Heartwood

2

Temple Carrol was a private investigator who lived down the road from me with her invalid father and did investigations for me during discovery. Her youthful looks and baby fat and the way she sometimes chewed gum and piled her chestnut hair on top of her head while you were talking to her were deceptive. She had been a patrolwoman in Dallas, a sheriffs deputy in Fort Bend County, and a gunbull in Angola Penitentiary over in Louisiana. People who got in her face did so only once.

I stood at the second-story window of my law office and looked across the square at the sandstone courthouse. High above the oak trees that shaded the lawn were the grilled and barred windows of the jail, where Wilbur Pickett had remained since his arrest last night.

Temple sat in a swayback deerhide chair by my desk, talking about East Los Angeles or San Antonio gang-bangers. Her face and chest were slatted with shadows from the window blinds.

"Are you listening?" she said.

"Sure. The Purple Hearts."

"Right. They were in East L.A. in the sixties. Now they're in San Antone. Their warlord is this kid Cholo Ramirez, your genuine Latino Cro-Magnon. He skipped his own plea-agreement hearing. All he had to do was be there and he would have walked. I picked him up for the bondsman behind a crack house in Austin and hooked him to the D-ring on my back floor, and he started telling me he was mobbed-up and he could rat out some greaseballs in San Antone.

"I go, 'Mobbed-up, like with the Dixie Mafia?'

"He goes, 'They're taking down rich marks in a card game, then messing up their heads so they can't report it. What I'm saying to you, gringita, is there's a lot of guys out there scared shitless and full of guilt with their bank accounts cleaned out. That ought to be worth my charges as well as something for me to visit my family in Guadalajara.'

"I go, 'All you had to do was show up at your plea. You would have been out of it.'

"He says, 'I had a bad night. I slept late. I didn't get paid on that last card-game score, anyway. Those guys deserved to get jammed up.'"

When I didn't respond, Temple picked up a crumpled ball of paper from the wastebasket and bounced it off my back.

"Are you listening?" she said.

"Absolutely."

"This is how it works," she said. "They bring the mark into the card game, at a hunting or fishing lodge somewhere up in the hill country. The mark wins two or three nights in a row and starts to feel like he's one of the boys. He even knows where the house bank is. Then three guys with nylon stockings over their faces bust into the game. Of course, one of the guys in a stocking is the thinking man's goon, Cholo Ramirez.

"One by one they take the players into the basement and torture, and execute them. The mark believes he's the only one left alive. By this time he's hysterical with fear. He tells the three guys where the bank is. They clean it out and tell him one guy in the basement is still alive, actually a guy who was decent to him during the games. They take the mark down the stairs and make him fire a round with a nine-millimeter into the body that's on the floor. So now the mark is an accomplice and can't tell anybody what he saw.

"A week or two goes by and the mark thinks it's over and nobody will ever know what he did. Except he gets a call from a greaseball who tells him he gave away the mob's money and he either writes a check for all of it or he gets fed ankles-first into a tree shredder.

"Cholo Ramirez says they got one guy for four hundred grand and bankrupted his business."

"The guns had blanks in them? They were all in on it?" I said.

"Gee, you were listening all the time," she said.

I looked at the tops of the oaks ruffling in the breeze on the courthouse lawn. The clock on the courthouse tower said 8:51.

"The only reason I told you the story is it'll never see the light of day. The kid Cholo stabbed dropped the charges and Cholo's home free again," Temple said. "You going to take Wilbur Pickett's case?"

"I think I ought to stay away from this one." In the silence, I could feel her eyes on the back of my neck.

At nine o'clock I walked downstairs, out of the cool lee of the building into the sunlight, then up the shaded sidewalk past the steel benches and the Spanish-American War artillery piece on the courthouse lawn. The wood floors inside the courthouse gleamed dully in the half-light, the frosted office windows glowing like crusted salt. I walked to the elevator cage in back and rode up to the jail and stepped out into a stone and iron corridor that was filled with wind blowing through the windows at each end.

Wilbur Pickett lay on an iron bunk in a barred holding cell, his shirt rolled under his head for a pillow. His shapeless Stetson hung from the tip of one boot like a hat on a rack. Gang graffiti had been scorched onto the ceiling with cigarette lighters. The turnkey gave me a chair to carry inside, then locked the door behind me.

"I took his watch, but I didn't steal no bearer bonds," Wilbur said.

"What'd you do with the watch?"

"Dropped it in the mail slot of the County Historical Museum," he said.

"That's brilliant."

"I allow I've had smarter moments." He sat up on the bunk and started flipping his hat in the air and catching it by the brim. "I ain't gonna be riding in that prison rodeo, am I?"

"I can't represent you."

He nodded and looked at the floor, then brushed at his boot with his hat.

"You don't want to take sides against Deitrich's wife?" he said.

"Excuse me?"

"Her boyfriend got killed in Vietnam. She went through a bunch of guys before Earl come to town. Ain't no secrets in a small town."

I felt the blood rise in my throat. I stood up and stared out the window at the old Rialto Theater across the square.

"It looks like you've got everything figured out. Except how to keep your hands off another man's property," I said, and instantly regretted my words.

"Maybe I ain't the only one that's thought about putting my hand where it don't belong," he said.

"Good luck to you, Wilbur," I said, then called for the turnkey to open up.

After the turnkey locked the door behind me, Wilbur rose from the bunk and stood at the bars. He pulled a folded and crimped sheet of lined notebook paper from the back pocket of his khakis and handed it to me between the bars.

"Give this to my wife, will you? We ain't got a phone. She don't know where I'm at," he said.

"Okay, Wilbur."

"You don't know her, do you?"

"No."

"You got to read it to her. She was born blind."

When I got back to the office, Kate, my secretary, told me a man had gone inside the inner office and had sat himself down in front of my desk and had refused to give his name or leave.

"You want me to call across the street?" she said.

"It's all right," I said, and went into my office.

My visitor's head was bald and veined like marble, his seersucker suit stretched tight on his powerful body. He was bent forward slightly in the chair, his Panama hat gripped tightly on his knee, as though he were about to run after a bus. He turned to face me by plodding the swivel chair in a circle with his feet, and I realized that his neck was fused so he could not change the angle of his vision without twisting his torso.

"Name's Skyler Doolittle, no relation to the aviator. I have been a salesman of Bibles, encyclopedias, and Fuller brushes. I won't deceive you. I have also been in prison, sir," he said, and gripped my hand, squeezing the bones.

His eyes were between gray and colorless, with a star-tied look in them, as though he had just experienced a heat flash. His mouth was pulled back on the corners, in either a fixed smile or a state of perplexity.

"What can I do for you, Mr. Doolittle?" I said.

"I seen the picture of this fellow Deitrich in the San Antonio paper this morning. That's the fellow cheated me out of my watch in a bouree game. I didn't know his name till now. I come to get my property back," he said.

"Why are you coming to me?"

"I called over to the jail. They said you was the lawyer for the man done stole it."

"They told you wrong."

He glanced about the room, like an owl on a tree limb.

"This fellow Deitrich had a trump card hidden under his thigh. I didn't find that out till later, though. That watch belonged to my great-great-grandfather. You'll find his name on that bronze plaque at the Alamo," he said.

"I wish I could help you, Mr. Doolittle."

"Ain't right. Law punishes a poor man. Rich man don't have to account."

"I can't argue with you on that."

I waited for him to leave. But he didn't.

"What were you in prison for, Mr. Doolittle?" I said.

"I stole money from my employer. But I didn't burn down no church house. If I'd done something that awful, I'd surely remember it."

"I see. Can you walk down to my car with me? I have to run an errand."

"I don't mind at all. You seem like a right nice fellow, Mr. Holland."

Wilbur Pickett lived out on the hardpan in a small house built of green lumber with cheesecloth curtains blowing in the windows and zinnias planted in tin cans on the gallery. It was treeless, dry land, with grass fires in j the summer that sometimes climbed into the blackjack on the hills and covered the late sun with ash. But Wilbur had a windmill and grew vegetables and kept chickens behind his house and had planted mimosas by his j small three-stall barn and irrigated a pasture for his Appaloosa and two palominos.

I had heard that Wilbur had married an Indian woman from the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana, but I had never met her. She came to the door in a pair of jeans, brown sandals, and a denim shirt with tiny flowers stitched on the pockets. Her face was narrow, the nose slightly flat, her hair fastened in a ponytail that hung I over one shoulder. But it was her eyes that transfixed you. They had no pupils and were the color of blue ink flecked with milk.

I told her Wilbur was in the county jail and would not be home until his bail was set. I stood in the center of the living room and read his penciled letter to her.

"'Dear Kippy Jo, Earl Deitrich is a damn liar and I didn't take no bonds from his safe. Ask Mrs. Titus to carry you down to the IGA to stock up on groceries. Charge the groceries if you can, but if you can't there is a one-hundred-dollar bill under the paper liner in my sock drawer. Don't fret over this little bump in the road. I have lived here all my life. People know me and ain't going to believe the likes of Earl Deitrich.

"'Keep all the mail in a safe spot. The pipeline deal in Venezuela is about to come through any day. Or else the gold deal up in B.C., which is just as good although a lot colder. Me and you are going to make it happen, hon. That's a Wilbur T. Pickett guarantee.

"'When this is over I aim to stick Earl Deitrich's head in a toilet bowl.

"'Your husband, Wilbur.'"

"You're his lawyer?" she asked.

"No, ma'am, I'm afraid not," I replied.

She seemed to look at a thought, or a question, inside her head.

"I'll get you some coffee. It's already made," she said.

Before I could answer, she walked into the kitchen and picked up a blue, white-freckled coffeepot off the stove with a hot pad and poured into a cup, one fingertip inset just below the cup's rim. She went to the cabinet and brought a sugar bowl and spoon to the table and sat down with me, her eyes fixed on my face as though she could see.

"This man Deitrich, he's got millions of dollars. Why's he doing this to Wilbur?" she said.

"He says Wilbur stole his bonds," I replied.

"If you're my husband's friend, you know he didn't do it."

"He shouldn't have taken the watch."

Her face darkened and her sightless eyes remained fixed on mine, as though she had transferred an image of me from the external world to one inside her head that she could examine, an image that bothered her. Unconsciously I wiped my palm on my trouser leg.

"Money and people are a bad combination, Ms. Pickett. I'm never surprised at what people will do for it. I'm not necessarily talking about your husband," I said. Outside, the windmill was pumping water into a corrugated metal tank that had overflowed on the ground.

The wind puffed the screen door open. Her head turned toward the sound, then back at me. "How much is it for a lawyer?" she asked.

"In a case like this, you'll probably need a few thousand. Sometimes you can pay it out."

She nodded again, then she said, "Ms. Titus, the neighbor he mentioned in the letter, is down sick. Can you drop me off at the IGA? I can get somebody to bring me back."

"Don't y'all have some family hereabouts?"

"His mother was the last one. She died a couple of months back."

I could hear the horses nickering out in the pasture, the windmill shifting in the breeze, the blades ginning furiously.

"Tell you what, Ms. Pickett. I'll carry you down to the grocery and wait for you, then I'll go back up to the jail and talk to Wilbur again."

Her face showed no expression.

"He thinks growing up here means people will take his word over a rich man's. That's why he loses out in all his business deals. That's just Wilbur. But this time it's different, isn't it?" she said.

"Well, you never know," I lied, then waited for her out by my Avalon.

Dust devils were blowing out of the hills in the distance and the wind was hot and dry and thick with grasshoppers.

I lived by myself in a three-story purple-brick Victorian home in the west end of the county. It had a wide, screened-in gallery and a veranda on the second floor, and the front and back yards were framed by poplar trees and blooming myrtle and the flower beds planted with hydrangeas and yellow and red roses. I parked the Avalon in back and fixed a chicken sandwich and plate of stuffed eggs and potato salad and a glass of iced tea for lunch and ate it at the kitchen table.

The interior of the house was oak and mahogany, and the wind seemed to fill every room with the presence of all my ancestors who had lived there. From my window I could see my barn and horse lot and my Morgan named Beau rolling on his side in the pasture, the windmill ginning on the far side of the barn roof, the fields of melons, corn, strawberries, cantaloupes, beans, and tomatoes that a neighbor farmed on shares, and a two-acre tank, or lake, that the state had stocked with bream and big-mouth bass.

At the far end of my property was a stand of hardwoods, then the bluffs over the river, which was slate green in late summer and roiling and full of mud and cottonwood bloom in the spring.

The sun went behind the clouds and the wind was cool inside the house, as though it were being drawn through the windows by a huge attic fan. But I could not concentrate on the fine day or the fact that where I lived had always been for me the best place on earth. Instead I kept thinking of Wilbur Pickett and the uncomfortable reality that I had never come to terms with my feelings for Peggy Jean Murphy, who was another man's wife now, or with the memory of what it was like to feel her hand slip down the small of my back, her thighs cradling my hips, while I came inside a woman for the first time and the fecund odor of damp earth and bruised grass and wildflowers rose around us in a green envelope that for a moment seemed to hold together the vanity of my passion and her unrequited love for a dead soldier.

I picked up the phone and called Marvin Pomroy at the prosecutor's office.

"I'm representing Wilbur Pickett," I said.

"That's funny. I just talked to him. He said you told him to drop dead," Marvin said.

"Must have been a bad echo in the cellhouse."

"Let me warn you beforehand, Billy Bob. Earl Deitrich wants Wilbur's head on a pike."

"Really? Say, I had a strange-looking fellow named Skyler Doolittle in my office this morning. He said something about doing time and burning down a church."

"He was pestering me, too. You don't remember him?" Marvin said.

"No."

"He got drunk and plowed into a church bus outside Goliad. The bus burned. Four or five kids didn't make it out," he said.

"Wilbur's wife is blind and by herself. Let Wilbur go on recognizance."

"We're talking about a three-hundred-thousand theft," Marvin said.

"According to Earl Deitrich. Has anyone ever seen those bonds?"

"Yeah, his wife. Is she lying, too?" When I didn't answer, he said, "You still there?"

"I'm going up to see Wilbur now. I don't want anybody questioning him unless I'm there."

"You ought to take a nap, get more rest. Your moods… Never mind. Have a good day," he said, and hung up.

That night the phone rang during a terrible electric storm. The rain was beating against the windows, and the yard was flooded and quivering with lightning and the barn doors crashed back and forth against the jamb.

"That young man, Pickett, is he still in jail?" the voice said.

"Who is this?"

"I think perhaps a degree of wrong is being done here."

"A degree of wrong?" I said.

"Yes."

Then the voice came together with an image, that of a small, nervous, dark-haired man, with a hawk's nose and thick glasses, in a blue suit with dandruff on the shoulders. What was the name? Green? Greenberg?

"You're Mr. Greenbaum. The accountant. You were at the Deitrichs' luncheon yesterday," I said.

The line went dead.