of the gas revenue. This means the two of you together will now receive eighty percent of all revenue and your stepmother, twenty percent. If you die, she gets your share. If she dies, you get hers.”
“What kind of money are we talking about?” Jack Jimson asked.
“Well, you’ve got five producing wells now and so we’re talking about twelve million cubic feet of gas a day. With your three-sixteenths royalty on the five wells, that amounts to a little over twenty thousand dollars a day per well, or about three million a month. Of course, the production tax on that’ll be two hundred and twenty-eight thousand a month, but that still leaves you two with eighty percent of two point seven-seven million a month.”
“About twenty-five million a year, huh? For Jill and me?”
“Yes.”
“That’s kind of interesting.”
“I’m sure Combine Wilson will find it so,” Parmenter said.
Wilson found it so interesting that, instead of setting a fee, he agreed to represent his two young clients-or orphans, as he liked to call them-on a contingency basis, virtually unheard of in a murder case. He explained that if he got them off and out the courtroom’s front door, they would pay him ten percent of their gross incomes for the next three years.
“But if I don’t get you two little darlin’s off,” Combine Wilson had said, “you don’t pay me a dime.”
Jack Adair paused in his recitation, reached for his glass and drank some more beer, which had grown almost warm. “Now ten percent of the override from that much natural gas was, as Combine himself liked to admit, ‘a tidy sum.’ And to earn it, he put on a brilliant show. Most say his finest.”
“An orator, I take it,” Parvis Mansur said.
“Spellbinder,” said Adair. “He wept and raved about unloved children driven by loneliness, despair and criminal neglect into each other’s arms, thus giving incest a nice warm glow. He railed against an aging, indifferent and philandering father who brought home as stepmother to his children a woman who had been arrested sixteen times in Houston for prostitution. He produced expert witnesses from Detroit and Los Angeles who went after the prosecution’s physical evidence, such as it was, and ripped it to shreds. He put the sheriff’s deputy on the stand and got him so rattled he shook, and then reduced at least three other prosecution witnesses to tears. But what Combine did best was to provoke a mediocre county judge into making some awfully bad law. And finally, there was Combine’s summation that was demagoguery at its finest and most effective.”
Adair paused to finish his beer and continued. “I’m told it was a kind of half-whispered, half-shouted demagoguery. Lawyers flew in from all over, a few for the entire trial, but most just to hear Combine’s summation. And it must’ve sounded like implacable, irresistible logic-unless you studied it closely, as I eventually did, and found it not much more than visceral rhetoric, but brilliantly organized and beautifully told. Kelly was there. He can tell you.”
The two half sisters and the Iranian looked at Kelly Vines. But it was B. D. Huckins who asked the question all three were thinking. “What were you doing there?”
“Representing a client-the same Short Mex and Big Mick outfit Jack mentioned earlier. They’d sent me down because they thought they might be able to nibble around the edges, or at least catch a few crumbs that might fall from the table, if the verdict went the way they had hoped.”
“And did it?” Huckins asked.
“No.”
She looked at Adair. “Well?”
“After the prosecutor was all done, and after Combine had finally closed his mouth, and after the judge’s dubious instructions, the jury went out and stayed out for an hour and fifteen minutes, just long enough to make it look halfway decent, then came back in and found both Jack and Jill Jimson guilty of first-degree murder.”
Chapter 19
Dessert was a sin-rich flan and after Merriman Dorr himself served it to everyone except Kelly Vines, who said he didn’t care for any, Dorr asked whether the two of them could speak privately.
Vines rose from the table and followed him out into the hall, where Dorr looked left, right and left again, the way he might look if he had come to a stop sign.
“Enjoy your lunch?” he asked Vines.
“The trout was good.”
“Think the salad had a smidgeon too much tarragon?”
“The salad was fine, too. How much?”
“One thousand cash,” Dorr said. “No checks. No plastic.”
“The trout wasn’t all that good.”
“You’re paying for what it costs to bring the help in on a Saturday. Then there’s the liquor and the room. But what really jacks up the price is the privacy and that’s sort of hard to cost out because there’s none better anywhere.”
“Cash only must simplify your bookkeeping,” Vines said, took a none-too-plump roll of one-hundred-dollar bills from his pants pocket, peeled off ten of the hundreds slowly enough for Dorr to keep up with the count and handed them over. Dorr counted them again, even more slowly, and said, “I don’t know what you and B. D.’ve got going, but-”
“Let’s keep it like that.”
Dorr ignored the interruption. “But whatever it is, if she or maybe even you ever need to go some place quick, I know where I can get me a Cessna.”
“What do you charge-two hundred dollars per mile?”
“You might practice up on your listening,” Dorr said, shoving the now folded $1,000 into a hip pocket. “I’m offering you a service through her. I mean, if she tells me you’ve got to go someplace in a hurry, that’s fine, I’ll fly you there although it’s got to have her okay because I don’t know you or your partner, if that’s what he is. But if there’s anything at all I can do for B. D., I’ll do it for free gratis because to me she’s the case ace.”
“Why?” Vines said.
“Why what?”
“Why’s everyone so willing to jump off tall buildings for her?”
“Because if you offer to jump today, you might not get pushed off tomorrow.”
When Kelly Vines returned to his seat at the round table, Jack Adair was already well launched into his account of the million-dollar bribe: “…so when the state court of appeals upheld their convictions, it also revoked their bail. The boy was sent to the state penitentiary at Goldstone and the girl to the Female Correctional Institution, which is what they’d named the state prison for women when they built it back in nineteen eleven.”
“And the sentence?” Parvis Mansur asked. “You never said.”
“Death by lethal injection.”
“Really. Both of them?”
“Both.”
“Who would administer it-a doctor?”
“A medical technician.”
Suspecting that her brother-in-law had a long list of other questions to ask about the mechanics of the execution, B. D. Huckins broke in with: “Let’s get to the bribe.”
With an agreeable nod, Adair said, “The attorney general himself appeared before us for the state. He isn’t much of a lawyer but he is a damned fine politician, which is why he’s now governor. Then came Combine Wilson and that’s when all of us on the court sat up and took notice because this was Combine the legal scholar, not Combine the crowd pleaser. And if some of us hadn’t been careful, we’d’ve found ourselves nodding along with him and maybe even amening now and again as he told us what the law really was and not what some semiliterate county judge down in Little Dixie thought it ought to be.”
“Little Dixie?” Dixie Mansur asked.
