BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (2 page)

Lucas sat shirtless in blue jeans and a pair of scuffed cowboy
boots on the edge of a bunk in a narrow cell layered with jailhouse
graffiti. His face was gray with hangover and fear, his reddish blond
hair spongy with sweat. His snap-button western shirt lay at his feet.
It had blue-and-white checks in it, and white cloth in the shoulders
with tiny gold trumpets stitched in it. He had paid forty dollars for
the shirt when he had first joined the band at Shorty's.

'How you feel?' I asked, after the turnkey locked the solid
iron door behind me.

'Not too good.' His wrists were thick, his wide hands cupped
on top of his knees. 'They tell you about the girl… I mean,
like how's she doing?'

'She's in bad shape, Lucas. What happened?'

'I don't know. We left Shorty's, you know, that joint on the
river. We was kind of making out in my truck… I remember
taking off my britches, then I don't remember nothing else.'

I sat down next to him on the bunk. It was made of cast iron
and suspended from the wall by chains. A thin mattress covered with
brown and yellow stains fit inside the rectangular rim. I picked up his
hands in mine and turned them over, then pressed my thumb along his
finger joints, all the time watching for a flinch in his face.

'A lady's going to come here this afternoon to photograph your
hands. In the meantime don't you do anything to bruise them,' I said.
'Who's the girl?'

'Her name's Roseanne. That's all she told me. She come in with
a mess of other people. They run off and left her and then her and me
got to knocking back shots. I wouldn't rape nobody, Mr Holland. I
wouldn't beat up a girl, either,' he said.

'How do you know?'

'Sir?'

'You don't remember what you did, Lucas… Look at me.
Don't sign anything, don't answer any of their questions, don't make a
statement, no matter what they promise you. You with me?'

'My father got you to come down here?'

'Not exactly.'

His blue eyes lingered on mine. They were bloodshot and full
of pain, but I could see them trying to reach inside my mind.

'You need a friend. We all do at one time or another,' I said.

'I ain't smart but I ain't stupid, either, Mr Holland. I know
about you and my mother. I don't study on it. It ain't no big deal to
me.'

I stood up from the bunk and looked out the window. Down the
street people were coming out of a brick church with a white steeple,
and seeds from cottonwood trees were blowing in the wind and I could
smell chicken frying in the back of a restaurant.

'You want me to represent you?' I said.

'Yes, sir, I'd sure appreciate it.'

He stared emptily at the floor and didn't look up again.

I stopped at Harley's office
downstairs.

'I'll be back for his arraignment,' I said.

'Why'd he have to beat the shit out of her?'

'He didn't.'

'I guess he didn't top her, either. She probably artificially
inseminated herself.'

'Why don't you shut up, Harley?'

He rubbed his chin with the ball of his thumb, a smile at the
corner of his mouth, his eyes wandering indolently over my face.

Outside, as I got into my Avalon, I saw him crossing the
courthouse lawn toward me, the sunlight through the trees freckling on
his face. I closed my car door and waited. He leaned one arm on the
roof, a dark loop of sweat under his armpit, and smiled down at me, his
words gathering in his mouth.

'You sure know how to stick it up a fellow's snout, Billy Bob.
I'll surely give you that, yessir. But at least I ain't killed my best
friend and I don't know anybody else who has. Have a good day,' he said.

Lucas's arraignment was at eleven Monday morning. At 8 a.m. I
met a sheriff's deputy at the courthouse and rode with her in her
cruiser to the spot on the river where Lucas and the girl from Shorty's
had been found.

The deputy's name was Mary Beth Sweeney. She wore a tan
uniform, with a lead-colored stripe down the side of each trouser leg,
and a campaign hat that slanted over her brow. Her face was powdered
with pale brown freckles and her dark brown hair hung in curls to her
shoulders. She was new to the department and seemed to have little
interest in either me or her assignment.

'Were you a law officer somewhere else?' I asked.

'CID in the army.'

'You didn't want to work for the feds after you got out?' I
said.

She raised her eyebrows and didn't answer. We passed Shorty's,
a ramshackle club built on pilings over the water, then pulled into an
old picnic area that had gone to seed among a grove of pine trees.
Yellow crime scene tape was stretched in the shape of a broken octagon
around the tree trunks.

'You responded to the 911?' I said.

'I was the second unit to arrive.'

'I see.'

I got out of the cruiser and stepped under the yellow tape.
But she didn't follow me.

'Where was the girl?' I said.

'Down there in those bushes by the water.'

'Undressed?'

'Her clothes were strewn around the ground.'

'On the ground by her?' I said.

'That's right.'

The soil in the clearing was damp and shady, and tire tracks
were stenciled across the pine needles that had fallen from the trees.

'And Lucas was in his truck, passed out? About here?' I said.

'Yes, sir.'

'You don't have to call me "sir".'

I walked down to the riverbank. The water was green and deep,
and cottonwood seeds swirled in eddies on top of the current.

'You know, I never heard of a rapist being arrested because he
was too drunk to flee the crime scene,' I said.

But the deputy didn't answer me. The ground among the bushes
was crisscrossed with dozens of footprints. I walked back to where
Lucas's truck had been parked. Mary Beth Sweeney still stood outside
the crime scene tape, her hands in her back pockets. Her arms looked
strong, her stomach flat under her breasts. Her black gunbelt was
polished and glinted with tiny lights.

'This is quite a puzzle,' I said.

'The sheriff just told me to give you the tour, Mr Holland.'

She put on a pair of dark green aviator's sunglasses and
looked at the river.

'Did Lucas attack her in his truck, then pass out? Or did he
attack her in the brush and walk back to his truck, have a few more
drinks and then pass out?' I said. 'You don't have an opinion?'

'I'll drive you back to your car if you're ready,' she said.

'Why not?' I said.

We drove through rolling fields that were thick with
bluebonnets and buttercups, then crossed a rusted iron bridge over the
river. The river's bottom was soap rock, and deep in the current you
could see the gray, moss-covered tops of boulders and the shadows they
made in the current.

'You're pleading your man innocent?' she said.

'You bet… You think I'm firing in the well?'

'I just wondered,' she said, and didn't speak again until we
pulled into the shade of the live oaks that surrounded the courthouse.

I walked to my car, then turned unexpectedly and caught her
watching me, her sunglasses hanging from her fingers.

I stopped the prosecutor outside his
office just before
Lucas's arraignment. The corridor was empty, and our voices echoed off
the old marble floor and high wood ceiling.

'You're not going to jam us up on the bail, are you, Marvin?'
I said.

'Don't expect any slack on this one, Billy Bob,' he replied.

He wore a bowtie and seersucker suit, and his face looked at
me with the quiet moral certitude of an ax blade.

'You don't have a rape case. You're not going to make assault
and battery without a weapon, either,' I said.

'Oh?'

'Lucas doesn't have a bruise on him.'

'You see the medical report on her genitalia? Or maybe that's
just Lucas's idea of rough sex… You want to talk about
weapons? How about if he beat her face on the side of the truck?'

'You have evidence of that?'

'It poured down Saturday night. The whole crime scene was
washed clean.'

'Pretty convenient, Marvin.'

'No, pretty sickening. And the charge isn't assault and
battery. Where have you been this morning?'

I stared into the righteous light in his eyes and knew, with a
sinking of the heart, what was coming next.

'She died an hour ago. The doc says it was probably a brain
hemorrhage. You want to plea out, give me a call. He's not going to do
the big sleep, but I guarantee you he'll get to be an expert at picking
state cotton,' he said.

Because Lucas was being arraigned on a
Monday morning, he was
brought to court on the same wrist chain as the collection of DWIs,
wife beaters, and barroom brawlers who had been in the drunk tank over
the weekend. Each Monday morning they would ride down to the first
floor in an elevator that resembled a packed zoo cage and, in stumbling
peckerwood or black or Mexican accents, offer their explanations for
the mercurial behavior that seemed to affect their lives like a
windstorm blowing arbitrarily through a deserted house.

Normally the weekend miscreants waved at their friends in the
courtroom or punched one another in the ribs and snickered while one of
their members tried to talk his bail down. But not today. When they sat
in the row of chairs at the front of the court and the bailiff unlocked
their wrists and dropped the chain to the wood floor, they rounded
their shoulders and looked at their shoes or moved a chair space away
from Lucas, as though eye contact or proximity to him would stain them
with a level of guilt that was not theirs.

I stood next to him when it was his turn to rise and face the
court. His father had brought him a clean white shirt and flowered tie
and pair of starched khakis, but he was unshaved and his wavy hair was
uncut and wet and combed straight back on his collar, so that he looked
like a 1950s hood rather an uneducated rural kid whose father had
belittled him since he was a child.

Marvin, the prosecutor, asked that Lucas's bail be set at
$200,000.

I heard Lucas's breath catch in his throat. I touched the back
of his wrist with mine.

'Your Honor, my client is just nineteen and has very little in
the way of resources. He has no felony arrests of any kind. He's lived
his whole life in this county. The bail request is not only
unreasonable, it's deliberately punitive. The real problem is, Marvin
doesn't have a case and he knows it.'

The judge's glasses were orbs of light and the lines in his
face seemed gathered around his mouth like crinkles in
papier-mâché.
'"Punitive" is it? Tell that to the family of the dead girl. I also
love your first-name familiarity. There is nothing I find more
heartwarming than to feel I'm involved in a court proceeding that might
be conducted by Lum and Abner. Bail is set at
one-hundred-fifty-thousand dollars. Count yourself fortunate,
counselor,' he said, and clicked his gavel on a small wood block.

On the way out of the courtroom Vernon Smothers's gnarled hand
clenched on my forearm. His gray eyes were jittering with anger.

'Everything you touch turns to shit, Billy Bob,' he said.

'Go home, Vernon,' I replied.

'I don't want my boy locked up with low-rent nigras. Get him
in a special cell or something.'

'Don't go home. Find a wastebasket and stand in it, Vernon,' I
said.

I rode up in the elevator with Lucas and a deputy. Lucas's
lower body was draped in a clinking net of waist and leg chains. The
deputy slid back the wire-mesh door on the elevator, then used a key to
unlock a second, barred door that swung out onto the third floor. We
walked under a row of electric lights with wire baskets over the bulbs,
our footsteps echoing off the sandstone walls, past a series of cells
with solid iron doors and food slits, past the tank where the drunks
were kept, toward three barred cells that faced back into the corridor.
Lucas's cheeks and throat were pooled with color, as though they had
been burned with dry ice.

'This is where we keep the superstars,' the deputy said. He
started to unlock Lucas's wrists in front of the middle cell. A hand
and arm came out of the bars to the right and undulated in the air like
a serpent.

'You got fresh meat for us, boss man?' the half-naked man in
the cell said. His eyes looked maniacal, the structure of his head as
though it had been broken in a machinist's vise. His arms were too
short for his thick torso, and his chest and pot stomach were white
from lack of sunlight and covered with green and red tattoos.

The deputy slipped his baton from the ring on his belt and
whanged it off the bars an inch from the tattooed man's hand.

'You stick it out there again, I'll break it,' he said.

'Come on, keep my Jell-O tonight and put that sweet thing in
here with me,' the man said, his palms wrapped around the bars now, his
eyes dancing with malevolence six inches from mine. His body exuded a
raw, damp odor like sewer gas.

After the deputy had unlocked Lucas's wrists from the
manacles, I saw the fingers on both his hands start to tremble.

'Give me a minute,' I said to the deputy.

'No problem. But I'm going to lock you inside so nobody don't
grab one of your parts. You think the smart-ass here on the right's
bad? They ain't thought up a name for that 'un on the other side.'

I went into the cell with Lucas and watched the deputy turn
the key on us and walk back down the corridor and sit at a small table
and take his lunch out of a paper bag.

'I don't care if I cain't remember anything or not, I didn't
hurt that girl. I liked her. She always come in there with college
kids, but she didn't put on like she was special,' he said.

'Which college kids?' I said.

He sat down on the bunk. A blowfly buzzed over the seatless
toilet behind him. Lucas's eyes started to film.