James Burke: Cimarron Rose

I offered her half of my ancient rented house in the Heights.

Two weeks later a fellow Houston police officer called Vernon and told him I was living with his wife. He came for her at night when I was not home, in the middle of a hurricane that tore the pecan tree out of my front yard. I never saw her again.

A month after Lucas was born she was electrocuted trying to fix the well pump that Vernon had repaired with adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet.

I wrapped my unfinished sandwich in wax paper and put it in the icebox. When I turned around, L.Q. Navarro was leaning against the back doorjamb, his arms folded across his chest. His Stetson was the color of ash, his eyes as lustrous as obsidian.

' How's it hangin, L.Q.?' I said.

'This weather's a pistol. It don't get any better.'

'You're not going to try to mess me up today, are you?'

'I wouldn't dream of it, Billy Bob.'

He slipped the scarlet rose from the top buttonhole of his shirt and rolled it by the stem between his fingers. Where the rose had been was a hole that glowed with a bloodred light, like a votive candle burning inside red glass.

' It was an accident,' I said.

' That's what I keep telling you. Get rid of this for me, will you ?' He drew the rose across my palm. My fingers constricted as though the tendons had been severed by a barber's razor.

Ten minutes later I heard an automobile in front. I opened the door and looked down the flagstone walk that dissected the wall of poplars at the foot of the lawn, and saw the sheriff's deputy named Mary Beth Sweeney getting out of her cruiser. She fixed her campaign hat so that the leather cord drew tight against the back of her head, pushed her shirt down inside her gunbelt with her fingers, and walked toward me. She had a walk that my father would have referred to as a 'fine carriage', her shoulders erect, her chin lifted, her long legs slightly accentuating the movement of her hips.

'How you doin'?' I said.

'You going to use a PI in discovery?'

'Probably… You want to come inside?'

'Out here is good. At the river, night before last? The scene investigator picked up a vinyl bag-load of beer cans. They're not in the evidence locker.'

'Why are you telling me this?'

'That kid's going down on a bad bounce. I'm not buying into it.'

'You can lose your job for this.'

'Look, you know all these things. The victim's teeth were broken. Your man didn't have any cuts on his hands. There was no weapon. When we cuffed him, he was too drunk to stand up.'

'Criminal Investigation Division, huh?' I said.

'What about it?'

'Doing grunt work in a place like this… You must like the mild summers. In July we fry eggs on the sidewalks.'

'Use what I've told you, Mr Holland, or wear it in your hat,' she said.

She walked back to her cruiser, her attention already focused on a cardinal perched atop a rose trellis, her hat tipped forward on her curly head like a Marine Corps DI's.

Before she became a private investigator, Temple Carrol had been a corrections officer at Angola penitentiary over in Louisiana, a patrolwoman with the Dallas police department, and a deputy sheriff in Fort Bend County. She lived with her invalid father only a mile down the road from me, and every morning, just at sunrise, she would jog past my house in her T-shirt and sweatpants, her chestnut hair piled on her head, the baby fat winking on her hips. She never broke her pace, never did less than five miles, and never stopped at intersections. Temple Carrol believed in straight lines.

Tuesday morning she tapped on the glass to my office door and then came inside without waiting. She wore a pair of sandals and blue jeans and a brown-cotton shirt stitched with flowers. She sat on the corner of my desk and pointed her finger at me.

'What did that deputy tell you?' she asked.

'They bagged a whole load of beer cans and whiskey bottles at the crime scene,' I answered.

'Try five cans and a couple of wine bottles. The cans all have Lucas's or the dead girl's prints on them. The bottles are probably twenty years old.'

'What have you got on the girl?'

'Raised by an aunt… Long welfare history… In high school she was known as a real piece of work… Went to a community college for a while and dropped out… Worked at a church store, got fired from Wal-Mart for stealing… Get this, though. Three people at Shorty's say she came there by herself, not with a bunch of college kids. Not good news for Lucas.'

'Maybe she met them there.'

'Maybe… There's another problem, too, Billy Bob. You'd better get that boy out of jail.'

'What's going on?'

'Harley Sweet.'

She widened her eyes and held them on my face.

I rode up to the third floor of the courthouse with a turnkey. The heat had risen in the building and the stone walls were speckled with condensation.

'I'd like to talk to Lucas in an interview room,' I said.

'Sorry, Billy Bob. Harley says he stays in lockdown… By the way, don't worry about that 'un on the left. He's got a lot more Christian perspective today.'

The man in the cell to the left was dressed only in a pair of paper-thin Jockey undershorts. His sparse hair was the color of Mercurochrome, pasted in oily strains across his head. His skin had the unblemished smoothness of latex stretched over stone, and his left eye was smaller than the other, like a dime-size blue marble pushed deep into clay.

'What's your name, buddy?' I said to him, while the turnkey opened Lucas's cell.

'Garland T. Moon,' he answered, his eyes brightening with challenge.

'They treating you all right?'

He got up from the bunk, his stomach cording with muscle, and stood close to the bars. His breath was sweet, like prunes that have fermented in a jar. 'I like it here. I wouldn't trade it for a half dozen Californias. It don't impress me out there.'

'Ask him what happened inside that family's house in Santa Monica. If you got the stomach to hear it,' the turnkey said.

The man who called himself Garland T. Moon smiled into my face and ran his tongue along his bottom lip. His tongue was red and thick as a biscuit.

The turnkey locked me in Lucas's cell. I sat down next to Lucas on his bunk.

'My PI says you've seen something that might get you in trouble,' I said.

Lucas pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. 'The guy in there,' he said, his voice lowered. 'Harley was telling him last night Texas won't send him back to California because California don't like to give people the death penalty. He was telling the guy what it's like to die by injection, how the guy's muscles are going to turn to cement so his lungs cain't go up and down, how he'll suffocate way down inside himself while everybody watches.

'Harley was almost back to the elevator and the guy says, "One… one… one Fannin Street." It made Harley go crazy. He got three other guys up here and they went in the guy's cell and chained him up and drug him down to the shower, then Harley went back to a locker and got a cattle prod. Mr Holland, the guy's eyes was rolled in his head and his britches was around his knees when they drug him back…'

'Listen to me, Lucas. As long as you're in here, you didn't see any of this,' I said.

'I cain't take it. The guy in the other cell, Jimmy Cole, he told me this morning what he done to a little boy in Georgia.'

He started to cry, unashamedly, his arms stiff on his knees, his eyes squinted shut, the tears streaming down his cheeks.

The sheriff kept his office behind the courthouse in the squat, one-story yellow sandstone building that had been the original county jail in the 1870s. He was six and a half feet tall and weighed over three hundred pounds, ate five meals a day, chainsmoked cigars, kept a spittoon by his desk, and hung framed pictures on the ancient log walls of every man his department had helped the state of Texas execute.