The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,26

a detective, I cover the entire metro area. You know the kids I have the most trouble with? You pissants in Southwest Houston. You think you’re better than other people. I’ll take the nigras or the Mexicans over y’all any day. They might steal, but some of them don’t have much choice. Y’all vandalize property because you think it’s your right. Sometimes I fantasize about stuffing the bunch of you into a tree shredder.”

“What do you want from me?”

“For starters, you’d better choose your words more carefully.”

As bad luck would have it, Saber’s 1936 Chevy roared out of a side street and bounced up the dip into the station lot. Saber had a bottle of Jax in one hand, the radio and the stolen speakers from the drive-in theater blaring. His face lost its color when he saw me in the car with the detective.

“Turn off your engine, lose the beer, and get in the backseat,” Jenks said to Saber.

Saber got out and set the beer down by his front tire.

“I said, lose it.”

“Yes, sir,” Saber said. He threw the bottle up on the patch of lawn by the boulevard and opened the back door of Jenks’s car and sat down as though taking up residence in a tiger’s cage.

Jenks turned around. “You going to give me a bad time, Bledsoe?”

“No, sir,” Saber said.

“When we’re done, pick up that bottle and put it in a trash can.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you boys like to continue drag racing, feeling up the girls at the drive-in, running your money through your peckers on beer and whores, and maybe even graduating from that brat factory you call a high school?”

“Yes, sir, we’re on board for all of that,” Saber said.

Shut up, Saber.

Jenks went to the trunk of the car and returned with a canvas haversack full of file folders. He sat behind the wheel, the door hanging open, and began sorting through sheaves of typewritten pages and black-and-white photographs. “Here’s a mug shot you’ve already seen. I want you to look at it again. This is one time in your life you don’t want to lie. Did you ever see this girl?”

“That’s the girl named Wanda, Loren Nichols’s cousin, the one whose neck was broken,” I said.

“Where did you see her?”

“I saw her in that mug shot you showed me,” I said.

“Nowhere else? You haven’t changed your mind?”

“No, sir.”

“Because I think she pulled a train for a bunch of high school guys more than once. You know what I mean by pulling a train?”

“No,” I said.

“How about you?” he said to Saber.

“Same as Aaron.”

Jenks scratched the tip of his nose. “Strange she ends up with a broken neck two blocks from where you boys might have torched Loren’s vehicle.”

“We didn’t do that, sir,” I said.

“I admit that might take more smarts than either of you seems to have,” he said. “I got some other photos in here.”

He pulled out about fifteen of them, all of different sizes and origins, like photographs someone had thrown in a box and put away in a closet: elegantly dressed men and women eating in a supper club, evening gowns glittering like melted sherbet; a man in a summer tux with his hair parted down the middle, shaking hands with Tommy Dorsey; a racehorse dripping with roses in the winner’s circle, its owner wearing round glasses as dark as welders’ goggles; a casino under construction in a desert; a jailhouse photo of a man in a wide-brimmed fedora; and a nude woman with glorious breasts leaning back on a polar-bear rug in front of a fireplace, one eye closed in a lascivious wink.

Jenks made each of us look through the photos one at a time. Neither of us spoke.

“Big blank?” he said.

“I recognize the man in the mug shot,” I said.

Jenks looked out at the boulevard, amused or bored, I couldn’t tell which. “Care to tell me his name?”

“Benjamin Siegel.”

“Which magazine did you see his photo in?”

“My uncle introduced me to him at the Shamrock Hotel. My father has never forgiven him for that.”

“What’s your uncle’s name?”

“Cody Holland. Mr. Siegel was at the Shamrock with Frankie Carbo.”

Jenks rolled his eyes. “Cody Holland the boxing promoter?”

“He’s an oilman, too.”

“Do you know who Frankie Carbo is?”

“He’s my uncle’s business partner.”

“Business partner? Where’d you pick up that language, boy? Frankie Carbo was a member of Murder, Incorporated.”

“That’s why my father was upset.”

“You know anyone else in these photos?”

I could see Saber out of the corner of my eye. His upper lip was moist