James Burke - Cimarron Rose

'I just didn't know when you were coming. That's what I meant.'

'I heard about you tearing up Brian. What started it?'

'The conversation got out of hand.'

'He won't file charges. His career's unraveling on him. He's one step from Fargo, North Dakota, already.'

I felt my palm squeeze involuntarily on the telephone receiver.

'Can you take a cab out to the house? We can drive back into town together,' I said.

'I have a bunch of incoming calls,' she said.

'I see.'

'Some people in my office weren't comfortable with me coming back here.'

'Yeah… I understand. I appreciate your doing it.'

I felt foolish and stupid, a mendicant holding a telephone to his ear as though it were a black tumor.

'When do I testify?' she asked.

'Probably this afternoon. Mary Beth, is it the career? Or am I just the wrong man for you?'

'I don't know how to say it, Billy Bob.'

The house seemed to fill with the sounds of wind and silence.

'You always think of yourself as an extension of your past,' she said. 'So every new day of your life you're condemned to revisiting what you can't change.'

'I'll be at the office directly if you have a chance to drop by,' I said.

After I replaced the receiver I walked to the library window and looked at the darkness over the hills. The pages of my great-grandfather's journal fluttered whitely in the rush of wind through the screen. The silence in my head was so great I thought I heard the tinkling of L.Q. Navarro's roweled spurs.

An hour later Mary Beth walked from the hotel to my office. She wore a pink suit and white blouse with a purple broach and looked absolutely beautiful. But if I had expected to mend my relationship with her at that moment, the prospect went out the window when Temple Carrol came through the door thirty seconds later.

The three of us were standing in a circle, like people who had met inconveniently at a cocktail party.

'Y'all know each other, of course,' I said.

'Sure, the lady who pops in and out of uniform,' Temple said.

'Excuse me?' Mary Beth said.

'Billy Bob kicked the ass of a federal agent. Has he told you about it?' Temple asked.

'No. Why don't you?' Mary Beth said.

'I don't remember the details very well. I was more worried about the Mexican dirtbag, what's his name, Felix Ringo, the greaseball who fronts points for y'all, he tried to use the situation to cap Billy Bob. A great guy to have on a federal pad,' Temple said.

Mary Beth turned toward me. 'I didn't know that,' she said.

I pulled up the blinds loudly on a sky that swirled with storm clouds. The wind gusted under the trees on the courthouse lawn and blew leaves high in the air. 'Let's talk about our agenda today,' I said.

But agenda was the wrong word. The prosecution's case was not a complex one. Lucas Smothers was found passed out thirty feet from the homicide victim. He was sexually involved with her. He feared she carried his child. His semen, no one else's, was inside the victim's vagina. The pathologist would testify the damage to the genitalia indicated the assailant was probably driven by sexual rage. Lucas himself had told the arresting officers he had no memory of his actions after he had taken off his trousers in the pickup truck. Finally, Lucas had lied and denied even knowing Roseanne Hazlitt's last name.

But my problem was not with any evidence or possible testimony I had learned about in discovery. Instead, I had the brooding sense the loaded gun, the one pointed at Lucas's heart, was in my hand, not Marvin Pomroy's. But I didn't know what to do about it.

That afternoon Marvin rested his case, and while the rain drummed on the trees outside the window, I called Hugo Roberts to the stand.

His sheriff's uniform was freshly pressed, his brass name tag full of light on his pocket, an American flag sewn on the sleeve, but an odor of cigarettes and hair tonic and antiperspirant radiated from him as though it were sealed in his skin. He looked at the jury and spectators and at Marvin Pomroy and at the rain clicking on the windowsills, at virtually everything around him except me, as though I were of little consequence in his day.

'Your unit was the first one to arrive at the crime scene, sheriff?' I said.

'Yeah, I patrolled that area for the last couple of years. While I was a deputy, I mean.'

'Have you run a lot of kids out of there?'

'Yeah, after dark, when they don't have no business being there.'

I picked up a vinyl bag from the exhibit table and removed five Lone Star beer cans and two dirt-impacted wine bottles from it.

'Are these the cans and bottles you recovered at the crime scene, sir?' I asked.

'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.