by Austin Davis
“And you haven’t been helping him out?”
Sally looked at me in exasperation. “No, Counselor, I have not been helping Nyman. He’s asked, all right, lots of times, and every single time I’ve shut him down. Daddy’s little girl isn’t Daddy’s little girl anymore. What’s more, if I ever get proof—solid proof—that he has killed an animal for money, I’ll go after him any way I can.”
I remembered Stroud thundering at Wick in Boo’s barbecue shack that there was no evidence of wrongdoing on Sally’s part as judicial district coordinator, and I felt one of the knots in my gut begin to loosen. The old man was right about Sally—and I suddenly realized that she was the one thing in the world I had most wanted the lying old charlatan to be right about.
“And yet,” I said, moving toward her, “here you are, whoring for Bevo Rasmussen.”
She stared at me for a moment—just long enough to see that, for the first time, I had gotten the jump on her. She shrugged, a faint smile on her lips. “I guess it’s my bad blood,” she said. “What can I do?”
“I think you need a lawyer,” I said. She got off her stool, backed slowly along the table as I approached.
“Why would I need a lawyer?” she asked, letting me back her against the wall.
“Legal services,” I replied. “Maybe something to do with duct tape.” I reached to kiss her, but as my lips brushed hers she pushed me away.
“No, damn it,” she said, “I’m mad at you.” She poked me in the chest, and it was my turn to be backed along the wall. “I cooked you dinner, I exorcised your house, I saved your kneecap, I provided you with truly amazing sex, and you called me a whore. Jesus, I get crazy just thinking about it. No, sir, I’ve got no more pity for the poor city boy.”
“Pity?” I said. “You left me taped to the goddamned chair!”
“You deserved it,” she replied. She started to say something else, then her gaze went past me into the room beyond.
I turned and looked into the room. It was packed to the ceiling with boxes. I switched on the light and saw that the boxes were for electronic equipment of all sorts—television sets, stereo amplifiers, speakers, CD players, phone answering machines, faxes. There must have been a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of boxed goods, all stacked neatly as if in a warehouse.
“Bevo is fencing stolen goods,” Sally said. She began to laugh. “Like I said, the little shit is full of surprises.”
CHAPTER 31
SALLY DROVE ME BACK TO STROUD’S, and I ran upstairs to tell the old man about the stolen goods warehoused in his cabin. They would create quite an embarrassment if the police found them. And as of tomorrow, the police would include among their ranks an ex-pilot with revenge on his mind. I yelled Stroud’s name.
“Be careful,” Sally called after me.
The old man wasn’t in his room. He wasn’t in the house.
“Damn,” said Sally. “That means he’s headed for the county line.”
Jenks was dry, and the nearest bars were in Claymore County. According to Sally, Stroud often slipped out and drove himself to the Claymore County line, coming home hours later in a lolling, weaving tour that had made him infamous in the small towns along State Highway 11. “Folks down there call him the road warrior,” Sally said.
“He wouldn’t get drunk tonight,” I said, “not with a deposition tomorrow.”
Sally shook her head. “I’ve seen him drink himself half to death the night before a murder trial.” And so had I, it occurred to me: The morning before the Clifton Hardesty trial, Stroud had been boiling drunk when I helped Molly Tunstall bail him out for DWI.
“He says drinking helps him see things he wouldn’t see sober,” Sally explained. “The finer points of the law are hiding at the bottom of the glass, he says.”
I phoned Wick Chandler’s home and got no answer. “Damn it,” I said to Sally, “Wick is supposed to be going over Bevo’s case file.”
“Wick Chandler is going over Deirdre Starns,” Sally replied. “Or maybe Joyce Littler or Bobbie June Gilroy. Inch by inch.”
I got in my car and headed back to town, miffed that neither of my colleagues seemed to be taking their looming courtroom disaster seriously. On the way home I stopped at the office to pick up the file that Wick Chandler had told me he was going to review. To my surprise, Molly Tunstall was at her desk working on the computer.
“On a Sunday, Molly?” I said, standing in the doorway to her office.
“It’s this new word processor,” she explained. “I don’t have time during the week to figure it out.” She sat hunched in front of the keyboard, frowning at the screen.
“It’s too bad your bosses don’t have your dedication,” I told her. There must have been a good deal of disgust in my voice.
“Mr. Chandler and Mr. Stroud tend to do business in funny ways,” she said, “but the business gets done. If Mr. Stroud has a big trial coming up, he might go fishing for a couple of days before it starts.”
“Or go drinking,” I said.
“Mr. Chandler usually hunts up some female companionship. It may look to you like they’re just not paying attention to the case at hand, but it’s always on the back burner. Sometimes the back burner is better than the front burner.”
“Sometimes?” I asked.
The lines around Molly’s mouth and chin tightened. “It doesn’t always work.”
“Is it going to work for Bevo Rasmussen?” I asked.
She looked mournfully up at me. “I couldn’t say.”
“How long have you been with the firm, Molly?”
“About eight years.”
“Has it always been like this? Have they always flown by the seat of their pants?”
She thought for a moment. “There have always been ups and downs, I suppose. Things might have been a little smoother when Sally Dean worked here. She really was a help. I think Mr. Stroud tended to drink less back then. At least when he came in to work he was in better shape.”
“He cleaned himself up for her?” I asked.
Molly nodded. “When she left, the drinking got a lot worse. Then Sally started spending time at the farm. She moved her horse up there. It seems to have done Mr. Stroud some good.”
“So you don’t dislike Sally?”
Molly looked at me for a long moment. I could tell she was trying to make up her mind about telling me something.
“My husband and I had a farm out west of town. This was before I came to work here. One afternoon Roy came back from a stock sale down in Pickton with a milk cow he’d bought from a teenaged girl. He had paid a little more than we had agreed on for the cow. He was a bit embarrassed about that. But he said he had done a good deed. The girl needed the money. He said I’d have been proud of him. The next week, the sheriff came out to tell us that the sale hadn’t gone through. The cow was really owned by a farmer out toward Mule Springs, and the ownership paper the girl had was fraudulent. We wound up losing the cow and the money Roy had paid. It made a hole in our budget for quite a while.”
“I take it the girl was Sally?”
“I didn’t know who she was at the time. Three years later, after Roy had died and the farm was up for sale, I got a knock at the door. It was a girl, asking if I was Mrs. Tunstall and wanting to see Roy. When I told her Roy was gone, she handed me an envelope with cash in it, told me she had come to make restitution for the cow, and started to leave. I asked her to stay and made some tea. We had a nice talk. That was how I met Sally Dean.”
“She paid you back for the cow,” I said.
“Every dime. I’m not sure, but I think she paid everybody back that she had cheated. She impressed me back then as somebody on a mission. She didn’t know me from Adam, but she stepped right up and admitted what she did and apologized for it. I liked the way she took responsibility for herself. In this office you don’t see a lot of people who are willing to do that.”
“True,” I said.
“I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that I don�
��t like Sally. That isn’t true.”
“It’s okay, Molly,” I said. “I’m sorry about Roy.”
“Me, too.”
I got Molly to give me Sally’s home number, and after I drove home I called her but got no answer. I left a message asking her to let me buy her dinner, and then went to work rereading the Rasmussen file. I had found it at the office—Wick had not touched it—and for three hours I studied the documents again: the bills of sale for the horses; the declaration sheets for each horse, physical descriptions of the horses on which Stromboli based the insurance policies; the three-way barrage of letters from Bevo, Stromboli, and Stroud; Stromboli’s petition against Bevo; and, of course, SWAT’s unanswered interrogatories.
I noticed that a new document had been added: On Friday Stroud had filed a motion addressed to the Honorable A. C. Tidwell, presiding judge in the case, asking that the deadlines for answering and for requesting answers for interrogatories be extended. The ground Stroud gave for the request was gross incompetence on the part of the lawyer of record—himself. So he had not used the heart attack. What a lot of pride he must have swallowed to draft that motion. I hoped the judge was the sort of man who could rise above personal animosity and grant relief.
I went to sleep on the couch reading the file. Sally never called me back.
At three a.m. my phone rang.
“You’ve got to help me, Clay.” It was Wick, whispering and out of breath. There was a lot of static on the line.
“I can barely hear you,” I told him.
There was shuffling, and when he spoke again, the static had cleared a little. “Clay, do you remember that little house where you picked me up the other day?”
“The house where your girlfriend handcuffed you to the bed?”
“There’s a dirt road about fifty yards beyond the house. I need you to drive down that road about a hundred feet and stop the car. Do you think you could do that?”
“Tonight?” I asked.
“Now!”
“So Mike Starns came home from his fishing trip a little early, did he?”
“Listen, it’ll take you maybe twenty-five minutes to reach that spot. I’ll be waiting for you there. One more thing, Clay.”
“What?”
“When you turn down the dirt road, would you switch off your headlights?”
“Jesus, Wick, is he after you?”
“In a big way, partner,” he said, and the line went dead.
CHAPTER 32
IT WAS A MOONLESS, HUMID NIGHT. Wick had underestimated the time it would take me to reach the turnoff in the Austin Healey. On my way there I scanned the road ahead and behind, looking for any vehicle that might be looking for me, but the countryside was deserted. I turned onto the dirt road, which disappeared into the woods, and switched off my lights. The world went black. This wasn’t going to work; I could not keep the car on the road in such total darkness, so I turned on the parking lights and crept forward.
“Wick!” I whispered out the open window.
Something flitted across the dim glow of the parking lights. It looked like a giant piebald bat with a horribly distended stomach. With a leathery flapping of its wings the creature pulled desperately at the passenger door.
“For God’s sake, unlock it!” the figure cried. Its face was masked. I reached over and let it into the car. “Jesus, Clay, are you trying to get us caught?” Wick was wearing black bikini briefs, a black cape, and a glittering black mask, and that was all. His snow hill of a stomach heaved as he fought to get air into his lungs. I could see scratches on his pale skin, some of them bleeding.
“What the hell?”
“Go!” Wick yelled. “Go, go, go!” I hit the accelerator and took off down the dirt road.
“There’s a crossroads in half a mile that’ll take us back to the main road,” said the big bat in the passenger seat.
“Are you all right, Wick?” I asked.
“Maybe he didn’t see me,” Wick gasped. “Thank God Deirdre’s got better hearing than me. She had me out the back door with seconds to spare. She threw me the phone and locked the door. I just wish to hell she’d thrown me my pants.”
“So you don’t know for sure if Mike Starns is looking for you?” I asked. “Jesus, Wick, he’ll know your car!”
“It’s at home. Deirdre drove last night. But he’s got to be out here, Clay,” Wick said. “He’s not very smart, but, hell, my clothes are all over the house, and the way Deirdre’s made up...”
We turned left onto another dirt road and found ourselves driving alongside a tall chain-link fence.
“Are those headlights?” Wick cried, looking behind us.
“I can’t see anything,” I told him. Wick panicked. He reached over, switched off the parking lights, and grabbed the steering wheel.
“Faster, Clay!” he yelled as we fought for the wheel. The little car left the road and bounced through grass at maybe fifty miles an hour. I slammed my foot down on the brake, and the car fishtailed to the left, smashing into something springy that yielded to the weight of the car, snapping and singing like a piano hitting pavement after a seven-story drop. The engine died as the car came to a stop. I found myself crumpled in the floorboard, gasping for breath, with a terrific pain in my ribs. We were upright, though canted at a steep angle.
“You okay?” I asked. There was no answer. I looked over and saw that Wick was gone, his door open. He must have been thrown out of the speeding car, and as I struggled for breath, my mind formed a terrible picture of Wick Chandler sprawled in the grass, dying, in his Batman outfit. Then I heard the sounds of a scuffle. I raised up painfully and peered through the windshield. Two shadowy figures were wrestling in the starlit meadow. One, the bat, seemed to be getting pummeled pretty badly. I heard blow after blow landing on soft flesh, and Wick’s panicked voice raining curses.
“I’m coming, Wick!” I hollered, afraid Mike Starns would beat him to death before I could pull myself out of the car. My door would not open, so I began to climb across to the passenger side, when it occurred to me to flip on the car’s lights. I did so, and for an instant both antagonists froze in the headlights’ glare. Then Wick’s assailant disappeared, jumping straight up, out of the light, with a rustle of its shaggy wings. There was a thump as it landed on the car’s hood, and then the big bird was loping down the dirt road, kicking up little puffs of dust in the heavy night air.
“Where’d he go?” asked a dazed and battered Wick. He sank to the grass and ran his hands over his face. “Jesus,” he said, “he kicked the shit out of me.”
“Congratulations, Batman,” I said, “you just got beaten up by an emu.” I climbed out of the passenger door, gasping against the pain in my ribs, and helped Wick to his feet. We inspected the car, which had smashed into the fence circling Starns’s ostrich farm and was now sitting on a fallen stretch of chain link. Aside from a crumpled rear fender and a jammed door, the Austin Healey seemed okay. When I crawled back in and turned the key in the ignition, the engine started up. Wick limped around and got in, and we rolled off the chain link.
“Do you think we could travel for a while without the lights, Clay?” Wick asked. I told him to shut up, and neither of us opened our mouths, except to groan, until we reached town.
Fearful that Mike Starns might be waiting for him at his place, Wick asked if he could sleep on my sofa. I drove us to my place, found him sheets and a pillow, and went into the bathroom to take a look at my ribs. There was a purplish shadow under my arm that hurt when I prodded it, but in general the pain was subsiding, and I could breathe without difficulty. When I came out of the bathroom, Wick was sitting on the sofa, putting a Band-Aid over a particularly nasty scratch on his forearm.
“I almost pulled my goddamn arm off in a thicket,” he told me. In his bedraggled cape and briefs, he looked like a parody of a comic-book crime fighter. He was terribly skinned up from running through the woods, and his arms and legs were a mottled mass of bruises.
“Well
, Wick,” I said, “so much for reform.”
“I think it has something to do with my thyroid,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to get it checked.”
Gathering up the pages of the Rasmussen file, I dropped them next to him on the couch.
“I’ll go over it before I go to sleep,” he promised.
“Sleep light tonight, Wick,” I said. “There’s an emu stalking you.”
I went to bed and drifted off to sleep, wondering if a phone call would summon me to the jail before dawn to bail out my other boss.
CHAPTER 33
A SAFFRON HAZE BLANKETED THE FIELDS early the next morning as I drove Chandler and Stroud out to the Scales ranch for the deposition. We were in Stroud’s Lincoln. The old man had made it back from the Claymore County bars the night before without incident, so far as he remembered. Now he lay in the backseat with his battered briefcase on his chest and his knees in the air. He looked like a corpse squeezed into a coffin too short for him.
Wick Chandler slumped against the passenger door in the front seat about three-quarters dressed: His suit was on him, but nothing was buttoned or zipped. Earlier that morning, after I had driven him to his house to clean himself up, he discovered that various parts of his body were so swollen with pain from his night in the woods that he could not fasten his clothes. “You’re going to have to cinch up when we get to Scales’s ranch,” I told him as we drove.
“I’ll be dead from pain and shame before we reach Tyler,” he replied. “I am already losing feeling in my extremities.” It was like driving an ambulance full of crash victims who were slipping away.
“Gentlemen,” I said, “we need to talk about our client.” I told them about Bevo’s Dairy Queen assignations with Antoine Duett, the SWAT dirty tricks man. “Bevo’s talking with the enemy,” I said. “Anybody know why?”
“I wish I could die right now,” Wick moaned. “I wish this door would open and I would fall out on the road and die.”