BBH01 - Cimarron Rose Read Online Free PDF

I said.
    'You violated a confidence, Mr Holland.'
    'I didn't,' I said.
    'Yeah? I think it's Bubba and Bubba lighting each other's
cigars.'
    'Who are you?' I said.
    She fitted her hat on her head and let the screen slam behind
her.
    I followed her to her cruiser.
    'You're wrong about this,' I said.
    I watched her cruiser spin gravel onto the county road and
disappear over a rise between two pastures filled with red Angus.
     
    My law office was above the old bank
on the corner of the town
square. From my window I could see the iron tethering rings that bled
rust out of the old elevated sidewalks, the hardware and feed stores
that had gone broke, the tiny neon-scrolled Rialto theater that still
showed first-run movies, the yellow tip of a Spanish-American War
artillery piece under the live oaks on the courthouse lawn, the
Roman-numeraled clock perched atop the third floor, where Lucas
Smothers waited in a cell with a sociopath behind the wall on each side
of him.
    I sat at my desk with a cup of coffee and stared at the glass
case on the wall where I had mounted Great-grandpa Sam's Navy Colt .36
caliber revolvers and his octagon-barrel Winchester '73 lever-action
rifle on a field of blue felt. I picked up the telephone and punched in
the sheriff's office extension.
    'My client hasn't been moved,' I said.
    'Talk to Harley.'
    'Harley's a sadistic moron.'
    'You're starting to try my patience, Billy Bob.'
    'Tell your scene investigator I'm going to fry his ass.'
    'The missing beer cans or whatever?'
    'That's right.'
    'What would they prove, that a lot of people get drunk and
diddle each other in that picnic ground?… Go to a head doctor
while you still got time, son. I'm worried about you.'
     
    I drove out to the clapboard,
tin-roofed home of the victim,
Roseanne Hazlitt. The aunt was a frail, wizened woman who snapped the
screen latch in place as I stepped up on her tiny gallery. Behind her,
the television set was tuned to a talk show on which people shouted and
jeered at one another. An ironing board on a short stand was elevated
in front of the couch. Through the screen I smelled an odor on her like
camphor and dried flowers and sweat baked into her clothes by the heat
of her work.
    'You asking me to hep set that boy loose?' she said.
    'No, ma'am. I just wondered if Roseanne had other friends she
might have met sometimes at Shorty's.'
    'Like who?'
    'Like one she had reason to slap the daylights out of.'
    'She never hurt nobody in her life. It was them hurt her.'
    'May I come in?'
    'No.'
    'Who's
them
, Ms Hazlitt?'
    'Any of them that gets the scent of it, like a bunch of dogs
sniffing around a brooder house. Now, you get off my gallery, and you
tell that Smothers boy he might fool y'all, he don't fool me.'
    'You know Lucas?'
     
    I drove back to Deaf Smith, parked my
Avalon by the office,
and walked across the street to the courthouse. I opened Harley Sweet's
door without knocking.
    'I want to see Lucas in private, in an interview room, and I
don't want anybody disturbing me while I talk to him,' I said.
    'I wouldn't have it no other way, Billy Bob.' He leaned back
in his swivel chair, his jaw resting on his fingers, a shadow of a
smile on his mouth.
    Upstairs, inside the jail, the turnkey unlocked Lucas's cell.
The man with the misshaped head and pot stomach in the cell to the
right, whose name was Jimmy Cole, walked up and down, tapping his fists
one on top of the other, oblivious to our presence. The man on the
left, Garland T. Moon, sat naked on his bunk. He had been exercising,
and he wiped the sweat off his stomach with a towel and grinned at me.
His shrunken, receded left eye glistened with a rheumy, mirthful light.
    The turnkey walked Lucas and me down a short hallway to a
small windowless room, with a wood table and two wood chairs and a
urine-streaked grated drain in the concrete floor.
    Lucas sat down, one hand clenched on his wrist. He watched my
face, then licked his lips.
    'What's wrong, Mr Holland?'
    'You led me to