BBH01 - Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  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.

  '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.

  * * *

  chapter four

  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, t
he 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?'

  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.