Heartwood (33 page)

Marvin Pomroy and I drove to the crime scene together. The paramedics zipped up a black bag over Skyler’s face and loaded the body into an ambulance and drove away with it, and Hugo Roberts’s deputies strung yellow crime scene tape through the trees that surrounded the lichen-painted rocks where Skyler had died.

“You got any fix on Jessie Stump?” Marvin asked Hugo.

“The 911 come in from a convenience store three miles down the highway. A car was stole out of a lady’s driveway not far away about the same time,” Hugo said.
also run a powder-residue test on Jeff Deitrich and any of his friends who happen to be hanging around,” I said.

“Right now the number one suspect is Jessie Stump,” Hugo said.

“The entry wound was at the top of his chest. The exit wound was in his rib cage. What does that suggest to you, Hugo?” I said.

“That a bullet goes in one place and out the other,” he replied, and pared a fingernail with a penknife.

A young uniformed deputy, new to the department, walked down the hillside through the pine trees, holding a .30-06 shell on the tip of a pencil.

“Found it on the crest up there. You can even see the shooter’s boot and knee prints in the pine needles. It looks like he fired from the right side of the trunk, which means he’s probably right-handed …” He paused. “I do something wrong?” he said, looking at Hugo’s face.

That afternoon I drove down the long valley and across the cattleguard in front of the Deitrich home and walked up the huge slabs of black stone that formed the front steps. When no one answered the chimes I walked around the side of the house to the terrace, which was shaded by a black-and-white-striped canopy. Peggy Jean and Jeff and Earl sat at a glass-topped table, drinking daiquiris, while shish kebab smoked on a barbecue pit and young people I didn’t know swam in the pool.

Fletcher Grinnel, the ex-mercenary, stepped out of the French doors with a drink tray, paused momentarily when he saw me, smiling either deferentially or to himself, then set down the tray and painted the shish kebab on the grill with a small brush.

“Why don’t you invite yourself over?” Earl said.

“Hugo Roberts wouldn’t get a warrant on your
home. But I thought I should let you know what you’ve done,” I said.

“Sit down with us, Billy Bob. It’s Sunday. Can’t we be friends for today?” Peggy Jean said.

“Skyler Doolittle is dead. If I had to bet on the shooter, I’d put my money on either Fletcher over there, grimacing into the smoke, or Jeff and his friends wondering if they should go to a swimming party this afternoon or, say, gang-rape a Mexican girl,” I said.

Jeff wore a Hawaiian shirt open on his chest. He slanted his head sideways and pushed the curls off his forehead with the tips of his fingers, studying my words with the idle concentration he might show a street beggar. Then he shook his head slowly as though he were bemused by a metaphysical absurdity and let his eyes wander out onto the swimming pool.

“Fletcher, go inside and call the sheriff’s office and find out what this is about,” Earl said.

“Should I show Mr. Holland to his car?” Fletcher asked.

“That’s a possibility,” Earl said.

“You know what you’ve let either this hired moron or your psychopath of a son do?” I said to Earl. “Skyler Doolittle had gotten Jessie Stump off your case. They were headed for Matagorda Bay, out of your life. But somebody murdered this harmless, gentle man with a .30-06 rifle while Jessie was shaving a few feet away. It looked like Jessie tried to stop the bleeding with his shirt. Skyler’s blood was smeared over everything in the area, which means Jessie probably tried to drag him out of the line of fire. That’s the man who’s probably up in your tree line now, Earl.”

Fletcher Grinnel set down the barbecue brush on a
white plate and wiped his fingers with a paper towel and approached me, his lips pursed whimsically.

“No,” Peggy Jean said, and rose from her chair. She took me by the arm. “You walk with me, Billy Bob. This kind of thing is not going to happen at our house.”

She held my arm tightly, almost in a romantic fashion. Her breast touched my arm and her hip brushed against mine as we walked toward the front of the house. When we were around the corner of the building I felt the tension go out of her grip and I stepped away from her.

“You tried to warn Skyler. When this plays out in a courtroom, that’ll count for something,” I said.

“Whatever do you mean?”

“You left him a note on a pine branch outside the cave he and Stump were hidden in.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“He saw you picking blackberries on the creek. Why do you deny a good deed?”

“You listen, Billy Bob. My husband has gambled away or mismanaged or leveraged everything we own. After all the years I’ve spent on this marriage I’m not about to accept a life of genteel poverty in Deaf Smith. I’m bringing civil suit against Wilbur Pickett for the damage he’s done to us. Don’t you dare lie to me about the theft of those bonds, either. That man stole them and he’s going to pay for it.”

“Skyler Doolittle was murdered this morning, probably by a member of your household, and you’re talking about a civil suit?”

The blood climbed into her face.

“Maybe I’m a victim here, too. Did that ever occur to you?” she said.

“Yes, it did …”

“Then why do you treat me the way you do?” She
stepped close to me and hit me in the chest with the flat of her fist, then again, desperately, her jawbone flexing. “We could have made it work. Why weren’t you willing to try?”

“Because you don’t love what we are, Peggy Jean. You’re in love with what we were.”

Her face crinkled high up on one cheek, like a flower held too close to heat. Then she turned and went into the house, her elbows cupped tightly in her palms, her back shaking.

Monday evening Ronnie Cruise turned off the road into my driveway and parked by the barn, out of view from the front. He was driving Cholo Ramirez’s ’49 Mercury, and an odor of burning rubber and oil rose from the tires and engine. Ronnie got out of the car and took off his shades and looked back down the drive at the road.

“What are you doing with Cholo’s car?” I said.

“I just got it out of the pound. Both our names were on the pink slip,” he said.

“Somebody after you, Ronnie?”

“I cruised Val’s. Some guys in a roll-bar rig followed me out. I got to sit down. I didn’t get no sleep last night.”

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

“I’m gonna save you a lot of time. My uncle, the guy who owns the auto shop where I work? He’s mobbed-up. Him and Cholo and some other guys, guys out of Galveston, were working the stick-up scam on Deitrich’s business friends. There’s this old skeet club between Conroe and Houston, except now it’s got water beds and chippies in it. Deitrich would steer his friends to the card
game, then Cholo and the others would take it down. I got some guilt over this.”

“You said you weren’t involved with it.”

“You not understanding me. Yesterday I saw this dude Johnny Krause with my uncle. I asked my uncle, ‘Hey, what are you doing with this guy?’ He goes, ‘Johnny was one of the take-down artists on the last job at the skeet club.’ I go, ‘That’s the guy who killed Cholo.’

“My uncle goes, ‘Cholo wasn’t in on that last one, so he didn’t know who Johnny was when he run into him at the boxing gym. Too bad it shakes out like that sometimes.’

“Too bad? That’s my own uncle talking like Cholo was a sack of shit. I told my uncle to go fuck himself. I hope the cops nail his chop shop and jam a grease gun up his ass.”

“You want to come inside?”

“Yeah, I’d like that,” he said.

In the kitchen he sat at the table and drank an RC Cola and ate a ham and lettuce sandwich with his face close to the plate. He wore a pair of wash-faded Levi’s without a belt and a purple T-shirt razored off below the nipples. His eyes kept studying mine, his lips seeming to form words that he rubbed away with the back of a finger before he completed them.

“What eke did you come here to tell me, Ronnie?” I asked.

“Some Purple Hearts got it that Jeff Deitrich wants to do Essie, make her pull a train. The word is he’s gonna use some bikers, meth-heads that don’t got boundaries. Then he’s gonna pop your boy.”

“Say that again.”

“They’re gonna kill Lucas after they get finished with
Essie. What world you live in, Mr. Holland? You don’t think Jeff and his friends got it in them?”

I was standing up when he said this, and I could feel the blood pounding in my wrists and temples, and for some reason I wanted to attack him with my fists.

“Here’s what it is, Mr. Holland,” he said. “I ain’t gonna let Jeff get away with this. You remember the two Viscounts who put their hands all over Essie in a movie theater, the ones who took a real bad bounce off a roof? I didn’t throw them off, but the choices they had weren’t too good. They were either gonna grow new kneecaps or learn how to fly.

“Since that day no Viscount has bothered a Purple Heart or one of our girls. I’m telling you this because I heard about some stuff you done when you were a Texas Ranger, about dope mules that got a playing card stuck down their throats in Coahuila. I don’t got any playing cards with Purple Hearts on them, but maybe Jeff and his friends are gonna ask themselves how many funerals they want to go to.”

I sat down at the table. The wood felt cold and hard against my forearms.

“You’re going to take somebody out?” I said, my words catching in my throat.

“You don’t want it to get done, or you don’t want to know about it? You rather your boy be killed? Which one you want, Mr. Holland?”

That same night Wilbur Pickett appeared in the ESPN television broadcast booth high above an indoor arena in Mesquite, where a rodeo was in progress. Wilbur wore a new gray Stetson with a blue cord tied around the crown and a snap-button silver and blue cowboy shirt that rang
like ice water on his shoulders. Kippy Jo sat next to him, wearing dark glasses, her forearm touching Wilbur’s.

The broadcaster was a short, wiry, lantern-jawed, ex–bull rider himself, with recessed buckshot eyes and a high-pitched East Texas accent that was like tin being stripped off a roof. His teeth were as rectangular as tombstones when he grinned and pushed the microphone in front of Wilbur.

“It’s good to see you, boy. The last time you was here you was coming out of chute number 6 on a bull named Bad Whiskey. That was the only bull on the circuit besides Bodacious could run the clowns up the boards, turn around in midair, and give you a view from El Paso to Texarkana, all in one hop,” the announcer said.

“I appreciate being here, W.D. It’s a real opportunity for me …”

“It’s a treat having you drop by to do color for us again,” the announcer interrupted. “We’re gonna take a break in a minute, then I want your opinion on a bulldogging buddy of yours out of Quanah …”

Wilbur sat rigidly in the chair, his right hand clenched around his left wrist. He leaned toward the microphone, the brim of his hat partly shadowing his face, as though he were creating a private space in which he was about to confide a secret to a solitary individual.

“My wife says I got to do this or I ain’t never gonna have no peace,” he said. “I want to apologize to all the friends and rodeo fans I let down. I was accused of stealing from a man in Deaf Smith. I told everybody I didn’t do it, but I lied. I took fifty thousand dollars from this fellow. He says it was more … It wasn’t but that don’t matter. I stole and I lied about it and I’m sorry. Thanks for having me on, W.D.”

Both Wilbur and Kippy Jo walked off camera. The
announcer stared blankly after them, then said, “I guess we’ll go to a commercial now. I don’t know about y’all, but I still figure Wilbur T. Pickett for a special kind of rodeo cowboy.”

It didn’t take long. Earl and Peggy Jean Deitrich were in my office the next afternoon with their attorney, a towering, likable man named Clayton Spangler, who was rumored to own fifty thousand acres of the old XIT Ranch around Dalhart. Peggy Jean wore a white suit and sheer white hose and sat with her legs crossed, her face rouged high up on the cheekbones, so that her whole manner seemed angular and pointed, like the cutting edge of an instrument. Earl had come directly from the handball court at the country club, and his hair was still wet from his shower, his skin glowing with health and the excitement of the moment.

I felt like a mortician presiding over my best friend’s wake while his enemies took the ice from his body and dropped it in their beer.

“It seems like an equitable way of resolving the whole affair,” Clayton said.

“All his and Kippy Jo’s two hundred acres in Wyoming? With all mineral rights? Forget it,” I said.

“How about this scenario instead?” Earl said, leaning forward. “We refile criminal charges against Pickett, sue him in civil court, and take both the Wyoming tract and his place out on the hardpan and get a judgment against everything he makes in the future.”

“I’ll talk to him,” I said, replying to Clayton Spangler rather than to Earl.

“It’s good seeing you again, Billy Bob,” Clayton said, and stood up and shook hands.

Peggy Jean stood by the window, looking down into
the street. Against the shadowy, cool colors of my office her suit seemed woven from light. She brushed at the back of her neck with her fingers, bending her knees slightly to see someone through the blinds, then rubbing her fingertips idly, totally oblivious to the people around her.

She and Earl went out the door, but Clayton Spangler hung back a moment.

“This one has got a personal and ugly bent to it. That’s not my way of conducting business. Come back with something reasonable and we’ll lock the barn door on it,” he said.

“Sounds good, Clayton. Earl and his kind put me in mind of livestock with the red scours,” I said.

“I tried,” he said.

That evening, when I came home, Lucas’s pickup truck was in the driveway and he was sitting on the tailgate, swinging his feet in the dirt. His straw hat was pushed up on his forehead and his reddish-blond hair stuck out on his brow. Through the kitchen window I saw Esmeralda washing dishes at the sink.