Five minutes passed, then the cell door at the end of the corridor clanged shut again and a figure dressed like Harley walked past the bars of the drunk tank, the straw hat held to the side of his face. The wire-mesh door on the elevator clattered into the jamb, and the walls hummed with the reverberations of the elevator's motor as the cage dropped to the first floor.
A few kids who were still dragging Main said they saw a figure in boots and a white straw hat emerge from the side door of the courthouse and walk across the darkened lawn to Harley's truck, tap on his shirt pocket as though the package of cigarettes he discovered there were a nice surprise, light one, and drive away.
The turnkey who came on duty at 6 a.m. rode up to the third floor of the courthouse and saw nothing out of the ordinary. At 7 a.m. the trusties brought up the food carts loaded with aluminum containers of grits, fried ham, white bread, and black coffee. The men in the drunk tank were fed first, then Lucas Smothers, who had been moved into an isolation cell by the showers. A trusty stopped his food cart in front of Jimmy Cole's cell and tapped a wood serving spoon against the bars.
'Fixing to tote it back, Jimmy Cole… Hey, boy, you want to eat, you better roll it out.'
The trusty looked more closely at the man in the bunk, who was dressed in jailhouse whites, and at the striped pillow pressed down on his face with one arm, and at the thin coppery glint buried in the folds of his throat. The trusty whirled and shouted down the corridor at the turnkey: 'Inmate out on the ground, bossman!'
'What the hell you talking about? That's him right yonder,' the turnkey said, pointing through the bars. Then the turnkey saw the chipped, black baton on the floor under the bunk and the lower part of the face under the pillow. 'Oh Lord have mercy,' he said, and unlocked and flung back the door and then gingerly pulled the pillow loose from the arm folded across it like a person who cannot watch the next frames of film about to flash on a movie screen.
The copper wire had been unwrapped from the head of a broom, twisted into a hangman's noose, dropped over Harley Sweet's neck, and then razored into the flesh. Later, the medical examiner would report that the blows with the baton had been delivered while Harley Sweet strangled to death on his knees.
Garland T. Moon wolfed his breakfast and talked the trusty into filling his tin plate again with grits and the ham fat from the bottom of the serving container. Then he leaped up and grabbed the lip of a steel crossbeam at the top of his cell with his fingertips and did chin-ups in his Jockey undershorts, the veins and sinew in his body erupting across his skin like nests of twigs.
'Hey, bossman, don't Mr Sweet's mother live at 111 Fannin Street?… I'd put a guard on her if I was y'all. You got Jimmy Cole out on the ground, there ain't no telling what might happen,' he said. He dropped flat-footed from the steel crossbeam and giggled uncontrollably.
The courtroom was almost empty when Lucas Smothers appeared before the judge and had his bail reduced from $150,000 to $75,000. His father, Vernon, was supposed to appear in court with a bondsman. He didn't. I put up my property for the bond, then waited on the front steps of the courthouse for Lucas to be processed out of the jail.
Vernon Smothers parked his pickup by the curb and cut across the lawn toward me. He wore a pair of dark blue overalls that were wet at the knees.
'Where were you, Vernon?' I asked.
'Putting in pepper plants. I didn't watch the time. That little snip of a bondsman didn't call me back, either. What happened in there?'
'I went his bond.'
'I ain't asked for that.'
'It's no big thing.'
His eyes looked out at the glare of sunlight on the walk, the traffic in the square, the old men who sat on benches by the Spanish-American War artillery piece. The olive skin of his narrow face twitched as though someone were touching it with the tip of a feather.
'Them that's got money use it to put their shame on others. That's the way it's always worked around here. I won't abide it, though,' he said.
'Vernon, don't hurt your boy again.'
'Seems like the calf's mine only when it's time for you to lecture, Billy Bob.'
I walked away from him, through the doors of the courthouse and down a hallway whose woodwork seemed infused with the dull amber glow of its own past. Marvin Pomroy came out of his office and almost collided into me. His face was bloodless, as though it had been slapped.
'What's wrong?' I said.
'We messed up. Moon and Jimmy Cole did time together at Sugarland,' he answered.
'You're not communicating, Marvin.'
'The witness… The customer who saw Moon go into the store where he killed the old woman… Somebody sliced her back screen and stabbed her to death with a screwdriver this morning… Harley's truck was found in a pond a half mile away.'
I saw Lucas Smothers walk down the circular stairs in the center of the courthouse, a possessions bag in his hand.
'We've got no physical evidence to put Moon in that store,' Marvin said.
I stared into his face and the knowledge there that I didn't want to accept.
'That crazy sonofabitch is going to get out, Billy Bob.'
'Lucas's deposition-' I began.
'It won't hold up by itself.'
'Does Moon know that Lucas…' I could feel the pinpoints of sweat breaking on my forehead.
'You already know the answer to that… I'm sorry. We thought we had this guy halfway to the boneyard,' Marvin said.
Lucas walked toward us, his face uncertain in front of Marvin.
'How y'all doin'? Is my dad outside?' he said.
I sat alone in my office with the blinds down and tried to think. I kept seeing the grin on the face of Garland T. Moon, the latex skin, the liquid blue eye; I could almost smell the breath that was like fermented prunes. I pulled open the blinds and let the sunlight flood into the room.
The secretary buzzed me on the intercom.
'Mr Vanzandt and his son are here to see you, Billy Bob,' she said.
Jack Vanzandt, the college baseball star who'd fought in Vietnam and had come home decorated and had made a fortune in the Mexican oil business, then had lost it and made another fortune in computers. He'd called yesterday, or was it the day before? Yes, about his son, the one who had been expelled from Texas A amp;M.
'Bad day for a talk?' Jack said.
'Sorry. It's been a peculiar morning,' I said.
Jack still lifted weights and worked out regularly on a speed bag and played polo at a club in Dallas. He was well mannered and intelligent and made little of his war record. Few found any reason not to like him.
His son was another matter. His blond, youthful face always seemed slightly flushed, overheated, his gaze turned inward on thoughts that swam like threadworms in his green eyes.
'Darl had a fistfight with a Mexican kid. We'd like to just shake hands and forget it. But it looks like the family found out we have a little money,' Jack said.
'What about it, Darl?' I asked.
'At the American Legion game. Kid scratched all over my hood with a nail. I asked him why he did it. He said because of the cheer we were yelling in the stands. So I told him it was a free country, people can say anything they want 'cause that's why we got a First Amendment. Wets don't like it, they can swim back home.'
'What cheer?' I asked.
'"Two-bits, four-bits, six-bits a peso, all good pepper bellies stand up and say so."' His eyes smiled at nothing. He rubbed the thick ball of muscle along his forearm.
I looked at his father.
'The Mexican boy had to have his jaws wired together,' Jack said.
I took a yellow legal pad and a ballpoint pen out of my drawer and pushed them across my desk toward Darl.