Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  “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.

  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.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  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.

  “Darl had a fistfight with a Mexican kid. We’d like to just
shake hands and forget it. But it looks like the family found out we have a little money,” Jack said.

  “What about it, Darl?” I asked.

  “At the American Legion game. Kid scratched all over my hood with a nail. I asked him why he did it. He said because of the cheer we were yelling in the stands. So I told him it was a free country, people can say anything they want ’cause that’s why we got a First Amendment. Wets don’t like it, they can swim back home.”

  “What cheer?” I asked.

  “‘Two-bits, four-bits, six-bits, a peso, all good pepper bellies stand up and say so.’” His eyes smiled at nothing. He rubbed the thick ball of muscle along his forearm.

  I looked at his father.

  “The Mexican boy had to have his jaws wired together,” Jack said.

  I took a yellow legal pad and a ballpoint pen out of my drawer and pushed them across my desk toward Darl.

  “I’d like you to write down what happened for me. Just like you’re writing a school essay,” I said.

  “I just told you what happened,” he said.

  “Darl has dyslexia,” Jack said.

  “I see,” I said. “I tell you what, I’ll get back with y’all this afternoon. I’m sorry I’m a little distant this morning.”

  Darl Vanzandt played with the high school ring on his finger, his cheeks glowing with peach fuzz. His eyes seemed amused at a private thought. Then he looked me straight in the face and said, “My father says Lucas Smothers is your woods colt.”

  “Go to the car, son,” Jack said.

  After Darl was gone, his father extended his hand.

  “I apologize. Darl has serious emotional problems. His mother . . . It’s called fetal alcohol syndrome. He’s not always accountable for the things he says and does,” Jack said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  “I really appreciate your helping us, Billy Bob.”

  He squeezed my hand a second time. His grip was encompassing, long lasting, the skin moist and warm. After he was gone and I was seated again behind my desk, I found myself unconsciously rubbing my hand on the knee of my trousers.