Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“No.”

“You got to read it to her. She was born blind.”

When I got back to the office, Kate, my secretary, told me a man had gone inside the inner office and had sat himself down in front of my desk and had refused to give his name or leave.

“You want me to call across the street?” she said.

“It’s all right,” I said, and went into my office.

My visitor’s head was bald and veined like marble, his seersucker suit stretched tight on his powerful body. He was bent forward slightly in the chair, his Panama hat gripped tightly on his knee, as though he were about to run after a bus. He turned to face me by plodding the swivel chair in a circle with his feet, and I realized that his neck was fused so he could not change the angle of his vision without twisting his torso.

“Name’s Skyler Doolittle, no relation to the aviator. I have been a salesman of Bibles, encyclopedias, and Fuller brushes. I won’t deceive you. I have also been in prison, sir,” he said, and gripped my hand, squeezing the bones.

His eyes were between gray and colorless, with a startled look in them, as though he had just experienced a heat flash. His mouth was pulled back on the corners, in either a fixed smile or a state of perplexity.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Doolittle?” I said.

“I seen the picture of this fellow Deitrich in the San Antonio paper this morning. That’s the fellow cheated me out of my watch in a bouree game. I didn’t know his name till now. I come to get my property back,” he said.

“Why are you coming to me?”

“I called over to the jail. They said you was the lawyer for the man done stole it.”

“They told you wrong.”

He glanced about the room, like an owl on a tree limb.

“This fellow Deitrich had a trump card hidden under

his thigh. I didn’t find that out till later, though. That watch belonged to my great-great-grandfather. You’ll find his name on that bronze plaque at the Alamo,” he said.

“I wish I could help you, Mr. Doolittle.”

“Ain’t right. Law punishes a poor man. Rich man don’t have to account.”

“I can’t argue with you on that.”

I waited for him to leave. But he didn’t.

“What were you in prison for, Mr. Doolittle?” I said.

“I stole money from my employer. But I didn’t burn down no church house. If I’d done something that awful, I’d surely remember it.”

“I see. Can you walk down to my car with me? I have to run an errand.”

“I don’t mind at all. You seem like a right nice fellow, Mr. Holland.”

Wilbur Pickett lived out on the hardpan in a small house built of green lumber with cheesecloth curtains blowing in the windows and zinnias planted in tin cans on the gallery. It was treeless, dry land, with grass fires in the summer that sometimes climbed into the blackjack on the hills and covered the late sun with ash. But Wilbur had a windmill and grew vegetables and kept chickens behind his house and had planted mimosas by his small three-stall barn and irrigated a pasture for his Appaloosa and two palominos.

I had heard that Wilbur had married an Indian woman from the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana, but I had never met her. She came to the door in a pair of jeans, brown sandals, and a denim shirt with tiny flowers stitched on the pockets. Her face was narrow, the nose slightly flat, her hair fastened in a ponytail that hung over one shoulder. But it was her eyes that transfixed you. They had no pupils and were the color of blue ink flecked with milk.

I told her Wilbur was in the county jail and would not be home until his bail was set. I stood in the center of the living room and read his penciled letter to her.

“ ‘Dear Kippy Jo, Earl Deitrich is a damn liar and I didn’t take no bonds from his safe. Ask Mrs. Titus to carry you down to the IGA to stock up on groceries. Charge the groceries if you can, but if you can’t there is one-hundred-dollar bill under the paper liner in my sock drawer. Don’t fret over this little bump in the road. I have lived here all my life. People know me and ain’t going to believe the likes of Earl Deitrich.

“ ‘Keep all the mail in a safe spot. The pipeline deal in Venezuela is about to come through any day. Or else the gold deal up in B.C., which is just as good although a lot colder. Me and you are going to make it happen, hon. That’s a Wilbur T. Pickett guarantee.

“ ‘When this is over I aim to stick Earl Deitrich’s head in a toilet bowl.