“None,” he said.
“Maybe she wasn’t using the jail as an alibi after all.”
“I’m still convinced her people were the ones who creeped Bruxal’s house,” he said.
“You hear anything from the Feds?” I asked.
“A couple of calls from this Mossbacher woman. She seems on the square, but she doesn’t know any more than we do.”
“You got anybody tailing Trish Klein?”
“With our budget for overtime? We don’t have the manpower to patrol our own parking lot,” he replied. “You about to wrap it up here?”
“Just about,” I said.
I can’t tell you exactly why I wanted to go inside the fraternity house with the kid named Sonny Williamson. Maybe, like most people, I wanted to believe in the Orwellian admonition that human beings are always better than we think they are. Ask a street cop how often he has glanced in his rearview mirror at a handcuffed suspect whose clothes are stippled with his victim’s blood, hoping to catch a glimmer of humanity that will dispel his growing sense that not all of us descend from the same tree.
“You have an interesting name,” I said in the kitchen.
“Why’s that?”
“Sonny Boy Williamson was a famous bluesman from Jackson, Tennessee, same town that produced Carl Perkins,” I said.
He seemed to think about the implications of my statement. “Never heard of either one of them. What do you want to see?” he said.
“The bedrooms.”
“They’re all upstairs.”
“Good,” I said.
It was obvious he didn’t like embarking on a mission whose purpose was hidden from him. He stopped on the second landing and gestured vaguely down the hallway. “About a half-dozen guys sleep here, but they’re gone for the summer,” he said.
I looked down from the banister at the living room area below and the thread-worn carpet and scarred furniture. “Your parties usually take place down there?” I said.
“Right, when we have parties.”
“Remember a party about the time of spring break?”
“Not particularly.”
“Think hard.”
“I don’t remember,” he said, shaking his head.
“Don’t you guys sometimes call that ‘booze and cooze night’?”
“No, man, we don’t.”
I rested one hand on his shoulder, as a blind man might if he wanted someone to cross a dangerous street with him. “Show me the bedrooms, Sonny. I’ve got a lot of faith in you. I can tell you’re a guy who wants to do the right thing.”
The afternoon heat was trapped against the ceiling, the air motionless, gray with motes of dust. A drop of sweat ran in a clear line down the side of Sonny’s face. “See for yourself. It’s just empty rooms,” he said, flexing his back.
“But you know the one I’m interested in. She was stoned when she got here, then she loaded up again and probably couldn’t walk too well. So one guy probably offered to help her, you know, show her to the bathroom or give her a place to lie down. It would have been just one guy, right? She wouldn’t have gone upstairs with two or three. That would have caused all kinds of alarm bells to go off in her head, and besides, it would look bad. Who was the guy, Sonny? I don’t think it was Tony Lujan and I know she didn’t like or trust Slim Bruxal. Who’s the guy who walked Yvonne Darbonne upstairs?”
He had stepped back from me, causing my hand to drop from his shoulder. His neck was slick with sweat, his breathing audible in the silence. “I wasn’t there,” he said.
“How can you say you weren’t there if you don’t even remember the party? You mean you don’t attend fraternity parties?”
He stared at me dumbly, unable to reason through the question. I pushed open a bedroom door that was already ajar. The closet was empty, the drawers pulled loose from the dresser, the bed little more than a stained mattress askew on a set of springs.
“Is this y’all’s fuck pad?” I said.
“You’re all wrong on this.”
“Right. Were you one of them, Sonny?”
“One of who?”
“She’d already been raped earlier in the day. She was drunk and stoned and unable to protect herself. Did your buds say she was a good lay? Did you have a go at her yourself?”
“I ain’t saying anything else.”
“You don’t have to, Sonny. People stack time in different ways. I think you’ve got a life sentence tattooed right across your forehead.”
I left him in the hallway and walked down the stairs and out into the yard, into wind and the shadows of trees moving on the grass and flowers blooming in a garden across the street and automobiles passing in columns of sunlight that shone through the canopy of oaks overhead. I walked into the ebb and flow of a world separate from the systematic ruin of a young woman’s life.
As I was getting into the cruiser, Sonny Williamson came out on the gallery, his arms pumped. “What do you mean, life sentence?” he shouted. “What’s your problem, man?”
NO BASEBALL BATS were found in the search at the Bruxal or Lujan homes, and the search team had already left the Bruxal property when Top and I arrived. But it was obvious a calamity of some sort had struck the Bruxal family. An upstairs window was broken; an earthen pot lay shattered on a terrace, the root system of the plant cooking in the sun. All the doors were wide open, the air-conditioning gushing out into the heat. The waxed black Humvee had been backed into a stucco pillar by the carriage house and left there, glass and electrical connections leaking from the crushed taillight socket.
Top parked the cruiser in the drive and he and I rang the bell on the porch and heard it chime deep in the house. But no one came to the door, which yawed open on a living room littered with huge amounts of paper that looked torn from binders. We went around to the back of the house and saw Slim Bruxal under a shed attached to the side of a barn, grooming the red Morgan I had seen running in the pasture on my previous visit.
Slim did not look well. One eye was swollen and bloodshot. A fresh abrasion flamed high on his other cheek. His T-shirt was sweaty and dirt-streaked and stretched out of shape at the neck.
“Who messed up your face?” I said.
“My father did. After he went nuts and chased my mother out of the house.”
“When?”
“Ten minutes ago,” he said. “His goddamn money got transferred out of the Islands into a bunch of domestic accounts. He blamed it on her and me. He says somebody got ahold of all his bank account numbers.”
“Really?” I said, my expression blank.
“Yeah, really.”
Slim’s face reminded me of a hurt child’s, and I had a feeling the injury his father had visited upon him would not go away for a very long time. I asked Top to go to the cruiser and radio Helen we’d be late getting back to the department.
I stepped under the shed and rested my arm across the mare’s croup. I felt her skin wrinkle, heard her tail swish and one hoof thump into the compacted dirt under her.
“I think you’re an intelligent man, Slim, and I won’t try to jerk you around. But one way or another, your kite is about to crash and burn. So is your old man’s. We won’t get you and your father on everything y’all have done, but we’ll get you on part of it and that’ll be enough.
“You killed the homeless man with a baseball bat. It wasn’t planned, but that’s what happened. You and Tony
