James Burke - Light of the World

“Suit yourself.”

She stood up, then looked out the window at the deer. “There’s corn on the grass,” she said.

“The doe’s got a hurt leg. I put it out at night for her and the fawn.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“I didn’t check.”

“Maybe you are a kinder man than you pretend to be, Mr. Dixon,” she said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You’re a right handsome woman, if a little on the heavy side,” he said.

“That’s supposed to be a compliment?”

“I’d call it a statement of fact. You’re a nice-looking lady. I get out of sorts sometime. You already ate breakfast?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Stick around.”

“I’m not sure for what purpose.”

“My huevos rancheros ain’t half bad. I got coffee and biscuits, too. There’s a bowl of pineapple in the icebox I chopped up. I learned cooking in the army before they kicked me out.”

“You do have manners,” she said.

“You’re working for Love Younger, though, ain’t you?”

“I most certainly am not. I do not care for Mr. Younger. I do not care for his ilk, his progeny, or the industries he owns.”

“What was that second one?”

“His offspring. They’re like their father. They’re notorious for their lack of morality.”

He snapped the buttons into place on his cowboy shirt, the tails splaying across his narrow hips. He pulled on his boots and filled the coffeepot under the spigot, his mouth a slit, his eyes as empty as glass.

“Is there some reason you’re not speaking to me now?” she asked.

“There’s something you hid from me. I just ain’t figured out what it is,” he replied. His eyes rested on the ballpoint in her hand. “You like ham or a chunk of steak with your eggs?”

Wyatt Dixon had never been on the property of a wealthy man and had always assumed that the geographical passage from the world of those who ate potatoes and those whose bread was served on a gold plate would involve rumbling over a drawbridge and a moat, not simply driving up a maple-shaded road through an open gate and cutting his engine in front of a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion overlooking the Clark Fork of the Columbia River.

The gardens were bursting with flowers, the lawn a blue-green mixture of fescue and clover and Bermuda grass. Three men who looked like gardeners were watering the flowers and weeding the beds, hummingbirds hanging in midair above them, the sun a yellow flame through trees that grew higher than the roof.

One of the gardeners snipped a rose and set it in a bucket of water and walked toward Wyatt, sticking his cloth gloves in his back pocket, smiling behind a pair of Ray-Ban wraparounds. His hair was gold and braided in cornrows, his tanned scalp popping with perspiration. A red spider was tattooed on the back of one hand. “You the plumber?” he said.

“I look like a plumber?” Wyatt replied.

The gardener gazed up the driveway at the road and at the sunlight spangling in the canopy, his smile never leaving his mouth. His lips had no color and seemed glued on his face. “You’re lost and you need directions?”

“I got a message for Mr. Love Younger. Is he home?”

The gardener took a two-way phone from a pouch on his belt. “I can ask.”

Wyatt glanced at an upstairs window from which an elderly man was looking back. “Is that him yonder?” he said.

“What’s your name, buddy?” the gardener said.

Wyatt pulled the walkie-talkie from the gardener’s hand and pushed the talk button. “Howdy-doody, Mr. Younger. This is Mr. Dixon. You got yourself a little-bitty teensy-weensy pissant down here deciding who talks to you and who don’t. I need to have a word with you about the death of your granddaughter. You want to come down here or not?”

“You’re the rodeo man who sold her the bracelet?” a voice replied.

“Yes, sir, that would be yours truly. I sold it to her in the biker joint she didn’t have no business in.”

“Stay right there,” the voice said.

A moment later, a man with a broad forehead and vascular arms and a glare emerged from the front door. When Wyatt extended his hand and stepped toward him, the man with the cornrows and another gardener grabbed his upper arms, struggling to get their fingers around the entirety of his triceps.

“Let him go,” Younger said.

“Thank you, kind sir. Breeding shows every time,” Wyatt said, straightening a crick out of his neck. “A journalist named Bertha Phelps come to see me this morning. I think maybe she’s working for you, but she says that ain’t true.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Younger said.

“The cops are trying to put your granddaughter’s murder on me. The one who tried hardest was Bill Pepper. I bet you know who he is. Or rather, who he was.”

“I do.”

“You were paying him?”

“Why have you come here, Mr. Dixon?”

“To find out why y’all are trying to do me in.”

“I have no interest in you at all, except for the fact that you were the last person to see my granddaughter alive.”

“That’s a lie, Mr. Younger. Every biker in the Wigwam saw her. Except I’m the only man there what got pulled in.”

Younger held his gaze on Wyatt’s face. “I understand you have quite a history. You ever kill anyone, Mr. Dixon?”

“They say I busted a cap on a rapist.”

“But you didn’t do it?”

“I’m just telling you what they say. In prison you don’t ever ask a man what he done. You ask, ‘What do they say you did?’ ”

“I think you’re a dangerous and violent man.”

“Not no more, I ain’t. Not unless people fuck with me.”

“You can’t use that language here,” Younger said. “State your purpose or leave.”

Wyatt folded his arms on his chest and looked at the Tudor-style house and the beige walls and the purple rockwork around the windows and entranceways and the flowers blooming as big as cantaloupes in the beds. “I just wondered why a man who owned all this would hire a small-town flatfoot and general loser like Bill Pepper to give grief to a man what ain’t done him nothing. You must be pretty goddamn bored.”

“I’ve done you no harm. Don’t you dare say I have.”

“What do you call tasing a man?”

“I don’t even know what the term means.”

“You have a reason for staring into my face like that?” Wyatt said.

“Where’d you grow up?”

“Northeast Texas, just south of the Red.”

“You have unusual eyes.”

“What’s my place of birth have to do with my eyes?”

“Nothing. I have a feeling you want trouble. I don’t think you’ll be happy until you get it.”

Wyatt peeled the paper off a lollipop and stuck the lollipop in his jaw. “There is one other thing you can tell me, because it’s perplexed me for years. It’s got to do with the unpleasant subject of incest and such. I heard this tale about a mountain boy in Kentucky who married a girl from the next hollow and learned on their wedding night she was a virgin. In the morning he sent her back to her folks. When his daddy asked him how come he kicked her out, the boy said she was a virgin. His pap said, ‘You done the right thing, son. If she ain’t good enough for her own family, she ain’t good enough for ours, either.’ Is that story true?”

“Get him out of here,” Younger said.

The next day the sheriff called Albert’s house. By chance I answered the phone. I wished I hadn’t. “Where is the Horowitz woman?” he asked.

“I think she went to the airport early this morning,” I said.

“She did what?”

“She’s making a documentary,” I said. “Can I help with something?”