Shoveling Smoke

by Austin Davis

  Bevo read my thoughts. “Before you go heaping any more dirt on my head,” he said, “you better check your facts. Okay, Sally might not have greased you just because I asked her. But she’d have done it for her daddy, and her daddy would have gotten her to do it for me.”

  “Her father?”

  “Nyman Scales. You know about him, if you’ve been reading my file. He’s my bidniss partner.”

  I knew the name. Scales was the horse dealer from whom Bevo had bought his horses. I recalled Sally telling me that her father was a local rancher. She had not mentioned his name.

  “Sally Dean is Nyman Scales’s daughter?”

  “That’s right,” Bevo replied. “And she does whatever her daddy tells her to. Always has.”

  “Wait a minute. Why are their last names different?”

  “Dean was Sally’s mother’s maiden name. Sally had a soft spot in her heart for old Mom. Any more questions?”

  The conversation was getting crazier. “All right,” I said, “let’s assume it’s true, Sally is Nyman Scales’s daughter. Why would Scales tell his daughter to go to bed with a stranger?”

  He gave me a sneer. “Because Nyman is a friend of mine, and he wants to see me beat this lawsuit. And it’s going to take a third lawyer, somebody who ain’t on his last legs, like Stroud, or has his brains all in his dick, like Wick Chandler. Since my case started, there’ve been four new lawyers start up with Chandler and Stroud, and none of them lasted long enough to do any good. Nyman and me, we don’t want to lose another one.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying that Sally Dean slept with me because her father wants to keep me happy defending you?”

  “You have caught my drift.”

  “That would make Sally Dean a whore and her father a pimp.”

  He nodded smugly. “It’s what we call teamwork.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “You don’t know Nyman Scales,” he replied. “And you damn sure don’t know Sally.”

  I had never felt more contempt for any human being than I did at that moment for Bevo Rasmussen. It was contempt mixed with awe. What he was suggesting was so off the wall, so illogical, that I could not imagine a human brain capable of taking it seriously. Yet this twisted little man sat nodding at me as if expecting me to buy the whole load.

  “You like the house?” he asked. “I had a little something to do with it, too.”

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed, and Bevo started up out of his chair as if he thought I might backhand him. On the bed lay my robe, the one Sally had worn last night. I put it on.

  “Leave, Bevo,” I said. “Get out of my house.”

  “I didn’t come here to bullshit you, Counselor. I come to ask you a favor. I got some bidniss in Dallas tomorrow night, and I sure would appreciate it if you would ride along with me.”

  “Why?”

  The little man shrugged, his left shoulder moving more fully with the gesture than his damaged right one. “Oh, for friendship, let’s say. I think we should get to know each other better, you being my new lawyer and all.”

  I remembered Wick’s warning. Don’t believe a word the man says. Don’t do anything he wants you to do.

  “I’m not driving with you to Dallas, Bevo.”

  “Not even if it would help my case?” he asked.

  “This trip is connected to Stromboli’s lawsuit against you?”

  “It just might be,” he said.

  “Why not get Wick Chandler to go with you?”

  “The people I got to meet wouldn’t be impressed with Wick. They might be with you.”

  I had an idea that I did not want to meet these people, and I told him so.

  Rasmussen leaned close. “How about if I got Sally to come with us? You and her could have the backseat all to yourselves.” He leered at me. “Ever come in a Cadillac, Mr. Parker?”

  I chased him halfway around the chair that he had kept between us.

  “Hold it, Counselor,” he said. “There’s something else I know. I know Stroud has bungled my case. He’s blown it so big that I can clean him out in a malpractice suit. I might even be able to sink your whole firm. How would that be?”

  I quit chasing him. He might be right, I admitted to myself. Thanks to Stroud’s failure with the interrogatories, this little rat just might have us by the short hairs.

  “Did you set fire to your horses, Bevo?” I asked him.

  “I swear on my mother’s grave, Mr. Parker, I didn’t do it. My horses was fine last time I saw them. Jesus, look at all the shit I’m in now. Do you think I’d have brought all this trouble on myself?”

  “Then why won’t your insurance carrier pay off?”

  “It’s a conspiracy, Mr. Parker. There’s folks out to get me. They don’t want to see me better myself. I don’t know who they are, but they’re the ones behind it. I swear it’s true.” He was starting to whine.

  I told him to call me that afternoon and I would tell him then whether I would go with him to Dallas. “But now I want you to leave,” I said.

  Bevo was visibly relieved that I had agreed at least to think about going with him. He walked to the bedroom door, then turned.

  “I’d count it a real favor if you’d go, Mr. Parker.”

  “No more threats against the firm,” I replied.

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “It just shows you how desperate I am.”

  A thought suddenly struck me. “Bevo, this trip to Dallas. Is it going to be dangerous?”

  He laughed at that. “I don’t know what you’ve been hearing about me, Mr. Parker, but I can tell it’s all wrong. Hell, no, the trip ain’t dangerous. Would I put my new lawyer in jeopardy? So how about it, will you come with me?”

  “Call me at the office this afternoon, and I’ll give you my answer.”

  He looked down at his feet, shaking his head. “You’re a hard man to pin down, that’s for sure. Think of Sally in the backseat,” he said, winking at me, and he walked out the door.

  A moment later I heard the front door close. I went into the bathroom to take a shower. After talking to Bevo Rasmussen, I felt I needed one.

  Standing in the tub, I let the water run over me as I thought through recent events. Bevo Rasmussen’s presence in my bedroom this morning suggested that the little ceremony Sally Dean and I had enacted last night, guaranteed to keep the willies off me, hadn’t worked. I still had at least one willy to worry about, a diamond-toothed one, at that. This did not at all mean, however, that the ceremony had been without value. I probed a sore spot over my rib cage, remembering the release that had rolled through me, unstringing muscles and tendons, dissolving away the last of the old life. Nothing I could remember had ever felt so good as Sally Dean had felt the night before.

  Sally Dean. Sally Scales. Sally Scales Dean.

  It was beginning to look as if country law was a bit more complicated than I had anticipated. But one thing I knew was true, I told myself as I dried off from my shower. Sally Dean had some real fun last night. I had the bruises to prove it.

  CHAPTER 15

  HALF AN HOUR LATER I walked out of the house planning to get some breakfast at the Dairy Queen and head for the office. A tall, round-shouldered man in a knit sport shirt and bill cap was rolling my lawn mower—the one I had never gotten around to using on my first night in town—down the driveway toward a pickup. I asked him what he thought he was doing. He stopped and looked at me.

  “I’m repossessing what’s mine,” he said, chewing on a dead cigar stump clenched in his teeth. He took the cigar out of his mouth and introduced himself as Glenn Lawson, owner of the hardware store in town. We shook hands, and I told him my name.

  “You’re the new lawyer,” he said. “Sorry to hear about your feet.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “They’re better now.”

  “Well, Mr. Parker, how many people like me have shown up since you moved in?”

  �
�People like you?”

  “Creditors. Didn’t you know that the guy who owns this place walked away from all his debts? He moved in, bought up a bunch of shit, furniture and tools and whatnot, and then just stopped paying on everything.”

  “Hardwick Chandler didn’t make his payments?”

  “Hardwick Chandler don’t own this place,” Lawson replied. “It belongs to that little squirrel dick Bevo Rasmussen.”

  “Bevo?”

  Lawson nodded. “I was a fool for selling him this mower. If business hadn’t been so damn bad, I’d have kicked his skinny ass out of my store. The little shit broke into my brother-in-law’s warehouse a couple of years back and tried to steal a truckload of electronic stuff.” Lawson bit down on the cigar butt and started pushing the lawn mower again. Then he stopped and said, “You can have the mower, if you’ll pay for it. It’s a handy machine, the best I’ve got on the floor. It’s self-propelled. Three hundred and fourteen dollars, and that’s my cost. You can’t buy it for that at the goddamned Wal-Mart.”

  “Mr. Lawson,” I said, “you’re telling me Bevo Rasmussen owns the house I’m living in?”

  Lawson chuckled. “I guess maybe old Hard-dick pulled one on you, son. Are you paying anything on it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s a mercy,” he said. “Though sticking you in a house that’s apt to be stripped and foreclosed on is a low deal, even for Hard-dick Chandler.”

  So Bevo had told me the truth: He did have something to do with my being in this house. In fact, he had everything to do with it.

  Lawson told me that Bevo Rasmussen had bought the house over a year ago, from an out-of-work geologist so desperate to leave town that he accepted Bevo’s offer even though Bevo was an unqualified buyer, and an unsavory one at that. Bevo moved in, outfitted the house, then failed to make payments on most of the things he’d bought.

  “The story is, he only made one or two mortgage payments on the house,” Lawson said. “It was a HUD loan, you see, and when the mortgage company saw he wasn’t making his payments and threatened to foreclose, he filed for some sort of HUD extension, and that stopped the foreclosure. HUD is so loaded down with cases that it could be another year or so before they ever get around to taking care of the mess Bevo made.”

  “So Rasmussen was living here for free?” I asked.

  “That’s right. There are people who do that, you know, buy a house knowing they aren’t going to pay for it. They just stay in it until somebody kicks them out. Then they slink away in the night. Since the loan was unqualified, the house goes back to the first owner, along with the debt. The first owner gets the shaft.”

  “Is that what happened to the guy Bevo bought the house from, the geologist? Did he get the shaft?”

  “He will if HUD ever gets around to looking him up. I don’t know where he moved to. If I had sold my house to Bevo Rasmussen, I think I’d move to Mars.”

  “What you’re saying is Bevo stole this house?” I asked.

  “I suppose so,” Lawson replied. “He stole the use of it, anyway.”

  “And now I’m stealing the use of it? I’m living in it for free while the mortgage debt piles up at the door of that geologist?”

  “Ask old Hard-dick about it. Maybe he cut some sort of deal with the owner or the mortgage holder. He’s great at finessing deals.”

  I planned to ask old Hard-dick about it, all right.

  “Why did Bevo stop living in the house?” I asked.

  Lawson shrugged. “So you could move into it, I guess. I don’t really know, just like I don’t know why he bought it in the first place. My brother-in-law thinks maybe he was just tired of being a lowlife. Maybe he wanted to go legitimate, join us happy people here in the middle class. My brother-in-law’s an idiot. I think Bevo was working some dodge, and it caught up with him. I’ve heard he’s got himself into some trouble with a drug dealer. Maybe he’s laying low. You sure you won’t buy this fine lawn mower here? You won’t find a better deal.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I replied.

  Lawson had rolled the lawn mower to his truck. He squatted, rubbed at a scratch in the mower’s red paint. “If I could just sell three of these beauties to everybody in this town,” he said, “I could get halfway out of debt.”

  “I’ll pass the word, Mr. Lawson,” I told him. We picked up the lawn mower and put it in Lawson’s truck.

  Lawson climbed into the truck’s cab. “Good luck, son,” he said. “If you see Bevo Rasmussen, do me a favor and kick his ass up his throat.” He laughed. “No, don’t do it. He’d find a way to sue me if you did.”

  At the Dairy Queen Lu-Anne gave me a cup of coffee and a smile, smacking her gum with the sound of a rifle shot. I asked her how she could chew gum at 7:45 in the morning.

  “I got a lot of excess energy,” she replied. She put down her coffeepot. “You see this hand? See how steady it is? It would be jumping all over the place if I wasn’t working my gum.” She picked up the pot and topped off my cup. “You’d have coffee all over you right now if I didn’t have this gum in my mouth.”

  She talked me into trying a country ham biscuit. The Jenks Dairy Queen, she said, was the only one in the state that offered country ham, a delicacy smuggled in from Tennessee by a cousin of the owner. Country ham, she said, was different from breakfast ham. She was right: Country ham tasted like the boot sole of a worker in a salt mine. It was something to chew on while I pondered once again the ironies of life in the country.

  “You’re the new lawyer, ain’t you?” Lu-Anne asked me as she refilled my coffee.

  “What makes you think I’m a lawyer?”

  “It’s your suit,” she replied. “You’re either a lawyer or a banker, and we don’t get bankers in here very often.”

  “Couldn’t I be a doctor?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Doctors dress like golfers. You know, knit shirts, loafers...”

  “How about a mortician?”

  “A what?”

  “An undertaker.”

  “We only got one of them, and he’s not hiring.”

  “You’d make a pretty fair detective,” I told her.

  “You’re that lawyer with the bad feet,” she said. “How they doing today?”

  “Maybe I’m a famous movie director thinking about using this town as the setting of my new picture.”

  She laughed at that. “Come on, what kind of movie would you be making out here?”

  “Science fiction,” I told her. “It’s all about an alien who gets trapped in a small town in Texas. Nobody knows he’s an alien because he looks just like everybody else. But he’s not like everybody else. The question is, will he go crazy in the small town or will he adjust and live a peaceful life among the earthlings?”

  “What does the alien look like?” she asked.

  “He looks just like everybody else.”

  “No,” said Lu-Anne, “what does he look like for real, when he doesn’t have on his human disguise?”

  “He looks like a giant purple foot.”

  A few minutes later, as I got up to leave, Lu-Anne patted me on the shoulder. “You’ll get used to them,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Mr. Chandler and Mr. Stroud. You’ll get used to them. We’re all used to them. You just have to learn how to duck from time to time. But you’ll make out all right.” She smiled at me and went back behind the counter.

  Hardwick Chandler had not checked in when I arrived at the office. “Did you know that the house I’m living in belongs to Bevo Rasmussen?” I asked Molly Tunstall.

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  “Well, I didn’t know.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Parker. I’m sure Mr. Chandler was going to tell you.”

  I told her to buzz me the minute Mr. Chandler showed up.

  “Lu-Anne at the Dairy Queen says I’ll make out all right here,” I said, “if I learn how to duck.”

  “That’s good advice,” Molly responded. I had hope
d to get a laugh out of her, but she just gave me a woebegone look from behind her desk.

  “You’ll help me learn to duck, won’t you, Molly?”

  “I’ll try, Mr. Parker,” she said. Under those mournful eyes her face scrunched up, and I realized she was smiling.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE RASMUSSEN FILE LAY ON MOLLY’S DESK, exactly where I had left it for Wick Chandler the previous evening. Apparently his attempt at reform had not yet gotten truly under way. Neither of the partners was in, so I took the file back to my office and read it through again, trying to brainstorm some way around the problem with the interrogatories. I got nowhere.

  About eleven o’clock Molly called on the intercom to tell me I had a visitor. It was a tiny, round lady in a cotton sundress, cowboy boots, and a denim apron stitched with the phrase I’m with Stupid in red across the front. She introduced herself as Mrs. Nevah June Balch and placed a quart jar on the desk. The jar was filled with what looked like a meat stew. A hoof of some sort floated in it.

  “It needs to be good and hot,” she said. “And never mind the smell. It’ll fix your feet in two days.”

  “Do I eat it?” I asked.

  “Well, of course you eat it,” she said, giving me a surprised laugh. “What did you think you’d do, soak your feet in it?”

  I asked her how much I owed her.

  “Don’t you worry about that,” she said as she left. “Bevo took care of this dose. If you need another one, we can talk.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Balch,” I called after her. For maybe fifteen minutes I sat watching the hoof floating around in the herbal stew. Molly came back and stood in the doorway.

  “Would you like me to do something with that?” she asked, pointing to the jar.

  “Thanks, Molly,” I said. She picked up the jar and left.

  Around twelve o’clock Wick Chandler stuck his head in my door. “How about taking a break?” he asked. Before I could answer him, he and Stroud swept into the room, grabbed me under the arms, and whisked me outside. Stroud’s Continental was idling at the curb. “Quick,” Chandler said, throwing open a door to the backseat and pulling me toward it, “get in before we’re spotted.”