by Austin Davis
The sad fact was, we didn’t know what SWAT had on him. Since Stroud had never sent over his own interrogatories, SWAT was under no obligation to send us any information on their case. We had no idea what sort of evidence they would present. It would be the O.K. Corral, with SWAT as the Earps and us as the Clantons. The only significant difference was that, in the real gunfight, the Clantons got to use live ammunition. We would be firing blanks.
I tried to think of something to do on the case, but Wick was right, there was nothing else, except get braced for what SWAT would do to us. My brain had still not worked its way out from under the rock I seemed to have set on it the night before, so I took some aspirin and tried to go back to sleep. At three o’clock I showered and went down to the Dairy Queen for a late lunch. As I was parking the Austin Healey, a man came out of the restaurant who matched the description Lu-Anne had given us of the “lawyer” who had been meeting secretly with Bevo. He got into a big black Lexus and pulled out of the DQ parking lot as I walked in.
“That’s him,” Lu-Anne said, “your competition. You missed Bevo by about four minutes. You ask me, I think they’re heading out of town to meet somewhere.”
I ran back out to my Austin Healey and took off after the Lexus. The car was too far ahead for me to see it, but it had left a fine haze of dust hanging in the air east along Main Street, heading out of town. I lost the trail at the last asphalt cross street before the roads turned to dirt. There was too much dust in the air to make a guess as to which road the Lexus had taken.
“Too fast for you?” Lu-Anne asked as I walked back in the DQ.
“If I’d taken you along, we wouldn’t have lost them,” I replied.
There were no other customers. Lu-Anne explained that I had missed the Sunday lunch crunch and was too early for the after-Sunday-night-church crowd. I told her to surprise me with something good to eat and slid into a booth.
I had seen that man before. In Houston, although I could not remember exactly where or in what context. Lu-Anne was right: He looked like a lawyer. He was a lawyer. But who the hell was he?
I figured it out just as Lu-Anne came to my table with my lunch. As she put the plate down, I jumped out of the booth.
“It’s just chicken fried steak,” Lu-Anne said.
“Antoine Duett,” I said.
“What?”
I sat back down and tried to eat the lunch Lu-Anne had brought me, but my appetite was gone.
This was serious news. Antoine Duett was indeed a Houston lawyer. I remembered my old colleague Rita Humphrey introducing us once in the lobby of the building where our firm had its offices. He was not one of Rita’s favorite people, she told me later. More a dirty-tricks operator than a practicing lawyer, Duett performed nasty little jobs for other law firms. He tracked down reluctant witnesses, encouraged unreluctant witnesses to change their minds, and helped with the general shuffling of opinion and evidence that often goes on behind the scenes of a trial and can sometimes shake up even the most open-and-shut cases. People like Duett are the CIA and the KGB of the big firms. Some lawyers see them as a necessary evil. Some would like to round them all up and stick them in a gulag.
I knew one other thing about Antoine Duett of Houston. Although he kept no legal connection with any firm, he had an office in the same building as Slaven, Wortmann, Applegate, and Tice. Bevo was holding secret meetings with the enemy.
CHAPTER 29
I DROVE TO WICK’S HOME, rang the doorbell, then beat on the door with my fist. No Wick. When I got to Stroud’s farmhouse, about four-thirty, Sally’s blue Mercedes was parked in the yard, and Sally was out in the stable, going over Ed with a brush. She was wearing jeans and a workshirt tied at her waist. A country girl again.
I went into the stable and stood awhile, watching Sally work the brush methodically down the horse’s side, and tried to think of something to say. “Hot day,” was what I came up with.
“I want to thank you,” she said, without looking at me, “for not turning me in to the police.”
“There’s no law against refusing to untape a man from a chair.”
“There’s one against prostitution,” she replied. “You could have shut me down, and I’d have had to fall back on my day job.”
So it was going to be like that.
“I’m looking for Bevo,” I said. “Do you know where he is?”
She shrugged. “You could ask Gill, but he’s probably still asleep.”
“Maybe I’ll wake him up.”
“You might try, but I should warn you, he sleeps with a loaded gun. I know, because my daddy pays me to service him from time to time, just like I do you.”
I went up to her, took the brush out of her hand, and spun her around. “How long are you going to keep this up?” I asked. There was a sharp, painful tug at my waist: Ed had clamped his teeth on my belt and was apparently trying to expel me from the stable. I pulled free, and he showed me a grin full of gigantic teeth.
“This is Ed’s hour,” Sally said, “not yours. You’re lucky he didn’t get you by the tenders.”
I handed the brush back, and she continued grooming the horse.
“I saw Deck Willhoit in Dallas a couple of nights ago,” I said. “He told me to tell you your father misses you. I guess you’d better check in.”
The only sound for a while was the rasp of the brush as it moved down Ed’s flank. “Deck is my uncle,” she said at last. “Not by blood, but by business. He and Nyman were partners years ago. They probably still are, in ways that would interest the FBI if they only knew where and how to look.”
She moved around the horse and began to work Ed’s other side. “I’ve been trying for a couple of years now to decide whether or not to have a talk with the feds, see if I couldn’t point them in the right direction. Selling out your own father is a harder thing than you might think, even for the daughter of Nyman Scales. But you and your idiotic guesswork the other night have just about made up my mind for me.”
“You’ve kept up with your father’s business activities?” I asked.
“According to you and Bevo, I am one of my father’s business activities.” She laughed. “You and Wick and Bevo and Gill, half the judges in the county, and my father, too, old crafty Nyman. You’re all working so hard to come up with an angle on me. I can see the gears running behind your eyes. It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.”
“Come on, Sally.”
“This may surprise you, Counselor, but I’ve never known exactly what my father is up to. Oh, I’ve known for years that he was up to no good, and God knows, I did some odd things for him when I was young. But he always kept me as much in the dark as possible. And he never told me the truth. He doesn’t know how. Even when I was busted for fraud—I was fourteen at the time—and Gill got the charges dropped, Nyman insisted to me there had been a terrible mistake. For a while he said he was working up a lawsuit against the county for arresting his little girl. Keeping quiet might have been his way of protecting me, but more likely it was because he didn’t want anyone, even his daughter, to have enough on him to cause him to worry. So, no, I haven’t kept up with him. But lately I’ve been doing a little checking. From the questions he asks me about my judges’ schedules, I think I’ve figured out which of the bastards he’s bought. That information might be of help to some DA. I’m beginning to think that I could put Nyman away.”
She kept working on the horse, methodically, carefully. “Did you ever have a pet, Counselor? Did your mommy and daddy ever get you a dog or a cat or some little rodent, or maybe a turtle?”
“I had a dog,” I replied.
“When I was young, Nyman used to give me pets. Not dogs or cats. Larger animals. Sometimes a calf, sometimes a half-grown horse. He usually did it after he’d been away from home for a couple of weeks or a month, with Mama wondering where he was, cursing him under her breath. She really was a Cajun witch. I think she tried spells on Daddy. Maybe they are what made him such a son of a bitch. Maybe
they kept him from being worse than he is. Or maybe they just annoyed him; there is a rumor that he killed her.”
“I’ve heard it,” I said.
“It’s a lie,” she said flatly. “Who told you, anyway? Wick Chandler?” She laughed. “He’s been sore at me ever since I refused to do with him what I never should have done with you.”
“Sally—”
“Anyway, Daddy would finally show up after one of his absences, with an animal in tow, and he’d sit me down and give me a big hug and make a show of giving me a pet. 'It’s all yours, baby,’ he’d say. 'You can name her and raise her as your own.’ And I’d do it every time. I’d feed them and brush them and do whatever else it took to keep them healthy. But I learned never to get too involved with my pets, because I knew that someday I’d come home after school and my colt or my calf would be gone. It had run away, Nyman said. He had looked everywhere for it. He thought maybe someone had stolen it.”
She sighed. “It took me two or three years to figure out what was happening. My father was giving me his special stock, those animals he was saving for some particular scheme, some get-rich-quick experiment. When I was a little older, I would try to find out what happened when my pet-of-the-moment disappeared. Usually it had been sold—I found where Nyman kept his bills of sale—but sometimes it had had an accident. Little Buttercup had run into barbed wire or gotten struck by lightning.”
“I’m sorry, Sally,” I said.
“You’d think a man as clever as Nyman would be smarter about his own child. He seemed to think I would never catch on to what he was doing. Or maybe that I just wouldn’t care. Well, I did care. I just didn’t know what to do about it. You see, Counselor, in a way, you and Bevo were right about me. I was the most special stock of all. I could do tricks without having to be maimed or killed first. Nyman taught me a lot of them. It was petty thievery mostly, in the beginning, but it got more complicated after Mama died. Nyman said it wasn’t wrong because it’s every man for himself out there. 'It’s a fallen world,’ he’d say. 'But we don’t have to fall along with it.’”
“Sally, you don’t have to tell me any of this.”
“You asked me once why I keep Ed here instead of at Daddy’s place. Do you think you can figure out why now?”
“I guess, maybe, an unspotted Appaloosa wouldn’t have much value to Nyman,” I said.
“Except as tinder,” she replied. “Well, Ed is going to live into old age. Gill and I are going to see to that.” She put the brush on a shelf and washed her hands at a faucet. “Do you really need to see Bevo?” she asked.
“I have a few questions that need answering.”
“Come on, then. I’ll take you to his hideout.” She walked out of the stable and climbed into her Mercedes.
“So you know where he lives?” I asked as I got into the passenger seat.
She switched on the engine. “A girl always has to know the whereabouts of her pimp.”
CHAPTER 30
SALLY DROVE EAST OUT OF THE YARD along a road that was nothing more than a couple of wheel ruts running through knee-high grass. The little car did not have much road clearance, and it crested the waves of grass like a speedboat. I realized it was a good thing that we hadn’t taken my car, because the Austin Healey would have surely run aground.
“Nice car,” I said.
“If a girl takes care of herself in this line of work, she can make some money.”
“Look, Sally I want to—” A bump in the road bounced me up against the car’s roof, and I bit my tongue hard enough for pain to ring like a bell in my mouth.
“You better buckle up,” Sally said. “I’d hate to bring you back with a broken neck. Bad for business.”
We bucked on for about five minutes, sometimes through fields with no wheel ruts at all, until we arrived at a brick-and-shingle cabin sitting beside a large pond.
“Is this Stroud’s shooting spot?” I asked.
“It used to be.”
Though badly run down, Stroud’s cabin was a pretty sophisticated piece of work, with a fireplace, a garage, and a screened-in porch running the length of the cabin’s front. Square holes bordered with elaborate wooden frames had been let into the screen at a variety of heights.
“The holes are for shooting at snakes in the pond,” Sally explained. Bevo’s Seville was not in sight, nor were any of the other cars he claimed to own. We walked across the porch, knocked, got no answer.
“Does Stroud know Bevo is living in his cabin?” I asked.
“Bevo’s a real entrepreneur. Cows, horses, whores. There’s a connection there, don’t you think?”
“You left out emus,” I said.
“He’s branching out into the big birds?” she replied. “That little man is full of surprises.”
Sally told me that Bevo had been a hanger-on at her father’s ranch back when she used to crash there. “He thought he was hot stuff because he was selling invisible cows.” She shook her head. “When he found out who I was, he made a dozen different kinds of moves on me, all of them hopeless. He was like a mangy puppy rubbing up against my leg. But he wasn’t really after me. He was after Nyman. He wanted Nyman to turn him into a big-time horse dealer. I left the ranch about the time Nyman started noticing him. It surprised me to learn that Nyman had sold Bevo some horses. Bevo always seemed like such a lightweight.”
“They’re big pals now,” I said. I told her that Bevo was counting on Nyman to save him at tomorrow’s deposition out at the Scales ranch.
Sally shook her head. “Nyman used to be a better judge of scum.”
I tried the door. It was unlocked, and we went inside. The front room of the cabin was a mess of strewn clothes, half-eaten TV dinners, and bedsheets. It looked like Bevo had been sleeping on the couch. There was a big table that stood not quite chest high with some odd-looking machines on it, some of them clamped to the table’s edge.
“Are these for drugs?” I asked, pointing to the machines.
“They’re not Bevo’s,” Sally said. “They’re Gill’s. They’re for loading bullet casings. He and Wick used to make their own bullets.” She pointed under the table to a huge plastic sack of what looked like black sand.
“Gunpowder?” I asked.
“Walk lightly, city boy,” she said, “that stuff is pretty old. You don’t want to set it off.”
“Sally, tell me about you and Stroud.”
She sat on the stool in front of the loading table and took a brass casing out of a paper sack. “Gill showed me how to do this once,” she said. “Let’s see if I can work it without blowing us both up.” She fitted the casing into a recess in one of the machines clamped to the edge of the table.
“It’s a simple story,” she said. “Gill rehabilitated me. After I graduated from college I went into a tailspin. I think I was having an allergic reaction to being Nyman Scales’s daughter, though I didn’t know that’s what it was.” She took some gunpowder out of a small crock and filled a metal funnel on the top of the machine. “I had an apartment in Mule Springs, but I was out at the ranch all the time. Nyman had me change my name legally. It was all part of a scam to fool the government about who owned his dairy. I didn’t care. I was into drugs, antidepressants mostly, mixing them with whatever I could find in the liquor cabinet. Nyman didn’t notice. He still saw me as his trained pony. At the time, I still was. I would listen to him, knowing everything coming out of his mouth was a lie, and yet I would nod and smile and do what he told me to do.” She shook her head. “What makes people do things like that, Counselor? How can a person just consign herself to hell?”
“He’s your father, Sally,” I said. She put up a hand as if to bat the words away.
“The judicial coordinator’s job came open, and Nyman thought it would be great having someone he could use in the office, someone to feed him inside information. So he found out what the requirements were—college degree, six months of work in a law office, the ability to count to ten. He told me to go get a job with
some lawyers. I remembered the time Gill got me out of jail, so I went there. He hired me on the spot. God knows why. I looked like a reanimated corpse with the shakes. But then, so did Gill. He hired me, and Wick went along with it.”
“And Stroud straightened you out?” I asked.
“Let’s just say that Gill Stroud did not treat me like a trained pony. He was the first man I ever met who dealt with me like I was a human being.”
“And then he fell in love with you?” I asked.
“That’s one version.”
“What’s your version?” I asked.
Sally turned a crank on the side of the machine and sent a small amount of powder into the casing. She set a cone of lead in another fitting in the machine and used a lever to stuff the cone into the top of the casing. She tossed me the bullet.
“That’s for a .38 special,” she said. “It’ll fit the gun that the boys gave you last night and which you forgot when you went home, I assume because Wanda Sue Lovell had got you thinking about dental hygiene.”
“Sally.”
“My relationship with Gill Stroud is my business. Mine and Gill’s. Can you accept that, Counselor?”
“I guess I’ll have to,” I replied. “But after you straightened out, you took the district coordinator’s job, anyway.”
“That’s right. I let Nyman pull the strings, and I got the job.”
“Why?”
“I figured doing an honest job in that office was the best way to show my father that he’d better train another pony, because this one had gotten away from him.”