by Austin Davis
When we reached Greenville we turned onto State Highway 57 and drove toward McKinney. About the time the sun disappeared in front of us, Stroud told me to start looking for a turnoff. “It could be tough to find in the dark.”
“Have you ever been to Pulaski’s place before?” I asked.
“Once. He hosted a get-together of the East Texas Bar Association. It’s a fancy house with a pool and a couple of big barns and a landing strip that he keeps smooth as a putting green. The whiskey flowed that night, and if I recall correctly, the lieutenant governor and some of his buddies staged a three-legged race on the runway and tore out some grass. Pulaski got a little put out. He’s a very serious fellow.”
“Do you really think he’s crooked?”
“A horse pathologist, Mr. Parker, is the ripest virgin in the whorehouse. Everybody wants to corrupt him. If you’re in the horse business and are crooked, as you very probably are, you practically have to have an animal pathologist in your pocket. Stanislaus Pulaski has testified in over four hundred insurance fraud cases. In three hundred of those, he was hired by SWAT. Now, you tell me, are there scorch marks on his pudenda, or what?
“So you think he’s been bought by SWAT?”
“It’s a foregone conclusion.”
We got all the way to McKinney, having missed the turnoff. “Jesus wept!” Stroud cried. “Turn around, Mr. Parker. We’ll try again.”
On our second pass we found the road, drove about five miles down an asphalted lane, and then a couple of miles on gravel through a pine forest, coming at last to Pulaski’s compound. The house sat on a rise, with the barns in a little valley behind it and the landing strip at the bottom of the valley. There were two vehicles in the driveway, both Jeeps, but no lights on in the house or the barns.
“Does he have a family?” I asked.
“Divorced.”
“Maybe there’s nobody home,” I said, pulling to a stop behind one of the Jeeps.
“Yep,” said Stroud. From his tone of voice, I gathered he was not surprised.
We got out, went to the front door, rang the bell. We rang again. Stroud knocked. “Stan,” he called, “come on out, you lying, thieving son of a bitch.”
“Jesus, Gill,” I said. “Take it easy.”
Stroud cocked his head, listening. All I could hear was the whisper of a soft wind and the crickets taking up where the locusts had left off at dusk. It was a dark night, no moon, the stars dimmed by a low-lying haze. Stroud was only a gaunt shadow as he limped to the side of the house.
“Come on, Mr. Parker,” he said, disappearing toward the back. I followed him along the side of the house, past the swimming pool, a green glow in the darkness, to a sliding glass patio door. Shards of glass crackled under our feet: The door had been smashed. From somewhere inside the house came a faint beeping.
“A break-in,” I whispered. “That noise must be the burglar alarm.”
“Yep,” said Stroud. “It’s coming together. Stan, you stinker, you.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, taking the old man’s arm. “The burglars may still be inside.”
“If they are,” said Stroud, “they’d better be ready for a fight.”
Stroud shook free of me and, before I could stop him, walked through the jagged hole in the door.
“Stroud!” I hissed, sticking my head through the hole in the glass. It was pitch black inside the house.
I jumped when Stroud’s voice boomed in the darkness next to me. “Go get my flashlight out of the trunk,” he said.
“This is burglary!” I replied.
“Hurry, Mr. Parker. I imagine the police are on their way.”
I ran to the car, fumbled in the darkness for the trunk key, opened the trunk, and found the flashlight. Stroud was waiting inside the door when I got back.
“We have to find the study,” he said, switching on the beam. We were in a kind of solarium, full of hothouse trees and exotic plants. Walking through the house, we saw evidence here and there of vandalism: smashed picture frames, lamps knocked over, a mahogany entertainment center in the den cleaned out of all its electronic components. But the house was not in terrible shape.
“Very neat burglars,” said Stroud. We found the study, a big cherry-paneled room in the center of the house. Stroud switched off his flashlight and turned on the overhead light. In one corner of the room sat a computer work desk with wires sprawling across its top and no computer; in another, a small bookshelf had been knocked over, with books strewn on the floor around it.
“What are we looking for?” I asked.
“Something we won’t find, if I’m right about this little operation.” There were papers scattered throughout the room. Stroud picked up a few and scanned them, then went to the big cherry-wood desk in the center of the room and looked through a couple of drawers. “I would bet Bevo’s whole insurance policy that we won’t find a single page relating to his case in this room,” said the old man.
“We don’t have time to look,” I replied. The beeping of the burglar alarm was making my skin crawl. Perhaps six minutes had passed since we drove up to the house. How long would it take the Collin County sheriff to answer Pulaski’s alarm?
“Look here!” cried Stroud, kicking at a cardboard box big enough to hold a good-sized television set. Across the side of the box was stenciled the name Rasmussen.
“What’s in the box, Mr. Parker?”
I knelt and opened the top. There were several Mason jars containing little piles of whitened ash. Plastic freezer bags held fragments of bone and charred flesh. There were plastic boxes of microscope slides and three small pails full of debris, wadded-up paper, scorched links from a metal chain, bent nails.
“Bevo’s horses, is my guess,” I replied.
“Pick up the box!” Stroud said.
“Why?”
“Pick it up, goddamn it, or I’ll do it myself.”
I folded the top closed and picked up the box.
“Now what?” I said.
“What do you think? Go put it in the car!”
“We can’t do that!”
“Move!” the old man snapped.
“Do you know how many laws we’re breaking, Stroud? We’re stealing. We’re tampering with evidence. We’re—”
“That’s right, Parker, and if you don’t move your ass, we’re going to get caught.”
I set the box back down. “Mr. Stroud, this is wrong.”
“fine,” he said, “it’s wrong. Just get out of here, then.”
“The cops will be here any minute!” I reminded him.
“Let ’em come!” said Stroud. “Let ’em carry me off in chains. Let me waste away in prison, a martyr to your goddamn notion of ethics. And when I die, you can lower me into the ground with your lily-white hands.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“I don’t recall much about law in the city, Mr. Parker, but out here we try to win our cases. Now, you have a choice. You can either leave that box on the floor, in which case I’m not budging until the police come and arrest me, or you can pick up the goddamn box and we can get out of here and maybe save the case and our law firm to boot.”
Stroud sat down in Pulaski’s office chair and crossed his arms.
“You’re not moving?” I asked.
“Not without the box.”
“They won’t arrest you, Stroud. They’ll wonder what you’re doing here, but they’ll know you didn’t break in. You’re not a burglar.”
“Maybe so,” the old man said. “Though it won’t exactly help our case for me to be found here. But if we get out of here in time, and we take this box with us, we can turn this case around.” He paused for a moment, then said, “You wanted a new life in the country, son. Well, here it is, tied up in a bow for you. Let’s just win this case, and we can thrash out the morality of it tomorrow morning.”
I looked at Stroud, and I looked at the box. I thought long and hard. And in the end I carried the box to the car. I broke the law b
ig time. As I stumbled back out through the darkness, listening to the Mason jars clinking in the box that I held in my hands, I tried to convince myself that I had given in only to save this cracked old man from embarrassing himself and his firm—my firm—by being caught at the scene of a crime. But I knew that was a lie. The fact was, I wanted to win the Rasmussen case, and this was the only way I could see to do it. So much for rediscovering a sense of ethics in the country, I thought as I closed the trunk.
When I got back to the study, Stroud had the phone receiver in his hand and was dialing a number from his address book.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Keep quiet!”
I heard a muffled click as the line connected, then a voice, unintelligible from where I stood. Without a word, Stroud put his whistle to his lips and blew. I staggered out of the room, my spine jumping as if zapped by a current. The whistle kept attacking my nerves until I had made it back outside, and even standing away from the house, I felt the skin dance on the bridge of my nose. I thought seriously again of just getting in the car and driving off, leaving the old man to fend for himself. The appeal of that idea grew as minutes passed and Stroud did not appear. Then the high, thin whine of a siren reached me, and I ran to the house to pull Stroud out by his collar. We collided at the broken patio door.
“The police!” I said.
“Let’s vamoose!” he replied.
By the time I had the Lincoln’s engine started, we could see gleams of light cutting through the trees from the dirt road that led to Pulaski’s house. Our escape route was blocked.
“Let’s go visit the barns,” Stroud suggested. Without headlights, I drove down the gentle, shadowy slope of the valley toward the farther of the two barns, a Quonset building that, I figured, must serve as the hangar for Pulaski’s plane. Behind the building was a stand of evergreens and, passing nearby, a small road that ran alongside the landing strip. I was heading for that road when the flashing lights of a squad car appeared on it, about a mile ahead of us, cresting the top of the valley.
“Trapped like rats!” Stroud said.
I turned the car into the grove of evergreens and got out.
“Where are you going?” Stroud asked.
“They may find the car, but they don’t have to find us,” I replied. He got out, too, and we ran for the barn. There was a small metal side door, locked, but with a glass panel in the top half of it. I used the butt of Stroud’s flashlight to smash the glass, and we got inside before the patrol car reached the barn. We stood panting in the darkness, waiting to see whether the police would catch sight of the Lincoln or drive on up to the house. Stroud, starting to wheeze, took his inhaler out of his pocket and dosed himself.
“I hope they catch us,” I said between gasps. “I want to tell them we got caught because you spent five minutes blowing your goddamned whistle into the phone. That whistle’s going to be exhibit A in your sanity hearing.”
Stroud switched on the flashlight and swung it through the room. “This is a happy place,” he said. We were in a long, narrow, high-ceilinged room, lined on all four sides with shelves that were loaded with Mason jars. The jars contained ash, like the ones in the Rasmussen evidence box. A superfine haze of dust hung in the air, making the flashlight beam a solid, glowing shaft as it played along the sides of the jars. Under the shelves were numbered bins full of plastic freezer bags, each wrapped around bone fragments or other horse parts. Close to me at one end of the room were a couple of refrigerators. I thought about opening them, then changed my mind.
“It’s the elephants’ graveyard of horses,” I said. “There must be half a ton of defunct tissue in these jars.”
“Put all the parts together,” said Stroud, “and you would have one hell of a horse.”
Every surface in the room was coated with shaggy grit. I could feel it under my shoes. Stroud broke into a shuffling dance step. “The old soft shoe,” he said with a chuckle that turned into a sharp, barking cough.
“Put out the light!” I cried as the sheriff’s car drove past. It missed the Lincoln and rolled on up the slope. Stroud and I crept out of the barn, got into his car, and without headlights I drove up the valley road. At the house on the hill behind us, spinning lights from three patrol cars raked, red and blues, through the darkness.
CHAPTER 39
“HOW MUCH DO YOU KNOW about the horse insurance business, Mr. Parker?” Stroud asked.
“Not much.”
We were less than half an hour from Jenks, and I was still numb with relief over our escape from the McKinney police. Stroud had been cogitating quietly in the passenger seat, the look on his face suggesting he was shifting something from the back burner to the front.
“It’s pretty cut and dried,” Stroud continued. “You buy a horse, you apply for an insurance policy on it. The carrier sends you a form to fill out describing the horse in detail, from its dollar value right down to the fuzz on its ass.”
“The dec sheet,” I said.
“Correct. You fill it out, usually by hand, send it to the carrier, and some scribe in the carrier’s office attaches the policy to it and files it away.”
“And you think something happened to the dec sheets when Bevo sent them to Stromboli,” I said. By then the same thought had occurred to me.
“That’s right. One of the wop secretaries could have attached Bevo’s dec sheets to the wrong insurance policies. It wouldn’t be the first time a mistake like that was made. Think how many policies show up in one day at a big outfit like Stromboli. Hundreds. A couple of years back, a friend of mine, Dallas Goode, got his policy back from a carrier out of Philadelphia. Dallas took a look at the contracts the carrier returned to him and found out he had insured six performing Shetland ponies instead of the brood mares he’d bought.” Stroud laughed. “He said he’d rather have had the Shetlands, for all the good he got from those mares.”
“You’re saying Stromboli accidentally mixed up the dec sheets and attached the descriptions of somebody else’s horses to Bevo’s policies?”
“I’m saying that sort of thing happens. Maybe it happened to Bevo. Bear with me here. A month after he buys them, Bevo’s horses are killed in a fire, and he sends in his claim. Stromboli contacts SWAT, and SWAT sends Pulaski to investigate and write the necropsies. Stan-the-Man does his usual thing, pours the horses into his little jars, takes the evidence back to the lab. Now, here’s where things get interesting. As a matter of course, Stromboli would have sent Pulaski a telex with all the relevant information about the horses: their ages, their sex, potential productivity, and, of course, their money value. Suppose that Pulaski, being the cocky son of a bitch that he is, does a half-assed job of analyzing the evidence. Or, better, doesn’t even look at the stuff in the jars. After all, he’s got the Stromboli telex giving him all he really needs to know about the horses. What if he writes up his necropsies solely on the basis of the info Stromboli sent him?”
“Without comparing the telex information to the physical evidence?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
“What sort of pathologist would do a thing like that?”
“A no-good, lazy-ass pathologist who thinks he’s God. Don’t forget, Mr. Parker, Pulaski has a reputation for never being wrong. His word is law. Nobody contests him anymore. He thinks anything he does is right.”
“But that’s stupid!” I replied. “It’s like a coroner basing an official autopsy on information from the dead guy’s insurance carrier.”
“That’s exactly what it’s like. And don’t think that doesn’t happen, either!”
“So Pulaski’s report is completely screwed up, and nobody checked it until today?” I asked.
“Nobody felt the need to look at it. After all, it’s from Sherlock Holmes Pulaski. He might not even have given a copy to Jacobs until the last day or so.”
“What you’re saying is, SWAT didn’t take this case seriously.”
“No,” Stroud replied, “what I’m saying is,
they treated it as routine. And anytime you allow the law to become routine, it can jump up and bite you between the buttons, as I have cause to know.” He stretched, scratched himself with a self-satisfied air. “It seems, Mr. Parker, that both parties to this particular suit have been remiss. Our adversaries, however, have proved themselves a little more remiss than we.”
“Too bad this is all just speculation,” I said.
“Is that all it is?” Stroud asked. “Why do you think there was a break-in tonight at Stan Pulaski’s house?”
“You think there’s a connection?”
“I asked you what you think,” replied Stroud, the old Baylor law professor. “Let’s see if you have a country lawyer’s powers of deduction.”
“Or invention,” I countered.
“Or invention,” he said, smiling.
I thought for a moment. “All right. Let’s assume the report really is screwed up. That would explain the sudden change in Jacobs’s tone of voice on the phone today. Don’t forget, he was nonplussed.”
“Nonplussed?” Stroud said. “He was abashed, Mr. Parker. He was seriously disconcerted.”
“Okay, he was abashed. He’s got two problems. first, how to stop you from making good on your threat to subpoena all of Pulaski’s notes. Second, how to fix the bogus report without the court ever getting wind of the problem.”
“And what is his solution?”
“Well, apparently, it isn’t simply to come clean and fix the report.”
“With Gilliam Stroud on his tail? He’s got no chance of that. I’ll scream foul. I’ll argue they were manufacturing evidence to work some sort of scam on our poor, innocent client. Before I’m through, I’ll have the jury believing Pulaski himself set fire to those horses. And Warren Jacobs knows it.”
“All right, then. I guess Pulaski sets up a break-in at his own house, in which the burglars take the stereo, the TV, the computer, some cheesy paintings—oh, yes, and the pathology report for Bevo Rasmussen’s suit! Then, since the original report is missing, Pulaski will petition the court to let him write a new report based on the physical evidence he has collected.”