The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“Poison would have caused convulsions and vomiting. The dog simply went to sleep. You still think Saber wasn’t involved?”

He waited for my reply.

“Can we get him a bondsman?” I asked.

“He might be better off in jail. Anyway, we can’t mix in the family business of other people.”

> “Hopkins rubbed the soles of our shoes in the paint on Mr. Krauser’s floor.”

“I think it’s time we have a talk with Mr. Harrelson.”

“Grady?”

“No, his father.”

We crossed the street to Kelly’s steak house, one of my father’s favorite downtown spots. His face was untroubled, perhaps even at peace, his fedora tilted over one eye, his clothes free of cigarette smoke. I wondered if we had entered a new day.

Chapter

13

I WAS SURPRISED HOW easily we gained access to Clint Harrelson, since he was known as a recluse and an introvert. My father called him, and he invited us to his home. As we opened the piked gate and entered the main grounds of the estate, I noticed how my father looked at the details surrounding him; I knew what he was thinking. The Harrelson estate was a replica, at least generically, of the Louisiana home where my father was born in 1899, except the brick walkways and live oaks and camellia bushes and creamy columns and emerald-green lawn and clumps of pink and lavender wisteria and subterranean garage of the Harrelson estate were real. They were not an abstraction or part of a postbellum era that had become little more than a decaying memory on a polluted bayou.

Grady had no siblings nor a mother. Grady told others she had died of breast cancer in a Mexico City clinic. Others said she’d died in a plane crash with her Brazilian lover, a famous polo player and owner of a coffee plantation. Regardless of how she died, all of her genes and physical characteristics must have gone into her son, because Grady looked nothing like his father. Texas was full of loud, porcine oilmen who made fortunes during the war. They combined a predatory form of capitalism with down-home John Wayne folksiness and couldn’t wait to spit a mouthful of Red Man on the lawn of a country-club terrace. Mr. Harrelson was not one of these. He was a slight ascetic-looking man with a thin, bloodless nose and a V-shaped chin and a broad forehead and steel-rimmed glasses and white-gold hair cut short. He wore a white robe and slippers on his small feet and had a book in one hand. “Oh, yes, you’re Mr. Broussard.” He glanced at his watch. “Right on time. Come in.”

He didn’t bother to acknowledge me. My father waited for him to extend his hand, but he didn’t.

“This is Aaron, my son,” my father said.

“Yes, how are you?” Mr. Harrelson said. “Follow me, if you would.” He paused at the staircase. It was wide enough to drive a truck up, the handrail and steps made of restored cypress, the grain polished to a glossy amber. “Our guests are here, Grady!”

His voice had no inflection, no regional accent. His eyes were a grayish blue. They showed neither interest nor dislike and seemed to look inward rather than out. He made me think of a mathematician or a chemist, not the owner of rice mills and a drilling company. There was an antiseptic cleanliness about him that made me wonder if his glands were capable of secretion. If he had a botanical equivalent, it was a hothouse plant that had never seen sunlight or one that had been leeched of its chlorophyll.

He went into the living room and sat down in a stuffed chair by the fireplace. There was a tea service on the coffee table with a cup for one. He raised his eyebrows and gestured toward a divan on the other side of the fireplace. “Let’s see if I have everything straight. It started with the Epstein girl and progressed to a brick being thrown through the windshield of Grady’s car, right? So your son wishes to own up and apologize or pay damages, or you want me to speak to the Atlas boy’s father? Or some combination thereof? Does that sum it up?”

I stole a glance at my father. I could not count the number of social indiscretions that, in his eyes, Mr. Harrelson had already committed.

“You have a very attractive home,” my father said. “I was admiring your camellia bushes. They put me in mind of the place where I grew up.”

Mr. Harrelson set his book facedown on the table, splayed open against the spine; he crossed his legs, his robe falling loose. He pawed at a place below one eye. There were white bookcases on either side of the fireplace. The titles of the books had to do with history and economics. The only novelist I recognized was Ayn Rand.

“Can you tell me why you’re here?” Mr. Harrelson asked.

“My son has been accused of things he hasn’t done. This morning he was charged with a break-in. The possibility that someone is doing this to him deliberately is difficult to abide.” He held his gaze on Mr. Harrelson.

“Does your indignation extend to the Atlas boy losing an eye?” Mr. Harrelson said.

“Yes, it does. I’m bothered by another factor as well. The Atlas family are criminals. Your son was in the company of both the father and the son and a gangster named Frankie Carbo. Does that seem normal to you?”

Mr. Harrelson touched at his nose with one knuckle. He looked toward the staircase. “Come down here, Grady.”

Barefoot, Grady walked down the stairs and into the living room. He was wearing a T-shirt cut off at the mid-abdomen and beltless Levi’s that hung below the navel. His tan had deepened, and his body tone was as supple and smooth as warm tallow. “What’s going on, Pop?”

“This gentleman says you were with a gangster named Carbo.”

“Not so. I saw Vick Atlas at a nightclub. Vick was at another table and joined us. That’s about all there was to it.”

“You urinated in Aaron’s car,” my father said.