'No.'
'He's into something, it's got to do with the Vanzandt family. Anyway, we've got to kick him loose in another hour. So suit yourself.'
The previous night, Garland T. Moon had showed up first at Shorty's, then at the drive-in restaurant north of town, dressed in plastic cowboy boots, white pleated slacks, a form-fitting sleeveless undershirt, costume jewelry on his hands and wrists and neck. He wandered among the cars in the parking lot, gregarious, avuncular, a paper shell of french fries in one hand, a frosted Coke in the other. He worked his way into groups of teenagers, as t
hough he were an old friend, and told obscene jokes that made their faces go slack with disgust.
Then Bunny Vogel's '55 Chevy, with a girl in the front passenger seat, and Darl Vanzandt and another girl in back, cruised the lines of parked cars and backed into an empty space twenty feet from Moon.
He walked to their car, bent down grinning into the windows, his face lighted with familiarity.
'Who's that in there?' he said.
Inside the car, they looked at one another.
'How about we go for some beers? Maybe I score a little muta?' he said.
'We don't know you, man,' Darl said.
'You kids got a look in your eyes tells me y'all don't care y'all end up in the gutter or not… I'm a student of people. I want to know where that look comes from. Let's make it scrambled eggs at my place.'
'I just washed my car. Get your fucking armpits off the window,' Bunny said.
A few minutes later every car in the drive-in had burned rubber out onto the highway and left Garland T. Moon standing alone, with his french fries and frosted Coke, amid the litter in the parking lot.
The next day Jack Vanzandt was among a foursome on the ninth green at the country club when a man in a cream-colored suit, a Hawaiian shirt printed with flowers that could have been shotgun wounds, and brand-new white K-Mart tennis shoes with the word JOX emblazoned across the tops, strolled up from the edge of the water trap, his wisps of red hair oiled on his scalp, and said, 'Excuse me, sir, I'd like to talk with you over at the Shake 'n' Dog about a mutual interest we got… Say, this is a right nice golf range, ain't it? I been thinking about getting a membership myself.'
Garland T. Moon was in the holding cage on the first floor, by the elevator shaft that led up to the jail. He had stripped off his coat and shirt, and was standing barechested in his slacks and JOX running shoes, his hands hooked like claws in the wire mesh.
'What kind of bullshit are you up to, Moon?' I said.
'I got 'em by the short hairs.'
'Oh?'
'That little puke Darl Vanzandt done Jimmy Cole, thinks he's some kind of Satanist? I got news for y'all, there's people that's the real thing, that's made different in the womb, it's in the Bible and you can check it out. You getting my drift, boy?'
'Why'd you want to see me?'
'Tell his father I want a hunnerd-thousand dollars.'
'Tell him yourself.'
'Don't walk away from me… You gonna do what I tell you whether you like it or not. I can give testimony I heard Lucas Smothers confess to raping and killing that girl in the picnic ground.'
'Have you been in a mental asylum?'
'Where I been is in this tub of nigger bathwater when I was fifteen years old.' His mouth puckered into a peculiar grin, red and glistening, flanged with small teeth.
'It's the town, isn't it, not me or Lucas or some peckerwoods who worked you over with a cattle prod,' I said.
'You know the old county prison north of the drive-in restaurant? Forty-one years ago two gunbulls put me over an oil drum every Sunday morning and took turns. Tore my insides out and laughed while they done it… Y'all gonna get rid of me the day you learn how to scrub the stink out of your own shit.'
I turned and walked back toward the entrance.
'You won't pick up a gun 'cause you killed your best friend! I got the Indian sign on you, boy!' he called at my back.
Marvin Pomroy waited for me outside. He was a Little League coach, and because it was Saturday he wore a pair of seersucker slacks and a washed-out golf shirt without a coat. But, as always, not a hair was out of place on his head, and his face had the serenity of a thoughtful Puritan who viewed the failure of the world through Plexiglas.