could hear Darl's shirt puffing and flapping in the wind.
'You and Marvin Pomroy got to work some kind of deal,' he said. 'The judge said I fart in the street, I'm going to the Walls. I'm still a kid.'
I put down Beau's left hoof and stooped under his neck and picked up his other front hoof. The wind blew my hat across the lot into the barn.
'My old man,' Darl said.
'What?'
'That's who you're really after. You want him, I can give him to you.'
I stood erect and stared at him. No shame, no expression except one of expectancy showed in his face. I folded my pocketknife blade in my palm and walked toward him and placed my hand on the smoothness of the fence rail next to his. His skin was sunburned inside the peach fuzz on his cheeks; there was a small clot of mucus in the corner of his mouth.
'I don't want anything you can give,' I said.
'Wha-'
'I'm going to take it from you on the stand,' I said.
I turned away from him and stroked Beau's face and took a sugar cube from my shirt pocket and let him gum it out of the flat of my hand. A moment later I heard Darl's car engine roar, then the dual exhausts echo off the side of the house and fade away in the wind. chapter twenty-eight
The evening before opening statements I drove to Lucas Smothers's house and took a new brown suit, white shirt, and tie off the clothes hook in the back of the Avalon and knocked on the door. Lucas appeared at the screen with a wooden spoon in one hand and a shot glass in the other.
'You got your hair cut,' I said.
'Yeah, just like you told me.'
'What are you doing with a whiskey glass?'
'Oh, that,' he said, and smiled. 'I'm baking a cake for my father's birthday. I use it for measuring. Come on in.'
I followed him into the kitchen, the plastic suit bag rattling over my shoulder.
'What's that?' he asked.
'It's your new suit. Wear it tomorrow.'
'I got a suit.'
'Yeah, you've got this one. Tomorrow, you sit erect in the chair. You don't chew gum, you don't grin at anything the prosecutor or a witness says. If you want to tell me something, you write it on a pad, you never whisper. You do nothing that makes the jury think you're a wiseass. There's nothing a jury hates worse than a wiseass. Are we connecting here?'
'Why don't you carve it on my chest?'
'You know how many defendants flush themselves down the commode because they think the court is an amusement park?'
'You're more strung out about this than I am.'
Because I know what you'll face if we lose, I thought. But I didn't say it.
He stood tall and barefoot at the drainboard, measuring vanilla extract into the shot glass. Outside the screen window, the windmill was silhouetted against a bank of yellow and purple clouds.
I watched him pour the vanilla extract into the cake bowl, his long fingers pinched lightly on the sides of the shot glass.
'Why you looking at me like that?' he asked.
'The first time I interviewed you at the jail, you told me you and Roseanne were 'knocking back shots',' I said.
'Yeah, Beam, with a draft beer on the side.'
'But you were working with the band that night. You had on that blue-check shirt with the gold trumpets sewn on the shoulders, the shirt you bought to play in the band.'
'Yeah, like that Jamie Lake gal said.'
'Why'd you start doing boilermakers while you were working?'
'We were on the break. I just had two. My stomach must have been empty or something. I remember Roseanne was mad 'cause of something Bunny said. She wanted to get a six-pack and go down the road and drink it. I wouldn't have done it, but I was jackhammered by then.'
'Did she drink as much as you did?'
'Yeah, I guess.'
'But you passed out and she didn't.'
'I just ain't following you, Mr Holland.'
'Where was Darl Vanzandt when you decided to smash down a couple of boilermakers?'
'He was at the bar. Darl never gets far from the juice man when he's inside Shorty's… What's wrong?'
'I never saw it. I kept thinking about the autopsy report on Roseanne. I was thinking about the wrong person.'
'What per-'
'A hooker from San Antone told me Darl probably doped Roseanne with roofies. But he didn't. He doped you.'
Lucas set the shot glass down on the drainboard and looked at it numbly.
'They laced me with downers twice? I reckon that makes me pretty dumb, don't it?' he said.
'I'll pick you up in the morning,' I said.
'Mr Holland, Darl didn't have no reason to kill Roseanne.'
'He doesn't need one. He enjoys it.'
My motion to dismiss was denied by Judge Judy Bonham, known as Stonewall Judy for her malleability and sense of humor. She was perhaps forty years old, had a complexion that seemed never to have been exposed to sunshine, and black hair that looked waved permanently in place. Four times a week she lifted freeweights at the health club in a pair of sweatpants and a heavy, long-sleeve jersey. When she did stomach stretches on the bench, her hips and buttocks flattened and seized against her sweats like metal plate.
The court had never been air-conditioned and depended for cooling on a cross breeze through the open windows and the oscillating electric fans affixed high up on the walls. The courthouse lawn was still in early- morning shadow, the sprinklers slapping against the tree trunks, when Marvin Pomroy began his opening statement.
It was eloquent, filled with a subdued outrage at the brutality of the crime, the degradation visited upon the victim before she died, her betrayal by a young man 'whom she had trusted, whom she had probably loved, perhaps hoped to marry, until in a drunken rage he ripped the young life out of her body.'
As always, Marvin called upon his greatest talent, namely, his ability to convey to a jury that, regardless of what the evidence did or did not indicate, he himself was absolutely convinced of the defendant's guilt. Over half the jury was black and Hispanic. It didn't matter. Marvin became the hard-shell southern Baptist who did not apologize for what he was and instead made you feel you shared the same sense of decency and tragic loss as he. The rectitude in his eye, the bloom on his cheeks, the knot in his words when he mentioned the blows that had rained down on the victim's face, were such that the listener heard the voice of principle, the preacher in his own church, the moral instruction of his mother and father.
On his left hand, Marvin wore a silver ring with a gold cross embossed on it. During his opening statement, that hand would clench the rim of the jury box several times.
In fact, his opening statement was too convincing. The doubts I had seen in him during our last meeting were gone. Which meant something had happened since that day I had told him I had found two witnesses who would testify Lucas was passed out in his truck when Roseanne was still alive.
I walked toward the jury box.
'The prosecutor has told you about the level of injury and the humiliating death visited upon the victim, Roseanne Hazlitt,' I said. 'He will come back to those images again and again. The implication is that someone must be punished for what was done to this young woman. And that's the problem: the prosecutor is telling you someone must be punished, even if it's the wrong person.
