'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 lie 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 charbroiled 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.
This time Marvin didn't pass on cross-examination.
'Did you think the defendant was dead?' he asked.
'No,' she answered.
'Why not?'
'Because he was breathing. Dead people don't breathe.'
'Thank you for telling us that. Did anybody pay you to come here today?' he asked.
'No,' she replied.
'Did anybody pay your friend Virgil Morales to come here today?'
She chewed her gum and turned her right hand in the air, looking at the rings on her fingers.
'Did you understand the question?' Marvin said.
'Yeah, I'm thinking. How come you question me and not him? Like, I'm dumb and he's smart, or I'm smart and Virgil's a beaner can't understand big words?' she replied.
'Have you been using any narcotics today, Ms Lake?'
'Yeah, I just scored some crystal from the bailiff. Where
'd they get you?'
Then Marvin introduced into evidence the subpoenaed bank records of both Jamie Lake's and Virgil Morales's checking accounts.
'You and Virgil both made deposits of five thousand dollars on the same day three weeks ago, Ms Lake. How'd y'all come by this good fortune?' Marvin said.
'I didn't make a deposit. It just showed up on my statement,' she said.
'It has nothing to do with your testimony today? Just coincidence?'
'I was UA-ed and I took a polygraph.'
'What you took is money.'
'What's-his-face over there, Lucas, looked like a corpse that fell out of an icebox. You don't like what I tell you, go play with your suspenders. Excuse me, I take that back. Go fuck yourself, you little twit.'
Set up and sandbagged, and I had walked right into it.
An hour later I drove Mary Beth to our small airport. The windows of my car were beaded with water, and lightning forked without sound into the hills.
'Don't feel bad,' she said.
'It was a slick ruse. Those two kids were telling the truth, but somebody gave them money and turned them into witnesses for the prosecution.'
'Felix Ringo and Jack Vanzandt sent them to you?'
'Let's talk about something else.'
'Sorry.'
There was nothing for it. Everything I said to her was wrong. We stood under a dripping shed and watched a two-engine plane taxi toward us, its propellers blowing water off the airstrip. I felt a sense of ending that I couldn't give words to.
'I didn't do you much good, did I?' she said.
'Sure you did.'
'I have to think over some things. I'll be better about calling this time,' she said.
Then a strange thing happened, as though I were an adolescent boy caught up in his sexual fantasies. I hugged her lightly around the shoulders, my cheek barely touching hers, but in my mind's eye I saw her undressed, smelled the heat in her skin, the perfume that rose from her breasts, felt her bare stomach press against my loins. It wasn't lust. It was an unrequited desire, like a flame sealed inside my skin, one that would not be relieved and that told me I was completely alone. For just a moment I understood why people drank and did violent things.
'So long,' she said.
'Good-bye, Mary Beth.'
'Watch your butt.'
'You bet.'
I watched her plane take off in the rain, its wings lifting steadily toward a patch of blue in the west. I got in my car and drove back to town. The hills were sodden and green under clouds that churned like curds from burning oil tanks.
L.Q. Navarro was waiting for me when I got home. He leaned his hands on the windowsill in the library and looked out at a cold band of light on the western horizon.
'It's been a mighty wet spring,' he said.
'I might have blown the trial today, L.Q.'
'You know what you got on your side? It's that boy's character. He's got sand. You know why?'
'Tell me.'
'He's your son.'
'You always looked after me, L.Q.'
'Know how I'd run it? Put that boy on the stand and let the jury see what he's made of.'
I still had my hat on. I sat in the stuffed leather chair in the corner and pulled my hat brim down over my eyes. I could hear L.Q.' s spurs tinkling on the rug.
'That DEA woman got you down?' he asked.
'Remember the time we went to that beer garden in Monterrey? The mariachi bands were playing, and you flamenco danced with that lady who played the castanets. It was cool every night and we could see fires out in the hills when the sun went down. Life was real good to us then, wasn't it?' I said.
'What's her name, Mary Beth, I still think she's a right good gal. Sometimes you got to let a mare have her head.'
'Hope you won't take offense, L.Q., but how about shutting up?' I said.
'Read your great-grandpa's journal. All good things come to the righteous and the just.'
I fell asleep amid the sounds of distant thunder. When I woke up a half hour later, L.Q. was gone and Bunny Vogel was banging on my door.
He sat at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee in his hand, his bronze hair splayed damply on his neck.
'Start over again,' I said.
'The old man was in the sack with this woman works at the mill. He said he'd latched the screen. He figures Moon slipped a match cover in it and popped the hook up. It was the gal, Geraldine's her name, who saw him first. She goes, "Herbert, there's a man in the doorway. He's watching us," and she rolls the old man off her and tries to pull the sheet over herself.
'Moon was leaning against the doorway, smoking a cigarette, tipping his ashes in his hand. The old man says, "You get the fuck out of here."
'Moon says, "I wouldn't let that in my bed unless I painted it with turpentine and run castor oil through it first."
'The old man says, "I got a gun in my drawer." Moon laughs and goes, "A fat old fart like you would have to Vaseline his finger to get it through the trigger guard."
'Then he picks up Geraldine's dress and tosses it at her and says, "Go 'head on, woman. I ain't interested in what you got."
'The old man tried to get up, and Moon pushed him back down with three fingers; A big fat naked guy, wheezing on cigarettes, trying to get off the mattress while another guy kept shoving him down.'
'What did Moon tell him?'
'He says, "Sorry I missed Bunny. I hear he ripped some Longhorn ass up at A amp;M. I like that."'
'Nothing else?'
Bunny stared at the door of the icebox, widening his eyes, flexing his jawbone, as though he were watching a moving picture on the unblemished whiteness of the door. Then his throat made a muted sound and he started over and said, 'He put my old man's nose between his fingers and squeezed and twisted it. He kept smiling down at him while he done it.'
The whites of Bunny's eyes had turned pink and glistened with an unnatural shine, like the surface of a peeled hard-boiled egg that's been tainted with dye. He stared down into his coffee cup.
'There's something else, isn't there?' I said.
He shook his head.
'What is it, Bunny?
'The old man had me drop him at the bus depot. He said he was gonna visit my grandma in Corpus. He said I ought to do the same.'
'Don't be too hard on him,' I said.
Then Bunny began to weep.
'What are you hiding, kid? What makes you so ashamed?' I asked.
But he didn't reply.
I couldn't sleep. I went to the cafe by the church to eat a late dinner, but it was closed. So I drove to the drive-in restaurant north of town, that neon-lighted square of neutral territory that was dominated by East Enders during the week because of the amount of money they had to spend and their freedom from jobs and responsibility. Or maybe it was the only place where they could take their secret need and see it in the faces of others and for a short time not be bothered by its presence in themselves.
I sat in a red vinyl booth by the window and looked through the rain at the line of parked cars under the canvas awning that had been pulled out on guy wires. The windows of the cars were steamed from the inside, some of the engines running, the tailpipes wisping tongues of smoke in the rain. Occasionally, a cigarette would drop sparking from a wind vane, or a shoulder, a clutch of hair, would press against the glass. But no one, at least not I, knew what went on inside each of those hand-buffed, lacquered, chopped and channeled cars whose surfaces seemed to ignite like colored flame when touched by neon.
It was a week night, so the kids inside those cars were not the kind to worry about school. Did they neck with the innocent, dry lust of a previous generation? Or drink beer with a sense of discovery and wonder, as though the spring season and their own physical yearning and the brassy cold glow in the backs of their throats held a portent for them that was like an endless song? Was the greenness of their lives like a bursting flower scattering pollen from their open palms?
Or were they already bitten
with ennui and hatred of one another, joyless in their couplings, insatiable in their disdain for difference without knowing why? Darl Vanzandt's '32 Ford was backed into the middle of the row under the canvas awning. Its cherry-red finish gleamed with the wet, hard luster of a tunnel wound. The passenger's window was rolled down, and Darl's bare arm was curled on the sill, the bicep pumped like a small, white grapefruit. A girl sat on his lap, combing his hair, shaping and reshaping it as though she were creating a sculpture. He turned his face toward the restaurant window and his expression was as morally empty, his eyes as sightless, as a perforated sack of skin stuffed with chemical jelly.
The waitress brought me a steak, with two fried eggs on top of it, and an order of refried beans and tortillas. I broke the egg yokes on the steak, sliced the meat in strips and rolled the strips with beans inside a tortilla. When I looked up, the girl from Darl's car was running through the rain for the restaurant. She came through the door, shaking water out of her hair, and dropped a quarter into the payphone by my booth, glancing back through the window, her slippered foot tapping on the floor.
'Mr Vanzandt?… Yeah, it's Holly. Look, Darl's not exactly in good driving shape,' she said. 'Yeah, well, I'd drive him home and all that, but he just told me to take my diaphragm and get the fuck out of his life, so I think I'm just gonna say nighty-nighty and let somebody else clean up his shit. Bye, now.'
After she hung up she looked at the phone and said, 'Fuckhead,' and went out the door.
While I was paying my check at the cash register, I saw Jack Vanzandt's Cadillac drive into the parking area with a black man behind the wheel and Jack get out in a pair of jeans and tennis shoes and a polo shirt and walk to his son's car. Darl still sat in the passenger's seat, but now with his head on his chest. Jack tipped Darl's head back and tried to wake him, but Darl's face was bloodless, his eyes closed, his skin glowing with the tallowy shine of melted wax.
By the time I started my Avalon, Jack had gotten behind the wheel of Darl's car and had driven the two of them to the highway's entrance. Jack was waiting for a line of traffic to pass so he could turn left, while I was about to turn right and go back to the West End. Then I had one of those moments that nullify all easy definitions about human behavior and the nature of love.
Cimarron Rose bbh-1 Page 24
