Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

elvet case and was looking at the calligraphy incised on the case. Without missing a beat in his description of Montana trout fishing, Earl reached out and gingerly lifted the watch by its chain out of Wilbur’s hand and replaced it in the box and closed the lid.

Wilbur’s face was like a pink lightbulb.

I finished eating and turned to Peggy Jean.

“I have to get back to the office. It was surely a fine lunch,” I said.

“Yeah, we’ll talk more later about that real estate problem I mentioned,” Earl said.

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

“You’ll see,” Earl said, and winked again. “Anyway, I want y’all to see the alligator I dumped in my pond,” he said to the others. Then he turned to Wilbur and said, “You don’t need to finish that fence today. Just help John clean up here and we’ll call it square.”

Earl and his guests went out the door and strolled through a peach orchard that was white with bloom. Wilbur stood for a long time by the plank table, his face empty, his leather work gloves sticking from his back pocket.

“You go on and finish what you were doing out there. John and I will take care of things here,” Peggy Jean said.

“No, ma’am, I don’t mind doing it. I’m always glad to hep out,” Wilbur said, and began stacking dirty plates one on top of another.

I walked out to my car, into the bright, cool air and the smell of flowers and horses in the fields, and decided I couldn’t afford any more lunches with Earl Deitrich.

But the lunch and its aftermath were not over. At four that afternoon Earl called me at my office on the town square.

“Have you seen that sonofabitch?” he said.

“Pardon?” I said.

“Wilbur Pickett. I put that watch on my office desk. When Peggy Jean’s back was turned, he went in after it.”

“Wilbur? That’s hard to believe.”

“Believe this. He didn’t take just the watch. My safe door was open. He robbed me of three hundred thousand dollars in bearer bonds.”

2

Temple Carrol was a private investigator who lived down the road from me with her invalid father and did investigations for me during discovery. Her youthful looks and baby fat and the way she sometimes chewed gum and piled her chestnut hair on top of her head while you were talking to her were deceptive. She had been a patrolwoman in Dallas, a sheriff’s deputy in Fort Bend County, and a gunbull in Angola Penitentiary over in Louisiana. People who got in her face did so only once.

I stood at the second-story window of my law office and looked across the square at the sandstone courthouse. High above the oak trees that shaded the lawn were the grilled and barred windows of the jail, where Wilbur Pickett had remained since his arrest last night.

Temple sat in a swayback deerhide chair by my desk, talking about East Los Angeles or San Antonio gangbangers. Her face and chest were slatted with shadows from the window blinds.

“Are you listening?” she said.

“Sure. The Purple Hearts.”

“Right. They were in East L.A. in the sixties. Now they’re in San Antone. Their warlord is this kid Cholo Ramirez, your genuine Latino Cro-Magnon. He skipped his own plea-agreement hearing. All he had to do was be there and he would have walked. I picked him up for the bondsman behind a crack house in Austin and hooked him to the D-ring on my back floor, and he started telling me he was mobbed-up and he could rat out some greaseballs in San Antone.

“I go, ‘Mobbed-up, like with the Dixie Mafia?’

“He goes, ‘They’re taking down rich marks in a card game, then messing up their heads so they can’t report it. What I’m saying to you, gringita, is there’s a lot of guys out there scared shitless and full of guilt with their bank accounts cleaned out. That ought to be worth my charges as well as something for me to visit my family in Guadalajara.’

“I go, ‘All you had to do was show up at your plea. You would have been out of it.’

“He says, ‘I had a bad night. I slept late. I didn’t get paid on that last card-game score, anyway. Those guys deserved to get jammed up.’ ”

When I didn’t respond, Temple picked up a crumpled ball of paper from the wastebasket and bounced it off my back.

“Are you listening?” she said.