Something in Lulu’s eyes that night told me she wouldn’t have become what she was if she’d had any choice. So I gave her that choice: testify against Nash for his Sequoya business, plus a couple of armed robberies the Rangers wanted to nail him on down in Houston. In return I agreed to get the DA to drop everything we had against her, get her into rehab, and see to it that she found a job when she got out. I also promised to lend her enough money to get her a place to live and make it through to her first paycheck. She made the right decision and went into the ninety-day drug treatment program at Rusk State Hospital. Meanwhile, the DA hit Titus with the bitch, by which I mean he convicted him under Texas’s habitual criminal statute, which allows a jury to prescribe life for a three-time felony offender it they are in the mood to do so. And East Texas juries usually are. The last I heard, Titus was picking cotton in the Brazos River bottom and would be until about 2030. Lulu had been clean for ten years and was now holding down a good job as the manager of a local convenience store. Somewhere along the way she’d joined Nelda Parson’s father’s Rising Star Baptist Church, and she’d even found a decent boyfriend, a divorced gentleman a few years her senior who coached the boys’ basketball team at the local high school.
When I called she was happy to hear from me. “What have you got on your mind?” she asked.
“Lulu, do you remember how you’ve said so many times that you wished there was some way you could repay me for going to bat for you? You do remember? Well, that’s great because I think it’s about time for you to make your acting debut.”
A few minutes later I put the phone down, laced my fingers behind my head, and leaned back in my chair to stare up at the ceiling fan with a smile on my face. “Dykes,” I said and laughed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I decided I wanted a real meal for supper that evening, but I also decided I didn’t want to stay in town. I picked up the phone and dialed Carla’s cell number. “Let’s go over to Nacogdoches tonight for Italian,” I said as soon as she answered.
“Do you think that’s wise?”
“I don’t care if it is or not. Me and Charlie Morton killed a guy this afternoon, and I want some company.”
I heard her sharp intake of breath. “God, Bo! Who?”
“That Paul Arno character. Haven’t you heard about it?”
“Don’t you ever look at the schedule? I’m off today. I’ve been home all afternoon with the TV and radio off and the house phone unplugged. Soft music on the stereo and housecleaning. Sometimes I just have to get away from all the craziness.”
“Well, today I’ve been in the middle of the craziness. Pick you up about seven?”
“Sure, Bo. If you need me.”
“Dammit, I’m beginning to suspect I’ll always need you.”
I hung up the phone and muttered to myself, “Now why in the hell did I go and say something like that?”
No fool like an old fool.
* * *
Carla wore a pair of black slacks and a simple blouse of coarse gray silk. Besides her gold watch, she wore no jewelry except for a single strand of creamy pearls that contrasted with the tanned skin of her neck and made her look edible. I felt myself sinking even deeper.
My favorite restaurant in Nacogdoches is Auntie Pasta’s, a great Italian joint down by the railroad tracks in an old building that was built back in 1892 as the first refrigerated warehouse west of the Mississippi. We had just ordered and gotten a glass of Chianti when an old friend named Ben Ruggles appeared at our table. Ben was one of those rare football coaches who had real brains. Besides coaching the backfield at Sequoya High School for years, he’d taught accounting and business law. He was tall and not overly bulky, as befitted a man who’d been a star fullback at Texas A&M many years earlier. Ben had short gray hair and a face that was full of good humor.
“Sit down, Ben,” I said, pointing to a chair. “You know Carla, don’t you?”
“Oh yes,” he said, giving her a warm smile. “But I’ve just got a minute or two. I’m with some friends and I need to get back to our table.”
“Sure. What’s on your mind?”
“Amanda Twiller’s murder.”
I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Ben Ruggles was not the sort of man to engage in idle gossip. If he had something to say, it would be worth hearing. “Go on,” I said.
“As you probably know, I’ve been working part-time at the Pak-a-Sak for about a year.”
“I’d heard that,” I said. “I also heard that you and Zorn had become buddies, which surprised me.”
He shook his head. “Emmet and I aren’t really friends. We could have been, but he tries too damn hard to impress, and I can’t stand that. I also got tired of listening to his stories about his love life, and I told him off and quit three days ago.”
“How did you happen to be working for him in the first place?”
“I was in there buying some beer one day not long after I retired, and the two of us got to talking. He told me that he knew I’d taught accounting and asked me to help out with the bookkeeping. I was a little bored with retirement and knew I could always use some extra money. So I signed on as assistant manager.”
“Is it a good business?” I asked.
“It makes him a decent living. It could be a great business if he’d stay there and take care of things. The beer companies are always offering specials where you can buy fifty or more cases of a popular brand cheap enough to double your margin, but he would never let me make the decisions on things like that. He was always off chasing women or hanging around in these country-and-western clubs.”
“He does like the ladies,” I said.
“The Casanova of the soap opera set.”
Carla laughed. “Doesn’t sound like you have much regard for the man, Ben,” she said.
“In a way I feel sorry for him. It’s like he’s always onstage trying to make a big splash, but I finally got tired of hearing his conquest stories. I think the truth is that he doesn’t really care all that much about women beyond bedding them and having a good looker on his arm to bolster his ego. But as far as really enjoying their company?” He shook his head. “The man just doesn’t get it.”
“Did he ever say anything about Amanda Twiller?” I asked. “I mean beyond the obvious.”
“Oh, yeah. I heard all about it.”
“How in the hell did the two of them ever meet, anyway?” I asked.
He smiled. “There’s a sad irony in that, Bo.”
“What do you mean?”
“Reverend Twiller got caught up in this return-to-authentic-Christian-practices movement. As you probably know, up until after the Civil War everybody used real wine in communion. Then came Carrie Nation and the temperance movement, and most of the Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians switched to grape juice. In the last few years a lot of congregations have gone back to real wine and unleavened bread because that’s what the early church used. Twiller must have delegated the wine buying to his wife because she came in one morning asking questions about what kind of wine would be suitable. She was a fine-looking woman, and Emmet battened on to her like Velcro. After that, nature took its course.”
“Did he ever mention anything about Amanda Twiller having a prescription drug addiction?”
He shook his head. “No, but I’d heard rumors and Emmet bragged to me a couple of times about being able to get drugs without a prescription. I know for a fact that he used some mild amphetamines every now and then. He always claimed they improved his performance in the bedroom.”
“Can you remember anything else that he might have said about her?” I asked.
“A couple of days before she was killed they had a little tiff right there in the store. After she left he was really steamed and said something he probably shouldn’t have said.”
“Which was?”
“ ‘That bitch knows too much about my business.’ ”
“Yeah?”
“Right. And I didn�
��t get the feeling that he was talking about the store, either.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The next morning Carla woke me up and then slipped out the door. I put on the coffee and called the dispatcher and told her to have Trina Newland brought down to the courthouse for interrogation as soon as breakfast was finished at the jail. I also called Hotchkiss and asked him if he could meet me at the office. He agreed and was already there when I arrived, installed in front of my desk with more of Maylene’s cookies and a big mug of coffee. I filled him in on what I had learned in the last two days.
“So you’re convinced that Arno didn’t do the Twiller killing?” he asked.
“Yeah, but so far you and Toby and Linda are the only people who know that, and I want you to keep quiet about it. There’s nothing to be gained by broadcasting it.”
“And you feel pretty strongly about the Kimball kid?”
“I sure do.”
“You’ve known him all his life, haven’t you?” he asked.
“Oh Lord, yes. This office has been handling him on minor stuff since he was in junior high school. Ditto for the city police.”
“Did he ever seem to fight against his worst impulses?”
“Never a time that I could see. It’s like he always knew he wanted to be an outlaw, and that’s all he ever studied.”
“I wish I knew what causes a person to be like him. All the textbooks say it’s environmental influences, abuse and so forth, but still I wonder.…”
“Well, in his case the textbooks are wrong,” I said. “There wasn’t any abuse. Scott’s parents were two of the finest people you’d ever want to meet.”
“Do you know if he had any record of torturing animals or anything like that when he was little?”
“Not for sure,” I said. “But I’ve heard stories. My niece is pretty close to his mother, and Willa has told her things about the kid that she doesn’t want to dwell on.”
“Whether he did the Twiller killing or not, he was up to something with Arno, and it had to be bad.”
There came a knock at the door. It was Billy Don and Linda with Trina Newland in tow. “Stick around,” I told Hotchkiss. “You might learn something.”
Linda ushered her in. The girl was already beginning to look institutionalized in her ill-fitting jailhouse coveralls, and the delousing shower had taken all the body out of her hair. I motioned for her to sit down, and then I let her wait while I finished reading my morning’s report. Hotchkiss sat silently and munched his cookies and sipped his coffee. I tossed the report on my desk and looked her over good. I could tell that she was humbled but not broken. But she was close.
“You don’t look like you got much sleep,” I said.
“I didn’t. There was this black lesbo that was after me all night long.”
“Well, in that case you should have complained to the jailers.”
“Yeah, sure. I know what happens to people who snitch in jail.”
I shrugged. “Your choice. We can’t fix problems we don’t know about.”
“What did you bring me down here for?”
“I wanted to appraise you of your situation, Trina. Under state law you were in possession of that cocaine by virtue of being in the same room where it was lying there in plain sight. It’s a slam dunk for two years right there. But…” Here I stopped speaking and gave her a grim smile. “By a quirk of Texas law, this felony can be enhanced by a number of other factors. For example, your past record.”
“I ain’t got no past record,” she said, “except a juvie beef or two, and even I know you can’t use them in adult court.”
“Right you are. But the possession charge can also be enhanced by any other felonies you committed while in possession of the coke. Such as the reckless endangerment of your child. So you can see that once you’re convicted of the possession charge, the rest of it falls over like the next domino in the line. When it goes to trial, you’ll get a country jury made up of good small-town Baptists and Methodists and Campbellites with maybe a couple of oldtime Presbyterians thrown in to leaven the mixture. They’ll stay in the jury room at least an hour to make it look like there was a little debate involved. Which there won’t be. Then they’ll come out and hang fifteen to twenty years on your happy little ass. After which they’ll go home and have a good supper and then sleep secure in the knowledge that they’ve done the Lord’s work.”
“Twenty years? My God! I never did no drugs in my life except a little weed. This ain’t fair!”
“I know, dear. Life’s rough and then you die. But that’s only one way it can all shake down. The other way is that you tell me what I need to know and you walk out of here today free as a bird. All this unpleasantness will be forgotten.”
“Do I get my baby back?”
“That’s out of my hands. Under state law there has to be a custody hearing within ten days. I can get you hooked up with an interfaith social services agency that will show you what moves you have to make. But I can tell you that if you put forth any effort at all to clean up your act and be the momma that little boy deserves, then you’ll get him back.”
She thought it over for a minute, all the while chewing her lower lip. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell you anything except where Scott is.”
“But that’s the one thing I need to know,” I said.
“I love Scott, and I won’t give him up.”
She’d seen the carrot, and now it was time for the stick.
“Do you think he really cares anything about you, girl?” I asked roughly. “Do you actually believe he’s going to wait around until you get out of the pen a dozen or so years from now? Shit, he’ll be out there pronging the first little twit that catches his eye, if he isn’t already. And you’ll be locked up in a steel cage and getting older by the day.”
“You’re just awful!”
I stood up, came around my desk, and jerked her chair around to where she was looking straight at me. Then I leaned down with my face just a few inches from hers.
“I’m worse than awful. I’m the meanest old son of a bitch you ever laid your two eyes on. You think we got bad dykes here in our jail? You ain’t seen nothing like what they’ve got at the women’s unit at Mountain View. Some of them weigh two hundred pounds or better and look like they could eat a Jeep for breakfast. You’re sexy and you know it, and that’s an asset here on the outside. But inside it’s a liability because you’ll just be fresh meat to those gals. Two or three of the biggest and meanest will pick you out the first week, and then they’ll square off and fight to see which one owns you. You’ve never seen anything like a pair of bull daggers fighting. They go at it like rabid hyenas. I don’t even want to think about the winner. Hell, I bet she’ll have an iron ring in her nose and tattoos all over the rest of her body. Whatever she looks like, she’ll be the she-wolf in that pack, and you’ll be her little piggy. Then every night that passes she’ll sit on your pretty face and howl at the moon.”
That’s when she broke.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I had no intention of letting the girl tip off Kimball because of late-blooming second thoughts. Which meant that she would stay in custody at least another day. I called the interfaith group like I’d promised, and they sent a representative down to the courthouse to begin the process of working with her. I also assured her that there was no need to drop the reckless endangerment charge because it had never been filed. We saw to it that she got a good lunch from the Texan Café, and by early afternoon she’d perked up and started to act like a human being again. I think she was even beginning to see the possibility of life after Scott. I hoped she’d make it into the ranks of the decent and the productive, and I told her so. But I had seen too much in my years as sheriff to have much confidence that she would.
I had phone calls to make and details to attend to, but in midmorning I stopped to have a cup of coffee and a donut with Linda.
“That was a very creative interpretation of the state enhancement stat
ute you gave that little fool,” she said. “I’ve never heard anything quite like it before.”
“She was Mirandaized and didn’t ask for a lawyer. I don’t see that it’s my duty to explain every little nuance of the law with gilt-edged accuracy. Besides, it scared her into giving Scott Kimball up, and when she did that she made the right move for herself and her kid. Can you imagine raising a child around that boy?”
She shook her head. “She’s sure scared of dykes, isn’t she?”
I snapped my fingers. “That reminds me to make a note to Maylene. I want to have her draw up one of those fancy citizens commendation certificates from the sheriff’s department.”
“You don’t give many of those out, do you?”
“No, I do not. I strongly believe that they should be something more than a PR move.”
“I just remember two in the five years I’ve worked for you. Who’s this one for?”
“Lulu Wilson. And I’m going to personally send her a big ham at Christmas time.”
“Lulu? What did she do?”
I grinned and sipped my coffee. “That’s another of those stories too harsh for your young and tender ears.”
“Damn it, Bo,” she seethed. “You can be such an asshole sometimes!”
Just then Toby came in and took the other chair opposite my desk. “How about telling us how you made Scott Kimball for this mess?” he asked. “I thought nobody had seen him in town.”
“Two things. For one, Danny Kettle has a source who says that the coke was stolen from Zorn just like we thought, and that it was Scott who got it. At the time he told me the story, I didn’t believe it because Scott hadn’t been seen in town in months. But the last time I talked to Doyle Raynes’s aunt, she told me that Doyle was gay. Did either of you know that?”
Nights of the Red Moon Page 20