by Austin Davis
“It’s Primrose,” said Wick as we headed home. “He must have called the justice of the peace and got him to set the bond so goddamned high. Otherwise we could’ve gotten Bevo out with postage stamps. Hell, they don’t set bonds that high on capital murderers in this county.”
“Straight is the way,” said Stroud in the backseat, “and narrow is the gate.”
“Primrose isn’t even a real Baptist,” Wick griped. “He was Episcopalian until he found he couldn’t get elected without the Baptist vote. So he switched religions.”
“They’re just different denominations,” I said. “They’re not different religions.”
“Have you ever been to a Baptist service out here, Clay?” Wick asked.
It was vital to get Bevo out of jail. If SWAT discovered that he was stuck behind bars, they would go to trial and we would be even worse off, naked in front of a jury with no client in the courtroom. We agreed that Wick would get the bail money from the bank and drive it back to Mule Springs while Stroud and I stayed at the office to work on the Pulaski deposition set for the next morning. We went through the drive-in teller at the first National Bank for the bail money, then Wick insisted that we accompany him to his house while he got his car. He was worried that Mike Starns, Deirdre’s husband, might be planning a little surprise for him, and he thought there might be safety in numbers. When I pulled up in front of his house, Wick got out and walked slowly across the yard, peering in the front windows.
“Check under the car,” Stroud called from the Lincoln’s backseat.
Wick squatted down, balancing his stomach on his knees, and looked under the wheels of his Corvette.
“Emus like to hide down there,” Stroud told him, chuckling.
“If this car blows up on me halfway to Mule Springs, you remember to tell that joke at my wake,” Wick replied, struggling to his feet.
Stroud handed the envelope from the bank through the window. Wick took it, looked at it for a moment. “Twenty-five hundred dollars,” he said. “I wonder what the chances are of Bevo ever paying this back?”
“About the same as our winning the case,” Stroud replied.
As Wick climbed into the driver’s seat of his Corvette—it was a tight squeeze—I remembered something I had meant to grill Bevo about before the deposition blew up on us. “Wick,” I called out of the Lincoln’s window, “when you spring Bevo, tell him to get all that electronic stuff out of the cabin. If he doesn’t do it soon, we might be bailing Gill here out of jail next.”
“I’ll tell him he has twenty-four hours,” said Wick, “or else we’ll turn him in ourselves.”
Back at the office, I sat in the conference room reading through the Rasmussen file for the fifth or sixth time. Stroud sat at the other end of the conference table and stared at the wall, doom raying out from under his iron-gray brows.
“Have you got a plan for the Pulaski deposition?” I asked.
Stroud shook his head. “It’ll take all day, and it won’t be pretty. I’ll ask the son of a bitch a thousand questions, mostly details about the fire, and hope that some of his answers don’t square. I doubt that will happen, though, Mr. Parker. I have questioned Stan Pulaski on the stand maybe five times and never cracked him, never even come close. He’s crooked, I’m sure of it, but he’s so convinced of his own righteousness that the jury thinks he eats, breathes, sleeps, and shits truth. Examining the good Dr. Pulaski is like examining Mount Rushmore.” He sighed. “Wick’s right. We need a copy of that report, and I fucked up. There doesn’t seem to be much I’m good for anymore.”
“That’s not what Wick said.”
But Stroud had dived into the sea of self-pity. “Mr. Parker,” he said, “promise me that the next time I fuck up, you’ll use that gun we bought you to put me out of my misery.”
“I don’t know where it is,” I told him.
“It’s at my place. I’ll see you get it back.”
“There’s an old picture of you in the Baylor Law building,” I said, “You’re out at the Waco bridge, swinging part of a train trestle, saving your client from a mob.”
“That wasn’t me,” Stroud replied.
“It was you, all right.”
“I was drunk.”
“You weren’t drunk.”
Stroud gave me a black look. “I didn’t take you for an ass-kisser, Mr. Parker,” he said.
“I didn’t take you for a mewling, self-indulgent, pathetic sack of shit, Mr. Stroud,” I replied. For an instant his eyes flashed murder at me, then the anger went out of them, and a half-smile played across his face.
“Looks like we were both wrong about each other,” he said.
“Looks like,” I replied.
There was a knock at the door of the conference room. It was Molly Tunstall with cups and a pot of coffee.
“So how about it, Molly girl,” Stroud said as Molly poured, “have you ever seen a case as badly screwed up as this one?”
Molly thought for a minute. “There was the Greiner case last year. That one was pretty bad.”
“Yes, but I wasn’t the cause of the trouble then. Have you ever seen a case that I screwed up like I’ve screwed up this one?”
“I have never seen a case that could have been handled better than you handled it, Mr. Stroud. I have seen you lose cases, but never because of something you did.”
Stroud reached over and patted the hand that held the coffeepot. “Thank you, Mrs. Tunstall. But I’m afraid we’re about to reach a new low.”
Molly started to say something, thought better of it, and left the room.
“Why couldn’t that little moron have fallen into the fire with his horses?” Stroud muttered. He had begun to finger the little silver whistle hanging around his neck.
“If you blow that thing, I’m walking out of here,” I told him.
He smiled. “So you don’t think it’s time to play taps over this mess of a case?” he asked.
“Is there a chance that Bevo’s telling the truth about not starting the fire?”
“There’s a chance,” replied Stroud. “There’s also a chance pigs will learn to fly. I wouldn’t want to bet money on either possibility.”
“Why would Nyman Scales sell Bevo out like he did this morning?” I asked.
“Are you sure he did? We only had Bevo’s word that Scales would help him. We don’t know if Scales ever really promised Bevo anything.”
“Then why would Bevo have told us Scales would save him?”
“There’s no honor among thieves, Mr. Parker. Maybe Scales promised to lie and then thought better of it for some reason.”
But that scenario did not explain, at least to my satisfaction, the utter blind fury of Bevo’s attack on Scales in the horse lab. There was shock and pain mixed in with Bevo’s rage, more emotion than there would have been if Scales had simply refused to lie for him. Bevo’s was the anger of a born liar who had finally told the truth and then seen it undercut by a better liar.
And if Scales had lied at his deposition, then there really was a conspiracy to hang these horse murders on Bevo. And Nyman Scales was behind it.
Suddenly Stroud changed the subject. “I want you to know something,” he said, his gaze fixed on the wall. “Bevo is dead wrong about Miss Dean. She is not a spy. She is not a whore. She is my protégée. That’s all she is. My protégée and my friend.”
It was an abdication speech: Stroud was renouncing any emotional claim I might have thought he had on Sally, and when he was through, the old man shot me a glance that told me not to open my mouth for a while. It was just as well, because I did not know what to say. We sat in silence.
The phone rang. I answered. It was Warren Jacobs, the SWAT lawyer.
“Put it on the speaker,” Stroud said. I did, and Jacobs’s voice, oozing condescension and mock concern, filled the room.
“I think that maybe tomorrow’s deposition could be dispensed with, gentlemen.”
“He wants to grind our noses into the manure,” S
troud whispered. Then he asked, “Why don’t you want us to talk to your pathologist, Warren?”
“I’m just trying to save you some trouble, Gill. As you can see from the written report, Dr. Pulaski has done his usual professional job on the...oh, that’s right, you haven’t seen the report, have you? You never asked for it, did you?”
“We’ll have Dr. Pulaski fill us in tomorrow at the deposition,” I said. “Now, Mr. Jacobs, if you’ll excuse us—”
Stroud shook his head at me. “Never cut off a talkative enemy,” he whispered.
“Who’s that doing your talking for you, Gill?” Jacobs asked.
“That’s Parker, our book lawyer from Houston,” Stroud replied. “You met him this morning at Scales’s place, remember?”
“Well, Mr. Parker, welcome aboard,” said Jacobs. “Why don’t I just read some of this report to you? Maybe that would help cut your book work down a little.”
Intimidation was a SWAT specialty. Jacobs was trying to demoralize us. Stroud set his chin in his hand and closed his eyes. “Be our guest,” he said, “you shit-eating son of a bitch.”
“What a sad story,” said Jacobs, “all these beautiful horses, penned up and set on fire.” He began to read from the section of the report that described the horses before and after they were killed.
“Here’s Shannon’s Misfit, a strapping sorrel mare, one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of pampered horseflesh, reduced to a thighbone, some hide scraps, and a box of teeth...Wow! Hey, guys, did you know your client chained the stalls so the horses couldn’t kick their way out? He chained them in and doused them with kerosene!”
Stroud rubbed his temples, let out a strained sigh.
Jacobs read descriptions for a couple of the other horses, potential champions, and told us what was left of them after the fire.
Suddenly Stroud’s head snapped up, a look of surprise on his face. He reached across the table, pulled the dec sheets out of the Rasmussen file, and scanned a few of them.
“I’m not boring you boys, am I?” Jacobs asked.
“Not too much, Warren,” said Stroud. “Read on.” He slid the dec sheets across the table to me and whispered, “Read along!” Jacobs began to recite the vital statistics of After the Goldrush, an Appaloosa stallion, reduced to half a rib cage, a fetlock, and some patches of charred skin.
But something was wrong. In his grade-school scrawl, Bevo had described After the Goldrush on the dec sheet as a roan mare, not an Appaloosa stallion. I read back through the dec sheets for the other horses Jacobs had described, and I looked up at Stroud. “They’re different!” I whispered, sliding the pages back to him.
“Warren,” Stroud said, interrupting the lawyer’s oration, “would you start over again on that horse?”
There was a pause, then Jacobs said, “I beg your pardon?”
“You just told us that After the Goldrush was a stallion, is that correct?” Stroud asked.
“Correct.”
“That’s very curious,” said Stroud, “since the dec sheet I’ve got here says that he was really a she, and not an Appaloosa, but roan. How do you explain the discrepancies, Warren?”
There was silence on the line for a moment.
“Are you there, Warren?” Stroud asked.
“Yes,” came the answer, in a voice that had suddenly lost its coat of oil, “I’m here. I’m sorry, boys. It looks like I’ve been reading from a different report.”
“A different report?” I asked. “How many did Pulaski write?” There was a shuffling of papers on the other end of the line.
“Yes. I apologize, gentlemen. It seems I’ve been reading the report for another case I’m working on. I have several at the moment, and I guess my secretary just got careless. She handed me the wrong file.”
“So you were reading from another case, is that it, Warren?” Stroud asked.
“I’m sorry,” Jacobs said. “I realize it was not very professional of me.”
“If you’re reading from a different report,” asked Stroud, “then why do the horses in this other case all have the same names as Bevo’s horses? That’s a hell of a coincidence, Warren.”
There was a very long pause. “Yes,” replied Jacobs, “it’s hard to account for.”
“Could it be that there is some irregularity in the pathology report for Bevo’s case?”
“No,” said Jacobs, “there is no irregularity. It’s just a simple mistake. I—”
“I’ll tell you what, Warren,” Stroud said. “I’m going to subpoena every single goddamn note that your pathologist took on the Rasmussen case, and we’re going to find out how Sherlock Holmes Pulaski managed to guess wrong on the sex and color of every single horse he says was killed in the fire. Now, what do you think about that?”
“Well,” said Jacobs, “it would be a waste of time, but you boys do what you have to do. It’s a shame, though, to see Gilliam Stroud grabbing at straws, resorting to pathetic little tricks.”
“You didn’t just make up those descriptions to tease us, did you, Warren?” Stroud asked. “SWAT hasn’t started hiring novelists to try their cases, have they?”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“It’s simple, Warren. Somebody’s switched horses. Now, was it you or Pulaski?”
“Go fuck yourself, Stroud.”
“I think I’d rather fuck your pathologist, Warren. See he gets to the Mule Springs courthouse at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“Listen to me, if you boys try to argue that—”
“Can’t hear you, Warren,” Stroud said, “the connection is breaking up.” He reached over, punched a button on the phone, and the line went dead.
Stroud sat back in his chair, spread his arms, and began to sing in a booming profundo: “'Amazing grace, how sweet the sound/That saved a wretch like me!’ Sing with me, Mr. Parker!”
“I’m not much of a singer,” I said, staring at him.
“Not even when God almighty pours out his blessings on the heads of his children?”
“I didn’t know he’d done any pouring,” I replied.
“Let this be a lesson to you, son. Cockiness is one of the seven deadly sins.” He laughed. “Didn’t you hear what our worthy opponent just said? Somebody screwed up somewhere, son, and that may just save our asses!” He got up and limped down the hall, singing.
CHAPTER 38
THREE HOURS LATER, Stroud and I were on the road again, driving west in the big Lincoln toward Greenville on State Highway 11. “Careful, Mr. Parker,” Stroud warned. “The highway patrolmen on this stretch of road know my car, and we can’t afford to be stopped now.” In the canted light of evening, the hills were lengthening, the deep green of the pines taking on shadows. “We want to hit him right after supper,” said the old man. “People tend to put their brains on hold about then.”
We were on our way to shake down Stan-the-Man Pulaski, veterinary pathologist extraordinaire. Stroud felt that if we surprised him tonight with questions about the discrepancies in his report, he might become flustered enough to tell us something useful.
“Pulaski is Jehovah on the stand,” Stroud said. “But it’s hard to be Jehovah when you’re caught off guard in your living room.”
“But how off guard will he be?” I asked. “Won’t Jacobs have already told him about his talk with us?”
“Of course. And if I’m right, if the good doctor really did screw up the necropsies, he’ll be getting sweaty, trying to pull a story together. But he won’t expect to have to tell his story until tomorrow morning. Trust me, Mr. Parker, we’ll be a big surprise.”
“The surprise may be on us,” I reminded him. “Jacobs may have done what he said. He may have just picked up the wrong report.”
Stroud laughed. “We’ve got him, Mr. Parker. You heard him on the phone. That was the voice of someone seriously nonplussed.”
“Nonplussed?”
“Can’t you feel the change in the wind?” Stroud added, “God is on our side. W
e’re living in a state of grace.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “How did Pulaski screw up? Could he have gone to the wrong fire?”
Stroud hooted. “Jesus, I wish he had! What a great story that would make. It would be the end of him in this state. But no, Mr. Parker, he must have found the barn, all right. There wouldn’t have been more than one to go up in flames that night. We would have heard.”
I was surprised when Stroud told me that neither he nor Wick Chandler had ever visited the site of the fire. “Why would we have gone out there?” Stroud said. “We’re no experts. Besides, the fire happened months before Bevo brought us in on the case. By then there would have been nothing left.”
Stroud explained how Pulaski went about examining the site of a fire. “first, he shovels and sweeps the site down to bare earth and six inches beyond. Then he carts off the ashes in buckets and crates that he numbers to correspond with a grid he draws over a diagram of the site. finally, he winnows it all down to a few jars of stuff. That’s what he brings to the trial to ram up the other side’s ass.”
“All right, then,” I said, “what happened with the report?”
Stroud hummed tunelessly for a minute. “I am beginning to see it, to smell the rottenness of it. The parts are coming together. Let it percolate a little longer, Mr. Parker. Let me keep it on the back burner awhile.”
“Molly Tunstall said you liked the back burner.”
“I’m a great believer in it,” he replied. “The back burner and God’s grace.” He started singing “Amazing Grace” again, thumping the dash in time. “'I once was lost, but now am found,/Was blind but now I see.’ Grace, Mr. Parker. Sometimes that’s all you have to fall back on.”
“I didn’t know you were such a believer, Mr. Stroud.”
“I’ll believe in anything that wins the case. If it takes God to do it, then I’m a goddamn deacon.”
Traffic picked up a little as we neared Greenville. “Farmers,” said Stroud, watching the taillights of the pickup ahead of us. “I was raised on a farm. A big one. Hated every minute of it. I swore I would get away, make a name for myself. And now here I am, living in a run-down farmhouse, making wills and getting divorces for farmers.” He laughed, shook his head. “God surely has a sense of humor.”