Cypress Grove

Chapter Seventeen

Much prison conversation consists of homilies, catchphrases, familiar incantations passed back and forth without thought. Someone gave voice to one of them, others within hearing would nod, that was an entire conversation. A particular favorite was: You don’t use your time, it’ll sure use you.

From every indication Carl Hazelwood had been well used by time, long before he wound up pinned like a specimen moth to a carport wall.

I’d barely got back to the office from talking to Sarah, who’d been picked up by Adrienne after she put their exhausted father to bed, when Don Lee answered the phone and handed it over.

Val Bjorn jumped right in. “Hey, I have your man. Had to hold my head right, figure out which way to look. His fingerprints…” She trailed off. Because I’d not responded? “You had it already, didn’t you?”

“Just.”

“Day late and a dollar short.”

I filled her in on the Hazelwood family’s arrival. “Not that this in any way lessens my appreciation of your efforts, you know.”

“You have no idea how hard I humped to get this.”

“Maybe I can make it up to you.”

“How are they? The family. They have any idea what might have gone down?”

“Mostly they’re still trying to figure out what he was doing here.”

“Aren’t we all.” She paused to sip at something. “What’d you have in mind with that making-up thing?”

“Dinner, maybe? I’m open to suggestion.”

“You cook?”

“I buy.”

“That could be a problem ’round here.”

“So could my cooking.”

“Hmmm. Then maybe I should cook. Lesser of two evils. Not a lot lesser, I’ll admit.”

“Or we could throw that whole food business overboard-”

“Quick footwork there, Turner. Look out below!”

“-and just have a drink.”

“Done.”

“There has to be a bar somewhere around here. I’ll ask.”

“Don’t bother. I know just the place.”

“Have a date, do we?” Don Lee said when I hung up.

We spent the day updating files on the murder, sorting medical reports and bits of information that had come in by e-mail and fax, reading back through it all, sifting, sorting, making lists. Like much of life, a murder investigation consists mainly of plodding along, circling back and waiting, considerably more low cleric than high adventure. Don Lee brought the sheriff up to speed on our visitors. Bates had called in a couple of times, around noon and again at three or so when we’d gone down to the diner for coffee, to see how we were doing, then showed up to take over not long after, just before daughter June went off duty at the desk. Father and daughter hugged, Bates and Don Lee did a quick shift report, most of it already covered by phone, and Don Lee headed home. I stayed around a while to talk things over. Then the sheriff dropped me off for my rendezvous with Val.

Just the Place turned out to be not a description but a proper name. Surrounded by a gravel parking lot, it sat in a clearing on a blacktop road three or four miles out of town. Just the Place was what folks back home called a beer joint, and most of them would have tipped over stone dead rather than get caught near one. Beer joints were for drunks-dagos and winos, people in blue jeans or greasy work clothes who drank up paychecks, beat wives, let kids go hungry and wild.

The inside looked pretty much what the outside, and old prejudices, promised. Val was sitting at the bar with a beer at half mast.

“I was gonna be a lady and wait-”

“Must have been a struggle.’’

“-but then I figured, what the hell.”

“Objection sustained.”

She raised her bottle in agreement. Moments later I managed to extract one of my own from the bartender, a woman with a western shirt straining at the snaps and big hair of the kind one rarely sees outside Texas. I expanded on what I’d already passed along about Carl and the rest of the Hazelwood clan. Their identification of the body, what they’d told me of his background, what I’d learned about them. Val said we’d be getting initial results on the forensics kit first thing in the morning by fax once the medical officer had had a look and signed off on it. Don’t think it’s gonna help much, though. Got some blood types and so on for you, but it’s all generic.

Then she was telling me about a current case. She’d been in court from nine that morning till just before we met.

“Mostly I do family law. Almost a year ago, my client’s husband got upset because she’d gone out to dinner with an old friend from high school. He went into their daughter’s room, she was four at the time, and began beating her. The mother came home and found her there in the crib, eyes filmed over, slicks of mucus and blood on sheets printed with blue angels and pink rocking horses. The husband said he didn’t know anything about it, the kid was fine the last time he looked in. My client moved out immediately, of course. But the girl had sustained significant brain damage. She’s never recovered, she’ll never develop mentally, even as her body continues to grow. Medical bills and maintenance costs are staggering. The husband’s not paid a cent of child support.”

“So you’re going after him.”

“Hardly. I represent the mother, but we’re the defense. He’s petitioning for full custody.”

What could I say to that?

“No way he wants the child. Susie’s a symbol, a possession. Like a couch or a painting, the contents of a lockbox.”

“He has to hurt his wife once and for all, worse than ever before.”

Val nodded.

I became aware that for some time there’d been activity behind us, against the far wall. Now someone blew into a microphone and music started up. A simple riff on guitar, then a steel swelling behind, a long bass glide, drums. I turned on my bar stool, as did Val. We glanced at one another and moved to a table ringside.

“These guys are amazing,” she said. “Just wait.”

Interestingly, the band’s front man and singer was black-the first black face I remembered seeing since moving back here. Save Adrienne’s, of course, but she was an import. After a couple of Hank Williams songs and a creditable cover of “San Antonio Rose,” the band locked onto Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Gone So Long,” taking it down home the same way early Texas string and swing bands had liberated “Sittin’ on Top of the World” or “Milk Cow Blues,” making it their own.

Fine stuff, followed by more. All of it purest amalgam country, voice calling, guitar responding, steel and bass laying a foundation, cellar, stairs. Chunks of Appalachian ballads, Delta blues, early jazz and Hawaiian floating about in there like vegetables in a rich stew.

“I once fell in love with a man because he had nothing but George Jones tapes in his apartment,” Val said during an intermission.

“Is this something I need to know?”

“Think about it. It’s a better reason than most others. I figured any man that devoted to Jones had to have something to him. Your lover’s going to lose jobs, hair and interest in you, get fat, sit on the couch farting. Those tapes will still be there, still be the same, old George pouring his heart into even note. Always sounds like he’s wrestling himself, squeezing notes out past some kind of emotional or physical obstruction. His voice stumbles, crawls and soars, always somehow at the very edge of what a voice is, what a man can feel.” Dregs of a fourth beer went down her throat. She waved off another. “Sorry. I take this music seriously. Not many people do anymore. For a long time it was all that remained of our folk music. Now it’s gone, or almost. Become just another part of the commercial blur.”

By this time Eldon Brown, the band’s singer, who, as it turned out, Val knew, had joined us. He sat with thin legs crossed, sipping from a cup the size of a goldfish bowl. Tea with honey and lemon, he said. For all his verisimilitudinous vocal renditions, not a trace of South or hill country in his speaking voice. Hoboken, New Jersey, he said when I asked.

“Family moved north during the war, looking for work. I grew up on local soul and gospel radio and this monster country station over in Carlyle, Pennsylvania. Came back south on tour with an R amp;B band, as guitarist, nine years ago, one of those last-minute pickup things. Third, fourth week into it, we’re playing a bar in Clarksdale and the bass player takes after the singer with an oyster knife, to this day I don’t know why. Not much left of the band at that point, but I stayed on. Been working steady ever since. Speaking of which…”

He excused himself to take his place on the bandstand, kicking off with a no-holds-barred “Lovesick Blues,” yodels slapping at the room’s walls like a tide.

Val and I left around nine, picking our way out through packed bodies and a full parking lot. At her place we pulled cold cuts, cheese, pickles, olives and apples from the refrigerator and took them, with beers, out onto the front porch. It was a gorgeous, clear night, stars like spots of ice. Wind worked fingers in the trees. An owl crossed the moon.

“It’s good to have someone to talk to,” Val said. She popped a bite of bologna into her mouth. The half-pound in her refrigerator (folks around here would call it an icebox) had come off the store’s solid stick; we’d hacked it into cubes. “I’m not looking for anything more. I hope you know that.”

Nor was I.

“You miss it?” she said.

“Someone to talk to-or something more?”

“Both, I guess.” Her eyes met mine. “Either.”

“Strange thing is, I don’t. Not really.”

Neither of us spoke for a time.

“I had a partner, back when I was a cop. His wife left him, took the kid, his whole life fell apart. One day I said to him it had to be hard. He looked across at me there in the squad car. Scary thing’s how easy it is, he said.”

After a moment she said, “I understand,” and we sat silently in the wash of that amazing night, two people together alone under stars and pecan trees, personal histories tucked tight against our hearts as though to still or quieten them.