James Burke: Cimarron Rose

His hands were a miracle to watch on a stringed instrument. But in his father's eyes, they, like Lucas himself, were not good for anything of value.

When he was sixteen Vernon caught him playing triple-neck steel in a beer joint in Lampasas and beat him so unmercifully with a razor strop in the front yard that a passing truck driver climbed out of his cab and pinned Vernon's arms to his sides until the boy could run next door.

Lucas sat shirtless in blue jeans and a pair of scuffed cowboy boots on the edge of a bunk in a narrow cell layered with jailhouse graffiti. His face was gray with hangover and fear, his reddish blond hair spongy with sweat. His snap-button western shirt lay at his feet. It had blue-and-white checks in it, and white cloth in the shoulders with tiny gold trumpets stitched in it. He had paid forty dollars for the shirt when he had first joined the band at Shorty's.

'How you feel?' I asked, after the turnkey locked the solid iron door behind me.

'Not too good.' His wrists were thick, his wide hands cupped on top of his knees. 'They tell you about the girl… I mean, like how's she doing?'

'She's in bad shape, Lucas. What happened?'

'I don't know. We left Shorty's, you know, that joint on the river. We was kind of making out in my truck… I remember taking off my britches, then I don't remember nothing else.'

I sat down next to him on the bunk. It was made of cast iron and suspended from the wall by chains. A thin mattress covered with brown and yellow stains fit inside the rectangular rim. I picked up his hands in mine and turned them over, then pressed my thumb along his finger joints, all the time watching for a flinch in his face.

'A lady's going to come here this afternoon to photograph your hands. In the meantime don't you do anything to bruise them,' I said. 'Who's the girl?'

'Her name's Roseanne. That's all she told me. She come in with a mess of other people. They run off and left her and then her and me got to knocking back shots. I wouldn't rape nobody, Mr Holland. I wouldn't beat up a girl, either,' he said.

'How do you know?'

'Sir?'

'You don't remember what you did, Lucas… Look at me. Don't sign anything, don't answer any of their questions, don't make a statement, no matter what they promise you. You with me?'

'My father got you to come down here?'

'Not exactly.'

His blue eyes lingered on mine. They were bloodshot and full of pain, but I could see them trying to reach inside my mind.

'You need a friend. We all do at one time or another,' I said.

'I ain't smart but I ain't stupid, either, Mr Holland. I know about you and my mother. I don't study on it. It ain't no big deal to me.'

I stood up from the bunk and looked out the window. Down the street people were coming out of a brick church with a white steeple, and seeds from cottonwood trees were blowing in the wind and I could smell chicken frying in the back of a restaurant.

'You want me to represent you?' I said.

'Yes, sir, I'd sure appreciate it.'

He stared emptily at the floor and didn't look up again.

I stopped at Harley's office downstairs.

'I'll be back for his arraignment,' I said.

'Why'd he have to beat the shit out of her?'

'He didn't.'

'I guess he didn't top her, either. She probably artificially inseminated herself.'

'Why don't you shut up, Harley?'

He rubbed his chin with the ball of his thumb, a smile at the corner of his mouth, his eyes wandering indolently over my face.

Outside, as I got into my Avalon, I saw him crossing the courthouse lawn toward me, the sunlight through the trees freckling on his face. I closed my car door and waited. He leaned one arm on the roof, a dark loop of sweat under his armpit, and smiled down at me, his words gathering in his mouth.

'You sure know how to stick it up a fellow's snout, Billy Bob. I'll surely give you that, yessir. But at least I ain't killed my best friend and I don't know anybody else who has. Have a good day,' he said.

Lucas's arraignment was at eleven Monday morning. At 8 a.m. I met a sheriff's deputy at the courthouse and rode with her in her cruiser to the spot on the river where Lucas and the girl from Shorty's had been found.

The deputy's name was Mary Beth Sweeney. She wore a tan uniform, with a lead-colored stripe down the side of each trouser leg, and a campaign hat that slanted over her brow. Her face was powdered with pale brown freckles and her dark brown hair hung in curls to her shoulders. She was new to the department and seemed to have little interest in either me or her assignment.

'Were you a law officer somewhere else?' I asked.

'CID in the army.'

'You didn't want to work for the feds after you got out?' I said.

She raised her eyebrows and didn't answer. We passed Shorty's, a ramshackle club built on pilings over the water, then pulled into an old picnic area that had gone to seed among a grove of pine trees. Yellow crime scene tape was stretched in the shape of a broken octagon around the tree trunks.

'You responded to the 911?' I said.

'I was the second unit to arrive.'

'I see.'

I got out of the cruiser and stepped under the yellow tape. But she didn't follow me.

'Where was the girl?' I said.

'Down there in those bushes by the water.'

'Undressed?'

'Her clothes were strewn around the ground.'

'On the ground by her?' I said.

'That's right.'

The soil in the clearing was damp and shady, and tire tracks were stenciled across the pine needles that had fallen from the trees.

'And Lucas was in his truck, passed out? About here?' I said.

'Yes, sir.'

'You don't have to call me "sir".'

I walked down to the riverbank. The water was green and deep, and cottonwood seeds swirled in eddies on top of the current.

'You know, I never heard of a rapist being arrested because he was too drunk to flee the crime scene,' I said.

But the deputy didn't answer me. The ground among the bushes was crisscrossed with dozens of footprints. I walked back to where Lucas's truck had been parked. Mary Beth Sweeney still stood outside the crime scene tape, her hands in her back pockets. Her arms looked strong, her stomach flat under her breasts. Her black gunbelt was polished and glinted with tiny lights.

'This is quite a puzzle,' I said.

'The sheriff just told me to give you the tour, Mr Holland.'

She put on a pair of dark green aviator's sunglasses and looked at the river.

'Did Lucas attack her in his truck, then pass out? Or did he attack her in the brush and walk back to his truck, have a few more drinks and then pass out?' I said. 'You don't have an opinion?'

'I'll drive you back to your car if you're ready,' she said.

'Why not?' I said.

We drove through rolling fields that were thick with bluebonnets and buttercups, then crossed a rusted iron bridge over the river. The river's bottom was soap rock, and deep in the current you could see the gray, moss-covered tops of boulders and the shadows they made in the current.

'You're pleading your man innocent?' she said.

'You bet… You think I'm firing in the well?'

'I just wondered,' she said, and didn't speak again until we pulled into the shade of the live oaks that surrounded the courthouse.

I walked to my car, then turned unexpectedly and caught her watching me, her sunglasses hanging from her fingers.

I stopped the prosecutor outside his office just before Lucas's arraignment. The corridor was empty, and our voices echoed off the old marble floor and high wood ceiling.

'You're not going to jam us up on the bail, are you, Marvin?' I said.

'Don't expect any slack on this one, Billy Bob,' he replied.

He wore a bowtie and seersucker suit, and his face looked at me with the quiet moral certitude of an ax blade.