'Did you see Roseanne Hazlitt slap Bunny Vogel the night she was attacked?'
He pushed at his nose with the flats of his fingers. His eyes were threaded with veins, fixed on mine.
'Yeah. At Shorty's. It wasn't a big deal. She always had her head up her hole about something,' he said.
'It made you mad to see your friend get hit, didn't it?'
'No. I bought her and Lucas a drink. I wasn't mad at anybody.'
'Is that when you put roofies-downers-in Lucas's drink?' I asked.
'Objection, your honor. He's badgering and leading his own witness,' Marvin said.
'Withdrawn,' I said. 'Darl, why'd Roseanne slap Bunny Vogel?'
'She said she was getting baptized. She wanted him to take her to this holy-roller church that's on TV.'
'Baptized?'
'I told you, she had boards in her head. She goes, 'Do something decent for a change. Take me to my baptism. Maybe it'll wash off on you.' So Bunny says, 'Let's take a drive. I'll roll down the windows so you can air the reefer out of your head.'
'She goes, 'I'm going down to the Lakewood Church in Houston. I done talked to the preacher already.'
'Bunny says, 'Shorty's is a funny kind of church house to show folks you been saved.' She goes, 'I'm here to meet Lucas Smothers. At least he don't treat his old friends like yesterday's fuck.' Another guy goes, 'That's 'cause you're Lucas's reg'lar fuck now.'
'Bunny put his hand on her arm and said he'd take her home. That's when she slapped him. She walked on inside and shot him the bone.'
Darl's eyes smiled at his friends.
'Did Roseanne once work in the same church store you do, Darl?'
I saw a thought, like a yellow-green insect, catch in his eye. Then I realized his distraction had nothing to do with my question. He was staring at a spectator in the back of the courtroom. The spectator, Felix Ringo, sat by the aisle with his tropical hat on his knee, one elbow propped on the chair arm, three fingers resting across his mouth.
'What's that got to do with anything?' Darl asked.
'Answer the question,' the judge said.
'Yeah, she worked there,' Darl said.
'Who got her the job?' I asked.
'My parents did. They felt sorry for her 'cause she had a crummy life.'
'How'd your parents know Roseanne Hazlitt, Darl?'
'Bunny brought her over. You saying I was mixed up with her? I wouldn't touch her. It was probably like the Houston Ship Channel down there.'
He leaned forward mischievously, his eyes bright under his blond brows, as though in leaning closer to his friends, whose faces were lit with the same mocking grin as his, he shut out the rest of the courtroom.
'Did you and your friends dope Lucas Smothers and strip off his clothes and pour a bucket of feces on him at the country club? Did you vandalize his house? Did you try to threaten me at my home? Did you murder an indigent man, Darl?'
'Mr Holland, you're way beyond anything I'll allow,' the judge said.
'Withdrawn,' I said.
Darl got down from the stand, his face stupefied, his mouth round and wordless, his teeth exposed like those of a hungry fish.
At noon Marvin Pomroy caught me in the corridor and asked me into his office. He sat down behind his desk, took his glasses off, and rubbed one eyebrow with the back of his wrist.
'I'm not comfortable with some stuff that's going on here,' he said.
'Gee, Marvin, sorry to hear that,' I said.
'I checked into this threat Moon supposedly made against Bunny Vogel and his father. But there's no handle on it… He walked into their house without knocking.'
'So why tell me about it?'
He picked up a sheet of pink carbon paper from his desk blotter.
'That gal down the road from you, Wilma Flores, the mother of the little boy who's always fishing in your tank?' he said.
'Pete's mother.'
'Yeah, that his name, Pete. She made a 911 at five this morning. She was showering to go to work. She went to wipe off the bathroom window to see if it was still raining outside. Six inches from her face is a guy with tufts of red hair slicked down on his head and blue eyes like she's never seen in a human being before.'
I felt a tingling, a deadness, in my hands that made me open and close my palms.
'The deputy put it down as a Peeping Tom incident. Nothing would have come of it, except I heard him talking about it when I was in the bullpen this morning. I made him go back out to the house with mug shots of Garland Moon and five other of our graduates. The deputy said she took one look at Moon's photo and wouldn't even touch it with her finger when she identified him,' Marvin said.
'Where's Pete now?'
'At school. I'll put a deputy at their house this afternoon.'
'Your deputies are worthless. Did you pick up Moon?'
'He has two witnesses who say he was eating breakfast in a diner at five A.M.'
'You believe them?'
'It's a Peeping Tom complaint. Even if we could charge him, he'd be out on bond in an hour.'
Then his defensiveness, his frustration with me and his job went out of his face.
'I called the lady and offered to keep Pete at our house for a while. She said I was helping Social Services take her little boy from her… Where you going?' he said.
Stonewall Judy granted a recess until the following morning.
I drove home and went into the barn, unlocked the tack room and sorted through the garden hoes and rakes and mauls and picks and axes that were stacked inside an old Mayflower moving drum. The edges of the tools were flecked with bits of dried mud and tangles of dead weeds from cleaning the vegetable garden and flower beds in the early spring, or strung with resinous wisps of pine from the cords of wood I had split last fall. But I knew the tool I was looking for.
It was a mattock whose heavy, oblong iron head had already worn loose from the helve. I clamped a pair of vise grips on the wedge that held the handle fast inside the mattock head, twisted it out of the wood, and slipped the handle free. It was made from ash, thick across the top to support the weight of the iron head, the grain worn smooth at the grip. I propped it on the passenger seat in the Avalon and headed down the road to town just as a curtain of rain moved in a steady line across the clumped-up herd of red Angus in my neighbor's draw.
I parked behind the tin shed where Moon worked. The rain pattered on my slicker and the brim of my Stetson as I pulled open the back door of the shed. A black man in a bikini swimsuit with a yellow rag tied around his head was grinding a metal bracket on an emery wheel.
'Hep you?' he asked.
'Is this your shop?'
'What you want?'
'Garland Moon.'
His eyes went over my person. 'That a chunk of wood under your raincoat?'
'It's been that kind of day.'
He nodded. 'He gone down to Snooker's Big Eight.'
'You going to use the telephone on me?'
'Rather y'all do it there than here… Tell you something, a man like that is looking for somebody to click off his switch. You don't do it, he'll find the right man sooner or later.'
I drove a half mile down the road to a bluff above the river and a long wood building that was ventilated with window fans and set in a grove of oak trees that had been the site of a beer garden during the 1940s. The parking lot was full of pickup trucks and motorcycles, and rain was blowing through the trees and streaking on the front windows, which glowed with purple and red neon.
I walked the length of the building, stepping across puddles, looking through the spinning blades of fans at
