Shoveling Smoke (5 page)

“I seem to be getting along with Ed here,” I said.

“That doesn’t mean anything. Ed’s a rotten judge of character. But I think the boys may have picked right this time.”

“This time?” I said. “What do you mean, this time?” But Ed had increased his speed, and horse and rider were leaving me behind.

“Be patient with the boys,” she called over her shoulder. “Just don’t judge them by their spots.”

“Or lack of,” I said to myself as the big horse plodded down the street.

I went inside my new house and found it furnished in a mongrel sort of way, odd pieces throughout, as if from many different homes. But that was okay. My boxes from Houston had arrived and were stacked neatly in the living room. The three window units in the house—bedroom, living room, kitchen—weren’t running, and the air was hot and thick and bitter with the smell of ancient cigarette smoke. I switched on all of the air conditioners and changed into a T-shirt and shorts, then went out to the car to get the file that Molly Tunstall had given me in the office, the Rasmussen file. Some perspicacious and benevolent individual—Hardwick Chandler, perhaps—had stocked the liquor cabinet in the living room. I poured myself a good-sized bourbon and, sitting at the kitchen table, opened the file, grateful to have something to do on this first night of my new life.

Right on top I found a letter from Rasmussen to Stroud, outlining the case. Some horses that Bevo Rasmussen owned had died in a fire started by lightning, and Rasmussen’s insurance carrier was refusing to pay off on his claim. It was to be a big payoff, over a million dollars. Apparently, these Appaloosas had spots.

Rasmussen’s letter, full of typos, painted a miserable picture: dreams dashed, a business ruined, a reputation at stake. Rasmussen had to have the insurance money as fast as possible. “The wolves are at the door, Mr. Stroud,” he wrote. “You are the only man who can get me out of this mess.” I noted that the letter had been written over a year ago. How desperate was Rasmussen now? Surely in all that time the wolves had gotten in and carried off the baby. I would have to read further into the file to find out what had happened. But I could feel my concentration slipping away, and in a minute I had to get up and move around.

I should have been exhausted after the day I’d had, but I wasn’t. What I needed was something to do, something other than wade through the misery of the Rasmussen file. I had noticed a lawn mower in the garage. The lawn could use a trim. That’s what I would do, mow my new yard as the last of the evening sun died away. Backyard as well as front. Who knows, maybe I would keep going after the sun went down, edging, pruning the shade trees, painting the trim in the dark.

I finished my bourbon and poured myself another, raising it in a toast to Hardwick Chandler, whose bourbon I was probably drinking. May he be a reasonable man, when he finally showed himself. I drained the glass—one toast per glass, a law school tradition—then poured another and toasted his partner, Gilliam Stroud, a badly wrecked man but an amazing lawyer, still swinging that trestle. I tried to picture myself at Stroud’s age, both barrels shot, a giant, ruined condor of a man. I wouldn’t make it all the way to condor. I didn’t have the height or the weight. Barn owl, maybe.

I toasted Bevo Rasmussen, the poor son of a bitch, and his sea of troubles, against which Gilliam Stroud and Hardwick Chandler—and now I—had taken arms. Molly Tunstall said the case was trouble. Well, all right. Let’s see what kind of trouble a body can get into in the country.

My sixth, seventh, and eighth toasts went to Sally Dean, with her beautiful skin and her ironic smile. What the hell had she meant, “They picked right
this time”?
How many other times had there been, how many other lawyers had “the boys” hired before me, and why hadn’t any of them worked out? How often did Chandler or Stroud ask their new associates to do—or be—something they weren’t? I could tell from our little chat about ethics in the Mule Springs parking lot that Stroud and I had different ideas about where the lawyer on the case draws the line. Or did we?

My mind was getting fuzzy from the bourbon. I toasted Stroud again, then toasted the ethics of my profession. The drone of the air conditioners filled the cooling house.

During the night
the locusts found a way into my brain, and when I woke up shortly after dawn, they were packed under my skull, shrieking like a chainsaw massacre. five aspirin and a freezing shower shook only a few of them out. I put on a suit I found hanging in a wardrobe box and went down to the Dairy Queen, where a tiny waitress named Lu-Anne smiled as she took my order and asked me how I was doing. I thought of telling her, really telling her, then remembered that this was my town now, and Lu-Anne, like everybody else, was a potential client. Young as she was, it occurred to me that, this being the country, Lu-Anne might well be working on her third marriage to her third snuff-dipping, longhaired, out-of-work truck mechanic husband and might need my help to get out of this union, too, at any minute. It doesn’t pay to alienate potential clients.

After finishing the sausage-and-biscuit sandwich that Lu-Anne brought me, I drove to the office to meet Hardwick Chandler. He would have to fill me in on the Rasmussen case. I had not finished working through the file.

When I got to the office Chandler wasn’t there. Molly Tunstall had not heard from him. Stroud wasn’t in, either, but would be soon, she said. This was my second visit to the only law office on the business street of Jenks, and I had yet to see another lawyer in it.

“What goes on, Molly?” I asked. “I mean, these guys have clients, don’t they? They do practice law?”

“Mr. Chandler says he runs a nick-of-time law firm,” Molly replied. “Everything gets done that has to get done, but only in the nick of time.”

“By the seat of the pants?” I suggested.

“That’s another way to say it, I suppose.”

“What about the Rasmussen case?” I asked. “Are we going to be in the nick of time on that one?”

The color in the planes of her face darkened. “I don’t know about that one. Maybe you can tell us.”

I went back to my new office, the near-empty one, a windowless room with cream-colored stucco walls, a desk, three chairs, and, hanging on a wall, a copy of the famous black-and-white photograph of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, sitting next to each other during the Scopes trial. Bryan was squinting off in the distance, as if trying to imagine what a wonderful day he would have been having if only Darrow weren’t there. On the desk sat a phone, an intercom, and a wire in-basket full of files. I laid the Rasmussen file next to the in-basket, sat down in the desk chair, and swiveled back and forth for a moment. It was a livable office, spare and quiet except for the soft hum of the building’s air conditioner.

Molly brought me a cup of coffee, and as I sipped it I leafed through the files in the in-basket, confirming to myself that they were the sorts of things I had expected to find in my new job: wills, probate, minor civil cases, minor criminal cases, and divorce and child custody suits. Abandoning the files in the in-basket, I opened the Rasmussen file. There were a number of documents in it that I had not gotten to the night before, copies of bills of sale for the horses, insurance policies, letters to and from creditors, pleas for help written to Stroud. I read for forty minutes. All together, the documents told the story of a lawsuit gone horribly wrong.

Thirteen months earlier, Bevo Rasmussen had bought nine quarter horses from one Nyman Scales, a breeder in Tyler. The horses cost Rasmussen $978,000. He had borrowed a quarter of that money from the Farmer’s Branch Bank of Tyler and another quarter from Nyman Scales, the seller. The rest of the money, $500,000, Rasmussen had put up himself. He pastured the horses in a rented section of land out in Claymore County, where he had built a barn, and he bought insurance policies on the horses that totaled just over a million dollars.

A month later, the barn on the rental property where the horses were stabled burned down in a lightning storm, and all nine horses were killed. This sort of accident was covered in the insurance policy, but when Bevo filed his claim, the carrier refused to pay off. Bevo retained Gilliam Stroud to file suit against the insurance carrier, but the carrier jumped in ahead of Stroud, filing its own action for a declaratory judgment, claiming that the horses had been intentionally killed by Mr. Rasmussen, who was, therefore, a fraud and a felon. If the carrier won its action, Rasmussen would not collect a cent. Worse, if anybody over in the district attorney’s office was watching, our client would most assuredly be prosecuted for fraud, arson, and animal cruelty.

That was not the end of Mr. Rasmussen’s troubles. Three months after the carrier filed its claim against him, the Farmer’s Branch Bank of Tyler sued him to recover the $240,000 it had loaned him on the original purchase. About the only thing going for Mr. Rasmussen was that Nyman Scales, his other major creditor in the horse deal, had not sued him. Yet.

I had heard of the insurance carrier before, an Italian outfit based in Naples named Associazione Stromboli, one of the biggest insurers of high-dollar horses in the world. Savage, Carlock, and Gannon, my old law firm in Houston, had a half-dozen lawyers who specialized in horse insurance, horses being a not-uncommon phenomenon in Texas. One of these lawyers, Rita Humphrey, had an office on my floor. Occasionally, over lunch, Rita and I compared cases in our respective bailiwicks, and I remembered her mentioning Stromboli. I kidded her about suing a Disney cartoon villain—Stromboli being the name of the evil carnival owner in
Pinocchio,
of course, who threatened to chop up the little wooden boy with an axe. She reminded me that Stromboli was also a volcanic island off the Italian coast, as well as a kind of Italian meat pie. Stromboli, she explained, was all things to all people.

Actually, Associazione Stromboli was not a single company, but a Lloyd’s-type syndicate made up of several insurance companies that shared both the premiums and the liability of big-money policies. Say a horse dealer in Amarillo wanted to insure his new thoroughbred with Stromboli for five hundred thousand dollars. Stromboli would write him a policy, divvying it up among different member companies of the syndicate, who agreed to assume a certain percentage of the liability in return for a proportionate amount of the premium paid by the dealer. The volume of business such a syndicate did was staggering, hundreds of millions of dollars a year, much of it from horse breeders and dealers in the American Southwest.

Since there are about as many types of fraud involving horse breeders as there are breeds of horses, Stromboli often found itself in court, sitting opposite lawyers like Rita Humphrey, who was no slouch. This meant that counsel representing Associazione Stromboli had to be mean. The lawyers Stromboli used most often in their Southwest cases came from the insurance wing of Slaven, Wortmann, Applegate, and Tice, a Houston firm. I knew about them. The SWAT team, they were called. There was nobody meaner. When I found the plaintiff’s original petition in the Bevo Rasmussen file, I crossed my fingers and turned immediately to the end of the pleading to find out who had filed it. The lawyer was someone named Warren Jacobs, and under his name was listed the name of the firm he worked for. Slaven, Wortmann, Applegate, and Tice. Sure enough, we were up against SWAT.

At the bottom of the documents in the Rasmussen file I came to the set of interrogatories SWAT had sent us, all ninety pages of them. They were pretty much what I expected, thorough and efficient. I could not find a copy of Stroud’s answers, and I called Molly Tunstall on the intercom to ask her where they were.

“I don’t believe Mr. Stroud sent any answers,” she said.

“No, Molly,” I replied, “these are the interrogatories.”

“Yes, sir. I know what interrogatories are.”

“Well, then, you know that Stroud
had
to have answered them. I need to see his answers.”

Molly appeared in my doorway. “Mr. Parker, I don’t believe Mr. Stroud answered the interrogatories.”

I sat stunned, staring at Molly Tunstall, who looked sadly back at me. “Molly, that’s not possible. It
can’t
be.”

Interrogatories are what keep the average lawsuit from lasting until the end of time. Each side sends the other a set of questions that have to be answered, vital questions. The answers reveal who your witnesses are going to be and what physical evidence you plan to introduce. Interrogatories illuminate the contours of the case. If both sides handle their interrogatories well, asking and answering questions skillfully, then there will be no surprises in court, only arguments based on information that both sides hold in common and use to their best advantage.

By Texas law, interrogatories must be answered within thirty days of receipt. If in that time you fail to respond to the other side’s questions, you cannot during the trial introduce a single piece of evidence or ask a single question contemplated by the interrogatories. SWAT’s interrogatories had been sent to Stroud ten months ago.

“Molly, if he hasn’t answered the interrogatories, he can’t put on a case.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Jesus, Molly. He’s completely cooked.”

The enormity of Stroud’s dereliction dawned on me fully. I understood now what Molly had meant when she told me the Rasmussen case might mean trouble. She had been dealing in heroic understatement. We were dead in the water, deaf, dumb, and blind, unable to put on even the semblance of a defense. And what was worse, it was our fault. How in hell could Stroud have failed to get the answers to the interrogatories back? How could a man who was so deadly in the courtroom be such a screwup out of it?

“Get him on the phone, Molly,” I said.

Molly flushed a deep red. “Mr. Stroud doesn’t like to be disturbed out at the farm.”

“I don’t give a damn about Mr. Stroud’s likes and dislikes. Get him on the phone.” There was just a chance that the old man had scribbled his answers out at his farm and mailed them from there. There was a chance that rats had gotten into the file I had in my hand and eaten our copy of Stroud’s response. Or maybe Stroud had sent the answers by smoke signal from the barnyard. Whatever he had done, or not done, I wanted to hear it from his own withered lips. And I wanted to do a little yelling. I started by yelling after Molly as she disappeared down the hallway:

“And where the hell is Hardwick Chandler?”

Stroud was responsible for the Rasmussen fiasco, all right, but Chandler came in for a giant share of the blame, too. The head of the firm should have been watching his partner’s back. What sort of man would leave his practice, even for a day, in the hands of a senile, debauched derelict like Stroud? What did Chandler’s sloppy business practices say about his sense of responsibility to his clients? I looked at the basket full of documents on my desk and wondered how many other cases I would discover that had been as terribly mismanaged as the Rasmussen case. Questions flooded my mind, questions I should have asked Hardwick Chandler long before I ever agreed to take the job. A voice in the back of my mind whispered: Too late, too late.

What timing! I had gone to work in a dysfunctional law firm just in time to watch it get hooted out of the Claymore County courthouse for simple stupidity. No doubt we would be slapped with a whopping malpractice lawsuit by Bevo Rasmussen, who would most likely be sent to jail the minute we lost the case. I thumbed through the file on my desk, wondering if Bevo Rasmussen knew that he was already twisting in the breeze. If he didn’t, it wouldn’t be long now. According to the file, we had a court date for
Associazione Stromboli v. Bevo Rasmussen
in Mule Springs in eight days. Molly Tunstall’s anxiety over the Rasmussen case was justified. We weren’t going to make the nick of time on this one.

“It don’t look good, does it?”

A scrawny, longhaired little man was sitting in the client’s chair across from me, smiling like a redneck leprechaun. Several teeth in his mouth were gold, and in one I caught the flash of a tiny diamond.