by Austin Davis
“Mr. Rasmussen,” said Fortinbras, “you’re under arrest. The charge is racketeering. I need you to come with me, sir.”
The fury I had seen once or twice before in Bevo’s eyes was there again. His hand slipped down toward his ankle, but before he could reach the razor, I took hold of his wrist. “That’s not going to do you any good,” I said, slipping the razor out of his sock.
“What did I tell you, Mr. Parker?” said Bevo. “It’s a fucking conspiracy.” The sheriff tapped him on the shoulder, and we both stood.
“You’d better get started back to Jenks, Gill,” said Primrose, “if you want to get bail money before the bank closes. Too bad the forfeiture includes your fee, or you could dip into that.”
“P.P., are you sure you are a saved man?” asked Stroud. “Are you certain you have been washed in the blood?”
“Why, yes, Gill, I am a Christian.”
“Well, gird up your loins, because you are about to walk through the valley of the shadow.” He turned, and the whole troupe of us was filing through Primrose’s door, when the DA stopped us.
“You might enjoy this as you drive home,” he said, placing a small tape recorder on his desk and flicking it on. It was a taped conversation between two men, one of whom was unmistakably Bevo, and the other, I realized in a moment, had to have been Antoine Duett, the SWAT dirty-tricks lawyer with whom Bevo had tried to make a secret deal. It was a very clear recording—the wire Duett had been wearing must have been very high-tech—and Bevo’s voice, oozing self-importance, filled the room.
“...flipped the switch and that horse starting sparking and shimmying like Christmas. I never saw anything like it. Smoke coming out its ears. I thought it might buck itself clear, but it just stood there shaking, and then it fell over. The worst part was the smell, of course. It ruined my clothes. Remember to stand upwind. But I got to tell you, there’s better ways to manage a lightning strike.”
We stood transfixed, listening to the tape, until Primrose switched it off.
“The Lord giveth,” he said, “and the Lord taketh away.”
CHAPTER 44
“SON OF A BITCH, you can’t trust nobody!” said Bevo. “None of it’s true, Mr. Stroud, I swear! I was just shooting the shit, was all. I never zapped no horse.”
“Where did you get that tape?” Stroud demanded of Primrose. The DA tossed a manila envelope on the desk. Stroud picked it up and examined it. There was no return address, no mark of any kind.
“My secretary found that envelope taped to the door when she came in this morning,” said Primrose. “There was nothing inside it except the tape. I just assumed it was left by a concerned citizen doing his part to clean the riffraff out of our county.” He said he did not recognize the other voice on the tape, but that he would begin searching for him in the foreseeable future. “Unless you would like to tell me who he is,” the DA said to Bevo.
All heads turned to our client, whom the sheriff had just cuffed. “Well,” said Stroud, “are you going to tell him?”
“Mr. Stroud, I was just shooting the shit with the guy, honest. It’s a fucking conspiracy to get me.”
“From the tape it sounds to me like you got yourself, Mr. Rasmussen,” said Primrose.
“Maybe we can cut a deal,” Bevo suggested. “What’ll you do for me if I name the man on the tape, Mr. District Attorney?”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said Primrose. “I’ll give you the best cell in the basement. Now, how’s that?”
“Bevo, it’s no skin off his ass if you don’t talk,” Stroud said. “He’s not after the other guy, unless that guy’s got a million dollars he can be screwed out of, too, right, P.P.?”
“You want a deal, Bevo?” Primrose asked. “I have one for you. Don’t fight the seizure. Let the court take the money. Hell, there’s a good chance we’d get it, anyway. You do that, and this tape may just get lost.”
“That’s extortion!” thundered Stroud. “Highway robbery! We piss on your offer.”
“Why don’t you let your client talk for himself, Gill?” Primrose suggested.
“Because I’m his lawyer, you moron,” Stroud snorted.
But Bevo was thinking. “You’re saying if I give up the insurance money, I walk?”
“No, Bevo,” Wick replied. “He’s saying you might walk. It’s possible you could give up the money and still wind up in jail.”
“Is that true?” Bevo asked Primrose.
Primrose arched his eyebrows. “I doubt that would happen.”
“See?” said Wick. “You don’t want to trust him.”
But Bevo, standing next to the sheriff in handcuffs, was crumbling. “This is fucking unreal,” he said. “I can’t do time, guys.”
“Our client needs to sleep on your offer,” I told Primrose.
The DA shrugged. “fine with me, Counselor. I’ll give him twenty-four hours. If he doesn’t give up his little friend by then, the deal’s off.”
The sheriff took Bevo downstairs and put him in the same cell he had been in the day before. Bevo was pacing again, kicking at the bars each time he got to the end of his brief circuit. Chandler, Stroud, and I sat on the bed.
“So what do I do, boys?” he asked. “You’re my fucking lawyers. How do I get out of this?”
“The thing that burns my chops is that this is just for spite,” said Wick. “SWAT didn’t have to do this. The case was over. Warren Jacobs just didn’t want us to get the money.”
“Bevo,” I said, “why in hell were you telling Duett about electrocuting a horse? You deliberately incriminated yourself in front of a SWAT lawyer!”
“I don’t know. It just kind of happened. I was dealing dirt on Nyman Scales, you know, trying to cut a deal on the Stromboli case....Hey, that’s right! Most of the stuff on that tape is about shit that Scales done. Why don’t they go after him? I was just doing my patriotic duty, helping ’em get the goods on a low-life horse thief.”
“I promise you, Bevo,” said Stroud, “you didn’t tell them anything about Scales they haven’t already heard. Scales has beaten those raps before. No evidence, remember?”
“Then why’d they come after me?” he cried. “I was just blowing air, Mr. Stroud, honest. None of that shit happened. I was just trying to make that lawyer think I was hot stuff. You know how you get when you start spinning tales? That’s what I was doing. And he was eating it up. Duett thought I was Jesse James.”
“So he just sort of coaxed that story about electrocuting the horse out of you?” I asked.
“That’s what’s so bad!” cried Bevo, close to hysterics. “I never electrocuted no horse. That was Nyman Scales that done that. I just sort of stole that story and put me in it.” He took hold of the bars, and his whole body sagged. “And now I’m gonna go to jail over shit that Nyman Scales done!” He whirled to look at us. “You said they got no evidence on Scales for that stuff, right? Well, they got no evidence on me, either!”
“Just your taped confession,” I reminded him.
“Shit, you guys could beat that,” Bevo said.
“Maybe,” said Wick. “If you could be believed. Or even if anybody anywhere had any use for you at all. But nobody can stand you, Bevo. You’ve pissed off too many officials of the law. It would be hard to beat your freely given confession in a trial, even if you were Billy Graham, which you aren’t.” Wick sighed. “And God knows what would have happened to our money by then.”
“My money,” said Bevo.
“Primrose will spend it to put Bibles in the cells,” Stroud muttered.
“I can’t do time, Mr. Stroud!” Bevo said.
“Primrose doesn’t want to send you to jail, Bevo,” I told him. “He’s just trying to get hold of the money.”
Stroud stood up and signaled for the guard to let us out of the cell. “Don’t agree to any deal Primrose makes you,” he told Bevo. “Do you hear me? Don’t agree to a thing until you hear from me. If you do, I swear to God, I’ll kill you myself.”
&nbs
p; As we got into the elevator, we heard Bevo moaning in his cell, “I can’t do time!”
CHAPTER 45
WICK DROVE US BACK TO JENKS in Bevo’s Lexus. The loss of a three-hundred-thousand-dollar fee had plunged him into a foul state of mind. “There goes Barbados in August,” he said, “and Deirdre in a string bikini.”
“How were you planning to get her off the emu ranch without her husband finding out?” I asked.
“Starns would never know she’s gone,” Stroud said from the backseat. “He hasn’t caught that bird you two let loose the other night. I imagine he’ll still be chasing it in August.”
“Primrose!” Wick spat out the name. “That fucking hypocrite. Did you know he’s a lay preacher, Clay? He preaches all over the goddamned county. Saving souls for Jesus. A whited sepulcher, that’s what he is. It’s enough to make me give up being a Baptist!”
“You’re a Baptist, Wick?” I asked.
“He’s lapsed a bit,” replied Stroud, “but he’s not gone yet. As many men’s wives as Hard-dick runs through, he can’t afford to give up God completely.”
“I imagine Primrose is telling the truth about the tape, though,” I said. “Duett or somebody else from SWAT probably left it at the door, just like he said.”
“True,” said Stroud. “P.P. is an asshole, but he doesn’t have the nerve for a real criminal conspiracy.” Stroud seemed more bemused than angry at the turn of events.
It was almost four o’clock when we got to town. Wick headed for the bank’s drive-through teller window, but Stroud had him take us to the office instead. “No bail-out for Bevo?” asked Wick, parking in front of the door. “Suits me fine.”
Wick shuffled into the office ahead of us, head hanging low, hands in his pockets. Molly Tunstall was sitting at her desk, typing. She gave us her look of deep concern as we came in.
“Molly,” Wick said, “get Reverend Blankenship on the phone. Tell him we’ve all resigned from the Baptist religion until they excommunicate Paul Primrose.”
“Before you do that, Molly,” said Stroud, “dial Warren Jacobs’s office for me. Let’s see if we can catch him before he goes home. Put it through to the conference room.”
“Good idea,” said Wick, “let’s make an obscene phone call.”
The phone rang. Stroud pushed a button and transferred the call to the speakerphone.
“Afternoon, Warren,” said Stroud.
“Well, well, Gill Stroud,” the lawyer replied. “I’m glad you called. I left the courtroom without congratulating you on your stroke of good fortune.”
“Why, thanks, Warren. Pulaski’s burglars really saved our ass. You should give them a bonus.”
“What a card.”
“Listen, Warren, do you happen to know a fellow named Antoine Duett?”
“Duett?” There was a pause. “No, I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
“That’s odd. He has offices in your building.”
“It’s a big building, Gill. I doubt I know half the people we employ, much less who rents space down the hall.”
“But you would know Duett. He’s the dirty-tricks boy your firm sent to undermine our case. Remember? The spy who held secret meetings with our client, which he seems to have taped?”
“Spy? Tape? I’m sorry, Gill. It sounds like you’ve gotten into some bad Scotch.”
“So you’re saying you don’t know Antoine Duett?”
“You’re catching on. I do not know the man.”
“And you know nothing about the seizure of Bevo’s settlement money?”
“The money was seized? By whom?”
Winking at us, Stroud filled Jacobs in briefly on our afternoon.
“Oh, dear,” said Jacobs, “how unfortunate for you. I guess Bevo loses, after all. That should teach him not to play with matches.”
“I’ve got a hunch, Warren, that you’re up to your buttocks in shit on this.”
“Are you sure that’s a hunch, Gill? At your age it could be wind or senility. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some work to do.”
“Before you go, let me tell you about one of my hunches that just paid off. I had a hunch that the break-in at your man Pulaski’s house might not have been so random as Pulaski wanted us to believe.”
“Oh?”
“So I did a little checking, and, by golly, the phone company has proved me right.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jacobs replied.
“You might want to do a little checking on your own. I’ll expect a call from you tonight between seven-thirty and eight. If you don’t call, I’m taking my little hunch—and Pulaski’s phone records—to the FBI.”
“A hunch isn’t going to save Bevo’s money, Stroud.”
The old man switched off the phone. “Boys,” he said, “we’re finally getting down to the licklog.”
CHAPTER 46
THE FIVE-D STEAKHOUSE, five miles from town, was a series of shabby, interconnecting shacks that sprawled under a thick stand of evergreens next to a small lake. Going in, I hit my head on the doorpost, and as my eyes teared up from the smart, I noticed a sign posted on the wall opposite the door that read Hurts, don’t it?
“Barbarian humor,” said Wick, clapping me on the shoulder.
“I noticed you didn’t warn me,” I replied.
According to Chandler and Stroud, the five-D was the only eating establishment within sixty miles of Jenks that cooked a decent steak. Stroud had offered to prove to me the truth of this contention, so at six o’clock that evening the three of us found ourselves seated at a linoleum table in a tackboard lean-to next to the salad bar, waiting for our steaks to arrive from the kitchen. It was a slow night, which suited me fine, since the flooring of our little room did not feel all that secure to me, and I believed that the weight of an extra party or two might sink us.
Stroud, in high spirits, raised his glass of iced tea and offered a toast, “to the law,” in which we all joined him.
“Enjoy your steaks, gentlemen,” said the old man. “But remember, we must be back at the office by seven-thirty.”
“Or not,” said Wick. He smirked unhappily at his partner, who faced him across the square table.
“Mr. Parker,” Stroud said, “we are about to discover whether I am a genius or a senile idiot.”
“Can we vote now?” Wick asked.
“Mr. Chandler has become temporarily deranged from the loss of a great deal of money,” Stroud explained to me. “It remains, then, for you to make my case for me.”
“Me?” I said.
“Of course, you. You’re the only one left to represent me. Surely you see the method in my madness?”
At that moment, I did not see much of anything.
“Let us retrace some of our steps,” Stroud said. “Do you recall our visit to Stan Pulaski’s house last night?”
“I believe I do,” I said.
“Did anything of interest happen there?”
“We became felons,” I replied.
“Anything else?”
“We narrowly escaped being arrested with stolen property in the trunk of your car.”
“Anything else, Mr. Parker?”
“You made a phone call,” I said.
“Exactly!” said Stroud, slapping the table with his palm.
And at that moment, I caught on. I saw Stroud’s gamble, realized the nature of the trap he was trying to spring. It seemed flimsy to me, yet the simple fact that I saw it—that I had finally figured something out—gave me a feeling of relief that was almost dizzying. Maybe I would not have to spend the rest of my life two steps behind.
“So, what do you say, Mr. Parker, am I a genius or a candidate for the bone orchard?”
“I am not competent to answer that question, Mr. Stroud, but I do know one thing that you are.”
“What is that?”
“You’re a whistle-blower.”
A self-satisfied smile creased his pallid face. “Well done, Mr. Parker
.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Wick asked.
“The phone call, Wick,” I said, “the one your partner made from Pulaski’s study when we broke in last night.” I turned to Stroud. “You crafty son of a bitch,” I said to him. “You called SWAT!”
Stroud’s eyes gave off a crocodile glint. “Jimmy Wortmann’s office, to be exact,” he said. “The phone company records will show that at the time of the burglary, a call was placed from the scene of the crime to a SWAT office.”
“SWAT would have one hell of a time explaining that,” I said. “But I’ve got a question. Why did you blow the whistle into the earpiece?”
The answer came from Wick. “You haven’t heard that thing come through a phone line, have you, Clay?” he said. “It makes a noise on the line that everybody can hear. Like Ma Bell is melting.”
“I had a hunch that’s what it was,” I said. “The big firms usually have a taping system that records calls coming in after business hours, which means there’s a chance that they’ve got the whistle on tape. If they do, it’ll sound like something very odd has happened to a phone conversation on Jimmy Wortmann’s line.”
“It would sound like something’s been erased,” said Wick.
“At least it will give pause to any law enforcement agency that hears it,” Stroud said.
“So the call was insurance,” I said. “You were betting SWAT might pull something at the last minute, and you found a way to give us some hidden leverage.”
“That’s right.” Stroud turned to Chandler. “So, Hard-dick, has our new associate made my case?”
Wick raised his glass of iced tea in a salute to his partner. “Goddamn dry county,” he said. “This ought to be champagne.”
CHAPTER 47
THE STEAKS ARRIVED. As we ate, Stroud explained why he thought SWAT would find the phone call he placed from Pulaski’s house alarming.
“SWAT is the top firm in the country for horse insurance litigation. What if they have a way to know for certain which cases they take on are genuine and which are crooked? What if they’re in league with someone who can tip them off to the crooked claims, even hand them the evidence needed to beat the suit? An arrangement like that would guarantee them a phenomenal win-loss record in handling big-dollar lawsuits, and, after all, winning is what keeps that steady stream of business coming in from big insurance firms like Stromboli.”