I didn't have an answer for him.
On the way out, I heard the man with the misshaped head and white pot stomach laughing in a high, whinnying voice, mimicking the conversation he'd heard in Lucas's cell: 'They gonna 'lectrocute me? They gonna 'lectrocute me?… Hey, you punk, the black boys gonna take you into the bridal suite and teach you how to pull a train.'
He held his chin and loins close against the bars and made a wet, chugging sound like a locomotive.
I went home and fixed lunch in the kitchen. The silence of the house seemed to ring and pop in my ears. I opened all the downstairs windows and pulled back the curtains and felt the wind flow through the hallway and puff open the back screen. The morning paper lay folded on an oak table in front of the hallway mirror. A full-length photo of Lucas in handcuffs stared up at me. He didn't have my eyes, I thought. They were obviously his mother's. But the hair, the cut of the jaw, the six-foot-one frame… None of those belonged to Vernon Smothers.
I went back into the kitchen and tried to finish the fried pork chop sandwich I'd fixed.
His mother and I had gone to high school together. Both her parents had been road musicians who worked oil field honkytonks from Texas City to Casper, Wyoming. When she was sixteen she met and married Vernon Smothers, who was ten years older than she. When she was nineteen she found me in Houston and asked for money so she could leave him.
I offered her half of my ancient rented house in the Heights.
Two weeks later a fellow Houston police officer called Vernon and told him I was living with his wife. He came for her at night when I was not home, in the middle of a hurricane that tore the pecan tree out of my front yard. I never saw her again.
A month after Lucas was born she was electrocuted trying to fix the well pump that Vernon had repaired with adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet.
I wrapped my unfinished sandwich in wax paper and put it in the icebox. When I turned around, L.Q. Navarro was leaning against the back doorjamb, his arms folded across his chest. His Stetson was the color of ash, his eyes as lustrous as obsidian.
' How's it hangin, L.Q.?' I said.
'This weather's a pistol. It don't get any better.'
'You're not going to try to mess me up today, are you?'
'I wouldn't dream of it, Billy Bob.'
He slipped the scarlet rose from the top buttonhole of his shirt and rolled it by the stem between his fingers. Where the rose had been was a hole that glowed with a bloodred light, like a votive candle burning inside red glass.
' It was an accident,' I said.
' That's what I keep telling you. Get rid of this for me, will you ?' He drew the rose across my palm. My fingers constricted as though the tendons had been severed by a barber's razor.
Ten minutes later I heard an automobile in front. I opened the door and looked down the flagstone walk that dissected the wall of poplars at the foot of the lawn, and saw the sheriff's deputy named Mary Beth Sweeney getting out of her cruiser. She fixed her campaign hat so that the leather cord drew tight against the back of her head, pushed her shirt down inside her gunbelt with her fingers, and walked toward me. She had a walk that my father would have referred to as a 'fine carriage', her shoulders erect, her chin lifted, her long legs slightly accentuating the movement of her hips.
'How you doin'?' I said.
'You going to use a PI in discovery?'
'Probably… You want to come inside?'
'Out here is good. At the river, night before last? The scene investigator picked up a vinyl bag-load of beer cans. They're not in the evidence locker.'
'Why are you telling me this?'
'That kid's going down on a bad bounce. I'm not buying into it.'
'You can lose your job for this.'
'Look, you know all these things. The victim's teeth were broken. Your man didn't have any cuts on his hands. There was no weapon. When we cuffed him, he was too drunk to stand up.'
'Criminal Investigation Division, huh?' I said.
'What about it?'
'Doing grunt work in a place like this… You must like the mild summers. In July we fry eggs on the sidewalks.'
'Use what I've told you, Mr Holland, or wear it in your hat,' she said.
She walked back to her cruiser, her attention already focused on a cardinal perched atop a rose trellis, her hat tipped forward on her curly head like a Marine Corps DI's.
chapter three
Before she became a private investigator, Temple Carrol had been a corrections officer at Angola penitentiary over in Louisiana, a patrolwoman with the Dallas police department, and a deputy sheriff in Fort Bend County. She lived with her invalid father only a mile down the road from me, and every morning, just at sunrise, she would jog past my house in her T-shirt and sweatpants, her chestnut hair piled on her head, the baby fat winking on her hips. She never broke her pace, never did less than five miles, and never stopped at intersections. Temple Carrol believed in straight lines.
Tuesday morning she tapped on the glass to my office door and then came inside without waiting. She wore a pair of sandals and blue jeans and a brown-cotton shirt stitched with flowers. She sat on the corner of my desk and pointed her finger at me.
'What did that deputy tell you?' she asked.
'They bagged a whole load of beer cans and whiskey bottles at the crime scene,' I answered.
'Try five cans and a couple of wine bottles. The cans all have Lucas's or the dead girl's prints on them. The bottles are probably twenty years old.'
'What have you got on the girl?'
'Raised by an aunt… Long welfare history… In high school she was known as a real piece of work… Went to a community college for a while and dropped out… Worked at a church store, got fired from Wal-Mart for stealing… Get this, though. Three people at Shorty's say she came there by herself, not with a bunch of college kids. Not good news for Lucas.'
'Maybe she met them there.'
'Maybe… There's another problem, too, Billy Bob. You'd better get that boy out of jail.'
'What's going on?'
'Harley Sweet.'
She widened her eyes and held them on my face.
I rode up to the third floor of the courthouse with a turnkey. The heat had risen in the building and the stone walls were speckled with condensation.
'I'd like to talk to Lucas in an interview room,' I said.
'Sorry, Billy Bob. Harley says he stays in lockdown… By the way, don't worry about that 'un on the left. He's got a lot more Christian perspective today.'
The man in the cell to the left was dressed only in a pair of paper-thin Jockey undershorts. His sparse hair was the color of Mercurochrome, pasted in oily strains across his head. His skin had the unblemished smoothness of latex stretched over stone, and his left eye was smaller than the other, like a dime-size blue marble pushed deep into clay.
'What's your name, buddy?' I said to him, while the turnkey opened Lucas's cell.
'Garland T. Moon,' he answered, his eyes brightening with challenge.
'They treating you all right?'
He got up from the bunk, his stomach cording with muscle, and stood close to the bars. His breath was
