BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (5 page)

He stared fixedly at his hands, but his eyes seemed to be
looking over a cliff into a canyon that had no bottom.

'She said she might be pregnant.'

'She wanted you to marry her?' I asked.

'No, sir. She said she was gonna fix some guy good. She said,
"I'm gonna show him up for what he is. People around here gonna be real
surprised. I bet I can get my story on TV and make this whole town look
like two cents."'

'Why didn't you tell me this?'

'Cause maybe that baby's mine. Maybe y'all would think I had
reason to kill her 'cause I didn't want it.' He breathed through his
nose and dug at a callus with his thumbnail, a hard light in his eyes.

'I've seen the autopsy, Lucas. She wasn't pregnant.'

'Then why—'

'She was probably late.'

He dropped his hands in his lap, his face empty, like someone
whose head is filled with white noise.

'I got to get away from them two back at the cells,' he said.

'Don't pay attention to them.'

'They talk in the dark when nobody else ain't
around… Last night Garland told Jimmy Cole, that's the one
with the tattoos all over him, Garland says to him, "Damn if that old
woman didn't put me in mind of my mother. She was trussed up like a
little bird behind the counter there, peeping up at me, scared to
death, I declare she looked so pitiful she made me hurt. So I walked
back to her and said, 'Lady, a good woman like you ain't deserving of
the evil a man like me brings into the world,' and I put both my hands
on her face and she wet her panties and died right there."

'Mr Holland, they laughed so hard I had to wrap the mattress
around my head to keep the sound out… Mr Holland?'

Ten minutes later I tapped on the
frosted glass of Marvin
Pomroy's office door.

'How bad you want to zip up the package on Garland T. Moon?' I
said.

'What have you got?' Marvin said.

'Lucas can put a nail gun in Moon's mouth.'

Marvin made an indifferent face. 'So go on and tell me,' he
said.

'What's on the table?'

'It's not a seller's market, Billy Bob. I've got a witness who
saw Moon go into the store.'

'Forget your witness. I've got the confession.'

'You want to plea out?'

'Nope.'

'If it's what you say, maybe his bail can get cut in
half… Maybe we can go south one bump on the charge.'

'Manslaughter, no rape.'

'Manslaughter, sexual battery.'

'Not good enough.'

Marvin scratched the back of his head.

'If it goes to sentencing, I won't object to an argument for
his youth and lack of criminal history,' he said.

He listened quietly while I repeated the story just told me by
Lucas Smothers, his red suspenders notched into his shoulders. He
removed his steel-rimmed glasses and polished them with a Kleenex.

'She suffocated. She didn't die of fright,' he said.

'He says he put his hands on her face. Same thing. Did she wet
her underwear?'

'Yep.'

'You got him, then,' I said.

'Maybe.'

'Nice doing business with you, Marvin.' At the door I turned
around. 'You set this up, didn't you?' I said.

'Me? I'm just not that smart, Billy Bob. But I appreciate your
thinking so.'

That evening I worked late in my
office. It was Easter break,
when college kids came home to Deaf Smith and re-created their high
school rituals as though indicating to the classes behind them they
would never completely relinquish the joys of their youth. My windows
were open and I could see the pale luminous face of the clock on the
courthouse roof and the oaks ruffling in the wind and the kids dragging
Main from the rich neighborhoods out east all the way to the dirt side
streets of the Mexican and black district on the far end of town.

The sun was almost down and the square seemed filled with a
soft blue glow, the air scented with flowers and the distant smell of
watermelons in the fields. Down below, the procession of customized
cars and pickups and vans snaked around the square, the lacquered paint
jobs like glazed red and orange and purple candy, the deep-throated
Hollywood mufflers rumbling off the pavement, the exposed chromed
engines rippling with light. A beer can tinkled on a sidewalk; a
stoned-out girl stood on the leather backseat of a convertible,
undulating in a skin-tight white dress that she had pulled above her
nylons.

Lucas's bail hearing was scheduled for nine in the morning.
For no reason I could quite explain I picked up the phone and called
the jail.

Harley Sweet answered the phone.

'You make sure that boy's all right tonight,' I said.

'Say again?'

'Bad things happen to people in your jail, Harley. They'd
better not happen to my client.'

'Your client is a pissant I wouldn't take time to spit on if
he was burning… You liberals kill me, Billy Bob. You want to
come over here and feed Jimmy Cole and Garland T. Moon, see they got
toilet paper and showers and ain't nobody infringing on their
rights?… I didn't think so.'

He hung up.

Neither Harley nor I could guess how much our lives would
change because of that night's events.

At 12:01 a.m. the turnkey stopped by
Harley Sweet's office and
signed off his shift.

'I caught Jimmy Cole eating a bar of soap,' he said.

'We better get a new cook,' Harley said.

'I wouldn't let that boy get into the hospital, Harley. He's
planning something.'

'You haven't had more trouble with Garland T. Moon, have you?'

'No, sir.'

'See there, it just needs Bible study.'

At around 3 a.m. a Mexican in the drunk tank heard the cables
on the elevator working, then the wire-mesh door rattling open and a
key turning in the barred second door. Harley Sweet walked down the row
of cells past the drunk tank with a paper bag rolled in his right hand,
his leather-soled boots echoing off the concrete floor, a bleached
straw cowboy hat cocked on his head.

The Mexican in the drunk tank, who was surrounded by men
sleeping on the floor, pressed his face against the bars and tried to
see farther down the corridor but could not.

A key turned in another cell door and Harley's voice said,
'Turn around and lean against the wall. Your face sure don't brighten
my work. Your mama must have beat on it with an ugly stick.'

The Mexican in the drunk tank heard scuffling, intense and
prolonged, with no words spoken, like that of men who know the cost of
a wasted movement or an exhalation of breath. Then there was a single,
abrupt gasp, a body collapsing on the floor, followed by a series of
blows, which began with a whistling sound, like a baton ripping through
the air, then the
thunk
of wood against muscle
and bone, and more blows, one after another, until the Mexican pressed
his palms against his ears and crouched in the back of the drunk tank
and hid from the sound.

Five minutes passed, then the cell door at the end of the
corridor clanged shut again and a figure dressed like Harley walked
past the bars of the drunk tank, the straw hat held to the side of his
face. The wire-mesh door on the elevator clattered into the jamb, and
the walls hummed with the reverberations of the elevator's motor as the
cage dropped to the first floor.

A few kids who were still dragging Main said they saw a figure
in boots and a white straw hat emerge from the side door of the
courthouse and walk across the darkened lawn to Harley's truck, tap on
his shirt pocket as though the package of cigarettes he discovered
there were a nice surprise, light one, and drive away.

The turnkey who came on duty at 6 a.m.
rode up to the third
floor of the courthouse and saw nothing out of the ordinary. At 7 a.m.
the trusties brought up the food carts loaded with aluminum containers
of grits, fried ham, white bread, and black coffee. The men in the
drunk tank were fed first, then Lucas Smothers, who had been moved into
an isolation cell by the showers. A trusty stopped his food cart in
front of Jimmy Cole's cell and tapped a wood serving spoon against the
bars.

'Fixing to tote it back, Jimmy Cole… Hey, boy, you
want to eat, you better roll it out.'

The trusty looked more closely at the man in the bunk, who was
dressed in jailhouse whites, and at the striped pillow pressed down on
his face with one arm, and at the thin coppery glint buried in the
folds of his throat. The trusty whirled and shouted down the corridor
at the turnkey: 'Inmate out on the ground, bossman!'

'What the hell you talking about? That's him right yonder,'
the turnkey said, pointing through the bars. Then the turnkey saw the
chipped, black baton on the floor under the bunk and the lower part of
the face under the pillow. 'Oh Lord have mercy,' he said, and unlocked
and flung back the door and then gingerly pulled the pillow loose from
the arm folded across it like a person who cannot watch the next frames
of film about to flash on a movie screen.

The copper wire had been unwrapped from the head of a broom,
twisted into a hangman's noose, dropped over Harley Sweet's neck, and
then razored into the flesh. Later, the medical examiner would report
that the blows with the baton had been delivered while Harley Sweet
strangled to death on his knees.

Garland T. Moon wolfed his breakfast and talked the trusty
into filling his tin plate again with grits and the ham fat from the
bottom of the serving container. Then he leaped up and grabbed the lip
of a steel crossbeam at the top of his cell with his fingertips and did
chin-ups in his Jockey undershorts, the veins and sinew in his body
erupting across his skin like nests of twigs.

'Hey, bossman, don't Mr Sweet's mother live at 111 Fannin
Street?… I'd put a guard on her if I was y'all. You got Jimmy
Cole out on the ground, there ain't no telling what might happen,' he
said. He dropped flat-footed from the steel crossbeam and giggled
uncontrollably.

The courtroom was almost empty when
Lucas Smothers appeared
before the judge and had his bail reduced from $150,000 to $75,000. His
father, Vernon, was supposed to appear in court with a bondsman. He
didn't. I put up my property for the bond, then waited on the front
steps of the courthouse for Lucas to be processed out of the jail.

Vernon Smothers parked his pickup by the curb and cut across
the lawn toward me. He wore a pair of dark blue overalls that were wet
at the knees.

'Where were you, Vernon?' I asked.

'Putting in pepper plants. I didn't watch the time. That
little snip of a bondsman didn't call me back, either. What happened in
there?'

'I went his bond.'

'I ain't asked for that.'

'It's no big thing.'

His eyes looked out at the glare of sunlight on the walk, the
traffic in the square, the old men who sat on benches by the
Spanish-American War artillery piece. The olive skin of his narrow face
twitched as though someone were touching it with the tip of a feather.

'Them that's got money use it to put their shame on others.
That's the way it's always worked around here. I won't abide it,
though,' he said.

'Vernon, don't hurt your boy again.'

'Seems like the calf's mine only when it's time for
you to
lecture, Billy Bob.'

I walked away from him, through the doors of the courthouse
and down a hallway whose woodwork seemed infused with the dull amber
glow of its own past. Marvin Pomroy came out of his office and almost
collided into me. His face was bloodless, as though it had been slapped.

'What's wrong?' I said.

'We messed up. Moon and Jimmy Cole did time together at
Sugarland,' he answered.

'You're not communicating, Marvin.'

'The witness… The customer who saw Moon go into the
store where he killed the old woman… Somebody sliced her back
screen and stabbed her to death with a screwdriver this
morning… Harley's truck was found in a pond a half mile away.'

I saw Lucas Smothers walk down the circular stairs in the
center of the courthouse, a possessions bag in his hand.

'We've got no physical evidence to put Moon in that store,'
Marvin said.

I stared into his face and the knowledge there that I didn't
want to accept.

'That crazy sonofabitch is going to get out, Billy Bob.'

'Lucas's deposition—' I began.

'It won't hold up by itself.'

'Does Moon know that Lucas…' I could feel the
pinpoints of sweat breaking on my forehead.

'You already know the answer to that… I'm sorry. We
thought we had this guy halfway to the boneyard,' Marvin said.

Lucas walked toward us, his face uncertain in front of Marvin.

'How y'all doin'? Is my dad outside?' he said.

I sat alone in my office with the
blinds down and tried to
think. I kept seeing the grin on the face of Garland T. Moon, the latex
skin, the liquid blue eye; I could almost smell the breath that was
like fermented prunes. I pulled open the blinds and let the sunlight
flood into the room.

The secretary buzzed me on the intercom.

'Mr Vanzandt and his son are here to see you, Billy Bob,' she
said.

Jack Vanzandt, the college baseball star who'd fought in
Vietnam and had come home decorated and had made a fortune in the
Mexican oil business, then had lost it and made another fortune in
computers. He'd called yesterday, or was it the day before? Yes, about
his son, the one who had been expelled from Texas A&M.

'Bad day for a talk?' Jack said.

'Sorry. It's been a peculiar morning,' I said.

Jack still lifted weights and worked out regularly on a speed
bag and played polo at a club in Dallas. He was well mannered and
intelligent and made little of his war record. Few found any reason not
to like him.

His son was another matter. His blond, youthful face always
seemed slightly flushed, overheated, his gaze turned inward on thoughts
that swam like threadworms in his green eyes.