Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“Who cares? They’re street rats. It’s not related to defending Wilbur Pickett, anyway.”

“I don’t like getting used.”

She straightened herself on the bench, pressing the heels of her hands against the metal. I felt the edge of her hand wedge against mine.

“You want to feel these kids aren’t all greaseballs. The truth is they are,” she said.

“You’re too hard, Temple.”

“It’s a habit I got into down in Fort Bend County after I let a gangbanger ride in the back of my cruiser without cuffs. He paid back the favor by wrapping his belt around my throat,” she said.

I looked at her profile. She lifted a wisp of her chestnut hair off her forehead and fanned her face with a magazine. Her mouth was red and small, her skin moist and pink with the heat. Her eyes had the same milky green color as the river that ran through our county, and they often had shadows in them, just the way the river did when the current flowed under a tree. Her uplifted chin and the parting of her lips made me think of a flower opening in the shade.

“You staring at me for a reason?” she said.

“Sorry. You’re a real pal, Temple.”

“A pal? Oh yes,” she said, standing up. “Always glad to be a pal. See you later, cowboy. Don’t let your worries over the Purple Hearts screw up your day.”

I still hadn’t eaten lunch and I walked over to the Langtry Hotel. It had been built of sandstone in the nineteenth century, with a wood colonnade over the elevated sidewalk that was still inset with tethering rings. Supposedly the Sundance Kid and his schoolteacher mistress, Etta Place, had stayed there, as well as the vaudevillians Eddie Foy and Will Rogers. The upstairs rooms were boarded up now, but the old bar, with its white, octagon-tile floor and stamped tin ceiling, was still open, as well as the dining room, which was paneled with carved mahogany and oak and hung with chandeliers that when lighted looked like yellow ice.

Diagonally parked in front of the entrance was Earl Deitrich’s maroon Lincoln, its chrome wire wheels and immaculate white sidewalls blazing in the sunlight. The velvet curtains were open in the dining room and I could see Earl and Peggy Jean at a long, linen-covered table with some of the town’s leading businesspeople. Peggy Jean, whom I had never seen drink, had an Old-Fashioned glass in her hand.

Don’t go in. Leave them alone, I thought.

Then, with all the caution of a drunk careening down a sidewalk, I thought, Like hell I will.

I sat at a small table by the window, across the room from them, and ordered. Earl and his friends were in high spirits, garrulous and loud, Earl’s laughter even more cacophonous than the others, as though it welled up from some irreverent and arrogant knowledge about the world that only he possessed.

I listened to it for five minutes, then could take it no longer. On the table next to me was an abandoned copy of the morning paper. I folded it in half and walked to Earl’s table and set it by his elbow, so the headline about the fire in Houston could not escape his vision.

“Too bad about those four firemen who got burned to death on your property last night,” I said.

The mirth in his face died like air leaking from a balloon.

“Yes. It’s a terrible thing. I’ve been keeping in touch by telephone,” he said.

“Hugo Roberts’s trained cretins picked up Skyler Doolittle on a bogus beef. I think you know what I’m talking about,” I said.

“No, I don’t,” he said.

“You cheated him at cards. He got in your face about it. So you had Hugo’s Brownshirts roust him.”

Earl smiled tolerantly and shook his head. The other men at the table looked like they had been frame-frozen in a film, their hands poised on a napkin, a water glass, their eyes neutral.

“Go back to your table, sir,” the owner, a California entrepreneur, said behind me.

“No, no, he’s invited here. You sit down with us, Billy Bob,” Peggy Jean said, her throat flushed, her mouth stiff and unnatural and cold-looking from the whiskey and iced cherries in her Old-Fashioned glass.

I put one hand on the table and leaned down toward Earl’s face. His fine brown hair hung on his brow.

“You paid Hugo Roberts to plant evidence on Wilbur Pickett. Then you shamed and humiliated a handicapped man. I’m going to take what you’ve done and shove it up your sorry ass,” I said.

“You went to night school and earned a law degree and are to be admired for that. But you’re still white trash at heart, Billy Bob. And that’s the only reason I don’t get up and knock you down,” he replied.

I turned and walked stiffly past my table, left a dollar for having used the place setting, and went up the stairs through the old darkened lobby, past the empty registration desk and pigeonholes for guest mail and room keys and the dust-covered telephone switchboard, into the shade under the colonnade and the wind that blew like a blowtorch across the asphalt.

I was a half block down the street