Heartwood bbh-2 Page 4

  Early the following Monday I tapped on the frosted glass of Marvin Pomroy's office on the first floor of the courthouse. He sat behind his desk in his rimless glasses and blue suspenders and immaculate white, starched shirt, his hair neatly combed, his jaws ruddy and closely shaved, his eyes as placid and secure as a Puritan theologian's.

  "Hugo Roberts redecorated Wilbur Pickett's house late Friday afternoon. He also stuck a nine-millimeter down Wilbur's fly," I said.

  "I see Hugo Roberts five times a day. You don't have to tell me about his potential."

  "I think he's more interested in a confession than in recovering stolen bonds."

  "You're saying Hugo is on a pad for Earl Deitrich and Earl Deitrich is running a scam on the insurance company?"

  "You know, that actually crossed my mind," I said.

  His eyes rested calmly on my face. "We both know why you don't like Earl," he said. "But Peggy Jean asked you out there for that lunch, didn't she? How many women ask their old boyfriends to their husbands' business lunches? That doesn't strike you as peculiar?"

  "Not with Peggy Jean. She's a decent and fine person."

  Marvin got up from his chair and pulled open the window. He leaned on the sill and looked out at the oaks on the courthouse lawn and the mockingbirds flying in and out of the shade. "I'm coaching American Legion this year," he said. "For some reason I can't teach those boys not to swing on a change-up. Meanest pitch in baseball. The pitcher holds the ball in the back of his hand and messes up your head every time."

  For lunch I walked over to the saloon and pool room next to the barbershop and ate a sandwich and drank a cup of coffee at the bar. The saloon was dark and had wood floors and an old mirror over the bar and was cooled by electric fans mounted on the walls.

  Skyler Doolittle walked in from the glare of the street and stood at the end of the bar, twisting his torso one way, then another, his fused neck turning with his shoulders, until he saw me in back.

  "This fellow Deitrich is trying to have me sent to the asylum. I want to hire you. Ain't nobody else around here gonna represent me. I want my watch back, too," he said.

  "Why would Earl want to send you to an asylum, Mr. Doolittle?" I asked.

  "The fellow's a cheat. I confronted him with it. In the Langtry Hotel dining room. In front of all them businessmen."

  "I'm primarily a criminal defense lawyer. I don't know if I'm the right man for you, sir."

  His eyes looked about the saloon, wide, frenetic. The pool players were bent over the tables in cones of light.

  "I knowed your daddy years back. You was river-baptized," he said. "Immersed both in the reflection of the sky and the silt from Noie's flood. That means the earth and the heavens got you cupped between them, just like the hands of God. I ain't no crazy person, Mr. Holland. On a clear day like today I see everything the way it is. I'm haunted by them children. A crazy man don't walk around in Hell."

  "The children in the bus accident?" I said.

  "They talk to me out of the flames, sir. I don't never get rid of it."

  The pool shooters nearby did not look in our direction, but their bodies seemed to hang motionlessly on the edges of the light that enveloped the tables.

  "Why don't we walk on over to my office, Mr. Doolittle?" I said.

  He fitted his Panama hat back on his head and stepped out the front door into the heat like a man braving a furnace.

  I worked late in the office that evening. My air conditioner had broken and I opened the window and looked down onto the square at the cooling streets, the scrolled pink and purple and green neon on the Rialto Theater, the swallows dipping and gliding around the clock tower on the courthouse. Then I saw the sheriffs tow truck hauling Cholo Ramirez's customized 1949 Mercury through the square toward the pound.

  The tow truck was followed by two cruisers that stopped on the side of the courthouse. Four uniformed deputies got out and escorted Esmeralda Ramirez, her wrists cuffed behind her, into the squat, one-story sandstone building that served as the office of Hugo Roberts.

  I went back to my desk and tried to resume work. But I could not get out of my mind the image of four men dressed in khaki, their campaign hats slanted forward on their heads, the lead-gray stripes on their trousers creasing at the knees, marching a manacled girl into a building that looked like a blockhouse.

  It started to sprinkle while the sun was still shining. I put on my coat and Stetson and walked across the street, then around the side of the courthouse lawn to the entrance of Hugo's office. Two of the deputies were smoking cigarettes by the door, their faces opaque, my own reflection looking back at me in their sunglasses. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Temple Carrol carry a sack of groceries from the Mexican store on the side street to her Cherokee.

  "What's the deal on the girl?" I said to the deputies.

  "What's it to you?" one said.

  "The '49 Mercury you were towing, a kid named Cholo was driving it the other night. He tried to give me some trouble," I said.

  "We got a 911. The girl was weaving on the highway out by the Deitrich place. We found a vial with two rocks in it under the seat," the same deputy said.

  "Is Hugo inside?" I asked.

  "Yeah, but the office is closed."

  "I'll just take a minute," I said, and went between them and pushed open the heavy oak door.

  Hugo Roberts was sitting behind his desk, bent forward, his elbow propped on his blotter, toking on his cigarette while he watched a deputy shake down Esmeralda Ramirez against the wall.

  Her palms were high up on the logs, her ankles spread, her midriff exposed above her jeans. Her dark hair hung down on both sides of her face. A uniformed deputy ran his hands down her armpits and ribs, bis fingers brushing the edges of her breasts, then over her buttocks, up her thighs, until one hand came to rest firmly against her genitalia.

  "You better get a female deputy in here, you sonofabitch," I said to Hugo.

  "And you'd better get your ass out of here," he replied.

  "Fuck you," I said.

  " What? What did you say to him?" the deputy shaking down the girl said, straightening up now, his right hand clenching and unclenching. When I didn't answer, he shoved me in the breastbone with three fingers. "Boy, I'm about to turn you into a serious Christian."

  Hugo's head was wreathed in cigarette smoke. "Kyle won't abide interference with an officer in the performance of his duty. I won't, either, Billy Bob," he said.

  The deputy named Kyle snipped the cuffs on Esmeralda Ramirez's wrists again, this time in the front, and stuck his hand inside the back of her blue jeans and panties, knotting the fabric, his knuckles wedging into her buttocks, and pulled her toward a chair.

  I grabbed his upper arm and spun him toward me.

  The skin of his face tightened against the bone, his teeth showing, his eyes glinting. He pulled a lead-weighted blackjack from his back pocket and wrapped his palm around the braided grip. I swung with my right and caught him just below the eye, snapping his head back, driving him into the wall.

  Then I felt the old curse have its way, like kerosene evaporating on hot coals and igniting in an enclosed space, a yellow-red flash that burned away all restraint and always left me numb and shaking and unable to remember what I had just done.

  I felt my fist sink to my wrist in his stomach, then my boot arched into his face, the heel raking his mouth and nose, splitting the back of his head against a log in the wall.

  But three other men were swinging at me now, with fists or batons or both, the blows showering across my back, and I knew I was about to slide into the bottom of a dark well where I would be safe from the angry faces that shouted down at me from above.

  Then suddenly the room was still, speckled with blowing rain, the only sound that of the deputy named Kyle, on his hands and knees, spitting blood on the oak floor. Temple Carrol stood in the doorway, her extended arms and rounded shoulders and chestnut hair etched with the sun's last fiery glow.

  "Ah, the
testosterone boys in uniform at work and play. Hugo, you sorry sack of shit, please give me an excuse to blow your other lung out," she said.

  At the same time that I, an officer of the court, was brawling with rednecks, a small man with thick glasses named Max Greenbaum was leaving a synagogue in the old Montrose district of South Houston. The rabbi, who had known Greenbaum for years, waved goodbye from the doorway. Greenbaum stopped at a post office and picked up a priority envelope, then drove into Herman Park and stopped by a tree-shaded lake and was writing on a legal pad when three cars filled with Mexican gangbangers pulled into the parking area, sealing off Max Greenbaum's Jeep.

  It was dusk now, and the only other people at the lake were an elderly black couple and their grandchildren picnicking on the grass. The gangbangers' stereos roared with such ear-pounding volume that the water in the lake trembled. A kid who wore a bodybuilder's shirt deliberately scissored into strips threw a beer can in the direction of the picnickers.

  "Hey, man, the park's closing," he said.

  Then they pulled Max Greenbaum from his Jeep, lifted the cellular phone from his hand, and crushed it on the pavement.

  "Y'all leave that man alone. He ain't done you nothing," the black woman yelled.

  "Time to haul yo' black ham hocks out of here, mama," the kid in the scissored shirt said.

  The elderly black couple loaded their grandchildren into their car and backed out into the road, their faces staring in bewilderment at the scene taking place before them.

  One of the gangbangers tore Max Greenbaum's priority mail envelope and the sheet of letterhead paper it contained into shreds and threw them in his face. Then they formed a circle around him and began pushing him back and forth as they would a medicine ball.

  But the terror that Max Greenbaum probably felt turned to anger and he began to fight, flailing blindly at the gangbangers with his fists, his glasses broken on the pavement. At first they laughed at him, then his finger scraped across someone's eyeball. A gangbanger reeled backwards, the heel of his hand pressed into his eye socket as though it had been gouged with a stick.

  The circle closed on Greenbaum like crabs feeding on a piece of meat.

  5

  The Houston homicide detective who called the next afternoon was a woman named Janet Valenzuela.

  "The early word from the coroner is it looks like heart failure," she said.

  "How'd you get my name?" I asked.

  "The gangbangers picked up most of the pieces of the priority envelope. But a couple were under the victim's Jeep. We could make out your zip code and the last five letters of your name. Do you know why he would be writing you?"

  "I think he had knowledge that would exonerate a client of mine," I said.

  "Does this have to do with stolen bonds?"

  "How'd you know?" I said.

  "Greenbaum told his rabbi an uneducated working-man was being set up in an insurance claim. It's a muddy story. It has something to do with a guy being provoked at a luncheon, then stealing a watch, and a rich guy claiming hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonds were stolen, too. Are the gangbangers tied into this somehow?"

  "I'm not sure."

  "You were a city cop here?"

  "That's right."

  "Keep in touch."

  An hour later Cholo Ramirez pulled his customized Mercury to the curb in front of my office, the stereo thundering. His sister, Esmeralda, got out and walked into the portico on the first floor.

  A moment later she was standing in my office, dressed in the same jeans and maroon shirt, now thoroughly rumpled, she had been arrested in the day before.

  "You're sprung?" I said, and smiled.

  "They're not filing on me."

  "How about the rock under the seat?"

  "The cop was lying. Who'd be crazy enough to drive around in Cholo's car with crack in it?"

  "They're bad guys. Who sicced them on you?" I said.

  "I just came to thank you for what you did."

  "Sit down a minute, will you?"

  "I'm not feeling too good. There was noise in the jail all night."

  Her face was pretty, her eyes turquoise. She pushed her hair up on her neck with one hand. A package of cigarettes stuck out of the front pocket of her jeans.

  "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.