Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“This will be over soon,” I said.

“No, it won’t, Weldon. They’re like the fascists. They torture with passion and murder with indifference.”

“They messed with the wrong bunch.”

“The Hollands?”

“Sure. You’re a Holland, too. How’s it feel?”

“You still believe there’s light in all men. They know that about you. They also know you’ll never change, that you’ll always be bound by the restraints of conscience.”

“You worry too much, kid.”

She squeezed my arm and turned toward the wall, the sheet pulled over her shoulder.

I showered and dressed and called again for a taxi. As I drove away with the cabbie, I looked through the rear window at the darkened amusement pier and the great slate-green moonlit roll and pitch of the Gulf, and I felt a pang in my heart that I couldn’t explain. Maybe it was because I felt the spring and summer of our lives had slipped away, as though a thief had sneaked onto the pier and clicked off the switch on the Ferris wheel before we could reverse the terrible attrition that time imposes on us all. Or did my sense of mutability have another source? In 1942 Nazi U-boats had lain silently in wolf packs under the Gulf, waiting for the oil tankers that sailed from the Houston Ship Channel and the oil refineries in Baton Rouge. Four of them had been sunk by depth charges and were supposedly scudding along the Gulf’s bottom, some of the crew members still aboard, their uniforms and empty eye sockets strung with seaweed. I wondered if their time in history was about to roll round again, like Pharaoh and his chariots laboring up on the shores of the Red Sea, determined that God’s chosen would never get away from the points of their spears.

Chapter

23

THE LOCATION OF the office I maintained in downtown Houston was one I had chosen for reasons that had nothing to do with commerce. The building was in a seedy area off Congress Street and looked more like a structure you would find in the New Orleans French Quarter or Old Natchez than in a commercial center. It was made of stucco and crumbling brick and had a courtyard and an upstairs balcony with Spanish grillwork. More important, one wall in the courtyard contained a wall within a wall, one constructed of heavy stones that were out of context, rocks not from the coastal plains but perhaps from the bed of the Comal or Guadalupe River or the rough terrain of the Texas hill country. Regardless of their origins, the wall within a wall resembled a mosaic, the rocks held together more by their weight and their chiseled shape than by mortar and plaster. According to the legend, three Texas soldiers had been executed against this wall by Santa Ana’s troops just before Santa Ana was entrapped, not far away, in the San Jacinto Basin on April 21, 1836.

These three soldiers, who in all probability were boys, may have lost their lives hours before Texas won its independence. A Mexican lady used to run a flower stall between two buildings on Congress Street, right next to Eddy Pearl’s pawnshop, and once a week I bought a bouquet from her and put it in a ceramic vase filled with water and set it in front of the wall within a wall.

I had already gone to the Houston police station and had just gotten off the telephone with an assistant to the state attorney in Austin when Roy Wiseheart stuck his head in my office door and said, “Buy you lunch, Lieutenant?”

“Another time,” I replied.

He stepped inside without being invited and closed the door behind him. He was dressed in a powder-blue sport coat and a polo shirt and pressed gray slacks and oxblood tasseled loafers, his face fresh and ruddy, as though he had just come from his gym. Roy had a perpetual aura of youthfulness that made me wonder if there wasn’t a bit of Dorian Gray in his glue. “You mad at me about something?” he said, pulling up a chair.

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Because you look like it,” he replied.

I told him of Slakely’s visit to our house and what Rosita had done. Roy’s face was composed while he listened, not one hair out of place, his eyes never blinking or leaving mine.

“You want me to look into it?” he said.

“In order to do what?”

“I don’t know. Blitz the sod, as Jerry Fallon would say. Your troubles make mine sound minor.”

“What troubles?”

He looked through the doorway into the side office where my secretary was working. I got up and closed the door. “What’s the problem, Roy?” I said, barely able to hide my impatience.

“I’m co-producing Linda Gail’s movie. Her husband showed up on the set down in Mexico. I think he’s got the wrong idea.”

“Regarding what?”

“I guess there’re rumors going around about me and Linda Gail.”

“The rumors aren’t true?” I said.

“I suspect it’s a matter of how you look at it. Things happen on a set. I can’t say I’ve always stayed on the straight and narrow.”

“What kind of statement is that?”