Shoveling Smoke (14 page)

It was seven-thirty
Friday evening when Bevo and I crossed the long bridges spanning Lake Ray Hubbard at the northeast edge of Dallas. Pleasure boats of all shapes and sizes dotted the lake, and although the boats were enveloped in evening shadow, sunlight still flashed on the billowing canvas of a parasailing skier floating high in the air half a mile away.

“That’s not something I would want to do,” said my traveling companion. “Parasailing is dangerous shit. Friend of mine took off in one of those outfits, got tangled up in some electric lines. No more friend.”

Name something, anything, and Bevo Rasmussen had a friend who had seen it, tried it, bought it, swallowed it, ridden it, run over it, or shot at it. Bevo had on the sharkskin
Godfather
suit he was wearing when we met, and he popped his cuffs out of his jacket sleeves to show me his cuff links. They were little silver skulls with diamond eyes.

“Got them from the president of the Hells Angels,” he told me. “He’s a friend of mine. He give me this one, too.” Bevo curled his upper lip in a lupine snarl to show me the diamond in his tooth. “That one’s worth over a thousand dollars.”

Bevo had friends in high places. “Places of respect,” he said. “Governors, movie stars, drug lords, TV preachers. The cream of the crop. There’s a writer whose name you’d probably know, wants to write my life up. He says he’d have to make it a novel, because nobody would believe it if he told it for the truth.”

“Who’s that other lawyer you’ve been talking to?” I asked, hoping to catch him by surprise. “Is he one of your friends?”

Bevo said he did not know what I was talking about.

“You know,” I said, “the one you’ve been meeting in the Dairy Queen.”

“Oh, him,” Bevo said. “He ain’t a lawyer. He’s an architect. From Dallas.”

“An architect?”

“Yep. I’m thinking of building me an estate outside of town, and I brought him down from Dallas to consult on which land to buy. It’s hard finding just the right spot. I need a lot of western exposure. Mornings ain’t my time of day, but I love a good sunset.”

“Bevo, how much do you think you’re going to clear out of the insurance money?” That question had been puzzling me. I knew at least half of the purchase money, around $500,000, had come from the Farmer’s Bank in Tyler and from Nyman Scales, in roughly equal amounts. I did not believe the other half-million could possibly have come from his own pocket. Bevo was carrying a lot of debt.

“It don’t matter how much I clear,” he said. “It’s seed money. All seed money. I got me a plan, Mr. Parker. In four years, I’ll be the richest man in the state. No, goddamn it, in two years. Know how I’m gonna do it?”

“Emus?” I asked.

“Damn right,” he replied. “I’m gonna be the biggest goddamn emu breeder in the Southwest.”

He rattled on about the big birds for a while, telling me how much money could be made from them. “They lay golden eggs, Mr. Parker. Pure gold. You should think of investing. Wick Chandler’s gonna invest. Stick with me, I’ll make you rich.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

We had been driving down I-30 in Bevo’s open-topped 1977 Cadillac Seville, and my ears were starting to burn from the hot wind whipping against them. The Seville was his nighttime car, he told me. He had a couple of daytime cars, too, but his nighttime car was for cruising. “Women love this car,” he said.

“Looks to me like Sally Dean doesn’t much care for it,” I replied. I reminded him of his promise to have Sally Dean waiting for me in the backseat if I agreed to ride with him. Sally was absent.

“Sally couldn’t come. I hope you don’t mind too much.”

I told him I didn’t mind.

“Nyman and I’ll get her to make it up to you, Clay. You can count on it. Do you mind if I call you Clay?”

“Yes.”

“How’s that leg?” he asked.

Every five minutes or so he inquired about my wounded leg, apologizing for the danger he had put me in by letting Wick Chandler move me into his house. “I swear, Mr. Parker, I couldn’t feel worse about it. I almost feel like it’s my fault.”

“It
is
your fault,” I told him.

“If it will make you feel better, you can stick a pin in
my
leg,” he said. “Hell, you can stick two.”

I told him I didn’t want to stick a pin into anybody. He asked me if I would like him to kill the man who stuck me. “I’ll kill him so you can watch,” he promised. “I’ll kill him with my bare hands. I’ll kill him with his own goddamn pins.”

Stroud and Chandler both had told me it was impossible to have a real conversation with Bevo, and two hours in the car with him had convinced me they were right. I tried to talk to him about the lawsuit, but all I could get was a smile and a wink.

“You just get Nyman Scales on the stand,” he said. “We’re going to depose Nyman on Monday, right?”

“Right, but Bevo—”

“Just listen to Nyman on Monday, and you’ll know,” he said. “I didn’t burn those horses, Mr. Parker. Nyman’s gonna save my ass in court, and we’ll all go home rich.”

“You think a lot of Nyman Scales, don’t you?” I asked.

“Hell, Mr. Parker, he’s my mentor,” Bevo said. “He’s made me what I am today.”

It turned out that Bevo had almost as many stories about Nyman Scales as he did about himself. It was a clear case of hero worship.

“Wait till you meet him, Mr. Parker,” he continued. “You’d never guess how rich he is. Most of the time he dresses like a farmhand. Talks like a Baptist preacher. He’s got that lisp, you know, that soft little
s,
like a pass-the-plate evangelist. People around the county say butter won’t melt in his mouth.” Bevo laughed and slapped his leg. “Biggest operator in five states, and he sounds like a fucking preacher.”

“You’re admitting to me that Nyman Scales is a crook?” I asked.

“Show me a big man who ain’t,” Bevo replied. “It takes a little wheelin’ and dealin’ to get to the top. It’s the American way. Shit, you know that as well as I do. You were a tax lawyer, for Christ’s sake.”

“If he’s such a famous crook, why hasn’t he been caught?” I asked.

“Because he’s so damn smooth,” Bevo replied. “He’s been named in all kinds of schemes. He’s been indicted three or four times. There have been investigations. But I’m telling you, he thinks of everything. He’s too smart for the local law. For the feds, too, for that matter. He’s a hero to the people around him. He’s like an old-time gangster, you know. A big shot. You can’t catch the big dog.”

Bevo asked if I had heard the “rumor” about Scales and one Jim Ed Murphy, whom he described as the Dr. Frankenstein of horse veterinarians.

“Nyman had this highbred colt, see, a stallion he named Beelzebub’s Ghost, that would have fetched a good price but for one thing. He didn’t have testicles. Born nutless. Nyman got Jim Ed Murphy to manufacture a set of balls for the colt and stick them on with surgery.”

“They sewed fake genitals onto the horse?”

“God’s truth, Mr. Parker. The horse was impotent and sterile, but he had balls. Jim Ed did such a bang-up job on the plastic surgery that it could not be detected. That colt fetched a hell of a price, too.”

“This is pretty deep, Bevo.”

“If you knew anything about raising horses, Mr. Parker, you’d know that birth defects like that are not uncommon, and that they ruin an otherwise big-money stallion. Thanks to what he did for Beelzebub’s Ghost, Jim Ed Murphy became a kind of hero. Breeders would come to him to get him to sew fake testicles onto their own shortchanged horses. He and Nyman made a lot of money at it. Of course, I can’t prove none of what I’ve told you,” Bevo said with a smile. “Nor can nobody else. We’re just speculating about a highly successful gentleman. And I want you to know that all my bidniss dealings with Nyman Scales have been strictly on the up-and-up.”

“Tell me, Bevo,” I said, “would this highly successful gentleman of yours ever destroy a horse for money?”

“On my honor, Mr. Parker, he would not,” Bevo replied. “That’s a nasty bidniss that Nyman and me wouldn’t have any part of. I can tell you, though, there’s those that do. There’s all sorts of things a person can do to make a horse die accidentally, Mr. Parker. One thing is to give a horse a big enough shot of potassium to cause a heart attack that can’t be detected in an autopsy. Another thing is give a horse a concussion. There’s seven or eight ways to do that so the horse will go into a coma. You have to destroy it then.”

“I get the picture,” I said.

“You can stand a horse in four buckets of water, wrap it in heavy-gauge wire, and then shoot electricity through it. Just plug it in. Zap!—a lightning strike.”

“Okay, Bevo.”

“I’ve seen a surgical knife,” he continued, “a long, mean-looking thing, can make a horse look like it’s got itself all caught up in a barbed-wire fence. It’s so sliced up it has to be put down.” He wrinkled his lip in distaste. “That’s a bad one.”

“This is some business you’re in,” I told him.

“It’s just temporary,” he replied. “Like I said, I plan to make my fortune in the big birds. This is where Nyman and me are alike, Mr. Parker. Okay, he’s in horses and I’m planning to be in birds, but we are both men of vision.”

We reached the broad belt of the LBJ Expressway circling the city. There was always a kind of moving traffic jam on LBJ, cars bumper to bumper, all going seventy-five miles an hour.

“Okay, Bevo,” I said, “why are we here?” I had tried to get him to tell me the reason for our run to Dallas as soon as we started out, but he refused, saying he would explain when we got there. Now, as he pushed the Cadillac into the westbound LBJ traffic, Bevo smiled.

“We’re running an errand for Wick Chandler,” he said.

“That can’t be,” I told him. “Mr. Chandler says he hasn’t spoken to you in weeks.”

Bevo’s smile widened. “Now, don’t get upset, Mr. Parker. Old Hard-dick wants you to know how sorry he is for this little deception. He says you can chew his ass when we get back.”

Wick had told me he did not know Bevo’s motive for driving to Dallas. Wick had lied. Or else Bevo was lying now. For a moment I tried to determine which of my two new acquaintances was a bigger liar, but I soon gave up.

“Don’t be too hard on him,” Bevo said. “The fact is, it never occurred to him to ask you to go along with me in the first place. It was my idea. When you told him I asked you, he did some quick thinking and figured it would be a good idea. You see, Mr. Parker, I’m running a little repossession service tonight. We’re picking up something that belongs to Mr. Chandler. It’s something he feels real strong about and, to tell you God’s truth, he don’t trust me with it. He’s counting on you to keep me honest.” Bevo laughed at that. “Mr. Chandler was afraid you wouldn’t come if you knew what we was here to pick up. Don’t worry, it ain’t drugs or nothing like that. Hell, it would make more sense if it was.” He asked me if I knew a Dallas lawyer named Dick Devereau.

“No,” I replied.

“Devereau and Wick are old friends. They went to school together, I believe.”

We had taken the Skillman/Audelia exit, made a couple of turns, and were now driving through one of those raw, undeveloped patches that spread through the outlying areas of all fast-growing cities like a bad skin graft. Here and there sat half-built shopping strips, housing developments, and industrial parks consisting of Quonset huts surrounded by dirt and transplanted, anemic trees. Not yet finished, the area already looked old and tired, dried out, ready to be blown away by the first strong wind. I had seen a lot of this sort of urban wasteland. It made up half of Houston.

“So we’re here to pick up something from Devereau?” I asked.

“In a manner of speaking.”

Bevo told me that, years ago, Wick Chandler had gone fishing in the Yukon. He had taken someone else’s wife with him, who bought him a memento of their trip. Wick loved the gift and mounted it on his wall.

“What was it?” I asked.

“It’s a...a dingus.” Bevo scratched his head. “Hell, Wick told me what you call it. Now, what is it? It’ll come to me.” He resumed the story. “Last fall Dick Devereau come to Jenks to see his old buddy Wick and do some drinking. Well, sir, he stole the dingus right off Wick’s wall. Took it back to Dallas and put it on the wall behind his desk in his office. Wick called him, wrote him, but he couldn’t get Devereau to give it back.”

“What the hell is this dingus, Bevo?”

We were driving slowly through a trailer park, Bevo trying to read the numbers on the sides of the trailers. He stopped the car and switched off the engine. “It’s right around here,” he said. He reached over and, opening the glove compartment, took out a tiny plastic vial filled with powdery white stones.

“Goddamn it, Bevo, if we’d gotten stopped by the police—”

“I’ll be right back, Mr. P,” he said. “You might not want to get out of the car.” He disappeared into the shadows, leaving me to listen to the crickets in this Dallas trailer park telling me what a fool I was, something I had already come to understand. A couple of minutes later Bevo was back, carrying a thin pole at least six feet long, which he handed to me as he got into the car.

“What do you think!” he said, starting the Cadillac. “I said I’d get it back, and I got it back.”

It was a long spiral of something like rawhide that had been heavily shellacked. I tried bending it and found it amazingly strong.

“Bevo,” I said, “this is a—”

“Pizzle!” he said. “That’s what Wick told me to call it. A whale’s pizzle.”

“It’s a penis!” I said.

“Yep. A whale’s dick.” The thing felt clammy. I dropped the base of it on the floorboard and wiped my hands on my pants. We drove back toward LBJ with the pizzle sticking up out of the convertible like a crazy, corkscrewed aerial.

Bevo patted himself on the back for his detective work. He said he had staked out the floor of the high-rise where Devereau’s office was located and made the acquaintance of one of the janitors.

“Took about twenty minutes,” he boasted. “The Mex janitor
wanted
me to steal it. He wanted it gone. He said it’s unholy. I think the man is Catholic.” He laughed. “Devereau’s going to explode when he sees his empty wall on Monday morning. He was more attached to this thing than Wick. Wick says Devereau got superstitious about it, started thinking it brought him luck when he went to trial. He even signed documents with the name Whale-Dick Devereau.”