“You remind me of my sister,” I told her when she first brought it up. “Always going on about how when I was young I’d been a natural leader, and she wondered why that changed.”
“Did it?”
I shoveled about half a cup of salsa onto a chip and threw it back, washed it down with a long sip of Miller’s.
“What happened, I think, was we grew apart.”
“You and your sister?”
“Me and the other kids. We had everything in common at first. They weren’t a particularly vocal or imaginative lot, and I’d just step up there, speak for them, pull them together. But as time went on, as we became individuals, our interests diverged. They took to sports, which I couldn’t care about. I just never got it, you know? Still don’t. Then I gravitated to books-every bit as mysterious to them, or more so.”
Marsha reached over and got my beer, took a swig. Things liberated always taste better. “Just listen to yourself,” she said. “Exactly what I mean.”
Flagging down the waitress, I ordered another beer.
“Don’t suppose you want one?” I asked Marsha.
“Me? A beer? Why on earth would I?”
“Just as I thought.”
She forged ahead into enchiladas, refried beans and soggy pimiento-shot rice, bolstering same with occasional forksful from my plate, though it was identical with hers. Neither of us did well, finally, by the challenge. Fully half the food remained heaped on our plates when we were done, foil-wrapped tortillas untouched. I had another beer. We declined offers of take-home containers.
Out, then, into a typically fine southern evening, cicadae singing, moths beating at screens, quarter-moon above. My car waited. Beneath artificial lights its shiny, hard, blue-green body resembled nothing so much as the carapace of another insect.
“Randy doesn’t have much to look forward to, does he?”
“Not right now.”
“Without you, he’d have far less.” She laid her head back against the seat. “It’s so beautiful, you almost forget.”
Years later in similar circumstances, in what might have been the same night inhabited by the great-great-grandchildren of those same cicadae, Val Bjorn turned her head to me and said, “A real Hank Williams night.” As she hummed softly, the words came to me. A night so long… Time goes slowly by… His heart’s as lonesome as mine.
Chapter Seventeen
Much prison conversation consists of homilies, catchphrases, familiar incantations passed back and forth without thought. Someone gave voice to one of them, others within hearing would nod, that was an entire conversation. A particular favorite was: You don’t use your time, it’ll sure use you.
From every indication Carl Hazelwood had been well used by time, long before he wound up pinned like a specimen moth to a carport wall.
I’d barely got back to the office from talking to Sarah, who’d been picked up by Adrienne after she put their exhausted father to bed, when Don Lee answered the phone and handed it over.
Val Bjorn jumped right in. “Hey, I have your man. Had to hold my head right, figure out which way to look. His fingerprints…” She trailed off. Because I’d not responded? “You had it already, didn’t you?”
“Just.”
“Day late and a dollar short.”
I filled her in on the Hazelwood family’s arrival. “Not that this in any way lessens my appreciation of your efforts, you know.”
“You have no idea how hard I humped to get this.”
“Maybe I can make it up to you.”
“How are they? The family. They have any idea what might have gone down?”
“Mostly they’re still trying to figure out what he was doing here.”
“Aren’t we all.” She paused to sip at something. “What’d you have in mind with that making-up thing?”
“Dinner, maybe? I’m open to suggestion.”
“You cook?”
“I buy.”
“That could be a problem ’round here.”
“So could my cooking.”
“Hmmm. Then maybe I should cook. Lesser of two evils. Not a lot lesser, I’ll admit.”
“Or we could throw that whole food business overboard-”
“Quick footwork there, Turner. Look out below!”
“-and just have a drink.”
“Done.”
“There has to be a bar somewhere around here. I’ll ask.”
“Don’t bother. I know just the place.”
“Have a date, do we?” Don Lee said when I hung up.
We spent the day updating files on the murder, sorting medical reports and bits of information that had come in by e-mail and fax, reading back through it all, sifting, sorting, making lists. Like much of life, a murder investigation consists mainly of plodding along, circling back and waiting, considerably more low cleric than high adventure. Don Lee brought the sheriff up to speed on our visitors. Bates had called in a couple of times, around noon and again at three or so when we’d gone down to the diner for coffee, to see how we were doing, then showed up to take over not long after, just before daughter June went off duty at the desk. Father and daughter hugged, Bates and Don Lee did a quick shift report, most of it already covered by phone, and Don Lee headed home. I stayed around a while to talk things over. Then the sheriff dropped me off for my rendezvous with Val.
Just the Place turned out to be not a description but a proper name. Surrounded by a gravel parking lot, it sat in a clearing on a blacktop road three or four miles out of town. Just the Place was what folks back home called a beer joint, and most of them would have tipped over stone dead rather than get caught near one. Beer joints were for drunks-dagos and winos, people in blue jeans or greasy work clothes who drank up paychecks, beat wives, let kids go hungry and wild.
The inside looked pretty much what the outside, and old prejudices, promised. Val was sitting at the bar with a beer at half mast.
“I was gonna be a lady and wait-”
“Must have been a struggle.’’
“-but then I figured, what the hell.”
“Objection sustained.”
She raised her bottle in agreement. Moments later I managed to extract one of my own from the bartender, a woman with a western shirt straining at the snaps and big hair of the kind one rarely sees outside Texas. I expanded on what I’d already passed along about Carl and the rest of the Hazelwood clan. Their identification of the body, what they’d told me of his background, what I’d learned about them. Val said we’d be getting initial results on the forensics kit first thing in the morning by fax once the medical officer had had a look and signed off on it. Don’t think it’s gonna help much, though. Got some blood types and so on for you, but it’s all generic.
Then she was telling me about a current case. She’d been in court from nine that morning till just before we met.
“Mostly I do family law. Almost a year ago, my client’s husband got upset because she’d gone out to dinner with an old friend from high school. He went into their daughter’s room, she was four at the time, and began beating her. The mother came home and found her there in the crib, eyes filmed over, slicks of mucus and blood on sheets printed with blue angels and pink rocking horses. The husband said he didn’t know anything about it, the kid was fine the last time he looked in. My client moved out immediately, of course. But the girl had sustained significant brain damage. She’s never recovered, she’ll never develop mentally, even as her body continues to grow. Medical bills and maintenance costs are staggering. The husband’s not paid a cent of child support.”
“So you’re going after him.”
“Hardly. I represent the mother, but we’re the defense. He’s petitioning for full custody.”