Cimarron Rose Read online

  Lucas pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “The guy in there,” he said, his voice lowered. “Harley was telling him last night Texas won’t send him back to California because California don’t like to give people the death penalty. He was telling the guy what it’s like to die by injection, how the guy’s muscles are going to turn to cement so his lungs cain’t go up and down, how he’ll suffocate way down inside himself while everybody watches.

  “Harley was almost back to the elevator and the guy says, ‘One . . . one . . . one Fannin Street.’ It made Harley go crazy. He got three other guys up here and they went in the guy’s cell and chained him up and drug him down to the shower, then Harley went back to a locker and got a cattle prod. Mr. Holland, the guy’s eyes was rolled in his head and his britches was around his knees when they drug him back . . .”

  “Listen to me, Lucas. As long as you’re in here, you didn’t see any of this,” I said.

  “I cain’t take it. The guy in the other cell, Jimmy Cole, he told me this morning what he done to a little boy in Georgia.”

  He started to cry, unashamedly, his arms stiff on his knees, his eyes squinted shut, the tears streaming down his cheeks.

  THE SHERIFF KEPT his office behind the courthouse in the squat, one-story yellow sandstone building that had been the original county jail in the 1870s. He was six and a half feet tall and weighed over three hundred pounds, ate five meals a day, chain-smoked cigars, kept a spittoon by his desk, and hung framed pictures on the ancient log walls of every man his department had helped the state of Texas execute.

  With no more than a fourth grade education, he had managed to remain sheriff for twenty-seven years.

  He spun a poker chip on his desk blotter while I talked. The brow of his granite head was furrowed, his massive upper arms red with sunburn.

  “Evidence disappearing? No, sir, not in this department. Where’d you hear this?” His eyes, which were flat and gray, lifted into mine.

  “It happens, sheriff. Things get misplaced sometimes.”

  “My response to you is simple. The sonofabitch told you it is a goddamn liar. But—” He picked up a pencil stub in his huge hand and started writing on a legal pad. “I’ll make a note to myself and get back to you. How’s that?”

  “I want my client moved.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Harley Sweet makes nighttime visits to some of the cells. I don’t want my client involved as a witness in any other kind of court proceeding.”

  He leaned back in his swivel chair, the ends of the pencil stub crimped in the fingers of each hand.

  “You telling me Harley’s abusing a prisoner?” he asked.

  “In my view, he’s a sick man.”

  He looked at me hard for a moment, then burst out laughing. “Hell, he’s got to do something, son. I cain’t have the whole goddamn county on welfare.”

  “I’ll see you, sheriff.”

  “Don’t get your tallywhacker out of joint. I’ll move the boy and I’ll talk to Harley. Go get laid or develop a sense of humor. I swear you depress the hell out of me every time you come in here.”

  THAT EVENING MY investigator, Temple Carrol, and I drove out to Shorty’s on the river. The parking lot was filled with rusted gas-guzzlers, customized hot rods like kids built in the 1950s, chopped-down motorcycles, gleaming new convertibles, vans with bubble windows, and pickup trucks scrolled with chrome.

  The interior was deafening. From the screen porches and elevated bandstand to the dance floor and the long, railed bar, the faces of the patrons were rippled with neon, their voices hoarse with their own conversation, their eyes lighted like people who had survived a highway catastrophe and knew they were eternal. When people went to Shorty’s, they went to score—booze, barbecue, homegrown reefer, crystal meth, a stomp-ass brawl out in the trees, or the horizontal bop in the backseat—and they came from every background to do it: ranchers, sawmill workers, oil field roughnecks, businessmen, ex-cons, dope mules, college kids, blue-collar housewives dumping their husbands, pipeliners, hillbilly musicians, pool hustlers, steroid freaks with butchwax in their hair, and biker girls in black leather whose purple makeup bloomed like a death wish on their cheeks.

  But the revelers were two nights’ distance from the rape and murder of a girl in an abandoned picnic ground down the road, and their unfocused smiles never left their faces at the mention of her name.

  Temple and I finally gave it up and walked back outside into the coolness of the evening. Far in the distance, the green land seemed to cup and flow off the earth’s edge into an arroyo lighted by the sun’s last dying spark.

  “Billy Bob, if anybody could help out, it’d be the guys in the band,” she said.

  “So?”

  “They turn to stone.” She averted her eyes. “The girl came here alone. She left with Lucas. They were both drunk. We’re going to have to go at it from another angle.”

  “He’s a gentle boy, Temple. He didn’t do this.”

  “You know what a state psychologist is going to say on the stand? About a boy who was controlled and abused all his life by a father like Vernon Smothers?”

  An elderly black man with a thin white mustache and a stub of pipe between his teeth was spearing trash amidst the chopped-down motorcycles with a stick that had a nail on the end. He pulled each piece of trash off the nail and stuck it in a cloth bag that hung from his shoulder.

  “I’ll buy you a Mexican dinner,” I said to Temple.

  “I think I’ll just go home and take a shower. I feel like somebody rubbed nicotine in my hair.”

  I backed the Avalon around and started to pull out of the parking lot. I saw her eyes watching the black man, a tooth working on the corner of her lip.

  “You didn’t interview him?” I said.

  “No, he wasn’t here before.”

  I stopped the car, and we both got out and walked over to him. He kept at his work and paid little attention to us. Temple held out a photo she had gotten from the dead girl’s high school.

  “Have you seen this girl before, sir?” she asked.

  He took the photo from her and looked at it briefly, then handed it back.

  “Yeah, I seen her. She the one killed up the road,” he said.

  “Did you know her?” I asked.

  “No, I didn’t know her. But I seen her, all right.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “Night she got killed. She come here in a cab. Some boys was fixing to leave, then they seen her and axed her to go off with them. She had her own mind about it, though.”

  “Sir?” I said.

  “She hit this one boy right ’cross the face, whap. He stood there, holding his jaw, just like he had a toothache. Then she give him the finger while she was walking back inside. Didn’t even bother to turn around when she done it, just held it up in the air for him to see.”

  “Who was the boy?” I said.

  “Ain’t seen him befo’. Ain’t sure I’d know him again.” His eyes drifted off my face.

  “Yeah, you would,” Temple said.

  “Why didn’t you tell this to someone?” I said.

  “They come to a place like this more than once, it’s for a reason. The wrong one, too. What I say ain’t gonna change that.”

  “What kind of car did this boy have?” Temple said.

  “What reason I got to watch his car?”

  “Who was he with?” Temple said.

  “I ain’t seen them befo’.”

  “Give me your name,” she said. She wrote it down, then stuck a business card in his hand. “You just became a witness in a murder trial. Stay in touch. Work on your memory, too. I know you can do it.”

  I FOLLOWED THE two-lane county road along the river, past a cornfield that was green and dented with wind under the moon.

  “That’s kind of a
tough statement to make to an old fellow,” I said.

  “I don’t like people who’re cutesy about a raped and murdered girl,” Temple said.

  AFTER I HAD dropped her off, I made a call to the jail and then drove to the house of Marvin Pomroy, the prosecutor. He lived in a white gingerbread house, shaded by live oaks, in the old affluent district of Deaf Smith. His St. Augustine grass was wet with soak hoses and iridescent in the glare of the flood lamps that lit and shadowed his property.

  His wife answered the door and invited me in, but I thanked her and asked if Marvin could simply step outside a minute. He still had a dinner napkin in his hand when he came out on the gallery.

  “I’ve got a problem with some missing evidence,” I said.

  “See the sheriff.”

  “You’re an honest man, Marvin. Don’t jerk me around.”

  “Same response. You shouldn’t try to do business on my gallery.”

  “Somebody’s sandbagging the investigation and setting up my client.”

  He reached behind him and closed the front door. His well-shaped head and steel-rimmed glasses and neatly combed short hair were covered with the yellow glow of the bug light overhead.

  “You listen, goddamn it, that kid’s got dirty written all over him. You get out of my face with this bullshit,” he said.

  “I asked the sheriff to move him today. It didn’t happen.”

  “That’s not my problem. You know what is? A guy who could have been dredged up out of the Abyss, Garland T. Moon. He murdered a whole family in California, he tied them up in a basement and killed them one by one with a knife, but his attorney has already gotten most of the evidence suppressed because the cops seized it with a bad warrant. If I don’t make the case on that old woman he killed here, he’ll be back on the street, in our midst, ready to do it again . . . Listen, I could get Lucas on capital murder. But I choose not to do so. Do you hear what I’m saying, Billy Bob?”

  “No.”

  He shook his head, a sad, private thought in his eyes.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I said.

  “You were an assistant U.S. attorney. Why’d you blow it?”

  “Go to hell, Marvin.”

  “Come in and eat,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Good night to you, then,” he said.

  I walked across the grass to my car. The yard seemed filled with shadows that leaped and broke apart and re-formed themselves in the wind. I looked back over my shoulder through the front windows of Marvin’s house. He and his wife and children were seated at the dining room table, a chandelier dripping with light above their heads, their faces animated with their own company as they passed bowls of food back and forth to one another.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  I WOKE BEFORE sunrise and fried eggs and ham in the kitchen and ate them out of the skillet with bread and a cup of coffee on the back porch. The dawn was gray and misty, the air so cool and soft that I could hear sound from a long way off—a bass flopping in the tank, the creak of the windmill shifting directions, a cowbell clanging on my neighbor’s gate.

  L.Q. Navarro was stretched out on the perforated, white-painted iron lawn bench under the chinaberry tree, his Stetson tilted sideways on his head, his cheek resting on one hand.

  I tried to ignore him.

  But when I closed my eyes he and I were on horseback again in a reed-choked muddy bottom across the border in Coahuila, our eyes stinging with sweat in the darkness, our noses and mouths filled with insects. Then the fusillade exploded all around us, from behind sandhills and scrub brush and mesquite and gutted car bodies, the muzzle flashes blooming in the dark, our horses caving under us as though they had been eviscerated.

  But L.Q.’s mare labored to her feet again, a hole in her rib cage squirting blood like a broken pipe, and began galloping in terror up an arroyo, flailing her head against the collapsed reins. Then I saw L.Q.’s boot and roweled Mexican spur tangled in the stirrup and his body bouncing across the rocks, his arms folded over his head as the mare’s iron shoes sliced the suitcoat off his shoulders.

  My right arm felt dead, useless at my side, the upper bone snapped in two by a round that had struck it like a sharp, solitary blow from a cold chisel. I stood erect and fired and fired, until my nine-millimeter locked empty, then I dropped it to the ground and began firing my .357 Magnum, not taking aim, the air crisscrossed with ricochets and toppling rounds that made a whirring sound past the ear or pinged out into the darkness like a broken spring.

  Then I heard our attackers begin moving through the brush, the sand slicks, from behind the rusted car bodies, through the blackened greasewood and tangles of wire fence. I heard the man behind me before I saw him, his boots digging hopelessly for purchase into the soil as he slid down the arroyo. I turned just as his weight propelled him toward the bottom of the arroyo, the starlight glinting on the barrel of his rifle, and I pointed my revolver straight in front of me and squeezed off the last round in the cylinder, the hammer ratcheting back and slamming down on the cartridge before I recognized the thin, silvery tinkle of L.Q.’s Mexican spurs.

  I pushed away the frying pan and coffee cup and wiped my mouth on a paper napkin.

  “Why’d you pick up that damn rifle?” I said.

  He adjusted his cheek on his palm and tipped back his hat. “I dropped my piece. What was I supposed to shoot at them with, spitballs?”

  “They all made it back into the mountains. We lost you for nothing.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I busted off my pocketknife in the guy I took the rifle from. It’s that same dude we liked to smoked a couple of other times. I expect he took his next leak with one kidney.”

  “You were sure a fine lawman, L.Q.”

  He cut his head and grinned and stuck a long grass stem in his mouth.

  I heard a car out front, then the doorbell ring.

  “Come around back!” I shouted through the kitchen.

  The deputy named Mary Beth Sweeney walked around the corner of the house, the sun like a soft yellow balloon at her back. L.Q. was standing under the chinaberry tree now, looking at her curiously. She walked right through him. His silhouette broke apart in a burst of gold needles.

  I pushed open the back screen for her.

  “How about a cup of coffee?” I said.

  She stepped inside and took off her campaign hat. She pushed a curl off her forehead.

  “This won’t take long,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You jammed me up with the sheriff.”

  “About the missing evidence?” I said.

  “You violated a confidence, Mr. Holland.”

  “I didn’t,” I said.

  “Yeah? I think it’s Bubba and Bubba lighting each other’s cigars.”

  “Who are you?” I said.

  She fitted her hat on her head and let the screen slam behind her.

  I followed her to her cruiser.

  “You’re wrong about this,” I said.

  I watched her cruiser spin gravel onto the county road and disappear over a rise between two pastures filled with red Angus.

  MY LAW OFFICE was above the old bank on the corner of the town square. From my window I could see the iron tethering rings that bled rust out of the old elevated sidewalks, the hardware and feed stores that had gone broke, the tiny neon-scrolled Rialto theater that still showed first-run movies, the yellow tip of a Spanish-American War artillery piece under the live oaks on the courthouse lawn, the Roman-numeraled clock perched atop the third floor, where Lucas Smothers waited in a cell with a sociopath behind the wall on each side of him.

  I sat at my desk with a cup of coffee and stared at the glass case on the wall where I had mounted Great-grandpa Sam’s Navy Colt .36-caliber revolvers and his octagon-barrel Winchester ’73 lever-action rifl
e on a field of blue felt. I picked up the telephone and punched in the sheriff’s office extension.

  “My client hasn’t been moved,” I said.

  “Talk to Harley.”

  “Harley’s a sadistic moron.”

  “You’re starting to try my patience, Billy Bob.”

  “Tell your scene investigator I’m going to fry his ass.”

  “The missing beer cans or whatever?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What would they prove, that a lot of people get drunk and diddle each other in that picnic ground? . . . Go to a head doctor while you still got time, son. I’m worried about you.”

  I DROVE OUT to the clapboard, tin-roofed home of the victim, Roseanne Hazlitt. The aunt was a frail, wizened woman who snapped the screen latch in place as I stepped up on her tiny gallery. Behind her, the television set was tuned to a talk show on which people shouted and jeered at one another. An ironing board on a short stand was elevated in front of the couch. Through the screen I smelled an odor on her like camphor and dried flowers and sweat baked into her clothes by the heat of her work.

  “You asking me to hep set that boy loose?” she said.

  “No, ma’am. I just wondered if Roseanne had other friends she might have met sometimes at Shorty’s.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like one she had reason to slap the daylights out of.”

  “She never hurt nobody in her life. It was them hurt her.”

  “May I come in?”

  “No.”

  “Who’s them, Ms. Hazlitt?”

  “Any of them that gets the scent of it, like a bunch of dogs sniffing around a brooder house. Now, you get off my gallery, and you tell that Smothers boy he might fool y’all, he don’t fool me.”

  “You know Lucas?”

  I DROVE BACK to Deaf Smith, parked my Avalon by the office, and walked across the street to the courthouse. I opened Harley Sweet’s door without knocking.

  “I want to see Lucas in private, in an interview room, and I don’t want anybody disturbing me while I talk to him,” I said.