BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (4 page)

'I'll buy you a Mexican dinner,' I said to Temple.

'I think I'll just go home and take a shower. I feel like
somebody rubbed nicotine in my hair.'.

I backed the Avalon around and started to pull out of the
parking lot. I saw her eyes watching the black man, a tooth working on
the corner of her lip.

'You didn't interview him?' I said.

'No, he wasn't here before.'

I stopped the car, and we both got out and walked over to him.
He kept at his work and paid little attention to us. Temple held out a
photo she had gotten from the dead girl's high school.

'Have you seen this girl before, sir?' she asked.

He took the photo from her and looked at it briefly, then
handed it back.

'Yeah, I seen her. She the one killed up the road,' he said.

'Did you know her?' I asked.

'No, I didn't know her. But I seen her, all right.'

'When?' I asked.

'Night she got killed. She come here in a cab. Some boys was
fixing to leave, then they seen her and axed her to go off with them.
She had her own mind about it, though.'

'Sir?' I said.

'She hit this one boy right 'cross the face,
whap
.
He stood there, holding his jaw, just like he had a toothache. Then she
give him the finger while she was walking back inside. Didn't even
bother to turn around when she done it, just held it up in the air for
him to see.'

'Who was the boy?' I said.

'Ain't seen him befo'. Ain't sure I'd know him again.' His
eyes drifted off my face.

'Yeah, you would,' Temple said.

'Why didn't you tell this to someone?' I said.

'They come to a place like this more than once, it's for a
reason. The wrong one, too. What I say ain't gonna change that.'

'What kind of car did this boy have?' Temple said.

'What reason I got to watch his car?'

'Who was he with?' Temple said.

'I ain't seen them befo'.'

'Give me your name,' she said. She wrote it down, then stuck a
business card in his hand. 'You just became a witness in a murder
trial. Stay in touch. Work on your memory, too. I know you can do it.'

I followed the two-lane county road along the river, past a
cornfield that was green and dented with wind under the moon.

'That's kind of a tough statement to make to an old fellow,' I
said.

'I don't like people who're cutesy about a raped and murdered
girl,' Temple said.

After I had dropped her off, I made a
call to the jail and
then drove to the house of Marvin Pomroy, the prosecutor. He lived in a
white gingerbread house, shaded by live oaks, in the old affluent
district of Deaf Smith. His St Augustine grass was wet with soak hoses
and iridescent in the glare of the flood lamps that lit and shadowed
his property.

His wife answered the door and invited me in, but I thanked
her and asked if Marvin could simply step outside a minute. He still
had a dinner napkin in his hand when .he came out on the gallery.

'I've got a problem with some missing evidence,' I said.

'See the sheriff.'

'You're an honest man, Marvin. Don't jerk me around.'

'Same response. You shouldn't try to do business on my
gallery.'

'Somebody's sandbagging the investigation and setting up my
client.'

He reached behind him and closed the front door. His
well-shaped head and steel-rimmed glasses and neatly combed short hair
were covered with the yellow glow of the bug light overhead.

'You listen, goddamn it, that kid's got dirty written all over
him. You get out of my face with this bullshit,' he said.

'I asked the sheriff to move him today. It didn't happen.'

'That's not my problem. You know what is? A guy who could have
been dredged up out of the Abyss, Garland T. Moon. He murdered a whole
family in California, he tied them
up in a basement and killed them one by one with a knife, but his
attorney has already gotten most of the evidence suppressed because the
cops seized it with a bad warrant. If I don't make the case on that old
woman he killed here, he'll be back on the street, in our midst, ready
to do it again… Listen, I could get Lucas on capital murder.
But I choose not to do so. Do you hear what I'm saying, Billy Bob?'

'No.'

He shook his head, a sad, private thought in his eyes.

'Don't look at me like that,' I said.

'You were an assistant US attorney. Why'd you blow it?'

'Go to hell, Marvin.'

'Come in and eat,' he said.

'No.'

'Good night to you, then,' he said.

I walked across the grass to my car. The yard seemed filled
with shadows that leaped and broke apart and reformed themselves in the
wind. I looked back over my shoulder through the front windows of
Marvin's house. He and his wife and children were seated at the dining
room table, a chandelier dripping with light above their heads, their
faces animated with their own company as they passed bowls of food back
and forth to one another.

I woke before sunrise and fried eggs
and ham in the kitchen
and ate them out of the skillet with bread and a cup of coffee on the
back porch. The dawn was gray and misty, the air so cool and soft that
I could hear sound from a long way off—a bass flopping in the
tank,
the creak of the windmill shifting directions, a cowbell clanging on my
neighbor's gate.

L.Q. Navarro was stretched out on the perforated,
white-painted iron lawn bench under the chinaberry tree, his Stetson
tilted sideways on his head, his cheek resting on one hand.

I tried to ignore him.

But when I closed my eyes he and I were on horseback again in
a reed-choked muddy bottom across the border in Coahuila, our eyes
stinging with sweat in the darkness, our noses and mouths filled with
insects. Then the fusillade exploded all around us, from behind
sandhills and scrub brush and mesquite and gutted car bodies, the
muzzle flashes blooming in the dark, our horses caving under us as
though they had been eviscerated.

But L.Q.' s mare labored to her feet again, a hole in her rib
cage squirting blood like a broken pipe, and began galloping in terror
up an arroyo, flailing her head against the collapsed reins. Then I saw
L.Q.' s boot and roweled Mexican spur tangled in the stirrup and his
body bouncing across the rocks, his arms folded over his head as the
mare's iron shoes sliced the suitcoat off his shoulders.

My right arm felt dead, useless at my side, the upper bone
snapped in two by a round that had struck it like a sharp, solitary
blow from a cold chisel. I stood erect and fired and fired, until my
nine-millimeter locked empty, then I dropped it to the ground and began
firing my .357 Magnum, not taking aim, the air crisscrossed with
ricochets and toppling rounds that made a
whirring
sound past the ear or
pinged
out into the
darkness like a broken spring.

Then I heard our attackers begin moving through the brush, the
sand slicks, from behind the rusted car bodies, through the blackened
greasewood and tangles of wire fence. I heard the man behind me before
I saw him, his boots digging hopelessly for purchase into the soil as
he slid down the arroyo. I turned just as his weight propelled him
toward the bottom of the arroyo, the starlight glinting on the barrel
of his rifle, and I pointed my revolver straight in front of me and
squeezed off the last round in the cylinder, the hammer ratcheting back
and slamming down on the cartridge before I recognized the thin,
silvery tinkle of L.Q.' s Mexican spurs.

I pushed away the frying pan and coffee cup and wiped my mouth
on a paper napkin.

'
Why'd you pick up that damn rifle?'
I
said.

He adjusted his cheek on his palm and tipped back his hat. '
I
dropped
my piece. What was I supposed to shoot at them with, spitballs
?'

'They all made it back into the mountains. We lost
you for nothing.'

'
I
wouldn't say that. I busted
off my pocketknife
in the guy I took the rifle from. It's that same dude we liked to
smoked a couple of other times. I expect he took his next leak with one
kidney
.'

'You were sure a fine lawman, L.Q.'

He cut his head and grinned and stuck a long grass stem in his
mouth.

I heard a car out front, then the doorbell ring.

'Come around back!' I shouted through the kitchen.

The deputy named Mary Beth Sweeney walked around the corner of
the house, the sun like a soft yellow balloon at her back. L.Q. was
standing under the chinaberry tree now, looking at her curiously. She
walked right through him. His silhouette broke apart in a burst of gold
needles.

I pushed open the back screen for her.

'How about a cup of coffee?' I said.

She stepped inside and took off her campaign hat. She pushed a
curl off her forehead.

'This won't take long,' she said.

'Excuse me?'

'You jammed me up with the sheriff.'

'About the missing evidence?' I said.

'You violated a confidence, Mr Holland.'

'I didn't,' I said.

'Yeah? I think it's Bubba and Bubba lighting each other's
cigars.'

'Who are you?' I said.

She fitted her hat on her head and let the screen slam behind
her.

I followed her to her cruiser.

'You're wrong about this,' I said.

I watched her cruiser spin gravel onto the county road and
disappear over a rise between two pastures filled with red Angus.

My law office was above the old bank
on the corner of the town
square. From my window I could see the iron tethering rings that bled
rust out of the old elevated sidewalks, the hardware and feed stores
that had gone broke, the tiny neon-scrolled Rialto theater that still
showed first-run movies, the yellow tip of a Spanish-American War
artillery piece under the live oaks on the courthouse lawn, the
Roman-numeraled clock perched atop the third floor, where Lucas
Smothers waited in a cell with a sociopath behind the wall on each side
of him.

I sat at my desk with a cup of coffee and stared at the glass
case on the wall where I had mounted Great-grandpa Sam's Navy Colt .36
caliber revolvers and his octagon-barrel Winchester '73 lever-action
rifle on a field of blue felt. I picked up the telephone and punched in
the sheriff's office extension.

'My client hasn't been moved,' I said.

'Talk to Harley.'

'Harley's a sadistic moron.'

'You're starting to try my patience, Billy Bob.'

'Tell your scene investigator I'm going to fry his ass.'

'The missing beer cans or whatever?'

'That's right.'

'What would they prove, that a lot of people get drunk and
diddle each other in that picnic ground?… Go to a head doctor
while you still got time, son. I'm worried about you.'

I drove out to the clapboard,
tin-roofed home of the victim,
Roseanne Hazlitt. The aunt was a frail, wizened woman who snapped the
screen latch in place as I stepped up on her tiny gallery. Behind her,
the television set was tuned to a talk show on which people shouted and
jeered at one another. An ironing board on a short stand was elevated
in front of the couch. Through the screen I smelled an odor on her like
camphor and dried flowers and sweat baked into her clothes by the heat
of her work.

'You asking me to hep set that boy loose?' she said.

'No, ma'am. I just wondered if Roseanne had other friends she
might have met sometimes at Shorty's.'

'Like who?'

'Like one she had reason to slap the daylights out of.'

'She never hurt nobody in her life. It was them hurt her.'

'May I come in?'

'No.'

'Who's
them
, Ms Hazlitt?'

'Any of them that gets the scent of it, like a bunch of dogs
sniffing around a brooder house. Now, you get off my gallery, and you
tell that Smothers boy he might fool y'all, he don't fool me.'

'You know Lucas?'

I drove back to Deaf Smith, parked my
Avalon by the office,
and walked across the street to the courthouse. I opened Harley Sweet's
door without knocking.

'I want to see Lucas in private, in an interview room, and I
don't want anybody disturbing me while I talk to him,' I said.

'I wouldn't have it no other way, Billy Bob.' He leaned back
in his swivel chair, his jaw resting on his fingers, a shadow of a
smile on his mouth.

Upstairs, inside the jail, the turnkey unlocked Lucas's cell.
The man with the misshaped head and pot stomach in the cell to the
right, whose name was Jimmy Cole, walked up and down, tapping his fists
one on top of the other, oblivious to our presence. The man on the
left, Garland T. Moon, sat naked on his bunk. He had been exercising,
and he wiped the sweat off his stomach with a towel and grinned at me.
His shrunken, receded left eye glistened with a rheumy, mirthful light.

The turnkey walked Lucas and me down a short hallway to a
small windowless room, with a wood table and two wood chairs and a
urine-streaked grated drain in the concrete floor.

Lucas sat down, one hand clenched on his wrist. He watched my
face, then licked his lips.

'What's wrong, Mr Holland?'

'You led me to believe you didn't know Roseanne Hazlitt
outside of Shorty's.'

'I didn't know her real good, that's all.'

'You're lying.'

'I drove her home a couple of times after Shorty's closed. We
didn't go out reg'lar or nothing.'

'No, all you did was get in her pants.'

He swallowed dryly. There were discolorations in his cheeks,
like small pieces of melting ice.

'You want to spend the rest of your life in Huntsville? You
keep lying to me, and Marvin Pomroy is going to grind you into
sausage… What are you hiding, Lucas?'