Read Online BBH01 - Cimarron Rose by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online

chicken that had been cooked on a mesquite
fire. The river that flowed under the pilings of the club was dented
with raindrops, the trees along the bank smoky with mist. Downstream,
some boys were swinging out over the water on a rubber tire tied to a
rope, cannonballing into the current.
    I heard beer cans clattering outside the screen.
    'He's an old-timer, Temple. Let's try to keep him in
a better mood this time,' I said.
    'I'll just watch. Maybe I can learn how it's done,'
she said.
    We went out the side door to a woodshed with a tarp
that was extended out from the roof on slanted poles. The elderly black
man we had interviewed earlier in the week was heaving two vinyl sacks
of cans into the shed. When he saw us, he took his stub of a pipe out
of his shirt pocket and pared the charcoal out of the bowl with a
penknife.
    'My memory ain't no better than it was the other
day. Must be age. Or maybe I don't take to rudeness,' he said. He
pointed the stem of his pipe at Temple.
    'I get the notion you don't like working here,' I
said.
    'The job's fine. What a lot of people do here ain't.'
    I held the Polaroid of Darl Vanzandt in front of
him. He dipped his pipe in a leather tobacco pouch and pressed the
tobacco down into the bowl with the ball of his thumb.
    'Is that the boy Roseanne Hazlitt slapped?' I said.
    He struck a wood match and cupped it over his pipe,
puffing smoke out into the rain. He tossed the match into a puddle and
watched it go out.
    'You a church man?' I said.
    'My wife and me belong to a church in town. If
that's what you're axing.'
    'That girl didn't deserve to die the way she did,' I
said.
    He tapped his fingernail on the Polaroid.
    'That ain't the one she slapped,' he said. His eyes
lingered for a moment on mine, then looked out into the rain.
    'But he was in the crowd?' I asked.
    'A boy like that don't have no use for anybody else
'cause he don't have no use for himself. What other kind of place he
gonna go to? Come back tonight, he'll be here, insulting people,
yelling on the dance flo', getting sick out in the weeds. He ain't hard
to find.'
    'Was he here the night she was attacked?' I said.
    'Why you giving me this truck? You know the one
question y'all ain't axed me? Who'd that po' girl leave with? It was
Lucas Smothers. That's what I seen.' He pointed
to the corner of his eye. 'Y'all always think you find the right
nigger, you gonna get the answer you want.'
    In the car, I felt Temple's eyes on the side of my
face. She rubbed me on the arm with the back of her finger.
    'Lucas didn't do it, Billy Bob,' she said.
     
    On the way home, by chance and
accident, Temple and
I witnessed a peculiar event, one that would only add to the questions
for which I had no answer.
    It had stopped raining, but the sky was sealed with
clouds that were as black as gun cotton and mist floated off the river
and clung to the sides of the low hills along the two-lane road. A
quarter mile ahead of us, a flatbed truck with a welding machine
mounted behind the cab veered back and forth across the yellow stripe.
A sheriff's cruiser that had been parked under an overpass, the trunk
up to hide the emergency flasher on the roof, pulled the truck to the
side of the road and two uniformed deputies got out, slipping their
batons into the rings on their belts.
    It should have been an easy roadside DWI arrest. It
wasn't. The driver of the truck, his khakis and white T-shirt streaked
with grease, his face dilated and red with alcohol, fell from the cab
into the road, his hard hat rolling away like a tiddledywink. He got to
his feet, his ankles spread wide for balance, and started swinging, his
first blow snapping a deputy's jaw back against his shoulder.
    The other deputy whipped his baton across the tendon
behind the truck driver's knee and crumpled him to the asphalt.
    It should have been over. It wasn't. We had passed
the truck now, and the two deputies were into their own program.
    'Uh-oh,' Temple said.
    They lifted the drunk man by each