by Austin Davis
“They took your report?” asked Stroud. “But you must have copies, Stan.”
“The burglars took all the copies.”
“All the copies?” Stroud asked. “How could that be?”
Pulaski shrugged. “I’d collected them all together. That’s how.”
“But Mr. Jacobs read to me from a copy of the report yesterday,” Stroud said. “What happened to that copy?”
“If you will recall, Mr. Stroud,” interrupted Jacobs, “I told you I was not reading from the Rasmussen report. I had meant to—”
“Oh, that’s right, Warren. You picked up the wrong report by mistake. You’re working on so many, you just got a little careless.”
“That is correct,” Jacobs replied, coloring deeply. “I gave my copy back to Dr. Pulaski yesterday afternoon, so that he could check it for errors.” Jacobs looked at Pulaski. “Are you saying, Stan, that my copy is stolen, too?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Pulaski said. “All gone.”
Stroud walked up to Pulaski’s chair, cocked his head in disbelief. “You’re telling us, Dr. Pulaski, that thieves broke into your home and stole a pathology report?”
“That’s not all they took, of course,” Pulaski said. “They got my stereo, my VCR, my fax machine—”
“But why would they take a pathology report?” Stroud interrupted.
Pulaski swallowed. “It was in a very expensive briefcase. I assume the burglars were after the case.”
“Was it a leather case, Mr. Pulaski?” asked Stroud.
“Yes.”
“What kind of leather, do you recall?”
“Ostrich.”
Stroud walked back to the table. He winked at me.
“We’re wasting time, Gill,” Jacobs said. “In view of this unfortunate event, may I suggest that Dr. Pulaski be allowed to reconstruct—”
“My suggestion, Warren,” said Stroud, “is that Signore Laspari contact his employers in Naples to tell them to drop their lawsuit and pay my client the full amount of the claim.”
“Now, hold on, Counselor,” Jacobs said, rising to his feet. “The break-in is a tragedy, to be sure, and we sympathize with Dr. Pulaski. But losing the documents is no more than a minor inconvenience as far as our case is concerned. I’m sure Judge Tidwell will give us time to reconstruct the pathology report.”
“Reconstruct the report?” said Stroud. “You mean rewrite it? After all this time has passed since the fire? How could anyone, even the immensely talented Stanislaus Pulaski, reconstruct it? I don’t know, Warren, sounds fishy to me.”
“It should be a simple matter,” Jacobs continued. “After all, Dr. Pulaski still has the physical evidence, the remains of the horses. That should be enough, in Dr. Pulaski’s capable hands, to establish the necessary facts, cause of death, and so forth.”
Pulaski cleared his throat. “I don’t have the physical evidence,” he said, looking down at his feet.
“I’m sorry, Stan,” Stroud said, “I didn’t hear you. Would you repeat that?”
“I said, I don’t have the physical evidence.” He raised his eyes and met Jacobs’s shocked gaze. “It was stolen, too.”
“All of it?” Jacobs asked.
“Yes, of course, all of it. It was all in one box. The thieves took the box. It’s gone.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Any other bright ideas, Warren?” Stroud asked.
“Just a moment,” Jacobs said. “I need to confer with Dr. Pulaski.”
“I’ll tell you what you need to do, Warren,” said Stroud. “You need to think about the doctrine of spoliation. What’s worse, your fumble-fingered expert here cannot possibly hope to make a credible reconstruction of the fire. Then you need to think about the counterclaim I’m going to file against you and your client as soon as we get out of here today.”
Stroud walked toward the plaintiff’s table, behind which Laspari sat, eyeing the old man in horror. “The facts are, Signore Laspari, that your company dragged my client into this protracted and expensive litigation without a single piece of physical evidence on which to base their case. Your company has failed to deal with its own customer in any semblance of good faith. Thanks to the cost of defending himself against your spurious charges, my client has lost his house and its furnishings. The mental anguish he has endured has been intense. We’re talking really bad faith, something folks down here don’t like to see. Something that used to make them itchy for a rope.”
Stroud hovered over Laspari like the angel of death. “Pay my client what you owe him, Signore Laspari, or I’ll file a claim for bad faith settlement practices that will make you think twice about ever setting foot in the New World again!”
CHAPTER 42
WICK HAD CRANKED UP THE STEREO in his office and was dancing down the hallways, singing along in a gravelly rhythm-and-blues grunt. He stopped in front of my door. “Catch, Clay,” he said, tossing me a dripping bottle of Chihuahua beer. The bottle slipped through my fingers, thumped on the desktop, but didn’t break. He tossed an opener next to the bottle.
“There’s pâté in my office,” he said, bobbing like a buoy in rough seas. “It’s Mexican, made from the livers of geese fed on grain soaked in mescal. Eat and you will see visions.”
“I’m seeing one now,” I replied, watching him gyrate.
It was only twelve-thirty, but we had closed the office following Laspari’s capitulation in the Rasmussen suit. The vision of Stroud in the courtroom that morning, looming over him with lightning in his eyes, had proved too much for the dapper Italian. Against Jacobs’s white-faced protest, Laspari agreed to file a motion to dismiss Stromboli’s lawsuit and to pay Bevo the face value of his policy, $1.2 million. Stroud pressed Laspari into agreeing to send a certified check, made out to Chandler and Stroud as trustees for Bevo, that very afternoon by courier, an unprecedented move.
“The sooner the better,” Wick had told Laspari, “considering the wrong done to our client.”
“Nice doing business with you, Warren,” Stroud had called to Jacobs as the SWAT lawyer hurried from the courtroom, hot on the trail of Stan Pulaski, who had slipped out ahead of him.
The firm’s fee for the settlement would come to $360,000. Not bad, considering that a day earlier we had not had a prayer of winning the case.
“It was a religious experience,” Wick had said as we drove out of the Mule Springs parking lot, “like beating a full house with two deuces and a cat turd.” He sat silent on our drive home, stunned, I think, by the victory. But as soon as I’d parked in front of the office, he came alive.
Now, in my office doorway, he shuffled through a flab-punishing disco lounge breakdown. “I’m happy as a dog with two dicks!” he hollered, his shirt buttons threatening to pop. As Molly Tunstall edged by him with some files in her hand, he caught her and danced her down the hall.
I was working on some papers for another case; in the last few days the pile of documents in the basket on my desk had grown. What with the bass throbbing through the walls and Wick shaking the foundations of the building, I was having a hard time concentrating. I picked up the bottle of beer and rolled it across my forehead. The cold felt good.
“It works better if you flip that little silver thing off the top and stick the end in your mouth.” It was Sally, sitting in the client’s chair. She reached over the desk, took the beer out of my hand, popped the cap, and after the shaken beer had spewed half its contents on my rug, took a long, slow swallow.
“That’s how you do it,” she said. “What are you looking at?”
“You are the most beautiful administrative judicial district coordinator ever to drink a beer in my office during work hours.”
“Hey, I’m on my lunch break,” she asked. “Cut me some slack.”
“Have I got a story for you,” I said, getting up and coming around the desk.
She set the beer bottle on the desk and stood up. “Wick’s trying to get me to dance with him out there. I thought I’
d come in here and see if I might get you to show me how they do the two-step in Houston. That is, if you can dance with bad feet.”
“Let’s see if I can,” I said, putting my arm around her. We two-stepped around the desk.
“So, Counselor,” she said, “how does it feel to win your first case in the country?”
“I didn’t have much to do with it,” I replied. “A little breaking and entering, a little burglary, that was it.” As we danced I told her a bit about what had happened last night at Pulaski’s house and then at Gill’s snake-shooting retreat.
“So how do you feel about all these backwoods antics?” she asked. “I wonder if life in the country is agreeing with you.”
“I’m dancing, aren’t I?”
We two-stepped until Wick cut in on me. Then he and Sally danced, then Sally and Stroud, until Sally’s lunch hour was all danced away, and she drove back to Wyman.
About two o’clock Bevo showed up at the office, dressed in a new shark-skin suit and driving a Lexus that resembled the one Antoine Duett had been driving when I tried to tail him from the Dairy Queen two days earlier.
“What do you think?” he asked, dragging us all out to look at the car. “Don’t it show me off to perfection?” He smiled. One tooth winked in the afternoon sun.
“I see you got your diamond back,” Stroud said.
“They just bonded it back on, no problem. Wealth sticks to me.”
“The settlement hasn’t even come in yet, Bevo,” I said, “and you’re already spending it?”
“This ain’t as frivolous as it looks,” Bevo replied. “This is my company car.” He handed all of us business cards with an engraved picture of a big shaggy bird, and words that read:
—FREEBIRD ENTERPRISES—
The Wings of Emus
“You know, gentlemen, emus are the future of East Texas.”
“If that’s the case,” muttered Wick, looking at the card, “I’m moving.”
“You couldn’t do better with that three hundred thou I just made for you than invest it in this little enterprise right here.”
We were saved from the rest of Bevo’s sales pitch by the arrival of a small red car out of which came the messenger, a young man in the uniform of his carrier service. Stroud signed a paper on a clipboard, and the messenger handed him an envelope and left.
“I wasn’t sure Laspari would come through,” Stroud mused.
“After your performance this morning?” Wick replied. “You could have doubled the settlement.”
“Come on, come on,” said Bevo. “Open her up.”
Stroud opened his penknife and, with a flourish, slit the edge of the envelope. He pulled out a folded piece of blank paper, out of which a check fell on the sidewalk. The old man picked it up.
“Amazing grace!” he said, turning the slip of paper around in his hand so we could read it. It was a $1.2 million check, made out to Hardwick Chandler and Gilliam Stroud, trustees for Bevo Rasmussen, signed by Vincenzo Laspari.
“No shit,” said Bevo, snatching the check from Stroud. “Amazing grace.”
The actual arrival of the check proved an anticlimax after the office party. Stroud showed no inclination to burst into song, and Wick declined to dance. There was talk of what to do with the check. Bevo wanted to cash it immediately and take his share. Wick tried explaining to him that there wasn’t that much money in both of Jenks’s banks put together. But Bevo insisted that Chandler and Stroud accompany him to the bank to see what could be done. To my surprise, they agreed.
“Maybe it’ll get him out of our hair,” Wick told me. Molly had joined us outside the office, and she and I watched the three of them walk across the street to the first National Bank of Jenks.
“Have we ever settled a case this big before?” I asked Molly.
“Never a single one this big,” she said. Then she added, giving me her odd near-smile, “Maybe you’ve brought us some luck.”
Molly went inside, but I sat on the fender of Bevo’s Lexus and watched the Jenks traffic go by. A cloud had obscured the sun momentarily, tempering the glare, and the heat felt good after several hours of office air-conditioning. From the trees wafted the billowing song of the locusts. A pickup went by with a middle-aged couple in it, both wearing baseball caps. They waved at me as they passed. I waved back and found it a pleasant thing to do.
I might have sat on Bevo’s fender for the rest of the afternoon, communing with the locusts and solidifying my new position as the waving lawyer of Jenks, but the front door of the first National Bank burst open and Bevo, Wick, and Stroud sprinted out of it. Bevo reached the car first, yanked open the driver’s door, and leaped inside.
“Get off!” he hollered at me. Chandler and Stroud reached the car and climbed in. I scrambled into the backseat just as the car lurched backward out of its parking slot. With a screech of the tires, we were heading out of town.
Winded from his run to the car, Stroud was sprawled in the seat next to me, his chest wheezing like an antique furnace. Pulling his inhaler from his pocket, he gave himself two jolts of medicine.
“Goddamn,” he gasped, glassy-eyed and pale, “goddamn.”
CHAPTER 43
“THERE WAS A HOLD ON THE CHECK,” Wick panted, fighting for breath in the front seat. “Notice of forfeiture. Primrose did it.”
“The DA seized the check?” I asked.
“I’ll kill him,” Bevo said. “I’ll cut his fucking heart out.”
“That pious cocksucker,” said Wick. “He’s looking for a way to screw us out of the money.”
“How can he do that?” I asked.
“RICO,” Stroud replied.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “All right, Bevo, what have you been up to?”
“Me? I ain’t done nothing, goddamn it. I’m pure as a newborn.”
“Save it,” said Stroud as the car tore down the road to Mule Springs. “We’ll know when we get there.”
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act allows the government to confiscate anything suspected of having been either used or obtained by a criminal during the commission of a crime or as a result of a crime. A man suspected of driving the getaway car in a robbery could find his car taken away from him and sold. Simply put, RICO is a way for the government to steal from people who may or may not turn out to be guilty of a crime. The federal version of the act proved such a smashing revenue bonanza that many states set up their own RICO acts. The money forfeited goes into private “law enforcement” budgets, and district attorneys can tap into the money without having to account for it to the public.
Now it seemed that Paul Primrose, the DA of Claymore County, was using the Texas RICO act to confiscate Bevo’s insurance settlement. All Primrose had to do was think up a way to implicate Bevo and his settlement in a crime that had taken place within his jurisdiction. Since Bevo’s horses had died in Claymore County, Primrose would not have had to work very hard at sketching a case.
Bevo was out of the car almost before it careened to a halt in the courthouse parking lot. We ran after him into the building, rode an elevator to the office of the district attorney. Bevo had taken the stairs and beaten us. When we arrived he was leaning over the DA’s desk, ranting and shaking his fist in Primrose’s colorless face. Stroud swept into the room, grabbed the back of Bevo’s collar, and yanked him into a chair.
“Thanks, Gill,” said Primrose in his dry whine. “I thought for a moment I was a goner.” He adjusted his bolo tie coolly, nodded at us. “Good afternoon, Mr. Parker, Wick. I was sort of expecting you boys.”
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Primrose,” said Stroud, “but I hope you keep it up.”
“I appreciate your support,” Primrose replied. “It’s always gratifying when good works are recognized.”
“I hope you keep it up, because I would sort of like to own this courthouse, and that is exactly what I’ll do after I get through suing you for violating my client’s civil rights.”
Primrose pushed a button on his intercom. “Helen? See if you can get Clyde to step in here for a minute, will you? I think he’s in the basement.” He leaned back in his chair. “Why don’t you boys all have a seat?” There was only one other chair in the room besides the one Bevo was in. I tried to steer Stroud into it, but he shrugged me off, so I took it.
“Mr. Primrose,” I asked, “what is your legal basis for seizing the Rasmussen settlement money?”
“I’d have thought a big-city attorney like you would know the answer to that, Mr. Parker,” the DA replied. “RICO, of course. We have reason to believe that Mr. Rasmussen here is guilty of fraud, and the settlement being the fruit of his criminal activity, we’re confiscating it.”
“There’s not a case you can make against Bevo,” Wick said. “This is stealing, Primrose, pure and simple.”
Primrose’s mouth was hidden by his drooping dishwater mustache, but his eyes were crinkling in a smile. It was the smile of the righteous. “No, Mr. Chandler,” Primrose replied, “these are the wages of sin. We are relieving your client of the wages of sin.”
“Bullshit,” Stroud said. “It’s not going to work, Paul. You’ve got nothing on Bevo, and unless you release the check right now, you will soon have less than that. Not only are you not going to be able to keep the money, but I’m going to grind your pompous dick in the dirt. I will take you to court and crucify you worse than Jesus Christ had it done to him. I’ll take your name off this door and put my own on it. We’ll have bingo in the courtroom every Wednesday night.”
A deputy in a tall white Stetson appeared at the door. “Hey, Paul,” he said.
“Hey, Clyde,” said Primrose. “Wick, Gill, I think you both know Clyde. Mr. Parker, this is Clyde Fortinbras, our sheriff. Clyde, that fellow in the chair over there is Bevo Rasmussen. Have you got something for him?”
“I surely do,” said Clyde. He handed Bevo a couple of papers, which Bevo squinted at before handing them to me. One was a copy of the notice of forfeiture that had prevented Bevo from claiming his money. The other one was an arrest warrant.