BBH01 - Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  'You were a uniform in Houston? A Texas Ranger got in some trouble later?' he said.

  'Good memory, Sammy,' I said.

  'You remember me?'

  'You bet. You killed a Houston cop.'

  'Hey,' he said playfully, raising a finger on each hand, as though he were warding off bees. 'I shot a guy coming through my bedroom window without no shield in his hand, in the middle of the night, in a neighborhood with cannibals mugging old people down at the church.'

  'What's with this guy?' Felix Ringo said.

  'Nothing. Billy Bob's all right. He's just trying to work some things out,' Jack said.

  'You take it easy, Jack,' I said.

  I walked back down the dock toward my car. The wind was warm on my back, the water sliding through pebbles and sand onto the grass. I heard Jack's leather sandals behind me.

  'That kid's going to come to your office. His name's Virgil Morales,' he said.

  'Why are you doing this?' I asked.

  'Because you keep laying off your problem on Darl. Don't make it hard. Take the favor.'

  'Does Sammy Mace come with it?'

  'He's got the biggest chain of computer outlets in south Texas. I lit up villages in Vietnam; you killed people in Mexico. Why don't you get your nose out of the air?'

  When I drove away I saw Felix Ringo screw a cigarette into a gold holder, then stop what he was doing and rise from his chair when Emma Vanzandt joined their table. The black cook took a bottle of chilled wine from an ice bucket, wrapped it in a towel, and poured into the goblets on the table. The diners cut into their steaks and ate with the poise of people on the cover of Southern Living.

  I wanted to take Jack Vanzandt off at the neck.

  After dinner I took out my mother's old family photo album and began leafing through the stiffened pages of forty years ago. At the top of the page my mother, always the librarian, had written the year each group of pictures was taken. On the pages marked 1956 were five black-and-white photos of my father at work or at a company picnic. One shot showed him out on the pipeline, smiling, his welder's hood pushed up on his head, a teenage boy in pinstripe overalls standing behind him with an electrical brush in his hands to clean the weld on the pipe joint. In another photo, my father sat at a picnic table filled with lean-faced blue-collar men and their wives. In the midst of the adults was the same teenage boy, burr-headed, jug-eared, his face an incongruous tin pie plate among those grinning at the camera.

  I went to Marvin Pomroy's office in the morning and got him to pull Garland T. Moon's jacket. The first of many mug shots was paper-clipped to the second page. I pulled it loose and dropped it and the two photos from my mother's album on Marvin's desk.

  'This mug shot was taken when Moon was seventeen. Look at the kid in the pictures of my father,' I said.

  Marvin propped his elbows on the blotter and peered down through his glasses at the photos, his fingers on his temples.

  'You called it. He knew your old man. But I don't know what difference it makes,' he said.

  'I think he's got some kind of obsession with my father.'

  'So what? Jack the Ripper was probably a surgeon or a Mason or the queen's grandson. The bottom line is he eviscerated hookers.'

  'You're really a breath of fresh air, Marvin. You ought to get a Roman collar and start counseling people,' I said.

  'This isn't Mexico. You stay away from Moon, Billy Bob.'

  'You want to spell that out?'

  'We don't have free-fire zones in Deaf Smith. You get into any of that Ranger-danger dogshit here, you're going to be in front of a grand jury yourself.'

  I picked up the photos of my father from his desk blotter and put them in my shirt pocket.

  'Sammy Mace is in town. Hanging with Jack Vanzandt and this Felix Ringo character. I'd give it my attention,' I said, and didn't bother to close the door when I left.

  That afternoon I was staring down from my office window into the street, wondering if I would ever extricate Lucas from the legal process that was about to eat him alive, when a Mexican kid on a Harley pulled to the curb and walked into the archway on the first floor. A minute later my secretary buzzed me and I opened the door of my inner office.

  'You're Virgil Morales?' I said.

  He was tall, his bare arms clean of jailhouse or biker art, his Indian-black hair curly on the back of his neck. His face could have been that of a male model's, except for one eye that had a lazy drift in it.

  'How'd you know?' he asked.

  'Oh, you hear things.' I grinned. 'Why'd you decide to come see me?'

  He looked at the glass-encased guns of my great-grandfather on the wall.

  'I want to do the right thing,' he replied.

  'Good for the conscience, I guess.'

  'They re-filed some old charges against me in San Antone. Mr Ringo says he can square it.'

  'What charges?'

  'Holding some reefer and a few whites. I'm on probation, see, and my PO can stick me back in county. I might get consecutive time, too.'

  'It all makes sense,' I said.

  'They get you in the system, they jam you up. It's like they only got so many names in the computer and these are the guys they keep jamming up.'

  'What have you got for me, Virgil?'

  He wore a sleeveless purple T-shirt and jeans and shined, half-topped leather boots. He sat down and rubbed his hands up and down his forearms.

  'The night Roseanne got killed? I stopped in that picnic ground,' he said. 'Lucas was passed out drunk in his truck. Roseanne wanted me to drive her home. I wish I had. But there ain't no way Lucas killed her.'

  'Anybody else see this?'

  'Yeah, some college girl from Austin. She was on my bike. That's why I couldn't give Roseanne a ride. Maybe you can find her.'

  I nodded while he talked. His eyes wandered around the office; occasionally he squeezed the inside of his thigh, high up by his scrotum. I had the feeling he could eat a hot cigarette and not miss a beat.

  'Why didn't you tell someone this earlier?' I asked.

  'I was in county.'

  'You got into Bunny Vogel's face the other night. You weren't in county then.'

  'I just got out. You don't want the information, I'll boogie. Where'd those old guns come from?'

  'Out at Shorty's you called Bunny a pimp. Why would you do that?'

  'I don't remember saying that.'

  'Other people do.'

  He shook his head profoundly. 'It don't come to mind. Maybe I was just hot. Bunny and me had some trouble over Roseanne once.'

  'He took her away from you?'

  Virgil shrugged. 'Yeah, that about says it. I still liked her, though. She was a good girl. Too good for all them rich kids.'

  I tried to read his face, his voice, the apparent genuine sentiment in his last statement.

  'How old are you, Virgil?'

  'Twenty-one.'

  'I think you got a lot of mileage.'

  'You gonna tell Mr Ringo I hepped out?'

  I pushed a yellow legal pad and a pencil across the desk to him.

  'Write this stuff down for me, will you?' I said.

  After he was gone, I walked to the window and watched him start his Harley. and roar off the square, his exhaust echoing between the buildings. When I turned around, L.Q. Navarro was sitting in the deerhide chair, throwing cards from his Ranger deck into the crown of his hat.

  'You believe him?' he asked.

  'He can bust Marvin's case.'

  'That boy's jailwise, bud.'

  'Right. So why would he trade off a chickenshit possession charge against perjury in a homicide trial?'

  'Picking up the soap in a county bag ain't no more fun than it is in Huntsville.'

  'L.Q., you could have out-debated Daniel Webster.'

  He cut his head and grinned, as he always did when he had decided to desist, and with two fingers flipped the joker into the hat.

  Through my library window the sun was red and molten over the hills, th
e willows on the edge of the tank puffing in the wind. Mary Beth and Pete had been making dinner sandwiches in the kitchen. I didn't hear her behind me.

  She saw L.Q.' s revolver, the belt wrapped around the holster, on top of my desk, next to Great-grandpa Sam's open journal. I had removed the old cartridges from the leather loops and inserted fresh ones from a box of Remingtons. Then I had taken apart the revolver and cleaned and oiled the springs and mechanisms in it and run a bore brush through the barrel until a silver luster had returned to the rifling.

  'I didn't think you kept any guns in your house,' she said.

  'It belonged to L.Q. Navarro,' I said.

  'I see.'

  'I had it in a safe deposit box. I was afraid it might rust.' I put it and the box of Remingtons and the bore brush and the can of oil inside the desk drawer and closed the drawer.

  She went to the window and looked at the sunset.

  'Is it for Moon?' she said.

  'Sometimes a guy keeps a blank space in his mind.'

  'Not a good answer.'

  She walked back into the kitchen.

  We went down to the tank and spread a checkered cloth on the grass and set out our sandwiches and deviled eggs on paper plates. Pete scooped night crawlers out of a coffee can and baited the hooks on three cane poles and swung the bobbers out on the flooded reeds. The sun dipped over the hills, and the dusk felt moist and heated from the water and dense with insects.

  'You need to back off,' she said.

  'From a guy like Moon?' I asked.

  'From all of it. You're straying too deep into federal territory.'

  She kept her gaze on the tank and never looked at me. She hooked her thumbs in the pockets of her riding pants.

  I put my hand on her back. I could feel the heat in her skin through her shirt.

  'These guys threatened Pete; they were going to take me down in pieces,' I said.

  'You think that's lost on me?'

  'We're seeing each other and I don't even know who you are,' I said.

  She didn't reply.

  'Mary Beth?' I said.

  'Maybe you don't know who you are yourself, Billy Bob,' she said. She turned and looked me full in the face. Her throat was bladed with color. 'I know what y'all did in Mexico. The man you idolize was a self-appointed executioner. Is that what you want to be?'

  'He was a brave man, Mary Beth. You shouldn't speak of him like that.'

  She opened the top of the wicker basket and took out the tin cups for lemonade and started to fill them. Then she stopped and brushed a long curl out of her eye.

  'I apologize for remarking on your friend. Say good night to Pete for me,' she said, and walked toward the house and her car.

  I went to the health club at six-thirty the next morning and lay on the tile stoop at the rear of the steam room and began the series of exercises the doctor had recommended for my back. The room was empty, billowing with vapor, the temperature set at 130 degrees.

  Then the door opened and closed and Sammy Mace and Felix Ringo entered and sat down naked on the stoop. They paid no attention to me. Felix Ringo was telling a story, pumping his hands as though he were rotating the inverted pedals on a bicycle.

  'You get it going real fast, man. The wires are already clipped on the guy, and the guy starts jerking around and jittering and his words are popping on his lips like sparks. The faster you pump it, the faster his mouth is working,' Ringo said, giggling. 'This was the same guy says he ain't never going to give nobody up, spitting on people, acting like he don't care when we walk him into the basement. They got it coming, man, you seen some of the stuff they done.'

  He continued his story, tilting forward on his arms, looking at Sammy Mace's profile for reaction. Sammy placed two fingers on Ringo's arm and looked in my direction. Then he wrapped his loins in a towel and moved down the stoop and sat next to me. His face was flushed, slick with sweat, heated by the room and the animus that drove his thoughts, like that of a man to whom lust, anger, and vindictiveness were interchangeable passions. His eyes took my inventory, dropped briefly to my genitalia, settled on- my mouth, then my eyes.

  'You a lawyer here now, huh?' he said.

  'You got it.'

  'I like it here. It's clean. That biker kid Felix found help you out?'

  'Too soon to tell, Sammy.'

  His eyes were so dark they were almost black, the eyebrows silver. His stare held on mine, trying to read what I wanted, what lie did my words conceal.

  'Jack Vanzandt was a pathfinder, a war hero. He ought to be governor of Texas. Why you trying to hurt his family?' Sammy said.

  'It's a nice day. I think I'm going to get back in it,' I said, and started to rise.

  'I'm talking to you,' he said, touching me in the sternum with the balls of his fingers. 'You brought up that cop-killer stuff in front of my friends. I let it go. But that don't mean I forgot.'

  'You still live in River Oaks?'

  'So what?'

  'It's probably the richest neighborhood in the United States. That cop had a wife and four kids. You providing for them, Sammy?'

  I walked past him, out the door and into the shower. I turned on the hot water in my face and let it fountain over my head and shoulders. But my encounter with Felix Ringo and Sammy Mace was not over. They were at the far end of the shower, lathering under the nozzles, soap roiling off their swimming-pool tans, men who knew that youth might fade but money and power did not.

  I didn't want to look at or engage them again, but an image registered in the corner of my eye, one that connected somehow with memory and dreams and the voice of L.Q. Navarro. On Felix Ringo's right side, low in the back, was a six-inch scar, as thick as a night crawler, welted, perforated with stitch holes along the edges.

  I walked into the dressing area and opened my locker. Felix Ringo followed me, drying his head with a wadded towel, his body hair glowing against a bank of lighted mirrors behind him. He rubbed a stick of deodorant under his arm.

  'I hear your PI is checking out the kid I sent you,' he said.

  'Maybe.'

  'That kid's a good witness. You a guy who sees plots all the time. Don't fuck it up.'

  'Who carved on your kidney?' I said.

  The glare in his eyes made me think of a phosphorous match burning inside brown glass.

  * * *

  chapter twenty-two

  Friday afternoon Temple Carrol asked me to walk across the square with her to the Mexican grocery store. The wind was warm, even in the shade of the trees on the courthouse lawn, and we sat in the back of the grocery, under the fans by the old soda fountain, and ordered tacos and iced tea. She read from the notebook opened by her elbow while she ate.

  'Virgil Morales is everything he says he is,' she said. 'Hangs with some biker pukes called the Purple Hearts, in and out of juvie since he was thirteen, a couple of times down in county for dope and barroom bullshit. He's also had three paternity suits filed against him. In other words, your average Mexican gangbanger who operates on two brain cells and believes his Hollywood career is right around the corner.'

  The overhead fan blew a strand of hair in her face.

  'How do you think he'd do on a lie detector?' I asked.

  'A kid who'd probably roll a joint during the Apocalypse? You tell me.'

  'How about the girl he says was with him?'

  'She lives in Austin, all right, but she's no college student. Not unless you count being a barmaid in a rathskeller next to the campus. Anyway, she's been in detox once, has butterflies tattooed on her shoulders, and gets off on bikers. You might think about hiring a speech coach for her.'

  'Why's that?'

  'Every third word in her vocabulary rhymes with duck.'

  'She gives the same account as Virgil?'

  'She says Lucas was passed out in his truck and Roseanne Hazlitt was throwing up in the bushes. She said they tried to wake him up and couldn't do it.'

  'Lucas was passed out when the first cruiser got to the murder scene
,' I said. 'Drunks don't wake up from stupors and kill other people and go to sleep again. You did a great job, Temple.'

  She didn't reply. She looked at the front screen door, her eyes as empty as glass.

  'What's wrong?' I said.

  'There's a smell to this. It found us too easy.'

  'They both tell the same story. Why would the girl commit perjury for Lucas?'

  She shook her head. 'You're personally involved with this one, Billy Bob. You're not seeing things like you should… How do I say it?'

  'Come on, Temple. Don't be that way.'

  'How about that Sweeney broad? You know she's an undercover operative of some kind. When the feds or whoever they are get finished with whatever they're doing around here, she'll take off and you and me and Pete and Lucas will still be chopping in the same cotton patch. Except one of us never knew who his real friends were.'

  'That's not true. You know the respect I have for you.'

  'The word the girl in Austin uses all the time? It's fuck. Yeah, that's it, fuck. As in fuck it.'

  I picked up the bill and paid it at the register in front. When I came back to the table, Temple had gone.

  I couldn't sleep that night. I went downstairs in my robe and turned on the desk lamp in the library and, with heat lightning veining the sky outside, read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal.

  August 26, 1891

  I convinced myself the Rose of Cimarron should not be blamed for the crimes committed by her kinfolks. She was reared among people that's hardly human and it is only through God's grace she has survived as unsoiled as she is. But that don't mean I have to abide the likes of Blackface Charley Bryant and them others who think holding unarmed people at gunpoint somehow adds several inches to what I suspect is their pitiful excuse for a pecker.

  This collection of homicidal pissants not only steals from each other, they pass their diseases back and forth through their squaws. Their defenders might say they was victims of the railroads or carpetbag government. But I was with boys of the Fourth Texas at Gettysburg who went up those hills into federal cannon with their uniforms in rags and without no shoes on their feet. In camp you could hang your gold watch on a tree branch overnight and come morning it'd be glinting in the sunlight when you opened your eyes.