'My client hasn't been moved,' I said.
'Talk to Harley.'
'Harley's a sadistic moron.'
'You're starting to try my patience, Billy Bob.'
'Tell your scene investigator I'm going to fry his ass.'
'The missing beer cans or whatever?'
'That's right.'
'What would they prove, that a lot of people get drunk and diddle each other in that picnic ground?… Go to a head doctor while you still got time, son. I'm worried about you.'
I drove out to the clapboard, tin-roofed home of the victim, Roseanne Hazlitt. The aunt was a frail, wizened woman who snapped the screen latch in place as I stepped up on her tiny gallery. Behind her, the television set was tuned to a talk show on which people shouted and jeered at one another. An ironing board on a short stand was elevated in front of the couch. Through the screen I smelled an odor on her like camphor and dried flowers and sweat baked into her clothes by the heat of her work.
'You asking me to hep set that boy loose?' she said.
'No, ma'am. I just wondered if Roseanne had other friends she might have met sometimes at Shorty's.'
'Like who?'
'Like one she had reason to slap the daylights out of.'
'She never hurt nobody in her life. It was them hurt her.'
'May I come in?'
'No.'
'Who's them, Ms Hazlitt?'
'Any of them that gets the scent of it, like a bunch of dogs sniffing around a brooder house. Now, you get off my gallery, and you tell that Smothers boy he might fool y'all, he don't fool me.'
'You know Lucas?'
I drove back to Deaf Smith, parked my Avalon by the office, and walked across the street to the courthouse. I opened Harley Sweet's door without knocking.
'I want to see Lucas in private, in an interview room, and I don't want anybody disturbing me while I talk to him,' I said.
'I wouldn't have it no other way, Billy Bob.' He leaned back in his swivel chair, his jaw resting on his fingers, a shadow of a smile on his mouth.
Upstairs, inside the jail, the turnkey unlocked Lucas's cell. The man with the misshaped head and pot stomach in the cell to the right, whose name was Jimmy Cole, walked up and down, tapping his fists one on top of the other, oblivious to our presence. The man on the left, Garland T. Moon, sat naked on his bunk. He had been exercising, and he wiped the sweat off his stomach with a towel and grinned at me. His shrunken, receded left eye glistened with a rheumy, mirthful light.
The turnkey walked Lucas and me down a short hallway to a small windowless room, with a wood table and two wood chairs and a urine-streaked grated drain in the concrete floor.
Lucas sat down, one hand clenched on his wrist. He watched my face, then licked his lips.
'What's wrong, Mr Holland?'
'You led me to believe you didn't know Roseanne Hazlitt outside of Shorty's.'
'I didn't know her real good, that's all.'
'You're lying.'
'I drove her home a couple of times after Shorty's closed. We didn't go out reg'lar or nothing.'
'No, all you did was get in her pants.'
He swallowed dryly. There were discolorations in his cheeks, like small pieces of melting ice.
'You want to spend the rest of your life in Huntsville? You keep lying to me, and Marvin Pomroy is going to grind you into sausage… What are you hiding, Lucas?'
He stared fixedly at his hands, but his eyes seemed to be looking over a cliff into a canyon that had no bottom.
'She said she might be pregnant.'
'She wanted you to marry her?' I asked.
'No, sir. She said she was gonna fix some guy good. She said, "I'm gonna show him up for what he is. People around here gonna be real surprised. I bet I can get my story on TV and make this whole town look like two cents."'
'Why didn't you tell me this?'
'Cause maybe that baby's mine. Maybe y'all would think I had reason to kill her 'cause I didn't want it.' He breathed through his nose and dug at a callus with his thumbnail, a hard light in his eyes.
'I've seen the autopsy, Lucas. She wasn't pregnant.'
'Then why-'
'She was probably late.'
He dropped his hands in his lap, his face empty, like someone whose head is filled with white noise.
'I got to get away from them two back at the cells,' he said.
'Don't pay attention to them.'
'They talk in the dark when nobody else ain't around… Last night Garland told Jimmy Cole, that's the one with the tattoos all over him, Garland says to him, "Damn if that old woman didn't put me in mind of my mother. She was trussed up like a little bird behind the counter there, peeping up at me, scared to death, I declare she looked so pitiful she made me hurt. So I walked back to her and said, 'Lady, a good woman like you ain't deserving of the evil a man like me brings into the world,' and I put both my hands on her face and she wet her panties and died right there."
'Mr Holland, they laughed so hard I had to wrap the mattress around my head to keep the sound out… Mr Holland?'
Ten minutes later I tapped on the frosted glass of Marvin Pomroy's office door.
'How bad you want to zip up the package on Garland T. Moon?' I said.
'What have you got?' Marvin said.
'Lucas can put a nail gun in Moon's mouth.'
Marvin made an indifferent face. 'So go on and tell me,' he said.
'What's on the table?'
'It's not a seller's market, Billy Bob. I've got a witness who saw Moon go into the store.'
'Forget your witness. I've got the confession.'
'You want to plea out?'
'Nope.'
'If it's what you say, maybe his bail can get cut in half… Maybe we can go south one bump on the charge.'
'Manslaughter, no rape.'
'Manslaughter, sexual battery.'
'Not good enough.'
Marvin scratched the back of his head.
'If it goes to sentencing, I won't object to an argument for his youth and lack of criminal history,' he said.
He listened quietly while I repeated the story just told me by Lucas Smothers, his red suspenders notched into his shoulders. He removed his steel-rimmed glasses and polished them with a Kleenex.
'She suffocated. She didn't die of fright,' he said.
'He says he put his hands on her face. Same thing. Did she wet her underwear?'
'Yep.'
'You got him, then,' I said.
'Maybe.'
'Nice doing business with you, Marvin.' At the door I turned around. 'You set this up, didn't you?' I said.
'Me? I'm just not that smart, Billy Bob. But I appreciate your thinking so.'
That evening I worked late in my office. It was Easter break, when college kids came home to Deaf Smith and re-created their high school rituals as though indicating to the classes behind them they would never completely relinquish the joys of their youth. My windows were open and I could see the pale luminous face of the clock on the courthouse roof and the oaks ruffling in the wind and the kids dragging Main from the rich neighborhoods out east all the way to the dirt side streets of the Mexican and black district on the far end of town.
The sun was almost down and the square seemed filled with a soft blue glow, the air scented with flowers and the distant smell of watermelons in the fields. Down below, the procession of customized cars and pickups and vans snaked around the square, the lacquered paint jobs like glazed red and orange and purple candy, the deep-throated Hollywood mufflers rumbling off the pavement, the exposed chromed engines rippling with light. A beer can tinkled on a sidewalk; a stoned-out girl stood on the leather backseat of a convertible, undulating in a skin-tight white dress that she had pulled above her nylons.
Lucas's bail hearing was scheduled for nine in the morning. For no reason I could quite explain I picked up the phone and called the jail.