'You got it. Rohypnol. That's what the Vanzandt kid uses. He picks up a girl and dumps it in her drink so he can do anything he wants with her.' She fitted her glasses on, then removed them again. 'I wish I'd sent him to the Ellis Unit at Huntsville. The colored boys always appreciate new Ivory soap when they come out of the field.'
'I've seen the autopsy. She was full of booze but no dope.'
She brushed a long red thumbnail back and forth across a callus. 'He sat on my chest and spit in my face. He broke both my lips. I told this to his old man. He goes, "Ten thousand is my limit."'
'The Vanzandts have their own way of doing things,' I said, my attention starting to wander.
She got up to leave.
'Forget about the dope. Either that kid did her, or y'all got real bad luck.'
'What do you mean?'
'Two like him in one town? This might be a shithole, honey, but it doesn't deserve that,' she said.
Just before lunch, the lady in charge of payroll at my father's old pipeline company called from Houston.
'We didn't contract any jobs around Waco during the late Depression or the war years. But of course that doesn't mean in itself your father wasn't there,' she said.
'Well, what you've found is still helpful,' I said.
'Wait a minute. I did some other checking. I don't know if it will be useful to you or not.'
'Yeah, please, go ahead.'
'Your father worked steadily for us in east Texas from 1939 to 1942. Then evidently he was drafted into the army. I don't know how it would have been possible for him to have worked for another company around Waco at the same time. Does this help you out?'
'I can't tell you how much.' I thanked her again and was just about to hang up. Then I said, 'Just out of curiosity, would the "search" key on your computer kick up the name of a man named Garland T. Moon?'
'Hold on. I'll see. When did he work for us?'
'During the mid-1950s.'
I heard her fingers clicking on the keyboard of a computer, then she scraped the phone up off the table.
'Yes, we have a record of a G. T. Moon. But not during the 1950s. He was a hot-pass welder on a natural gas line down at Matagorda Bay in 1965. Is that the same man?… Hello?'
I don't remember if I answered her or not. I recall replacing the receiver in the cradle, the residue of moisture and oil that my palm print left on the plastic, the skin tightening in my face.
My father had been blown out of a hellhole while mending a leak on a pipe joint at Matagorda Bay in 1965.
* * *
chapter twenty-seven
I walked across the street to the one-story sandstone building, which was now the office of the new sheriff, Hugo Roberts. He sat with one half-topped boot propped on his desk, the air around him layered with cigarette smoke.
'You want Garland T. Moon's file? Marvin Pomroy don't have it?' he asked.
'It's gone back into Records.'
'What d' you want it for?'
'Idle curiosity. Since he probably killed your predecessor with an ax, I thought you might be interested in it, too.'
He dropped his foot to the floor.
'Damn, Billy Bob, every time I talk with you I feel like a bird dog sticking his nose down a porcupine hole.' He picked up his phone and punched an extension. 'Tell Cleo to stop playing with hisself and to bring Garland Moon's sheet to my office,' he said. He put the phone back down and smiled. 'Hang on, I got to take a whiz.'