'Yeah, that looks like them.'
'They are or they aren't?'
'Yeah, that's them.'
I introduced the cans and bottles into evidence, then walked back toward the stand.
'These were all you found?' I asked.
'That's what the report says. Five cans and two bottles.' He laughed to himself, as though he were tolerating the ritual of a fool.
'Since those bottles were probably there for years, I won't ask you about them. Whose fingerprints were on the beer cans?'
'Lucas Smothers's and the victim's.'
'Nobody else's?'
'No, sir.'
'Do teenage kids drink and smoke dope out there with some regularity?' I asked.
'I guess some do.'
'But you found no cans or bottles that would indicate anybody else had used that picnic ground recently besides Lucas Smothers and Roseanne Hazlitt?'
'I cain't find what ain't there. Street people pick up gunny sacks of that stuff. Maybe I should have stuck some used rubbers in there.'
Spectators and some of the jury laughed before the judge tapped her gavel. 'Lose the attitude in a hurry, sheriff,' she said.
'Sheriff, why do you think the prosecution didn't introduce the evidence you put in that vinyl bag?' I said.
'Objection, calls for speculation,' Marvin said.
'Overruled. Answer the question, Sheriff Roberts,' the judge said.
'How the hell should I know?' he replied.
After a ten-minute recess, I called Mary Beth to the stand. The windows were raised halfway; rain dripped from the trees out on the lawn and a fine mist floated through the window screens. Mary Beth wore little makeup and sat erect in the witness chair, her hands folded.
'You were the second deputy to arrive at the picnic ground?' I asked.
'Yes, that's correct.'
'You saw Hugo Roberts pick up a number of bottles and cans from the area around Lucas Smothers's truck?'
'Yes, sir.'
'How many cans and bottles would you say he recovered?'
'Maybe a couple of dozen,' Mary Beth replied.
'Objection, relevance, your honor. This beer can stuff is a red herring. A thousand fingerprints on other cans or bottles doesn't put anybody else at the crime scene when the assault was committed,' Marvin said.
'I was trying to point out that Hugo Roberts and others either lost or deliberately destroyed exculpatory evidence,' I said.
'Approach,' the judge said. She leaned forward on her forearms, her hand covering the microphone. 'What's going on here, Mr Pomroy?'
'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.
