'I'm going to put Darl Vanzandt on the stand,' I said.
That night there was still no call from Mary Beth. In the morning I drove to the office, then walked to the thrift store operated by the Baptist church, where Emma Vanzandt was a volunteer worker.
She was in back, sorting donated clothes on a long wood table. She wore tailored jeans and red pumps and a white silk blouse with red beads. She didn't bother to look up when I approached her.
'Jack and Felix Ringo gave me some witnesses that are almost too good to be true,' I said.
'Oh, how grand,' she said.
'I think Jack may have done it to get me off your son's back.'
She looked me in the face and silently formed the word stepson with her mouth.
'Excuse me, your stepson, Darl.'
'Why tell me, good sir?'
'Because Darl's going on the stand just the same.'
'Would you kindly take the okra out of your mouth and explain what you're talking about.'
'Darl was at Shorty's the night Roseanne Hazlitt was attacked. He's mentally defective and has a violent history. He's beaten women with his fists. He goes into rages with little provocation. You figure it out, Emma.'
'Ah, our conscience feels better now, doesn't it? You take Jack's favor, but to prove your integrity, you subpoena a walking basket case and fuck him cross-eyed in front of a jury of nigras and Mexicans.'
A woman paying for her purchase at the counter turned around with her mouth open.
'Tell Jack what I said.'
I walked back out the front door. Then I heard her behind me. In the sunlight her makeup looked like a white and pink mask stretched on her face, her black hair pulled tightly back on her forehead, her eyes aglitter with anger or uppers or whatever energy it was that drove her.
'You're a fool,' she said.
'Why?'
Her mouth was thick with lipstick, slightly opened, her eyes fastened on mine, as though she were on the edge of saying something that would forever make me party to a secret that she imparted to no one.
'Bunny Vogel,' she said.
'What?'
Then the moment went out of her eyes.
'I wish I were a man. I'd beat the shit out of you. I truly hate you, Billy Bob Holland,' she said.
My father was both a tack and hot-pass welder on pipelines for thirty years, but all his jobs came from the same company, one that contracted statewide out of Houston. I called their office and asked the lady in charge of payroll if their records would indicate whether my father ever worked around Waco in the late 1930s or early 1940s.
'My heavens, that's a long time ago,' she said.
'It's really important,' I said.
'A lot of our old records are on the computer now, but employees' names of fifty years ago, that's another matter—'
'I don't understand.'
'The company has to know where all its pipe is. But back during the Depression a lot of men were hired by the day and paid in cash. WPA boys, drifters off the highway, they came and they went.'
And the company didn't have to pay union wages or into the Social Security fund, either, I thought.