Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  Then I hit him across the mouth with the back of my hand, my ring breaking his lip against his teeth.

  Moon grinned and spit blood onto the molten rim of the foundry. He blotted his mouth with his palm before he spoke. “A man got that much hate in him is a whole lot more like me than he thinks,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  VIRGIL MORALES, THE San Antonio Purple Heart who liked to call other people “spermbrain,” sat in my office with his girlfriend from Austin, looking at his watch and waiting for me to get off the phone. The girlfriend was named Jamie Lake and she had winged dragons tattooed on both her sun-browned shoulders. She also smelled as if she had been smoking reefer inside a closed automobile.

  Temple Carrol leaned against a table behind them, her arms folded, looking at Jamie Lake as though Jamie had swum through a hole in the dimension.

  I finished talking to my friend whom I had paid to run polygraphs on both of them.

  “He says all indications are you’re telling the truth,” I said to Virgil.

  “So that’s supposed to make me feel good?” he replied.

  “The tests aren’t always conclusive. Yours is,” I said.

  “Glad to hear it. When you want us back?”

  “We empanel the jury in ten days.”

  “I been this route before. No disrespect, but I don’t want to come up here every morning at seven-thirty and sit on a bench in a hallway and play with my Johnson till somebody remembers I’m a friend of the court,” he said.

  “How about I send somebody for you? Will that be okay?” I asked.

  He stretched out one leg and rubbed the inside of his thigh. “Yeah, that’s probably the best way to do it. Call first, though, okay?”

  Jamie Lake chewed gum with her mouth open. Her hair was long and dark blonde and her face narrow, with a pinched light in it. “Why do I get the feeling I’m anybody’s fuck here?” she asked.

  “My friend, the man who ran the polygraph on you, says he couldn’t make a determination. It happens sometimes,” I said.

  “Yeah? Well, I don’t believe you. I think your friend was trying to see down my tank top,” she said.

  “Maybe he was.”

  “So get fucko back on the phone. I told him the truth. I didn’t come all this way for y’all’s bullshit.”

  In the background, Temple cocked her head and looked at me.

  “My friend thinks you might have had contact with a few pharmaceuticals before the test,” I said.

  “You had us both UA-ed. You tell that asshole I have an IQ of one-sixty and I remember everything I see, like in a camera. Also tell him I think he’s probably a needle dick.”

  “I’ll try to pass it on,” I replied.

  “Do we get some expense money for gas and meals?” Virgil said.

  “You bet. The secretary’s got it. Y’all have been real helpful,” I said. I didn’t look at Jamie Lake.

  “Kiss my ass,” she said.

  Just then, my secretary buzzed me on the intercom.

  “Billy Bob, it’s Lucas Smothers,” she said, and before I could respond, Lucas opened the inner office door and walked inside.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you was in here with anybody,” he said.

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  Jamie Lake’s eyes seemed to peel Lucas’s clothes off his skin. Then she turned her glare on me.

  “Ask him what other time he had that shirt on,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “The night we saw him in the picnic ground. That’s all he had on. His pants were around his knees and he was passed out, and he had that blue-white check shirt on, with the little gold horns on the shoulders. He was passed out, with his underwear down on his moon, and she was puking in the bushes,” she said.

  Lucas’s face turned dark red.

  “Yeah, she’s right. But I don’t understand what’s going on,” he said.

  Temple walked from behind Jamie’s chair and put one hand on Jamie’s shoulder, her fingers stroking the tattoo of a winged dragon.

  “Let’s talk about long-sleeve blouses, kiddo. What do you wear, like a medium or a ten?” she said.

  AFTER JAMIE AND Virgil had gone, Lucas sat down in front of my desk.

  “It’s my dad. He don’t usually drink. But last night he sat out on the windmill tank and drunk durn near a pint of whiskey,” he said.

  “This has been hard on him,” I said.

  “That ain’t it.” He turned around and looked at Temple.

  “Go ahead. It won’t leave this office,” I said.

  “He wouldn’t come in. He slept out there on the ground. This morning he showered and ate some aspirins and I fixed him some breakfast, and he sat there eating it like it was cardboard.”

  I waited. Lucas pulled at his shirtsleeve and snuffed down in his nose, as though the room were too cold.

  “He was talking about getting even with Vanzandt. I go, ‘You mean Darl, ’cause of what he done at the country club?’

  “He says, ‘Darl does them things ’cause his father lets him. His father gets away with it ’cause he’s rich. That’s the way this county works.’

  “I said, ‘It’s Darl. There’s something wrong with him. It ain’t his daddy’s fault.’

  “He goes, ‘You’re a good boy, son. You make me proud. Jack Vanzandt’s fixing to have his day.’

  “My father ain’t ever talked like that before, Mr. Holland. His pistol, the one he brung home from the army, I looked and it ain’t in his drawer.”

  “I don’t think your dad would kill anyone, Lucas.”

  He looked around behind him again.

  “You want me to leave?” Temple said.

  I raised my hand. “Go ahead, Lucas,” I said.

  “He done it in the war. A lieutenant kept getting people killed. My dad threw a grenade in his tent.”

  “Where is your dad now?”

  “Getting a haircut down the street.”

  I winked at him.

  BUT MY CONFIDENCE was cosmetic. Neither I nor anyone I knew in Deaf Smith had any influence over Vernon Smothers. He believed intransigence was a virtue, a laconic and mean-spirited demeanor was strength, reason was the tool the rich used to keep the poor satisfied with their lot, and education amounted to reading books full of lies written by history’s victors.

  I was almost relieved when I asked in the barbershop and was told Vernon had already gone. Then the barber added, “Right next door in the beer joint. Tell him to stay there, too, will you?”

  The inside of the tavern was dark and cool, filled with the sounds of midday pool shooters, and at the end of the long wood bar Vernon Smothers sat hunched over a plate, peeling a hardboiled egg, a cup of coffee by his wrist.

  I had rather seen him drunk. Under the brim of a white straw hat, his face had the deceptive serenity of a man who was probably threading his way in and out of a nervous breakdown, his eyes predisposed and resolute with private conclusions that no one would alter.

  I waved the bartender away and remained standing.

  “We found a couple of witnesses, Vernon. I think Lucas is going to walk.”

  “You want an egg?”

  “Jack Vanzandt doesn’t have any power in that courtroom.”

  “The hell he don’t.”

  “You won’t trust me?”

  “I trusted the people sent me to Vietnam. I come home on a troop ship under the Golden Gate. People up on the bridge dropped Baggies full of shit on us.”

  “To tell you the truth, Vernon, I don’t think you’d have had it any other way,” I said, and walked back down the polished length of the bar into the sunlight.

  It was a cheap remark to make, one that I would regret.

  I CROSSED THE street to the cou
rthouse and opened Marvin Pomroy’s office door. He was talking to his secretary.

  “Got time for some early disclosure?” I asked.

  “No more deals. You’ve got all the slack you’re getting,” he said.

  “I’m filing a motion to dismiss.”

  “I’ve got to hear this. I haven’t had a laugh all day,” he replied.

  I followed him into the inner office.

  “I’ve got two witnesses who saw Lucas passed out at the murder scene when Roseanne Hazlitt was still alive,” I said.

  “Winos?”

  “A Mexican biker from San Antone who just passed a polygraph, and a gal who puts me in mind of a chain saw going across a knee joint. By the way, I wonder what percentage of our jury is going to be Hispanic?”

  Marvin leaned back in his swivel chair and pulled at his red suspenders with his thumbs.

  “You feeling pretty good about yourself, huh?” he said.

  “It’s reasonable doubt. A kid who’s so drunk three people can’t wake him up doesn’t suddenly revive himself and rape and beat someone to death.”

  “Who says?” But he was looking into space now, and the conviction had dissipated in his voice.

  “Why not cut your losses?” I asked.

  “Because ‘the people’ are the advocate of the victim, Billy Bob, in this case a dead girl who doesn’t have a voice. I represent them and her. I don’t cut my losses.”

  “Lucas Smothers is a victim, too.”

  “No, he’s your son. And that’s been the problem since the get-go. He lied through his teeth about how well he knew her. What makes you think he’s telling the truth now? Go look again at the morgue pictures. You think she did that to herself?” Then his face colored and he rubbed a finger in the middle of his forehead.

  “You’re going to lose,” I said.

  “So? For me it’s a way of life. Say, what kind of rap sheet does your Mexican biker have? Or does he just use his hog to go to and from Mass?”

  PETE AND TWO of his friends had come over to ride Beau that evening. I saw the three of them, mounted in a row on his back, turn Beau up the embankment on the rim of the tank, then disappear through the pasture where it sloped down toward the river. A half hour later I heard Beau’s hooves by the windmill, then on the wood floor of the barn. I walked out into the yard.

  “Y’all didn’t want to stay out longer?” I asked.

  “There’s a man fishing by that sunk car. He’s standing in the water in a suit,” Pete said.

  A boy and girl Pete’s age sat behind him on Beau’s spine. They both kept looking back over their shoulders, through the open doors behind them.

  “What color hair does he have, bud?” I asked.

  Pete pulled his leg over Beau’s withers and dropped to the ground and walked toward me, his expression hidden from the others. He kept walking until we were on the grass in the yard, out of earshot of his friends.

  “It’s red. We was letting Beau drink. Juanita was up on the bank, pulling flowers. This man standing in the water says, ‘That your girlfriend?’ I say, ‘I ain’t got no girlfriend.’

  “He says, ‘She’s a right trim little thing. You don’t get it first, somebody else will.’

  “I said I didn’t know what he meant and I didn’t want to, either. I told him I was going back to my house. He says, ‘Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher.’

  “It was the look on his face. He kept watching Juanita. I ain’t never seen a grown person look at a kid like that.”

  I put my hand on the back of Pete’s head.

  “Y’all go inside and fix yourself some peach ice cream,” I said.

  I drove the Avalon down the dirt track, past the tank, and through the field to the bluffs over the river, the grass thropping under the bumper. Five feet out from the bank, submerged to his hips, in his blue serge suit with no shirt under his coat, was Garland T. Moon. He flung his bait with a cheap rod out into the current.

  I got out of the Avalon and looked down at him from the bluff. Against the late sun his skin looked bathed in iodine.

  “This waterway is public property. State of Texas law,” he said. A brown, triangular scab had formed on his bottom lip where I had hit him.

  “I’m going to have you picked up anyway.”

  He had to lick the scab on his lip before he spoke. “Thought you might want to know I got me an ACLU civil rights lawyer from Dallas.”

  “You know who Sammy Mace is?” I said.

  “A greaseball out of Houston?”

  “He’s in town. I think you’ve stumbled into his business interests. Maybe I’m wrong.”

  He retrieved his bait out of the water and flipped it in an arc back into the current.

  “’Fore you hit me, you said your daddy was a fine man. That ‘fine’ man run me off the job. Sixteen years old, carried me out on the highway, told me to get out of his truck. Without no home, food, people, nothing.”

  “If he ran you off, you probably stole from him or did worse. I suspect it was ‘worse.’”

  He was quiet a long time, smiling at nothing. Then he said, “You ever asked yourself why your daddy hepped out a jailhouse kid like me?”

  “He was kind to animals and white trash. That was his way, Moon.”

  “My hair is darker red than yours, but maybe that’s ’cause my mama was a redhead. Think about it, boy. Your daddy ever pipeline around Waco fifteen years or so before you was born?”

  I got in the Avalon and drove back to the house and called 911, a wave of nausea surging into the bottom of my throat.

  By the time a deputy in a cruiser got to the house and I went back down to the river with him, Moon had disappeared.

  “What’s wrong, Billy Bob?” Pete said later in the kitchen.

  “Nothing, bud. Everything’s solid.”

  Don’t let Moon wound you, I told myself. That’s his power over people. He makes them hate themselves.

  “You want some ice cream?” Pete asked.

  “Not tonight.”

  He continued to stare at me with a puzzled look, then I heard Temple’s car in the drive and a moment later Pete going out the screen door for his ride back to her house.

  IT’S THE MOMENT every decent cop dreads. It comes unexpectedly, out of nowhere, like a freight train through a wall. Later, when you play the tape over and over again, seeking justification, wondering if there were alternatives, you’re left invariably with the last frame on the spool, the only one that counts, and it tells you daily what your true potential is.

  Mary Beth went back on duty after only two days’ rest.

  The 911 call reporting a trespasser and disturbing-the-peace incident at the skeet club should have required little more than the dispatch of a cruiser, perhaps a mediation, perhaps escorting someone off the property or even putting him in jail for twenty-four hours.

  Vernon Smothers started looking for Jack Vanzandt at his office, then his home and the yacht basin and the country club. It was late afternoon when he found his way to the skeet club and parked by the pavilion in front of the row of traps that sailed clay pigeons toward a distant tree line.

  Bunny Vogel saw him first, saw the energy in his face that was like both anger and fear at the same time, and walked from the pavilion to intercept him.

  “You a guest here this evening, Mr. Smothers?” Bunny asked.

  Vernon’s khakis and denim shirt were pressed and clean, his white straw hat tilted on the back of his head, his eyes wide, unblinking. A heated, dry odor seemed to envelop his skin and his clothes.

  “You got to be a member or a guest, Mr. Smothers. You can go over to the clubhouse there and see about a membership . . .”

  “I see Emma Vanzandt there. Where’s her husband at?” Vernon said.

  “Sir, I don’t think this is a good idea. I’m sorry
for what happened to Lucas. I mean, I’m sorry for my part in it . . .” He gestured in the air, then his voice trailed off.

  Jack Vanzandt, Sammy Mace, and a middle-aged man with a ponytail and thick lips and glasses that magnified his eyes walked out of the squat, green building that served as a clubhouse and approached the pavilion. Jack had the breech of a double-barrel shotgun cracked open on his forearm.

  Vernon put one hand on Bunny’s shoulder and moved him aside, as he would push open a door.

  “I ain’t up to no traveling shit storms today, Mr. Smothers. I got orders about—” Bunny began.

  But Vernon was already walking away from him as though he were not there.

  Jack and Sammy Mace and the man with the ponytail sat down at a plank table with Emma Vanzandt. None of them paid attention to Vernon Smothers until he was three feet from their table.

  “How you doin’, Vernon?” Jack said.

  “Your boy and his friends vandalized my house and humiliated my son,” Vernon said.

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Jack said.

  “Go ask Bunny Vogel. He’s the little Judas Iscariot hepped Darl do it.”

  Jack blew out his breath.

  “This isn’t the place for it. Come to my office,” he said.

  “I know you for the type man you are, Jack Vanzandt. That man next to you is a goddamn criminal,” Vernon said.

  “Hey! This is a private club here. You watch your language,” Sammy Mace said.

  “Get up, Jack,” Vernon said.

  The man with the ponytail put his hand on top of Jack’s forearm. “It’s all right. I’ll walk this guy to his truck. Is that your truck there, big man?” he said.

  “No,” Jack said. “Listen, Vernon. Kids get into trouble. It doesn’t make it any better if the parents fight. Now—”

  Vernon reached out and, with the flat of his hand, popped Jack on one cheek.

  “You ain’t no war hero. You just a rich man bought all the right people,” he said.

  “Jack, put an end to this,” Emma said.

  But Bunny Vogel had already called the sheriff’s department, and Mary Beth’s cruiser had been only two hundred yards from the skeet club when the dispatcher’s voice came over her radio.