Shoveling Smoke (3 page)

“Yes, sir.”

It was like a verbal ballet, or rather a tango, with the tall, black-frocked lawyer manhandling his disdainful partner across the floor. I thought the prosecutor or the judge would come down on Stroud for badgering the witness, but they didn’t. They were too caught up in the dance.

“And forty minutes after your husband was shot, you finally made it to the hospital, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir. Something like that.”

“That’s almost an hour just to get across town. Didn’t you know how serious his wounds were, Jolene?”

“Yes, sir, I did. I knew they was serious.”

“Mrs. Biggs, did your husband ever use his baseball bat on you?”

The prosecutor thundered out an objection, but Stroud withdrew the question.

“Let’s get this straight, Jolene: Your husband was shot, he was bleeding to death on the sidewalk, and you were thinking gasoline, burrito, and then hospital, in that order?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But no doughnut?”

She gave Stroud a strange look that wasn’t exactly anger but was a long way from grief. “No, sir,” she said, “no doughnut.”

“Pass the witness,” said Stroud.

The prosecutor had no more questions for Jolene Biggs. Instead, he called his last witness, the county medical examiner. As he took the stand, Stroud told me to look straight at the doctor and roll my eyes every time he said something more than yes or no. The medical examiner testified woodenly about the death wounds and the agony that Lanier Biggs went through while he bled to death. As the prosecuting attorney passed the witness to him for cross-examination, Stroud whispered in my ear, “Now we get the deceased Mr. Biggs to work for us.” There were gasps from the jury.

I was worried that the old man was about to call me as a witness. Instead, Stroud got the photographs of Biggs’s nude, battle-scarred body accepted as evidence. He passed copies out to the jury and to the pathologist on the stand. There were gasps from the jury.

“Now, Doctor,” Stroud began, “this spot here on the decedent’s side—how would you describe this scar?”

The pathologist, a portly, middle-aged man with sixties sideburns and a handlebar mustache, studied the photo through thick-rimmed glasses. “Scarring of an old stellate punctate wound,” he answered.

“Isn’t there another name for this type of wound, Doctor, in layman’s parlance?”

“Yes.”

“What is that?”

“Bullet wound.”

“Bullet wound?”

“Yes.”

And so it went, scar by scar, from razor slash to stab wound to buckshot pattern, truncheon scar, chain marks, and handcuff tracks.

When Stroud got through cross-examining the pathologist, the prosecution rested its case. Stroud began the defense, and I received still another lesson in trial law. Stroud made no comment on any of the prosecutor’s claims, no rebuttals. Instead, he merely put on witness after witness to testify to the homicidal behavior of Lanier Biggs. There were motorists who had been terrorized by the bat-wielding Biggs, bar patrons whom Lanier had put in the hospital for no discernible reason, except, perhaps, the shape of their heads. Stroud got policemen to testify to the difficulty of arresting Biggs. A jail trustee explained on the stand how Lanier had once pulled an iron bar out of a cell door and bent it across the head of his cellmate.

The prosecutor tried to undermine the credibility of Stroud’s witnesses, but he didn’t have a chance. They were simply testifying to what they had seen and heard, and it was hard to shake the sort of memories that Lanier Biggs tended to leave with people. By the time Stroud was through, he had transformed Lanier Biggs from a murder victim into a nightmare.

At three-thirty, when the judge offered to postpone closing arguments until tomorrow, Stroud talked him and the prosecuting attorney into going ahead. Why the prosecution agreed was hard to figure. At that moment, Stroud owned the jury. It would have been in the prosecution’s interest to let the images that Stroud had conjured up dissipate a little. But the prosecutor offered no resistance to Stroud’s request. Maybe by then Stroud owned him, too, and the judge, and the court reporter, and everybody else in that big white room.

In his summation, the prosecutor did what he could: He reiterated the facts of the case, which clearly showed that Clifton Hardesty, from the safety of his pickup truck, had shot and killed an unarmed man at point-blank range. The prosecution argued that murder had been Hardesty’s motive for driving to the Biggs home in the first place, and that the facts bore this out.

But I’m not sure how many of the jurors heard the prosecutor. If they were like me, they were trying to deal with the image that Gilliam Stroud, in his closing argument, had just drawn of a man so insane with violence that his own wife let him bleed to death rather than risk his recovery. Stroud invited us to put ourselves in Clifton Hardesty’s place, sitting in the driveway of a homicidal maniac who had sworn to murder us for no reason and who had just ordered us to sit in our pickup,
sit right there,
while he went inside and got a gun. Which of us, looking into those hate-glazed eyes and seeing our own annihilation, would not have done as Hardesty had done? You see a rabid dog about to leap, a rattlesnake coiled to strike, you kill it.

Stroud asked the jury to acquit Clifton Hardesty on grounds of self-defense. Half an hour later, it did just that. Several of the jurors, when they filed out of the jury box, came over to congratulate Stroud. Clifton Hardesty, who had collapsed back into his chair at the announcement of the verdict, looked dazed as his children climbed over him and his wife cradled his head against her breast. The effort of keeping himself rigid throughout the trial had exhausted him.

As we left the courtroom,
Stroud made a point of shaking hands with the prosecutor.

“P.P., you’ve got to stop feeding me lunatics like Lanier Biggs,” said Stroud. “It’s no challenge.”

“All I know,” said P.P., in his high, thin whine, “is that it takes a lunatic to nail a lunatic. Mr. Hardesty was very lucky in his choice of lawyers.”

P.P. was Paul Primrose, the district attorney for Claymore County. He was a tall, narrow-shouldered man who looked to be in his late forties. Everything about him, from his thinning hair to his high-dollar boots, was the color of dishwater, except the big chunk of turquoise in his bolo tie, which he continually readjusted with a nervous jerk of his fingers. Stroud introduced me as his new associate, late of a big firm in Houston. “Mr. Parker is a city lawyer,” he said, “come to find a little peace and quiet in the country.”

Primrose gave me a long and not very pleasant look, his mustache working in an odd way. He was chewing on the news that I was not a medical expert, as Stroud had implied I was in court, and that he had been suckered into keeping his questions to the pathologist tame from worry that Stroud’s expert would refute his claims. It was a tough knot to digest, but he did it and, with an odd little swoop of his shoulder, offered me his hand to shake.

“I knew it,” he said, winking at me. “I had a feeling you weren’t a doctor. Glad to have you among us, Mr. Parker. But I don’t know how much peace and quiet you’ll have looking after your boss here.” There was a stiffness about Primrose’s manner that was off-putting. He apparently understood this and tried to make up for it by lunging a little forward when he shook hands or spoke, like a bank president trying to act as if he were at home among farmhands. The ruse only succeeded in making him seem more aloof.

“Sorry about your foot problem,” Primrose said. “I can give you the name of a first-rate podiatrist here in Mule Springs.”

I thanked him.

“Speaking of feet, are those new boots, P.P.?” Stroud asked. “They look like elephant skin to me. Now, how does a humble servant of the people afford to go around in elephant boots?”

“Clean living, Gill,” Primrose answered. “I don’t make much, but I don’t spend it on liquor and whores.” The DA’s smile tightened a notch.

Stroud turned to me. “P.P. is as straight an arrow as you’d ever want to meet, Mr. Parker. You would do well to use him as a model of deportment.”

We had reached the front door of the courthouse. Stroud offered to buy Primrose a drink, but the district attorney said he had work to do. “I’m sure Mr. Stroud will agree with me when I tell you, Mr. Parker, that even out here in God’s country, evil never sleeps.”

“P.P. is a Southern Baptist,” Stroud explained. “A lay preacher, in fact. It’s why he’s such a damn good prosecutor, this being one nation under God and all.”

“We would love to see you this Sunday down at the Grace Tabernacle, Mr. Parker,” Primrose said.

I thanked him for the invitation, we shook hands, and he headed toward a flight of stairs.

“Self-righteous son of a bitch,” Stroud muttered.

“He’s really a Baptist preacher?” I asked. “With that voice?”

Stroud nodded. “The coldest-hearted bastard in the county. You’d better not be caught breaking the law around here, Mr. Parker. Not so much as a parking ticket. If Preacher Paul gets the goods on you, you’ll think what happened to Christ on Calvary was a picnic. There are a lot of lawyers like Primrose out in these small towns whose pants we’ve pulled down so often they’re dying to get a look at our drawers. That’s why we hired you, son. You are here to help us keep our drawers inviolate.”

By the time we reached the bottom of the courthouse steps, Molly had joined us, and the three of us headed for the car. “Son of a bitch, it’s great to win,” Stroud said, throwing his arm over my shoulder. “You were a great help in there, young man.”

“I didn’t do a damn thing except sit, Mr. Stroud,” I reminded him.

“But you looked like you knew what you were doing. You have an affidavit face, Mr. Parker. That’s worth a hell of a lot in front of a jury. By just doing nothing you came off better than that whore of a doctor bought by our Brother Primrose, who is up in his office right now eating his heart out, I promise you. You just sat there looking moral as a church, and we won. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

“It doesn’t always work, though, does it, Molly?” he continued as we approached the Lincoln. “Old Hard-dick hired us a lawyer a couple of years ago, one of those fundamentalist Baptist types, you know, with a rod up his ass and a Bible in each hand. Maybe he was proof against Satan, but he sure as hell couldn’t put up with us.” Stroud laughed. “Just coming to work in the morning gave him the galloping shits so bad that Wick started calling him the Brown Bomber. He’s a missionary now, somewhere in Cambodia, I think.”

He stopped suddenly, clutched my elbow. “You wouldn’t be a Baptist, would you?”

I told him I was not a Baptist.

“Thank Christ,” he said, walking on.

“Do me a favor, Mr. Stroud,” I said to him. “Don’t pass me off as something I’m not. Especially in front of a judge.”

The old man gave me a look of sly appraisal. “Call me Gill,” he said with a smile.

“Don’t pass me off as something I’m not, Gill,” I said.

“It was my understanding, Mr. Clayton, that you are moving to the country to transform your life, to pursue a sea change into something rich and strange. Let’s assume the transformation has begun, that it began in Prosecutor Primrose’s courtroom. Doesn’t the fact that you’re becoming something new mean that you don’t quite know what you are at the moment?”

“I know I’m not a medical doctor, Gill.”

“So,” he said, turning to face me, “are we confronting a breach of ethics here? Did I step over the line back in that courtroom?”

The tone he had fallen into, I realized, must have been the one he had used on his students at Baylor Law. He clearly found my annoyance amusing, a fact that annoyed me even more.

“Did you actually hear me say you were a medical doctor?” he asked.

“It was the implication,” I said.

The old man cackled. “Implication? I thought you were a lawyer, Mr. Parker. Or maybe you thought country lawyers only spoke mother’s-milk truth? Tell me, my sandal-wearing friend, what is the first question a trial lawyer asks his client?”

I sighed. He was cueing me for a timeworn mantra taught to every first-semester Baylor Law student. “He asks, 'Are you guilty?’” I replied. “I know where you’re going with this.”

“And what’s the second question he asks his client?”

“It’s 'How do you want to plead?’”

“And what do these two questions, taken together, indicate about our legal system?” he asked.

“They mean that everybody, guilty or not, has a right to the best defense we can make.”

“Regardless of truth? Regardless of justice?” Stroud asked with a smile, giving the words
truth
and
justice
the slightest twist.

“Just don’t pass me off in any discipline in which I could not actually earn my keep,” I said. “Let’s leave it at that.”

He laughed again, and offered me his hand to shake. “I promise to consult you the next time your proficiencies come up in conversation.”

“What is this bromohydrosis that I have such a bad case of, anyway?” I asked.

“Foot odor,” he replied.

Stroud’s limp was becoming more pronounced, and as we reached the car he leaned on me a little more solidly. He was tired. Winning was hard work.

By the time we turned onto Highway 69 and headed for Jenks, he had begun to snore in the backseat. This time Molly drove, and we rolled grandly in Stroud’s barge of a car through the late-afternoon haze that the heat had thrown over the pastures and farmlands. I peppered Molly with questions about the firm, about Stroud, and about the missing Hardwick Chandler. She gave each question the same grave consideration and chose her words with care.

“We usually operate in what I call medium chaos,” she said. “That’s different from total chaos, but not much.”

“Tell me about the boss, Molly.”

“I think it’s best if you form your own conclusions,” she replied. “You’ll meet him soon enough. But you may have to meet him on the run.”

We reached Jenks about six o’clock. The downtown area’s single street was deserted but for my car. Molly pulled the Lincoln up beside the Austin Healey. “Thank you for your help today, Mr. Parker,” she said. “I’m sorry we had to pitch you right in like we did.”

“And me with a killer case of bromohydrosis.”

“I hope you find your shoes,” she said.

There was a perpetual sadness about Molly Tunstall’s eyes, small and blue, and a forlorn strength in the set of her chin. I had already decided that she was my idea of a pioneer woman: She had been worn down to essentials, all her edges shaped by strong winds. The ruddy tinge to her skin and her high cheekbones made me wonder if there was some Indian blood in her.

Molly was planning to drive Stroud out to his farmhouse and asked if I would follow her in my car so that I could drive her back to town. I followed the Lincoln a couple of miles past the city limits to a dirt road that led, in three more miles, into the yard of an old farmhouse standing in a grove of live oak trees beside a stock tank. It was a big two-story frame house with a sagging porch and a carport, under which sat a battered Winnebago van and a tractor that seemed to have turned completely into rust. To one side of the carport was a sleek, new sky-blue Mercedes convertible, looking as out of place as a flying saucer amid the decay. The house and the shabby barn behind it could not have been painted anytime this century. There was an odor of rotting hay about the place.

A lone cow watched from behind a barbed-wire fence as Molly and I opened the back door of the Lincoln to help Stroud out of the car. It was harder than it should have been. While lying in the Lincoln’s backseat on his way home, Stroud had been drinking. As I yanked him upright by the shoulders, he waved a silver and leather boot flask at me.

“Have a drink, my boy,” he said. “You’ve earned it.”

Stroud was in worse shape than he had been in at the jail that morning. It was all we could do to get him on his feet and start him toward the house, with his arms over our shoulders. He was breathing hard, and when we reached the stairs, he started to wheeze. The wheezing got worse—great, tortured gasps that didn’t seem to find any air—until he produced from a coat pocket an aerosol inhaler, which he jammed into his mouth and triggered. The medicine revived him a little, and he leveled his heavy eyebrows at me.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“This is Mr. Parker,” Molly told him as we half pulled, half pushed him up the steps. “He’s a member of our firm now, Mr. Stroud. He just helped you win the Hardesty case, remember?”

“That’s right,” he said. “The lawyer with the bad feet!” He laughed and pulled free of our grasp, then froze, his gaze fixed on the blue Mercedes beside the dilapidated carport.

“She’s here,” he said. “I thought she’d be coming tomorrow.”

“Today
is
tomorrow,” Molly told him.

Stroud tiptoed to the window and peeked inside his house, then turned, holding to the wall for support, and stared at me. “Mr. Parker,” he asked, “can you tell that I have been tippling?”

“It’s pretty obvious.”

He turned back to the window. “She’s going to have my ass,” he murmured.

“The horse isn’t in the barn,” Molly said. “She’s out riding.”

“Mr. Parker,” Stroud said, “would you try that doorknob?”

I turned the knob. The door was not locked.

“Now would you go inside and see if there is anyone in the house?”

“She’s out riding, Mr. Stroud,” Molly said again.

“That horse can get out of the barn by himself,” Stroud snapped. He was still peering through the window. “Go on, Mr. Parker.”

I stepped into the doorway. “Who am I looking for?” I asked.

“You’ll know when you see her,” said Stroud.

“What do I say if I find her?” I asked.

“Say something to get her to go out the back door,” Stroud urged. “Then I’ll come in the front.”

I walked into a large, gloomy room full of overstuffed furniture. There were no lights on in the house. The late-afternoon sun shone through a window whose drapes were lying in a heap beneath the sill.

“Call to her!” Stroud whispered.

“What’s her name?” I replied.

“Sally.”

I called. There was no answer. I walked through the front room, past a parlor outfitted in cheap vinyl sofa and chairs, through a dining room empty of furniture but littered with piles of books. Down a hallway was a kitchen unmodernized since the original inhabitants, with an iron pump poised above a dusty sink. Layers of shadow covered layers of dust. Despite the moaning of the wind about the roof, the air inside the place seemed shocked into stillness by a crushing sense of emptiness. It was a home for ghosts.

I walked back to the front room. “Nobody here,” I said.

“Go upstairs!” Stroud hissed from the doorway.

“Mr. Stroud, this is stupid,” I said, shaking my head and staring at the floor. I was about to explain that I had reached my limit of foolishness for the day, and that if he did not want this Sally-whoever to catch him drunk, then he’d better just not drink, when I felt a wind rush past me, caught a faint whiff of Garden Mist air freshener, and turned to see Gilliam Stroud loping like a crazed black bear up the stairway, his wrecked lungs shrieking at each step. He disappeared down a hallway, and I heard a door slam.