Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  “You all right?” he asked, and cupped his hand on my bare shoulder. I could feel the heat and oil in his skin, as though he were rubbing a layer of fouled air into my pores.

  Don’t let it happen, I told myself.

  “Sorry we tossed your house,” he said.

  “Forget it.”

  “About Mary Beth . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “She’ll come for you a second time, but you have to stay on top. There’s something about the missionary position with her. She just can’t get over the crest when she’s sitting on you.”

  I caught him right below the bottom lip, saw his teeth bare and his mouth go out of shape with the blow; then I drove my fist into his eye socket, hooked him with my left in the nose and hit him again in the mouth. His knees buckled and his head bounced off a fence rail. I felt him try to grab my waist as he went down, his eyes wide with fear, like those of a man who realizes he has slipped forever off a precipice, and I knew the old enemy had once more had its way and something terrible was happening in me that I couldn’t stop.

  He was at my feet now, his face strung with blood, his tie twisted backward on his neck, his chest laboring for breath.

  Then among the thud of Beau’s hooves, I saw Felix Ringo running at me through the tunnel of light inside the barn, simultaneously pulling back the slide on his nine-millimeter, his hat blowing off his head.

  “You wasn’t born, gringo. You was picked out of your mother’s shit. This is for them people you killed down in Coahuila,” he said.

  My hands felt swollen and useless at my sides, my chest running with sweat in the wind, the spilled water bucket ballooning in the dust by my feet. I could hear the blades on the windmill clattering like a playing card clipped inside whirling bicycle spokes. Felix Ringo extended the nine-millimeter in front of him with both hands, crouched in a shooter’s position, as though he were on a practice range, and flipped off the butterfly safety with his thumb.

  Temple Carrol stooped under the top fence rail, ripped L.Q. Navarro’s revolver from the holster I had hung on a fence post, and screwed the barrel right behind Ringo’s ear. She cocked the hammer, locking the cylinder in place.

  “How your pud hanging, greaseball? You want to wear your brain pan on your shirt?” she asked.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  THERE WAS NO false dawn the next morning. The sky was a black lid above the velvet green crest of the hills, the clouds veined with lightning. I opened all the windows and let the smell of ozone and wind and distant rain fill the house. Mary Beth called while I was fixing breakfast.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “At the hotel downtown.”

  “When did you get in?”

  “Late. I went right to bed.”

  “I could have picked you up.”

  “You mean if I’d called?”

  “No, I meant—”

  “My schedule’s not too predictable these days.”

  “I just didn’t know when you were coming. That’s what I meant.”

  “I heard about you tearing up Brian. What started it?”

  “The conversation got out of hand.”

  “He won’t file charges. His career’s unraveling on him. He’s one step from Fargo, North Dakota, already.”

  I felt my palm squeeze involuntarily on the telephone receiver.

  “Can you take a cab out to the house? We can drive back into town together,” I said.

  “I have a bunch of incoming calls,” she said.

  “I see.”

  “Some people in my office weren’t comfortable with me coming back here.”

  “Yeah . . . I understand. I appreciate your doing it.”

  I felt foolish and stupid, a mendicant holding a telephone to his ear as though it were a black tumor.

  “When do I testify?” she asked.

  “Probably this afternoon. Mary Beth, is it the career? Or am I just the wrong man for you?”

  “I don’t know how to say it, Billy Bob.”

  The house seemed to fill with the sounds of wind and silence.

  “You always think of yourself as an extension of your past,” she said. “So every new day of your life you’re condemned to revisiting what you can’t change.”

  “I’ll be at the office directly if you have a chance to drop by,” I said.

  After I replaced the receiver I walked to the library window and looked at the darkness over the hills. The pages of my great-grandfather’s journal fluttered whitely in the rush of wind through the screen. The silence in my head was so great I thought I heard the tinkling of L.Q. Navarro’s roweled spurs.

  AN HOUR LATER Mary Beth walked from the hotel to my office. She wore a pink suit and white blouse with a purple brooch and looked absolutely beautiful. But if I had expected to mend my relationship with her at that moment, the prospect went out the window when Temple Carrol came through the door thirty seconds later.

  The three of us were standing in a circle, like people who had met inconveniently at a cocktail party.

  “Y’all know each other, of course,” I said.

  “Sure, the lady who pops in and out of uniform,” Temple said.

  “Excuse me?” Mary Beth said.

  “Billy Bob kicked the ass of a federal agent. Has he told you about it?” Temple asked.

  “No. Why don’t you?” Mary Beth said.

  “I don’t remember the details very well. I was more worried about the Mexican dirtbag, what’s his name, Felix Ringo, the greaseball who fronts points for y’all, he tried to use the situation to cap Billy Bob. A great guy to have on a federal pad,” Temple said.

  Mary Beth turned toward me. “I didn’t know that,” she said.

  I pulled up the blinds loudly on a sky that swirled with storm clouds. The wind gusted under the trees on the courthouse lawn and blew leaves high in the air. “Let’s talk about our agenda today,” I said.

  BUT AGENDA WAS the wrong word. The prosecution’s case was not a complex one. Lucas Smothers was found passed out thirty feet from the homicide victim. He was sexually involved with her. He feared she carried his child. His semen, no one else’s, was inside the victim’s vagina. The pathologist would testify the damage to the genitalia indicated the assailant was probably driven by sexual rage. Lucas himself had told the arresting officers he had no memory of his actions after he had taken off his trousers in the pickup truck. Finally, Lucas had lied and denied even knowing Roseanne Hazlitt’s last name.

  But my problem was not with any evidence or possible testimony I had learned about in discovery. Instead, I had the brooding sense the loaded gun, the one pointed at Lucas’s heart, was in my hand, not Marvin Pomroy’s. But I didn’t know what to do about it.

  THAT AFTERNOON MARVIN rested his case, and while the rain drummed on the trees outside the window, I called Hugo Roberts to the stand.

  His sheriff’s uniform was freshly pressed, his brass name tag full of light on his pocket, an American flag sewn on the sleeve, but an odor of cigarettes and hair tonic and antiperspirant radiated from him as though it were sealed in his skin. He looked at the jury and spectators and at Marvin Pomroy and at the rain clicking on the windowsills, at virtually everything around him except me, as though I were of little consequence in his day.

  “Your unit was the first one to arrive at the crime scene, sheriff?” I said.

  “Yeah, I patrolled that area for the last couple of years. While I was a deputy, I mean.”

  “Have you run a lot of kids out of there?”

  “Yeah, after dark, when they don’t have no business being there.”

  I picked up a vinyl bag from the exhibit table and removed five Lone Star beer cans and two dirt-impacted wine bottles from it.

  “Are these the cans and bottles you recovered at the crime scene,
sir?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that looks like them.”

  “They are or they aren’t?”

  “Yeah, that’s them.”

  I introduced the cans and bottles into evidence, then walked back toward the stand.

  “These were all you found?” I asked.

  “That’s what the report says. Five cans and two bottles.” He laughed to himself, as though he were tolerating the ritual of a fool.

  “Since those bottles were probably there for years, I won’t ask you about them. Whose fingerprints were on the beer cans?”

  “Lucas Smothers’s and the victim’s.”

  “Nobody else’s?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do teenage kids drink and smoke dope out there with some regularity?” I asked.

  “I guess some do.”

  “But you found no cans or bottles that would indicate anybody else had used that picnic ground recently besides Lucas Smothers and Roseanne Hazlitt?”

  “I cain’t find what ain’t there. Street people pick up gunny sacks of that stuff. Maybe I should have stuck some used rubbers in there.”

  Spectators and some of the jury laughed before the judge tapped her gravel. “Lose the attitude in a hurry, sheriff,” she said.

  “Sheriff, why do you think the prosecution didn’t introduce the evidence you put in that vinyl bag?” I said.

  “Objection, calls for speculation,” Marvin said.

  “Overruled. Answer the question, Sheriff Roberts,” the judge said.

  “How the hell should I know?” he replied.

  After a ten-minute recess, I called Mary Beth to the stand. The windows were raised halfway; rain dripped from the trees out on the lawn and a fine mist floated through the window screens. Mary Beth wore little makeup and sat erect in the witness chair, her hands folded.

  “You were the second deputy to arrive at the picnic ground?” I asked.

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “You saw Hugo Roberts pick up a number of bottles and cans from the area around Lucas Smothers’s truck?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How many cans and bottles would you say he recovered?”

  “Maybe a couple of dozen,” Mary Beth replied.

  “Objection, relevance, your honor. This beer can stuff is a red herring. A thousand fingerprints on other cans or bottles doesn’t put anybody else at the crime scene when the assault was committed,” Marvin said.

  “I was trying to point out that Hugo Roberts and others either lost or deliberately destroyed exculpatory evidence,” I said.

  “Approach,” the judge said. She leaned forward on her forearms, her hand covering the microphone. “What’s going on here, Mr. Pomroy?”

  “Nothing, your honor. That’s the point. Mr. Holland is trying to distract and confuse the jury.”

  “Destroyed evidence, whether or not of probative value, still indicates conspiracy, your honor,” I said.

  “What’s your explanation, Mr. Pomroy?” she said.

  “Incompetence has never precluded membership in the sheriff’s department,” he replied.

  “That’s not adequate, sir. You’re too good a prosecutor to let some redneck bozos jerk you around. You’d better get your act together. Don’t be mistaken, either. This isn’t over. I’ll see you later in chambers . . . Step back,” she said.

  Flowers for Stonewall Judy, I thought.

  Then Marvin began his cross-examination of Mary Beth.

  “Who’s your employer, Ms. Sweeney?” he asked.

  “The Drug Enforcement Administration.”

  “The DEA?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you employed by the DEA while you were working as a deputy sheriff in this county?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell anyone that?”

  “No.”

  “Did you like about your background when you went to work for the department?”

  “Technically, yes.”

  “Technically? In other words, you came here as a spy, a federal informer of some kind, and lied about what you were doing. But you’re not lying to us now? Is that correct?” Marvin said.

  “Your honor,” I said.

  “Mr. Pomroy,” she said.

  “I have nothing else for this witness,” he said.

  TEMPLE CARROL HANDED me a note over the spectator rail. It read, Garland Moon’s at your office and won’t leave. You want him picked up?

  Stonewall Judy granted a twenty-minute recess, and I put a raincoat over my head and walked across the street and up the stairs of my building. Moon sat in the outer office, wearing a gray, wide-necked weight lifter’s shirt, with palm trees and VENICE BEACH, CALIFORNIA ironed on the front, and tennis shoes and gray running pants with crimson stripes down the legs. His face knotted with self-satisfied humor when he saw me.

  “Got you away from your pup. I ’spect you study a lot more on me than you admit,” he said.

  “Go inside my office,” I said.

  He picked himself up lazily from the chair, arching a crick out of his neck, flexing his shoulders. When he went through the doorway into the inner office, he casually scratched a match on the wooden jamb and lit a cigarette with it.

  “Billy Bob, I hope someone kills that man,” Kate, my secretary, said.

  I went into the inner office and closed the door behind me. Moon stood at the window, one finger pulling the blinds into a V, staring down at the wet street, at the people who moved along on it, oblivious to the pair of blue eyes that followed them.

  “A rich person made me a deal. Kind of work a man like me can handle,” he said.

  “Get to it, Moon.”

  “Money ain’t no good to me. I want the place should have been mine. At least part of it.”

  “You want what?”

  “Ten acres, on the back of your property, along the river there. I’ll build my own house, one of them log jobs. With a truck patch and some poultry, I’ll make out fine.”

  “What do I get?”

  “I’ll fuck whoever you want with a wood rasp. I done things to folks you couldn’t even guess at.”

  “I think your benefactor will use you for a golf tee, Moon.”

  I saw the heat climb from his throat into his face.

  “There’s a kid hereabouts thinks he’s a swinging dick ’cause he can throw a football—” Then Moon caught himself, his mouth drawn back on his teeth.

  “You molested a little Negro girl when you were sixteen. That’s why my father fired you off the line,” I said.

  He walked to my desk and mashed out his cigarette. His arms were still damp from the rain and his muscles knotted and glistened like white rubber.

  “The little girl lied. It was her uncle done it,” he said.

  “You were at Matagorda Bay when my father was killed in 1965.”

  His eyes lighted and crinkled at the corners.

  “You’re hooked, ain’t you?” he said.

  “Nope, it’s just time for you to find another wallow. Deal with that wet rat that’s eating out your insides.”

  He sucked his teeth, then scraped a thumbnail inside one nostril, his expression hidden. “You got a mean streak, boy, but I know how to put the stone bruise down in the bone,” he said.

  He strolled through the outer office into the hallway, dragging one finger across the secretary’s desk.

  I opened the windows, heedless of the rain that blew in on the rug, then told the secretary to call the police if Moon came back again.

  When I walked down the stairs into the foyer, he was waiting for me. The rain danced on the street and sidewalk and gusted inside the archway.

  “Your mama probably told you your daddy died a brave man,” he said. “He was rolling around in the dirt, squealing like a c
harbroiled hog, praying and begging folks to take him to a hospital, his pecker hanging out his pants like a white worm. I went behind the toolshed and laughed till I couldn’t hardly breathe.”

  I took a yellowed free newspaper from a mailbox that had no cover. I unfolded it and popped the wrinkles out. I walked to within six inches of Moon’s face, saw the skin under his recessed eye twitch involuntarily.

  “Here, Garland, put this over your head so you don’t get wet. That’s a real frog-stringer out there,” I said, and crossed the street through the afternoon traffic.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY

  VIRGIL MORALES, THE San Antonio Purple Heart, was my next witness. He wore knife-creased white slacks, tasseled loafers, a purple suede belt, and a short-sleeve shirt scrolled with green and purple flowers. His freshly combed hair looked like wet duck feathers on the back of his neck. His walk was loose and relaxed, his eye contact with the jury deferential and respectful; in fact, he had transformed from bad-ass biker into the image of an innocuous, slightly vain, blue-collar kid who simply wanted to cooperate with the legal system. I couldn’t have wished for a better witness.

  “You’re sure the defendant was unconscious while Roseanne Hazlitt was alive?” I said.

  “The guy was a bag of concrete. You could look in his eyes and nobody was home. I was worried about him,” Virgil replied.

  “Worried?”

  “I thought he might be dead.”

  Then the judge asked Marvin if he wished to cross-examine, and I knew I had a problem.

  “No questions at this time, your honor. But I’d like to reserve the right to recall the witness later,” he said.

  It was 4:25 when Jamie Lake took the stand, which meant she would be the last witness of the day, and it was her testimony that would be the most clear and influential in the jury’s memory overnight. I couldn’t believe her appearance. She had showed up in sandals, hoop earrings, faded jeans that barely clung to her hips, and a tie-dye beach shirt that exposed the dragons tattooed on her shoulders. She had peroxided her hair in streaks and pinned it up on her head like a World War II factory worker. She popped her gum on the way to the stand, her hips undulating, and let her eyes rove across the jury box as though she were looking at chickens perched in a henhouse.