by Austin Davis
I told him I didn’t want to stick a pin into anybody. He asked me if I would like him to kill the man who stuck me. “I’ll kill him so you can watch,” he promised. “I’ll kill him with my bare hands. I’ll kill him with his own goddamn pins.”
Stroud and Chandler both had told me it was impossible to have a real conversation with Bevo, and two hours in the car with him had convinced me they were right. I tried to talk to him about the lawsuit, but all I could get was a smile and a wink.
“You just get Nyman Scales on the stand,” he said. “We’re going to depose Nyman on Monday, right?”
“Right, but Bevo—”
“Just listen to Nyman on Monday, and you’ll know,” he said. “I didn’t burn those horses, Mr. Parker. Nyman’s gonna save my ass in court, and we’ll all go home rich.”
“You think a lot of Nyman Scales, don’t you?” I asked.
“Hell, Mr. Parker, he’s my mentor,” Bevo said. “He’s made me what I am today.”
It turned out that Bevo had almost as many stories about Nyman Scales as he did about himself. It was a clear case of hero worship.
“Wait till you meet him, Mr. Parker,” he continued. “You’d never guess how rich he is. Most of the time he dresses like a farmhand. Talks like a Baptist preacher. He’s got that lisp, you know, that soft little s, like a pass-the-plate evangelist. People around the county say butter won’t melt in his mouth.” Bevo laughed and slapped his leg. “Biggest operator in five states, and he sounds like a fucking preacher.”
“You’re admitting to me that Nyman Scales is a crook?” I asked.
“Show me a big man who ain’t,” Bevo replied. “It takes a little wheelin’ and dealin’ to get to the top. It’s the American way. Shit, you know that as well as I do. You were a tax lawyer, for Christ’s sake.”
“If he’s such a famous crook, why hasn’t he been caught?” I asked.
“Because he’s so damn smooth,” Bevo replied. “He’s been named in all kinds of schemes. He’s been indicted three or four times. There have been investigations. But I’m telling you, he thinks of everything. He’s too smart for the local law. For the feds, too, for that matter. He’s a hero to the people around him. He’s like an old-time gangster, you know. A big shot. You can’t catch the big dog.”
Bevo asked if I had heard the “rumor” about Scales and one Jim Ed Murphy, whom he described as the Dr. Frankenstein of horse veterinarians.
“Nyman had this highbred colt, see, a stallion he named Beelzebub’s Ghost, that would have fetched a good price but for one thing. He didn’t have testicles. Born nutless. Nyman got Jim Ed Murphy to manufacture a set of balls for the colt and stick them on with surgery.”
“They sewed fake genitals onto the horse?”
“God’s truth, Mr. Parker. The horse was impotent and sterile, but he had balls. Jim Ed did such a bang-up job on the plastic surgery that it could not be detected. That colt fetched a hell of a price, too.”
“This is pretty deep, Bevo.”
“If you knew anything about raising horses, Mr. Parker, you’d know that birth defects like that are not uncommon, and that they ruin an otherwise big-money stallion. Thanks to what he did for Beelzebub’s Ghost, Jim Ed Murphy became a kind of hero. Breeders would come to him to get him to sew fake testicles onto their own shortchanged horses. He and Nyman made a lot of money at it. Of course, I can’t prove none of what I’ve told you,” Bevo said with a smile. “Nor can nobody else. We’re just speculating about a highly successful gentleman. And I want you to know that all my bidniss dealings with Nyman Scales have been strictly on the up-and-up.”
“Tell me, Bevo,” I said, “would this highly successful gentleman of yours ever destroy a horse for money?”
“On my honor, Mr. Parker, he would not,” Bevo replied. “That’s a nasty bidniss that Nyman and me wouldn’t have any part of. I can tell you, though, there’s those that do. There’s all sorts of things a person can do to make a horse die accidentally, Mr. Parker. One thing is to give a horse a big enough shot of potassium to cause a heart attack that can’t be detected in an autopsy. Another thing is give a horse a concussion. There’s seven or eight ways to do that so the horse will go into a coma. You have to destroy it then.”
“I get the picture,” I said.
“You can stand a horse in four buckets of water, wrap it in heavy-gauge wire, and then shoot electricity through it. Just plug it in. Zap!—a lightning strike.”
“Okay, Bevo.”
“I’ve seen a surgical knife,” he continued, “a long, mean-looking thing, can make a horse look like it’s got itself all caught up in a barbed-wire fence. It’s so sliced up it has to be put down.” He wrinkled his lip in distaste. “That’s a bad one.”
“This is some business you’re in,” I told him.
“It’s just temporary,” he replied. “Like I said, I plan to make my fortune in the big birds. This is where Nyman and me are alike, Mr. Parker. Okay, he’s in horses and I’m planning to be in birds, but we are both men of vision.”
We reached the broad belt of the LBJ Expressway circling the city. There was always a kind of moving traffic jam on LBJ, cars bumper to bumper, all going seventy-five miles an hour.
“Okay, Bevo,” I said, “why are we here?” I had tried to get him to tell me the reason for our run to Dallas as soon as we started out, but he refused, saying he would explain when we got there. Now, as he pushed the Cadillac into the westbound LBJ traffic, Bevo smiled.
“We’re running an errand for Wick Chandler,” he said.
“That can’t be,” I told him. “Mr. Chandler says he hasn’t spoken to you in weeks.”
Bevo’s smile widened. “Now, don’t get upset, Mr. Parker. Old Hard-dick wants you to know how sorry he is for this little deception. He says you can chew his ass when we get back.”
Wick had told me he did not know Bevo’s motive for driving to Dallas. Wick had lied. Or else Bevo was lying now. For a moment I tried to determine which of my two new acquaintances was a bigger liar, but I soon gave up.
“Don’t be too hard on him,” Bevo said. “The fact is, it never occurred to him to ask you to go along with me in the first place. It was my idea. When you told him I asked you, he did some quick thinking and figured it would be a good idea. You see, Mr. Parker, I’m running a little repossession service tonight. We’re picking up something that belongs to Mr. Chandler. It’s something he feels real strong about and, to tell you God’s truth, he don’t trust me with it. He’s counting on you to keep me honest.” Bevo laughed at that. “Mr. Chandler was afraid you wouldn’t come if you knew what we was here to pick up. Don’t worry, it ain’t drugs or nothing like that. Hell, it would make more sense if it was.” He asked me if I knew a Dallas lawyer named Dick Devereau.
“No,” I replied.
“Devereau and Wick are old friends. They went to school together, I believe.”
We had taken the Skillman/Audelia exit, made a couple of turns, and were now driving through one of those raw, undeveloped patches that spread through the outlying areas of all fast-growing cities like a bad skin graft. Here and there sat half-built shopping strips, housing developments, and industrial parks consisting of Quonset huts surrounded by dirt and transplanted, anemic trees. Not yet finished, the area already looked old and tired, dried out, ready to be blown away by the first strong wind. I had seen a lot of this sort of urban wasteland. It made up half of Houston.
“So we’re here to pick up something from Devereau?” I asked.
“In a manner of speaking.”
Bevo told me that, years ago, Wick Chandler had gone fishing in the Yukon. He had taken someone else’s wife with him, who bought him a memento of their trip. Wick loved the gift and mounted it on his wall.
“What was it?” I asked.
“It’s a...a dingus.” Bevo scratched his head. “Hell, Wick told me what you call it. Now, what is it? It’ll come to me.” He resumed the story. “Last fall Dick Devereau come to Jenks
to see his old buddy Wick and do some drinking. Well, sir, he stole the dingus right off Wick’s wall. Took it back to Dallas and put it on the wall behind his desk in his office. Wick called him, wrote him, but he couldn’t get Devereau to give it back.”
“What the hell is this dingus, Bevo?”
We were driving slowly through a trailer park, Bevo trying to read the numbers on the sides of the trailers. He stopped the car and switched off the engine. “It’s right around here,” he said. He reached over and, opening the glove compartment, took out a tiny plastic vial filled with powdery white stones.
“Goddamn it, Bevo, if we’d gotten stopped by the police—”
“I’ll be right back, Mr. P,” he said. “You might not want to get out of the car.” He disappeared into the shadows, leaving me to listen to the crickets in this Dallas trailer park telling me what a fool I was, something I had already come to understand. A couple of minutes later Bevo was back, carrying a thin pole at least six feet long, which he handed to me as he got into the car.
“What do you think!” he said, starting the Cadillac. “I said I’d get it back, and I got it back.”
It was a long spiral of something like rawhide that had been heavily shellacked. I tried bending it and found it amazingly strong.
“Bevo,” I said, “this is a—”
“Pizzle!” he said. “That’s what Wick told me to call it. A whale’s pizzle.”
“It’s a penis!” I said.
“Yep. A whale’s dick.” The thing felt clammy. I dropped the base of it on the floorboard and wiped my hands on my pants. We drove back toward LBJ with the pizzle sticking up out of the convertible like a crazy, corkscrewed aerial.
Bevo patted himself on the back for his detective work. He said he had staked out the floor of the high-rise where Devereau’s office was located and made the acquaintance of one of the janitors.
“Took about twenty minutes,” he boasted. “The Mex janitor wanted me to steal it. He wanted it gone. He said it’s unholy. I think the man is Catholic.” He laughed. “Devereau’s going to explode when he sees his empty wall on Monday morning. He was more attached to this thing than Wick. Wick says Devereau got superstitious about it, started thinking it brought him luck when he went to trial. He even signed documents with the name Whale-Dick Devereau.”
“Of course he did,” I said.
“You get Wick to show you anything Dick Devereau signed in the last couple of months,” Bevo replied. “The typing underneath will say Willard Dick Devereau, but you tell me what the signature says. I admit, it’s hard to make out, but it sure ain’t Willard Dick.” Bevo laughed. “You lawyers are crazy fuckers.”
CHAPTER 25
WHEN WE GOT BACK TO THE LBJ EXPRESSWAY, Bevo went west instead of heading back toward home.
“Now where?” I asked as we worked through LBJ’s six lanes of traffic.
“Just another errand,” he said.
“For Wick?”
“This one’s personal.”
That was all I could get out of him for twenty-five minutes, until he pulled the Cadillac into the parking lot of a seedy club on Industrial Boulevard. I could hear rock music booming through the walls of the strip joint next to the lot.
“Would you mind coming with me this time, Mr. Parker?”
“I’m not interested in retrieving any more whale parts, Bevo,” I told him.
“It ain’t anything like that,” Bevo replied. “Please, Mr. Parker. There’s some friends I want you to meet. They’ll be impressed with you.”
We headed toward the club, but before we got to the door, a Mexican in pressed Levi’s, boots, and a Western-cut sport coat came out from between the cars and stopped us with a motion of his hand.
“How’s it hanging, Mig?” said Bevo.
Without answering, Mig led us to the back of the lot. Seven or eight men dressed like Mig were lounging around a big black Bentley Arrow. There was music coming from the Bentley, a ZZ Top blues tune, and dancing in the bed of a pickup next to the Bentley was a girl in a sequined mini-dress. The girl danced languidly, a stripper’s motions, the sequins on her dress blazing in the light from the neon sign that rasped and sputtered out the name of the strip joint: the Showtime Lounge. As we walked toward the Bentley, the girl saw us, jumped off the truck, and ran away, and the men moved out to circle us.
“Are these the friends you wanted me to meet?” I asked Bevo.
“Just give ’em a chance,” Bevo replied. “You’ll like them.”
One of the men, the one standing closest to the back window of the Bentley, was Kirby Nutter. He had traded in his good-old-boy clothes for a Western outfit like the ones the others were wearing, but he still had his Colorado Rockies cap on. He did not look happy to see me.
Bevo seemed as unconcerned as if he were at a Sunday picnic. He walked toward the Bentley until Mig stopped him. The men behind us moved up so near that I could feel breathing on the back of my neck. Bevo peered into the Bentley from fifteen feet away.
“Howdy, Deck,” he said.
All I could see in the Bentley were shadows. A voice came from the backseat, a low-pitched drawl I could barely hear above the rock and roll.
“There’s folks said you’d be late to your own funeral, Bevo. I’m happy to see they were wrong.”
Bevo reached into his jacket, a move that caused consternation among the men around us.
“Easy, boys,” Bevo said, pulling out a banded stack of currency. He handed the money to Mig. “Would you give this to your boss, Miguelito?” Bevo asked him. The Mexican walked over to the car and handed the money in. There was a moment of silence, then a woman giggled in the backseat.
“A drop in the bucket, Bevo,” said the voice.
“A first installment,” said Bevo. “I know I screwed up, Deck. But I’m going to make good. You know about my lawsuit.” He pointed at me. “This here is Mr. Clayton Parker, one of my lawyers. He’s the fellow took the message you sent to my house. He’ll tell you for me.”
“How do, Counselor,” said the disembodied voice.
“How do,” I replied.
“You’re new, aren’t you? Whereabouts you from?”
I told him.
“A Houston man,” said Willhoit. “Bevo Rasmussen has confused me on one point, Counselor. He says you intercepted the message I sent him. Now, what exactly does he mean by that?”
Kirby Nutter was staring at me from his spot near the rear door of the Bentley.
“He means that your associate contacted me in Jenks, and I acted as go-between,” I said.
There was a moment of silence. Sweat gleamed on Kirby Nutter’s impassive face.
“My, my,” said the voice. Then, after another silence: “I understand there was an altercation at the Rasmussen house. You must understand, Counselor, that my associate is new to the company. I trust he did not behave indecorously?”
Nutter went white. I realized that he must have lied to his boss about his visit to Jenks—God knows what kind of story he made up—and had just discovered that his boss knew about the lie. I wondered how Willhoit had found out, and how much he knew. Had he heard about Nutter’s arrest, or about Sally Dean getting the best of his new thug? I had the feeling that I had walked into a kind of back-lot trial, and that Kirby Nutter’s fate rested in my hands.
“I believe that you would have approved of your associate’s behavior,” I said. I told Willhoit that Nutter had found me at Bevo’s home instead of Bevo and had made an honest mistake.
“I heard,” said Willhoit, “that at one point in your discussion, my associate became incapacitated.”
I replied that his man had indeed been temporarily immobilized by an associate of mine.
“An associate with great tits, is what I heard,” said the voice. There was a round of hooting and laughter, and Nutter’s face went from white to flaming red.
The fact that I was working to save the man who had tried to shatter my kneecap with a needle must have shifted my exha
usted brain into a kind of overdrive. My fear melted away, and I chatted with Willhoit as if he were a judge I was trying to talk out of coming down hard on a first-offender.
“So Bevo moved you in and didn’t give out a forwarding address?” Willhoit chuckled, and the focus of ridicule slid from Nutter toward me.
“Yes, sir,” I said, one good old Texas boy to another, “Bevo left both of us out of the loop on that one. You didn’t know about me, and I sure as hell didn’t know about you.” That caused more laughter.
“Mr. Rasmussen is a resourceful rascal,” said Willhoit. “Quite a salesman, too. Do you know about our business transaction, Counselor Parker?”
I said I had not heard about it.
“Your client there sold me on the idea of getting into the cattle business. I entrusted him with enough money to set me up in a small way, and damned if that money didn’t just disappear.”
“That is unfortunate,” I said.
“And that was over a year ago. I keep waiting for restitution, but all I get are promises. Where has all my business sense gone?”
“I’ll pay you back double, Deck,” said Bevo. “I said I would, and I will. Tell him about my case, Mr. Parker.”
“Did you hear that, Counselor?” said Willhoit. “Your client claims he can increase my original investment two-fold. What do you think? Will you win the case?”
It occurred to me that I could end everybody’s troubles right then just by telling the truth. I could tell this invisible cowboy gangster that we didn’t have a chance in hell of winning, that Bevo wasn’t going to get a cent for his horses, and then Willhoit would hang Bevo from the neon sign, and we could all go home. Chandler and Stroud would be off the hook for screwing up the lawsuit; the geologist, wherever he was, could reclaim his house without a fight, if he wanted it; and I could stop puzzling about the hold this little weasel of a man might or might not have over Sally Dean. What a calmer, saner world it would be, I realized, if I came clean.
“Yes, sir,” I said, “we’re going to win.”
“Well,” replied Willhoit, “it was my intent to kick a mud hole in your client’s lying ass and then stomp it dry. But you think I ought to wait on the trial?”