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Chapter One
Jeb Quinlin had done the best he could to put Brett Holman in prison for the rest of his life. Now, as he stepped down from the witness stand, he wasn't sure he'd done enough. Quinlin had testified about Holman's prints being found on the murder weapon, offered proof that he had bought the Smith and Wesson .38 from a sporting-goods store a week before the murder, and destroyed Holman's only alibi witness, a bottle blonde who wasn't nearly as eager to commit perjury after Quinlin had threatened her with a guaranteed ten years at Gatesville for the vial of cocaine in her purse.
Still, juries were dice rolls. They liked things neat and nice, with no loose ends. Hell, life was a loose end. Not black, not white, just a bunch of diffuse gray, which, often as not, obscured the truth like fog on a rock. Juries wanted motives, and Quinlin hadn't given them one. He knew why Brett Holman had rung Gerald Richardson's doorbell, then shot him three times in the face and chest when he opened the door. But knowing something to be true and proving it was a horse of a different color. The O. J. trial had taught him that, along with several judicial abortions of his own.
On his way out of the courtroom, Quinlin spotted a seat on the aisle and impulsively slid in. The stack of paperwork on his desk could wait a half hour. Pluck Watkins was the prosecution's next witness, and Quinlin figured Pluck would be worth hanging around for, particularly if he was sober. Pluck could give the jury the motive. If they believed him.
Pluck Watkins had been the Richardsons' gardener. Quinlin had found him just two days before trial, and even when he had, he wasn't sure about Pluck's abilities as a witness. The old man was nearly seventy, stooped and grayed, and spoke in a near-indiscernible black dialect. Worse, Pluck was a career wino. Drunk, he spoke his own language.
Pluck had been trimming hedges in the Richardsons' backyard when he happened to glance through the windows into Loretta Richardson's bedroom, catching the lady of the house and an equally nude Brett Holman doing the horizontal mambo.
Now, on the witness stand, Quinlin noticed, Pluck was nervous and edgy, which probably meant he was at least quasi-sober.
"You're appearing here to testify voluntarily, aren't you, Mr. Watkins?" the prosecutor asked.
"Not 'zactly, no, suh," the old man said earnestly.
"What do you mean, 'not exactly'?"
"Well, suh, that deetective, Quinfield—"
"You mean, Quinlin?"
"Yas, suh," Pluck said, "he told me he'd put my sorry ass under the jail if I wudn't sober and tell the truth."
Quinlin felt his face turning red. He hoped Pluck stopped there, not volunteering that the detective had also promised him a bottle of Thunderbird if he showed up sober and did a good job on the stand. The assistant district attorney grinned and waited for the light laughter to end before moving along. Quinlin sensed the jury liked the old man, who clearly was trying to do his best, despite his alien surroundings. The prosecutor led him through the questioning, which put Pluck in the Richardsons' backyard with his hedge trimmers on that fateful day and, by happenstance, glancing through the window of the master bedroom.
"When you saw Mrs. Richardson and Mr. Holman in the Richardson bedroom, how were they attired?" the prosecutor was asking Pluck.
The old drunk looked at him quizzically but didn't say anything.
"Come on, Mr. Watkins," the assistant district attorney said, annoyed. "Don't be bashful. You can tell the jury. How were they attired?"
The old man's forehead wrinkled and he stared distantly at the ceiling.
Finally, the judge interceded. "Mr. Watkins, I can hold you in contempt and put you in jail if you don't answer," he said. "Now, answer the state's question. How were Mrs. Richardson and Mr. Holman attired?"
"Well, suh," Pluck said finally, "they wasn't a-tired. They was a-fuckin'."
The jury gave Brett Holman life.
As it winds its way south from Dallas, Houston School Road moseys through flat, indistinguishable farmland. South of Loop 635, decades of heavy farm machinery and neglect by county commissioners have turned the asphalt into a quilt of pits, ruts, and patches. Day or night, Jan Baynum knew the stretch of road by heart, veering over the center stripe by rote to dodge a pit, swerving to the sloping shoulder to avoid a rut. She'd made the same trip five days a week for more than fifteen years from her home in Lancaster to Baylor Medical Center in downtown Dallas.
On this night, the registered nurse was woefully late. It was 3:30 A.M. before she finally left the hospital, staying late because every bed in the sixth-floor cancer ward had been full and her counterpart on the overnight shift had phoned in sick at the last minute. Administering chemotherapy was exacting work, made even more difficult if the shift was short-handed; reluctantly, she had volunteered to stay over.
Jan Baynum would later put the time at about 3:55 A.M., when, just as she neared a curve in the road, she saw a pair of taillights appear almost spontaneously, as if they had just swerved onto the road from the ditch. Instinctively, she tapped the brakes entering the curve. That's when she saw the little sports car beside the road. As her car was almost beside the vehicle, the splash of her headlights swept across the silver sportster, and she thought she saw someone slumped against the glass on the driver's side. The taillights that had appeared so abruptly in front of her had already disappeared into the darkness.
She was a woman by herself, in pitch-black darkness on a lonely road, but the more she drove, the more she knew she had to go back. She was a registered nurse, after all, and someone could need help. She turned around and went back.
The nurse stopped on the opposite shoulder of the two-lane road, leaving her engine running and her headlights on. She removed her cell phone and dialed 911 but didn't push the send button. The phone was primed if she needed it; the push of one button would summon help. Cautiously, she approached the car and tapped on the side window. She could see the side of a man's head and his ear. When he didn't move, she opened the door gently, reaching over quickly to keep the man from slumping out of the car.
She put her fingers on his carotid artery but found no pulse. She couldn't see it in the dark, but she smelled the vomit. Jan Baynum pushed the send key on her phone and walked back across the road to her car to wait for the police.
She collected her wits. She almost forgot about the taillights that had appeared from nowhere and then vanished so quickly.
Nothing made Quinlin sleep better than a conviction. Now, the early-morning smells invigorated him, made him happy to be alive and up early, before the sun moved things ahead on its own agenda. For some reason, the clock moved more quickly in the light than in the dark. The smell of brewing coffee gurgling in the pot on the counter mixed with the freshness of sourdough bread toasting in the oven, all of which was overpowered by the aroma of bacon crackling in the microwave.
And there was Madeline, meandering obliviously through the logged kitchen and great room in nothing but a white Dallas Cowboys jersey and a pair of black panties, making it tough for him to concentrate on the five eggs scrambling in the skillet. Physical attraction was one thing. Lust, after all, was a dilemma with a twenty-minute solution. But whatever the intangible trait that lay beyond her skin-deep beauty, Quinlin knew it was the real reason Madeline had become habit-forming.
She took her customary position at the back window, peering intently through the faltering predawn darkness at the deer feeders twenty-five yards from the back of the ranch house. Deer moved early, and once they had discovered the corn in the two galvanized feeders, the backyard of Quinlin's house had become a regular stop. The ritual also became an anticipated treat for Madeline and Quinlin, who ate their breakfast in the nook at the back windows, watching the deer gouge and butt one another for their turn at the yellow corn in the troughs.
"Jeb, he's back!" Madeline yelled just as he was spooning the scrambled eggs from the iron frying pan onto a serving plate. "Get over here quick, before you miss him!"
Quinlin dumped the eggs onto the platter and moved quickly to the telescope at the back of the great room. The sun hadn't yet made its grand debut, but it was already diluting the darkness the way a hefty splash of cream lightens black coffee. He could see the right side of the buck's rack, then a portion of his muzzle through the crosshairs. He squinted over the magnifying glass to orient himself. The deer in the distant dawn was sturdy and big, his muzzle maybe even reaching Jeb's shoulders.
"Let me see," Madeline said, pushing Quinlin from his vantage point behind the telescope. "God, he's so beautiful. Can you imagine how many people have tried to put him on their walls? He's just majestic."
The buck didn't have a lock on majestic. Not with Madeline bent over the tripod, the Cowboy jersey clumped at her waist, leaving nothing to cover the black panties. It was sensory overload, with Jeb looking over her shoulder at the spectacular deer, then glancing down at a rounded butt that couldn't be contained by the pair of overtaxed bikini panties.
"This ol' boy's bound to be pretty good at staying alive," Quinlin said, still in his coarse, precoffee rasp. "He's a trophy all right. How many white deer do you see, anyway? I need to nail him before he gets away again."
He moved to the tripod that held his Canon Rebel, which was already loaded with the fastest film he could find. He hoped for enough light as he focused the zoom lens and hit the motor drive. He had reserved a special place for Whitey's picture above the mantel on the native-rock fireplace. The motor drive roared, clicking off all thirty-six frames in only seconds.
As if the white buck instinctively sensed the intrusion, he meandered off behind a clump of blackjack oaks, taking the three does with him.
"You'd have missed Whitey if you hadn't finally listened to me," Quinlin said, grinning. "Told you it'd be worth your while to spend another night. But no, you just had to get back to town. So tell me, Ms. Meggers, how many sights like this do you see from your back door in the city?"
"Whitey's the only reason I've been hanging out here," she said, acting indifferent. "Now that we've got him on film, guess I'm fresh out of reasons for living like a part-time hillbilly."
"I think you mean redneck," Quinlin said. "There's a difference. Socially and politically. Tell you what. Leave your car out here and drive in with me this morning. While we're in Dallas, we'll get a doctor to look at that arm, too."
"What arm?" Madeline asked, clearly clueless.
"The one that I'm apparently twisting against your will."
Excerpted from Doin' Dirty by Howard Swindle. Copyright © 2000 by Howard Swindle. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
