“Just your taped confession,” I reminded him.

“Shit, you guys could beat that,” Bevo said.

“Maybe,” said Wick. “If you could be believed. Or even if anybody anywhere had any use for you at all. But nobody can stand you, Bevo. You’ve pissed off too many officials of the law. It would be hard to beat your freely given confession in a trial, even if you were Billy Graham, which you aren’t.” Wick sighed. “And God knows what would have happened to our money by then.”

“My
money,” said Bevo.

“Primrose will spend it to put Bibles in the cells,” Stroud muttered.

“I can’t do time, Mr. Stroud!” Bevo said.

“Primrose doesn’t want to send you to jail, Bevo,” I told him. “He’s just trying to get hold of the money.”

Stroud stood up and signaled for the guard to let us out of the cell. “Don’t agree to any deal Primrose makes you,” he told Bevo. “Do you hear me? Don’t agree to a thing until you hear from me. If you do, I swear to God, I’ll kill you myself.”

As we got into the elevator, we heard Bevo moaning in his cell,
“I can’t do time!”

Wick drove us back to Jenks
in Bevo’s Lexus. The loss of a three-hundred-thousand-dollar fee had plunged him into a foul state of mind. “There goes Barbados in August,” he said, “and Deirdre in a string bikini.”

“How were you planning to get her off the emu ranch without her husband finding out?” I asked.

“Starns would never know she’s gone,” Stroud said from the backseat. “He hasn’t caught that bird you two let loose the other night. I imagine he’ll still be chasing it in August.”

“Primrose!” Wick spat out the name. “That fucking hypocrite. Did you know he’s a lay preacher, Clay? He preaches all over the goddamned county. Saving souls for Jesus. A whited sepulcher, that’s what he is. It’s enough to make me give up being a Baptist!”

“You’re a Baptist, Wick?” I asked.

“He’s lapsed a bit,” replied Stroud, “but he’s not gone yet. As many men’s wives as Hard-dick runs through, he can’t afford to give up God completely.”

“I imagine Primrose is telling the truth about the tape, though,” I said. “Duett or somebody else from SWAT probably left it at the door, just like he said.”

“True,” said Stroud. “P.P. is an asshole, but he doesn’t have the nerve for a real criminal conspiracy.” Stroud seemed more bemused than angry at the turn of events.

It was almost four o’clock when we got to town. Wick headed for the bank’s drive-through teller window, but Stroud had him take us to the office instead. “No bail-out for Bevo?” asked Wick, parking in front of the door. “Suits me fine.”

Wick shuffled into the office ahead of us, head hanging low, hands in his pockets. Molly Tunstall was sitting at her desk, typing. She gave us her look of deep concern as we came in.

“Molly,” Wick said, “get Reverend Blankenship on the phone. Tell him we’ve all resigned from the Baptist religion until they excommunicate Paul Primrose.”

“Before you do that, Molly,” said Stroud, “dial Warren Jacobs’s office for me. Let’s see if we can catch him before he goes home. Put it through to the conference room.”

“Good idea,” said Wick, “let’s make an obscene phone call.”

The phone rang. Stroud pushed a button and transferred the call to the speakerphone.

“Afternoon, Warren,” said Stroud.

“Well, well, Gill Stroud,” the lawyer replied. “I’m glad you called. I left the courtroom without congratulating you on your stroke of good fortune.”

“Why, thanks, Warren. Pulaski’s burglars really saved our ass. You should give them a bonus.”

“What a card.”

“Listen, Warren, do you happen to know a fellow named Antoine Duett?”

“Duett?” There was a pause. “No, I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

“That’s odd. He has offices in your building.”

“It’s a big building, Gill. I doubt I know half the people we employ, much less who rents space down the hall.”

“But you would know Duett. He’s the dirty-tricks boy your firm sent to undermine our case. Remember? The spy who held secret meetings with our client, which he seems to have taped?”

“Spy? Tape? I’m sorry, Gill. It sounds like you’ve gotten into some bad Scotch.”

“So you’re saying you don’t know Antoine Duett?”

“You’re catching on. I do not know the man.”

“And you know nothing about the seizure of Bevo’s settlement money?”

“The money was seized? By whom?”

Winking at us, Stroud filled Jacobs in briefly on our afternoon.

“Oh, dear,” said Jacobs, “how unfortunate for you. I guess Bevo loses, after all. That should teach him not to play with matches.”

“I’ve got a hunch, Warren, that you’re up to your buttocks in shit on this.”

“Are you sure that’s a hunch, Gill? At your age it could be wind or senility. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some work to do.”

“Before you go, let me tell you about one of my hunches that just paid off. I had a hunch that the break-in at your man Pulaski’s house might not have been so random as Pulaski wanted us to believe.”

“Oh?”

“So I did a little checking, and, by golly, the phone company has proved me right.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jacobs replied.

“You might want to do a little checking on your own. I’ll expect a call from you tonight between seven-thirty and eight. If you don’t call, I’m taking my little hunch—and Pulaski’s phone records—to the FBI.”

“A hunch isn’t going to save Bevo’s money, Stroud.”

The old man switched off the phone. “Boys,” he said, “we’re finally getting down to the licklog.”