by Austin Davis
“Yes, sir.”
Suddenly a couple of the cowboys behind us took hold of Bevo and pinned his arms behind his back. Bevo fought, tried to speak, but one of the cowboys had an armlock around his windpipe.
“Wait a minute, guys,” I said, stepping toward Bevo. I felt something sharp press against my spine.
“I wouldn’t move, if I was you, Houston,” the man behind me said.
“Don’t worry, Counselor,” Willhoit said, “I’ll wait for the trial, but I want to hold some security this time. Kirby, go on over there and cut something off Mr. Rasmussen. He’s got a razor in his sock. Use that.”
Bevo’s body jerked as if a current had shot through it, but he was still held fast. I saw red fury in his eyes. Kirby came over to him, glanced at me as if to say, Sorry about all this. As he reached down to take the razor out of Bevo’s sock, Bevo kicked him hard enough in the temple to cause him to go down on one knee. After the sap that Sally had given him the night before, I was surprised that Nutter didn’t pass out. He grabbed Bevo’s ankle and ripped the razor out of his sock.
“Cut me something I can put on my key chain,” Willhoit called. “Don’t take something he can’t live without, but make it something he’ll miss.” He had leaned up from the backseat of the Bentley to get a good look at what was about to happen, and I saw his face for the first time. Deck Willhoit was a ZZ Top wanna-be, all black sunglasses and thick, grizzled beard.
Two other massive cowboys had captured Bevo’s ankles and were holding his feet on the pavement so that he could not move. The arm around his neck tightened, and a strained, gurgling sound came out of his mouth. Nutter, kneeling, was unbuckling Bevo’s belt.
“Hold on, Mr. Willhoit,” I said. “Let’s trade.”
Willhoit cocked his head. “What sort of trade?”
“I’ve got an antique in the car that you just might find more amusing than one of Bevo’s body parts.”
“I doubt it,” Willhoit said. “But let’s see.”
I went to Bevo’s car and retrieved the whale’s pizzle.
“What the fuck is that?” asked Willhoit as I handed it in to him. It protruded several feet out the window. I told him what it was, and he inspected it, turning it in his hands. I could now see the woman in the seat next to him, a brunette in a glittery dress who ran her fingers along the rawhide spirals of the pizzle.
“How about it, babe?” Willhoit asked her. He made thrusting movements with it, and I had to duck to keep from being struck in the eye. This amused Willhoit, and he used the pizzle to knock the hat off a cowboy standing next to the car.
“Whoa!” he said. “That’s some dick.”
“How about it,” I said, “a dick for Deck.”
He thought that was hilarious, and so did his girl. “What do you say, Bevo?” Willhoit called. “Is this thing bigger than yours?”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” I said, “it’ll make a hell of a key chain.”
The brunette whispered in his ear, and he laughed again. “Okay, Counselor,” he said, “you’ve got yourself a deal. Kirby, turn that little rat’s ass loose.”
Nutter let go of Bevo’s belt. As he climbed to his feet, he gave Bevo a terrific punch in the stomach. Bevo doubled over and fell to the pavement, gasping for breath. Nutter handed me the razor.
“I owe you one,” he whispered, patting me on the back as he walked past me. Nutter and the other cowboys got into a couple of cars.
Willhoit had his driver roll the Bentley a few feet closer to us, and the drug dealer prodded Bevo with the end of the pizzle. “One hundred and eighty thousand dollars, Bevo, due the day you get it. Wait one day longer, and you and the whale this thing came from can start your own lonely hearts club.”
A hand thick with gold nugget rings came out of the Bentley’s window.
“It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Counselor,” said Willhoit. “Maybe we’ll do business together someday.” We shook hands. “If you see Nyman Scales’s daughter anytime soon, you tell that little girl to call her pappy. I know Nyman’s been missing her.”
I promised to deliver the message to Sally Dean, and the big car pulled away, followed by the two carloads of cowboys. The tip of the pizzle slanted out of the Bentley’s back window, whirling and thrusting in the air.
“You shouldn’t ought to given that dingus away,” Bevo gasped. He was on his hands and knees, trying to stand up.
“It was either that one or yours,” I reminded him.
“That dickweed wasn’t gonna lay a hand on me,” Bevo gasped. I pulled him to his feet—he was amazingly light—and he bent over and vomited.
“This is the second time you’ve put me on the spot with your friend Willhoit,” I said to him a few minutes later as I drove the convertible back toward the LBJ Expressway. Bevo was slouched in the passenger seat, staring at the dash. “Don’t do it again.”
“Willhoit’s made a big mistake,” Bevo said, flicking his razor open and closed. “A big mistake.”
“It was a laundering scheme, right?” I asked. “You were supposed to use Willhoit’s money to buy him some cattle, make him a real cowboy.”
“I should have sold him on emus,” Bevo said. “I coulda got more out of him.”
“Instead of buying cattle, you used his money to help buy your horses. Which you then burned for the insurance money. What in hell were you thinking, Bevo? Didn’t you know a guy like Willhoit would be watching to see what happened to his money?”
“I didn’t burn them horses, Mr. Parker. Besides, I’m gonna pay him off with the insurance money.”
It was time one of Bevo’s lawyers fulfilled his ethical obligation to his client by spilling the beans. “Bevo, you can’t win the lawsuit.” I told him all about Stroud’s screwup with the interrogatories, how it meant we could not call any witnesses. I explained that SWAT was going to eat us for breakfast. The news did not register.
“Stroud will fix it,” Bevo said. “All we got to do is get Nyman Scales on the stand. Stroud can do that. Or else you can.”
“Bevo, listen to me. We are going to lose. Scales can’t get on the stand for us. Nobody can. You can’t count on money from the lawsuit to pay off your debts. We just lied to your drug dealer. I lied to him. Jesus, why did I do that?”
My question seemed to surprise him. “You were representing me, is why you did it. That’s why I brought you along. We just went to court, Mr. Parker. We went to Deck Willhoit’s court, and we won. You did just fine, like I knew you would.”
“We didn’t win,” I told him. “We bought some time with a lie.”
“Whatever works,” he said. The motto of our firm.
I asked him where he got the money he gave to Willhoit that night. “You told me you were living hand to mouth,” I reminded him.
“Money ain’t nothing,” Bevo said. “Getting money ain’t nothing. It’s the principle. That’s all that matters. It’s the principle of the thing.”
“Is it principle to lie to everybody you meet, Bevo?” I asked. “Putting me in that house when you knew there was a chance Willhoit would come after you, did you do that on principle?”
“Principle is sticking to a plan, Mr. Parker,” said the little man. “It’s putting together the best plan you can make and then sticking with it. You do that, you’re a principled man. No Deck Willhoit nor fancy-ass SWAT lawyer nor the whole goddamn state of Texas is gonna fuck up my plan.”
“So you’re a principled man, are you?” I asked.
“Yes, sir, I am. Though I know some that ain’t.”
CHAPTER 26
IT TOOK THREE SOLID MINUTES of banging on Wick Chandler’s door Saturday morning to get him to open up. When he finally did, he was in pretty much the same condition as when I had first met him: naked except for a robe, this time one of aquamarine silk. A black sleep mask hung around his neck, along with his gold chains.
“We need to talk,” I said.
“Now?” he asked, in a voice husky from sleep. I pushed past
him and into the front room.
It was like stepping into another dimension. Chandler had gone in for postmodern in a big way, colors that scorched the eye and lean, rippling furniture, some of which looked like interior parts of a big machine. The couch seemed to be melting; the coffee table crouched, ready to spring. The room could have been a display in a museum for mad decorators, if it weren’t for the clothes scattered across the raspberry-colored carpet. Some of the clothing belonged to a woman.
“This is a bad time, Clay,” Chandler said, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
“You’re going to have to make do with only one penis, Wick. I gave your whale ornament to Deck Willhoit to stop him from carving up Bevo. Which is just as well, because if I’d gotten home with it, I’d be jamming it up your left nostril right now.”
That woke him up a little. He offered me a seat on the melting couch and then sat on a tiny wire chair that looked as if it could not possibly support his bulk. I told him about the run-in with Willhoit and his cowboys.
“You ask me,” he said, scratching his ear, “that was damned irresponsible of Bevo, to get you involved in his shady deals like that.”
“Irresponsible of Bevo? You sent me to Dallas to fetch a goddamned mummified whale’s penis!”
“You’ve got to understand, Clay. It’s a valuable artifact,” he said.
“I’m sure it is.”
“It has a lot of sentimental value to me.”
“I’m sure it does. I just don’t want to hear about it.”
“I’m real sorry, Clay,” he said. “The last thing in the world I wanted to do was hurt your feelings.”
“You didn’t hurt my feelings. You almost got me killed by a drug dealer in a Dallas stripjoint’s parking lot, but you didn’t hurt my feelings.”
“I don’t think Willhoit would have killed you, Clay,” Wick said. “It sounds to me like the two of you got along fine.”
“I have a low tolerance for fetching whale parts in the middle of the night, Wick. I didn’t sign on for that sort of work.” I stood up.
Wick stood up, too. “Jesus, Clay, you aren’t thinking of quitting, are you?”
I hadn’t been, and now that he mentioned it, I found that fact surprising.
“Give me one reason why I should stay.”
“The firm needs you, Clay. You don’t know how much you’ve done for us in just the last few days.”
“All I’ve done is lose your whale dick for you.”
“You’ve sharpened us up. We were just drifting on the Rasmussen case until you showed up and got us to working on it.”
“You’re still just drifting,” I said. “You’re going to lose the case big time.”
“You fit here, Clay. You don’t think you do, but you do.” He spoke about plans he and Stroud were mulling over to expand the firm. In five years, maybe four, we would all be rich. “Don’t you want to be rich?” he asked.
“I’d rather be sane,” I told him.
“All right, then,” he said. “There’s another reason for you to stay. Sally.”
“She left me taped naked to a chair for the police to find, Wick. I’m not too sure Sally cares if I stick around or not.”
“I think that shows a real interest on her part.”
“Wickie?” a woman’s husky voice called from down the hall.
“Just a minute, Clay,” said Wick, scuttling down the hallway. I heard the low, muffled drawl of Chandler’s voice, its tone ardent and cajoling. I noticed a garter belt lying under the coffee table, and next to it, an ivory-handled straight razor. Perhaps it was the razor lady I had talked to over the phone on my first day in the office!
He came back wrapping the flimsy robe tighter around his huge stomach. “Look, Clay, I’m sorry as I can be about last night. I should have told you about the pizzle, and Bevo sure as hell should have told you about the meeting with Willhoit. But let me ask you something: If you had known—if Bevo had come clean and told you he wanted you to go with him to keep him alive when he met his drug dealer—would you have gone?”
“Are you crazy?” I asked. “I’m no bodyguard. And I don’t practice law in parking lots.”
“I’m not asking you if it was smart to go. I’m asking if you would have gone to save your client’s life.”
I thought about that. “This is stupid,” I said. “If Bevo had told me what he wanted to do, I’d have talked him out of it.”
Wick shook his head. “You don’t talk Bevo out of things. He was going to meet that man in Dallas, with or without you. And without you, there was a much better chance of his winding up at the bottom of Lake Ray Hubbard. Now, knowing that, would you have turned Bevo down?”
“I don’t know, and here’s the point, Wick: I wasn’t given a chance to find out.”
“You’re right, partner. I’m sorry. No more crazy missions. I promise.”
I drove home but felt too restless to go in. Instead, I drove to the office and tried to work on the Rasmussen case but found I couldn’t concentrate. I kept wondering if Sally might show up at my house that morning—an unlikely possibility, considering that I had basically accused her of whoring for her father the last time I saw her. On my way home I went by Glenn Lawson’s hardware store and bought back the lawn mower. I mowed and edged and trimmed.
As Lawson predicted, off and on throughout the day people showed up to repossess things Bevo had failed to make payments on. An unassembled satellite dish was taken away by a couple of husky guys in a van. They took the television, too, and the VCR. I helped three teenagers carry a fiberglass Jacuzzi out of the garage and lift it into a pickup truck. Everybody who came to take away merchandise offered to sell it to me then and there. They would give me a great price on it. Apparently, there were not many buyers of luxury items left in Jenks.
Later on I strolled through the business district of Jenks, an exercise that took less than fifteen minutes, and noted all the shops that had gone out of business. The people I met, most of whom greeted the stranger in their midst with an automatic “howdy,” moved with a curious floating listlessness, as if their chests were hollow or they had been balancing something heavy on their heads for a long time. I compared these folks to the thousands I used to see every day caught in Houston’s frenetic bustle—the downtown crowds pushing through jungle heat on their way to lunch at noon or the parking lots at five o’clock. There was not much similarity. Houstonians were harried, but they knew they were going somewhere. If the citizens of Jenks had someplace to go, they weren’t in any hurry to get there.
About four o’clock I wandered into Glenn Lawson’s hardware store for the second time that day, this time just to chat, and ran into Captain Jack and Red Meachum, our soon-to-be sheriff’s deputy. They were buying a spring-loaded animal trap. I introduced myself, something I hadn’t done on our first encounter at the Singing Pig.
“I hope we can clear up any ill feelings that might exist between you boys and the firm of Chandler and Stroud,” I said.
Captain Jack turned to Meachum. “Do you have any ill feelings toward ’em, Red?”
“Nope,” said Red, “I love lawyers. Lawyers just make my day.” He smiled at me, and I understood Stroud’s contempt for the ex-pilots.
“That’s a mean-looking trap you got there,” I said. “What’s it for? Bobcats?”
Meachum shot me a suspicious look. “What would make you think it’s for bobcats?” he asked.
I shrugged. They had also brought to the counter a half-dozen little evergreen-shaped car deodorants.
“Whatever you fellows do in your cars must really be pungent,” I said.
Jack pointed a finger at me. “City boy, you tell those fat farts you work for that their day is coming.”
Meachum tapped his friend on the arm. “Now, Jack,” said the big man, “this lawyer wants to make friends.” Captain Jack bit down on the rest of his speech.
“We’ll have to go to lunch together again sometime,” I said as they left the store with their purc
hases.
Lawson had watched the encounter from behind the cash register. “I see you’ve met our rehabilitation project,” he said.
“What they lack in brains, they make up for in charm,” I replied.
“The big one there is gonna be our new deputy,” said Lawson. “He says he’s gonna get the others deputized, too. Their Rambo phase must be over, or else they’d have been all camouflaged up. Could be they’re starting a new phase.” He shook his head. “We’ll have to get old Hard-dick to name it for us. How’s the lawn mower working out?”
I told him that I had already given the yard a makeover.
He laughed. “You can usually tell who the city people are around here. They have the nicest lawns. I guess it’s hard for them to find stuff to do in this little town.”
“What is there to do around here?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “you could fertilize.”
CHAPTER 27
CHANDLER AND STROUD HAD PLANNED a little welcoming party for me that night out at Stroud’s place. Shortly after six-thirty I parked the Austin Healey in the yard of Gilliam Stroud’s farmhouse. From his stall in the broken-down stable, Ed the unspotted Appaloosa watched me climb onto the porch. The front door was open, and Cajun fiddle music blasted through the house so loudly that the air trembled. I peered in from the porch.
“Well, lookee here,” boomed Stroud from the shadows, “our wounded boy has returned to us! “
“Clay!” Wick Chandler hollered. “Get in here!” He danced across the room toward me, a Hawaiian shirt billowing over his massive paunch like a crimson sail. Wick’s top half looked too heavy to be supported by the thin, blue-white legs that peeped out from under his aquamarine Bermudas. He was wearing black business socks and loafers. He thrust a longneck into my hand, motioning toward the kitchen. “There’s pâté in there. Help yourself.” Wick was a dervish, whirling and hopping to the music, a ruby blimp caught in a cyclone. He danced away, bumping into furniture.