BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (3 page)

'People she went to school with, I guess. Are they gonna
electrocute me, Mr Holland?' he said.

'Texas doesn't have the electric chair anymore. But, no, you
won't be tried for capital murder. Just give me some time. We'll get
you out of this.'

'How?'

I didn't have an answer for him.

On the way out, I heard the man with the misshaped head and
white pot stomach laughing in a high, whinnying voice, mimicking the
conversation he'd heard in Lucas's cell: 'They gonna 'lectrocute me?
They gonna 'lectrocute me?… Hey, you punk, the black boys
gonna take you into the bridal suite and teach you how to pull a train.'

He held his chin and loins close against the bars and made a
wet, chugging sound like a locomotive.

I went home and fixed lunch in the
kitchen. The silence of the
house seemed to ring and pop in my ears. I opened all the downstairs
windows and pulled back the curtains and felt the wind flow through the
hallway and puff open the back screen. The morning paper lay folded on
an oak table in front of the hallway mirror. A full-length photo of
Lucas in handcuffs stared up at me. He didn't have my eyes, I thought.
They were obviously his mother's. But the hair, the cut of the jaw, the
six-foot-one frame… None of those belonged to Vernon Smothers.

I went back into the kitchen and tried to finish the fried
pork chop sandwich I'd fixed.

His mother and I had gone to high school together. Both her
parents had been road musicians who worked oil field honkytonks from
Texas City to Casper, Wyoming. When she was sixteen she met and married
Vernon Smothers, who was ten years older than she. When she was
nineteen she found me in Houston and asked for money so she could leave
him.

I offered her half of my ancient rented house in the Heights.

Two weeks later a fellow Houston police officer called Vernon
and told him I was living with his wife. He came for her at night when
I was not home, in the middle of a hurricane that tore the pecan tree
out of my front yard. I never saw her again.

A month after Lucas was born she was electrocuted trying to
fix the well pump that Vernon had repaired with adhesive tape from the
medicine cabinet.

I wrapped my unfinished sandwich in wax paper and put it in
the icebox. When I turned around, L.Q. Navarro was leaning against the
back doorjamb, his arms folded across his chest. His Stetson was the
color of ash, his eyes as lustrous as obsidian.

'
How's it hangin, L.Q.?'
I said.

'This weather's a pistol. It don't get any better.'

'You're not going to try to mess me up today, are
you?'

'I wouldn't dream of it, Billy Bob.'

He slipped the scarlet rose from the top buttonhole of his
shirt and rolled it by the stem between his fingers. Where the rose had
been was a hole that glowed with a bloodred light, like a votive candle
burning inside red glass.

'
It was an accident
,' I said.

'
That's what I keep telling you. Get rid of this for
me, will you
?' He drew the rose across my palm. My fingers
constricted as though the tendons had been severed by a barber's razor.

Ten minutes later I heard an
automobile in front. I opened the
door and looked down the flagstone walk that dissected the wall of
poplars at the foot of the lawn, and saw the sheriff's deputy named
Mary Beth Sweeney getting out of her cruiser. She fixed her campaign
hat so that the leather cord drew tight against the back of her head,
pushed her shirt down inside her gunbelt with her fingers, and walked
toward me. She had a walk that my father would have referred to as a
'fine carriage', her shoulders erect, her chin lifted, her long legs
slightly accentuating the movement of her hips.

'How you doin'?' I said.

'You going to use a PI in discovery?'

'Probably… You want to come inside?'

'Out here is good. At the river, night before last? The scene
investigator picked up a vinyl bag-load of beer cans. They're not in
the evidence locker.'

'Why are you telling me this?'

'That kid's going down on a bad bounce. I'm not buying into
it.'

'You can lose your job for this.'

'Look, you know all these things. The victim's teeth were
broken. Your man didn't have any cuts on his hands. There was no
weapon. When we cuffed him, he was too drunk to stand up.'

'Criminal Investigation Division, huh?' I said.

'What about it?'

'Doing grunt work in a place like this… You must
like the mild summers. In July we fry eggs on the sidewalks.'

'Use what I've told you, Mr Holland, or wear it in your hat,'
she said.

She walked back to her cruiser, her attention already focused
on a cardinal perched atop a rose trellis, her hat tipped forward on
her curly head like a Marine Corps DI's.

Before she became a private
investigator, Temple Carrol had
been a corrections officer at Angola penitentiary over in Louisiana, a
patrolwoman with the Dallas police department, and a deputy sheriff in
Fort Bend County. She lived with her invalid father only a mile down
the road from me, and every morning, just at sunrise, she would jog
past my house in her T-shirt and sweatpants, her chestnut hair piled on
her head, the baby fat winking on her hips. She never broke her pace,
never did less than five miles, and never stopped at intersections.
Temple Carrol believed in straight lines.

Tuesday morning she tapped on the glass to my office door and
then came inside without waiting. She wore a pair of sandals and blue
jeans and a brown-cotton shirt stitched with flowers. She sat on the
corner of my desk and pointed her finger at me.

'What did that deputy tell you?' she asked.

'They bagged a whole load of beer cans and whiskey bottles at
the crime scene,' I answered.

'Try five cans and a couple of wine bottles. The cans all have
Lucas's or the dead girl's prints on them. The bottles are probably
twenty years old.'

'What have you got on the girl?'

'Raised by an aunt… Long welfare history…
In high school she was known as a real piece of work… Went to
a community college for a while and dropped out… Worked at a
church store, got fired from Wal-Mart for stealing… Get this,
though. Three people at Shorty's say she came there by herself, not
with a bunch of college kids. Not good news for Lucas.'

'Maybe she met them there.'

'Maybe… There's another problem, too, Billy Bob.
You'd better get that boy out of jail.'

'What's going on?'

'Harley Sweet.'

She widened her eyes and held them on my face.

I rode up to the third floor of the
courthouse with a turnkey.
The heat had risen in the building and the stone walls were speckled
with condensation.

'I'd like to talk to Lucas in an interview room,' I said.

'Sorry, Billy Bob. Harley says he stays in lockdown…
By the way, don't worry about that 'un on the left. He's got a lot more
Christian perspective today.'

The man in the cell to the left was dressed only in a pair of
paper-thin Jockey undershorts. His sparse hair was the color of
Mercurochrome, pasted in oily strains across his head. His skin had the
unblemished smoothness of latex stretched over stone, and his left eye
was smaller than the other, like a dime-size blue marble pushed deep
into clay.

'What's your name, buddy?' I said to him, while the turnkey
opened Lucas's cell.

'Garland T. Moon,' he answered, his eyes brightening with
challenge.

'They treating you all right?'

He got up from the bunk, his stomach cording with muscle, and
stood close to the bars. His breath was sweet, like prunes that have
fermented in a jar. 'I like it here. I wouldn't trade it for a half
dozen Californias. It don't impress me out there.'

'Ask him what happened inside that family's house in Santa
Monica. If you got the stomach to hear it,' the turnkey said.

The man who called himself Garland T. Moon smiled into my face
and ran his tongue along his bottom lip. His tongue was red and thick
as a biscuit.

The turnkey locked me in Lucas's cell. I sat down next to
Lucas on his bunk.

'My PI says you've seen something that might get you in
trouble,' I said.

Lucas pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. 'The guy in
there,' he said, his voice lowered. 'Harley was telling him last night
Texas won't send him back to California because California don't like
to give people the death penalty. He was telling the guy what it's like
to die by injection, how the guy's muscles are going to turn to cement
so his lungs cain't go up and down, how he'll suffocate way down inside
himself while everybody watches.

'Harley was almost back to the elevator and the guy says,
"One… one… one Fannin Street." It made Harley go
crazy. He got three other guys up here and they went in the guy's cell
and chained him up and drug him down to the shower, then Harley went
back to a locker and got a cattle prod. Mr Holland, the guy's eyes was
rolled in his head and his britches was around his knees when they drug
him back…'

'Listen to me, Lucas. As long as you're in here, you didn't
see any of this,' I said.

'I cain't take it. The guy in the other cell, Jimmy Cole, he
told me this morning what he done to a little boy in Georgia.'

He started to cry, unashamedly, his arms stiff on his knees,
his eyes squinted shut, the tears streaming down his cheeks.

The sheriff kept his office behind the
courthouse in the
squat, one-story yellow sandstone building that had been the original
county jail in the 1870s. He was six and a half feet tall and weighed
over three hundred pounds, ate five meals a day, chainsmoked cigars,
kept a spittoon by his desk, and hung framed pictures on the ancient
log walls of every man his department had helped the state of Texas
execute.

With no more than a fourth grade education, he had managed to
remain sheriff for twenty-seven years.

He spun a poker chip on his desk blotter while I talked. The
brow of his granite head was furrowed, his massive upper arms red with
sunburn.

'Evidence disappearing? No, sir, not in this department.
Where'd you hear this?' His eyes, which were flat and gray, lifted into
mine.

'It happens, sheriff. Things get misplaced sometimes.'

'My response to you is simple. The sonofabitch told you it is
a goddamn liar. But—' He picked up a pencil stub in his huge
hand and
started writing on a legal pad. 'I'll make a note to myself and get
back to you. How's that?'

'I want my client moved.'

'Why's that?'

'Harley Sweet makes nighttime visits to some of the cells. I
don't want my client involved as a witness in any other kind of court
proceeding.'

He leaned back in his swivel chair, the ends of the pencil
stub crimped in the fingers of each hand.

'You telling me Harley's abusing a prisoner?' he asked.

'In my view, he's a sick man.'

He looked at me hard for a moment, then burst out laughing.
'Hell, he's got to do something, son. I cain't have the whole goddamn
county on welfare.'

'I'll see you, sheriff.'

'Don't get your tallywhacker out of joint. I'll move the boy
and I'll talk to Harley. Go get laid or develop a sense of humor. I
swear you depress the hell out of me every time you come in here.'

That evening my investigator, Temple
Carrol, and I drove out
to Shorty's on the river. The parking lot was filled with rusted
gas-guzzlers, customized hot rods like kids built in the 1950s,
chopped-down motorcycles, gleaming new convertibles, vans with bubble
windows, and pickup trucks scrolled with chrome.

The interior was deafening. From the screen porches and
elevated bandstand to the dance floor and the long, railed bar, the
faces of the patrons were rippled with neon, their voices hoarse with
their own conversation, their eyes lighted like people who had survived
a highway catastrophe and knew they were eternal. When people went to
Shorty's, they went to score—booze, barbecue, homegrown
reefer,
crystal meth, a stomp-ass brawl out in the trees, or the horizontal bop
in the backseat—and they came from every background to do it:
ranchers, sawmill workers, oil field roughnecks, businessmen, ex-cons,
dope mules, college kids, blue-collar housewives dumping their
husbands, pipeliners, hillbilly musicians, pool hustlers, steroid
freaks with butchwax in their hair, and biker girls in black leather
whose purple makeup bloomed like a death wish on their cheeks.

But the revelers were two nights' distance from the rape and
murder of a girl in an abandoned picnic ground down the road, and their
unfocused smiles never left their faces at the mention of her name.

Temple and I finally gave it up and walked back outside into
the coolness of the evening. Far in the distance, the green land seemed
to cup and flow off the earth's edge into an arroyo lighted by the
sun's last dying spark.

'Billy Bob, if anybody could help out, it'd be the guys in the
band,' she said.

'So?'

'They turn to stone.' She averted her eyes. 'The girl came
here alone. She left with Lucas. They were both drunk. We're going to
have to go at it from another angle.'

'He's a gentle boy, Temple. He didn't do this.'

'You know what a state psychologist is going to say on the
stand? About a boy who was controlled and abused all his life by a
father like Vernon Smothers?'

An elderly black man with a thin white mustache and a stub of
pipe between his teeth was spearing trash amidst the chopped-down
motorcycles with a stick that had a nail on the end. He pulled each
piece of trash off the nail and stuck it in a cloth bag that hung from
his shoulder.