'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?'
