Heartwood (2 page)

“Last year I inherited half a city block in downtown Houston,” Earl said to me, smiling, a glass of iced tea in his hand. He was a handsome man, at ease in his corduroys and soft burnt-orange shirt, his fine brown hair combed like a little boy’s across his forehead. There was nothing directly aggressive about Earl, but his conversation always had to do with himself, or what he owned, or the steelhead fishing trips he took to Idaho or up on the St. Lawrence River. If he had any interest in anyone outside his own frame of reference, he gave no sign of it.

“But it’s my worst nightmare,” he went on. “A failed savings and loan had the lease on the site. The government seized the savings and loan, and I can’t do anything with the property. The government doesn’t pay rent on seized properties and at the same time I have a six-figure tax obligation on the land. Can you believe that?”

“This has something to do with me?” I asked.

“It might,” he replied.

“Not interested,” I said.

He winked and squeezed my forearm with two fingers. “Let’s eat some lunch,” he said.

Then he followed my gaze out to the horse lot where Wilbur was working.

“You know Wilbur?” he said.

“I’ve bought horses from him.”

“We’ll invite him in.”

“You don’t need to do that, Earl,” I said.

“I like him.” He cut his head philosophically. “Sometimes I wish I could trade places with a guy like that,” he said.

I was soon to relearn an old lesson about the few very rich people I had known. Their cruelty was seldom deliberate, but its effect was more injurious than if it were the result of a calculated act, primarily because the victim was made to understand how insignificant his life really was.

An elderly black man, whose name was John, went out to the horse lot to get Wilbur, who looked uncertainly at the house a moment, then washed his hands and forearms and face with a garden hose and came in through the kitchen. He pulled up one of the cushioned redwood chairs to the table and nodded politely while he was introduced, his shirtfront plastered against his chest, his neck cuffed with fresh sunburn.

“Y’all pardon my appearance,” he said.

“Don’t worry about that. Eat up,” Earl said.

“It looks mighty good, I’ll tell you that,” Wilbur said.

But Earl was not listening now. “I want to show y’all a real piece of history,” Earl said to the others, and opened a blue velvet box, inside of which was a huge brass-cased vest watch with a thick, square-link chain. “This was taken off a Mexican prisoner at the battle of San Jacinto in 1836. The story is the Mexican looted it off a dead Texan at the Alamo. I have a feeling this was one day he wished he’d left it at home.”

The men at the table laughed.

Earl opened the hinged casing on each side of the watch and held it up by the chain. The watch twisted in a circle, like an impaired butterfly, a refracted, oily light wobbling on the yellowed face and Roman numerals.

“That come from the Alamo?” Wilbur said.

“You ever see one like it?” Earl said.

“No, sir. But my ancestor is supposed to have fought at San Jacinto. That’s the good part of the story. The bad part is the family says he stole horses and sold them to both sides,” Wilbur said.

But no one laughed, and Wilbur blinked and looked at a spot on the wall.

“John, would you bring a second glass for everyone so we can have some wine?” Earl said to the elderly black man.

“Yes, sir, right away,” John replied.

“Y’all have to come up on the Gallatin in Montana,” Earl said. “We catch five-pound rainbow right out the front door.”

Wilbur had picked up the watch from the velvet case and was looking at the calligraphy incised on the case. Without missing a beat in his description of Montana trout fishing, Earl reached out and gingerly lifted the watch by its chain out of Wilbur’s hand and replaced it in the box and closed the lid.

Wilbur’s face was like a pink lightbulb.

I finished eating and turned to Peggy Jean.

“I have to get back to the office. It was surely a fine lunch,” I said.

“Yeah, we’ll talk more later about that real estate problem I mentioned,” Earl said.

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

“You’ll see,” Earl said, and winked again. “Anyway, I
want y’all to see the alligator I dumped in my pond,” he said to the others. Then he turned to Wilbur and said, “You don’t need to finish that fence today. Just help John clean up here and we’ll call it square.”

Earl and his guests went out the door and strolled through a peach orchard that was white with bloom. Wilbur stood for a long time by the plank table, his face empty, his leather work gloves sticking from his back pocket.

“You go on and finish what you were doing out there. John and I will take care of things here,” Peggy Jean said.

“No, ma’am, I don’t mind doing it. I’m always glad to hep out,” Wilbur said, and began stacking dirty plates one on top of another.

I walked out to my car, into the bright, cool air and the smell of flowers and horses in the fields, and decided I couldn’t afford any more lunches with Earl Deitrich.

But the lunch and its aftermath were not over. At four that afternoon Earl called me at my office on the town square.

“Have you seen that sonofabitch?” he said.

“Pardon?” I said.

“Wilbur Pickett. I put that watch on my office desk. When Peggy Jean’s back was turned, he went in after it.”

“Wilbur? That’s hard to believe.”

“Believe this. He didn’t take just the watch. My safe door was open. He robbed me of three hundred thousand dollars in bearer bonds.”

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 sheriff’s 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 gangbangers. 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 startled 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.”