'My PI had to do some checking on Darl's record,' I said. I kept my eyes straight ahead on the piled dirt and sacks of pasteurized fertilizer and potted hydrangeas by the edge of a freshly spaded flower bed.
Jack cleared his throat slightly. 'Why's that?' he said.
'You don't want to find out later the other side is waiting for you with a baseball bat. Darl has four arrests involving violence of some kind… Am I correct, he beat up a waitress in a bar?'
Jack squatted by the mound of black dirt and picked up some pottery shards and rubbed them clean between his fingers. There was a thin, round place in the center of his gold hair.
'He shouldn't have been there. But she wasn't a waitress. She was a prostitute, and she and her pimp tried to roll him when they thought he was passed out,' he said.
'I'd like to take a Polaroid of Darl.'
'I'm a little unclear as to where this is going.'
'The kid who might take you for seven figures should at least be able to identify your son in a photo lineup.'
'Wait here. I'll get him.'
Five minutes later the two of them came out of the back of the house together. Even though it was almost noon, Darl's face looked thick with sleep. He raked his hair downward with a comb, then gazed at the lint that floated out in the sunlight.
'What's that spick say?' he asked.
'Darl…' his father began.
'That you blindsided him and kicked him on the ground,' I said.
'How about my car? I was supposed to enter it in the fifties show in Dallas. What right's he got to ruin my paint job?'
'That's a mean cut on your ring finger,' I said.
'It collided with a flying object. That guy's mouth.'
'Two weeks ago?'
'Yeah, his tooth broke off in my hand. I'm lucky I didn't have to get rabies shots.'
'Look up a little bit,' I said, and popped the flash on the Polaroid.
Darl's eyes stared back at me with the angry vacuity of an animal who believes it has been trapped in a box.
'I'm going back to the house,' he said.
'Thank Mr Holland for the help he's giving us, son,' Jack said.
'He's doing this for free? Get a life,' Darl said. Thick-bodied, sullen, his face unwashed, he walked through the shade, his hand caressing the peach fuzz along his jawbone.
Jack turned away, his fists knotted on his hips, his forearms corded with veins.
That afternoon Temple Carrol found me back by the windmill, hoeing out my vegetable garden. The sky behind her was purple and yellow with rain clouds, the air already heavy with the smell of ozone.
'My sister-in-law works at the video store. This tape was in the night drop box this morning,' she said.
I stopped work and leaned on my hoe. The blades of the windmill were ginning rapidly overhead.
'Somebody must have dropped it in by mistake. You'd better take a look,' she said.
We went through the back of the house to the library and plugged the cassette into the VCR.
At first the handheld camera swung wildly through trees illuminated by headlights, rock music blaring on the audio, then the camera steadied, as though it were aimed across a car hood, and we saw kids climbing out of convertibles, throwing ropes of beer on each other, passing joints, kissing each other hard on the mouth for the camera's benefit, their features as white as milk.
Then we saw her in an alcove of trees, in Clorox-faded jeans and a maroon T-shirt with a luminous horse head on it, a longneck beer in one hand, a joint in the other, dancing to the music as though there were no one else present on earth.
'Roseanne Hazlitt,' I said.
'Wait till you see what a small-town girl can do with the right audience,' Temple said.
Her auburn hair was partially pinned up in swirls on her head, but one long strand curled around her neck like a snake. She let the beer bottle, then the joint, drop from her fingers into the weeds, and began to sway her hips, her eyes closed, her profile turned to the camera. She pulled her T-shirt over her head, her hair collapsing on her shoulders, arched her shoulders back so that the tops of her breasts almost burst out of her bra, unsnapped her jeans and stepped out of them, then twined her hands in the air and rotated her hips, ran her fingers over her panties and thighs, grasped the back of her neck and widened her legs and opened her mouth in feigned orgasm and pushed her hair over her head so that it cascaded down her face while her tongue made a red circle inside her lips.
The screen turned to snow.
'How about the look on those boys watching her?' Temple said.
'You recognize any of them?' I asked.
'Three or four. Jocks with yesterday's ice cream for brains. How do kids get that screwed up?'
I looked at my watch. It had started to rain outside and the hills were aura-ed with a cold green light like the tarnish on brass.
'I'll buy you a barbecue dinner at Shorty's,' I said, and dropped the Polaroid photo of Darl Vanzandt in front of her.
We sat on the screen porch and ate plates of cole slaw and refried beans and chicken that had been cooked on a mesquite fire. The river that flowed under the pilings of the club was dented with raindrops, the trees along the bank smoky with mist. Downstream, some boys were swinging out over the water on a rubber tire tied to a rope, cannonballing into the current.
I heard beer cans clattering outside the screen.
'He's an old-timer, Temple. Let's try to keep him in a better mood this time,' I said.
'I'll just watch. Maybe I can learn how it's done,' she said.
We went out the side door to a woodshed with a tarp that was extended out from the roof on slanted poles. The elderly black man we had interviewed earlier in the week was heaving two vinyl sacks of cans into the shed. When he saw us, he took his stub of a pipe out of his shirt pocket and pared the charcoal out of the bowl with a penknife.
'My memory ain't no better than it was the other day. Must be age. Or maybe I don't take to rudeness,' he said. He pointed the stem of his pipe at Temple.
'I get the notion you don't like working here,' I said.
'The job's fine. What a lot of people do here ain't.'
I held the Polaroid of Darl Vanzandt in front of him. He dipped his pipe in a leather tobacco pouch and pressed the tobacco down into the bowl with the ball of his thumb.
'Is that the boy Roseanne Hazlitt slapped?' I said.
He struck a wood match and cupped it over his pipe, puffing smoke out into the rain. He tossed the match into a puddle and watched it go out.
'You a church man?' I said.
'My wife and me belong to a church in town. If that's what you're axing.'
'That girl didn't deserve to die the way she did,' I said.
He tapped his fingernail on the Polaroid.
'That ain't the one she slapped,' he said. His eyes lingered for a moment on mine, then looked out into the rain.
'But he was in the crowd?' I asked.
'A boy like that don't have no use for anybody else 'cause he don't have no use for himself. What other kind of place he gonna go to? Come back tonight, he'll be here, insulting people, yelling on the dance flo', getting sick out in the weeds. He ain't hard to find.'
'Was he here the night she was attacked?' I said.
'Why you giving me this truck? You know the one question y'all ain't axed me? Who'd that po' girl leave with? It was Lucas Smothers. That's what I seen.' He pointed to the corner of his eye. 'Y'all always think you find the right nigger, you gonna get the answer you want.'
In the car, I felt Temple's eyes on the side of my face. She rubbed me on the arm with the back of her finger.
'Lucas didn't do it, Billy Bob,' she said.