The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga #2) - James Lee Burke Page 0,54

man. You’re in jail.”

“Thanks for telling me that.”

I put my hand on Saber’s shoulder. “Your dad or mine will be here soon.”

I was wrong. The hours passed and the electric lights went on in the corridor, then at 11:01 P.M. they went off with a klatch all at once, dropping the building into darkness except for the fire exits and a guard box by the main gate.

At seven A.M. the trusty was back with a cauldron of Cream of Wheat and an aluminum bucket of sausages and a huge pot of coffee. One hour later we went to arraignment on a long wrist chain. My father was among a handful of spectators in the courtroom. Saber’s was not. We were charged with breaking and entering and destruction and theft of private property. Our bail was set at five hundred dollars, a great amount back then.

My father had brought cash. Saber kept craning his neck, looking at the entrance to the courtroom. Mr. Bledsoe never arrived. It took a half hour for me to be processed back on the street. Saber was issued jailhouse denims and told to change for transfer to a unit upstairs. I could see the fear and hurt in his eyes. “Your dad is probably putting the money together,” I said.

“No, he’s not. He’s drunk. He doesn’t care.”

“I’m sorry, Saber. Don’t mouth off to these guys. No matter what they say or do.”

“I can do this standing on my hands.” He missed an eyelet as he buttoned his denim shirt, as though his fingers had gone numb.

I lowered my voice. “Be careful about what you say to everybody, got it? There are no secrets in a place like this.”

“So maybe I’ll make some new friends.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s the way things worked out. I’m here. You’re going home. I told you they were out to get us. I was half right.”

Outside, in the freshness of the morning and the sound of traffic amid Houston’s tall buildings, I walked with my father toward his car while Saber was put in lockdown with mainline cons.

“Did you do it?” my father said.

“No, sir.”

“Your word on that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What about Saber?”

“He wouldn’t kill Mr. Krauser’s dog. I’m sure of that.”

“I talked with this fellow Hopkins, the one who arrested you all. He said the SPCA man thought the dog was fed sleeping pills, not poison.”

“How could he tell?”

“Poison would have caused convulsions and vomiting. The dog simply went to sleep. You still think Saber wasn’t involved?”

He waited for my reply.

“Can we get him a bondsman?” I asked.

“He might be better off in jail. Anyway, we can’t mix in the family business of other people.”

“Hopkins rubbed the soles of our shoes in the paint on Mr. Krauser’s floor.”

“I think it’s time we have a talk with Mr. Harrelson.”

“Grady?”

“No, his father.”

We crossed the street to Kelly’s steak house, one of my father’s favorite downtown spots. His face was untroubled, perhaps even at peace, his fedora tilted over one eye, his clothes free of cigarette smoke. I wondered if we had entered a new day.

Chapter

13

I WAS SURPRISED HOW easily we gained access to Clint Harrelson, since he was known as a recluse and an introvert. My father called him, and he invited us to his home. As we opened the piked gate and entered the main grounds of the estate, I noticed how my father looked at the details surrounding him; I knew what he was thinking. The Harrelson estate was a replica, at least generically, of the Louisiana home where my father was born in 1899, except the brick walkways and live oaks and camellia bushes and creamy columns and emerald-green lawn and clumps of pink and lavender wisteria and subterranean garage of the Harrelson estate were real. They were not an abstraction or part of a postbellum era that had become little more than a decaying memory on a polluted bayou.

Grady had no siblings nor a mother. Grady told others she had died of breast cancer in a Mexico City clinic. Others said she’d died in a plane crash with her Brazilian lover, a famous polo player and owner of a coffee plantation. Regardless of how she died, all of her genes and physical characteristics must have gone into her son, because Grady looked nothing like his father. Texas was full of loud, porcine oilmen who made fortunes during the war. They combined a predatory form of capitalism with down-home John Wayne folksiness and couldn’t wait to spit a mouthful of Red Man