'Did Roseanne once work in the same church store you do, Darl?'
I saw a thought, like a yellow-green insect, catch in his eye. Then I realized his distraction had nothing to do with my question. He was staring at a spectator in the back of the courtroom. The spectator, Felix Ringo, sat by the aisle with his tropical hat on his knee, one elbow propped on the chair arm, three fingers resting across his mouth.
'What's that got to do with anything?' Darl asked.
'Answer the
question,' the judge said.
'Yeah, she worked there,' Darl said.
'Who got her the job?' I asked.
'My parents did. They felt sorry for her 'cause she had a crummy life.'
'How'd your parents know Roseanne Hazlitt, Darl?'
'Bunny brought her over. You saying I was mixed up with her? I wouldn't touch her. It was probably like the Houston Ship Channel down there.'
He leaned forward mischievously, his eyes bright under his blond brows, as though in leaning closer to his friends, whose faces were lit with the same mocking grin as his, he shut out the rest of the courtroom.
'Did you and your friends dope Lucas Smothers and strip off his clothes and pour a bucket of feces on him at the country club? Did you vandalize his house? Did you try to threaten me at my home? Did you murder an indigent man, Darl?'
'Mr Holland, you're way beyond anything I'll allow,' the judge said.
'Withdrawn,' I said.
Darl got down from the stand, his face stupefied, his mouth round and wordless, his teeth exposed like those of a hungry fish.
At noon Marvin Pomroy caught me in the corridor and asked me into his office. He sat down behind his desk, took his glasses off, and rubbed one eyebrow with the back of his wrist.
'I'm not comfortable with some stuff that's going on here,' he said.
'Gee, Marvin, sorry to hear that,' I said.
'I checked into this threat Moon supposedly made against Bunny Vogel and his father. But there's no handle on it… He walked into their house without knocking.'
'So why tell me about it?'
He picked up a sheet of pink carbon paper from his desk blotter.
'That gal down the road from you, Wilma Flores, the mother of the little boy who's always fishing in your tank?' he said.
'Pete's mother.'
'Yeah, that his name, Pete. She made a 911 at five this morning. She was showering to go to work. She went to wipe off the bathroom window to see if it was still raining outside. Six inches from her face is a guy with tufts of red hair slicked down on his head and blue eyes like she's never seen in a human being before.'
I felt a tingling, a deadness, in my hands that made me open and close my palms.
'The deputy put it down as a Peeping Tom incident. Nothing would have come of it, except I heard him talking about it when I was in the bullpen this morning. I made him go back out to the house with mug shots of Garland Moon and five other of our graduates. The deputy said she took one look at Moon's photo and wouldn't even touch it with her finger when she identified him,' Marvin said.
'Where's Pete now?'
'At school. I'll put a deputy at their house this afternoon.'
'Your deputies are worthless. Did you pick up Moon?'
'He has two witnesses who say he was eating breakfast in a diner at five A.M.'