The Red Scream by Mary Willis Walker Page B

it. He was an important source for the section on the prosecution of Louie Bronk in the McFarland murder and he appeared as a major character. As a courtesy, she had sent him one of the first copies she got from her publisher, but she hadn’t heard from him. Did he find it accurate? Was he offended at her frank portrayal of him as slow and steady—theplodding tortoise who always won the race? Had he even read it yet? Of course he’d read it; not even Stan-the-Man-Heffernan could resist reading about himself.
    As he entered, he was pulling on his tie to loosen it from his thick bull neck, which was every bit as wide as his head. He closed the door behind him. “Molly, Molly, what’s this I hear about someone threatening you? We can’t have that.” His hoarse, whispery voice was almost inaudible. When he spoke to a jury, he had to wear a microphone. It always came as a surprise to her that such a big man had almost no voice—sort of like seeing a Saint Bernard opening its mouth and letting out a tiny mew. People tended to get very quiet and lean forward when Stan was around.
    She said, “I don’t know if it’s me being threatened, or just some general threat, or nothing but a crank letter, but I’d feel better if you’d take a look.” From her briefcase she pulled a plastic bag containing the envelope, the torn-out pages, and the poem. She set it down on the coffee table. “I didn’t think about prints when I was opening the mail, so I may have messed them up.”
    His tie hanging loose now, he took off his suit jacket and tossed it on his desk. Then he sat down in the chair across the coffee table from her and pulled a handkerchief out of his pants pocket. He used it to take the pages out of the plastic bag. Looking at the envelope through the plastic, he said, “Came by mail yesterday?”
    Molly nodded.
    In his usual unhurried, methodical way, which often drove his legal opponents to fury, he read the pages, moving his lips slightly as he did. When he got to the poem stuck to the last page, the deep line that ran vertically between his heavy brow ridges deepened. Finally, still silent, he put the pages back in the bag, stood, and walked to a cabinet under the bookshelves. When he opened the door, it revealed a small refrigerator inside. “Like something to drink, Molly? A soda water?”
    “No thanks,” she said.
    He pulled out a brown bag and can of Diet Dr Pepper which he carried back to his chair. As he lowered himself, he pulled over a magazine— Texas Lawyer —to put the can on, and with the little finger of his left hand he popped the top. Then he pulled from the bag a sandwich wrapped in plastic. He peeled it back just enough to allow him to take one big bite, which he chewed slowly, meditatively,for a long time. After he swallowed, he said, “It’s not from our old friend Bronk.”
    “Oh, no,” Molly said.
    “Has this shaken you?”
    “A little. I hate to be a sissy, but the line ‘Now that Louie’s doomed to die/I might give his craft a try’ is troublesome. The idea of a more literate version of Louie Bronk out there does worry me.” As usual when she talked to him, she found herself almost whispering so she wouldn’t sound loud and shrill in contrast. This phenomenon always made a conversation with him feel very intimate.
    Stan picked it up and read it again, then dropped it on the table. “Nah,” he said. “This is the kind of nutty stuff we get all the time. We just stick them in the file marked ‘mail from outer space’ and forget about them. But if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll send it over to the DPS lab, see if they can pick up some latents and run them through the computer. Since you’ve touched it you’ll need to drop by there and leave your prints. Okay?”
    Molly nodded. “Stan, there’s something else. I ran into David Serrano last night at Katz’s and he seemed upset about Louie’s execution coming up—the usual willies people get when they’re involved