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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?”
