'Don't insult me, Billy Bob.'

'Your boy's never been made accountable. Why don't y'all let him stand on his own for once?'

'Jack's made arrangements to send him to a treatment center in California. It's a one-year in-patient program. For God's sakes, give us a chance to correct our problem.'

'Darl came out to my house. He offered to give up his father,' I said.

'He offered to-' Her face had the startled, still quality of someone caught in a photographer's strobe.

'You've got a monster in your house, Emma. Whatever happens in this courthouse won't change that,' I said.

Temple and I left her standing in the middle of the corridor, her mouth moving soundlessly while her stepson snipped his fingernails on the bench behind her.

Temple and I went up to the second floor of the courthouse and bought cold drinks from the machine and drank them by a tall, arched window at the end of the hall. It had stopped raining temporarily, but the streets were flooded and the wake from passing automobiles slid up onto the courthouse lawn.

'You bothered about what you said to Emma?' Temple asked.

'Not really.'

'If you're worried about hanging it on Darl Vanzandt-'

'The jury won't see motive in Darl. We can make him an adverb but not a noun.'

She was silent. I heard her set her aluminum soda can on top of the radiator.

'You want to spell it out?' she asked.

'Bunny Vogel's going to have a bad day,' I said.

'Wrong kid for it.'

'Damn, I wish I could adjust like that. "Wrong kid for it." That's great.'

I walked back down the hall to the stairs, my boots echoing off the wood floor.

She caught me halfway down, stepped in front of me on the landing, her arms pumped. A strand of her chestnut hair was curved on her chin. 'There's one person only, one, who has always been on your side. Sorry I never let you fuck me a few times so I could leave town without even a phone call. You only get that kind of loyalty with federal grade,' she said.

She walked down the rest of the stairs alone, the anger in her eyes her only defense against tears. I stood in the silence, wondering what the final cost of Lucas's trial would be.

After Darl Vanzandt took the oath he sat at an angle in the witness chair, lowered his eyes coyly, as though the world's attention were upon him, played with his class ring, suppressed a smile when he looked at his friends.

'Bunny Vogel used to go out with Roseanne Hazlitt, didn't he?' I asked.

'Everybody knows that.'

'Is Bunny your friend?'

'He used to be.'

'He looked out for you at Texas A amp;M, didn't he?'

'We were from the same town, so we hung out.'

'He paid off a grader to change an exam score for you, didn't he?'

Darl's green eyes looked at nothing, then clouded and focused on me for the first time, as though the words he heard had to translate into a different language before they became thoughts in his mind. He rubbed the peach fuzz on his jawline. 'Yeah, we both got expelled,' he said.

'Did your stepmother get him a job at the skeet club?'

'Yeah.'

'You double-dated and you hung out at the drive-in restaurant together?'

'Sometimes.'

'I'd say y'all were pretty tight, right?'

'That was then, not now.'

'You let people get in your face, Darl?'

'What d'you mean?'

'Dis you, push you around, act like you're a woosh?'

'No, I don't take that stuff.'

'What happened to the Mexican kid who scratched up your car with a nail?'

'I kicked his ass, that's what.'

'Because people don't get in your face and abuse your property, right? You stomp their ass?'

'Yeah, that's right.'

'You ever beat up a woman, a prostitute in San Antonio by the name of Florence LaVey?'

'No, I didn't. I protected myself from people who were rolling me.'

'What happens when people hit your friends, Darl? You kick their ass, too.'

'You goddamn right.' He looked at his friends and grinned.

'Did you see Roseanne Hazlitt slap Bunny Vogel the night she was attacked?'

He pushed at his nose with the flats of his fingers. His eyes were threaded with veins, fixed on mine.

'Yeah. At Shorty's. It wasn't a big deal. She always had her head up her hole about something,' he said.

'It made you mad to see your friend get hit, didn't it?'

'No. I bought her and Lucas a drink. I wasn't mad at anybody.'

'Is that when you put roofies-downers-in Lucas's drink?' I asked.

'Objection, your honor. He's badgering and leading his own witness,' Marvin said.

'Withdrawn,' I said. 'Darl, why'd Roseanne slap Bunny Vogel?'

'She said she was getting baptized. She wanted him to take her to this holy-roller church that's on TV.'

'Baptized?'

'I told you, she had boards in her head. She goes, "Do something decent for a change. Take me to my baptism. Maybe it'll wash off on you." So Bunny says, "Let's take a drive. I'll roll down the windows so you can air the reefer out of your head."

'She goes, "I'm going down to the Lakewood Church in Houston. I done talked to the preacher already."

'Bunny says, "Shorty's is a funny kind of church house to show folks you been saved." She goes, "I'm here to meet Lucas Smothers. At least he don't treat his old friends like yesterday's fuck." Another guy goes, "That's 'cause you're Lucas's reg'lar fuck now."

'Bunny put his hand on her arm and said he'd take her home. That's when she slapped him. She walked on inside and shot him the bone.'

Darl's eyes smiled at his friends.

'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.