Shoveling Smoke (8 page)

Though I got back to the office
a few minutes before my first appointment, a couple of clients were already sitting in the waiting room, grumbling about being forgotten. For the next four hours I got acquainted with my neighbors, clients who had expected to see Hardwick Chandler and were suspicious of the new man. Most peppered me with questions, wanting to know who I was, where I was from, and why a man would leave a lucrative Houston law practice to live in a failing community out in East Texas.

I gave what counsel I could, but it was a different clientele from the one I had been used to in Houston. Instead of sleek executive types representing corporations looking for tax loopholes, I got cranky, ill-educated people mired in hatred, greed, hopelessness, and desperation, looking for a magic solution. Instead of Brioni suits and Gucci loafers and Rolexes, I saw Dickey work pants and Wal-Mart boots and Timexes. I worked on drawing up wills for folks who owned nothing, who parceled out poultry by the bird to their relatives. I counseled a man, out on bail, whose wife had accused him of sexually abusing their eight-month-old daughter and who confessed to me that he had done it and wanted to know if I could get him off for $212, which was all he had. There were clients wrangling about probate on inheritances already eaten away to nothing in court costs, mothers suing sons, small children held for ransom by divorcing parents. A parade of the disinherited moved through my office, a ragtag assortment of refugees bombed out of the running for the American Dream by their own or someone else’s stupidity, laziness, self-absorption, or just plain bad luck.

A case in point was Judi Rae Box, my last appointment of the afternoon. Mrs. Box was a small, wiry middle-aged woman with pinkish hair growing in odd patches on her head, a gauze bandage taped above her left eye, and a cigarette cough that sounded like timber splitting. Her speech was fast, low-voiced, and violent. I kept having to stop her midway through blasts of invective and coax her back on track as she told her story.

Judi Rae’s husband, Layton, a plumber, was having affairs. Judi Rae herself worked out of town, in Greenville, at the Durever Glove Factory, where for the last eleven years she had sewn the right thumb into tens of thousands of pairs of men’s gloves. The repetitiveness of her job made her inward looking and difficult to cope with on her days off. This was the reason Judi Rae gave for the start of her problems with Layton. Because of her work-induced contrariness, Layton had gone on the prowl.

“I own up to being prey to foul moods, Mr. Parker,” she said. “But just because I get a little testy, that don’t give him the right to go whoring around on me, does it?”

Judi Rae and Layton fought about his infidelity. Sometimes the fighting turned violent. Last night, Judi Rae caught him on the phone with one of his girlfriends and hammered him in the face with the phone’s base, whereupon Layton hit back with the receiver and opened a cut over her eye that took sixteen stitches to close. Hence the bandage. In spite of this battering, Judi Rae managed to grab him by the scrotum and stretch that tender flesh sufficiently to require a visit to the hospital emergency room. Layton was afraid that Judi Rae had impaired his ability to perform what he called his masculine duties.

“Masculine duties,” she scoffed. “He was doing his masculine duties all over the county. You ask me, I was the one doing the duty.”

Actually, they both went to the hospital, after which they both went to jail on warrants they swore out against each other. But the sheriff knew Layton and sent him home on personal recognizance in less than an hour, while Judi Rae stayed overnight and solidified her view of the world as a dark conspiracy directed at her. It was in this attitude that she had come to talk to Wick Chandler about getting a divorce. Wick had handled divorces for two of Judi Rae’s daughters, as well as for her mother.

Great patches of Judi Rae’s pink hair were missing, like divots in a golf course fairway. “You’re looking at my head,” said Judi Rae.

Embarrassed, I replied, “I really didn’t mean to stare. Do you have a medical condition?” I was convinced that she was in the early stages of chemotherapy.

“It’s Layton,” she explained, tears brimming in her eyes. “The son of a bitch tortures me.” She turned her head so that I could see the patches over her ear. “You see where he pulled out my hair by the handfuls? That cheating motherfucker.”

“Your husband did this?” I asked.

“Damn right he did.”

“Why, Mrs. Box?”

“Well, I had ahold of him.”

“You were holding him?”

“I had ahold of his balls,” she explained. “Any time he comes for me, I grab him where it hurts. You see these thumbs?” She held them up, and I saw that her hands were thick-muscled, mannish from her years of work in the glove factory. She made pinching movements with her thumbs. “These suckers can core an apple with one prod. And I’ll guaran-damn-tee-you, I wouldn’t have turned loose of Layton’s tender parts if he hadn’t pulled my hair out. He outlasted me that time.”

“I understand,” I said. “And you want a divorce.”

“Mister, I want more than a divorce. I want everything he has and everything he thinks he might ever get. I want you to get those balls off him permanent. Folks I’ve talked to say I can clean the son of a bitch out for beating me like he has and pulling my hair out and whoring around like he’s been doing and I’ve caught him at. I want you to rip him up one side and down the other. You can carve up whatever’s left to get your fee.”

Judi Rae did not have any money. She was going to pay us out of the settlement. I explained to her that we would need a retainer in order to take her case. Her face fell.

“How much?” she asked. I did not know. I told her that I would find out and get back to her. She left, grumbling about men in general and lawyers in particular, who, I heard her say as she walked out the door, are men without dicks.

I arrived home
to find a light blue Mercedes convertible parked at the curb in front of my house. The front door was unlocked, and there were cooking smells in the air. Sally Dean came out of the dining room, dressed in a black silk blouse and short skirt and holding out to me a bottle of white wine and a corkscrew.

“You said you liked salmon,” she said. “We’re about to see if that’s true.” I followed her back to the dining room, working on the cork. Candles flickered over an elaborately set table.

“Funny thing,” I said. “I could have sworn I locked my door when I left the house this morning.”

“I picked the lock,” she replied from the kitchen. “I can pick just about any lock.”

“Is that a useful skill in your line of work?”

She came in carrying a salad. “Don’t tell me you’ve never wished you could pick a lock, Counselor.” She shrugged, “It’s just something my daddy taught me. How are you coming with that wine?”

I got it open at last and poured. She came over to me, and we had a toast.

“To your new life,” she said.

“To picklocks everywhere.”

We sat at the table.

“Where’s Ed?” I asked.

“He had a date.”

“The only thing I can figure,” I said, “is that I have captivated you with my big-city charm.”

She smiled. “I believe I mentioned to you a bet I had with Gill over his murder case.”

“The bet you lost?”

She nodded.

“So this is the favor you owe him?” I asked. “You have to be nice to the new guy?”

“How’s the salmon?”

As we ate Judge Howell’s contraband salmon, Sally asked me about my first full day on the job. I told her about meeting Wick amid the ostriches.

“One of these days,” she said, “Mike Starns is going to catch Wick in Deirdre’s little bungalow, and it’ll be good-bye, Wick.” She laughed. “I can imagine the funeral. Two-thirds of the women in the county will be there, crying their eyes out.”

I didn’t want to talk about Wick Chandler. “Tell me the truth, Sally,” I said. “I refuse to believe you’ve come over here and done all this just because Gill Stroud asked you to look after me.”

She thought for a moment before answering. “I don’t know, Clay. Maybe I feel I have a proprietary interest in you. I did rescue you yesterday. If it hadn’t been for Ed and me, you’d still be out there looking for your house.”

“I wouldn’t give myself too much credit, if I were you,” I replied. “It seems to me Ed did most of the work.”

“Ed wouldn’t have done a thing on his own. He wanted to pass you by, but I convinced him to stop. You just looked so lost, sitting by the side of the road in your little car. A city boy lost in the country. I guess you appealed to my motherly instincts. I have this need to save lost critters.”

“Like Appaloosas without spots?”

She smiled, picked up the wine bottle, and filled my glass. “Drink up, Counselor. You need to be buzzed to do what we’re going to do tonight.”

My heart gave a little jump. “And what’s that, Ms. Dean?”

She poured herself another glass and drank it down. “My mama was a Cajun. There’s an old Cajun ceremony for christening a new house. It’s supposed to keep demons out of it. I don’t know that it works—to tell the truth, I’m not sure I remember the whole thing—but it seems to me you need all the help you can get. So we’re going to cleanse this house tonight, Cajun style.”

I was about to laugh, but there was a look in Sally’s eyes that stopped me.

“You don’t want demons in your house, do you, Clay?”

I gazed at my plate, trying to think of a witty answer. “Just how nice to the new guy are you planning to be?” I finally said, but when I looked up, she was gone.

“Sally?” She wasn’t in the kitchen. I looked through the other rooms on the first floor with no luck. The wine had started to work, and for a moment I had the feeling that I had dreamed the salmon feast and the beautiful girl, but when I walked back into the dining room, there were the plates, the burning candles. I walked up the stairs calling her name.

The landing was ablaze with candles, a line of them on the carpet leading to the master bedroom. I followed them, a little jittery, images of B-movie cult sacrifices forming in the back of my mind.

Sally’s clothes were scattered on the floor. From the bathroom came the hiss of the shower. I stood in the middle of the room, buzzed, waiting for whatever was going to happen next.

That old pit-of-the-stomach feeling of being lost, having lost control of my surroundings, was building. It was never far away, but this time there was little of the panic that usually accompanied it. During the year and a half since my marriage had broken up I had not dated, and now, suddenly, I seemed to be in two places at once: standing in a bedroom in Jenks, Texas, and crossing the International Date Line. Time was doing something strange, and I was too slow to pick up on what it was. Before I could figure anything out, the shower cut off, and Sally Dean came out of the bathroom, toweling her hair and wearing my robe.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said, walking over to the dresser and pouring some Jack Daniel’s into a couple of whiskey glasses swimming with ice. “That kitchen got me all sweaty, and the Cajun priestess has to be clean for the ceremony.” She came to me, offered me a glass.

“Here’s looking at you,” she said, taking a drink from hers.

I felt dizzy standing so close to her, breathing in the humid warmth of her hair and skin. I took a step back.

“This ceremony,” I said, “does it hurt?”

“Only if you do it right.”

Sally pressed forward, backing me toward an armchair next to a dresser covered with lighted candles. And I let myself be backed, taking part in a slow, sexy dance, trembling from the effort to keep my hands off her.

“All this just to pay off on a bet with Gill Stroud?” I asked.

“Out here we take our debts seriously,” she said. Her robe—my robe, silk, sea green—came loose, and I watched Sally’s skin welcoming the unfolding of the robe, welcoming the light.

“Are you sure this is a Cajun ceremony?” I asked as we both unbuttoned my shirt.

“I’m supposed to pluck a live chicken now,” Sally whispered. “I guess I’ll have to improvise.”

She must have unbuckled my pants, because they slid to the floor, throwing me off balance, and I fell backward into the chair. Sally Dean landed in my lap, with the robe down around her hips and the drinks spraying over both of us. The shock of the ice and the bourbon played over me and over her skin, which shivered, her nipples darkening, hardening.

“According to Mama, this will keep the willies off you,” she said. She took one of the burning candles off the dresser and poured a thin stream of molten wax across my chest.

“Jesus, Sally!” The heat shocked me, and I tried to push her off, but only for a moment. Everywhere I put my hands, she was there.

The next morning Sally Dean
was gone when I woke up. Bevo Rasmussen was sitting in the armchair, sipping Jack Daniel’s from one of last night’s glasses. He was wearing faded overalls, work boots, stained T-shirt, and bill cap, and I saw that I’d been right about him: A farm hand’s uniform fit his hayseed looks better than the Italian suit he’d had on yesterday. I could see more of the dragon tattoo that ran the length of his right arm, red, green, and blue. He smiled, showing me his jeweled tooth.

“How’s it hanging?” he asked. I struggled to sit up on the bed, surprised by how much effort it took. I was exhausted, played out in every muscle and sore in peculiar spots. A few dried strips of candle wax crumbled off my chest as I moved. My skin felt as if it had been sandblasted. I touched my rib cage and winced.

Bevo chuckled. “Sally sure can take it out of a man.”

“Get out of here,” I said. He reached to the dresser, poured some whiskey into the other glass, and handed it to me.

“Hair of the dog,” he said.

I took it from him and set in on the nightstand. “Mr. Rasmussen,” I said, “if you’re not gone in thirty seconds, I’m calling the police.”

“Now, that’s no way to talk to a client, Mr. Parker,” he said, “especially one who’s looking out for you like I am. Why do you think Sally came over here and did you fit to die last night? She sure didn’t do it for her boyfriend Stroud. He’d be eating his liver if he knew. No, sir, she did it for me.”

I stared at him.

“Yes, sir,” he said, smoothing his mustache with a self-satisfied air, “we have spared no expense to keep the new boy happy.”

“You’re insane,” I told him. “Sally Dean is a state judicial district coordinator. An officer of the court. There’s no way in hell she would be mixed up with you.” It was inconceivable. Sally Dean and Bevo Rasmussen were from two different worlds.

Bevo read my thoughts. “Before you go heaping any more dirt on my head,” he said, “you better check your facts. Okay, Sally might not have greased you just because I asked her. But she’d have done it for her daddy, and her daddy would have gotten her to do it for me.”

“Her father?”

“Nyman Scales. You know about him, if you’ve been reading my file. He’s my bidniss partner.”

I knew the name. Scales was the horse dealer from whom Bevo had bought his horses. I recalled Sally telling me that her father was a local rancher. She had not mentioned his name.

“Sally Dean is Nyman Scales’s daughter?”

“That’s right,” Bevo replied. “And she does whatever her daddy tells her to. Always has.”

“Wait a minute. Why are their last names different?”

“Dean was Sally’s mother’s maiden name. Sally had a soft spot in her heart for old Mom. Any more questions?”

The conversation was getting crazier. “All right,” I said, “let’s assume it’s true, Sally is Nyman Scales’s daughter. Why would Scales tell his daughter to go to bed with a stranger?”

He gave me a sneer. “Because Nyman is a friend of mine, and he wants to see me beat this lawsuit. And it’s going to take a third lawyer, somebody who ain’t on his last legs, like Stroud, or has his brains all in his dick, like Wick Chandler. Since my case started, there’ve been four new lawyers start up with Chandler and Stroud, and none of them lasted long enough to do any good. Nyman and me, we don’t want to lose another one.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying that Sally Dean slept with me because her father wants to keep me happy defending you?”

“You have caught my drift.”

“That would make Sally Dean a whore and her father a pimp.”

He nodded smugly. “It’s what we call teamwork.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“You don’t know Nyman Scales,” he replied. “And you damn sure don’t know Sally.”

I had never felt more contempt for any human being than I did at that moment for Bevo Rasmussen. It was contempt mixed with awe. What he was suggesting was so off the wall, so illogical, that I could not imagine a human brain capable of taking it seriously. Yet this twisted little man sat nodding at me as if expecting me to buy the whole load.

“You like the house?” he asked. “I had a little something to do with it, too.”

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, and Bevo started up out of his chair as if he thought I might backhand him. On the bed lay my robe, the one Sally had worn last night. I put it on.

“Leave, Bevo,” I said. “Get out of my house.”

“I didn’t come here to bullshit you, Counselor. I come to ask you a favor. I got some bidniss in Dallas tomorrow night, and I sure would appreciate it if you would ride along with me.”

“Why?”

The little man shrugged, his left shoulder moving more fully with the gesture than his damaged right one. “Oh, for friendship, let’s say. I think we should get to know each other better, you being my new lawyer and all.”

I remembered Wick’s warning.
Don’t believe a word the man says. Don’t do anything he wants you to do.

“I’m not driving with you to Dallas, Bevo.”

“Not even if it would help my case?” he asked.

“This trip is connected to Stromboli’s lawsuit against you?”

“It just might be,” he said.

“Why not get Wick Chandler to go with you?”

“The people I got to meet wouldn’t be impressed with Wick. They might be with you.”

I had an idea that I did not want to meet these people, and I told him so.

Rasmussen leaned close. “How about if I got Sally to come with us? You and her could have the backseat all to yourselves.” He leered at me. “Ever come in a Cadillac, Mr. Parker?”

I chased him halfway around the chair that he had kept between us.

“Hold it, Counselor,” he said. “There’s something else I know. I know Stroud has bungled my case. He’s blown it so big that I can clean him out in a malpractice suit. I might even be able to sink your whole firm. How would that be?”

I quit chasing him. He might be right, I admitted to myself. Thanks to Stroud’s failure with the interrogatories, this little rat just might have us by the short hairs.

“Did you set fire to your horses, Bevo?” I asked him.

“I swear on my mother’s grave, Mr. Parker, I didn’t do it. My horses was fine last time I saw them. Jesus, look at all the shit I’m in now. Do you think I’d have brought all this trouble on myself?”

“Then why won’t your insurance carrier pay off?”

“It’s a conspiracy, Mr. Parker. There’s folks out to get me. They don’t want to see me better myself. I don’t know who they are, but they’re the ones behind it. I swear it’s true.” He was starting to whine.

I told him to call me that afternoon and I would tell him then whether I would go with him to Dallas. “But now I want you to leave,” I said.

Bevo was visibly relieved that I had agreed at least to think about going with him. He walked to the bedroom door, then turned.

“I’d count it a real favor if you’d go, Mr. Parker.”

“No more threats against the firm,” I replied.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “It just shows you how desperate I am.”

A thought suddenly struck me. “Bevo, this trip to Dallas. Is it going to be dangerous?”

He laughed at that. “I don’t know what you’ve been hearing about me, Mr. Parker, but I can tell it’s all wrong. Hell, no, the trip ain’t dangerous. Would I put my new lawyer in jeopardy? So how about it, will you come with me?”

“Call me at the office this afternoon, and I’ll give you my answer.”

He looked down at his feet, shaking his head. “You’re a hard man to pin down, that’s for sure. Think of Sally in the backseat,” he said, winking at me, and he walked out the door.

A moment later I heard the front door close. I went into the bathroom to take a shower. After talking to Bevo Rasmussen, I felt I needed one.

Standing in the tub, I let the water run over me as I thought through recent events. Bevo Rasmussen’s presence in my bedroom this morning suggested that the little ceremony Sally Dean and I had enacted last night, guaranteed to keep the willies off me, hadn’t worked. I still had at least one willy to worry about, a diamond-toothed one, at that. This did not at all mean, however, that the ceremony had been without value. I probed a sore spot over my rib cage, remembering the release that had rolled through me, unstringing muscles and tendons, dissolving away the last of the old life. Nothing I could remember had ever felt so good as Sally Dean had felt the night before.

Sally Dean. Sally Scales. Sally Scales Dean.

It was beginning to look as if country law was a bit more complicated than I had anticipated. But one thing I knew was true, I told myself as I dried off from my shower. Sally Dean had some real fun last night. I had the bruises to prove it.