Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

Then a fireman yelled into his radio: “It’s a doll. A talking doll. Oh God, the tiger’s got us … Tell my wife I …”

The fire, fed by a sudden rush of cold air, turned the brick shell of the building into a chimney swirling with flame. The roof exploded into the night sky like a Roman candle.

“The doll was one of these battery-operated jobs. We think a homeless woman left it in there and the heat set it off,” Janet Valenzuela said.

“How’d the fire start?”

“Winos and street people live in there. Somebody saw some Hispanic kids hanging around earlier. The place was filled with accelerants. Take your choice.”

“Why are you calling me?”

“The building belonged to a savings and loan company before it went bankrupt and was seized by the government. But the land it stood on is owned by a man named Earl Deitrich. That’s the guy Max Greenbaum was an accountant for. Funny coincidence, huh?”

“Come up and see us sometime. Widen your horizons,” I said.

“If it’s arson and homicide on federal property, you’ll get to meet us as well as the FBI. Say, does this guy Deitrich know any Houston gang members?”

“You ever hear of a bunch called the Purple Hearts in San Antone?” I asked.

“Say again?”

At lunchtime I walked from my office to our town’s one health club and sat in the steam room with my back against the tiles. The bruises from the baton blows I had taken in Hugo Roberts’s office looked like purple and yellow carrots under my skin. I dipped a sponge in a bucket of water and squeezed it over my head, then lay on my back and stretched my muscles by pulling my knees toward my chest.

When I walked into the shower two of the men who had beaten me were lathering themselves with the showerheads turned off. Their bodies were tanned and hard and streaked with soapy hair, their eyes malevolent and invasive. I put my head under the shower and turned on both faucets and let the water boil over my face.

Temple Carrol met me in the courtroom, where a client of mine, a twenty-year-old four-time loser with alcohol fetal syndrome, was being arraigned for holding up the convenience store where he used to work. He had used no mask or disguise and his weapon had been a BB pistol.

The judge’s name was Kirby Jim Baxter. His face was furrowed and white, like a bleached prune, and it stayed twisted in an expression of chronic impatience and irritability.

“You back again? What the hell’s the matter with you? You want to spend the rest of your life getting pissed on by a prison guard’s horse?” he said.

My client, Wesley Rhodes, had a harelip, a flat nose, an I.Q. of eighty, and wide-set reptilian-green eyes that seemed to contain separate thoughts at the same time. He stuffed socks inside his fly and wore motorcycle boots with elevated soles and two heavy, long-sleeve shirts that made his upper torso splay from his Levi’s like a cloth-wrapped stump.

I began to run through the same old shuck that every judge hears when people like Wesley have their bail set. “Your Honor, my client has entered an alcoholic treatment program and is attending A.A. meetings daily. We’d like to request—”

“Did I address you, counselor?” Kirby Jim said.

“No, Your Honor.”

“Then shut up. Now, you listen, young man—”

It should have been a cakewalk. Kirby Jim was annoyed with the planet in general, but he wasn’t a bad man. He was sympathetic to the fact that people like Wesley Rhodes had no chance from the day they were born. He also knew that inside the system Wesley was anybody’s bar of soap.

“It wasn’t armed robbery ’cause there wasn’t no BBs in the gun. I was in there to buy a magazine. My daddy said to tell y’all that and to kiss my ass. I ain’t afraid to go back. Horses don’t piss on people unless you get under them, anyway. So that shows how damn much you know,” he said, and turned his grinning, pitiful face on me, as though his wit had forever destroyed the Texas legal system.

“Bail is set at ten thousand dollars. Bailiff, take him away,” Kirby Jim said.

That’s what most of it is like.

Outside, Temple and I sat under the trees on a steel-ribbed bench by the Spanish-American War artillery piece. It was warm in the shade and the trees were full of jays and mockingbirds.

“It’s not your fault. That kid had a millstone around his neck when he was born,” she said.

“I was thinking of something else.” I told her of the visit to my house by Ronnie Cruise the previous night and the fire that had burned down the empty savings and loan building on Earl Deitrich’s property in Houston.

“You think these Mexican kids did it and Ronnie Cruise was setting up an alibi?” she asked.

“Maybe.”