I found him at his job out at the skeet club. He could have been a Visigoth, with his grained, ruddy face, his long bronze-colored hair tangled on his shoulders, a deep pink scar, with stitch holes, along one jaw. Bunny was deferential and soft-spoken, even likable, but I always felt that behind his smile a clock was ticking as he waited for that moment when he would be free of older people and the sanction and approval they could arbitrarily withdraw if he displeased them.
Shotguns popped in the warm breeze behind him, and beyond the row of oblong green traps, clay pigeons exploded in puffs of colored smoke against the sky.
'I'd like to hep you, Mr Holland, but far as I know the only guy mixed up with Roseanne Hazlitt was ole Lucas. Sorry,' he said.
'Were you out at Shorty's the night she was attacked?' I asked.
'I might have been. But I didn't see her… Seen Lucas… That ain't no hep, though, is it?' He smiled boyishly and brushed at the grass with one shoe.
'You think Lucas could rape and kill a girl?'
'Lucas?' He thought about it. 'It's not like him. But a guy gets a snootful, who knows?'
'How you know he had a snootful, Bunny?'
He smiled with his eyes. 'I never saw him out there when he didn't.'
'See you around.'
'Yeah, anytime, Mr Holland. I hope it works out for Lucas.' He bit the corner of his lip philosophically.
On the way to my car I saw Emma Vanzandt walking toward me from a pavilion. She wore a pair of tailored brown riding jeans and lizard boots and a maroon silk shirt that filled with the wind.
'You're not going to say hello?' she asked.
'How you doin', Emma?'
'You've been busy. All Darl's friends wonder what you might be up to.'
'They haven't figured it out, huh?'
'Billy Bob,' she said, her voice climbing. 'Be a little kind. Darl's not a bad boy.'
'I didn't say he was.'
She looked back at the pavilion. 'Let's get in your car and I'll explain something… Darl suffers from—'
'Fetal alcohol syndrome. Jack told me about it.'
'I'd never heard of it before. But our last psychiatrist took one look at him and seemed to know everything about him… They've all got the same face. The eyes are set far apart, the upper lip is too close to the nose.' Then she looked at nothing and said, 'What a club to belong to,' and laughed, almost lewdly, as though giving vent to another person who lived inside her.
'His friends vandalized Lucas Smothers's house.'
'Oh, I don't believe that.'
'It's good to see you, Emma.'
'He wet his bed until he was fifteen. He's not capable of raping anybody. I don't think he's learned how to masturbate yet,' she said.
'Maybe he should start. He beat up a prostitute with his fists.'
'You should have gotten married, Billy Bob. Then you wouldn't be such a stick in the mud.'
'Really?'
She reached across the car seat and patted me on the wrist. 'Jack's sorry for speaking harshly to you. Come by and see us. We'll work all this out.'
'No, we won't,' I said.