“Put up the whiskey.”
“Come on. For one time in forty years of Baptist living, close the office early and tie on a real happy one.”
“Did you look at our calendar for this afternoon between drinks?”
“Yeah, R. C. Richardson is about to get burned again, and he needs us to clean up his shit.”
“You accepted him as a client. I don’t like the sonofabitch in the office.”
“You don’t understand that old country boy, Bailey. He’s not a bad guy, as far as sons of bitches go. Anyway, his ass can burn until Monday. Get a glass and sit down. The only ulcer you have is in the head, and you’re going to have a few dozen more there unless you let some cool air into that squeezed mind of yours.”
“If you want to get into the bottle and blow half our practice, do it, but shut off that patronizing crap. I’ve pretty well reached my level of tolerance in the last two weeks.”
“Look, I won appeal today on Art Gomez and the judge has set bond, and you have to admit that we haven’t sprung many of our clients from the state pen. So take a drink and lower your blood rate, and I’ll pick up Richardson’s case early Monday morning.”
“I can’t get it through to you, Hack. You’ve got cement around your head. The office isn’t a tennis club where you play between drinks.”
“All right, forget it,” I said, and picked up the telephone and dialed the number of a bondsman we dealt with. I turned my eyes away from Bailey’s vexed face and waited in the hot stillness for him to leave the room.
The bondsman was named Bobo Dietz. He was a dark, fat man, who always wore purple shirts and patent-leather shoes and a gold ring on his little finger. He had moved to Austin from New Jersey ten years ago, set up a shabby office next to the county jail, and in the time since then he had bought two pawnshops and three grocery stores in the Negro slum. He considered avarice a natural part of man’s chemistry, and you were a sucker if you believed otherwise; but he was always efficient and you could count on him to have bail posted and the client on the street a half hour after you set him in motion.
He assured me over the phone, in his hard Camden accent and bad grammar, that the ten-thousand-dollar bond would be made before five o’clock and Art would be released by tomorrow morning. For some reason Bobo liked me, and as always, when I went bail for a client on my own, he wouldn’t charge me for anything except expenses. Many times I wondered if there was some strange scar in my personality that attracted people like Bobo Dietz and R. C. Richardson to me.
I turned off the air conditioner and opened all the office windows. The stale afternoon heat and noise from the street rose off the yellow awnings below me. My shirt stuck to my skin, and the odor of gasoline exhaust and hot tar made my eyes water. In the middle of the intersection a big Negro in an undershirt was driving an air-hammer into the concrete. The broken street surfacing shaled back from the bit, and the compressor pumped like a throbbing headache. I sipped another straight drink in the windowsill, sweating in the humidity and the heat of the whiskey, then I decided to give Bailey and his fundamentalist mentality another try. I took a second glass from the drawer, poured a small shot in the bottom, and walked into his office.
He was dictating to our secretary, his eyes focused on the wall, and I could see in the nervous flick of his fingers on his knee that he expected an angry exchange, profanity (which he hated in front of women), or a quick thrust into one of his sensitive areas (such as his impoverished bachelorhood, the empty weekends in his four-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment). I leaned against the doorjamb, smoking a cigar, with a glass in each hand. He faltered in his dictation, and his eyes moved erratically over the wall.
“Hack, I’ll talk to you later.”
“No, we have to shut it down today. It’s Friday afternoon and R. C. Richardson will appreciate us a lot more Monday morning. Mrs. McFarland, my brother needs to direct me into the cocktail hour today, so you can leave early if you like.”
The secretary rested her pencil on her pad, her eyes smiling. Her hair was gray, streaked with iron, and her face was cheerful and bright as she waited for the proper moment either to stop work or resume the dictation.
I set Bailey’s drink down before him.
“I’d like to finish if—”
“Sorry, you’re unplugged for the day, brother,” I said. “Go ahead, Mrs. McFarland. There’s a slop chute down the road where I need a warden.”
Bailey saw that I had the first edge of a high on, and he let the secretary go with an apology. (He was the only southerner I ever knew who could have been a character in a Margaret Mitchell novel.)
“That’s too goddamn much,” he said. “I’ve had it with this type of irresponsible college-boy shit around the office. When you’re not loaded you’re coming off a drunk, or you’re spending your time on a union agitator’s appeal while our biggest account gets picked up by a couple of New York Jews. You’ve insulted everybody who’s tried to help you in the election, you got yourself put in jail because you were too drunk to know what universe you were in, and you had the balls to file a civil rights complaint against the man who arrested you.”
“Bailey—”
“Just shut up a minute. Senator Dowling kept that story off the wire services, but since you felt so outraged that you had to file a complaint with the F.B.I. we should have some real fine stuff in the newspapers before November. In the meantime you haven’t been in a courtroom in three months, and I’m tired of carrying your load. If you want out of the partnership, I’ll sign my name to a check and you can fill in the amount.”
“I started off to have a drink with you, brother, but since you’ve brought the conversation down to the bloodletting stage, let’s look at a couple of things closely. Number one, the criminal cases we’ve won in court have been handled by me, and our largest paying accounts, keeping Richardson and his kind out of the pen for stealing millions from the state, have been successful because I know how to bend oil regulation laws around a telephone pole. Number two, you haven’t been pumping my candidacy for Congress just because you want to see your brother’s sweet ass winking at you from Washington, D.C. I don’t like to put it rough to you like that, Bailey, but you don’t understand anything unless it comes at you like a freight train between the eyes. You have all these respectable attitudes and you heap them out on everybody else’s head and ask them to like you for it. You better learn that you have a real load of pig flop in that whee
lbarrow.”
On that note of vicious rapport I received the call from Bobo Dietz. Bailey’s face was white, the veins swollen in his neck, his eyes hot as he raised the whiskey to his mouth and I picked up the receiver.
“I don’t know what kind of deal this is, Mr. Holland,” Dietz said.
“What are you talking about?”
“That man’s dead.”