by Austin Davis
While they bantered with Boo and Betty, I watched my employers from a seat at the lunch counter. They were a study in contrasts: Gilliam Stroud, cadaverous in his dusty, hollow black suit, swept through the tiny diner like an ancient king; Hardwick Chandler, a bloated lounge lizard in tight silk shirt, sport jacket, and glittering gold, bustled like a cartoon steam engine. They were as odd a pairing as I had ever seen, yet they seemed to share some wavelength that coordinated their behavior. Boo’s was pretty much a self-serve eatery, and I watched Chandler and Stroud set up a table for the three of us, fetching tableware, napkins, bowls of condiments, squeeze bottles of sauce, with a perfect economy of motion. All the while Stroud crooned courtly endearments to Mrs. Boo, and Chandler, a sheen of sweat glimmering on his rosy jowls, interrogated Boo about the state of his beef and the likelihood of a customer’s bringing home from the Singing Pig something worse than a stomach-ache after eating the pork ribs. It was as if Stroud and Chandler, king and fool, were two halves of a single intelligence.
When it was time to order, Stroud gave me a canny look and asked, “What will it be, Mr. Parker, beef or pork?”
“Pork,” I said.
“Hah!” shouted Hardwick Chandler, who slapped the counter and ordered pork himself and beers for all of us.
Stroud ordered beef. Later, at the table, he told me that barbecued pork was how the South lost the Civil War. “Trichinosis destroyed the army of Virginia,” he explained.
Waiting for our food, we sipped our beers and brainstormed the Rasmussen case. The wording of the Stromboli petition required SWAT to prove that Bevo had killed his own horses. According to Stroud, Bevo claimed to have an airtight alibi for his presence on the night the horses burned. He was in Tyler, spending the night at the ranch of Nyman Scales, the breeder who sold Bevo the horses. Sally Dean’s father.
“We will depose Nyman Scales,” Stroud said. “I have already arranged with all parties to meet with Scales at his ranch in Tyler on Monday morning.”
“I’ve always wanted to see Scales’s ranch,” said Wick. “I’ve heard it’s a land unto itself.”
“This Nyman Scales,” I said, “I take it he’s a big operator?”
“The biggest,” replied Wick.
“And he’s really Sally Dean’s father?”
“Did she tell you that?” Stroud asked.
“Bevo mentioned it.” I told them a little bit about my morning chat with Bevo. A very little bit. From the way the old man’s eyebrows had lowered like thunderheads, I gathered that now was not the time to discuss Bevo Rasmussen’s peculiar theory about the Scaleses’ father-daughter relationship.
“That’s right,” said Stroud, “Scales is Ms. Dean’s father. What of it?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Coincidence, I guess.”
“It might be more than that,” Wick said with a note of wistfulness, turning to his partner. “It just might save our asses, if only you’d ask her to—”
“Stop right there!” the old man said. “Nobody’s asking Ms. Dean to do anything that even looks like a breach of ethics. Do you understand me, Wick?”
“But there’s nothing unethical about it, Gill,” Wick argued. “Hell, the judges themselves do it all the time, cozying up to her to ask for assignments. I don’t see why we can’t turn it around and ask her to help us out just this once. After all we’ve done for her.” He turned to me. “Tell him, Clay. There’s nothing wrong with simply asking if the district coordinator can influence which judge handles a particular trial, is there? In the interests of fair play?”
“I don’t understand this sudden delicacy on your part, Mr. Stroud,” I said. “It’s not as if you never ask Sally for favors.”
“What do you mean by that?” Stroud snapped.
I told him what Sally had said about the bet she had made with him over the Hardesty trial and how losing it had required her to act as a one-woman hospitality committee for the new guy. I didn’t say anything about the Cajun house exorcism or the willies-prevention ceremony, but Stroud eyed me suspiciously, anyway.
“I may have asked her to check on you, Mr. Parker, but only as a professional courtesy,” he said. “My request had nothing to do with any wager—and it sure as hell didn’t break any rules of the court.”
“So Sally Dean was lying to me about the bet?” I asked.
“Ms. Dean has a whimsical sense of humor,” Stroud said. “Perhaps she was simply amusing herself.”
I’ll say, I thought to myself.
“There is no way Ms. Dean can replace a judge who doesn’t want to be replaced, short of breaking a chair over his head and stuffing him in a closet,” said Stroud. “Not that it wouldn’t do most of them a world of good.”
Wick sighed. “I’m sorry, Gill. I guess I’m going crazy with this thing. If only we hadn’t drawn Judge Tidwell for the case.”
The food arrived, three immense platters, along with another round of beers.
“Well, it’s Tidwell, all right, so suck up and live with it.”
Wick sighed. “Wrong Tit Tidwell,” he said, shaking his head and biting into a huge, dripping pork rib.
“Wrong Tit?” I said.
“I told you, Gill,” said Wick through a mouthful of pork. “I told you it would catch up with us, and now it has.”
“What has caught up with us?” I asked.
Stroud and Chandler looked at each other.
“Never mind,” replied Stroud. “Let’s just say Judge Tidwell won’t mourn as we go down the tubes.”
We ate in silence for a while. Wick was right about Boo’s barbecue. It may have been the best in Texas.
“Okay,” I said, “so we’ll get no help from the judge on the interrogatories. Which means we can’t call any witnesses. Nyman Scales can swear himself blue in the face that he was with Bevo on the night the barn burned, and the jury will never hear it. So why are we deposing him?”
Stroud glared at me. “We are going to depose anybody we damn well please. Nobody can stop us from asking questions, and there are reasons, Mr. Parker, why we must do so.”
“What are they?” I asked.
“For one thing,” said Stroud, “we may uncover information that would allow us to prove gross misconduct by SWAT. If we do that, we can threaten the bastards with an ethical complaint to the bar, or even criminal prosecution. We may get them to back down.”
“There’s a one-in-a-million chance of that happening in a SWAT case, and you know it,” I told him. “You’re grasping at straws.”
Fury flushed the old man’s face. “All right then, goddamn it, we’re going to depose people because that’s all we can do. I prefer to fiddle while Rome burns. Satisfied, Mr. Parker?”
“No, Mr. Stroud, I’m not satisfied,” I said, “but I am glad to be back in the real world.”
“Where’s the pathologist’s report?” asked Wick. “At least we could see what kind of physical evidence they have.”
Stroud told us that SWAT had not provided a report yet from the horse pathologist who investigated the scene of the fire. That was odd. Perhaps it was the reason they had asked for a delay. I wondered if maybe there would be an irregularity in the pathologist’s report that we could exploit.
“No chance,” Stroud replied, without looking up from his plate. “They’re using Pulaski as their pathologist.”
“Oh, man,” Wick groaned, shoving his plate away from him on the table. “This just gets worse and worse.”
“Stan Pulaski?” I asked.
A horse pathologist who specialized in arson cases, Pulaski was known by lawyers all over the world as the Sherlock Holmes of horse pathology. He had testified in hundreds of trials, and only a handful of his opinions had ever been successfully contested. I had read articles about him in the Houston papers and remembered comments from Rita Humphrey, my old office-mate, who characterized Pulaski as brilliant and detestable, an arrogant bastard completely convinced of his own infallibility. I knew that Pulaski often worked for SWAT and that, acc
ording to Rita, he fit right in. That was the worst thing Rita could say about anybody—that he or she fit right in at SWAT.
“He lives not too far west of here,” said Wick. “Maybe an hour away. Has his own lab out in the country and a landing strip. He’s always flying off to study dead horses. He’s got his own plane.”
Stroud told me that he had cross-examined Pulaski several times and didn’t care for the job. “The son of a bitch is hard to crack,” the old man said. “I have never done a proper job of it.”
“Looks like you’re going to get another chance, partner,” said Wick.
“What if we get our own pathologist?” I asked. They both looked at me. “Right,” I said, “we can’t call any witnesses of our own. All we can do is cross-examine the plaintiff’s witnesses.”
“Wrong Tit Tidwell and Stan-the-Man Pulaski,” said Wick, shaking his head. “Goddamn it, Gill, you fucked up bad this time.”
Stroud handed his steak knife to Wick, and with both hands pulled his shirt open, pushing his tie aside, to reveal a yellowing undershirt and a sliver of pale, silver-haired skin. “Go ahead,” said the old man, “plunge it in to the hilt. Perhaps my life’s blood will erase my guilt.”
“For Christ’s sake,” said Wick.
“Could Bevo have been set up?” I asked. “He told me there was a conspiracy out to get him. Maybe somebody else did burn his horses.”
“It’s possible,” Wick said. “Bevo only has about five hundred folks who hate him. And those are the ones we know about.”
“How can this scrawny little loser stir up so many people?” I asked.
“Don’t let his size or his manner fool you, Mr. Parker,” said Stroud. “There is not a nastier son of a bitch in the state of Texas than our Bevo.”
“You sound like you know him pretty well,” I said.
“Better than I’d like to,” Stroud replied.
CHAPTER 18
“BEVO GOT HIS START out at the sale barns, kiting cows,” said Stroud.
“Kiting cows?”
“It’s like kiting checks,” Wick explained. “You go to a livestock auction, buy cows with a check at one barn, take them to another barn and sell them for enough money to cover the check you just wrote at the first barn, with maybe a little bit of a profit. At barn two you buy more cows, load ’em up, take ’em back to barn one and sell them there to cover the check you wrote at barn two.”
“Again with a little profit?” I asked.
“That’s right. Back and forth. You do the same thing at barn three, barn four. You’re kiting cows. A pro can do it all day. He never actually has any property at any of these sales, yet he’s always rolling in money. Everybody thinks he’s a wheeler-dealer because he’s always got a bunch of cows, herds of ’em.”
“And that’s Bevo Rasmussen?” I asked.
“That was Bevo,” Stroud said. “Until he got ambitious and decided to move up to horses. Mr. Parker, do you know anything about horse trading?”
“Not very much.”
“As a country lawyer, and this being East Texas, you will have to learn something of the horse trade.”
“It’s a different world, Clay,” said Wick, shaking his head. “People in the horse-trading business, they’re not even human. I don’t mean all of them, of course. Just the bad ones. The bad ones are some sort of crawling bug. You pick up a big rock and look under it, you’ll see some horse traders there. We’re talking the ass end of America, Clay. The fucking ass end.” From the look on his face, I had a hunch that Wick Chandler had had dealings with horse traders.
Stroud ordered another round of beers, which Boo brought over. “You boys talking about Bevo?” Boo asked, clearing away the plates.
“Boo here is a relative of Bevo’s,” said Wick.
“I’m his great-uncle,” Boo said. “At least I think that’s what I am. See that gal over there?” He pointed to Betty, who smiled at us from behind the counter. “That gal is Bevo’s grandmother’s youngest daughter.” He laughed. “Now, me being married to her, what does that make me?”
“An upstanding citizen of Claymore County,” Stroud replied.
“You boys going to make our Bevo a rich man?”
“We’ll be lucky to keep him out of prison, Boo,” Wick said.
“Well, don’t feel bad about it,” said Boo, walking away. “Prison might be just the thing that boy needs.”
“Spoken like a member of the family,” Wick said.
Wick continued his description of the horse trade. “Horse traders make screwing each other a way of life, and they all expect it, and they all lie, all the time. They’re goddamned vultures. They’re worse than you can imagine, Clay. Would you agree, Mr. Stroud?”
Stroud took a long pull from his beer, his Adam’s apple jerking up and down his scrawny neck. “I would say you are being kind, Mr. Chandler.”
“It’s so bad that they talk to themselves in a kind of code, because they know that no matter what a person is telling them about a particular horse, he’s lying. Everybody connected with these guys is the same. The veterinarians are crooked. The people who document pedigrees are crooked. They manufacture bloodlines. They make up horses, down to the last details. They make millions of dollars with imaginary horses. They’re artists, Clay. They’re the goddamned Vincent van Goghs of the maggot world.”
“But it’s a step up from the cow-kiting business?” I asked.
“That’s what Bevo thought,” Stroud said, taking up the story. “Our Mr. Rasmussen wanted to graduate from the cow business to the horse business. But it’s a big jump and, snake though he was, Bevo was a schoolboy compared to the horse crowd. But he was in a hurry to learn, so he apprenticed himself to a master of the crooked horse trade.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Nyman Scales,” said Wick.
“Sally’s father,” I said.
“Yep,” said Stroud, his eyes shining. “Bevo’s alibi for the night of the fire. And the man who sold Bevo the horses in the first place. He even loaned Bevo a quarter of the purchase money. And I would bet my partner’s last dime that Nyman Scales fully expected Bevo to burn his horses and split the insurance money with him.”
“It is widely believed that Scales sells horses to crooks who burn them for the insurance money,” said Wick.
“So Scales is a crook?”
“Oh, Nyman Scales is not your run-of-the-mill crook,” said Wick. “You recall what I said about breeders being artists? Scales is like that. Only he’s better than an artist. He’s a goddamned magician.”
According to Chandler and Stroud, there was no moneymaking scam concerning horses or cattle that Nyman Scales hadn’t run. Like Bevo, Scales had got his start running cow scams. One of his scams, the one that made him rich, had become a legend among local dairy felons.
Some years ago the government decided that there was an undesirable surplus of milk in the country and that the prudent way to end subsidies to dairies was simply to buy the dairymen out. Learning of the government program, Nyman Scales went to fifty or so different livestock auction barns and worked up a giant cow-kiting scheme, so that he accumulated a huge number of sales receipts on cows. With these receipts Scales convinced the government that he had a huge dairy, and so the government bought him out, paying the highest recent market price for all of Nyman’s cows, not one of which had ever actually set foot on Nyman’s farm. At the same time the government was buying Nyman’s cows, he was still kiting them, so Scales was actually making money two, three, even four times for the same cow.
“All this for beasts he’d never pulled a tit of milk from!” laughed Wick. “Now, there’s an artist.”
According to Wick, Scales used the enormous profit he made from the government buyout program to buy more cows, with which he set up a real dairy in order to receive the government subsidies that were still being doled out to the few dairies that stayed in business.
“How could he do that?” I asked. “Didn’t the government catch on?”
“You got a mighty high opinion of our government,” said Wick. “Nyman’s no fool. One requirement of the government program was that once you’d sold out of the dairy business, you had to promise not to go back into it for a period of five years, or else the government would put your ass in jail. So Nyman put all his dairy cows in the name of his daughter.”
“In Sally’s name?”
“That’s right.”
“So Sally Dean owns the largest dairy in the country?” I asked, astonished.
“She did,” Stroud said. “But she gave it up. She got us to void the agreement for her. She disinherited herself.”
“That’s true,” said Wick. “Scales had to hunt up some cousin from out of state to take over the dairy. As far as I know, nobody has ever seen this cousin. You ask me, he doesn’t exist. It’s just another one of Nyman’s scams.”
“That dairy must be worth a fortune,” I said. “Why did Sally give it up?”
“Because she’s through with her father,” said Stroud.
So Sally really was the daughter of a country gangster! Rasmussen had been right about that. I began wondering all over again how much else of Bevo’s crazy story was true. “She seems to have turned out pretty well,” I said.
“She has indeed,” Stroud replied.
“There was a time when nobody would’ve thought that,” said Wick. “Old Nyman had her running scams like you wouldn’t believe. Like she was born to it. It was his idea for her to become district coordinator. He thought she could slip him useful court information, maybe make sure he had a favorable judge if any of his schemes came to light and he went to trial. He bought off a couple of retired judges on Sally’s list—just insurance, you understand. Nyman Scales thinks of everything.”
Stroud hoisted himself to his feet. “There is no evidence that Sally Dean has ever once accommodated her father in that way, you son of a bitch!”
“Just because there’s no evidence doesn’t mean she hasn’t done it,” Wick replied. “I don’t have the faith in our Sally that you do, Gill. Blood will tell.”