Shoveling Smoke (26 page)

The five-D Steakhouse,
five miles from town, was a series of shabby, interconnecting shacks that sprawled under a thick stand of evergreens next to a small lake. Going in, I hit my head on the doorpost, and as my eyes teared up from the smart, I noticed a sign posted on the wall opposite the door that read Hurts, don’t it?

“Barbarian humor,” said Wick, clapping me on the shoulder.

“I noticed you didn’t warn me,” I replied.

According to Chandler and Stroud, the five-D was the only eating establishment within sixty miles of Jenks that cooked a decent steak. Stroud had offered to prove to me the truth of this contention, so at six o’clock that evening the three of us found ourselves seated at a linoleum table in a tackboard lean-to next to the salad bar, waiting for our steaks to arrive from the kitchen. It was a slow night, which suited me fine, since the flooring of our little room did not feel all that secure to me, and I believed that the weight of an extra party or two might sink us.

Stroud, in high spirits, raised his glass of iced tea and offered a toast, “to the law,” in which we all joined him.

“Enjoy your steaks, gentlemen,” said the old man. “But remember, we must be back at the office by seven-thirty.”

“Or not,” said Wick. He smirked unhappily at his partner, who faced him across the square table.

“Mr. Parker,” Stroud said, “we are about to discover whether I am a genius or a senile idiot.”

“Can we vote now?” Wick asked.

“Mr. Chandler has become temporarily deranged from the loss of a great deal of money,” Stroud explained to me. “It remains, then, for you to make my case for me.”

“Me?” I said.

“Of course, you. You’re the only one left to represent me. Surely you see the method in my madness?”

At that moment, I did not see much of anything.

“Let us retrace some of our steps,” Stroud said. “Do you recall our visit to Stan Pulaski’s house last night?”

“I believe I do,” I said.

“Did anything of interest happen there?”

“We became felons,” I replied.

“Anything else?”

“We narrowly escaped being arrested with stolen property in the trunk of your car.”

“Anything else, Mr. Parker?”

“You made a phone call,” I said.

“Exactly!” said Stroud, slapping the table with his palm.

And at that moment, I caught on. I saw Stroud’s gamble, realized the nature of the trap he was trying to spring. It seemed flimsy to me, yet the simple fact that I saw it—that I had finally figured something out—gave me a feeling of relief that was almost dizzying. Maybe I would not have to spend the rest of my life two steps behind.

“So, what do you say, Mr. Parker, am I a genius or a candidate for the bone orchard?”

“I am not competent to answer that question, Mr. Stroud, but I do know one thing that you are.”

“What is that?”

“You’re a whistle-blower.”

A self-satisfied smile creased his pallid face. “Well done, Mr. Parker.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Wick asked.

“The phone call, Wick,” I said, “the one your partner made from Pulaski’s study when we broke in last night.” I turned to Stroud. “You crafty son of a bitch,” I said to him. “You called SWAT!”

Stroud’s eyes gave off a crocodile glint. “Jimmy Wortmann’s office, to be exact,” he said. “The phone company records will show that at the time of the burglary, a call was placed from the scene of the crime to a SWAT office.”

“SWAT would have one hell of a time explaining that,” I said. “But I’ve got a question. Why did you blow the whistle into the earpiece?”

The answer came from Wick. “You haven’t heard that thing come through a phone line, have you, Clay?” he said. “It makes a noise on the line that everybody can hear. Like Ma Bell is melting.”

“I had a hunch that’s what it was,” I said. “The big firms usually have a taping system that records calls coming in after business hours, which means there’s a chance that they’ve got the whistle on tape. If they do, it’ll sound like something very odd has happened to a phone conversation on Jimmy Wortmann’s line.”

“It would sound like something’s been erased,” said Wick.

“At least it will give pause to any law enforcement agency that hears it,” Stroud said.

“So the call was insurance,” I said. “You were betting SWAT might pull something at the last minute, and you found a way to give us some hidden leverage.”

“That’s right.” Stroud turned to Chandler. “So, Hard-dick, has our new associate made my case?”

Wick raised his glass of iced tea in a salute to his partner. “Goddamn dry county,” he said. “This ought to be champagne.”

The steaks arrived.
As we ate, Stroud explained why he thought SWAT would find the phone call he placed from Pulaski’s house alarming.

“SWAT is the top firm in the country for horse insurance litigation. What if they have a way to know for certain which cases they take on are genuine and which are crooked? What if they’re in league with someone who can tip them off to the crooked claims, even hand them the evidence needed to beat the suit? An arrangement like that would guarantee them a phenomenal win-loss record in handling big-dollar lawsuits, and, after all, winning is what keeps that steady stream of business coming in from big insurance firms like Stromboli.”

“You’re saying SWAT has its own crook squealing on the crooks around him,” Wick said.

“It would have to be a superstar horse dealer,” Stroud said, “somebody who brokers a lot of horse deals in the course of a year. Somebody who knows all the ins and outs of the business. A real horse magician.”

“Somebody like Nyman Scales,” I said.

Stroud nodded. “Nyman must set up twenty or thirty big buys a month. All these horses get insured, and most of them live out their lives as God intended. But horses do die, they get hurt, so a percentage of these horse deals will end in an insurance claim. Some of the claims are legitimate, of course, but some aren’t.”

“Quite a few aren’t,” Wick said.

“Our magical dealer knows which claims are legit and which ones aren’t,” Stroud continued. “He knows because he’s the one who sets up the horse accidents, too. He sells the horses, then he zaps the horses.”

“All for a percentage of the insurance take,” I suggested, “and some kind of kickback from SWAT.”

“Mr. Parker, what do you think of that rib eye?” Stroud asked.

“It’s excellent,” I replied.

“So our horse dealer is in a position to feed information to SWAT about any claim coming from one of his crooked partners,” Stroud continued. “SWAT could then decide which of these lawsuits to win and which to lose. They would need to keep a balance, deliberately losing some suits and winning others. That way they could satisfy a percentage of Nyman’s partners as well as their own clients, the insurance carriers. And that’s the point—to keep the giant carriers like Stromboli happy. The name of the game is billable hours.”

“Billable hours,” Wick murmured. “The numbers must be staggering.”

“But what about the crooked lawsuits SWAT decides to win to keep its average up?” I asked. “In those cases Scales would be selling out his own partners.”

“Exactly,” said Stroud. “You’ve just seen it happen to Bevo.”

“But wouldn’t these people scream bloody murder?”

“What do you think Bevo’s been doing?” asked Stroud. “Nyman Scales has been surviving these kinds of accusations for years. Some of the people he chooses to do business with are lowlifes like Bevo, people so crooked they can’t pee in a straight line. What judge or jury is going to listen to them when they say they’ve been double-crossed by the biggest horse dealer in East Texas? Hell, Mr. Parker, Nyman probably put half the judges on the bench.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Wick. “So Bevo really didn’t burn his horses. He was telling the truth!”

“It’s a possibility,” Stroud replied. “Scales could have sent his boys to do it and make it look like it was Bevo. Or maybe Bevo did it himself. We’ll probably never know.”

“If you’re right,” I said to Stroud, “it’s an amazing setup. Your call from Pulaski’s house would scare the hell out of them.”

Stroud nodded. “The phone records will show that SWAT got a call from the burglars during the robbery. Jimmy Wortmann won’t run the risk of the law seeing those records and catching on to their operation.”

“My guess,” said Wick, “is SWAT will be falling all over itself to kiss our ass. Whoever calls us tonight is going to be wearing asbestos lips.”

“That’s quite a turnaround, Mr. Chandler,” said Stroud. “As I recall, not ten minutes ago you were ready to ship me off to the rest home.”

“I can’t argue with genius, Mr. Stroud,” said Wick.

We got back to the office at 7:15 and sat in the reception area by the front door, waiting for the phone to ring. Wick made a run to his house to pick up some bottles of champagne in the event that Stroud had guessed correctly about SWAT’s response to his threat.

“What if I was wrong?” Gill asked as we watched Wick drive away.

“Then we’ll have a more urgent reason to drink,” I replied.

Stroud sat on the edge of Molly Tunstall’s desk, staring out the window into the darkness. He looked tired and shriveled.

“I hope I will not insult you, Mr. Parker, if I ask whether you know the difference between being found not guilty of a crime and being innocent of it.”

“Of course I know the difference,” I replied.

“One may be found not guilty by a jury, and yet be guilty of committing the crime.”

“Is this conversation leading somewhere?” I asked.

“That case you reminded me about the other day,” he said, “the one in Waco.”

“I remember.”

“The fellow I got off. The black fellow. His name was Harms. Joseph Harms. The jury found him not guilty.”

“I know that.”

“What you don’t know is that Joseph Harms was not only found not guilty by the jury, he actually
was
not guilty.”

“That’s a good thing, then,” I said. “You saved an innocent man.”

“I saved him for about a week, Mr. Parker. Harms moved out of Waco as soon as he could. But he didn’t move far enough. The trial had gotten a lot of publicity throughout the South, more than Harms realized maybe. Anyway, six days after his acquittal, his body was found hanging from a tree down in East Louisiana.”

I thought of the picture hanging in the Baylor Law building, the shadowy figure of the acquitted man and the tall man with the trestle in his hands, trying to keep him safe. “You did your best,” I said to him.

“Ethics and justice,” he said. “Let me tell you about ethics and justice. About a week after Harms was killed, the Waco sheriff’s office arrested the dead girl’s father and charged him with the killing. And guess who defended him?”

“You?”

“That’s right. And I got him off, too. Want to know how I did it?”

“I wonder if I do.”

“I convinced the jury that Harms did it. Harms was dead, killed by folks who thought he was guilty. I just let that grassroots feeling work for us. The DA in the father’s case put a young criminalist on the stand who was really green. I turned him inside out. I could have gotten him to swear that the Easter Bunny had killed the girl. But Harms was handier. I refocused the light on a man who couldn’t be tried again for the crime.”

“Whatever works,” I said.

“I was besotted with vanity,” Stroud replied. “In those days I thought I could do no wrong. It pleased me to play with the law like that. I could have gotten Judas Iscariot off for fingering Jesus.”

“At least you got the dead girl’s father off.”

Stroud smiled grimly. “Like I just said, Mr. Parker, sometimes there’s a difference between being found not guilty and being innocent.”

We both sat looking out the front window at the empty street.

“Maybe I’ll retire,” Stroud said, “hang up my whistle.”

“I don’t know about the retirement part,” I said, “but the whistle should definitely go.”

Wick came in, hugging half a dozen bottles of chilled champagne to his chest. “My tits are freezing,” he said as he set the bottles on the table. He handed me one. “Open it for us, Clay. We might as well get braced.”

There were no glasses in the room, so he and Stroud went to find some. While I sat on the edge of the table peeling the leaded wrapper off the top of the bottle, Sally walked in.

“I wondered what sort of trouble the boys were leading you into,” she said. “Turns out it’s simple alcoholism.” She watched me work on the champagne cork. “You seem to be bottle impaired, Counselor. You aren’t having any more luck than you did with that beer bottle yesterday.” She came over and sat next to me. She was wearing her country-girl outfit, jeans and a T-shirt. I figured she had been out to Stroud’s place to check on her horse.

“How’s cousin Ed?” I asked, setting down the bottle.

“He sends his regards. He wants to know if—”

I kissed her hard on the lips. It surprised her.

“You wondered whether country life is agreeing with me,” I said. “Well, it is, but I have something to say.”

“Go on.”

“It’s just this. Once and for all, I’m sorry for any idiotic thing I’ve said to you in the last few days. I’m through asking questions, Sally. I’m tired of always being too slow, and the only way to catch up, it seems, is just to stop thinking altogether. So I don’t care anymore. I don’t care if you rustled stock when you were in diapers. I don’t care if your mother was a Cajun witch or if your daddy is the biggest gangster in Texas. If you want to go after him, fine, I’ll help you. If you don’t want to go after him, that’s fine, too.”

I kissed her again. This time she helped. “I don’t want to know anything else about your family or about your business or about your past. I don’t want to know anything about you and Gill or you and Bevo or you and the pope. I don’t want to be outguessed, I don’t want to be pinned down. All I really want is to take things a day at a time. And I want another kiss.”

I would have gotten it, too—I could see it in her eyes—but the phone rang. Wick burst into the room, scattering paper cups, followed by Stroud, who slowly walked to the table and switched on the speakerphone.

“Well?” he said.

“Gill, it’s Jimmy Wortmann. How do you want to handle this?”