'Can't we have dinner? Can't we spend some time together without talking about obligations to a government agency? You think you owe guys like Brian Wilcox?'
'This is pointless. Because you hung up your own career doesn't mean other-' She didn't finish. She put both her hands in her lap, then a moment later placed one hand on top of her shoulder bag.
I opened the refrigerator door to take out the iced tea pitcher again. Then closed it and stood stupidly in the center of the room, all of the wrong words already forming in my throat.
'An English writer, what's his name, E. M. Forster, once said if he had to choose between his country and his friend, he hoped he'd have the courage to choose his friend,' I said.
'I guess I missed that in my English lit survey course,' she said, rising from her chair. 'Can I use your phone to call a cab? I should have asked him to wait.'
'I apologize. Don't leave like this.'
She shook her head, then walked into the library and used the telephone. I stood in her way when she tried to walk down the hall to the front door.
'You see yourself as a failure. You put yourself through law school. You were a Texas Ranger and an AUSA. You can be a lawman again, anytime you want,' she said.
'Then stay. I'll cancel the cab.'
I put my hand on her arm. I saw the pause in her eyes, the antithetical thoughts she couldn't resolve, the pulse in her neck.
'I'd better go. I'll call later,' she said.
'Mary Beth-'
Then she was out the door, her cheeks glazed with color, her hand feeling behind her for the door handle so she would not have to look back at my face.
But by Monday morning there was no call. Instead, a dinged gas-guzzler stopped out front of my office and a woman in a platinum wig and shades and a flowered sundress got out and looked in both directions, as though by habit, then entered the downstairs foyer.
A minute later my secretary buzzed me.
'A Ms Florence LaVey. No appointment,' she said.
'Who is she?'
'She said you'd know who she was.'
'Nope. But send her in.'
The inner door opened and the woman in the platinum wig stood framed in the doorway, her shades dripping from her fingers, her face expectant, as though at any moment I would recognize her relationship to my life.
'Can I help you?' I asked. Then I noticed that one of her eyes was brown, the other blue.
'The name doesn't turn on your burner, huh? San Antonio? The White Camellia Bar?'
'Maybe I'm a little slow this morning.'
'I know what you mean. I always get boiled on Sunday nights myself. I think it has something to do with being raised Pentecostal… Let me try again… A nasty little fuck by the name of Darl Vanzandt?'
'You're the lady he beat up. You're a waitress?'
'A hostess, honey.' She winked and sat down and crossed her legs. She opened a compact and looked at herself. 'I'd like to slip some pieces of bamboo deep under his fingernails.'
'His father says you and a pimp tried to roll him.'
She wet the ball of one finger and wiped at something on her chin and clicked the compact shut.
'His old man paid me ten thousand dollars so he and his son could tell whatever lies they wanted to. You interested in what really happened?'
'It's not of much value if you took money to drop the charges.'
'I'm not talking about what that little shit did to me. I read about that girl in the paper when she got beaten to death. But I didn't make any connections. Then last night him and this ex-convict named Moon come to this new bar I'm working in. Fart Breath starts talking about a trial, about this girl got gang-raped and her head bashed in, about how some lawyer is trying to make him take somebody else's fall. I'm standing behind the bar. I keep waiting for him to catch on who I am. Forget it.'
'Yes?'
'Get the girl dug up. See if she wasn't stoned-out on roofies.'
'We're talking about Ro-'
'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.'
He went into a small rest room and urinated into the bowl with the door open.
'You got Moon made for the sheriff's murder, huh?' he said.
'That'd be my bet.'
He washed his hands, combed his hair in the mirror, and came back out. 'Since nobody else has figured that out, what gives you this special insight?' he said.