Shoveling Smoke by Austin Davis Read Free Book Online Page B

the sun went down, edging, pruning the shade trees, painting the trim in the dark.
    I finished my bourbon and poured myself another, raising it in a toast to Hardwick Chandler, whose bourbon I was probably drinking. May he be a reasonable man, when he finally showed himself. I drained the glass—one toast per glass, a law school tradition—then poured another and toasted his partner, Gilliam Stroud, a badly wrecked man but an amazing lawyer, still swinging that trestle. I tried to picture myself at Stroud’s age, both barrels shot, a giant, ruined condor of a man. I wouldn’t make it all the way to condor. I didn’t have the height or the weight. Barn owl, maybe.
    I toasted Bevo Rasmussen, the poor son of a bitch, and his sea of troubles, against which Gilliam Stroud and Hardwick Chandler—and now I—had taken arms. Molly Tunstall said the case was trouble. Well, all right. Let’s see what kind of trouble a body can get into in the country.
    My sixth, seventh, and eighth toasts went to Sally Dean, with her beautiful skin and her ironic smile. What the hell had she meant, “They picked right
this time”?
How many other times had there been, how many other lawyers had “the boys” hired before me, and why hadn’t any of them worked out? How often did Chandler or Stroud ask their new associates to do—or be—something they weren’t? I could tell from our little chat about ethics in the Mule Springs parking lot that Stroud and I had different ideas about where the lawyer on the case draws the line. Or did we?
    My mind was getting fuzzy from the bourbon. I toasted Stroud again, then toasted the ethics of my profession. The drone of the air conditioners filled the cooling house.

CHAPTER 7
    During the night the locusts found a way into my brain, and when I woke up shortly after dawn, they were packed under my skull, shrieking like a chainsaw massacre. five aspirin and a freezing shower shook only a few of them out. I put on a suit I found hanging in a wardrobe box and went down to the Dairy Queen, where a tiny waitress named Lu-Anne smiled as she took my order and asked me how I was doing. I thought of telling her, really telling her, then remembered that this was my town now, and Lu-Anne, like everybody else, was a potential client. Young as she was, it occurred to me that, this being the country, Lu-Anne might well be working on her third marriage to her third snuff-dipping, longhaired, out-of-work truck mechanic husband and might need my help to get out of this union, too, at any minute. It doesn’t pay to alienate potential clients.
    After finishing the sausage-and-biscuit sandwich that Lu-Anne brought me, I drove to the office to meet Hardwick Chandler. He would have to fill me in on the Rasmussen case. I had not finished working through the file.
    When I got to the office Chandler wasn’t there. Molly Tunstall had not heard from him. Stroud wasn’t in, either, but would be soon, she said. This was my second visit to the only law office on the business street of Jenks, and I had yet to see another lawyer in it.
    “What goes on, Molly?” I asked. “I mean, these guys have clients, don’t they? They do practice law?”
    “Mr. Chandler says he runs a nick-of-time law firm,” Molly replied. “Everything gets done that has to get done, but only in the nick of time.”
    “By the seat of the pants?” I suggested.
    “That’s another way to say it, I suppose.”
    “What about the Rasmussen case?” I asked. “Are we going to be in the nick of time on that one?”
    The color in the planes of her face darkened. “I don’t know about that one. Maybe you can tell us.”
    I went back to my new office, the near-empty one, a windowless room with cream-colored stucco walls, a desk, three chairs, and, hanging on a wall, a copy of the famous black-and-white photograph of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, sitting next to each other during the Scopes trial. Bryan was squinting off in the distance, as if