“Must have been a bad echo in the cellhouse.”
“Let me warn you beforehand, Billy Bob. Earl Deitrich wants Wilbur’s head on a pike.”
“Really? Say, I had a strange-looking fellow named Skyler Doolittle in my office this morning. He said something about doing time and burning down a church.”
“He was pestering me, too. You don’t remember him?” Marvin said.
“No.”
“He got drunk and plowed into a church bus outside Goliad. The bus burned. Four or five kids didn’t make it out,” he said.
“Wil
bur’s wife is blind and by herself. Let Wilbur go on recognizance.”
“We’re talking about a three-hundred-thousand theft,” Marvin said.
“According to Earl Deitrich. Has anyone ever seen those bonds?”
“Yeah, his wife. Is she lying, too?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “You still there?”
“I’m going up to see Wilbur now. I don’t want anybody questioning him unless I’m there.”
“You ought to take a nap, get more rest. Your moods … Never mind. Have a good day,” he said, and hung up.
That night the phone rang during a terrible electric storm. The rain was beating against the windows, and the yard was flooded and quivering with lightning and the barn doors crashed back and forth against the jamb.
“That young man, Pickett, is he still in jail?” the voice said.
“Who is this?”
“I think perhaps a degree of wrong is being done here.”
“A degree of wrong?” I said. “Yes.”
Then the voice came together with an image, that of a small, nervous, dark-haired man, with a hawk’s nose and thick glasses, in a blue suit with dandruff on the shoulders. What was the name? Green? Greenberg?
“You’re Mr. Greenbaum. The accountant. You were at the Deitrichs’ luncheon yesterday,” I said.
The line went dead.
3
The next day was Saturday, and the streets in town were rain-washed, the sky blue and the air shining. I did some work in my office, then drove out to Val’s for lunch. Val’s was the drive-in restaurant on the north side of town, equidistant between the West End and East End of Deaf Smith, a neutral territory where the children of the rich and those of oil field and cannery workers put their hatred and fear of one another in temporary abeyance.
I went inside and had just ordered when I saw Jeff Deitrich, Earl’s son, pull into the parking lot in a yellow convertible with a Mexican boy and girl next to him. They parked under the awning, and Jeff walked across the lot toward the entrance, his partially unbuttoned silk shirt filling with wind.
We were told he was the child of Earl’s brief first marriage to a Cajun girl when he was stationed at Fort Polk in Louisiana. Jeff was larger, more handsome and athletic than his father, with dark brown hair that had natural waves in it and wide shoulders and long arms and big-knuckled hands. He was bright in a limited way and confident and always ingratiating and had done well for two years at the University of Texas, then had quit, either to learn his father’s business or just out of indifference toward what he saw as the necessary province of others.
But I always had the sense that Jeff’s manners were the natural ones of his class and that he used them only as the situation required him to. Three years ago I had witnessed a scene in the same parking lot, one I had tried to forget. But I had never looked at Jeff quite the same afterwards.
It was a lovely fall night after a football game, with a yellow moon as big as a planet hovering right over the hills. The lot was filled with convertibles, customized 1950s hot rods that glowed like hard candy under the neon, chromed Harleys, and Cherokees and Land-Rovers and roll-bar Jeeps. Then a beery oil field roughneck, in Cloroxed jeans and steel-toe boots and a T-shirt still spotted with drilling mud, got into it with Jeff Deitrich.
They fought between cars, knocking serving trays onto the pavement, then went at it in an open area, both of them swinging hard, connecting with skin-tearing blows in the face that made the onlookers wince.
They fought their way between two cars in the front row, then Jeff caught the roughneck hard above the eye and knocked him across the curb against the side of the building. The roughneck was down on one knee, his eyes glazed, the fight gone out of his face, a self-deprecating smile of defeat already tugging at the corner of his mouth. When he started to rise, propping his fingers against the pavement for support, Jeff drove his fist into the hinge on the man’s jaw and fractured the bone like pecan shell.
The restaurant owner had to hold the roughneck’s jaw in place with a blood-soaked towel until the ambulance arrived.