Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“I say, ‘My wife’s charged with murder. You gonna make that go away?’

“He says, ‘With one phone call, my friend.’ Then he looked at Kippy Jo in the backyard, smiling, like he was thinking of a private joke.”

Wilbur watched the lamb trying to get to its feet in the stall. The interior of the barn was dissected with beams of bluish light.

“How would Earl Deitrich know about your land?” I asked.

“He’s a big man in extractive industries. I had the core tested at a lab in Denver. They all know each other,” Wilbur said. “That pipeline deal in Venezuela? Every dollar we make is going into our own drilling company. Billy Bob, I’m talking about an oil and natural gas dome big as that Tuscaloosa strike back in the seventies.”

“That’s what all this has been about, hasn’t it? He wants your oil property,” I said. “What’d you tell Fletcher?”

“To keep his eyes off my wife. To get his damn car out of my driveway.”

“That’s the ticket.”

He pulled the saddle off the Appaloosa and flung it across a sawhorse.

“It’s all bluff. If I got to give it up to get Kippy Jo off, that’s what we’ll do.” He replaced the jar of oil sand on the shelf. “It’s funny what can happen just from setting down at the wrong man’s table, ain’t it?”

He took off his hat and wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then grinned, blade-faced, in the sun’s first pink light.

Then something happened that I would not quite be able to get out of my memory. His innocent nature, his devotion to his wife, his concern for an injured animal, seemed exquisitely caught in the moment, until I smiled back at him and looked directly into his eyes. When I did, he dropped his head and buttoned a shirt pocket, as though he did not want me to see beyond an exterior that I obviously admired.

13

Temple Carrol came into my office Monday afternoon and sat down in front of an air-conditioning duct and let the wind stream blow across her body. Her blouse was peppered with perspiration.

“Pretty hot out there?” I said.

“I just spent two hours in the basement of the courthouse looking for the list of possessions on Bubba Grimes’s body. It was buried in a box on a shelf right next to the ceiling.”

She handed a manila folder to me with several departmental forms and penciled sheets from a yellow legal tablet inside. When he died Bubba Grimes’s pockets had contained car keys, a roll of breath mints, a wallet with fifty-three dollars inside, a comb, fingernail clippers, a wine cork, a Mexico peso, and three dimes.

“You checked the possessions bag?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s just like it says there.” She held her eyes on my face.

The possessions sheet was marked up, words smeared or scratched out. I picked up the phone and punched in Marvin Pomroy’s number.

“I’m looking at some of the expert paperwork done by Hugo Roberts’s deputies. For some reason it was filed in the basement with documents that are a hundred years old,” I said.

“Talk to Hugo,” he said.

“You know what’s not on the possessions list?”

“No.”

“A pocketknife. But at the bottom of the form a word is scratched out. It’s scratched out so thoroughly there’s no paper left,” I said.

Marvin was quiet a moment. “So Hugo’s boys get an F for penmanship and neatness. The scene investigator said Grimes was carrying only what’s on that list.”

“Grimes cut the back screen. He had to have a knife to do it. Forensics would have given us exculpatory evidence. That knife probably had strands of wire on it. I think that’s why you had a blowup with Hugo over the phone. You know he’s destroyed evidence.”

“No, I don’t know that.”

“This stinks, Marvin. Don’t let them drag you down with them.”

“You quit the U.S. Justice Department and went to work for the dirtbags, Billy Bob. Maybe I don’t always like the system I serve, but this county is a better place because of the work I do. Nothing derogatory meant. Maybe you like watching sociopaths prop their feet on your desk,” he said, and hung up.