'I didn't make a deposit. It just showed up on my statement,' she said.
'It has nothing to do with your testimony today? Just coincidence?'
'I was UA-ed and I took a polygraph.'
'What you took is money.'
'What's-his-face over there, Lucas, looked like a corpse that fell out of an icebox. You don't like what I tell you, go play with your suspenders. Excuse me, I take that back. Go fuck yourself, you little twit.'
Set up and sandbagged, and I had walked right into it.
An hour later I drove Mary Beth to our small airport. The windows of my car were beaded with water, and lightning forked without sound into the hills.
'Don't feel bad,' she said.
'It was a slick ruse. Those two kids were telling the truth, but somebody gave them money and turned them into witnesses for the prosecution.'
'Felix Ringo and Jack Vanzandt sent them to you?'
'Let's talk about something else.'
'Sorry.'
There was nothing for it. Everything I said to her was wrong. We stood under a dripping shed and watched a two-engine plane taxi toward us, its propellers blowing water off the airstrip. I felt a sense of ending that I couldn't give words to.
'I didn't do you much good, did I?' she said.
'Sure you did.'
'I have to think over some things. I'll be better about calling this time,' she said.
Then a strange thing happened, as though I were an adolescent boy caught up in his sexual fantasies. I hugged her lightly around the shoulders, my cheek barely touching hers, but in my mind's eye I saw her undressed, smelled the heat in her skin, the perfume that rose from her breasts, felt her bare stomach press against my loins. It wasn't lust. It was an unrequited desire, like a flame sealed inside my skin, one that would not be relieved and that told me I was completely alone. For just a moment I understood why people drank and did violent things.
'So long,' she said.
'Good-bye, Mary Beth.'
'Watch your butt.'
'You bet.'
I watched her plane take off in the rain, its wings lifting steadily toward a patch of blue in the west. I got in my car and drove back to town. The hills were sodden and green under clouds that churned like curds from burning oil tanks.
L.Q. Navarro was waiting for me when I got home. He leaned his hands on the windowsill in the library and looked out at a cold band of light on the western horizon.
'It's been a mighty wet spring,' he said.
'I might have blown the trial today, L.Q.'
'You know what you got on your side? It's that boy's character. He's got sand. You know why?'
'Tell me.'
'He's your son.'
'You always looked after me, L.Q.'
'Know how I'd run it? Put that boy on the stand and let the jury see what he's made of.'