BBH01 - Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  'You don't have a rape case. You're not going to make assault and battery without a weapon, either,' I said.

  'Oh?'

  'Lucas doesn't have a bruise on him.'

  'You see the medical report on her genitalia? Or maybe that's just Lucas's idea of rough sex… You want to talk about weapons? How about if he beat her face on the side of the truck?'

  'You have evidence of that?'

  'It poured down Saturday night. The whole crime scene was washed clean.'

  'Pretty convenient, Marvin.'

  'No, pretty sickening. And the charge isn't assault and battery. Where have you been this morning?'

  I stared into the righteous light in his eyes and knew, with a sinking of the heart, what was coming next.

  'She died an hour ago. The doc says it was probably a brain hemorrhage. You want to plea out, give me a call. He's not going to do the big sleep, but I guarantee you he'll get to be an expert at picking state cotton,' he said.

  Because Lucas was being arraigned on a Monday morning, he was brought to court on the same wrist chain as the collection of DWIs, wife beaters, and barroom brawlers who had been in the drunk tank over the weekend. Each Monday morning they would ride down to the first floor in an elevator that resembled a packed zoo cage and, in stumbling peckerwood or black or Mexican accents, offer their explanations for the mercurial behavior that seemed to affect their lives like a windstorm blowing arbitrarily through a deserted house.

  Normally the weekend miscreants waved at their friends in the courtroom or punched one another in the ribs and snickered while one of their members tried to talk his bail down. But not today. When they sat in the row of chairs at the front of the court and the bailiff unlocked their wrists and dropped the chain to the wood floor, they rounded their shoulders and looked at their shoes or moved a chair space away from Lucas, as though eye contact or proximity to him would stain them with a level of guilt that was not theirs.

  I stood next to him when it was his turn to rise and face the court. His father had brought him a clean white shirt and flowered tie and pair of starched khakis, but he was unshaved and his wavy hair was uncut and wet and combed straight back on his collar, so that he looked like a 1950s hood rather an uneducated rural kid whose father had belittled him since he was a child.

  Marvin, the prosecutor, asked that Lucas's bail be set at $200,000.

  I heard Lucas's breath catch in his throat. I touched the back of his wrist with mine.

  'Your Honor, my client is just nineteen and has very little in the way of resources. He has no felony arrests of any kind. He's lived his whole life in this county. The bail request is not only unreasonable, it's deliberately punitive. The real problem is, Marvin doesn't have a case and he knows it.'

  The judge's glasses were orbs of light and the lines in his face seemed gathered around his mouth like crinkles in papier-mâché. '"Punitive" is it? Tell that to the family of the dead girl. I also love your first-name familiarity. There is nothing I find more heartwarming than to feel I'm involved in a court proceeding that might be conducted by Lum and Abner. Bail is set at one-hundred-fifty-thousand dollars. Count yourself fortunate, counselor,' he said, and clicked his gavel on a small wood block.

  On the way out of the courtroom Vernon Smothers's gnarled hand clenched on my forearm. His gray eyes were jittering with anger.

  'Everything you touch turns to shit, Billy Bob,' he said.

  'Go home, Vernon,' I replied.

  'I don't want my boy locked up with low-rent nigras. Get him in a special cell or something.'

  'Don't go home. Find a wastebasket and stand in it, Vernon,' I said.

  I rode up in the elevator with Lucas and a deputy. Lucas's lower body was draped in a clinking net of waist and leg chains. The deputy slid back the wire-mesh door on the elevator, then used a key to unlock a second, barred door that swung out onto the third floor. We walked under a row of electric lights with wire baskets over the bulbs, our footsteps echoing off the sandstone walls, past a series of cells with solid iron doors and food slits, past the tank where the drunks were kept, toward three barred cells that faced back into the corridor. Lucas's cheeks and throat were pooled with color, as though they had been burned with dry ice.

  'This is where we keep the superstars,' the deputy said. He started to unlock Lucas's wrists in front of the middle cell. A hand and arm came out of the bars to the right and undulated in the air like a serpent.

  'You got fresh meat for us, boss man?' the half-naked man in the cell said. His eyes looked maniacal, the structure of his head as though it had been broken in a machinist's vise. His arms were too short for his thick torso, and his chest and pot stomach were white from lack of sunlight and covered with green and red tattoos.

  The deputy slipped his baton from the ring on his belt and whanged it off the bars an inch from the tattooed man's hand.

  'You stick it out there again, I'll break it,' he said.

  'Come on, keep my Jell-O tonight and put that sweet thing in here with me,' the man said, his palms wrapped around the bars now, his eyes dancing with malevolence six inches from mine. His body exuded a raw, damp odor like sewer gas.

  After the deputy had unlocked Lucas's wrists from the manacles, I saw the fingers on both his hands start to tremble.

  'Give me a minute,' I said to the deputy.

  'No problem. But I'm going to lock you inside so nobody don't grab one of your parts. You think the smart-ass here on the right's bad? They ain't thought up a name for that 'un on the other side.'

  I went into the cell with Lucas and watched the deputy turn the key on us and walk back down the corridor and sit at a small table and take his lunch out of a paper bag.

  'I don't care if I cain't remember anything or not, I didn't hurt that girl. I liked her. She always come in there with college kids, but she didn't put on like she was special,' he said.

  'Which college kids?' I said.

  He sat down on the bunk. A blowfly buzzed over the seatless toilet behind him. Lucas's eyes started to film.

  '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.

  * * *

  chapter three

  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.