BBH01 - Cimarron Rose Read Free

have a bruise on him.'
    'You see the medical report on her genitalia? Or maybe that's
just Lucas's idea of rough sex… You want to talk about
weapons? How about if he beat her face on the side of the truck?'
    'You have evidence of that?'
    'It poured down Saturday night. The whole crime scene was
washed clean.'
    'Pretty convenient, Marvin.'
    'No, pretty sickening. And the charge isn't assault and
battery. Where have you been this morning?'
    I stared into the righteous light in his eyes and knew, with a
sinking of the heart, what was coming next.
    'She died an hour ago. The doc says it was probably a brain
hemorrhage. You want to plea out, give me a call. He's not going to do
the big sleep, but I guarantee you he'll get to be an expert at picking
state cotton,' he said.
     
    Because Lucas was being arraigned on a
Monday morning, he was
brought to court on the same wrist chain as the collection of DWIs,
wife beaters, and barroom brawlers who had been in the drunk tank over
the weekend. Each Monday morning they would ride down to the first
floor in an elevator that resembled a packed zoo cage and, in stumbling
peckerwood or black or Mexican accents, offer their explanations for
the mercurial behavior that seemed to affect their lives like a
windstorm blowing arbitrarily through a deserted house.
    Normally the weekend miscreants waved at their friends in the
courtroom or punched one another in the ribs and snickered while one of
their members tried to talk his bail down. But not today. When they sat
in the row of chairs at the front of the court and the bailiff unlocked
their wrists and dropped the chain to the wood floor, they rounded
their shoulders and looked at their shoes or moved a chair space away
from Lucas, as though eye contact or proximity to him would stain them
with a level of guilt that was not theirs.
    I stood next to him when it was his turn to rise and face the
court. His father had brought him a clean white shirt and flowered tie
and pair of starched khakis, but he was unshaved and his wavy hair was
uncut and wet and combed straight back on his collar, so that he looked
like a 1950s hood rather an uneducated rural kid whose father had
belittled him since he was a child.
    Marvin, the prosecutor, asked that Lucas's bail be set at
$200,000.
    I heard Lucas's breath catch in his throat. I touched the back
of his wrist with mine.
    'Your Honor, my client is just nineteen and has very little in
the way of resources. He has no felony arrests of any kind. He's lived
his whole life in this county. The bail request is not only
unreasonable, it's deliberately punitive. The real problem is, Marvin
doesn't have a case and he knows it.'
    The judge's glasses were orbs of light and the lines in his
face seemed gathered around his mouth like crinkles in
papier-mâché.
'"Punitive" is it? Tell that to the family of the dead girl. I also
love your first-name familiarity. There is nothing I find more
heartwarming than to feel I'm involved in a court proceeding that might
be conducted by Lum and Abner. Bail is set at
one-hundred-fifty-thousand dollars. Count yourself fortunate,
counselor,' he said, and clicked his gavel on a small wood block.
    On the way out of the courtroom Vernon Smothers's gnarled hand
clenched on my forearm. His gray eyes were jittering with anger.
    'Everything you touch turns to shit, Billy Bob,' he said.
    'Go home, Vernon,' I replied.
    'I don't want my boy locked up with low-rent nigras. Get him
in a special cell or something.'
    'Don't go home. Find a wastebasket and stand in it, Vernon,' I
said.
    I rode up in the elevator with Lucas and a deputy. Lucas's
lower body was draped in a clinking net of waist and leg chains. The
deputy slid back the wire-mesh door on the elevator, then used a key to
unlock a second, barred door that swung out onto the third floor. We
walked under a row of electric lights with wire baskets over the bulbs,
our footsteps echoing off the sandstone walls, past a series of cells
with solid