Shoveling Smoke (16 page)

“Is it principle to lie to everybody you meet, Bevo?” I asked. “Putting me in that house when you knew there was a chance Willhoit would come after you, did you do that on principle?”

“Principle is sticking to a plan, Mr. Parker,” said the little man. “It’s putting together the best plan you can make and then sticking with it. You do that, you’re a principled man. No Deck Willhoit nor fancy-ass SWAT lawyer nor the whole goddamn state of Texas is gonna fuck up my plan.”

“So you’re a principled man, are you?” I asked.

“Yes, sir, I am. Though I know some that ain’t.”

It took three solid minutes
of banging on Wick Chandler’s door Saturday morning to get him to open up. When he finally did, he was in pretty much the same condition as when I had first met him: naked except for a robe, this time one of aquamarine silk. A black sleep mask hung around his neck, along with his gold chains.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“Now?” he asked, in a voice husky from sleep. I pushed past him and into the front room.

It was like stepping into another dimension. Chandler had gone in for postmodern in a big way, colors that scorched the eye and lean, rippling furniture, some of which looked like interior parts of a big machine. The couch seemed to be melting; the coffee table crouched, ready to spring. The room could have been a display in a museum for mad decorators, if it weren’t for the clothes scattered across the raspberry-colored carpet. Some of the clothing belonged to a woman.

“This is a bad time, Clay,” Chandler said, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“You’re going to have to make do with only one penis, Wick. I gave your whale ornament to Deck Willhoit to stop him from carving up Bevo. Which is just as well, because if I’d gotten home with it, I’d be jamming it up your left nostril right now.”

That woke him up a little. He offered me a seat on the melting couch and then sat on a tiny wire chair that looked as if it could not possibly support his bulk. I told him about the run-in with Willhoit and his cowboys.

“You ask me,” he said, scratching his ear, “that was damned irresponsible of Bevo, to get you involved in his shady deals like that.”

“Irresponsible of
Bevo? You
sent me to Dallas to fetch a goddamned mummified whale’s penis!”

“You’ve got to understand, Clay. It’s a valuable artifact,” he said.

“I’m sure it is.”

“It has a lot of sentimental value to me.”

“I’m sure it does. I just don’t want to hear about it.”

“I’m real sorry, Clay,” he said. “The last thing in the world I wanted to do was hurt your feelings.”

“You didn’t hurt my feelings. You almost got me killed by a drug dealer in a Dallas stripjoint’s parking lot, but you didn’t hurt my feelings.”

“I don’t think Willhoit would have killed you, Clay,” Wick said. “It sounds to me like the two of you got along fine.”

“I have a low tolerance for fetching whale parts in the middle of the night, Wick. I didn’t sign on for that sort of work.” I stood up.

Wick stood up, too. “Jesus, Clay, you aren’t thinking of quitting, are you?”

I hadn’t been, and now that he mentioned it, I found that fact surprising.

“Give me one reason why I should stay.”

“The firm needs you, Clay. You don’t know how much you’ve done for us in just the last few days.”

“All I’ve done is lose your whale dick for you.”

“You’ve sharpened us up. We were just drifting on the Rasmussen case until you showed up and got us to working on it.”

“You’re still just drifting,” I said. “You’re going to lose the case big time.”

“You fit here, Clay. You don’t think you do, but you do.” He spoke about plans he and Stroud were mulling over to expand the firm. In five years, maybe four, we would all be rich. “Don’t you want to be rich?” he asked.

“I’d rather be sane,” I told him.

“All right, then,” he said. “There’s another reason for you to stay. Sally.”

“She left me taped naked to a chair for the police to find, Wick. I’m not too sure Sally cares if I stick around or not.”

“I think that shows a real interest on her part.”

“Wickie?” a woman’s husky voice called from down the hall.

“Just a minute, Clay,” said Wick, scuttling down the hallway. I heard the low, muffled drawl of Chandler’s voice, its tone ardent and cajoling. I noticed a garter belt lying under the coffee table, and next to it, an ivory-handled straight razor. Perhaps it was the razor lady I had talked to over the phone on my first day in the office!

He came back wrapping the flimsy robe tighter around his huge stomach. “Look, Clay, I’m sorry as I can be about last night. I should have told you about the pizzle, and Bevo sure as hell should have told you about the meeting with Willhoit. But let me ask you something: If you
had
known—if Bevo had come clean and told you he wanted you to go with him to keep him alive when he met his drug dealer—would you have gone?”

“Are you crazy?” I asked. “I’m no bodyguard. And I don’t practice law in parking lots.”

“I’m not asking you if it was
smart
to go. I’m asking if you would have gone to save your client’s life.”

I thought about that. “This is stupid,” I said. “If Bevo had told me what he wanted to do, I’d have talked him out of it.”

Wick shook his head. “You don’t talk Bevo out of things. He was going to meet that man in Dallas, with or without you. And without you, there was a much better chance of his winding up at the bottom of Lake Ray Hubbard. Now, knowing
that,
would you have turned Bevo down?”

“I don’t know, and here’s the point, Wick: I wasn’t given a chance to find out.”

“You’re right, partner. I’m sorry. No more crazy missions. I promise.”

I drove home but felt too restless to go in. Instead, I drove to the office and tried to work on the Rasmussen case but found I couldn’t concentrate. I kept wondering if Sally might show up at my house that morning—an unlikely possibility, considering that I had basically accused her of whoring for her father the last time I saw her. On my way home I went by Glenn Lawson’s hardware store and bought back the lawn mower. I mowed and edged and trimmed.

As Lawson predicted, off and on throughout the day people showed up to repossess things Bevo had failed to make payments on. An unassembled satellite dish was taken away by a couple of husky guys in a van. They took the television, too, and the VCR. I helped three teenagers carry a fiberglass Jacuzzi out of the garage and lift it into a pickup truck. Everybody who came to take away merchandise offered to sell it to me then and there. They would give me a great price on it. Apparently, there were not many buyers of luxury items left in Jenks.

Later on I strolled through the business district of Jenks, an exercise that took less than fifteen minutes, and noted all the shops that had gone out of business. The people I met, most of whom greeted the stranger in their midst with an automatic “howdy,” moved with a curious floating listlessness, as if their chests were hollow or they had been balancing something heavy on their heads for a long time. I compared these folks to the thousands I used to see every day caught in Houston’s frenetic bustle—the downtown crowds pushing through jungle heat on their way to lunch at noon or the parking lots at five o’clock. There was not much similarity. Houstonians were harried, but they knew they were going somewhere. If the citizens of Jenks had someplace to go, they weren’t in any hurry to get there.

About four o’clock I wandered into Glenn Lawson’s hardware store for the second time that day, this time just to chat, and ran into Captain Jack and Red Meachum, our soon-to-be sheriff’s deputy. They were buying a spring-loaded animal trap. I introduced myself, something I hadn’t done on our first encounter at the Singing Pig.

“I hope we can clear up any ill feelings that might exist between you boys and the firm of Chandler and Stroud,” I said.

Captain Jack turned to Meachum. “Do you have any ill feelings toward ’em, Red?”

“Nope,” said Red, “I love lawyers. Lawyers just make my day.” He smiled at me, and I understood Stroud’s contempt for the ex-pilots.

“That’s a mean-looking trap you got there,” I said. “What’s it for? Bobcats?”

Meachum shot me a suspicious look. “What would make you think it’s for bobcats?” he asked.

I shrugged. They had also brought to the counter a half-dozen little evergreen-shaped car deodorants.

“Whatever you fellows do in your cars must really be pungent,” I said.

Jack pointed a finger at me. “City boy, you tell those fat farts you work for that their day is coming.”

Meachum tapped his friend on the arm. “Now, Jack,” said the big man, “this lawyer wants to make friends.” Captain Jack bit down on the rest of his speech.

“We’ll have to go to lunch together again sometime,” I said as they left the store with their purchases.

Lawson had watched the encounter from behind the cash register. “I see you’ve met our rehabilitation project,” he said.

“What they lack in brains, they make up for in charm,” I replied.

“The big one there is gonna be our new deputy,” said Lawson. “He says he’s gonna get the others deputized, too. Their Rambo phase must be over, or else they’d have been all camouflaged up. Could be they’re starting a new phase.” He shook his head. “We’ll have to get old Hard-dick to name it for us. How’s the lawn mower working out?”

I told him that I had already given the yard a makeover.

He laughed. “You can usually tell who the city people are around here. They have the nicest lawns. I guess it’s hard for them to find stuff to do in this little town.”

“What
is
there to do around here?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “you could fertilize.”

Chandler and Stroud had planned
a little welcoming party for me that night out at Stroud’s place. Shortly after six-thirty I parked the Austin Healey in the yard of Gilliam Stroud’s farmhouse. From his stall in the broken-down stable, Ed the unspotted Appaloosa watched me climb onto the porch. The front door was open, and Cajun fiddle music blasted through the house so loudly that the air trembled. I peered in from the porch.

“Well, lookee here,” boomed Stroud from the shadows, “our wounded boy has returned to us! “

“Clay!” Wick Chandler hollered. “Get in here!” He danced across the room toward me, a Hawaiian shirt billowing over his massive paunch like a crimson sail. Wick’s top half looked too heavy to be supported by the thin, blue-white legs that peeped out from under his aquamarine Bermudas. He was wearing black business socks and loafers. He thrust a longneck into my hand, motioning toward the kitchen. “There’s pâté in there. Help yourself.” Wick was a dervish, whirling and hopping to the music, a ruby blimp caught in a cyclone. He danced away, bumping into furniture.

The early-evening sun coming through the windows flung bright bands of light across the ancient furniture. Stroud was sprawled on a sofa in the room’s deepest shadow. He got up and lumbered toward me, holding out his hand for me to shake.

“Welcome to Jenks, Mr. Parker,” he boomed against the music. “How’s the leg?”

I told him it was fine, though to tell the truth it throbbed a little.

“That’s fine, that’s fine,” he said. “I’m mighty proud of you, boy. Anybody who’d take a darning needle in the leg for a client—such heroism.”

He put his hand on my shoulder, smiling broadly and, I thought, mockingly at me. He was wearing a bright yellow shirt with intricate designs like figures on a Mayan ruin and white linen pants that looked as if they had been wadded up before he put them on. He looked like a shriveled Sydney Greenstreet on a beach holiday, his pale feet marbly against the dark bands of his sandals. With a shock I noticed that the big toe on his left foot was missing. That explained the limp.

“We’ve got a housewarming present for you,” Stroud said, motioning toward a package on the coffee table. I set my beer on the table and unwrapped the package. It was a shiny nickel-plated revolver.

“Smith and Wesson model thirty-six,” said Stroud. “Hope you don’t already have one.”

I wondered if the gift was a joke concerning my run-in with Kirby Nutter. But when I replied that I didn’t own a gun, I got a look of genuine surprise.

“A Texas lawyer without a gun? Well, you’ve got one now, son. And it’s a honey.”

“There’s a holster goes with it,” said Wick, who had come up behind me, still dancing. “We’re getting your name put on it. In a while we’ll go down to the pond and you can shoot some snakes.”

“Thanks,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

We were joined by a slim blond woman who I guessed was in her late thirties, with a cloud of cotton-candy hair floating above the deep, leathery tan of her face and shoulders. It was Deirdre, the emu lady, dressed in a bright blue jumpsuit with sailor trimmings and a lot of cleavage showing. As we shook hands I wondered where her husband was. To my surprise, she told me.

“My husband Mike’s off catching bass at Texoma.”

“Is that so?” I said, smiling.

“Do you fish, Clay?” she asked, and now I saw that she was drunk.

“Not since I was a kid,” I answered, but she didn’t hear me, because another woman had walked up behind her and slipped an ice cube down her back. Deirdre whirled around and around.

“Get it out, get it out!” she shrieked. She managed to extract it herself, and she flung it at the other woman.

“Wanda Sue, I swear!”

Wanda Sue was blond and dark-tanned like Deirdre, maybe a little younger, and dressed in a sleeveless jumpsuit of white and green polka dots. The depth of their tans was a little shocking; these women had been seriously irradiated.

“This is Wanda Sue Lovell, my cousin,” Deirdre said. “She’s been dying to meet you.”

I shook hands and smiled at Wanda, who smiled back and moved close. Wick danced over and scooped Deirdre into his arms. He bumped against me, whispered, “Sally’s out of town,” and danced away grinning at me as if to say, Well...I realized then that Wanda was to be my date for the evening. A second welcome-party surprise: first the gun, now Wanda.

“Nice gun,” Wanda said. I was still holding the revolver. Wanda slid her dark fingers along its barrel.

I tried to think, but it was hard with the Cajun fiddle music making my vision blur. I figured I was being scammed again, but by whom? Was it just Wick, unhappy about my relationship with Sally and hoping Wanda would steer me in another direction? Or was Stroud in on it, too, which meant he knew about Sally and me?

“Do you like to shoot snakes?” I asked. I was hoping to talk Wanda into taking my place on the snake-shooting expedition.

“I’ve shot a few in my time.”

We all went to the dining room, where a feast was laid out on two card tables set up amid folding chairs and dusty piles of books: beef ribs, baked beans, potato salad, and a relish spicy enough to take paint off siding. Before long I was on my sixth beer and feeling wobbly. Gilliam Stroud didn’t seem to have much of an appetite. He sat distracted, glaring around the room. Was he upset about Sally and me? Had he heard?

Wanda, it turned out, was a dental hygienist and had a fund of stories about bad teeth. They made for unusual table talk. I continued to drink until the buzz from the beer muffled the screeching fiddle music. At one point, maybe in the kitchen, I remember Wanda telling me that I had good, strong teeth, but I don’t recall what I had done with them to earn her approbation.

I kept on drinking, moving from beer to whiskey. Everything got blurry. There may have been a fire. I have a memory of Wick dancing like a maniac with Deirdre, spinning her round and round until both of them fell laughing onto the sofa in the front room. Deirdre landed on me, and in the scramble she turned into Wanda, who performed a dental examination on my mouth with her tongue. I had one hand caught in the top of her jumpsuit and one in the tight bundle of her hair when I started to black out.

Then my brain jolted hard, like a fastball thudding into a catcher’s mitt, and a sharp pain peeled layer after layer of drunkenness away until I was awake and standing in the gloom of Stroud’s parlor. Wanda writhed on the couch, her hands clapped against her ears. I could hear Deirdre shrieking from the floor behind the sofa. “Goddamn it, Gill!” Wick hollered. “Cut it out.” The pain stopped, and in the silence—where had the fiddle music gone?—I could hear dogs howling, some from close by, some from far away across the fields. There was an old porch swing just outside the door, and from it came the creak of chains and a deep-voiced chuckle. Gilliam Stroud had blown his whistle.

I stumbled toward the screen door in a rage. I was going to make sure Stroud never seared my skull with his little toy again. The door wobbled, stuck in the frame. I yanked hard.

“Give me that whistle!” I yelled. Before I could pull the door open, Wick Chandler collided against me, pushing me away from the door.

“Wait, Clay!” he said. “You don’t know about it. Listen to me.” I pushed at him and grabbed for the door. The girls had gotten up, Wanda half out of her jumpsuit, and watched us struggle.

“Get away from me, Wick,” I said. “I’m gonna make him swallow that thing.” I wrenched the door open and stepped out onto the porch. Gilliam Stroud lay in the porch swing, head thrown back, snoring. It had taken him less than a minute to fall asleep. The whistle hung on its silver chain against the hieroglyphs of his shirt.

I wanted to yank the whistle off its chain and throw it as hard as I could. But looking at the massive ruin of the man, the utter collapse of him, I couldn’t do it. The anger began to drain out of me. Wick came out and stood with me, watching his partner drift on the swing.

“You don’t want to take it away from him, Clay,” Wick said.

“Why does he call it the voice of doom?” I asked. Winded, we sat down on the edge of the porch. Deirdre and Wanda joined us, and while Stroud snored, Wick told us the story of the whistle.

“There’s a pond on this property,” he said. “It’s over yonder. Gill and I used to go down there to shoot snakes. This was years ago, right after he moved here. He had been living somewhere down around Gonzales, just marking time since he left El Paso. His wife had died there.”

“What did she die of?” asked Deirdre.

“Cancer, I think. I’m not sure. Gill doesn’t talk about it. I think it’s what ruined him. He gave up his judgeship right after she died. A federal judge stepping down. I never heard of it before.”

Neither had I.

“He had a daughter, too,” Wick continued. “A friend of mine out in El Paso told me that she turned out to be no good. She got into drugs in a big way.”

“What happened to her?” asked Deirdre.

“She died, too, a year or so after her mother. Car accident in New Mexico, I think. Gill almost never talks about it. We’ve been partners going on seventeen years, and he has mentioned her to me maybe three times.” He gave his dozing partner a long, puzzled look.

“How did you two wind up together?” I asked.

Wick shrugged. “Just weird luck. I heard about his wife’s death and sent him a sympathy card. My old professor, you know? A couple of years later I got the craziest letter from him, asking if I thought East Texas had room for another lawyer. He didn’t mention the lawyer’s name, and I thought he was asking me to do him a favor, take on some kid out of law school who needed experience, that sort of thing. I wrote him back and said, Sure, send him on. Business was good back then, and I figured if the guy had a recommendation from Gilliam Stroud, he’d do fine. I didn’t know he was talking about himself until he showed up in the Lincoln. He was pulling a trailer with everything he owned in it. It was an awful small trailer.” Wick shook his head in wonder. “Gilliam Stroud, asking for a job from me. I wasn’t his best student, not by a long shot. To this day I’m not quite sure why he chose me and Jenks.”

“Maybe he was just looking for a way out,” I said. It made sense to me. If Gill Stroud had wanted to bury himself, Jenks was a good place to do it.

“I made him a partner right off, of course,” Wick said. “Jesus, I couldn’t get over the way he had changed since the days at Baylor Law. I don’t know how to describe it. It was like he’d been bitten in two, like something had dug in and scooped most of him out.”

Wanda went into the house and came back with longnecks for the four of us. Wick took a long drink before continuing.

“Anyway, Gill liked shooting snakes. He built a cabin by the pond; it’s about two miles over that way. We’d go out there with a cooler of beer and sit on the porch and shoot at the water. We could generally hit the pond. I don’t know that we killed many snakes, but they by-God knew we were out there.” He laughed. “One day we got really drunk and decided to play a fast-draw game. We strapped on pistols and nailed targets to a couple of pine trees, moved a ways off from each other, and let fly. We didn’t put a single hole in either of those targets. We were really buzzed.”

“You were lucky you didn’t kill yourselves,” I said.

“I thought about that later,” Wick replied. “I noticed that some of Gill’s shots were going wild. I mean
really
wild, snapping branches high off of trees. I looked around at him, and it looked kind of like he was fighting himself for the pistol. It was the strangest thing I ever saw, one hand fighting the other. He actually got the gun pointed at his skull a couple of times, and the second time, it went off, just missing him and singeing his hair. If you look hard, you’ll see a little white scar over his left ear.”

Wanda got up, tiptoed around behind the porch swing, and squinted at the side of Stroud’s head.

“Wanda!”
hissed Deirdre.

“Yep,” Wanda whispered, “there it is.” She came back to the group. “Well, I’m
sorry,
Dee-Dee,” she said to Deirdre, “but I’m the sort of person likes things proved. It’s there, all right, just the tiniest little scar.”

“We were shooting .22 target pistols,” Wick said. “If we’d been shooting anything else, the man wouldn’t be here with us today. You should have seen him, half-bald, black gunpowder on his face, and that red welt running across his skull. He was blinking like a baby, like he’d just been born.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I went crazy. I ran for him, got my hand on the gun. And it was like there were three of us fighting for it, me and Gill and whatever it was inside him that had made a grab for it in the first place. We fought for what seemed like five minutes before the gun went off again. The bullet hit him right in the joint of his big toe. It damn near tore it off.”

Wanda reached out to touch the empty spot on Stroud’s sandal. Deirdre swatted her hand.

“That sent him into shock, and I was able to get him into the Dodge and drive to the clinic. The doctor there said he couldn’t do anything but take off what was left of the toe. But Gill didn’t want any part of that. He raised hell, threatened to sue if the toe came off. We wound up going to Dallas in an ambulance, with Gill swearing and thrashing around, in spite of all the painkiller they gave him. He was a sight, hair all standing up, that big scar on his scalp, and the powder that had bit into his face and wouldn’t wash off. It looked like his brain had exploded inside his head. A surgeon at Parkland tried to save the toe, but he couldn’t do it. Gill was under anesthetic, of course. When he came to, there was hell to pay.”

“Wick,” I said, “what does this have to do with the whistle?”

“I’m coming to that. When he found out the toe was gone, he asked for it back. Can you imagine that? He wanted the remains. The surgeon said he couldn’t have them; they were long gone. Gill roared at him, said he would sue him and his hospital and the whole damn town if he didn’t get his toe back. finally he wore them down, and they gave him a prescription bottle with some tiny bone fragments in it and something that might have been a toenail. If you ask me, there was no way to know if they were really Gill’s toe bones or bones from a rat’s ass, but Gill took them and sent them to an Indian silversmith he knew in El Paso.” He pointed at the whistle hanging from Stroud’s neck. “You see those little flecks of white in there? Toe bones.”