'My response to you is simple. The sonofabitch told you it is a goddamn liar. But—' He picked up a pencil stub in his huge hand and started writing on a legal pad. 'I'll make a note to myself and get back to you. How's that?'
'I want my client moved.'
'Why's that?'
'Harley Sweet makes nighttime visits to some of the cells. I don't want my client involved as a witness in any other kind of court proceeding.'
He leaned back in his swivel chair, the ends of the pencil stub crimped in the fingers of each hand.
'You telling me Harley's abusing a prisoner?' he asked.
'In my view, he's a sick man.'
He looked at me hard for a moment, then burst out laughing. 'Hell, he's got to do something, son. I cain't have the whole goddamn county on welfare.'
'I'll see you, sheriff.'
'Don't get your tallywhacker out of joint. I'll move the boy and I'll talk to Harley. Go get laid or develop a sense of humor. I swear you depress the hell out of me every time you come in here.'
That evening my investigator, Temple Carrol, and I drove out to Shorty's on the river. The parking lot was filled with rusted gas-guzzlers, customized hot rods like kids built in the 1950s, chopped-down motorcycles, gleaming new convertibles, vans with bubble windows, and pickup trucks scrolled with chrome.
The interior was deafening. From the screen porches and elevated bandstand to the dance floor and the long, railed bar, the faces of the patrons were rippled with neon, their voices hoarse with their own conversation, their eyes lighted like people who had survived a highway catastrophe and knew they were eternal. When people went to Shorty's, they went to score—booze, barbecue, homegrown reefer, crystal meth, a stomp-ass brawl out in the trees, or the horizontal bop in the backseat—and they came from every background to do it: ranchers, sawmill workers, oil field roughnecks, businessmen, ex-cons, dope mules, college kids, blue-collar housewives dumping their husbands, pipeliners, hillbilly musicians, pool hustlers, steroid freaks with butchwax in their hair, and biker girls in black leather whose purple makeup bloomed like a death wish on their cheeks.
But the revelers were two nights' distance from the rape and murder of a girl in an abandoned picnic ground down the road, and their unfocused smiles never left their faces at the mention of her name.
Temple and I finally gave it up and walked back outside into the coolness of the evening. Far in the distance, the green land seemed to cup and flow off the earth's edge into an arroyo lighted by the sun's last dying spark.
'Billy Bob, if anybody could help out, it'd be the guys in the band,' she said.
'So?'
'They turn to stone.' She averted her eyes. 'The girl came here alone. She left with Lucas. They were both drunk. We're going to have to go at it from another angle.'
'He's a gentle boy, Temple. He didn't do this.'
'You know what a state psychologist is going to say on the stand? About a boy who was controlled and abused all his life by a father like Vernon Smothers?'
An elderly black man with a thin white mustache and a stub of pipe between his teeth was spearing trash amidst the chopped-down motorcycles with a stick that had a nail on the end. He pulled each piece of trash off the nail and stuck it in a cloth bag that hung from his shoulder.
'I'll buy you a Mexican dinner,' I said to Temple.
'I think I'll just go home and take a shower. I feel like somebody rubbed nicotine in my hair.'.
I backed the Avalon around and started to pull out of the parking lot. I saw her eyes watching the black man, a tooth working on the corner of her lip.
'You didn't interview him?' I said.
'No, he wasn't here before.'
I stopped the car, and we both got out and walked over to him. He kept at his work and paid little attention to us. Temple held out a photo she had gotten from the dead girl's high school.
'Have you seen this girl before, sir?' she asked.
He took the photo from her and looked at it briefly, then handed it back.
'Yeah, I seen her. She the one killed up the road,' he said.
'Did you know her?' I asked.