Heartwood

by James Lee Burke

  “You had a reason for being out by the Deitrichs’ place?” I asked.

  “I want Mr. Deitrich to leave my brother and Ronnie … Ronnie’s my boyfriend … I want Mr. Deitrich to leave him and Cholo alone.”

  “You were going to tell him that?”

  She blew her breath up in her face and sat down on the corner of the chair. “Look, he’s a bullshit guy. Guys like him didn’t make their money worrying about people who eat refried beans,” she said.

  “Earl Deitrich’s got another agenda?”

  “Hey, I’m glad you weren’t hurt too bad yesterday. That’s it,” she said, and walked out of the office without saying goodbye.

  Temple Carrol could find a chicken feather in a snowstorm. Early Wednesday morning we drove out of the hill country toward San Antonio. She had already put together a folder on both Cholo Ramirez and Ronnie Cruise, also known as Ronnie Cross.

  “Ronnie is a California transplant. He came out here with his uncle in ’88. This customized car business they run may be a front for a chop-shop operation. Boost them here and sell them in Mexico,” she said. “Anyway, Ronnie was in Juvie once in L.A. County, but that’s his whole sheet.”

  “Jeff Deitrich says he threw a couple of guys off a roof,” I said.

  “My friend at San Antonio P.D. says two Viscounts got splattered all over a cement loading dock about a year ago. The word on the street is Ronnie did it. Supposedly the Viscounts had tried to molest Cholo’s sister in a movie theater. Ronnie ’fronted them on the roof because Cholo was his warlord. Later Ronnie and Esmeralda developed the hots for each other. The stuff of great romance.”

  “I still don’t get the tie to Earl Deitrich,” I said.

  “Maybe Earl’s just helping out disadvantaged kids,Billy Bob. Maybe he’s not a total bastard, even though some people would like to think so.” She gave me a deliberate look.

  I kept my eyes straight ahead. The country was rolling and green, and red Angus were grazing on a hill. A moment later I heard Temple take some papers out of a second folder.

  “This kid Cholo is a walking nightmare,” she said. “The mother’s boyfriend threw him against the wall when he was a baby and probably damaged the brain. He has epileptic seizures and refuses all medication. He’s been in the reformatory three times and a mental ward twice. My friend at San Antonio P.D. says every cop in the city treats him with extreme caution.”

  “What about that story Cholo told you, the one about taking down rich marks at a phony poker game?” I said.

  “Nobody seems to know anything about it. He’s been on crystal and acid half his life. He probably sees snakes in his breakfast food,” she said.

  The car garage where Ronnie Cruise worked for his uncle was in a Mexican neighborhood just outside of town, one with dust-blown streets and untrimmed banana and palm trees and stucco houses with tin roofs and alleyways that groaned with unemptied garbage cans.

  Ronnie Cruise was taller than he had seemed at the drive-in restaurant in Deaf Smith, his arms heavy with muscle, his bare chest flat, his lats thick, tapering away to a narrow waist. The inside of the shop was filled with antique cars that were either being restored or customized and rebuilt with high-powered, chromed engines. Ronnie Cruise walked outside with us into the shade, away from the noise, wiping his hands on a rag. He wore a red bandanna wrapped around his hair. His upper left arm was ringed with scar tissue like a band of dried putty.

  “I had barbed wire tattooed there. Bad example in a time of AIDS. I had a doctor take it off,” he said.

  He leaned against the side of the building, one work boot propped against the stucco. He stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

  “Smoking bother you?” he said.

  “Go ahead,” Temple said.

  He played with his lighter, then dropped the cigarette back in the package and put the package in his pocket.

  “What’s between the Purple Hearts and Earl Deitrich?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he answered. He looked down the alley at a banana tree moving in the breeze.

  “You just drive up to Deaf Smith to hang around with Jeff?” I said.

  “How’d you know I been with Jeff?” he asked.

  “I saw you and Esmeralda with him at Val’s Drive-In,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, and nodded absently. “Look, my uncle don’t want me taking off too long.”

  “Some gangbangers caused the death of an accountant down in Houston. You and Cholo hear anything about that?” Temple said.

  “I don’t get to Houston much. Anyway, I’m signing off on this stuff. So excuse me and maybe I’ll see you some other time,” he said.

  “Cholo got Esmeralda out of jail. You didn’t want to be there for her yourself?” I said.

  “We’re not getting along real good right now,” he replied.

  Then I took a chance.

  “Is Jeff getting next to your girl? She got busted out by his house,” I said.

  He looked at the tops of his hands, his face impenetrable.

  “I heard you took some whacks for her. That’s the only reason we’re talking now. But anything between me and Jeff is private business. I don’t mean nothing personal by that,” he said.

  He untied the bandanna from his head and shook it out and walked back into the garage.

  Temple watched him go back to work on the shell of a 1941 Ford, the flats of her hands inserted in her back pockets.

  “That kid’s a piece of work. You see him throwing two guys off a roof?” she said.

  “With about as much emotion as spitting out his gum,” I said.

  That afternoon I walked over to Marvin Pomroy’s office in the courthouse. His secretary told me he was at the Mexican grocery store that was located just off the square. When I cut across the lawn toward the store, I thought I saw Skyler Doolittle walking on a side street, in his Panama hat and wilted seersucker, his upper torso bent forward, as though he wanted to arrive at his destination sooner than his body could take him.

  I found Marvin Pomroy at a table under a wood-bladed fan in the back of the store, eating a taco while he read a book.

  “I hope this is about baseball,” he said.

  “Was that Skyler Doolittle out there?” I asked.

  “He came by and gave me a book. About Earl Deitrich’s great-grandfather. Evidently the great-grandfather was an Alsatian diamond miner and slaver for the Belgians,”

  A uniformed deputy sheriff came in and bought a package of Red Man at the counter. He gave both of us a hard look before he went out.

  “Esmeralda Ramirez isn’t bringing sexual battery charges against Hugo’s office, provided they don’t charge you for punching out the deputy. Did you know that?” Marvin said.

  “No, I didn’t,” I said. Marvin lifted his eyes into my face when I pulled out a chair and sat down without being invited. “Cut Wilbur Pickett loose.”

  “The state attorney’s office seems to think he’s a guilty man. I’ve gotten calls from a few other people, too.” His eyes left mine and looked at nothing.

  “Tell both them and Earl Deitrich to get lost,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, that kind of statement makes people with money and power go away every time,” he said.

  We stared at each other in the silence. The breeze from the overhead fan ruffled the pages of the book he was reading. Marvin Pomroy was a good man who believed the system represented a level of integrity that somehow transcended the people who constantly manipulated it for their own ends. No amount of arguing or the personal battering of his soul had ever affected that faith. I knew nothing I said now would change that fact.

  “Why’d Skyler Doolittle give you the book?” I asked.

  “Hell if I know. I guess the great-grandfather was a genuine sonofabitch. He even wrote a handbook for the Belgian government on how to capture starved natives at night when they snuck into their gardens for food. Take a look at this picture. He used human skulls to border his flower beds … You all right?”<
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  “Wilbur Pickett’s wife talked about the same thing.She saw the picture inside her head. It has something to do with spirits that want revenge.”

  He pinched his temples gingerly, then signaled the waitress for his check.

  “I think I’ll stroll on back to the office. Don’t get up. Stay and have some iced tea. It’s on me. Really,” he said.

  6

  That evening I had an unexpected visitor, my son, Lucas Smothers, who was finishing his first year at A&M. He parked his stepfather’s pickup in the driveway and walked into the barn, where I was raking out the stalls and loading a wheelbarrow for the compost heap. His snap-button cowboy shirt was open on his chest and his straw hat was slanted down on his head. He squatted on his long legs, pushed the brim of his hat up with his thumb, and squinted with one eye at the sun setting over the tank, as though a great philosophic consideration was at hand.

  “I can think about a whole lot more fun things to do this evening,” he said.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be up at school?” I asked.

  “I got exams next week. You want to wet a line?” he said.

  “How about I buy you a barbecue dinner out at Shorty’s instead?”

  “I ain’t got no objection to that.” He stood up and removed a Mexican spur from a peg on the wall and spun the rowel with one finger. It was one of the spurs my friend L.Q. Navarro had worn the night he died down in Coahuila. “I hear you been messing with the Purple Hearts,” he said.

  “Who told you this?”

  “I saw Jeff Deitrich at Val’s Drive-In.”

  “You know why his father would want to get mixed up with Mexican gangbangers?”

  “I don’t know about his old man. I know about Jeff, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “His reg’lar is a gal named Rita Summers. I said to him once, ‘She’s sure a nice girl. In fact, she’s got it all, don’t she?’ He goes, ‘So does vanilla ice cream, Lucas. That don’t mean you cain’t try chocolate.’ ”

  He spun the rowel on the spur, then hung the spur back on the peg.

  We drove through the hills in the cooling shadows to Shorty’s and ate dinner on a screen porch that rested on pilings above the river. The water was high and milky green, and it flowed around the edge of a hill and dropped over boulders into pools that were white with cottonwood seeds. The air was cool now and smelled of fern and wet stone, and when the sun set, Shorty, the owner, turned on the electric lights in the oak trees that shaded his picnic tables.

  The country band on the dance floor was just warming up.

  “Got me a job roughnecking this summer. Got a bluegrass gig in Fredericksburg, too,” Lucas said.

  “You’ve done great, bud,” I said.

  He smiled but his eyes were looking beyond me,through the screen, at the shadows of the trees on the cliff wall across the river.

  “Be careful with Deitrich,” he said.

  “I don’t think Earl’s a real big challenge.”

  His fork paused in front of his mouth. Then he set it in his plate. “I ain’t talking about Earl,” he said. “Jeff used to go down to Austin to roll homosexuals. Not for the money. Just to stomp the shit out of them. I always been too ashamed to tell anybody I seen it.”

  His eyes were downcast when he picked up his fork again. His face looked curiously like a girl’s.

  Peggy Jean didn’t have to flirt to attract men to her. Oddly, a show of fatigue in her face, a buried injury, an unshared problem, made you want to step into her life and walk with her into the private places of the heart. Her vulnerability wove webs that allowed you to enter them without shame or caution.

  On Thursday morning I saw her by her pickup truck at a farm supply and tack store on the edge of town. A clerk was carrying a western saddle from inside the store to the back of the truck while she waited by the open tailgate, a platinum American Express card held loosely between two fingers.

  “Oh, hello, Billy Bob,” she said when I walked up behind her. She wore tight riding pants and a checkered shirt and sunglasses, and she pushed her glasses more tightly against her face when she smiled.

  “Beautiful saddle,” I said.

  “It’s for Jeff’s birthday.” She kept one side of her face turned from me, as though she were waiting for someone else to emerge from inside the store.

  “You already paid, Ms. Deitrich?” the clerk said, looking at the credit card in her hand.

  “No, I’m sorry. I’ll go inside and take care of it,” she replied.

  “Let me have your card and I’ll bring the charge slip out here for you to sign. It ain’t no trouble at all,” the clerk said, and took the card from between her fingers before she could reply.

  Peggy Jean looked away awkwardly at the loading platform. Her skin high up on one cheekbone was heavily made up with rouge and powder.

  “Everything okay, Peggy Jean?” I said.

  “Oh yes, just one of those days,” she said, then smiled, like an afterthought. “It’s so windy out here today.” She took a bandanna from her back pocket and tied it around her hair, knotting it under her chin.

  “It’s too bad about the accountant, that fellow named Greenbaum. He seemed like a nice man,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s dead. He was jumped by some gangbangers at Herman Park in Houston.”

  “Max? When?”

  “I’m sorry. I thought y’all knew.”

  “No … I heard nothing … You’re talking about Max Greenbaum?”

  She seemed to look about her, as though the answer to her confusion were inside the wind.

  I stepped closer to her, my fingers touching her elbows.

  “I’ll drive you home,” I said.

  “No … Absolutely not … Billy Bob, please, just …”

  She walked away from me and stood in the shade by the driver’s door of her pickup, her arms folded in front of her, as though she were creating a sanctuary that I couldn’t enter. The clerk came out of the store with her credit card and charge slip attached to a clipboard. Then he saw her expression and his face turned inward and he lowered his eyes.

  “If you’ll just sign this, ma’am, I’ll take care of everything and you can be on your way,” he said.

  “Peggy Jean—” I began.

  “I’m sorry for my lack of composure. Max? No, there’s a mistake about this,” she said, and got in her truck and scoured a cloud of pink dust out of the parking lot.

  I sat in the half-light of my office and drank a cup of coffee. On the wall, encased in glass on a field of blue felt, were the .36-caliber Navy Colt revolvers and octagon-barrel lever-action ’73 Winchester rifle that had been carried by my great-grandpa Sam Morgan Holland when he was a drover on the Chisholm Trail. In his life he had also been in the Fourth Texas at Little Round Top, a violent drunkard who shot five or six men in gun duels, and finally a saddle preacher who took his ministry into the godless moonscape west of the Pecos.

  The bluing on Sam’s weapons had long ago been rubbed off by holster wear, and the steel now had the dull hue of an old nickel. In Sam’s diary he described his encounters with John Wesley Hardin, Wild Bill Longley, and the Dalton-Doolin gang, all of whom he loathed as either psychopaths or white trash. But in his account of their depredations there is never an indication that the worst of them ever struck a woman.

  In the historical South the physical abuse of a woman by a man was on a level with sodomy of animals. Such a man was considered a moral and physical coward and was merely horsewhipped if he was lucky.

  But today a woman who did not flee the batterer or seek legal redress was usually consigned to her fate, even considered deserving of it.

  I wondered what Great-Grandpa Sam would do in my situation.

  I set my empty coffee cup in my saucer, opened my Rolodex to the “D” section, and punched a number into my telephone.

  “Earl?” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Who hit your wife?”
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  “What?”

  “You heard me. On the right side of her face.”

  “You’ve got some damn nerve.”

  “So it was you?”

  “You keep your carping, self-righteous mouth off my family.”

  “Touch her again and I’ll catch you out in public. Everything you own or you can buy won’t help you.”

  He slammed down the phone. I sat for a long time in the pale light glowing through the blinds, the fingers of my right hand curling into the oil and moisture on my palm.

  That evening a lacquered red biplane dropped out of an absolutely blue sky, circled once over the river, and landed in the pasture beyond the tank. I got into the Avalon and drove past the chicken run and barn and windmill and out through the tall grass that grew at the foot of the levee. When I came around the willows at the far end of the tank I saw the man named Bubba Grimes, who had claimed that Wilbur Pickett had tried to sell him bearer bonds; he was leaning against the fuselage of his plane, pouring from a dark bottle of Cold Duck into a paper cup.

  “You tend to show up in a peculiar fashion, Mr. Grimes,” I said, getting out of the Avalon.

  He set down the bottle on the bottom wing of his plane and grinned at the corner of his mouth. His drooping left eye looked like gray rubber that had melted and cooled again.

  “Got an offer for you. Wilbur Pickett is about to have some bad luck. Price is right, I can change all that,” he said.

  “Wilbur’s a poor man, Mr. Grimes. That means I’d have to give you money out of my own pocket. Now, why would I want to do that?”

  “To bring down Earl Deitrich. The word is you topped his wife.”

  “I think it’s time for you to get back in your plane.”

  He drank his paper cup empty and tossed it in the weeds. “The man’s weakness is gambling. You want my hep, here’s my number. The two of us can mess him up proper,” he said, and shoved a penciled piece of notepad paper in my shirt pocket with two fingers.

  “Get off my property,” I said.

  He cut his head. “I cain’t blame you for not wanting to know your own mind. That woman’s special. She’s got a fragrance like roses. In Africa once, she’d been out working in the heat and she come in the tent, and the smell was like warm roses. It’s too bad rich men always get the pick of the brooder house.”