She stepped inside and took off her campaign hat. She pushed a curl off her forehead.
'This won't take long,' she said.
'Excuse me?'
'You jammed me up with the sheriff.'
'About the missing evidence?' 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?'