'Sammy Mace is mobbed-up, Jack,' I said.
'Then why isn't he in Huntsville? Look, I don't feel good about some things Darl has done. So I've tried to help out.'
'Oh?'
'Felix Ringo is an old friend I knew at Benning. He's got a lot of ties in the Hispanic community. He found a kid who might clear Lucas.'
I didn't reply. I looked into his eyes.
'Eat with us. Let's end all this foolishness,' he said.
'Found which kid?' I asked.
'A biker. Belongs to a gang called the Purple Hearts. He's had a couple of beefs with Bunny Vogel.'
Then Felix Ringo and Sammy Mace were under the shed, smiling, nodding, while the black man ladled steaks onto metal plates. Out on the boat, Emma Vanzandt stepped out of the cabin with sunglasses on and shook out her hair.
Sammy Mace was in his fifties now, his hair silver and combed straight back on his head, his face distinguished, almost intellectual with the square, rimless glasses he wore. Except for his eyes, which did not match his smile. They studied me, then flexed at the corners with recognition.
'You were a uniform in Houston? A Texas Ranger got in some trouble later?' he said.
'Good memory, Sammy,' I said.
'You remember me?'
'You bet. You killed a Houston cop.'
'Hey,' he said playfully, raising a finger on each hand, as though he were warding off bees. 'I shot a guy coming through my bedroom window without no shield in his hand, in the middle of the night, in a neighborhood with cannibals mugging old people down at the church.'
'What's with this guy?' Felix Ringo said.
'Nothing. Billy Bob's all right. He's just trying to work some things out,' Jack said.
'You take it easy, Jack,' I said.
I walked back down the dock toward my car. The wind was warm on my back, the water sliding through pebbles and sand onto the grass. I heard Jack's leather sandals behind me.
'That kid's going to come to your office. His name's Virgil Morales,' he said.
'Why are you doing this?' I asked.
'Because you keep laying off your problem on Darl. Don't make it hard. Take the favor.'
'Does Sammy Mace come with it?'
'He's got the biggest chain of computer outlets in south Texas. I lit up villages in Vietnam; you killed people in Mexico. Why don't you get your nose out of the air?'
When I drove away I saw Felix Ringo screw a cigarette into a gold holder, then stop what he was doing and rise from his chair when Emma Vanzandt joined their table. The black cook took a bottle of chilled wine from an ice bucket, wrapped it in a towel, and poured into the goblets on the table. The diners cut into their steaks and ate with the poise of people on the cover of Southern Living.
I wanted to take Jack Vanzandt off at the neck.
After dinner I took out my mother's old family photo album and began leafing through the stiffened pages of forty years ago. At the top of the page my mother, always the librarian, had written the year each group of pictures was taken. On the pages marked 1956 were five black-and-white photos of my father at work or at a company picnic. One shot showed him out on the pipeline, smiling, his welder's hood pushed up on his head, a teenage boy in pinstripe overalls standing behind him with an electrical brush in his hands to clean the weld on the pipe joint. In another photo, my father sat at a picnic table filled with lean-faced blue-collar men and their wives. In the midst of the adults was the same teenage boy, burr-headed, jug-eared, his face an incongruous tin pie plate among those grinning at the camera.
I went to Marvin Pomroy's office in the morning and got him to pull Garland T. Moon's jacket. The first of many mug shots was paper-clipped to the second page. I pulled it loose and dropped it and the two photos from my mother's album on Marvin's desk.
'This mug shot was taken when Moon was seventeen. Look at the kid in the pictures of my father,' I said.
Marvin propped his elbows on the blotter and peered down through his glasses at the photos, his fingers on his temples.