by Sandra Brown
Clark and another deputy had already rounded up people who had been there the night before. By the time Ezzy arrived, they’d been questioned, but he conducted his own interrogations, taking notes on cocktail napkins imprinted with a wagon wheel.
“That’s right, Sheriff. Cecil and Carl were here with Patsy most of the evening. They were having themselves a real good time.”
“Patsy, she’d dance one song with Carl, then the next with Cecil. And when I say dance, I mean, you know, she plastered herself against ’em. Had ’em both heated up real good. I was kinda heated up myself, just watching.”
“By ‘provocative’ do you mean she was leading them on? Yes, sir, Sheriff Hardge. She surely was. I think she enjoyed having an audience while she did it, too.”
“I don’t mean to speak bad of the dead, you understand, but Patsy… well, sir, she was making herself available, if you know what I mean.”
“She and Cecil, they were giving everybody a real good show out on the dance floor. He had his hands on her ass—pardon the French—and his tongue down her throat.”
“I thought she and Carl were gonna go at it right over yonder on the pool table. ’N front o’ God and everybody.”
“Jealous? No, Sheriff, the brothers didn’t act jealous toward each other. They was sharing her and that seemed to suit them fine. ’Course they’s trash.”
The only witness who didn’t cooperate was the owner of the club, Parker Gee. He resented having his nightclub invaded by “cops” and his clientele interrogated like criminals. All questions posed to him were answered with a surly “I was busy last night. I don’t remember.”
Leaving deputies to take official statements, Ezzy put out an APB on the Herbolds, stressing that at this point they were wanted only for questioning. He drove straight from the tavern to the mobile-home park where they lived together in a ratty trailer. Their car was gone and they didn’t answer his knock. He resisted the urge to search the trailer without a warrant. On this case, everything must be done by the book. If the brothers were charged with murder, he didn’t want the case dismissed because of a technicality.
When he questioned their neighbors, they looked scornfully at the trailer and told the sheriff they hoped he arrested Carl and Cecil and locked them up for good. They were nuisances, coming and going at all hours of the night, speeding through the park and endangering the youngsters playing outdoors, terrorizing young women with crude remarks and catcalls. Their trailer was an eyesore in an otherwise neat community. Unanimously their neighbors would like to be rid of them.
He then drove to the oil-drilling rig where the Herbolds were employed. “They didn’t show up for work this morning,” the foreman told Ezzy. “I knew they’d done time, but everybody deserves a second chance. Now I’m two hands short. So much for being a nice guy. What’d they do, anyhow?”
Ezzy had declined to answer. But even if he had, he wouldn’t have known where to begin. The answer would have been long and complicated. The Herbolds had been getting into trouble since they were just kids still living with their stepfather.
Delray Corbett had married their widowed mother when the boys were in primary school. She was a pretty woman, shy and quiet, who was obviously intimidated by her boisterous sons. She never had exerted parental control over them. This made them all the more resentful of and rebellious against their new stepfather’s stern discipline. After their mother died, leaving Delray their guardian, their hostility toward him had intensified. When he remarried, they became full-fledged incorrigibles, making life hell for him and Mary.
The boys’ first malfeasance was a suspected shoplifting of a six-pack of beer. “They weren’t caught with the goods, Delray, so we can’t prove it.”
Ezzy remembered Delray Corbett’s mortification when he delivered the two tipsy boys to his doorstep. “I’ll tend to it, Sheriff Hardge. Thank you for bringing them home. You have my word that this will be the last time.”
Delray was unable to keep his promise. The boys grew more unruly with each passing year, especially after Dean Corbett was born. He was the apple of his daddy’s eye. Cecil and Carl seemed determined to be just the opposite.
Their misdeeds increased in seriousness until, in Cecil’s sophomore year of high school—Carl was a grade younger—a girl accused them of exposing themselves to her on the school bus and forcing her to fondle them. The boys claimed that she was lying, that the incident had never happened, that it was wishful thinking on her part. Since it was her word against theirs, they went unpunished. The girl’s parents were outraged and publicly blamed Delray for his stepsons’ behavior.
There followed a string of petty thefts, vandalism, and DUIs, but the boys were clever. None of the charges stuck. Then one night they were caught red-handed stealing auto parts from a salvage yard. They were sentenced to eighteen months in a juvenile detention facility. They were released after serving a year and returned to parental custody.
Delray had laid down the law: One misstep and they were out. Two nights later they got drunk, stole a car off a used-car lot, and drove it to Dallas, where they ran head-on into a van, seriously injuring the driver. They were tried as adults and sent to Huntsville. Delray washed his hands of them.
When they were released on parole, they didn’t return to Blewer. Not until the spring of 1976.
Earlier that year a drilling outfit had struck oil and in quick succession brought in three new wells. This incited a flurry of drilling, creating a demand for workers. Roughnecks looking for jobs flocked to the area. The Herbolds were among them.
One night a fight broke out in a local motel that catered to the transients. When Ezzy arrived on the scene, he was surprised to see the Herbold brothers in the thick of the fracas.
They had always been good-looking boys, and prison had done nothing to detract from their handsomeness. The bleeding cut above Carl’s eyebrow made him even more dashing and enhanced his natural charm.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned. Sheriff Hardge.” Carl grinned at Ezzy as he pulled him off a guy he’d been pummeling. “Long time no see.”
“Still making mischief, Carl? Didn’t you learn your lesson up at Huntsville?”
“We sure did, Sheriff.” Cecil elbowed his brother aside to address Ezzy. They were both rotten to the core, but Cecil was the least offensive. Ezzy doubted Cecil was any more righteous than his little brother, just more cautious. “This here was an accident.”
“Accident. Your brother was beating the hell out of that guy.”
A deputy was trying to bring the unconscious man around by smartly slapping his cheeks. “My brother was only protecting himself,” Cecil argued. “We’re no more to blame for the fight than any man here. If you arrest us, you have to arrest everybody. I don’t think your jail is big enough.”
He was right, of course. If Ezzy questioned these men all night, he would hear dozens of conflicting versions of how the fight started. Trying to get to the truth would be a waste of time and manpower. Instead, he imposed a curfew, ordering everyone to clear the area and return to their rooms to sleep it off.
Cecil tried pulling Carl toward their room, but Carl resisted. “Hey, Sheriff, you ever see our stepdaddy?”
“Sometimes.”
“Next time you do, tell him to go fuck himself.” Carl jabbed his finger for emphasis. “You tell that cocksucker I said that.”
“Shut up, Carl.” Smiling apologetically, Cecil dragged his brother across the parking lot.
The next day Ezzy had called Delray. He didn’t relay Carl’s message, but he asked if Delray knew his stepsons were back in the area.
“I’d heard, but I haven’t seen them. They know where they stand with me. I want no part of them.”
Ezzy had seen them on only one other occasion, and, again, they’d been at the epicenter of a disturbance. It had taken place at the Wrangler, one of the few remaining drive-in movie theaters in East Texas. Alcohol was prohibited anywhere on the premises, but enough alcohol to float a battleship wa
s consumed there just about every night during the summer.
Admittance was a dollar a carload. At that price, the drive-in was cheap entertainment for teenagers from Blewer and surrounding towns. It didn’t matter what movie was playing; kids by the hundreds flocked there, moving from car to car to visit, neck, drink.
On that particular night, for reasons that were never determined, the crowd at the drive-in became polarized. Those parked on the north end went to war with those parked on the south end. The graveled acreage was split right down the middle in the manner of the Mason-Dixon Line.
By the time it was all over, some blood had been shed, several cars had been vandalized, a fire had been started in the projection room, and the sheriff’s office had dispatched all five patrol cars to the scene.
Ezzy spotted Carl stanching a bloody nose while trying to pack a hopelessly inebriated woman into the front seat of a station wagon. “You just can’t stay out of trouble, can you, Carl?”
Immediately defensive, he sneered, “Hey, I didn’t start it.”
“That’s the God’s truth. He was just defending his girl’s honor. You can’t arrest him for that.”
Ezzy turned toward Cecil, who once again had come to his brother’s defense. “He’s in violation of parole,” Ezzy remarked. “I can arrest him for that.”
“Give him a break, Sheriff Hardge. What was he supposed to do? Some asshole called his girlfriend a fucking whore.”
Ezzy recognized the woman slumped in the front seat. She was in fact a well-known whore whom he’d had to jail a few times for boldly soliciting on the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly store. “Get on out of here, you two. But this makes twice. From here on, I’ve got my eye on you.”
Carl retorted, “Yeah, which one?”
Later Ezzy castigated himself for not cuffing them that night and taking them in. He should have reported them to their parole officer. He should have used the slightest infraction as an excuse to put them in jail. If he had, Patsy McCorkle might have lived.
Those two encounters with the Herbolds would haunt Ezzy for many years to come, but never more so than three days after Patsy’s body was discovered. Harvey Stroud had been wearing a linen suit the color of sweet cream when he huffed into Ezzy’s office and tossed a manila envelope onto his desk. “That’s it.”
“ ’Bout time,” Ezzy grumbled as he lowered his boots from the corner of his desk and opened the envelope.
“Couldn’t rush something like this, Ezzy.” The coroner removed his hat and fanned himself with it. “You got a cold Co’Cola you could spare?”
A deputy brought the county official the requested soft drink. He had drunk half of it before Ezzy raised his head from the reading material. “She died of a broken neck?”
“Snapped like a twig. Clean in two. Death was instantaneous.”
“What do you think happened?”
Stroud said, “Well, for starters, she had sexual intercourse with at least two partners.”
“Forced?”
“I prepared a rape kit just in case. It’s included there. But rape would be tough to prove because there’s no forensic evidence to support it. Besides, from what I hear about this girl, a young man wouldn’t have to force himself on her.”
“I’m concerned with her mortality, not her morality. That statement is unworthy of you, Harvey.”
“Maybe,” the coroner replied without taking umbrage. “But don’t you know it to be true?”
He did, and for that reason he didn’t pursue the argument. “What about the bruise on her neck?”
“It was a hickey. There was one to match it on her left breast. Caused by deep kissing, but nothing violent.”
“It says here you found semen in her vagina as well as her, uh…”
“Rectum. Only one donor there. I ran the tests several times on the specimen I took from there. Only one man ejaculated into her rectum.” Stroud belched and set his empty soda bottle on the edge of Ezzy’s desk. “There were abrasions and tearing around the anus. Light bleeding. So she was alive when she was penetrated there. My guess… If you’re interested in my guess, Ezzy.”
He motioned for Stroud to continue, although each word out of the coroner’s mouth was making him a little sick to his stomach.
“My guess is that she went willingly with the boys. They had themselves an orgy.”
“And then one of them raped her anally.”
The coroner frowned and thoughtfully tugged on his earlobe. “Again, that’s an iffy call. She could have been game. It could have been something new and untried for her. For all we know she even initiated it.”
Ezzy thought about Mrs. McCorkle in her daisy-patterned housecoat and hoped to hell she never had to hear this about her only child.
“What happened from there is anybody’s guess,” Stroud continued. “She might have balked and said no, and the boy held her down. But, again, there’s no significant bruising or scratching to suggest an all-out fight.”
“That’s what you’d testify to in court?”
“If it came to that, yeah, Ezzy. Under oath that’s what I would have to testify. Maybe she said yes initially, then changed her mind when it began to hurt. She put up a struggle; he killed her. Simple as that.
“But it is just as likely that the girl was enjoying it. Even people who engage in that particular sexual activity on a somewhat regular basis can experience irritation and bleeding.”
Ezzy rubbed his temple. Head down, he asked, “Then how did she wind up with a broken neck?”
“My theory? It happened in the throes of passion. The young man got a little carried away and unintentionally broke her neck.”
“You can’t be certain it was an accident.”
“True. But I can’t be certain that it was deliberate either. The only thing I know with certainty is that he completed the act.”
Ezzy stood and stretched his back. He wandered over to the window and needlessly adjusted the blinds. “Say it was an accident; why didn’t he report it?”
“And own up to the fact that he screwed her to death?” The coroner snorted skeptically. “Anyway, motivation is your department, Ezzy. I’ve done my part.” Stroud replaced his hat and heaved himself out of the chair. “I heard through the grapevine that the Herbold brothers are your prime suspects.”
“She was last seen in their company.”
“Hmm. Well, I’d say it could be either way, then. Unreported accidental death. Or rape and manslaughter.”
“Or murder.”
“Could be. What do the boys say?”
“They’ve run to ground.”
“Disappeared?”
“They were last seen leaving the Wagon Wheel with Patsy.”
“You don’t say? Hell of a thing for Delray, huh? Well, happy hunting. Thanks for the Coke.”
One of the reasons Ezzy hadn’t arrested the Herbolds when he’d had the opportunity was to spare Delray Corbett the embarrassment. As it turned out, he had done Delray no favors. The next time he saw him, Ezzy had to inform him that he was looking for his stepsons in connection with Patsy McCorkle’s death.
“Do you know where they are, Delray?”
“If I did I’d hand them over to you,” he had said, and Ezzy had believed him.
“It’s going to kill you, you know.”
Ezzy had been so lost in thought he hadn’t heard Cora’s approach. Her voice didn’t jolt him back into the present. His reemergence was a struggle, like working himself out of a spiderweb. Guilty memories clung to him with sticky tenacity.
When finally free of them, he smiled up at his wife. “Good morning to you, too.”
Apparently Cora didn’t consider it a good morning at all. Maintaining a stony silence, she filled his coffee cup from the carafe she’d carried out to the deck with her, then poured herself a cup and sat down in the lounger next to his. He could smell her talcum powder. She had dusted with it after every bath for as long as they’d been married.
“What’s going t
o kill me?” he asked.
“This obsession.”
“I’m not obsessed with anything except you.” He reached across the narrow space separating the chaises and covered her knee with his hand.
She promptly removed it. “That girl’s been dead more than twenty years.”
Dropping all pretense, he sighed. For several moments he stared out across the lawn and sipped his coffee. “I know how long she’s been dead, Cora.”
“Her daddy’s gone. For all we know Mrs. McCorkle is, too.”
McCorkle had followed his daughter to the grave five summers later. He had simply dropped dead one day at his desk at the Public Service Office while running an audit on someone’s electric bill. His widow had moved to Oklahoma. She hadn’t returned to Blewer, not even to decorate the graves of her daughter and husband. Ezzy couldn’t blame her. The town hadn’t left her with too many good memories.
“The only person blaming you for what happened to them is you,” Cora said, emphasizing the last word. “When are you going to let it go, Ezzy? When are you going to stop thinking about it?”
“How do you know that’s what I’m thinking about?”
“Don’t insult me on top of making me mad,” she snapped. “I know you snuck out the other night so you could go through those old files. And I saw through that fishing lie before you were out the back door.”
“I went fishing,” he argued lamely.
“You went to the place on the river where she died.” Setting her coffee cup on the small table between the chaises, she clasped her hands in her lap. “I could fight another woman, Ezzy. I would know what to do about that. But this… I don’t know how to fight this. And…” She paused and drew a deep breath. “And I’m tired of trying.”
He looked at her, saw the stubborn angle of her chin, and all of a sudden his heart felt like a lump of lead inside his chest.