Laura Lippman (22 page)

“O
bstruction of justice,” Al Guzman said, as if reading from a mental grocery list. “Accessory after the fact. Criminal trespassing. What else? There’s gotta be more. Maybe I’ll have your car towed down to a garage, make sure it meets our safety standards, check your dog’s license, impound it if you don’t have your rabies certificate number. Then again, if there was a felony charge for being
estupida
, I’d have you on a dozen counts of that.”

Tess regretted not following Crow out the window. She was persona non grata at SAPD, the city’s most unwelcome visitor since Santa Anna, to hear Guzman tell it. Rick was sulking, convinced that she had put him at risk for possible disbarment. A. J. Sheppard, who had sat a long, lonely vigil at Espejo Verde, only to be picked up by the cops, no longer wanted to be her new best friend. As for Steve Villanueve, who glimpsed her in the hallway, he just shook his head sadly.

“So what do you think?” Guzman demanded. “Would your boyfriend come back for you if I lock you up? Or is he running toward the border with Emmie Sterne? I guess what I’m really asking is if you were a willing accomplice or a dupe.”

“C’mon, Guzman,” Rick said, rousing himself from his funk. “She was trying to help. She kept the story out of the media for the short term, no easy trick when one of the most aggressive reporters in town is on the scene. By calling me and asking me to meet her at Ed Ransome’s apartment, she was trying to ensure he turned himself in. I was on the line with you when he went out the back window. What do you think, I was calling you to chat? Besides, how far could he get? He left his car and, according to him, he was low on funds.”

“Low on funds? I think not. He’s got his trust fund money, if my hunch is right. If not, then maybe he’s got fifty thousand dollars that he took from Tom Darden and Laylan Weeks. Which makes their deaths capital crimes, by the way. Death penalty crimes, which isn’t something we take lightly here in Texas, Miss Monaghan. We put more prisoners to death last year than any other state in the union. Year before last, half of the death row prisoners executed in the United States were executed right here in Texas.”

“You must be very proud,” Tess said.

“Go back to the fifty thousand dollars,” Rick said, giving her a will-you-shut-up look.

Guzman had a chair, but he preferred to sit on the edge of the table, well into Tess’s personal space. He was astute, he had figured out that such closeness made Tess feel nervous. And when she felt nervous, Tess was inclined to blurt out whatever occurred to her, as she had just demonstrated.

“We’ve had Darden and Weeks under surveillance since they got out of prison two months ago,” Guzman began.

“Not very close surveillance, apparently,” Tess said. She really couldn’t stop herself. If only Guzman would move even an inch away from her, she might be able to have an unexpressed thought.

“I’m not talking day in, day out. They weren’t the smartest two ex-felons around, but they’d know if we were on their ass, and they’d have gotten some slick little defense attorney to come after us for messing with their constitutional rights. After all, they paid their debt to society. Ran up a bigger debt while they did it, but that’s how it works.”

“As a professional devil’s advocate, I have to point out that they did their time—twenty years,” Rick put in. “If you ask me, the person who represented them ought to be in prison.”

“Hey, I got no problem locking up lawyers,” Guzman said meaningfully. “Anyway, they were always talking over at Huntsville how they had this money coming to them. The usual brag.
Someone owes us fifty thousand dollars for this thing we pulled, we’ll get paid when we get out, going to buy us some new motorcycles
. But, lo and behold, they come out, and pretty soon they’re flashing money all over this town, paying cash for all sorts of things. New Harleys, hundred-dollar tabs at Hector’s.”

Tess and Rick exchanged a look.

“Yeah, Hector’s,” Guzman said. “Biker bar south of the city, where a girl named Emmie Sterne and a guy named Ed Ransome happen to play in an after-hours band.”

“If they were making a big show of how much money they had, anyone could have killed them for it,” Tess offered. “They probably didn’t have the sweetest friends in the world.”

Guzman pretended to think about this. “Yeah, right. Darden and Weeks come out of prison, score a bunch of money somewhere, and someone kills them for it, then stashes one body outside a house in Twin Sisters, where Emmie and her friend happened to spend a few weeks this summer. Then the other guy shows up at Espejo Verde. Pure coincidence. By the way, how close did you get, Miss Monaghan? Did you get a good look?”

“Not very.”

“You see something kind of orange on the table? More red than orange, I guess, but it started out gold?”

The T-shirt, the goddamn T-shirt.

“It happens to be a shirt from someplace called Cafe Hon in a place called Bal-tee-more, Maryland.” He put a lot of Latin spin on those last two words, as if it were a ridiculous-sounding place for anyone to be from. “You know anyone with a T-shirt like that?”

“I do, for one. Lots of people have Cafe Hon T-shirts,” Tess replied. “They put them in local hotel rooms, like Bibles or terry-cloth robes. It’s practically a city ordinance that you’re not allowed to leave without one.”

But to her knowledge, there was only one the color of a mango.

“Do you know how Frank Conyers died?” Guzman asked. The question sounded random and sudden, but Tess doubted the detective ever said or did anything without having a reason.

“Everyone knows about the triple murders, Guzman,” Rick said in a bored voice. “He was killed with Lollie and the cook that night.”

“Not when,
how
. You see, Lollie and the cook, Pilar Rodriguez, they died nice and neatly, as these things go. Bullets in the back of the head. Frank Conyers was carved up as if someone was trying to make menudo out of him.”

“Menudo?” asked Tess.

“Tripe stew,” Rick said.

“They disemboweled him,” Guzman said helpfully. “See, I was trying to be nice, but Trejo here made me spell it out. Conyers’s throat was slit. So was Weeks’s. Conyers was disemboweled—”

“So was Weeks,” Tess finished for him.

“You saw?”

“I guessed. What about the fingers, though? Does that correspond, too?”

Guzman frowned. “No, that’s a new touch. But it’s the other stuff that intrigues me. We never made the details of Conyers’s death public, yet someone knows. Someone who Darden and Weeks were going to lead us to this summer.”

“A third person?” Rick asked.

“Three bodies, three killers. It has a nice symmetry to it, doesn’t it? Or, at least—no, that’s all I’m going to tell you right now. You already got more than you ever gave. I’m not telling you another thing until you tell me where to find Ed Ransorne and Emmie Sterne.”

Tess said dully, “Crow’s gone, God knows where. If I knew where Emmie was, I’d have been there already. And you’d have been right behind me. Unless you were right in front of me. From what I can tell, the cops have been surrounding me like bookends all week. I go someplace, you’ve been there. I look behind me, and you’re there. If I stopped suddenly, one of your guys would step on my heel.”

Guzman sighed and—finally—moved away from her. Not by much, but at least she no longer felt as if he were all but sitting in her lap.

“I don’t know what to do with you, Theresa Monaghan,” he said. “Maybe I should lock you up, maybe I should have you under surveillance. It all depends on if you’re crazy like a fox, or just
stupid
like a, like a—like a hamster.” He continued to scrutinize her, as if her animal orientation might be found in her face.

“And?” she said at last, losing the stare-down.

“Go home,” he said. “Don’t wear yourself out on your little exercise wheel.”

T
hursday morning. Tess had been in Texas nine days. She sat in the garden at the Alamo with a Peanut Buster Parfait and thought about everything she had accomplished.

She had found Crow, only to lose him again.

She had found two dead men, both so ripe they might have forever changed her relationship with soft cheeses.

She had learned to say “Good morning,” “Good dog,” and “You are the father of my baby” in Vietnamese. (People were always saying that last bit in Mrs. Nguyen’s private telenovela, and she was kind enough to translate.)

She had experienced coitus interruptus by SWAT team.

She had stumbled on a Dairy Queen in a downtown San Antonio mall and convinced the vacant-eyed adolescent at the counter that she had a medical condition requiring her to consume soft ice cream, hot fudge, and peanuts at eleven in the morning.

Yes, travel was broadening. She’d have to do it again sometime, perhaps at the end of the next millennium.

She saw a flash of blond hair and dared to hope—but no, Emmie wouldn’t come here. Emmie was on the run, a trail of dead men in her wake, their ill-gotten gains now her iller-gotten gains. Crow was on the run, looking for Emmie. Or on the run from Emmie, because he had the fifty thousand dollars and she wanted it. That was another one of Guzman’s theories. If Emmie and Crow weren’t in this together, then they were at each other’s throats. Emmie and Crow had conspired to kill her mother’s suspected murderers, then fallen out over the unexpected cash bonus. Tess wasn’t satisfied. Why would a girl with a trust fund bother to fight over a sum less than the yearly payout on a million-dollar lottery ticket? What did Emmie know about the night her mother died, if anything? What did someone think she knew?

And how could Crow kill anyone, under any circumstance? No one changed that much in five months.

But he would keep quiet to protect someone. Especially if he thought the act was morally defensible.

Especially if he was in love.

Oh, sure, he had been convincing enough in his thwarted seduction of her the other night. But you could sleep with someone while you were still in love with someone else. You could do it quite enthusiastically, even. Tess knew this from firsthand experience. What had Crow said? He had accused her of using him as a bookmark, a way of keeping her place while she tried to figure out how she felt about watching the death of a man who didn’t quite belong to her, and never would. A man she didn’t quite love, and never would. Just because Emmie was through with Crow didn’t mean Crow was through with Emmie. Lovers seldom finished at the same time.

“You’re thinking too much,” Rick had said when she tried to break down Guzman’s theories on the way home from the police station. Happy to be a lawyer still, all he wanted to do was find Crow and turn him over to the authorities, then start preparing his case. But Rick’s method of finding Crow was to sit back in his office, doing his other work, waiting for the phone to ring. Sure, they were still going to see that detective this afternoon, the one who had been involved in the original bust of Darden and Weeks. But what did it matter, now that Weeks was a corpse, too? Tess wanted to
do
something, go somewhere, ask some questions. Unfortunately, her inherent bias toward action was proving less than constructive, except as a way of drumming up business for local mortuaries. She felt as if she were flooring a car in snow and ice. The tires spun, the snow melted, taking you down to the ice, where there was no traction, so you went nowhere. So you floored it again, and the tires spun, and the snow melted, and you went nowhere.

Again she thought she saw a blond head, the same white blond as Emmie. It couldn’t be.

It wasn’t. It was Clay Sterne, disappointment naked in his face.

“She’s not here,” Tess said.

“I didn’t come to see her,” he shot back.

“You don’t have to worry, Clay. I won’t tell your father you were here.”

“I do what I want to do, not what my father tells me.”

Tess nodded. “Is that why you’re living at home, preparing to take over a business you can’t stand, instead of going for the advanced degree you want?”

He sat on her bench, keeping as much distance between them as possible. “I’d think you were an extraordinarily good detective if I didn’t know Javier had such a big mouth. Okay, sure, it’s no big secret. I’d rather be getting a Ph.D. in history, but someone has to run the business, and I’m it. The last of the Sternes.”

“You and Emmie.”

“She’s not a Sterne. And she’s not here.”

“Not a Sterne?”

“My father never adopted her. He took her in, she used the family name, but she’s still Emily Morgan on her birth certificate and driver’s license. Bad joke on her mother’s part, naming her that.”

Tess must have looked blank, for he added, “Emily Morgan was the so-called Yellow Rose of Texas, the beautiful ‘mulatto’ slave with whom Santa Anna was supposed to have dallied before the battle of San Jacinto. Serious scholarship doesn’t really support the story—Emily Morgan was more likely a free black woman who didn’t ‘dally’ with anyone—but never mind. You couldn’t have a song called ‘The Free Black Woman of Texas.’”

“Still, she is a Sterne. She’s Lollie’s daughter.”

“My dad made the business what it is, anyway,” Clay said, his tone argumentative, almost aggressive.

“Yes. Although it was faltering, right, twenty years ago?”

The question surprised him, but only for a moment. “If you’re going to read Texas history, you might want to try something with a little more depth than
The Green Glass
. May I suggest T. R. Fehrenbach? Not politically correct, of course, but still a good place to start. By the way, the Mexicans were on the outside here, the Texans on the inside.”

“Fine, mock me, if that makes you feel better. Besides, not all the Mexicans were on the outside.”

“What?”

“I went through the exhibit here. You think I was going to come all this way, sit in the garden at the Alamo, and not walk through the place? Some of the defenders were Mexican. There were women and children here, too. I never knew that. Some scholars have questioned whether the battle really was important, while others say it provided Sam Houston the opportunity he needed at San Jacinto. The legend has William Barrett Travis drawing the line that separated the men from the boys, and Davy Crockett going down swinging Old Betsy. But it’s been suggested by one historian that Crockett begged for his life, tried to pretend he was just passing by, and was executed on the spot.”

Clay gave her a suspicious look. “You didn’t learn all that here. The Daughters aren’t big on some of the, um, newer theories.”

“I went to the library. I didn’t read Fehrenbach, but I did manage to skim a few books on the subject. Not because I care if Jim Bowie had a broken leg or venereal disease—”

“Typhus, more likely.”

“Not because I care,” Tess repeated, “about anything that happened in 1836. But because I want to know where your cousin is, and I thought the answer might be in where she used to come, and history was all I had. Breakfast at the Alamo, Clay. What was that all about?”

He looked around the garden, as if the answer might be posted, like one of the sign boards in the Long Barracks. “It was just some ritual she had. She was very susceptible to rituals. One of her many, many psychiatrists diagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder.”

“Was that the same one who tried to recover her memories of the murder through hypnosis?”

Again she had surprised him. “I don’t think so. They were all hacks, if you ask me. The thing is, she wasn’t crazy then. I’m not sure she’s crazy now…just disappointed.”

“Disappointed?”

“In life. Isn’t everyone?” He looked around, frowning. “Personally, I don’t care much for the Alamo. It’s too accessible.”

“Do you think history should be hard to get to? That it doesn’t count if you can just walk over on your lunch hour, or on your way to the post office or the mall?”
Or after a trip to the Dairy Queen
.

“I think historic sites shouldn’t be places that you zip through on your way to the gift shop to buy a ceramic ashtray.”

He looked so serious when he said this that Tess couldn’t help laughing. Clay flushed. He was literally thin-skinned, so pale and transparent that his skin was almost blue when he wasn’t blushing. He was just twenty-two, she reminded herself, a young twenty-two at that, although he didn’t look quite so gangly and spindly away from his broad-shouldered, bigger-than-life, Texas-sized father.

“I’m sorry, you’re right,” she said contritely. “History is serious. All history, not just wars and elections, but family history.”

Clay’s eyes darted, anxious to be anywhere that wasn’t in her direct gaze.

“I know about how Emmie tried to burn the house down, Clay. A reporter from the
Eagle
told me.” The same reporter who has the page one exclusive today on the discovery of a body at Espejo Verde, but she didn’t want to go into that.

“It was an accident,” he said automatically. “The fire, I mean.”

Tess made a neutral noise, not bothering to let him know she had already been told otherwise. “Were you two close, growing up?”

“Sometimes. We’re only a year apart. That’s okay when you’re younger. When we got to high school, it was…different. She was part of this very fast crowd, and she did the whole Goth thing. Dyed her hair jet black, if you can imagine. Smoked pot, screwed around. My father had a fit.”

“Was she jealous of you?”

“Jealous? Why would she be jealous of me?”

“Because you’re the ‘real’ son, and she was merely a cousin. Because you’re the well-behaved, dutiful straight-A student type, and she’s always been so troubled. I imagine your father and mother treated her a little differently than they treated you.”

Clay shook his head. “My parents divorced when I was in junior high school. I don’t see her much. Truth is, she treated me and Emmie exactly the same—with complete indifference.”

Tess had forgotten about the divorce, the “Galveston girl” who had retreated to California. It was one of the rare bits of truth Marianna had let slip. “I’m sorry.”

“Why? It’s just more history. The social history of the latter part of the twentieth century. Half of all marriages, etc., etc.” He paused, stuck on his own statistic. “I’ve never quite believed that, actually. What does it mean? Does someone like Elizabeth Taylor skew the results? Do you count Richard Burton twice? Even if you don’t, in her case, one hundred percent of marriages end in divorce. See, that’s the problem with anecdotal evidence.”

“Not one hundred percent. Seven-eighths, not quite 90 percent.”

“Huh?”

“Mike Todd died in a plane crash. So, divorced seven times, widowed once. Nick Hilton, Michael Wilding, Michael Todd, Eddie Fisher, Richard Burton, Richard Burton, John Warner, Larry Fortensky. So far.”

Clay looked genuinely aghast. “You shouldn’t have that in your brain. It’s taking up space where something useful might go.”

“I don’t seem to have much say about what gets lodged in there,” Tess said, hitting her head lightly with her palm, as if to shake out the offending factoid. “Nope, it’s stuck, right next to the lyrics from the theme song from
The Flintstones
. Then again, you’d be surprised at the kind of information that proves useful. Why, I bet there are things Emmie told me the one time we talked, or even you and your father, which seemed meaningless, but may yet help me find her.”

She had thought her bluff hit just the right note of implicit menace, but Clay wasn’t impressed. “Sounds like urban archaeology to me. But at least they have a reason for doing things the way they do.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a hotel down Alamo Street, the Fairmount. It used to be an old flophouse, on the other side of town, and they moved it from one site to the other over two days. I think it made
Guinness
—not the largest building ever moved, but the largest one ever moved on rubber tires across city streets.”

“Now that’s the kind of stat Baltimore specializes in. Distinction through compound modifier.” The longer she stayed in San Antonio, the more she saw how much the two cities had in common. “But what does it have to do with archaeology?”

“They were clearing the site when they realized the land was essentially a trash pit from the battle of the Alamo. Broken china, weaponry, even an unfired cannon ball. But the hotel move couldn’t be delayed. So, toward the end, they just began shoveling it all up and carting away truckfuls of dirt, to be sifted through later at the University of Texas—San Antonio. Not an ideal way to work, but sometimes it’s all you’ve got.”

“Is there a point to the story, Clay? Is there a big pile of dirt I should be sifting through somewhere?”

He was suddenly, inexplicably, quite angry. “I’m saying that you can dig forever, but all you’re going to find is garbage. Even if you did find something of significance, you wouldn’t really know where it fit without years of study. You can’t just come someplace and get to know it right away. You can’t come into a family, any family, and think you know them because you heard some gossip, or read some sleazy book. You don’t know my dad, or me, or Emmie. You don’t understand anything you’ve seen. You’re just a dumb, gawking tourist. Too bad there’s not a gift shop for you to visit. At least you might leave with a nice keychain for your troubles.”

And with this, he pushed himself off the bench and ran for the exit, toward the very wall a handful of men had scaled when William Barrett Travis had drawn the line that separated the men from the boys. Assuming, Tess thought, that had ever really happened.