Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “The sheriff was on a pad. In this county the pad is passed on with the office. If the sheriff was murdered by the guys he was taking juice from, you’d be walking on eggshells, Hugo. You’re not.”

  A deputy opened the front door and stuck his head in. “You wanted the file on Moon?” he said.

  “Give it to the counselor here,” Hugo said. “Billy Bob, you don’t mind reading it outside, do you? There’s a nice table under the trees. Then carry it on back to Cleo.”

  I took the manila folder from the deputy and started to follow him outside. Hugo lit a cigarette from a match folder with cupped hands. “Read the weather warning, son. This is the last time you track your shit in my office,” he said.

  I SAT UNDER an oak tree filled with mockingbirds and went over the long and dreary history of Garland T. Moon. In Texas alone, he had been jailing for five decades. His career stretched back into the tail end of a prison farm system that had held the gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, Buck and Clyde Barrow, and the twelve-string guitarist Huddie Ledbetter. Hollywood films had always portrayed the Georgia chain gang as the most severe form of penal servitude in the United States. But among old-time recidivists, the benchmark was Arkansas, where convicts were worked long hours, fed the most meager of rations, and beaten with the Black Betty, a razor strop attached to a wood handle. Among these same recidivists, Texas always came in a close second.

  At Huntsville, Moon had been written up repeatedly for “shirking work quota” and “weighing in with dirt clods.”

  In the old days a convict at Huntsville had to pick a certain quota of cotton each day. If he didn’t, or if he was caught weighting his bag with dirt from the field, he was separated out from the other inmates, taken hot and dirty to a lockdown unit, not allowed to shower or eat, and forced to stand with two others on top of an oil drum until the next morning. If he fell off the drum, he had to deal with the gunbull in the cage.

  Moon had been hospitalized twice for head lacerations and broken foot bones. No cause for the injury was given. Each hospitalization took place after an escape attempt. His stomach had been seared by liquid Drano, his back held against a hot radiator, his calves branded with heated coat hangers. Everything in his record indicated he was as friendless and hated among the prison population as he was among the personnel.

  But what good did it do to dwell upon the cruelty that had been inculcated in Garland T. Moon or that he had cultivated and nourished in himself and injected systemically into the lives of others? The day you understood a man like Moon was the day you crossed a line and became like him.

  I needed to know what had happened between him and my father around the year 1956. Moon had said my father had put him in his truck and dropped him on the highway without food or money or destination. My father was a good-hearted and decent man, slow to anger and generous to a fault. If Moon’s account was true, Moon had either committed a crime so heinous or represented a threat so grave to others my father had felt no reservation in abandoning an ignorant, sexually abused boy to his fate.

  I went back to the first entries in Moon’s file. He had been released from the county prison, at age sixteen, in February of 1956. His record remained clean until August 17 of that same year. The words “suspicion of abduction” were typed out neatly by the date without explanation.

  I walked across the square to the newspaper and asked permission to use the paper’s morgue. The issues from 1956 had never been put on microfilm and were still bound in a heavy green cardboard cover that had turned gray with age around the borders. I turned to the August issues and found a four-inch back-page story about a missing ten-year-old Negro girl who was later discovered hiding in a cave. She told officers a white man had come into her yard and had led her into the woods behind her home. She refused to tell anyone what had happened to her between the time she left home and the time she had been found by sheriff’s deputies.

  Four days later there was a follow-up story about a juvenile who had been brought in for questioning about the girl’s abduction. The story did not give his name but stated he had been working on a pipeline nearby the girl’s home.

  The juvenile was released from custody when the parents refused to bring charges.

  The date on the newspaper follow-up story was August 18, the day after the date on Garland T. Moon’s rap sheet.

  I walked back across the street and threw Moon’s file on the sheriff’s desk.

  “Sorry, I couldn’t find Cleo,” I said. “By the way, some exculpatory evidence disappeared from the Roseanne Hazlitt homicide investigation. I’m talking about some bottles and beer cans taken from the murder scene by your deputies. You mind going on the stand about that, Hugo?”

  PETE’S MOTHER WAS waiting for me when I got back to the office. She wore a pink waitress uniform, her lank, colorless hair tied behind her head. She kept twisting the black plastic watchband on her wrist.

  “The social worker says she’s got to certify. If Pete ain’t living at home no more, she cain’t certify.” She sat bent forward, her eyes fastened on the tops of her hands.

  “I’ll talk to her,” I said.

  “It won’t do no good.”

  “It’s dangerous for him, Wilma.”

  “They ain’t done nothing but write that note. They sent it to you. They didn’t send it to us.” The resentment in her voice was like a child’s, muted, turned inward, resonant with fear.

  “I’ll ask Temple to bring his stuff home after school,” I said.

  “You been good to Pete and all but . . .” She didn’t finish. Her eyes looked receded, empty. “I’m gonna move away. This town ain’t ever been any good for us.”

  “I don’t think that’s the answer.”

  Then I saw the anger bloom in her face, past the fearful restraint that normally governed her life.

  “Yeah? Well, why don’t you just raise your own son and leave mine alone for a while?” she said.

  AT SIX THAT evening Mary Beth called from Denver.

  “Am I going to see you again?” I asked. My throat was dry, my tone vainly ironic and preemptive, the receiver held too tightly against my ear.

  “I can’t come back there for a while.”

  “I can get a flight to Denver . . . Mary Beth? Are you there?”

  “Yes . . . I mean, yes, I’m here.”

  “Did you hear what I said?” But I already knew the answer, and I could feel a weakness, a failing in my heart as though weevil worms had passed through it.

  “Some people here are still upset about the way things went in Deaf Smith,” she said.

  “With you and me?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “I think the problem is Brian Wilcox. Not you, not me, not the shooting of Sammy Mace and his bodyguard. I think Wilcox is poisoning the well everywhere he goes and your people are overlooking it to save the investigation.”

  “Maybe that’s true. But I can’t do anything about it.”

  I could hear her breathing in the silence.

  “Can you give me a telephone number?” I said.

  “We’re leaving tonight for a meeting in Virginia.”

  “Well, I hope it works out for you,” I said.

  “What? What did you say?”

  “Nothing. I never did well inside organizations. I hope you do. That’s all I meant.”

  In the silence I could hear her breath against the receiver.

  “Mary Beth?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll need you to testify at Lucas’s trial. About the cans and bottles those other deputies lost or destroyed.”

  “It’s a bad time to bring that up.”

  “Bad time? That’s what’s on your mind? It’s a bad time?”

  “Good-bye, Billy Bob.”

  After I hung up the receiver, I stared at
the telephone in the fading light through the window, as though I could will it to ring again. Then I walked outside, under an empty dome of yellow sky, into a sand-bitten wind that shredded leaves from the chinaberry tree. I got into my Avalon, the wind buffeting the windows, and drove to Pete’s house.

  “YOU’RE BY YOURSELF?” I asked.

  He stood on the porch in a pair of pin-striped overalls and a Clorox-stained purple T-shirt.

  “My mother don’t get off from work till nine,” he replied.

  “Did you eat yet?”

  “Some.”

  “Like what?”

  “Viennas and saltines.”

  “I think we’d better get us a couple of those chicken-fried steaks at the café.”

  “I knew you was gonna say that.”

  It was dusk when we got to the café. We sat under a big electric fan by the window and ordered. Down the street, the sun was red behind the pines in the churchyard. Pete had wet his hair and brushed it up on the sides so that it was as flat as a landing field.

  “You have to be careful, bud. Don’t talk to strangers, don’t let some no-count fellow tell you he’s a friend of your mom,” I said.

  “Temple done told me all that.”

  “Then you won’t mind hearing it again.”

  “That ain’t all she told me.”

  “Oh?”

  “She said for a river-baptized person you been doing something you ain’t supposed to. What’d she mean by that?”

  “Search me.”

  “It’s got to do with that lady from the sheriff’s department. That’s my take on it, anyway.” He bit off a bread stick and crunched it in his jaw.

  “Really?”

  “Temple talks about you all the time. She said she feels like going upside your head with a two-by-four.”

  “How about clicking it off, bud?”

  “You gonna come to my ball game this weekend?”

  “What do you think?”

  He chewed the bread stick and grinned at the same time.

  IN A CANDID moment most longtime cops and prison personnel will tell you there are some criminals whom they secretly respect. Charles Arthur Floyd was known for his scrupulousness in paying for the food he was given by Oklahoma farmers when he hid out on the Canadian River. Clyde Barrow finished a jolt on a Texas prison farm, then went back and broke his friends out. Men who have invested their entire lives in dishonesty do max time rather than lie about or snitch-off another con. Murderers go to their deaths without complaint, their shoulders erect, their fears sealed behind their eyes. The appellation “stand-up” in a prison population is never used lightly.

  But the above instances are the exceptions. The average sociopath is driven by one engine, namely, the self. He has no bottom, and his crimes, large or small, are as morally interchangeable to him as watching TV with his family or walking back to a witness at a convenience store robbery and popping a .22 round through the center of her forehead.

  Darl Vanzandt pulled his ’32 Ford into my drive the next evening, then saw me currying Beau in the lot and drove his car to the edge of the barn and got out and stood in the wind, his face twitching from the dust that swirled out of the fields or the chemicals that swam in his brain.

  He approached the fence and laid his forearm on the top rail, studying me, his unbuttoned shirt flapping on his chest. I hadn’t noticed before how truncated his body was. The legs were too short for his torso, the shoulders too wide for the hips, the hands as round and thick as clubs.

  “Say it and leave,” I said.

  “Bunny Vogel quit his job at the skeet club. My mother got him that job. He walks in yesterday and tells the manager he’s finished bagging trash and cleaning toilets. Big fucking superstar. He’s gonna dime me, that’s what he’s doing.”

  “Who cares?”

  “It’s Bunny who started it all. I’m talking about Roseanne. You listening? Bunny pretends he’s a victim or something. Believe me, ’cause he’s got a messed-up face doesn’t mean he’s a victim.”

  “Not interested.”

  He made an unintelligible sound and his face seemed to wrinkle with disbelief.

  “I can give you Bunny, man,” he said.

  “I’m not interested, because you’re a liar, Darl. Your information is worthless,” I said.

  He inched farther down the fence rail, as though somehow he were getting closer to me.

  “You want Garland Moon? I can do that, too. I got stuff on that geek can make you throw up,” he said.

  “Nope.”

  “What’s with you?”

  I pulled Beau’s left front hoof up between my legs and pried a rock out of his shoe with my pocketknife. I could hear Darl’s shirt puffing and flapping in the wind.

  “You and Marvin Pomroy got to work some kind of deal,” he said. “The judge said I fart in the street, I’m going to the Walls. I’m still a kid.”

  I put down Beau’s left hoof and stooped under his neck and picked up his other front hoof. The wind blew my hat across the lot into the barn.

  “My old man,” Darl said.

  “What?”

  “That’s who you’re really after. You want him, I can give him to you.”

  I stood erect and stared at him. No shame, no expression except one of expectancy showed in his face. I folded my pocketknife blade in my palm and walked toward him and placed my hand on the smoothness of the fence rail next to his. His skin was sunburned inside the peach fuzz on his cheeks; there was a small clot of mucus in the corner of his mouth.

  “I don’t want anything you can give,” I said.

  “Wha—”

  “I’m going to take it from you on the stand,” I said.

  I turned away from him and stroked Beau’s face and took a sugar cube from my shirt pocket and let him gum it out of the flat of my hand. A moment later I heard Darl’s car engine roar, then the dual exhausts echo off the side of the house and fade away in the wind.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE EVENING BEFORE opening statements I drove to Lucas Smothers’s house and took a new brown suit, white shirt, and tie off the clothes hook in the back of the Avalon and knocked on the door. Lucas appeared at the screen with a wooden spoon in one hand and a shot glass in the other.

  “You got your hair cut,” I said.

  “Yeah, just like you told me.”

  “What are you doing with a whiskey glass?”

  “Oh, that,” he said, and smiled. “I’m baking a cake for my father’s birthday. I use it for measuring. Come on in.”

  I followed him into the kitchen, the plastic suit bag rattling over my shoulder.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “It’s your new suit. Wear it tomorrow.”

  “I got a suit.”

  “Yeah, you’ve got this one. Tomorrow, you sit erect in the chair. You don’t chew gum, you don’t grin at anything the prosecutor or a witness says. If you want to tell me something, you write it on a pad, you never whisper. You do nothing that makes the jury think you’re a wiseass. There’s nothing a jury hates worse than a wiseass. Are we connecting here?”

  “Why don’t you carve it on my chest?”

  “You know how many defendants flush themselves down the commode because they think the court is an amusement park?”

  “You’re more strung out about this than I am.”

  Because I know what you’ll face if we lose, I thought. But I didn’t say it.

  He stood tall and barefoot at the drainboard, measuring vanilla extract into the shot glass. Outside the screen window, the windmill was silhouetted against a bank of yellow and purple clouds.

  I watched him pour the vanilla extract into the cake bowl, his long fingers pinched lightly on the sides of the shot glass.

  “Why you lo
oking at me like that?” he asked.

  “The first time I interviewed you at the jail, you told me you and Roseanne were ‘knocking back shots,’” I said.

  “Yeah, Beam, with a draft beer on the side.”

  “But you were working with the band that night. You had on that blue-check shirt with the gold trumpets sewn on the shoulders, the shirt you bought to play in the band.”

  “Yeah, like that Jamie Lake gal said.”

  “Why’d you start doing boilermakers while you were working?”

  “We were on the break. I just had two. My stomach must have been empty or something. I remember Roseanne was mad ’cause of something Bunny said. She wanted to get a six-pack and go down the road and drink it. I wouldn’t have done it, but I was jackhammered by then.”

  “Did she drink as much as you did?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “But you passed out and she didn’t.”

  “I just ain’t following you, Mr. Holland.”

  “Where was Darl Vanzandt when you decided to smash down a couple of boilermakers?”

  “He was at the bar. Darl never gets far from the juice man when he’s inside Shorty’s . . . What’s wrong?”

  “I never saw it. I kept thinking about the autopsy report on Roseanne. I was thinking about the wrong person.”

  “What per—”

  “A hooker from San Antone told me Darl probably doped Roseanne with roofies. But he didn’t. He doped you.”

  Lucas set the shot glass down on the drainboard and looked at it numbly.

  “They laced me with downers twice? I reckon that makes me pretty dumb, don’t it?” he said.

  “I’ll pick you up in the morning,” I said.

  “Mr. Holland, Darl didn’t have no reason to kill Roseanne.”

  “He doesn’t need one. He enjoys it.”

  MY MOTION TO dismiss was denied by Judge Judy Bonham, known as Stonewall Judy for her malleability and sense of humor. She was perhaps forty years old, had a complexion that seemed never to have been exposed to sunshine, and black hair that looked waved permanently in place. Four times a week she lifted free-weights at the health club in a pair of sweatpants and a heavy, long-sleeve jersey. When she did stomach stretches on the bench, her hips and buttocks flattened and seized against her sweats like metal plate.