BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (23 page)

'What charges?'

'Holding some reefer and a few whites. I'm on
probation, see, and my PO can stick me back in county. I might get
consecutive time, too.'

'It all makes sense,' I said.

'They get you in the system, they jam you up. It's
like they only got so many names in the computer and these are the guys
they keep jamming up.'

'What have you got for me, Virgil?'

He wore a sleeveless purple T-shirt and jeans and
shined, half-topped leather boots. He sat down and rubbed his hands up
and down his forearms.

'The night Roseanne got killed? I stopped in that
picnic ground,' he said. 'Lucas was passed out drunk in his truck.
Roseanne wanted me to drive her home. I wish I had. But there ain't no
way Lucas killed her.'

'Anybody else see this?'

'Yeah, some college girl from Austin. She was on my
bike. That's why I couldn't give Roseanne a ride. Maybe you can find
her.'

I nodded while he talked. His eyes wandered around
the office; occasionally he squeezed the inside of his thigh, high up
by his scrotum. I had the feeling he could eat a hot cigarette and not
miss a beat.

'Why didn't you tell someone this earlier?' I asked.

'I was in county.'

'You got into Bunny Vogel's face the other night.
You weren't in county then.'

'I just got out. You don't want the information,
I'll boogie. Where'd those old guns come from?'

'Out at Shorty's you called Bunny a pimp. Why would
you do that?'

'I don't remember saying that.'

'Other people do.'

He shook his head profoundly. 'It don't come to
mind. Maybe I was just hot. Bunny and me had some trouble over Roseanne
once.'

'He took her away from you?'

Virgil shrugged. 'Yeah, that about says it. I still
liked her, though. She was a good girl. Too good for all them rich
kids.'

I tried to read his face, his voice, the apparent
genuine sentiment in his last statement.

'How old are you, Virgil?'

'Twenty-one.'

'I think you got a lot of mileage.'

'You gonna tell Mr Ringo I hepped out?'

I pushed a yellow legal pad and a pencil across the
desk to him.

'Write this stuff down for me, will you?' I said.

After he was gone, I walked to the window and
watched him start his Harley. and roar off the square, his exhaust
echoing between the buildings. When I turned around, L.Q. Navarro was
sitting in the deerhide chair, throwing cards from his Ranger deck into
the crown of his hat.

'
You believe him?
' he asked.

'He can bust Marvin's case.'

'That boy's jailwise, bud.'

'Right. So why would he trade off a
chickenshit possession charge against perjury in a homicide trial?'

'Picking up the soap in a county bag ain't
no more fun than it is in Huntsville.'

'L.Q., you could have out-debated Daniel
Webster.'

He cut his head and grinned, as he always did when
he had decided to desist, and with two fingers flipped the joker into
the hat.

Through my library window the sun was
red and molten
over the hills, the willows on the edge of the tank puffing in the
wind. Mary Beth and Pete had been making dinner sandwiches in the
kitchen. I didn't hear her behind me.

She saw L.Q.' s revolver, the belt wrapped around
the holster, on top of my desk, next to Great-grandpa Sam's open
journal. I had removed the old cartridges from the leather loops and
inserted fresh ones from a box of Remingtons. Then I had taken apart
the revolver and cleaned and oiled the springs and mechanisms in it and
run a bore brush through the barrel until a silver luster had returned
to the rifling.

'I didn't think you kept any guns in your house,'
she said.

'It belonged to L.Q. Navarro,' I said.

'I see.'

'I had it in a safe deposit box. I was afraid it
might rust.' I put it and the box of Remingtons and the bore brush and
the can of oil inside the desk drawer and closed the drawer.

She went to the window and looked at the sunset.

'Is it for Moon?' she said.

'Sometimes a guy keeps a blank space in his mind.'

'Not a good answer.'

She walked back into the kitchen.

We went down to the tank and spread a checkered
cloth on the grass and set out our sandwiches and deviled eggs on paper
plates. Pete scooped night crawlers out of a coffee can and baited the
hooks on three cane poles and swung the bobbers out on the flooded
reeds. The sun dipped over the hills, and the dusk felt moist and
heated from the water and dense with insects.

'You need to back off,' she said.

'From a guy like Moon?' I asked.

'From all of it. You're straying too deep into
federal territory.'

She kept her gaze on the tank and never looked at
me. She hooked her thumbs in the pockets of her riding pants.

I put my hand on her back. I could feel the heat in
her skin through her shirt.

'These guys threatened Pete; they were going to take
me down in pieces,' I said.

'You think that's lost on me?'

'We're seeing each other and I don't even know who
you are,' I said.

She didn't reply.

'Mary Beth?' I said.

'Maybe you don't know who you are yourself, Billy
Bob,' she said. She turned and looked me full in the face. Her throat
was bladed with color. 'I know what y'all did in Mexico. The man you
idolize was a self-appointed executioner. Is that what you want to be?'

'He was a brave man, Mary Beth. You shouldn't speak
of him like that.'

She opened the top of the wicker basket and took out
the tin cups for lemonade and started to fill them. Then she stopped
and brushed a long curl out of her eye.

'I apologize for remarking on your friend. Say good
night to Pete for me,' she said, and walked toward the house and her
car.

I went to the health club at
six-thirty the next
morning and lay on the tile stoop at the rear of the steam room and
began the series of exercises the doctor had recommended for my back.
The room was empty, billowing with vapor, the temperature set at 130
degrees.

Then the door opened and closed and Sammy Mace and
Felix Ringo entered and sat down naked on the stoop. They paid no
attention to me. Felix Ringo was telling a story, pumping his hands as
though he were rotating the inverted pedals on a bicycle.

'You get it going real fast, man. The wires are
already clipped on the guy, and the guy starts jerking around and
jittering and his words are popping on his lips like sparks. The faster
you pump it, the faster his mouth is working,' Ringo said, giggling.
'This was the same guy says he ain't never going to give nobody up,
spitting on people, acting like he don't care when we walk him into the
basement. They got it coming, man, you seen some of the stuff they
done.'

He continued his story, tilting forward on his arms,
looking at Sammy Mace's profile for reaction. Sammy placed two fingers
on Ringo's arm and looked in my direction. Then he wrapped his loins in
a towel and moved down the stoop and sat next to me. His face was
flushed, slick with sweat, heated by the room and the animus that drove
his thoughts, like that of a man to whom lust, anger, and
vindictiveness were interchangeable passions. His eyes took my
inventory, dropped briefly to my genitalia, settled on- my mouth, then
my eyes.

'You a lawyer here now, huh?' he said.

'You got it.'

'I like it here. It's clean. That biker kid Felix
found help you out?'

'Too soon to tell, Sammy.'

His eyes were so dark they were almost black, the
eyebrows silver. His stare held on mine, trying to read what I wanted,
what lie did my words conceal.

'Jack Vanzandt was a pathfinder, a war hero. He
ought to be governor of Texas. Why you trying to hurt his family?'
Sammy said.

'It's a nice day. I think I'm going to get back in
it,' I said, and started to rise.

'I'm talking to you,' he said, touching me in the
sternum with the balls of his fingers. 'You brought up that cop-killer
stuff in front of my friends. I let it go. But that don't mean I
forgot.'

'You still live in River Oaks?'

'So what?'

'It's probably the richest neighborhood in the
United States. That cop had a wife and four kids. You providing for
them, Sammy?'

I walked past him, out the door and into the shower.
I turned on the hot water in my face and let it fountain over my head
and shoulders. But my encounter with Felix Ringo and Sammy Mace was not
over. They were at the far end of the shower, lathering under the
nozzles, soap roiling off their swimming-pool tans, men who knew that
youth might fade but money and power did not.

I didn't want to look at or engage them again, but
an image registered in the corner of my eye, one that connected somehow
with memory and dreams and the voice of L.Q. Navarro. On Felix Ringo's
right side, low in the back, was a six-inch scar, as thick as a night
crawler, welted, perforated with stitch holes along the edges.

I walked into the dressing area and opened my
locker. Felix Ringo followed me, drying his head with a wadded towel,
his body hair glowing against a bank of lighted mirrors behind him. He
rubbed a stick of deodorant under his arm.

'I hear your PI is checking out the kid I sent you,'
he said.

'Maybe.'

'That kid's a good witness. You a guy who sees plots
all the time. Don't fuck it up.'

'Who carved on your kidney?' I said.

The glare in his eyes made me think of a phosphorous
match burning inside brown glass.

Friday afternoon Temple Carrol asked
me to walk
across the square with her to the Mexican grocery store. The wind was
warm, even in the shade of the trees on the courthouse lawn, and we sat
in the back of the grocery, under the fans by the old soda fountain,
and ordered tacos and iced tea. She read from the notebook opened by
her elbow while she ate.

'Virgil Morales is everything he says he is,' she
said. 'Hangs with some biker pukes called the Purple Hearts, in and out
of juvie since he was thirteen, a couple of times down in county for
dope and barroom bullshit. He's also had three paternity suits filed
against him. In other words, your average Mexican gangbanger who
operates on two brain cells and believes his Hollywood career is right
around the corner.'

The overhead fan blew a strand of hair in her face.

'How do you think he'd do on a lie detector?' I
asked.

'A kid who'd probably roll a joint during the
Apocalypse? You tell me.'

'How about the girl he says was with him?'

'She lives in Austin, all right, but she's no
college student. Not unless you count being a barmaid in a rathskeller
next to the campus. Anyway, she's been in detox once, has butterflies
tattooed on her shoulders, and gets off on bikers. You might think
about hiring a speech coach for her.'

'Why's that?'

'Every third word in her vocabulary rhymes with
duck
.'

'She gives the same account as Virgil?'

'She says Lucas was passed out in his truck and
Roseanne Hazlitt was throwing up in the bushes. She said they tried to
wake him up and couldn't do it.'

'Lucas was passed out when the first cruiser got to
the murder scene,' I said. 'Drunks don't wake up from stupors and kill
other people and go to sleep again. You did a great job, Temple.'

She didn't reply. She looked at the front screen
door, her eyes as empty as glass.

'What's wrong?' I said.

'There's a smell to this. It found us too easy.'

'They both tell the same story. Why would the girl
commit perjury for Lucas?'

She shook her head. 'You're personally involved with
this one, Billy Bob. You're not seeing things like you
should… How do I say it?'

'Come on, Temple. Don't be that way.'

'How about that Sweeney broad? You know she's an
undercover operative of some kind. When the feds or whoever they are
get finished with whatever they're doing around here, she'll take off
and you and me and Pete and Lucas will still be chopping in the same
cotton patch. Except one of us never knew who his real friends were.'

'That's not true. You know the respect I have for
you.'

'The word the girl in Austin uses all the time? It's
fuck
. Yeah, that's it,
fuck.
As in
fuck it
.'

I picked up the bill and paid it at the register in
front. When I came back to the table, Temple had gone.

I couldn't sleep that night. I went
downstairs in my
robe and turned on the desk lamp in the library and, with heat
lightning veining the sky outside, read from Great-grandpa Sam's
journal.