BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (28 page)

She smiled and walked into the water, the backs of
her thighs wrinkling below the rim of her bathing suit. She leaned over
and cupped water on her shoulders and spread it on her arms. Bunny
watched her, his jaws slack, his eyes trying to take him out into the
sunlight, away from the conversation he was about to have.

'I'm calling you as a witness at Lucas's trial,' I
said.

'Oh man, don't tell me that.'

'You'll have a lot of company—Darl Vanzandt,
Virgil Morales, a biker girl named Jamie Lake, an elderly black man who
saw Roseanne Hazlitt slap you.'

'Morales? That pepper bel… that kid from
the Purple Hearts? What's he got to do with this?'

'Why'd Roseanne hit you? Why'd Morales call you a
pimp, Bunny?'

Bunny put the tips of his fingers on his temples.

'You don't know what you're doing. You're setting my
life on fire, Mr Holland.'

'Your life? How about the girl
who's in the cemetery? How about Lucas Smothers's life?'

Above his left nipple was the tattoo of a small
heart.

'I didn't want none of this to happen. People don't
plan for stuff like this to happen,' he said.

'Emma Vanzandt called me a fool yesterday. When I
asked her why, she used your name. Like you were a key I didn't know
how to fit on the ring.'

'Emma done that?' He twisted around on the bench and
stared at me, his eyes burning. 'That bitch done that?'

'That doesn't sound like you, Bunny.'

'Yeah, what does? Human dildo?'

He waited for me to comprehend his meaning. I kept
my expression flat.

'Rich woman catches her husband milking through the
fence, how does she stick it to him? She gets a young guy to put the
wood to her.'

'You and Emma?'

'It was a one-time deal. She drove a hundred miles
to a motel that was between two oil rigs. The walls was vibrating off
the foundation. I think she was whacked out on speed. She wanted to
call him up on the phone during a certain moment. I had to talk her out
of it.'

He stared out at the river and at the Mexican girl
whose body was bladed with the sun's reflection off the water. After a
while he said, 'She's a nice girl. Naomi, I mean. She don't know about
none of this. She thinks I'm hot shit 'cause I played football at
A&M.'

'Maybe you're a better guy than you think,' I said.

'No, I know what I am. I blame my trouble on the
Vanzandts, but they knew the kind of person they was looking for.'

'You're still a young man. You haven't done anything
that can't be undone.' When he didn't answer, I said, 'Have you?'

He looked down at the tops of his feet. His fingers
were pressed into his bronze hair like white snakes. When I walked to
the car I realized I had forgotten to deliver his father's message, but
I felt Bunny didn't need another reminder that day of who or what he
was.

I almost didn't recognize her when she
got out of a
taxi cab in my drive at noon the same day. She wore a powder-blue suit,
heels, a white blouse, and a beige shoulder bag. But for some reason,
in my mind's eye, I still saw the tall, naturally elegant woman in tan
uniform and campaign hat. I opened the side door and stepped out under
the porte cochere.

'Wow,' I said.

'Wow, yourself.'

'You sure look different.'

'That's the welcome?'

'Come in.' I opened the screen.

She hesitated. 'I don't want to interrupt your day.'

We seemed to be looking at each other like people
who might have just met at a bus stop.

'I don't know what to say, Mary Beth. I got one
phone message. My only source of information about you has been Brian
Wilcox.'

'Brian?'

'He got a warrant and tossed my house.'

She looked away, her face full of thought.

'I'm not supposed to be here. My people are cutting
a deal with the new sheriff,' she said.

'Your people?'

'Yes.'

The wind blew the curls on the back of her neck. I
could hear the tin roof on the barn pinging with heat, like wires
breaking.

'The locals are trying to jam you up on the
shooting?' I said.

'It's their out. I handed it to them on a shovel.'

'Sammy Mace was a cop killer. He got what he had
coming,' I said.

'Can we go inside, Billy Bob? We were in Denver this
morning. I overdressed.'

She sat down at the kitchen table. I poured her a
glass of iced tea. I ran cold water over my hands and dried them, not
knowing why I did. Outside, the barn roof shimmered like a heliograph
under the sun.

'My office is taking the weight for me. I screwed
up, but they're taking the weight, anyway,' she said.

'A stand-up bunch. We're talking about the DEA?' I
said.

Her back straightened under her coat. Her hand was
crimped on a paper napkin, her gaze pointed out the window.

'I thought coming here was the right thing to do.
But I'm all out of words, Billy Bob.'

'Can't we have dinner? Can't we spend some time
together without talking about obligations to a government agency? You
think you owe guys like Brian Wilcox?'

'This is pointless. Because you hung up your own
career doesn't mean other—' She didn't finish. She put both
her hands
in her lap, then a moment later placed one hand on top of her shoulder
bag.

I opened the refrigerator door to take out the iced
tea pitcher again. Then closed it and stood stupidly in the center of
the room, all of the wrong words already forming in my throat.

'An English writer, what's his name, E. M. Forster,
once said if he had to choose between his country and his friend, he
hoped he'd have the courage to choose his friend,' I said.

'I guess I missed that in my English lit survey
course,' she said, rising from her chair. 'Can I use your phone to call
a cab? I should have asked him to wait.'

'I apologize. Don't leave like this.'

She shook her head, then walked into the library and
used the telephone. I stood in her way when she tried to walk down the
hall to the front door.

'You see yourself as a failure. You put yourself
through law school. You were a Texas Ranger and an AUSA. You can be a
lawman again, anytime you want,' she said.

'Then stay. I'll cancel the cab.'

I put my hand on her arm. I saw the pause in her
eyes, the antithetical thoughts she couldn't resolve, the pulse in her
neck.

'I'd better go. I'll call later,' she said.

'Mary Beth—'

Then she was out the door, her cheeks glazed with
color, her hand feeling behind her for the door handle so she would not
have to look back at my face.

But by Monday morning there was no
call. Instead, a
dinged gas-guzzler stopped out front of my office and a woman in a
platinum wig and shades and a flowered sundress got out and looked in
both directions, as though by habit, then entered the downstairs foyer.

A minute later my secretary buzzed me.

'A Ms Florence LaVey. No appointment,' she said.

'Who is she?'

'She said you'd know who she was.'

'Nope. But send her in.'

The inner door opened and the woman in the platinum
wig stood framed in the doorway, her shades dripping from her fingers,
her face expectant, as though at any moment I would recognize her
relationship to my life.

'Can I help you?' I asked. Then I noticed that one
of her eyes was brown, the other blue.

'The name doesn't turn on your burner, huh? San
Antonio? The White Camellia Bar?'

'Maybe I'm a little slow this morning.'

'I know what you mean. I always get boiled on Sunday
nights myself. I think it has something to do with being raised
Pentecostal… Let me try again… A nasty little fuck
by the name of Darl Vanzandt?'

'You're the lady he beat up. You're a waitress?'

'A hostess, honey.' She winked and sat down and
crossed her legs. She opened a compact and looked at herself. 'I'd like
to slip some pieces of bamboo deep under his fingernails.'

'His father says you and a pimp tried to roll him.'

She wet the ball of one finger and wiped at
something on her chin and clicked the compact shut.

'His old man paid me ten thousand dollars so he and
his son could tell whatever lies they wanted to. You interested in what
really happened?'

'It's not of much value if you took money to drop
the charges.'

'I'm not talking about what that little shit did to
me. I read about that girl in the paper when she got beaten to death.
But I didn't make any connections. Then last night him and this
ex-convict named Moon come to this new bar I'm working in. Fart Breath
starts talking about a trial, about this girl got gang-raped and her
head bashed in, about how some lawyer is trying to make him take
somebody else's fall. I'm standing behind the bar. I keep waiting for
him to catch on who I am. Forget it.'

'Yes?'

'Get the girl dug up. See if she wasn't stoned-out
on roofies.'

'We're talking about Ro—'

'You got it. Rohypnol. That's what the Vanzandt kid
uses. He picks up a girl and dumps it in her drink so he can do
anything he wants with her.' She fitted her glasses on, then removed
them again. 'I wish I'd sent him to the Ellis Unit at Huntsville. The
colored boys always appreciate new Ivory soap when they come out of the
field.'

'I've seen the autopsy. She was full of booze but no
dope.'

She brushed a long red thumbnail back and forth
across a callus. 'He sat on my chest and spit in my face. He broke both
my lips. I told this to his old man. He goes, "Ten thousand is my
limit."'

'The Vanzandts have their own way of doing things,'
I said, my attention starting to wander.

She got up to leave.

'Forget about the dope. Either that kid did her, or
y'all got real bad luck.'

'What do you mean?'

'Two like him in one town? This might be a shithole,
honey, but it doesn't deserve that,' she said.

Just before lunch, the lady in charge
of payroll at
my father's old pipeline company called from Houston.

'We didn't contract any jobs around Waco during the
late Depression or the war years. But of course that doesn't mean in
itself your father wasn't there,' she said.

'Well, what you've found is still helpful,' I said.

'Wait a minute. I did some other checking. I don't
know if it will be useful to you or not.'

'Yeah, please, go ahead.'

'Your father worked steadily for us in east Texas
from 1939 to 1942. Then evidently he was drafted into the army. I don't
know how it would have been possible for him to have worked for another
company around Waco at the same time. Does this help you out?'

'I can't tell you how much.' I thanked her again and
was just about to hang up. Then I said, 'Just out of curiosity, would
the "search" key on your computer kick up the name of a man named
Garland T. Moon?'

'Hold on. I'll see. When did he work for us?'

'During the mid-1950s.'

I heard her fingers clicking on the keyboard of a
computer, then she scraped the phone up off the table.

'Yes, we have a record of a G. T. Moon. But not
during the 1950s. He was a hot-pass welder on a natural gas line down
at Matagorda Bay in 1965. Is that the same man?… Hello?'

I don't remember if I answered her or not. I recall
replacing the receiver in the cradle, the residue of moisture and oil
that my palm print left on the plastic, the skin tightening in my face.

My father had been blown out of a hellhole while
mending a leak on a pipe joint at Matagorda Bay in 1965.

I walked across the street to the
one-story
sandstone building, which was now the office of the new sheriff, Hugo
Roberts. He sat with one half-topped boot propped on his desk, the air
around him layered with cigarette smoke.

'You want Garland T. Moon's file? Marvin Pomroy
don't have it?' he asked.

'It's gone back into Records.'

'What d' you want it for?'

'Idle curiosity. Since he probably killed your
predecessor with an ax, I thought you might be interested in it, too.'

He dropped his foot to the floor.

'Damn, Billy Bob, every time I talk with you I feel
like a bird dog sticking his nose down a porcupine hole.' He picked up
his phone and punched an extension. 'Tell Cleo to stop playing with
hisself and to bring Garland Moon's sheet to my office,' he said. He
put the phone back down and smiled. 'Hang on, I got to take a whiz.'

He went into a small rest room and urinated into the
bowl with the door open.

'You got Moon made for the sheriff's murder, huh?'
he said.

'That'd be my bet.'

He washed his hands, combed his hair in the mirror,
and came back out. 'Since nobody else has figured that out, what gives
you this special insight?' he said.

'Because you're not worried about who did it.'

'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.