CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The next morning Carla woke me up and then slipped out the door. I put on the coffee and called the dispatcher and told her to have Trina Newland brought down to the courthouse for interrogation as soon as breakfast was finished at the jail. I also called Hotchkiss and asked him if he could meet me at the office. He agreed and was already there when I arrived, installed in front of my desk with more of Maylene’s cookies and a big mug of coffee. I filled him in on what I had learned in the last two days.

“So you’re convinced that Arno didn’t do the Twiller killing?” he asked.

“Yeah, but so far you and Toby and Linda are the only people who know that, and I want you to keep quiet about it. There’s nothing to be gained by broadcasting it.”

“And you feel pretty strongly about the Kimball kid?”

“I sure do.”

“You’ve known him all his life, haven’t you?” he asked.

“Oh Lord, yes. This office has been handling him on minor stuff since he was in junior high school. Ditto for the city police.”

“Did he ever seem to fight against his worst impulses?”

“Never a time that I could see. It’s like he always knew he wanted to be an outlaw, and that’s all he ever studied.”

“I wish I knew what causes a person to be like him. All the textbooks say it’s environmental influences, abuse and so forth, but still I wonder.…”

“Well, in his case the textbooks are wrong,” I said. “There wasn’t any abuse. Scott’s parents were two of the finest people you’d ever want to meet.”

“Do you know if he had any record of torturing animals or anything like that when he was little?”

“Not for sure,” I said. “But I’ve heard stories. My niece is pretty close to his mother, and Willa has told her things about the kid that she doesn’t want to dwell on.”

“Whether he did the Twiller killing or not, he was up to something with Arno, and it had to be bad.”

There came a knock at the door. It was Billy Don and Linda with Trina Newland in tow. “Stick around,” I told Hotchkiss. “You might learn something.”

Linda ushered her in. The girl was already beginning to look institutionalized in her ill-fitting jailhouse coveralls, and the delousing shower had taken all the body out of her hair. I motioned for her to sit down, and then I let her wait while I finished reading my morning’s report. Hotchkiss sat silently and munched his cookies and sipped his coffee. I tossed the report on my desk and looked her over good. I could tell that she was humbled but not broken. But she was close.

“You don’t look like you got much sleep,” I said.

“I didn’t. There was this black lesbo that was after me all night long.”

“Well, in that case you should have complained to the jailers.”

“Yeah, sure. I know what happens to people who snitch in jail.”

I shrugged. “Your choice. We can’t fix problems we don’t know about.”

“What did you bring me down here for?”

“I wanted to appraise you of your situation, Trina. Under state law you were in possession of that cocaine by virtue of being in the same room where it was lying there in plain sight. It’s a slam dunk for two years right there. But…” Here I stopped speaking and gave her a grim smile. “By a quirk of Texas law, this felony can be enhanced by a number of other factors. For example, your past record.”

“I ain’t got no past record,” she said, “except a juvie beef or two, and even I know you can’t use them in adult court.”

“Right you are. But the possession charge can also be enhanced by any other felonies you committed while in possession of the coke. Such as the reckless endangerment of your child. So you can see that once you’re convicted of the possession charge, the rest of it falls over like the next domino in the line. When it goes to trial, you’ll get a country jury made up of good small-town Baptists and Methodists and Campbellites with maybe a couple of oldtime Presbyterians thrown in to leaven the mixture. They’ll stay in the jury room at least an hour to make it look like there was a little debate involved. Which there won’t be. Then they’ll come out and hang fifteen to twenty years on your happy little ass. After which they’ll go home and have a good supper and then sleep secure in the knowledge that they’ve done the Lord’s work.”

“Twenty years? My God! I never did no drugs in my life except a little weed. This ain’t fair!”

“I know, dear. Life’s rough and then you die. But that’s only one way it can all shake down. The other way is that you tell me what I need to know and you walk out of here today free as a bird. All this unpleasantness will be forgotten.”

“Do I get my baby back?”

“That’s out of my hands. Under state law there has to be a custody hearing within ten days. I can get you hooked up with an interfaith social services agency that will show you what moves you have to make. But I can tell you that if you put forth any effort at all to clean up your act and be the momma that little boy deserves, then you’ll get him back.”

She thought it over for a minute, all the while chewing her lower lip. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell you anything except where Scott is.”

“But that’s the one thing I need to know,” I said.

“I love Scott, and I won’t give him up.”

She’d seen the carrot, and now it was time for the stick.

“Do you think he really cares anything about you, girl?” I asked roughly. “Do you actually believe he’s going to wait around until you get out of the pen a dozen or so years from now? Shit, he’ll be out there pronging the first little twit that catches his eye, if he isn’t already. And you’ll be locked up in a steel cage and getting older by the day.”

“You’re just awful!”

I stood up, came around my desk, and jerked her chair around to where she was looking straight at me. Then I leaned down with my face just a few inches from hers.

“I’m worse than awful. I’m the meanest old son of a bitch you ever laid your two eyes on. You think we got bad dykes here in our jail? You ain’t seen nothing like what they’ve got at the women’s unit at Mountain View. Some of them weigh two hundred pounds or better and look like they could eat a Jeep for breakfast. You’re sexy and you know it, and that’s an asset here on the outside. But inside it’s a liability because you’ll just be fresh meat to those gals. Two or three of the biggest and meanest will pick you out the first week, and then they’ll square off and fight to see which one owns you. You’ve never seen anything like a pair of bull daggers fighting. They go at it like rabid hyenas. I don’t even want to think about the winner. Hell, I bet she’ll have an iron ring in her nose and tattoos all over the rest of her body. Whatever she looks like, she’ll be the she-wolf in that pack, and you’ll be her little piggy. Then every night that passes she’ll sit on your pretty face and howl at the moon.”

That’s when she broke.