BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (27 page)

'You think you're getting a bad deal, huh? You cost
us eight months' work. That's right, we were about to flip Sammy Mace,
then you showed up. Plus your gal just got pulled out by her people.'

He looked at the reaction in my face, and a smile
broke at the corner of his mouth.

'Her people?' I said numbly.

'Call her apartment. She's gone, bro. She got picked
up in a plane at four this morning. She wouldn't survive an IA
investigation,' he said.

I started to pick books off the floor and stack them
on my desk, as though I were in a trance.

'You were a cop,' Wilcox said. 'You don't use a
baton to bring a suspect into submission. You never deliver a 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 face against the dust, trying to turn his cows away from the bluffs
when dry lightning caused them to rumble across the prairie louder than
the thunder itself.

I wished I had lived back in his time, when men like
Garland T. Moon were bounced off cottonwood trees and federal agents
didn't make you fall in love with them and then leave on airplanes at
four in the morning with no explanation.

It was a self-pitying way to think, but I didn't
care. I went into the library and got out Sam's journal and read it
while I finished lunch.

I didn't hear from Mary Beth again
that day. That
night I dreamed of a picnic ground filled with children. A green river
curled through cottonwoods behind them, and a rainbow arched through
the sky over their heads. In their midst was a goat-footed satyr, his
vascular arms as white as milk, a clutch of balloons strung from one
fist. At first I couldn't see his face, then he rotated his head toward
me, his mouth grinning, the scab on his lip as shiny as plastic. The
children ran toward the balloons and swirled about his thighs like
disembodied figures in a maelstrom.

In the morning I drove to Bunny
Vogel's house. His
father came out on the porch, barefoot and without a shirt. He was an
inept tank of a man, whose doughlike hand dwarfed his cigarette.

'You the lawyer been coming around?' he said.

'That's right.'

'He went swimming. At the beach, up the river,' he
said. 'You going up there?'

'I expect.'

'Tell him he went off without cleaning the grease
trap. Now there's some black gunk overflowing out of the sink. Whole
house smells like an elephant backed up and farted in it.'

I drove to the small stretch of sandy beach built by
the county at the curve of the river. Bunny's maroon '55 Chevy was
parked back in the trees, the waxed finish and green-tinted windows
sprinkled with pine needles. A heavyset Mexican girl in a black bathing
suit sat at a picnic table, watching Bunny do push-ups, his toes on the
table, his arms propped on a bench. He wore only a pair of lavender
running shorts, and his triceps and back muscles ridged like rolls of
metal washers.

When he saw me, his face reddened, and he sat on the
bench and dusted the sand off his feet and began fitting on his
flip-flops. His long, bronze-colored hair hung down over his disfigured
jawline.

'Your name keeps coming up in my trial preparation,'
I said.

'I ain't interested,' he said.

I looked at the girl and waited for him to introduce
me. When he didn't, I realized the redness in his face was not because
I had caught him impressing a girl with his strength.

'I'm Billy Bob Holland. How do you do?' I said to
her.

'It's nice to meet you,' she said. A gold tooth
shone in the back of her mouth.

'Yeah, excuse me, this is Naomi. We was taking a
swim,' he said, and his hand gestured at nothing, as though he needed
to offer an explanation.

'So that's what I'm gonna do,' she said, and picked
up her towel.

'You ain't got to go, Naomi,' Bunny said.