BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (19 page)

'It's not your style, Marvin.'

'You don't get it. I'm a law officer in a county
that's probably run by the Dixie Mafia. I just can't prove it.'

I walked back across the street to the
office and
took the mail out of the box in the first-floor foyer. The foyer was
cool and made of stucco and tile and decorated with earthen jars
planted with hibiscus. Mixed in with the letters and circulars was a
brown envelope with no postage, addressed to me in pencil.

For some reason—its soiled surfaces, the broken
lettering, a smear of dried food where the seal had been
licked—it
felt almost obscene in my hand. I didn't open it until I was inside my
office, as though my ignoring it would transform it into simply another
piece of crank mail written by a dissatisfied client or a convict who
thought his personal story was worth millions in movie rights. Then I
cracked it across the top with my finger, the way you peel back a
rotted bandage.

Inside was a Polaroid picture of Pete on the
playground at the Catholic elementary school. The penciled page ripped
out of a cheap notebook read: 'This was took this morning. When we get
finished carving on him, his parts will fit in your mailbox.'

I called the principal at the school. She was a
classic administrator; she did not want to hear about problems and
viewed those who brought them to her as conspirators who manufactured
situations to ruin her day.

'I just saw Pete. He's in the lunchroom,' she said.

'I'll pick him up at three. Don't let him walk
home,' I said.

'What's wrong?'

'Some people might try to hurt him.'

'What's going on here, Mr Holland?'

'I'm not sure.'

'I'm aware you pay his tuition and you're concerned
for his welfare, but we have other children here as well. This sounds
like a personal matter of some kind.'

'I'll call you back,' I said. I hung up and punched
in Temple Carrol's number.

'We need to throw a net over Roy Devins,' I said.

'What happened?'

I told her about the visit of the three men to my
house the previous night.

'They knew about my rope-dragging Devins out of the
bar. Devins was in the sack with Pete's mother. She's a drunk and gets
mixed up with bikers and dopers sometimes.'

'You told this to Marvin?'

'What's he going to do? Half the cops in the county
are on a pad. He's lucky he hasn't been assassinated.'

'Look, don't handle that letter. If we can lift some
prints, Marvin can run them through AFIS. I'll get back to you.'

I closed the blinds and sat in the gloom and tried
to think. These were the same men who thought they could terrorize Moon
and run him out of town, except he turned the situation around on them
and mutilated Roy Devins. But why put heat on Moon? Because he'd been
out at the Hart Ranch? Who were they?

L.Q. Navarro sat in a swayback deerhide chair in the
corner, one foot propped up on the wastebasket. He kept throwing his
hat through the air onto the point of his boot, gathering it up, and
throwing it again.

'
Time to go to the bank
,' he
said.

'I figured that's what you'd say.'

'You just gonna study on it?'

'I gave it up, L.Q. It got you dead.'

'Them that won't protect their home and
family don't deserve neither one. That's what you used to tell me.'

'Maybe I aim to cool them out. Maybe
that's what's really on my mind.'

'
Come on, bud, that little boy cain't be
hanging out in the breeze, not with some rat-bait writing letters about
killing him. If it was me, I'd blow that fellow's liver out and drink
an ice-cold Carta Blanca while I was at it… Sorry, my way of
putting things probably ain't always well thought out.'

I went downstairs to the bank, then
into the vault
where the safety deposit boxes were kept. I carried my rental box into
a private enclosure and set it on a table and opened the hinged lid.
Lying amidst my childhood coin collection and my father's Illinois
pocket watch was L.Q.'s holstered double-action revolver. The steel
had the soft sheen of liquorice; the ivory handles seemed molded into
the steel, rather than attached with screws, and age had given them a
faint yellow cast, as though the layer of calluses on L.Q.'s palm had
rubbed its color into them.

I pulled back the hammer to half-cock and opened the
loading gate and rotated the cylinder so I could see the whorls of
light in each empty chamber. Then I holstered the pistol again and
wrapped the belt and buckle around the holster and stuck it in a paper
bag and walked back up to my office.

Temple Carrol had called back and left a message
with my secretary—Roy Devins, whom Garland T. Moon had
mutilated, had
checked out of the hospital, all bills unpaid, and was thought to have
taken a Greyhound bus out of town.

I took L.Q.' s revolver home that afternoon and
placed it in my desk drawer in the library and read from Great-grandpa
Sam's journal.

A motorcycle turned into my drive, the
engine
popping and misfiring. I turned on the porch light and stepped outside.
Lucas Smothers sat astride an old, low-slung Indian motorcycle with
dented, purple fenders, his T-shirt and jeans streaked with grease. He
cut the engine and grinned.

'You ever see one like this?' he asked.

'Sure, they're collector's items.'

'I'm gonna restore it. It's got a crack in the frame
but I can braze it. The teacher at the high school body shop said I
could use the equipment in the afternoon while they're still cleaning
up.'

'Where'd you get it?'

'Darl Vanzandt.'

'Darl?'

Lucas's eyes went away from my face.

'He said he'd been going to church and trying to get
right for the bad things he's done. What was I supposed to say, "I
don't want to have nothing to do with you"?'

'I think he'll hurt you.'

'By giving me an old bike?'

'Jimmy Cole was murdered on
the Hart Ranch. You were probably right the first time. Darl and his
friends found him hiding out there and killed him.'

He pressed his palm on his forehead, smearing grease
in his hair.

'Everything I do is fucked up. I feel worse every
time I come over here,' he said, his eyes glistening.

'Leave the bike here. I'll call his father and have
it picked up.'

'Yeah, 'cause the product of your broken rubber
cain't take care of hisself. Thanks, anyway,' he said.

He started the motorcycle, fed it the gas until the
misfires became a dirty roar, then fishtailed off the gravel onto the
county road, his hair whipping in the wind, his T-shirt pooling with
air.

Way to go, Holland, I thought.

Mary Beth Sweeney called the next
morning, just as I
was about to leave for the office.

'Bunny Vogel got into it last night with a Mexican
biker at Shorty's,' she said.

'Which biker?'

'No name. He took off before I got there. But it
looks like the fight had something to do with Roseanne Hazlitt.'

'How do you know?'

'A couple of witnesses said the Mexican kid called
Bunny "spermbrain", then "Roseanne's pimp." That's when they went at
it. They tore up most of the side porch.'

'Where's Bunny now?'

'I kept him downtown two hours, then kicked him
loose. He's supposed to pay the owner half the damages.'

'You're a good cop, Mary Beth.'

'A good cop would take him to the Marine Corps
recruiting station before he ends up in Huntsville. Have you ever been
to California?'

'No, why?'

'These kids must go out there and take courses in
how to screw up their lives.'

Bunny lived on the west end of the
county, not far
from a train siding, a shut-down cannery, and a string of abandoned and
overgrown wood cottages that had been used by migrant workers during
the 1940s. His house was sheathed in ancient grey Montgomery Ward brick
and elevated on cinder blocks, but the floor had settled through the
center, so that the outside covering had cracked like a dried husk,
exposing the tar paper underneath. Bunny's '55 maroon Chevy, with the
rolled white leather interior, was parked in the dirt yard, as
incongruous as a color cutout pasted on a gray stage set, its
green-tinted windows filled with reflections of clouds.

Bunny stood in the backyard, in a sleeveless red
sweatshirt and running shorts and half-top cleats, flinging footballs
through a rubber tire that hung on a rope from the limb of a hackberry
tree.

'I heard you got put in the bag last night,' I said.

'Word gets around.' He picked up another football
from an orange crate and fired a bullet pass through the tire. It
landed on a grassy knoll and rolled toward the train tracks.

'Who was the biker?'

'Just a greaseball who wants to take down a swinging
dick in Shorty's. I ain't a swinging dick. But that's what the
greaseball wants to think.'

'He called you a spermbrain?'

'Yeah, I think that's what he said.' He shook his
hair back on his shoulders and flung another football at the tire. This
time it caromed off the rim.

'He's the same guy who picked up Roseanne at the
Dairy Queen, isn't he? The one you took her away from?'

'Maybe.'

'Something bothers me, Bunny. Roseanne slapped you
the night she was attacked. I think it was for something you're really
ashamed of, maybe something related to her death.'

'I guess I just ain't smart enough to figure all
them things out, Mr Holland.'

'The Mexican kid called you a pimp?'

'If that's what somebody told you.'

'That's when you swung on him?'

'Wouldn't you?' He cocked his arm to throw another
football, then dropped it back into the orange crate. 'I got to go to
work. Anything else on your mind?'

'Yeah, what kind of game is Darl Vanzandt trying to
run on Lucas Smothers?'

'What them two do ain't my business.'

'What is?'

'Sir?'

'Cleaning up after a moral retard for the Vanzandt
family?'

'People don't talk to me like that.'

'I just did. Watch your back, Bunny. Before it's
over, I think Darl will kick a two-by-four up your ass,' I said, and
walked back to my car.

I looked through the windshield at him before I
backed out. His hands were propped on his hips, his mouth a tight seam,
his disfigured profile pointed at the ground. Then he drove his cleated
shoe into the slats of the orange crate and showered footballs over the
yard.

Pete's mother waited tables in a diner
out by the
slaughterhouse. Sometimes the men she met in bars beat her up, stole
her money, and got her fired from her jobs. Last year she was found
wandering behind a motel in her slip and was put in a detox center for
three days. After she got out, a choleric judge who reeked of cigars
and self-righteousness lectured her in front of morning court and
sentenced her to pick up trash on the highways for six weekends with a
group of high school delinquents.