by Austin Davis
“You’re saying SWAT has its own crook squealing on the crooks around him,” Wick said.
“It would have to be a superstar horse dealer,” Stroud said, “somebody who brokers a lot of horse deals in the course of a year. Somebody who knows all the ins and outs of the business. A real horse magician.”
“Somebody like Nyman Scales,” I said.
Stroud nodded. “Nyman must set up twenty or thirty big buys a month. All these horses get insured, and most of them live out their lives as God intended. But horses do die, they get hurt, so a percentage of these horse deals will end in an insurance claim. Some of the claims are legitimate, of course, but some aren’t.”
“Quite a few aren’t,” Wick said.
“Our magical dealer knows which claims are legit and which ones aren’t,” Stroud continued. “He knows because he’s the one who sets up the horse accidents, too. He sells the horses, then he zaps the horses.”
“All for a percentage of the insurance take,” I suggested, “and some kind of kickback from SWAT.”
“Mr. Parker, what do you think of that rib eye?” Stroud asked.
“It’s excellent,” I replied.
“So our horse dealer is in a position to feed information to SWAT about any claim coming from one of his crooked partners,” Stroud continued. “SWAT could then decide which of these lawsuits to win and which to lose. They would need to keep a balance, deliberately losing some suits and winning others. That way they could satisfy a percentage of Nyman’s partners as well as their own clients, the insurance carriers. And that’s the point—to keep the giant carriers like Stromboli happy. The name of the game is billable hours.”
“Billable hours,” Wick murmured. “The numbers must be staggering.”
“But what about the crooked lawsuits SWAT decides to win to keep its average up?” I asked. “In those cases Scales would be selling out his own partners.”
“Exactly,” said Stroud. “You’ve just seen it happen to Bevo.”
“But wouldn’t these people scream bloody murder?”
“What do you think Bevo’s been doing?” asked Stroud. “Nyman Scales has been surviving these kinds of accusations for years. Some of the people he chooses to do business with are lowlifes like Bevo, people so crooked they can’t pee in a straight line. What judge or jury is going to listen to them when they say they’ve been double-crossed by the biggest horse dealer in East Texas? Hell, Mr. Parker, Nyman probably put half the judges on the bench.”
“I’ll be damned,” said Wick. “So Bevo really didn’t burn his horses. He was telling the truth!”
“It’s a possibility,” Stroud replied. “Scales could have sent his boys to do it and make it look like it was Bevo. Or maybe Bevo did it himself. We’ll probably never know.”
“If you’re right,” I said to Stroud, “it’s an amazing setup. Your call from Pulaski’s house would scare the hell out of them.”
Stroud nodded. “The phone records will show that SWAT got a call from the burglars during the robbery. Jimmy Wortmann won’t run the risk of the law seeing those records and catching on to their operation.”
“My guess,” said Wick, “is SWAT will be falling all over itself to kiss our ass. Whoever calls us tonight is going to be wearing asbestos lips.”
“That’s quite a turnaround, Mr. Chandler,” said Stroud. “As I recall, not ten minutes ago you were ready to ship me off to the rest home.”
“I can’t argue with genius, Mr. Stroud,” said Wick.
We got back to the office at 7:15 and sat in the reception area by the front door, waiting for the phone to ring. Wick made a run to his house to pick up some bottles of champagne in the event that Stroud had guessed correctly about SWAT’s response to his threat.
“What if I was wrong?” Gill asked as we watched Wick drive away.
“Then we’ll have a more urgent reason to drink,” I replied.
Stroud sat on the edge of Molly Tunstall’s desk, staring out the window into the darkness. He looked tired and shriveled.
“I hope I will not insult you, Mr. Parker, if I ask whether you know the difference between being found not guilty of a crime and being innocent of it.”
“Of course I know the difference,” I replied.
“One may be found not guilty by a jury, and yet be guilty of committing the crime.”
“Is this conversation leading somewhere?” I asked.
“That case you reminded me about the other day,” he said, “the one in Waco.”
“I remember.”
“The fellow I got off. The black fellow. His name was Harms. Joseph Harms. The jury found him not guilty.”
“I know that.”
“What you don’t know is that Joseph Harms was not only found not guilty by the jury, he actually was not guilty.”
“That’s a good thing, then,” I said. “You saved an innocent man.”
“I saved him for about a week, Mr. Parker. Harms moved out of Waco as soon as he could. But he didn’t move far enough. The trial had gotten a lot of publicity throughout the South, more than Harms realized maybe. Anyway, six days after his acquittal, his body was found hanging from a tree down in East Louisiana.”
I thought of the picture hanging in the Baylor Law building, the shadowy figure of the acquitted man and the tall man with the trestle in his hands, trying to keep him safe. “You did your best,” I said to him.
“Ethics and justice,” he said. “Let me tell you about ethics and justice. About a week after Harms was killed, the Waco sheriff’s office arrested the dead girl’s father and charged him with the killing. And guess who defended him?”
“You?”
“That’s right. And I got him off, too. Want to know how I did it?”
“I wonder if I do.”
“I convinced the jury that Harms did it. Harms was dead, killed by folks who thought he was guilty. I just let that grassroots feeling work for us. The DA in the father’s case put a young criminalist on the stand who was really green. I turned him inside out. I could have gotten him to swear that the Easter Bunny had killed the girl. But Harms was handier. I refocused the light on a man who couldn’t be tried again for the crime.”
“Whatever works,” I said.
“I was besotted with vanity,” Stroud replied. “In those days I thought I could do no wrong. It pleased me to play with the law like that. I could have gotten Judas Iscariot off for fingering Jesus.”
“At least you got the dead girl’s father off.”
Stroud smiled grimly. “Like I just said, Mr. Parker, sometimes there’s a difference between being found not guilty and being innocent.”
We both sat looking out the front window at the empty street.
“Maybe I’ll retire,” Stroud said, “hang up my whistle.”
“I don’t know about the retirement part,” I said, “but the whistle should definitely go.”
Wick came in, hugging half a dozen bottles of chilled champagne to his chest. “My tits are freezing,” he said as he set the bottles on the table. He handed me one. “Open it for us, Clay. We might as well get braced.”
There were no glasses in the room, so he and Stroud went to find some. While I sat on the edge of the table peeling the leaded wrapper off the top of the bottle, Sally walked in.
“I wondered what sort of trouble the boys were leading you into,” she said. “Turns out it’s simple alcoholism.” She watched me work on the champagne cork. “You seem to be bottle impaired, Counselor. You aren’t having any more luck than you did with that beer bottle yesterday.” She came over and sat next to me. She was wearing her country-girl outfit, jeans and a T-shirt. I figured she had been out to Stroud’s place to check on her horse.
“How’s cousin Ed?” I asked, setting down the bottle.
“He sends his regards. He wants to know if—”
I kissed her hard on the lips. It surprised her.
“You wondered whether country life is agreeing with me,” I said. “Well,
it is, but I have something to say.”
“Go on.”
“It’s just this. Once and for all, I’m sorry for any idiotic thing I’ve said to you in the last few days. I’m through asking questions, Sally. I’m tired of always being too slow, and the only way to catch up, it seems, is just to stop thinking altogether. So I don’t care anymore. I don’t care if you rustled stock when you were in diapers. I don’t care if your mother was a Cajun witch or if your daddy is the biggest gangster in Texas. If you want to go after him, fine, I’ll help you. If you don’t want to go after him, that’s fine, too.”
I kissed her again. This time she helped. “I don’t want to know anything else about your family or about your business or about your past. I don’t want to know anything about you and Gill or you and Bevo or you and the pope. I don’t want to be outguessed, I don’t want to be pinned down. All I really want is to take things a day at a time. And I want another kiss.”
I would have gotten it, too—I could see it in her eyes—but the phone rang. Wick burst into the room, scattering paper cups, followed by Stroud, who slowly walked to the table and switched on the speakerphone.
“Well?” he said.
“Gill, it’s Jimmy Wortmann. How do you want to handle this?”
CHAPTER 48
IT MUST HAVE BEEN A WILD NIGHT for Jimmy Wortmann and his associates. Gill demanded that Wortmann find a way to get the charge against Bevo dropped and Bevo driven back to Jenks by noon the next day, or else he, Gill, would go to the grand jury with the damaging phone record. He also demanded that the RICO hold on the Stromboli check be lifted by the time of Bevo’s arrival in Jenks. We found out later that a whole raft of SWAT lawyers, including Jimmy Wortmann himself—the W in SWAT—descended on Paul Primrose’s office at eight o’clock the next morning. Primrose was not there, he and Judge Wrong Tit Tidwell having teed off half an hour earlier at the Mule Springs Sportsman’s Club. Primrose and the judge had reached the fifth hole when the SWAT lawyers found them and whisked them back to the courthouse.
There Jimmy Wortmann related a sad tale. It seemed that Warren Jacobs, one of SWAT’s most brilliant associates, had, in the course of handling several high-pressure cases, become emotionally unstable. For reasons nobody could fathom, Jacobs had developed an intense hatred of Bevo Rasmussen, whose defense counsel had just outmaneuvered the ailing attorney in a recent lawsuit. Smarting from that defeat, the lawyer initiated a plan to send Rasmussen to prison.
Wortmann explained to his mystified audience how the tape on which Rasmussen bragged about committing certain crimes was rigged: The voice that sounded like Bevo’s belonged to an actor whom the demented lawyer paid to read from a script while he himself supplied the other voice. The sick man then delivered the tape anonymously, counting on Primrose to do his duty. The plot was only discovered late the night before, when Jacobs, the unfortunate associate, was relieved of his duties and sent to a hospital for a rest. SWAT was very, very sorry for any inconvenience their firm had caused the DA’s office, but they felt they had to come forward in order to prevent a terrible miscarriage of justice. Bevo Rasmussen, Wortmann explained to Primrose and Judge Tidwell, was an innocent man.
It could not have played very well. Primrose would have demanded to know why, if this crazy story were true, Bevo had admitted to taking part in the taped conversation when it was played for him in the DA’s office. I don’t know how Wortmann got around that, or around the other holes in the story, but one thing I had learned in the new life was that there is no story told in the country without a few holes in it, some big enough to drive a hay baler through. That’s true about stories told anywhere, of course. I had known that back in Houston—I was a tax lawyer, for God’s sake. I guess I had not wanted it to be true in the country. Put me down for an idiot.
In any event, Wortmann finessed his sloppy story. An exasperated Judge Tidwell ordered Primrose to release Bevo and unfreeze the check. Primrose had to drive to Jenks himself to deliver the original of the order dismissing the RICO forfeiture. We saw his Buick sliding into a parking space across the street in front of the bank at eleven-thirty.
“That’s one unhappy Baptist,” Wick said, watching through the blinds as Primrose trudged into the bank.
A few minutes later, Bevo showed up. For the second time in two days, he, Chandler, and Stroud walked across the street and into the bank to cash the settlement check. I sat again on the fender of Bevo’s Lexus, waiting for them to come out, wondering if I would need to dive into the car again for another wild ride through the blistering heat to avert some new catastrophe. To tell the truth, I don’t think I would have minded much.
Maybe it was something in the water, or the effect of thumping along so many country roads, or the craziness of Bevo’s case—or Sally, late last night, after we drove off in her Mercedes and found a roll of duct tape in her glove compartment—but I was beginning to think that country life was the right move for me.
True, it had not turned out to be quite the bucolic retreat I had imagined. In the last week, I had been threatened, stabbed, tied up, lost in the woods, and attacked in a diner. I had met drug dealers and horse thieves, I had survived a car crash, outwitted police, witnessed a fistfight between a man and an emu, burgled a house, and participated in a pitched battle won with firecrackers. I had careened in and out of the dim gray border regions of the law. And I had gotten shockingly, magnificently laid, on more than one occasion. I wondered what the next week would be like. Sitting on the fender of the Lexus, I waved to my neighbors as the locusts in the trees tried their best to give me a clue.
Then the three of them were out of the bank, heading toward me, and I saw that, for the moment at least, there would be no more mad dashes. I asked if they had seen Primrose while they were in the bank.
“He must have been hiding under the counter,” Stroud replied. “Too bad. I was going to invite him over for a drink.”
Bevo waved his cashier’s check at me. “You’re gonna have to treat me different now, Mr. Parker. I’m a rich man.”
“Remember what I told you, Bevo,” said Wick. “I’d stay out of the county for a while if I were you.”
“Scales ain’t coming after me,” Bevo said. “It would be bad for his bidniss if I disappeared so soon after the deposition.”
“On the contrary,” said Stroud. “He might think it good for his business. He surely knows you were selling him out to Duett. He’s probably even heard the tape. I wouldn’t think he’d take kindly to that.”
“Thanks for your concern, gentlemen, but I can look after myself,” Bevo said.
“At least now you can pay Deck Willhoit what you owe him,” I said. “That should give you some comfort.”
“I already paid him,” Bevo said. “Me and him are friends again. I’m gonna get that whale-dick back for you, too, Mr. Chandler, if I have to steal it myself.”
“Do me a favor, Bevo,” said Wick. “If you get caught, don’t mention my name.”
“You say you’ve already paid Willhoit off?” I asked.
“Like I told you, Mr. Parker, it’s no trouble getting hold of money.” The little man shook hands all around, opened the driver’s door, and climbed into the Lexus. “Gentlemen, I thank you for your services. If I ever get in another scrape—”
“When you get in another scrape,” Wick interrupted.
“Okay, when it happens, you’re my first call.”
“You don’t know how happy that makes us,” said Wick.
“Say, Bevo,” I called. “Wick and I have been thinking of driving over to take a look at your burned-down barn.”
“We’ve been thinking what?” asked Wick.
“Old time’s sake, you know, now that the case is over. We’ve never even seen the place. Can you give us directions, Bevo?”
Bevo looked at me for a long moment. “Sure, I can do that, Mr. Parker. But you don’t want to drive all that way. There’s nothing there anymore. I haven’t seen it myself in almost a year. You’re l
iable to drive right by and miss it.”
“All the same, Bevo,” I said, “we’d like to head out there and tell the neighbors what we got for your horses. I think it might surprise them.”
I looked into Bevo’s eyes and he into mine for maybe ten seconds. Then he gave me that wolf’s smile of his and shook his head. “How’d you figure it out?” he asked me.
“figure what out?” asked Wick.
“I’ll be damned!” said Stroud.
“It was a lot of things,” I said. “Your paying off Willhoit before you got the settlement check, of course. But there was always something a little fishy about the money. Even cooking the numbers like you did, the scam just wouldn’t have been worth the risk, after paying off all your debts, unless—”
“Unless what?” asked Wick.
“Unless there were never any horses to begin with!” Stroud said. He shuffled over and gave me an exultant slap on the back. “You’re a quick study, Mr. Parker.”
“I was wondering if any of you hot-shot lawyers would figure that out,” said Bevo. “Damn if it wasn’t the new guy.”
“Wait a minute,” said Wick, squinting dubiously at me. “You’re saying there were no horses?”
“No flesh-and-blood horses,” I explained. “But they were there on paper. I think what clued me in for sure was the glimpse Gill and I got of Pulaski’s horse mausoleum. All those little plastic bags, neatly arranged and labeled, just waiting to be used in an arson scam.”
“You’re scary, Mr. Parker,” Bevo said. “That’s what happened, all right. Nyman sold me seven dead horses. He called ’em pre-burned. Pulaski picked ’em out—he and Nyman have been in bidniss for some time. Old Nyman told me what to write on the dec sheets, and we were in bidniss. I only paid Nyman seven hundred dollars up front, a hundred a horse, even though it says on paper that he loaned me a quarter of a million.”