Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“You were in the river? It’s pretty high this time of year for swimming, Pete,” she said.

“We was at Ms. Deitrich’s place in New Braunfels. That’s what I was saying. Billy Bob and Ms. Deitrich was up changing at the cottage when I got pulled into the whirlpool,” Pete said.

“Oh, at Ms. Deitrich’s. South Texas’s angel of charity. I should have known. Did you have a good time, Billy Bob?” Temple said, her eyes peeling the skin off my face.

“It wasn’t a good day. It was also the last one I’ll have like it,” I said.

“Why is it I don’t believe you? Why is that, please tell me?” she said. She set down her coffee cup in the saucer, picked up her check, and rose from the table.

“What ch’all talking about?” Pete asked, his face filled with confusion.

Early Wednesday morning I got the milk delivery off the porch and picked up a half dozen eggs around the chicken run and under the tractor and put them in an apple basket and began beating an omelette in the kitchen. Beau was drinking out of an aluminum tank just inside the rails of the horse lot and I saw his head lift at the sound of a car in my drive.

Marvin Pomroy came around back and tapped on the screen door to the porch. He wore a seersucker suit and narrow brown suspenders with his white shirt. I thought he had come to the house to apologize for threatening to break my jaw. Wrong. He sat down at the kitchen table without being invited and began smacking one fist erratically into his palm.

“Yes?” I said.

“I think Wilbur and Kippy Jo Pickett and Skyler Doolittle are all guilty of various crimes. I think guilty people come to you as a matter of course, primarily because you’re a sucker for daytime TV watchers who model their lives on soap operas. So my being here has nothing to do with a change of attitude about your clients,” he said.

“Thanks for the feedback on that, Marvin.”

“But because your clients are dirty doesn’t mean that Earl Deitrich isn’t.”

“You’ve got a problem of conscience?” I asked.

“No. What I’ve got is this character Fletcher Grinnel, Deitrich’s chauffeur. A week ago he was staring at me in the courthouse with this smirk on his face. I said, ‘Can I help you with something?’

“He says, ‘I was just admiring your suspenders. I served with a man, an ex-banker, actually, who always wore suspenders like that when we were on leave. He was a ferocious fighter. You’d never believe it from his appearance.’

“So I said, ‘You were in the military?’

“He goes, ‘Here and there. Mostly with a private group. Ex-Legionnaires, South African mercs, guys who were drummed out of the British army, that sort of thing. But we saved a lot of Europeans from the wogs and the bush bunnies.’ ”

Marvin paused, his eyes blinking.

“What does this have to do with my clients?” I asked.

“Several political pissants in Austin keep calling me up about Wilbur and Kippy Jo Pickett, like somehow I’m not fully committed to the situation. Then I have this encounter with Fletcher Grinnel, who seems to think he can use racist language with me as though we’re in the same white brotherhood. So I called in a favor from a federal agent in Washington and had him run this guy.

“Grinnel is a naturalized U.S. citizen from New Zealand. He’s also worked for some very nasty people in South Africa and the Belgian Congo. He thinks cutting off body parts is quite a joke.”

“That’s on his sheet?”

“No. Grinnel told me his friend, the ex-banker who wore suspenders like mine, made necklaces of human ears and fingers that he traded for ivory and rhino horn. Grinnel said his friend put a burning tire around a man and made his family watch.”

Marvin sat very still in the chair, his face bemused at the strangeness of his own words, one strand of hair hanging in the middle of his glasses.

“I think once in a while we’re allo

wed to look into someone’s eyes, somebody who a moment earlier seemed perfectly normal, and see right to the bottom of the Abyss,” he said. “But maybe that’s just my fundamentalist upbringing.”

His eyes lifted earnestly into mine, as though waiting for an opinion.

That evening Wilbur Pickett drove a flatbed pipe truck into my backyard and stepped down from the cab with a half pint of whiskey in his hand. His skin was filmed with dust, his washed-out denim shirt unbuttoned on his chest, his battered hat streaked with grease.

“You’re listing hard to port, bud,” I said.

“I got run off two jobs in one day. The driller cut me loose at the rig and the water well boss said he felt ashamed at hiring a rodeo man to do nigra work. Told me he was firing me out of respect. How about them pineapples?” he said.