blow with it above the shoulders. They'd crucify her and drag her people into it with her.'
'I can't stop what you're doing here. But somewhere I'm going to square this down the line,' I said.
'Yeah, that's going to be a big worry of ours,' Wilcox said.
The man in shades began rifling my desk. He removed L.Q. Navarro's holstered. 45 revolver and flipped open the loading gate on the brass bottom of a cartridge.
I fitted my hand around his wrist.
'That belonged to a friend of mine. He's dead now. You don't mind not handling it, do you?' I said, and squeezed his wrist until I saw his lips part on his teeth and a look come into his eyes that his shades couldn't hide.
'We're done here,' Wilcox said, raising his palm pacifically. 'Don't misunderstand the gesture, Holland. Touch a federal agent again and I'll put a freight train up your ass.'
I waited for her call, but it didn't come.
I worked late at the office that day. Through the blinds I could see the sun, like a burning flare, behind the courthouse and the tops of the oak trees. At just after seven Temple Carrol came by.
'I'll buy you a beer,' she said.
'I still have some work to do.'
'I bet.' She sat with one leg on the corner of my desk. She lifted her chestnut hair off her neck. 'It's been a hot one.'
'Yeah, it's warming up.'
'She blew Dodge, huh?'
'I don't know, Temple. Not everybody reports in to me.'
'You want to talk business, or should I get lost?'
I pushed aside a deposition I was reading and waited.
'I took Jamie Lake shopping for some clothes that make her look half human,' she said. 'At first she's looking at these see-through things and I tell her, 'Jamie, it might be the nature of prejudice and all that jazz, but tattoos just don't float well with juries.'
'Oh I get it,' she says. 'Upscale people tell the truth. Trailer court people lie. Wow! Tell me, which kind was that needle-dick polygraph nerd who was trying to scope my jugs?'.
'I say, 'We do what works, kiddo.'
'She goes, 'There's nothing like being sweet, is there? I once told a narc, 'Gee, officer, I wouldn't have smoked it if I had known it was harmful to my health.' He was such a gentleman after that. He took it out of his pants all by himself.'
'Billy Bob, this gal is major off the wall.'
'Most of our clientele is. That's why they're in trouble all the time,' I said.
'Here's the rest of it. She had her nose really bent out of joint by this time. So she takes out her MasterCard and buys four hundred dollars' worth of clothes I couldn't afford.'
'It doesn't mean she's dirty.'
'Yeah, and Jack Vanzandt and this greaseball Felix Ringo brought her to us out of goodwill.'
I rubbed my forehead and looked at the soft orange glow of the sunset over the trees. Mockingbirds glided by the clock tower on the courthouse.
'Yeah, this guy Ringo doesn't fit. He's a friend of Jack, he was hanging around Sammy Mace, and he's hooked up with the G at the same time,' I said.
I felt the fatigue of the day catch up with me. I tried to think straight but I couldn't. I felt her eyes on my face.
'Go to supper with me,' she said.
'I'm going to put Darl Vanzandt on the stand,' I said.
That night there was still no call from Mary Beth. In the morning I drove to the office, then walked to the thrift store operated by the Baptist church, where Emma Vanzandt was a volunteer worker.
She was in back, sorting donated clothes on a long wood table. She wore tailored jeans and red pumps and a white silk blouse with red beads. She didn't bother to look up when I approached her.
'Jack and Felix Ringo gave me some witnesses that are almost too good to be true,' I said.
'Oh, how grand,' she said.
'I think Jack may have done it to get me off your son's back.'
She looked me in the face and silently formed the word stepson with her mouth.
'Excuse me, your stepson, Darl.'
'Why tell me, good sir?'
'Because Darl's going on the stand just the same.'
'Would you kindly take the okra out of your mouth and explain what you're talking about.'
'Darl was at Shorty's the night Roseanne Hazlitt was attacked. He's mentally defective and has a violent history. He's beaten women with his fists. He goes into rages with little provocation. You figure it out, Emma.'
'Ah, our conscience feels better now, doesn't it? You take Jack's favor, but to prove your integrity, you subpoena a walking basket case and fuck him cross-eyed in front of a jury of nigras and Mexicans.'
A woman paying for her purchase at the counter turned around with her mouth open.
'Tell Jack what I said.'
I walked back out the front door. Then I heard her behind me. In the sunlight her makeup looked like a white and pink mask stretched on her face, her black hair pulled tightly back on her forehead, her eyes aglitter with anger or uppers or whatever energy it was that drove her.
'You're a fool,' she said.
'Why?'
Her mouth was thick with lipstick, slightly opened, her eyes fastened on mine, as though she were on the edge of saying something that would forever make me party to a secret that she imparted to no one.
'Bunny Vogel,' she said.
'What?'
Then the moment went out of her eyes.
'I wish I were a man. I'd beat the shit out of you. I truly hate you, Billy Bob Holland,' she said.
My father was both a tack and hot-pass welder on pipelines for thirty years, but all his jobs came from the same company, one that contracted statewide out of Houston. I called their office and asked the lady in charge of payroll if their records would indicate whether my father ever worked around Waco in the late 1930s or early 1940s.
'My heavens, that's a long time ago,' she said.
'It's really important,' I said.
'A lot of our old records are on the computer now, but employees' names of fifty years ago, that's another matter-'
'I don't understand.'
'The company has to know where all its pipe is. But back during the Depression a lot of men were hired by the day and paid in cash. WPA boys, drifters off the highway, they came and they went.'
And the company didn't have to pay union wages or into the Social Security fund, either, I thought.
'Can you just determine if y'all lay any lines around Waco about 1940 or so?' I asked.
'That's a whole lot easier. Can I call you back when I have more time?' she said.
I gave her my office number and went home for lunch. The light on my telephone answering machine was flashing in the library. I pushed the 'play' button, trying not to be controlled by the expectation in my chest.
'It's me, Billy Bob. I'm sorry I left the way I did. I'm not even supposed to call you. I'll try to get back to you later,' Mary Beth's voice said.
The tape announced the time. I had missed her call by fifteen minutes.
I fixed a sandwich and some potato salad and a glass of iced tea and sat down to eat on the back porch. The fields were marbled with shadow and the breeze was warm and flecked with rain and I could smell cows watering at my neighbor's windmill. On the other side of the tank, beyond the line of willows that puffed with wind, was the network of baked wagon ruts and hoofprints where the Chisholm Trail had traversed my family's property. Sometimes I believed Great-grandpa Sam was still out there, in chaps and floppy hat, a bandanna tied across his
