Shoveling Smoke (22 page)

“I’m not much of a singer,” I said, staring at him.

“Not even when God almighty pours out his blessings on the heads of his children?”

“I didn’t know he’d done any pouring,” I replied.

“Let this be a lesson to you, son. Cockiness is one of the seven deadly sins.” He laughed. “Didn’t you hear what our worthy opponent just said? Somebody screwed up somewhere, son, and that may just save our asses!” He got up and limped down the hall, singing.

Three hours later,
Stroud and I were on the road again, driving west in the big Lincoln toward Greenville on State Highway 11. “Careful, Mr. Parker,” Stroud warned. “The highway patrolmen on this stretch of road know my car, and we can’t afford to be stopped now.” In the canted light of evening, the hills were lengthening, the deep green of the pines taking on shadows. “We want to hit him right after supper,” said the old man. “People tend to put their brains on hold about then.”

We were on our way to shake down Stan-the-Man Pulaski, veterinary pathologist extraordinaire. Stroud felt that if we surprised him tonight with questions about the discrepancies in his report, he might become flustered enough to tell us something useful.

“Pulaski is Jehovah on the stand,” Stroud said. “But it’s hard to be Jehovah when you’re caught off guard in your living room.”

“But how off guard will he be?” I asked. “Won’t Jacobs have already told him about his talk with us?”

“Of course. And if I’m right, if the good doctor really did screw up the necropsies, he’ll be getting sweaty, trying to pull a story together. But he won’t expect to have to tell his story until tomorrow morning. Trust me, Mr. Parker, we’ll be a big surprise.”

“The surprise may be on us,” I reminded him. “Jacobs may have done what he said. He may have just picked up the wrong report.”

Stroud laughed. “We’ve got him, Mr. Parker. You heard him on the phone. That was the voice of someone seriously nonplussed.”

“Nonplussed?”

“Can’t you feel the change in the wind?” Stroud added, “God is on our side. We’re living in a state of grace.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “How did Pulaski screw up? Could he have gone to the wrong fire?”

Stroud hooted. “Jesus, I wish he had! What a great story that would make. It would be the end of him in this state. But no, Mr. Parker, he must have found the barn, all right. There wouldn’t have been more than one to go up in flames that night. We would have heard.”

I was surprised when Stroud told me that neither he nor Wick Chandler had ever visited the site of the fire. “Why would we have gone out there?” Stroud said. “We’re no experts. Besides, the fire happened months before Bevo brought us in on the case. By then there would have been nothing left.”

Stroud explained how Pulaski went about examining the site of a fire. “first, he shovels and sweeps the site down to bare earth and six inches beyond. Then he carts off the ashes in buckets and crates that he numbers to correspond with a grid he draws over a diagram of the site. finally, he winnows it all down to a few jars of stuff. That’s what he brings to the trial to ram up the other side’s ass.”

“All right, then,” I said, “what happened with the report?”

Stroud hummed tunelessly for a minute. “I am beginning to see it, to smell the rottenness of it. The parts are coming together. Let it percolate a little longer, Mr. Parker. Let me keep it on the back burner awhile.”

“Molly Tunstall said you liked the back burner.”

“I’m a great believer in it,” he replied. “The back burner and God’s grace.” He started singing “Amazing Grace” again, thumping the dash in time. “'I once was lost, but now am found,/Was blind but now I see.’ Grace, Mr. Parker. Sometimes that’s all you have to fall back on.”

“I didn’t know you were such a believer, Mr. Stroud.”

“I’ll believe in anything that wins the case. If it takes God to do it, then I’m a goddamn deacon.”

Traffic picked up a little as we neared Greenville. “Farmers,” said Stroud, watching the taillights of the pickup ahead of us. “I was raised on a farm. A big one. Hated every minute of it. I swore I would get away, make a name for myself. And now here I am, living in a run-down farmhouse, making wills and getting divorces for farmers.” He laughed, shook his head. “God surely has a sense of humor.”

When we reached Greenville we turned onto State Highway 57 and drove toward McKinney. About the time the sun disappeared in front of us, Stroud told me to start looking for a turnoff. “It could be tough to find in the dark.”

“Have you ever been to Pulaski’s place before?” I asked.

“Once. He hosted a get-together of the East Texas Bar Association. It’s a fancy house with a pool and a couple of big barns and a landing strip that he keeps smooth as a putting green. The whiskey flowed that night, and if I recall correctly, the lieutenant governor and some of his buddies staged a three-legged race on the runway and tore out some grass. Pulaski got a little put out. He’s a very serious fellow.”

“Do you really think he’s crooked?”

“A horse pathologist, Mr. Parker, is the ripest virgin in the whorehouse. Everybody wants to corrupt him. If you’re in the horse business and are crooked, as you very probably are, you practically have to have an animal pathologist in your pocket. Stanislaus Pulaski has testified in over four hundred insurance fraud cases. In three hundred of those, he was hired by SWAT. Now, you tell me, are there scorch marks on his pudenda, or what?

“So you think he’s been bought by SWAT?”

“It’s a foregone conclusion.”

We got all the way to McKinney, having missed the turnoff. “Jesus wept!” Stroud cried. “Turn around, Mr. Parker. We’ll try again.”

On our second pass we found the road, drove about five miles down an asphalted lane, and then a couple of miles on gravel through a pine forest, coming at last to Pulaski’s compound. The house sat on a rise, with the barns in a little valley behind it and the landing strip at the bottom of the valley. There were two vehicles in the driveway, both Jeeps, but no lights on in the house or the barns.

“Does he have a family?” I asked.

“Divorced.”

“Maybe there’s nobody home,” I said, pulling to a stop behind one of the Jeeps.

“Yep,” said Stroud. From his tone of voice, I gathered he was not surprised.

We got out, went to the front door, rang the bell. We rang again. Stroud knocked. “Stan,” he called, “come on out, you lying, thieving son of a bitch.”

“Jesus, Gill,” I said. “Take it easy.”

Stroud cocked his head, listening. All I could hear was the whisper of a soft wind and the crickets taking up where the locusts had left off at dusk. It was a dark night, no moon, the stars dimmed by a low-lying haze. Stroud was only a gaunt shadow as he limped to the side of the house.

“Come on, Mr. Parker,” he said, disappearing toward the back. I followed him along the side of the house, past the swimming pool, a green glow in the darkness, to a sliding glass patio door. Shards of glass crackled under our feet: The door had been smashed. From somewhere inside the house came a faint beeping.

“A break-in,” I whispered. “That noise must be the burglar alarm.”

“Yep,” said Stroud. “It’s coming together. Stan, you stinker, you.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, taking the old man’s arm. “The burglars may still be inside.”

“If they are,” said Stroud, “they’d better be ready for a fight.”

Stroud shook free of me and, before I could stop him, walked through the jagged hole in the door.

“Stroud!” I hissed, sticking my head through the hole in the glass. It was pitch black inside the house.

I jumped when Stroud’s voice boomed in the darkness next to me. “Go get my flashlight out of the trunk,” he said.

“This is burglary!” I replied.

“Hurry, Mr. Parker. I imagine the police are on their way.”

I ran to the car, fumbled in the darkness for the trunk key, opened the trunk, and found the flashlight. Stroud was waiting inside the door when I got back.

“We have to find the study,” he said, switching on the beam. We were in a kind of solarium, full of hothouse trees and exotic plants. Walking through the house, we saw evidence here and there of vandalism: smashed picture frames, lamps knocked over, a mahogany entertainment center in the den cleaned out of all its electronic components. But the house was not in terrible shape.

“Very neat burglars,” said Stroud. We found the study, a big cherry-paneled room in the center of the house. Stroud switched off his flashlight and turned on the overhead light. In one corner of the room sat a computer work desk with wires sprawling across its top and no computer; in another, a small bookshelf had been knocked over, with books strewn on the floor around it.

“What are we looking for?” I asked.

“Something we won’t find, if I’m right about this little operation.” There were papers scattered throughout the room. Stroud picked up a few and scanned them, then went to the big cherry-wood desk in the center of the room and looked through a couple of drawers. “I would bet Bevo’s whole insurance policy that we won’t find a single page relating to his case in this room,” said the old man.

“We don’t have time to look,” I replied. The beeping of the burglar alarm was making my skin crawl. Perhaps six minutes had passed since we drove up to the house. How long would it take the Collin County sheriff to answer Pulaski’s alarm?

“Look here!” cried Stroud, kicking at a cardboard box big enough to hold a good-sized television set. Across the side of the box was stenciled the name
Rasmussen.

“What’s in the box, Mr. Parker?”

I knelt and opened the top. There were several Mason jars containing little piles of whitened ash. Plastic freezer bags held fragments of bone and charred flesh. There were plastic boxes of microscope slides and three small pails full of debris, wadded-up paper, scorched links from a metal chain, bent nails.

“Bevo’s horses, is my guess,” I replied.

“Pick up the box!” Stroud said.

“Why?”

“Pick it up, goddamn it, or I’ll do it myself.”

I folded the top closed and picked up the box.

“Now what?” I said.

“What do you think? Go put it in the car!”

“We can’t do that!”

“Move!” the old man snapped.

“Do you know how many laws we’re breaking, Stroud? We’re stealing. We’re tampering with evidence. We’re—”

“That’s right, Parker, and if you don’t move your ass, we’re going to get
caught.”

I set the box back down. “Mr. Stroud, this is wrong.”

“fine,” he said, “it’s wrong. Just get out of here, then.”

“The cops will be here any minute!” I reminded him.

“Let ’em come!” said Stroud. “Let ’em carry me off in chains. Let me waste away in prison, a martyr to your goddamn notion of ethics. And when I die, you can lower me into the ground with your lily-white hands.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“I don’t recall much about law in the city, Mr. Parker, but out here we try to win our cases. Now, you have a choice. You can either leave that box on the floor, in which case I’m not budging until the police come and arrest me, or you can pick up the goddamn box and we can get out of here and maybe save the case and our law firm to boot.”

Stroud sat down in Pulaski’s office chair and crossed his arms.

“You’re not moving?” I asked.

“Not without the box.”

“They won’t arrest you, Stroud. They’ll wonder what you’re doing here, but they’ll know you didn’t break in. You’re not a burglar.”

“Maybe so,” the old man said. “Though it won’t exactly help our case for me to be found here. But if we get out of here in time, and we take this box with us, we can turn this case around.” He paused for a moment, then said, “You wanted a new life in the country, son. Well, here it is, tied up in a bow for you. Let’s just win this case, and we can thrash out the morality of it tomorrow morning.”

I looked at Stroud, and I looked at the box. I thought long and hard. And in the end I carried the box to the car. I broke the law big time. As I stumbled back out through the darkness, listening to the Mason jars clinking in the box that I held in my hands, I tried to convince myself that I had given in only to save this cracked old man from embarrassing himself and his firm—my firm—by being caught at the scene of a crime. But I knew that was a lie. The fact was, I wanted to win the Rasmussen case, and this was the only way I could see to do it. So much for rediscovering a sense of ethics in the country, I thought as I closed the trunk.

When I got back to the study, Stroud had the phone receiver in his hand and was dialing a number from his address book.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Keep quiet!”

I heard a muffled click as the line connected, then a voice, unintelligible from where I stood. Without a word, Stroud put his whistle to his lips and blew. I staggered out of the room, my spine jumping as if zapped by a current. The whistle kept attacking my nerves until I had made it back outside, and even standing away from the house, I felt the skin dance on the bridge of my nose. I thought seriously again of just getting in the car and driving off, leaving the old man to fend for himself. The appeal of that idea grew as minutes passed and Stroud did not appear. Then the high, thin whine of a siren reached me, and I ran to the house to pull Stroud out by his collar. We collided at the broken patio door.

“The police!” I said.

“Let’s vamoose!” he replied.

By the time I had the Lincoln’s engine started, we could see gleams of light cutting through the trees from the dirt road that led to Pulaski’s house. Our escape route was blocked.

“Let’s go visit the barns,” Stroud suggested. Without headlights, I drove down the gentle, shadowy slope of the valley toward the farther of the two barns, a Quonset building that, I figured, must serve as the hangar for Pulaski’s plane. Behind the building was a stand of evergreens and, passing nearby, a small road that ran alongside the landing strip. I was heading for that road when the flashing lights of a squad car appeared on it, about a mile ahead of us, cresting the top of the valley.

“Trapped like rats!” Stroud said.

I turned the car into the grove of evergreens and got out.

“Where are you going?” Stroud asked.

“They may find the car, but they don’t have to find us,” I replied. He got out, too, and we ran for the barn. There was a small metal side door, locked, but with a glass panel in the top half of it. I used the butt of Stroud’s flashlight to smash the glass, and we got inside before the patrol car reached the barn. We stood panting in the darkness, waiting to see whether the police would catch sight of the Lincoln or drive on up to the house. Stroud, starting to wheeze, took his inhaler out of his pocket and dosed himself.