“It was nothing,” Vines said.
“I’m in your debt.”
“Not at all.”
“At least accept my gratitude.”
“Of course,” said Vines, wondering whether the pleasantries would ever end. They did when the door opened and a Mexican busboy hurried in with a new place setting. Right behind him came a frowning Merriman Dorr, who glared at Mansur’s wife and said, “You could’ve at least called, Dixie.”
She ignored both the scolding and Dorr, who was now supervising the busboy. After the place setting was laid, Dorr moved a salad fork a quarter of an inch to the left, turned to give no one in particular a charming-host smile and said, “I do hope you all enjoy your lunch.”
“I’m sure we will,” B. D. Huckins said.
“Good,” Dorr said and left, shooing the busboy ahead of him.
After the door closed Parvis Mansur turned to the mayor and asked, “Have we time for a drink?”
Huckins indicated the wet bar. “Help yourself.”
On his way to the bar Mansur asked, “Dixie?”
“Sure.”
All watched as Mansur dropped ice cubes into a pair of glasses, poured the Scotch and added the water. He did it with an economy of movement that was almost miserly. Vines suspected it was how he did everything, except talk, since Vines also suspected Mansur enjoyed the sound of his own voice, which was a deep baritone, verging on bass, and unaccented except for its British vowels and inflection. Wondering how early the British overtones had been acquired, Vines had a sudden mental picture, not quite a vision, of an elderly retired British Army officer, eking out his pension by spending long afternoons in Teheran, teaching received pronunciation to a squirming six-year-old Parvis Mansur, who never forgot anything.
After everyone was settled into either the easy chairs or the long couch, Mansur looked at Adair and said, “Tell us about it.”
“Hard to say where to begin.”
“Perhaps with the case itself-the one involving the million-dollar bribe.”
“The false bribe,” Adair said.
“Very well. The false bribe.”
Jack Adair drank the rest of his beer, put the glass down, clasped his hands over the black cane’s curved handle and examined the ceiling for a moment or two, as if gathering the threads of his narrative. He then looked at Parvis Mansur.
“Well, sir, it came to us on appeal, of course, and it involved murder, a touch of incest and maybe a few trillion or so cubic feet of natural gas. So you could say, as such cases go, this one was kind of interesting.”
“Yes,” Mansur said. “I can see how one might say that.”
Chapter 18
Jack Adair began his tale with Delano Maytubby, the fifty-two-year-old Osage Indian doodle-bugger who, equipped with nothing more than two wands of willow, had established a reputation for finding oil and gas beneath land the major oil companies had either ignored or written off. If things were slow, Maytubby, when pressed, would also look for water. But he first made it clear to whoever hired him that he was a genuine professional doodle-bugger and not some goddamn amateur dowser who believed in wood sprites and stuff.
Maytubby had been hired to look for either gas or oil beneath the five square miles of blackjack oaks and cockleburs that sixty-three-year-old Obie Jimson ran cattle on down in the southeast corner of Adair’s state.
The two of them would drive around the ranch in Jimson’s ancient Ford pickup until Maytubby said stop. He would then get out, armed with his two willow wands, and head off in a direction of his own choosing, Jimson following along in low gear in the pickup. They did this for nearly a month until the crossed willow wands dipped and bobbed three times, pointed straight down and Delano Maytubby said, “Oh-oh.”
Jimson climbed down from the pickup and looked around skeptically. “Here, you reckon?”
“Here.”
“So what is it?”
“Well, it ain’t oil so it must be gas.”
“How can you tell the difference?”
Maytubby pointed his right hand straight up. “What color’s that?”
“What?”
“The sky, goddamnit.”
“Blue.”
“How do you know?”
“I can see it.”
“How do you know you can see it?”
“Well, shit, Del, I just know.”
“And that’s how I can tell it’s gas instead of oil,” the doodle-bugger said. “I just know.”
The primary reason Obie Jimson had hired Maytubby, other than for his reputation as the state’s preeminent oil and gas diviner, was that Maytubby couldn’t keep his mouth shut. A leasehound for one of the majors, sitting in Crazy Kate’s Coffee Shop two days later, overheard Maytubby boasting about his alleged find on Jimson’s ranch.
The leasehound mentioned it casually to his boss, who told him to run a swab on the folks at the courthouse to see whether anyone else, besides a doodle-bugger, had been nosing around the area. When the leasehound reported back that a guy he knew from Phillips Petroleum had suddenly shown up in town, his boss told him to get out to Jimson’s place and see how hard a nut he’d be to crack.
Obie Jimson proved to be a real tuf nut, as the oil fraternity usually spelled it. He hemmed and he hawed and he mumbled about how cattle and oil don’t mix, and about protecting the land that’d been in his family for three generations and about how disappointed he was that that doodle-bugger he’d hired didn’t find any water because cows sure as hell can’t drink oil or gas.
After the leasehound left, promising to return with what might be an interesting proposition, Jimson telephoned Continental Airlines, which was the cheapest, and made a reservation for a flight to New Orleans. He then dug out a clipping from the Wall Street Journal, which had named the twenty best tax lawyers in the nation, and called Randolph Parmenter in New Orleans, who was listed as number sixteen.
Jimson flew down to New Orleans the next day, had a few drinks and a good dinner, wandered around the French Quarter until 3 A.M. and showed up for his 10 A.M. appointment with Parmenter, looking relaxed and rested.
Parmenter asked the initial question that most lawyers and doctors ask: “What seems to be the problem?”
“The problem,” Jimson said, “is there’s a chance of me getting stinking rich and I don’t want those socialist nut cases up in Washington to get their hands on it. Well, not on most of it, anyhow.”
Parmenter’s office was just off Canal in one of the older downtown buildings that prided itself on the respectability and stuffiness of its tenants. Its coffee shop was said to serve the best chicken salad sandwiches in town and its cigar stand prided itself on the quality of its contraband Cuban cigars.
The lawyer gave Obie Jimson a patronizing old-money smile and asked, “And just what do you consider to be stinking rich, Mr. Jimson?”
“Sixty, seventy million maybe-around in there. But not all at once, of course.”
Parmenter abandoned his patronizing air. “And the source of all this new wealth?”
“Natural gas.”
“Well, the deep stuff is bringing nine dollars per thousand cubic feet now,” Parmenter admitted.
(“You have to remember,” Jack Adair told his audience, “that this was all back in early nineteen eighty-four.”)
“Won’t stay up near that high,” Jimson said.
“Oh?”
“It’s gonna come down ass over teacup ’fore long.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Read in the Wall Street Journal where that Saudi Arabia guy, what’s his name, Sheek Yamani’s predicting it, and I figure he’s gotta know something I don’t.”
“The geology on your land’s been done, of course.”
“Don’t think I said that.”
“Then how can you be certain the gas is there?”
“Because the best doodle-bugger in the Osage Nation says so.”
“A doodle-bugger,” Parmenter said. “I see.”