saw her again.
A month after Lucas was born she was electrocuted trying to fix the well pump that Vernon had repaired with adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet.
I wrapped my unfinished sandwich in wax paper and put it in the icebox. When I turned around, L.Q. Navarro was leaning against the back doorjamb, his arms folded across his chest. His Stetson was the color of ash, his eyes as lustrous as obsidian.
'How's it hangin, L.Q.?' I said.
'This weather's a pistol. It don't get any better.'
'You're not going to try to mess me up today, are you?'
'I wouldn't dream of it, Billy Bob.'
He slipped the scarlet rose from the top buttonhole of his shirt and rolled it by the stem between his fingers. Where the rose had been was a hole that glowed with a bloodred light, like a votive candle burning inside red glass.
'It was an accident,' I said.
'That's what I keep telling you. Get rid of this for me, will you?' He drew the rose across my palm. My fingers constricted as though the tendons had been severed by a barber's razor.
Ten minutes later I heard an automobile in front. I opened the door and looked down the flagstone walk that dissected the wall of poplars at the foot of the lawn, and saw the sheriff's deputy named Mary Beth Sweeney getting out of her cruiser. She fixed her campaign hat so that the leather cord drew tight against the back of her head, pushed her shirt down inside her gunbelt with her fingers, and walked toward me. She had a walk that my father would have referred to as a 'fine carriage', her shoulders erect, her chin lifted, her long legs slightly accentuating the movement of her hips.
'How you doin'?' I said.
'You going to use a PI in discovery?'
'Probably… You want to come inside?'
'Out here is good. At the river, night before last? The scene investigator picked up a vinyl bag-load of beer cans. They're not in the evidence locker.'
'Why are you telling me this?'
'That kid's going down on a bad bounce. I'm not buying into it.'
'You can lose your job for this.'
'Look, you know all these things. The victim's teeth were broken. Your man didn't have any cuts on his hands. There was no weapon. When we cuffed him, he was too drunk to stand up.'
'Criminal Investigation Division, huh?' I said.
'What about it?'
'Doing grunt work in a place like this… You must like the mild summers. In July we fry eggs on the sidewalks.'
'Use what I've told you, Mr Holland, or wear it in your hat,' she said.
She walked back to her cruiser, her attention already focused on a cardinal perched atop a rose trellis, her hat tipped forward on her curly head like a Marine Corps DI's.
* * *
chapter three
Before she became a private investigator, Temple Carrol had been a corrections officer at Angola penitentiary over in Louisiana, a patrolwoman with the Dallas police department, and a deputy sheriff in Fort Bend County. She lived with her invalid father only a mile down the road from me, and every morning, just at sunrise, she would jog past my house in her T-shirt and sweatpants, her chestnut hair piled on her head, the baby fat winking on her hips. She never broke her pace, never did less than five miles, and never stopped at intersections. Temple Carrol believed in straight lines.
Tuesday morning she tapped on the glass to my office door and then came inside without waiting. She wore a pair of sandals and blue jeans and a brown-cotton shirt stitched with flowers. She sat on the corner of my desk and pointed her finger at me.
'What did that deputy tell you?' she asked.
'They bagged a whole load of beer cans and whiskey bottles at the crime scene,' I answered.