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gone. Not that it really mattered. I signed on as a night school professor at Osceola Community College’s unaccredited law school. And I prospered, more or less, as a member of the defense bar, defending those I used to put behind bars, often, I regret to say, successfully.
    That was a more efficient way to get under the Worm’s skin.
    About J.J.
    He was someone who got where he was by playing the angles. When he worked for me in the Homicide Bureau, he had a reputation as an operator, a fixer, someone whose eye was always on the desired result. Where it remained when he took over from me. And as much as I dislike admitting it, he was also a very skillful attorney.
    It was a skill inherited from his father. Walter McClure had been crippled by polio when he was in grade school in the town of Hamlet, in Parker County, and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Hamlet was not named after the Dane, but took its name from its size, and as it grew larger saw no reason to change. This was a part of South Midland where few words were wasted. Towns and counties bore names like Adverse and Badland, and the place-names established without unnecessary explanation local attitudes toward outsiders who entered the city limits or crossed the county line. Walter McClure had gone to South Midland University, then to the university law school, where he was on the law review, and after his graduation, had turned down corporate practice with the larger firms in Kiowa and Capital City to be a country lawyer in Hamlet. Where, at the age of thirty, he was elected Parker County attorney.
    County attorney was a job Walter McClure said he loved, though it paid him only seventy-five hundred dollars a year (stretched out with some money from his wife, Emily, who was always referred to as a St. Louis girl, as if her Missouri genes explained the source of her dowry). The cases weren’t much of a challenge—repos, unpaid taxes, DWIs, domestic abuse, drunk and disorderly, hunting or fishing out of season, bigamy, incest, crimes against nature (farmers and sheep), indecent exposure, embezzlement, fraud, grand theft larceny, a litany from the low end of the civil and penal codes—but Walter treated every one as if it would ultimately end up being reviewed by the Supreme Court. He was always cheerful, never complained about his useless legs, and for seven consecutive two-year terms he was elected president of the state bar association. It was an unpaid job nobody really wanted, and by electing someone who was handicapped, the state bar bureaucrats could congratulate themselves on doing a noble deed for good old crippled Walter McClure, what a damn shame, he could’ve been one of the best. What they didn’t say was that having Walter on the case spared electing a Jew from Cap City or Kiowa. And I was never entirely sure that Walter disagreed with that assessment. He was, after all, from Parker County, which wasn’t all that crazy about Catholics either.
    To be honest, I could not stand Walter McClure. An unsentimental verdict about someone whose legs were wrapped in metal braces, and got a lot of unearned mileage out of it. I always had the sense that Walter was trying out for one of those “Most Unforgettable Characters I Ever Met” who used to turn up in the
Reader’s Digest
but hadn’t made the cut. He used to say he wanted to write a book about the life of a county attorney. And what was the most important thing he had learned as a county attorney?
    That there were three stages in a man’s life—birth, puberty, and adultery.
    You see what I mean.
    Walter and Emily had J.J., and then four years later, Emmett.
    Emmett drowned when he was three, in the pond beyond the McClures’ farmhouse in Parker County.
    Five months before J.J. and Poppy were married, Walter McClure steered his wheelchair into the barn and shot himself with a single-action Colt .45 he had inherited from his father, who had