Heartwood

  Wilbur glanced up from his work, then went on shoving a stack of splintered boards into the flames.

  “Hugo Roberts drove you out in the hills?” I said.

  Wilbur sucked in one side of his mouth. “He showed me what was left of a cougar that got caught in a hoop wire. He said the more it fought, the more it cut itself up.”

  “He threatened you?” I asked.

  “He said we live way out here on the hardpan. He said Mexican dopers go through here at night sometimes. He wouldn’t want none of them to catch Kippy Jo home alone, ’cause some of them ain’t half human.”

  I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. His face looked flushed in the heat of the fire.

  “You’re not telling me something, Wilbur,” I said.

  “Hugo said he’d like to have a good boy like me as one of his deputies. He took his nine-millimeter out and stuck it down in my pants. Like this.” Wilbur shoved the flattened ends of his fingers down under his belt buckle. “He pushed it on down till it was pressing against my privates. He told me, ‘You’re a natural-born lawman, Pickett.’ His deputies was grinning from behind their sunglasses, like I was some kind of geek in a carnival.”

  “Hugo fears and hates people who have courage, Wilbur. That’s why he’s cruel,” I said.

  He speared a board into the flames, his eyes avoiding mine.

  “He offered you a deal, didn’t he?” I said.

  “He said it don’t matter if Deitrich gets the bonds back or not. I can say a fence burned me and took off without giving me no money. The insurance is gonna take care of it, anyway.”

  “Listen to Hugo Roberts and you’ll be chopping cotton on Huntsville Farm.”

  “He’s the man with the power.”

  “Goodbye, Wilbur.”

  I walked back out to my car. The scrub oak on the rim of the hills looked like stenciled black scars against the molten sun. I started the car engine, then turned it off and got back out and slammed the door. I stepped up on the gallery and opened the screen door without knocking. Kippy Jo was tucking in a fringed bedspread on the couch. She turned and stared in my direction.

  “Did you tell your husband I was a giver of death?” I asked.

  She folded her fingers in front of her, her eyes like white-flecked blue marbles, her very skin seeming to absorb the sounds around her. But she didn’t speak.

  “I not only killed drug transporters, I accidentally killed my best friend. If people want to talk about it, that’s fine. I just don’t want to listen to it,” I said.

  I let the screen swing back on the spring behind me. But my angry words brought me no comfort.

  That night I drove down the road to the convenience store for a loaf of bread. I heard the car behind me before I saw it, its twin Hollywood mufflers rumbling off the asphalt. It was a customized 1949 Mercury convertible, with a grille like chromed teeth, the deep maroon finish overpainted with a tangle of blue and red flames blowing out of the hood. I turned into the convenience store and went inside, and the customized Mercury turned in after me and parked in the shadows by the side of the building.

  When I came back out, two kids with baseball caps inverted on their heads were sitting in the convertible’s front seat. A third kid stood on the pavement, throwing a tennis ball against the store wall.

  He was bull-necked and thick-chested, his brown hair cut short, his T-shirt and beltless slacks as limp as rags against the hardness of his body. When I got into my Avalon, he threw the tennis ball against the front windshield. I opened the door and stood up, one foot still inside the car.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Earl Deitrich’s doing good for a lot of kids in San Antone. Why you bringing a crazy guy out of the woodwork to hurt him?” he said.

  “Crazy guy?”

  “Yeah, this guy burned kids up in a school bus, looks like a penis stuffed inside a suit, what’s his name …” He snapped his fingers at the air. “Skyler Doolittle, he’s telling lies about Earl Deitrich. We don’t like that, man.”

  He leaned over and picked up his tennis ball, then stepped closer to me, kneading the ball like a sponge in his palm. There was a tattoo of a death’s head on one side of his throat and on the other side a knife that was made to look like it had cut into the flesh and was dripping blood. The wind had dropped, and the heat rising from the pavement carried his odor into my face, a smell like reefer and unwashed hair and motor oil.

  “Put it in a letter, bud, and I’ll get back to you on that,” I said.

  “Bud? Who you think you’re fucking with, man?” he said.

  “You got me.”

  “My name’s Cholo Ramirez. You heard of the Purple Hearts?”

  “Cholo the warlord, right? There was a gal around here last Saturday by the name of Ramirez. She was with Earl Deitrich’s son and a kid named Ronnie Cruise. You related?”

  “Esmeralda? What you mean she was around here? She’s going to the Juco. She don’t have nothing to do with—hey, man, don’t try to sling and bing with me. I can break your sticks.”

  I sat back down behind the wheel. But he grabbed the window jamb before I could pull the door shut.

  “You telling me my sister was with Jeff Deitrich?” he said.

  “Stand away from the car. I don’t want to hit you backing out,” I said.

  “You pick the shit out of your teeth and answer me.”

  I dropped the Avalon into reverse, cut the wheels in a circle, and backed out into the light by the gas pumps, leaving Cholo Ramirez staring at me with his fists clenched by his sides, the veins in his arms pumped with blood.

  Early the following Monday I tapped on the frosted glass of Marvin Pomroy’s office on the first floor of the courthouse. He sat behind his desk in his rimless glasses and blue suspenders and immaculate white, starched shirt, his hair neatly combed, his jaws ruddy and closely shaved, his eyes as placid and secure as a Puritan theologian’s.

  “Hugo Roberts redecorated Wilbur Pickett’s house late Friday afternoon. He also stuck a nine-millimeter down Wilbur’s fly,” I said.

  “I see Hugo Roberts five times a day. You don’t have to tell me about his potential.”

  “I think he’s more interested in a confession than in recovering stolen bonds.”

  “You’re saying Hugo is on a pad for Earl Deitrich and Earl Deitrich is running a scam on the insurance company?”

  “You know, that actually crossed my mind,” I said.

  His eyes rested calmly on my face. “We both know why you don’t like Earl,” he said. “But Peggy Jean asked you out there for that lunch, didn’t she? How many women ask their old boyfriends to their husbands’ business lunches? That doesn’t strike you as peculiar?”

  “Not with Peggy Jean. She’s a decent and fine person.”

  Marvin got up from his chair and pulled open the window. He leaned on the sill and looked out at the oaks on the courthouse lawn and the mockingbirds flying in and out of the shade. “I’m coaching American Legion this year,” he said. “For some reason I can’t teach those boys not to swing on a change-up. Meanest pitch in baseball. The pitcher holds the ball in the back of his hand and messes up your head every time.”

  For lunch I walked over to the saloon and pool room next to the barbershop and ate a sandwich and drank a cup of coffee at the bar. The saloon was dark and had wood floors and an old mirror over the bar and was cooled by electric fans mounted on the walls.

  Skyler Doolittle walked in from the glare of the street and stood at the end of the bar, twisting his torso one way, then another, his fused neck turning with his shoulders, until he saw me in back.

  “This fellow Deitrich is trying to have me sent to the sylum. I want to hire you. Ain’t nobody else around here gonna represent me. I want my watch back, too,” he said.

  “Why would Earl want to send you to an asylum, Mr. Doolittle?” I asked.

  “The fellow’s a cheat. I confronted him with it. In the Langtry Hotel di
ning room. In front of all them businessmen.”

  “I’m primarily a criminal defense lawyer. I don’t know if I’m the right man for you, sir.”

  His eyes looked about the saloon, wide, frenetic. The pool players were bent over the tables in cones of light.

  “I knowed your daddy years back. You was river-baptized,” he said. “Immersed both in the reflection of the sky and the silt from Noie’s flood. That means the earth and the heavens got you cupped between them, just like the hands of God. I ain’t no crazy person, Mr. Holland. On a clear day like today I see everything the way it is. I’m haunted by them children. A crazy man don’t walk around in Hell.”

  “The children in the bus accident?” I said.

  “They talk to me out of the flames, sir. I don’t never get rid of it.”

  The pool shooters nearby did not look in our direction, but their bodies seemed to hang motionlessly on the edges of the light that enveloped the tables.

  “Why don’t we walk on over to my office, Mr. Doolittle?” I said.

  He fitted his Panama hat back on his head and stepped out the front door into the heat like a man braving a furnace.

  I worked late in the office that evening. My air conditioner had broken and I opened the window and looked down onto the square at the cooling streets, the scrolled pink and purple and green neon on the Rialto Theater, the swallows dipping and gliding around the clock tower on the courthouse. Then I saw the sheriffs tow truck hauling Cholo Ramirez’s customized 1949 Mercury through the square toward the pound.

  The tow truck was followed by two cruisers that stopped on the side of the courthouse. Four uniformed deputies got out and escorted Esmeralda Ramirez, her wrists cuffed behind her, into the squat, one-story sandstone building that served as the office of Hugo Roberts.

  I went back to my desk and tried to resume work. But I could not get out of my mind the image of four men dressed in khaki, their campaign hats slanted forward on their heads, the lead-gray stripes on their trousers creasing at the knees, marching a manacled girl into a building that looked like a blockhouse.

  It started to sprinkle while the sun was still shining. I put on my coat and Stetson and walked across the street, then around the side of the courthouse lawn to the entrance of Hugo’s office. Two of the deputies were smoking cigarettes by the door, their faces opaque, my own reflection looking back at me in their sunglasses. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Temple Carrol carry a sack of groceries from the Mexican store on the side street to her Cherokee.

  “What’s the deal on the girl?” I said to the deputies.

  “What’s it to you?” one said.

  “The ’49 Mercury you were towing, a kid named Cholo was driving it the other night. He tried to give me some trouble,” I said.

  “We got a 911. The girl was weaving on the highway out by the Deitrich place. We found a vial with two rocks in it under the seat,” the same deputy said.

  “Is Hugo inside?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but the office is closed.”

  “I’ll just take a minute,” I said, and went between them and pushed open the heavy oak door.

  Hugo Roberts was sitting behind his desk, bent forward, his elbow propped on his blotter, toking on his cigarette while he watched a deputy shake down Esmeralda Ramirez against the wall.

  Her palms were high up on the logs, her ankles spread, her midriff exposed above her jeans. Her dark hair hung down on both sides of her face. A uniformed deputy ran his hands down her armpits and ribs, his fingers brushing the edges of her breasts, then over her buttocks, up her thighs, until one hand came to rest firmly against her genitalia.

  “You better get a female deputy in here, you sonofabitch,” I said to Hugo.

  “And you’d better get your ass out of here,” he replied.

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “What? What did you say to him?” the deputy shaking down the girl said, straightening up now, his right hand clenching and unclenching. When I didn’t answer, he shoved me in the breastbone with three fingers. “Boy, I’m about to turn you into a serious Christian.”

  Hugo’s head was wreathed in cigarette smoke. “Kyle won’t abide interference with an officer in the performance of his duty. I won’t, either, Billy Bob,” he said.

  The deputy named Kyle snipped the cuffs on Esmeralda Ramirez’s wrists again, this time in the front, and stuck his hand inside the back of her blue jeans and panties, knotting the fabric, his knuckles wedging into her buttocks, and pulled her toward a chair.

  I grabbed his upper arm and spun him toward me.The skin of his face tightened against the bone, his teeth showing, his eyes glinting. He pulled a lead-weighted blackjack from his back pocket and wrapped his palm around the braided grip. I swung with my right and caught him just below the eye, snapping his head back, driving him into the wall.

  Then I felt the old curse have its way, like kerosene evaporating on hot coals and igniting in an enclosed space, a yellow-red flash that burned away all restraint and always left me numb and shaking and unable to remember what I had just done.

  I felt my fist sink to my wrist in his stomach, then my boot arched into his face, the heel raking his mouth and nose, splitting the back of his head against a log in the wall.

  But three other men were swinging at me now, with fists or batons or both, the blows showering across my back, and I knew I was about to slide into the bottom of a dark well where I would be safe from the angry faces that shouted down at me from above.

  Then suddenly the room was still, speckled with blowing rain, the only sound that of the deputy named Kyle, on his hands and knees, spitting blood on the oak floor. Temple Carrol stood in the doorway, her extended arms and rounded shoulders and chestnut hair etched with the sun’s last fiery glow.

  “Ah, the testosterone boys in uniform at work and play. Hugo, you sorry sack of shit, please give me an excuse to blow your other lung out,” she said.

  At the same time that I, an officer of the court, was brawling with rednecks, a small man with thick glasses named Max Greenbaum was leaving a synagogue in the old Montrose district of South Houston. The rabbi, who had known Greenbaum for years, waved goodbye from the doorway. Greenbaum stopped at a post office and picked up a priority envelope, then drove into Herman Park and stopped by a tree-shaded lake and was writing on a legal pad when three cars filled with Mexican gangbangers pulled into the parking area, sealing off Max Greenbaum’s Jeep.

  It was dusk now, and the only other people at the lake were an elderly black couple and their grandchildren picnicking on the grass. The gangbangers’ stereos roared with such ear-pounding volume that the water in the lake trembled. A kid who wore a bodybuilder’s shirt deliberately scissored into strips threw a beer can in the direction of the picnickers.

  “Hey, man, the park’s closing,” he said.

  Then they pulled Max Greenbaum from his Jeep, lifted the cellular phone from his hand, and crushed it on the pavement.

  “Y’all leave that man alone. He ain’t done you nothing,” the black woman yelled.

  “Time to haul yo’ black ham hocks out of here, mama,” the kid in the scissored shirt said.

  The elderly black couple loaded their grandchildren into their car and backed out into the road, their faces staring in bewilderment at the scene taking place before them.

  One of the gangbangers tore Max Greenbaum’s priority mail envelope and the sheet of letterhead paper it contained into shreds and threw them in his face. Then they formed a circle around him and began pushing him back and forth as they would a medicine ball.

  But the terror that Max Greenbaum probably felt turned to anger and he began to fight, flailing blindly at the gangbangers with his fists, his glasses broken on the pavement. At first they laughed at him, then his finger scraped across someone’s eyeball. A gangbanger reeled backwards, the heel of his hand pressed into his eye socket as though it had been gouged with a stick.

  The circle closed on Greenbaum like crabs feeding on a pi
ece of meat.

  5

  The Houston homicide detective who called the next afternoon was a woman named Janet Valenzuela.

  “The early word from the coroner is it looks like heart failure,” she said.

  “How’d you get my name?” I asked.

  “The gangbangers picked up most of the pieces of the priority envelope. But a couple were under the victim’s Jeep. We could make out your zip code and the last five letters of your name. Do you know why he would be writing you?”

  “I think he had knowledge that would exonerate a client of mine,” I said.

  “Does this have to do with stolen bonds?”

  “How’d you know?” I said.

  “Greenbaum told his rabbi an uneducated working-man was being set up in an insurance claim. It’s a muddy story. It has something to do with a guy being provoked at a luncheon, then stealing a watch, and a rich guy claiming hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonds were stolen, too. Are the gangbangers tied into this somehow?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You were a city cop here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Keep in touch.”

  An hour later Cholo Ramirez pulled his customized Mercury to the curb in front of my office, the stereo thundering. His sister, Esmeralda, got out and walked into the portico on the first floor.

  A moment later she was standing in my office, dressed in the same jeans and maroon shirt, now thoroughly rumpled, she had been arrested in the day before.

  “You’re sprung?” I said, and smiled.

  “They’re not filing on me.”

  “How about the rock under the seat?”

  “The cop was lying. Who’d be crazy enough to drive around in Cholo’s car with crack in it?”

  “They’re bad guys. Who sicced them on you?” I said.

  “I just came to thank you for what you did.”

  “Sit down a minute, will you?”

  “I’m not feeling too good. There was noise in the jail all night.”

  Her face was pretty, her eyes turquoise. She pushed her hair up on her neck with one hand. A package of cigarettes stuck out of the front pocket of her jeans.