Shoveling Smoke (20 page)

“Howdy, Paul,”
said Nyman Scales. “This is a nice surprise. You fellas come on in and have a seat.”

“Primrose?” said Stroud, rising from his chair. “What in hell are you doing here?”

Primrose smiled as he shook hands with us. He was wearing another string tie, this one with a bolo of clear plastic in which a scorpion was embedded. He introduced his companion, who was the assistant deputy sheriff for Claymore County.

“I was down here on business when I heard about the deposition,” he explained. “You don’t mind if I sit in, do you, Gill? After all, the horses we’re talking about were killed in my county. I’ve got an interest in this case.”

“I most certainly do object,” Stroud said. “This little get-together already looks too much like an undertakers’ convention to please me. You just go take care of your business and let us attend to ours.”

There was a knock at the door. It was Bevo, the last participant, wearing his sharkskin outfit. He had gotten his lank hair trimmed a little, but he still looked like a hayseed in a stolen suit as he clapped Scales on the back and apologized for being late. He shook hands all around, flashing his diamond tooth in his wolf’s smile.

“Well, Mr. DA,” he said, shaking Primrose’s hand. “I haven’t seen you since you tried to pin the murder of that poor Mexican fella on me. Sorry I couldn’t oblige you.”

“It’s okay, Bevo,” Primrose said with a washed-out smile. “You will one day.”

Bevo wanted to let the DA and the policeman sit in on the deposition. “It’s time they found out I’m innocent.” But Stroud insisted that Primrose and his deputy sheriff stay out. Under the court’s rules, one side has to give the other written notice of the intent to include persons other than the parties and their lawyers at a deposition. Jacobs had not sent such a notice, and Primrose had not gotten the court’s permission to attend. The DA knew he would be excluded if Stroud objected. Primrose waved wanly as Scales led the rest of us to another, much bigger room in the genetics lab.

In the center of the concrete floor lay a massive slab of what looked like black marble. Above it a jointed metal arm, rigged with pulleys and steel cables, reached into the room through a hole high in the wall. The arm ended in a wicked-looking metal claw, which hovered over the center of the slab. The slab was slightly concave, and there was a drain in its center.

“Homey place you got here, Nyman,” said Wick.

“You folks have a seat,” Scales said. There were folding chairs arranged in a couple of rows to one side of the slab. As we sat down, Scales pushed a button on the wall, and with a low hum the slab began to rise. Scales let it reach the height of a desk, then pushed another button, and the slab stopped moving.

“Mrs. Mears,” he said to the court reporter, “you might like to put your steno machine on the table.”

The reporter clearly did not want to have anything to do with the marble slab. “I’ll be fine right here,” she said, balancing the stenographer’s machine on her lap.

“I don’t blame you,” Scales said. “I suppose it’s a kind of creepy place. We sometimes use the table to gut large animals.” He pointed to the metal claw and winked at Laspari. “There’s a way to make that thing act just like a human arm.” Laspari nodded at him, and I wondered if the Italian understood English.

Scales sat on the marble slab while Wick got the deposition going by asking him the standard identifying questions. Then Wick turned to the case.

“Mr. Scales,” he asked, “do you know Mr. Bevo Rasmussen?”

“I do,” said Scales.

“Will you describe your business relationship with Mr. Rasmussen?”

“He bought some horses from me.”

“Would you characterize your relationship with Mr. Rasmussen as a cordial one?”

Scales smiled. “All my relationships are cordial.”

“Ask him about the night the horses died,”
hissed Bevo. Turning to me, he smiled and said, “I want to get out of here quick as possible.”

“Mr. Scales,” said Wick, “has Mr. Rasmussen ever spent the night at your home here?”

“Yes, sir, he has.”

“Did he do so on the night of July the fourteenth of last year?”

Scales squinted into the distance, as if trying to remember. “No, sir, I don’t believe he was with us that night.”

I stared at Scales. We all stared at him.

Wick cleared his throat. “Let me ask you again, Mr. Scales, did Bevo Rasmussen spend the night of July fourteenth of last year at your house?”

“Nope.”

“Are you aware, Mr. Scales, of what happened on that night?”

“Wasn’t that the night Bevo’s horses burned up?”

“Yes, sir.”

All innocence, Scales gave Wick an apologetic smile. “Well, then, I’m sure Bevo wasn’t with us. I remember reading about that fire in the papers the next morning and saying to old Pete Taliaferro down at the stables how sad the whole thing was, Bevo being so strapped for cash and all, and now he didn’t even have his horses. Pete was of the opinion that Bevo might have had something to do with the fire, but I told him I doubted the lad would stoop so low.”

There was a crash as Bevo’s chair flipped over. Bevo had launched himself at Scales.

“You lying son of a bitch!” Bevo hollered. He had one hand on Scales’s throat while the other was reaching toward the boot where he kept his razor. An instant later he was flying through the air. Scales had simply picked him up and thrown him. Bevo landed on top of Laspari, the Stromboli agent. Laspari cried out as his chair collapsed under him, but the moment he hit the floor, Bevo was up and racing for Scales again, his razor in his hand.

“I’ll tell ’em,” Bevo hissed. “I’ll tell ’em everything, you fucking backstabber.”

Scales looked at him quizzically. “You seem to have me mixed up with somebody else, Bevo,” he said. Bevo cut at Scales with the razor. Scales grabbed Bevo’s hand and cranked it hard, sending the razor flying. As the rest of us watched, frozen, Scales gave Bevo four fast blows in the ribs with his other fist, and Bevo crumpled. Scales picked up his scrawny assailant by the lapels of his sharkskin suit and placed him in the shallow depression of the marble slab.

“That claw up there could do you a world of good,” Scales said. Keeping a grip on Bevo’s throat, Scales flipped a toggle on the side of the marble slab, and a rigor passed through the long metal arm above them. Pushing buttons on the side of the slab, Scales caused the claw to open and descend. Bevo fought Scales’s grip but could not break it.

“Look here, Wick,” Scales called over his shoulder, “I’ll show you how to make a walking stick like the one I gave you.”

The rest of us finally found ourselves able to move. Jacobs bent to help Laspari to his feet, while Wick and I jumped to the table. I took hold of Scales’s arm to break his grip on Bevo’s neck. I might as well have tried to shatter the marble table with my forehead. Under Scales’s workshirt his muscles were steel cables. He turned and gave me a dry smile, his blue eyes dancing with deadly amusement.

“Let go of our client, Mr. Scales,” I said.

With a wink, Scales released Bevo. “I don’t take well to being jumped,” Scales said, and he walked out of the room, closing the door behind him.

For a moment Bevo lay gasping for breath, his hands at his throat, then he was off the table and running for the door Scales had just gone through.

“Come back here!” he screamed.

As he reached the door, it opened. The deputy sheriff from Mule Springs pushed Bevo back into the room, raised his revolver, and pointed it at Bevo’s forehead.

“Bevo Rasmussen,” he said, “you’re under arrest.”

Bevo stared at the muzzle of the revolver. “What for?” he asked.

“Arson.”

“Just a minute, Deputy,” roared Stroud, limping forward. “You have no jurisdiction here!”

Paul Primrose came out from behind the deputy and handed Stroud a document. Stroud read it, then crumpled it and threw it on the floor.

“I told you I was here on business, Gill,” Primrose whined, his face glowing with righteous irony.

“I’ll have him out before you can say grace at supper tonight,” Stroud told him.

“You’ll have to drive to Mule Springs to do it,” Primrose replied. “Cuff your prisoner, Deputy.”

The policeman shoved Bevo up against the wall and handcuffed his hands behind him. As he led Bevo out, the deputy began reading him his rights from a small card.

“Get me out, Mr. Stroud,” Bevo hollered as he disappeared down the hall. “I got things to tell you.”

Warren Jacobs and Vincenzo Laspari walked up to us at the door. “Well, Mr. Stroud,” said Jacobs, “you East Texas folks sure know how to show visitors a good time.” Smugness oozed out of both men’s smiles. We had been set up.

“If I find out you’ve had anything to do with the incarceration of my client, Jacobs,” said Stroud, “nothing little Jimmy Wortmann learned at Baylor is going to save your ass.”

“See you tomorrow, gentlemen,” said Jacobs as he brushed past us. “We have another deposition in the morning. I hope you manage to make it as amusing as this one has been.”

The shocks in Stroud’s Lincoln
were old, and as we tried to keep up with the patrol car taking Bevo to Mule Springs, the Lincoln bucked along the heat-rippled asphalt like a barge barreling down rapids. It was sixty hilly miles to Mule Springs from Tyler. Our friends in the patrol car were ignoring the speed limit, and before we had gone ten miles, they were so far ahead of us that we no longer glimpsed them as we crested the little hills.

“You’ve let them get away!” cried Wick, who sat in the passenger seat next to me.

“We know where they’re going, Wick,” I reminded him. “I’m not giving some state trooper the chance to run us in for speeding.” Sure enough, a couple of miles later we passed a black-and-white waiting in ambush on the road’s shoulder. Wick waved at them as we drove by.

From the backseat came a bitter laugh. “You can bet your grandmother’s ass Primrose set that up,” said Stroud. “The pious little shit.”

“You know why Primrose wants to beat us to Mule Springs,” said Wick. “Bevo’s going to get damaged in handling.”

That surprised me. “You don’t really think they would rough him up, do you?”

“The Mule Springs cops hate Bevo,” Wick said. “They’ve been chasing him for years, but he’s always slid loose. Now that he’s theirs, they’ll want to leave an impression on him.”

“Serves him right,” said Stroud. “He’s been lying to us from day one. In fact, Mr. Parker, slow down. Let’s give the Mule Springs police plenty of time to get to know our stalwart client.”

An hour later, when we saw him in a cell in the Mule Springs jail, Bevo looked as if he had witnessed a cattle stampede from underneath.

“He resisted when we took his fingerprints,” said the deputy who unlocked the cell door.

“Like hell I did!” said Bevo, who jumped up from the bunk and took hold of the cell bars. “They knocked the diamond out of my tooth, Mr. Stroud. Look here.” He hooked his mouth open with two fingers and thrust his face at us.

“We got his diamond,” said the deputy. “It’s in an envelope with his other stuff. He can have it when he leaves.
If
he leaves.”

“We’re gonna sue your ass,” said Bevo. “You have violated my civil goddamn rights. It was three against one!”

“I would hush if I were you, Brother Rasmussen,” said Stroud, sitting down on the end of the bunk. “They may take it into their heads to re-insert that diamond.”

“This is America, goddamn it,” huffed Bevo, throwing himself on the opposite end of the bed from where Stroud sat. “It ain’t the Soviet-fucking-Union.” His left eye was closing, and evidence of a nosebleed was caked across his face and down one sleeve of his shiny jacket. He kept running his tongue across the empty socket in his tooth.

“Bevo,” said Wick, “why do you think people keep beating you up?”

“The world is against me, Mr. Chandler,” Bevo replied in a voice mournful with self-pity. “They hate to see an honest man better himself.”

“Is that what you’ve been doing by lying to us?” I asked him. “You’ve been bettering yourself?”

“Like I told you, Mr. Parker, I got a plan. You stick to a plan, the plan will see you through.”

“You’d better let us in on the plan, Bevo,” said Wick, “before it beats you to death.”

“I must admit, there seems to be a flaw somewhere,” Bevo replied.

Bevo explained his plan. It was pretty much what we had thought. He had gotten Nyman Scales to set him up with high-dollar horses that would die in a fire so Bevo could claim the insurance money.

“After I paid off all the horse debt and the start-up money I owe Farmer’s Bank and that son of a bitch Nyman Scales, I figured to have cleared a little over one hundred and twenty thousand dollars,” he said. “That was gonna be seed money for my emu ranch.”

“But Stromboli didn’t roll over, did they?” Wick asked.

“No, sir, they did not. Scales was wrong about that. He said my case was small potatoes to Stromboli. That’s why we went with the goddamn wops in the first place. He said they wouldn’t read the claim twice, and I’d have my money before the last horse cooled.”

“But Stromboli sued you, and now Scales is not going to lie for you,” Wick said, “and your ass is cooked.”

“But Scales
did
lie,” Bevo said. “I did spend that night at his ranch. I really didn’t torch those horses, Mr. Chandler. I don’t know how many times I have to say it. I didn’t burn ’em. I was gonna do it, I think, but they went up before I had the chance.”

“What happened to them, then?” I asked.

“Nyman said it was probably lightning. It really does happen, you know; a barn gets zapped every once in a while. But now I figure Nyman himself did it. It’s not like he hasn’t burned horses before.” He shook his head. “Nyman Scales sold me out.” His voice broke on the last word. “He said I was like a son to him, and he sold me out. Him and his whore of a daughter.”

“What makes you think Sally was in on it?” I asked, glancing at Stroud, who sat staring at the floor.

“Nyman told me,” Bevo said. “After Stromboli shut me down, Nyman told me to sue them. He said Sally would fix it so’s we’d get one of Nyman’s judges.” Bevo got up and started to pace, a tricky feat in a small cell with three other men in it. “Then I discovered that she was playing hide-the-candle with the city boy here, and I figured Nyman had figured out another way to use her, to make sure you renegades didn’t run off another associate.”

There it was: If Stroud had not guessed at my relationship with Sally before, he knew about it now. Yet the old man sat motionless on the bed, staring down at the floor, as if he had not heard Bevo.

Bevo snapped his fingers. “Hell, I been wrong all along. Sally wasn’t fucking you to keep you on the case. She was spying for Nyman!” He pointed at me and hooted. “She was tickling information out of you and giving it to her daddy so’s he could jump me like he just done. Jesus H. Christ, why didn’t I see it coming?”

“Sally was sleeping with me in order to spy for her father?” I asked. “Bevo, that makes no sense.”

“It makes as much sense as anything else that’s happened since I bought those horses. Every goddamn thing that could go wrong has gone wrong. Even my own lawyers are working against me.” He was whining now.

“We’re not working against you, Bevo,” Wick said. “But it’s hard to defend a client who lies every time he opens his mouth.”

“You’re calling
me
a liar?” Bevo replied. “What about you, Hard-dick? What about the interro-whatchamacallits, those little questions you were supposed to send back to SWAT and forgot to? When were you planning to let me know this old man here fucked up my case? Mr. Parker’s the only one of you that’s come clean with me, and I figure that’s just because he’s new and hasn’t learned how to play the game your way yet.” He grinned his wolf’s grin. “Calling me a liar. Shit.”

“Why would Nyman Scales want to see you go down?” I asked him.

“Competition, Mr. Parker,” Bevo replied. “That’s the only reason I can see. Nyman Scales has got a swelled head. He thinks he’s the greatest thing since barbed wire. And here I come along, with a plan for a bird ranch that would make me the biggest show in East Texas. I think he was just jealous. He double-crossed me so’s I would never outdo him.”

“That’s a hoot,” said Wick.

“You people with your talk about lying and morals and ethics,” Bevo said, shaking his head. “You sound just like Scales, do you know that? He’s always talking ethics, shit like that, and here he’s sold me out. He’s as slimy as an otter’s cock.” He stopped pacing, took hold of the bars, and heaved a gigantic sigh. “I’m the only man I know has got an ounce of principle.”

“How much principle did it take to conspire with Stromboli’s lawyers without telling us?” I asked.

Bevo looked at me blankly. “I beg your pardon?”

“You’ve been talking to Antoine Duett, haven’t you, Bevo?”

“Who?” Bevo asked.

“Cut the shit, Rasmussen. I caught the two of you leaving the Dairy Queen yesterday afternoon, and I know you’ve met several times. Why are you holding secret meetings with the dirty-tricks man from SWAT?”

“All right,” he replied, “it’s true, I’ve spoken to Mr. Duett once or twice. But that was just self-protection. I wasn’t selling out my case. I wasn’t selling you guys out. Honest, Mr. Parker. I was just trying to help.”

Bevo explained that he had contacted SWAT to offer them a deal in return for settling the Stromboli case against him.

“I told them I had enough information to nail the biggest insurance crook in the country. That’s worth something to a big insurance law firm like SWAT. So they sent Antoine Duett down to see me about making a deal.”

“Who did you snitch on?” I asked.

Bevo rolled his eyes. “Why, Nyman Scales, of course. He’s the Al-fucking-Capone of insurance fraud in Texas, maybe even the whole country. He’s got dozens of jobs like mine working all the time, and nobody can nail him in court. He’s been keeping SWAT busy for years and costing Stromboli millions.”

“So you were selling out the man you just said was like a father to you?” I asked.
“That’s
principle, all right.”

“Didn’t Scales just do the same thing to me?” Bevo snapped.

“Yes,” I agreed. “He sold you out this morning. But you didn’t start meeting with Duett this morning. You were double-crossing Scales long before you knew he was double-crossing you.”

“It don’t hurt to have a backup plan,” Bevo replied.

“So you think you’ve got the dope on Scales?” Wick asked skeptically.

“Only enough to send him away for a thousand years,” Bevo replied. “I didn’t tell Duett no more than half of what I got. I got horse killings, rigged birth certificates, counterfeit bills of sale, doctored horses, if you know what I mean—”

“And you’ve got hard evidence to back you up?” Wick asked.

“I’m no goddamn detective,” Bevo said. “Let them find it on their own. I can tell them where to look.”

“Bevo,” Wick said, “if you don’t have hard evidence, you don’t have shit.
Everybody
knows the stories about Nyman Scales. But there’s no evidence. Scales is too smart to leave any. He’s famous for staying clean. Let me ask you, did Duett ever agree to a deal with you?”

“Not yet,” Bevo replied. “But it was in the works. We were going to meet next week and work something out.”

Wick shook his head. “SWAT wasn’t going to deal with you, Bevo. They were fishing for information about our case, jerking your chain. You just thought you were fucking Scales. He’ll turn out to be the tush hog in this deal.”

“We’ll see, won’t we?” Bevo sneered. He went back to pacing. He began muttering about Nyman Scales and Sally. “I’ll get him. Soon as I’m out of here. I’ll strap him to his goddamn table, see how he likes it. Him and that cunt Sally.”

Stroud, who had been brooding silently all this time, suddenly lunged off the bed, caught Bevo by the throat, and slammed him against the wall between Wick and me. The old man held Bevo off the ground while Bevo pulled desperately at the big liver-spotted hands that had cut off his wind. Wick and I were trying to loosen Stroud’s hold, when our commotion brought the jailer to the cell.

“Now, boys,” the jailer said, watching calmly from the other side of the bars, “you probably shouldn’t ought to choke your client like that.” Stroud let go of Bevo, who slumped to the floor, both hands at his throat.

“Miss Dean was not working against you, Rasmussen,” said Stroud, between gasping breaths, “if only because you aren’t worth working against. You aren’t worth a cup of cold piss, and I regret the day I ever took you on as a client.”

He motioned for the jailer to open the cell, and when he did, Stroud limped down the hall without another word.

“That old man tried to kill me,” Bevo said, staring wide-eyed at the departing Stroud.

“That’s the fourth attempt I’ve witnessed in less than a week,” I reminded him, “and the second one today. You’ve sure got a way with people, Bevo.”