Murder Takes a Break (2 page)

"OK," he admitted.
 
"It's not the same thing.
 
But it's close.
 
And like I said, this would be a personal favor."

"For you, or for someone else?"

"For me."

"But you're asking for someone else."

"Right."

"Why?"

"Well, see, Tack Kirbo's a sort of an old friend."

"What kind of friend?"

"From college.
 
I guess you don't remember him.
 
We played football together."

I felt a twinge, but I didn't say anything.
 
Dino knew what I was thinking, though.

"The knee doing OK these days?" he asked.

Dino had practically destroyed my knee with his helmet when he'd tackled me just as I was about to break away for a long run.
 
On a beautiful fall day, he'd ended what most sportswriters thought was a great football career that was going to become even greater when I turned pro.

What had happened hadn't been Dino's fault, but he couldn't quite get over the idea that it was.

"The knee's fine," I lied.
 
"But I don't remember Kirbo.
 
What position did he play?"

"He was mostly a back-up.
 
Played tight end.
 
No reason you'd remember him."

"But you do."

"Sure.
 
We were pretty good buddies in those days."

"And now he's lost his kid."

"Right.
 
And the cops can't find him.
 
No one can find him.
 
I thought you might give it a try."

"As a personal favor.
 
Sort of like when I looked for Outside Harry."

Outside Harry was a local character that Dino had developed an attachment to.
 
He'd disappeared not so long ago, and Dino had asked me to find him.
 
I did, but not before nearly getting killed three or four times.

"That was different," Dino said.
 
You knew that might be dangerous."

"Sure I did."

"Tack would pay you, if that's what you're worried about."

"I'm not talking about money."

"You can be a real bastard sometimes, Tru."

I smiled.
 
"You're only saying that because you like me."

"Fat chance.
 
Will you do it or not?"

I thought about it.
 
The people were missing their son, and while I didn't think I could help them, it wouldn't do any harm to talk to them.
 
Or that's what I thought at the time.

"I'll talk to the Kirbos," I said.
 
"As a personal favor."

Dino smiled.
 
"I'd appreciate it," he said.

Y
ou can never be sure what kind of weather to expect on Galveston Island in the winter.
 
In 1886, so the story goes, the temperature dropped to somewhere near zero, and the bay froze to a depth of two and a half inches.
 

The day Dino drove me to see Tack Kirbo was different.
 
According to the television news I'd seen a day or so earlier, it was snowing in New England and upstate New York.
 
In Seattle, there was a cold, drenching rain.
 
The Midwest was freezing, and ice covered the highways.

But in Galveston, it was a lot like springtime, seventy degrees, a deep blue sky with not a cloud in sight, and a strong southerly breeze the whipped the gray-green Gulf of Mexico into second-rate whitecaps.
 

Gulls swooped and dipped over the waves as if some kid were pulling them on kite strings.
 
Out near the horizon, oil rigs squatted over the water, and a tanker seemed painted on the sky.

I lived on the west end of the Island, and Dino hadn't wanted to drive along the seawall, but I'd insisted.
 
He preferred to stay in his house, and if he had to get out of it, he wanted to get as far from the water as possible.
 
But the Kirbos were staying in the Galvez Hotel, which is right on Seawall Boulevard.
 
There was no use to go out of our way to avoid seeing the Gulf.

A girl in a skimpy halter top and tight cut-off jeans was skimming along the top of the wall on a pair of in-line skates.
 
She had long legs, a blonde pony tail that hung out from under her safety helmet, and skin the color of almonds.

"Aren't you glad you came this way?" I said.

Dino didn't answer.
 
He looked straight ahead as if he were having to concentrate on the traffic.
 
There were only about four cars in sight.

"Want to stop and walk along one of the jetties?" I asked.
 
"Have a look at the mural?"

The Gulf side of the seawall had been painted with what the tourist office was calling the world's longest mural between 25th and 61st streets: surfers, giant clams, fish, waves — all kinds of briney stuff like that.

Dino cut his eyes in my direction.
 
"You're kidding me," he said.

"It might do you good.
 
You could get a little sun."

"Sun gives you skin cancer.
 
I don't need that."

I thought about the girl on the skates.
 
Dino was right, and I hated to think what might happen to her in twenty or thirty years or so.
 
On the other hand, Dino looked like a man who'd just returned to the free world after doing twenty years in solitary in one of the fine units of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
 
The Pillsbury Dough Boy had as much color as he did.
 
There had to be a reasonable compromise somewhere.

"How about that beach?" I said.

Dino didn't look.
 
"It's not as big as it used to be," he said.

He was right about that, too, though the city had invested millions in widening the beachfront.
 
The sand had been dredged off the bottom of the Gulf and pumped along the shore line.
 
The sand had smelled like the bilge in a shrimp boat for a while, but before long the smell went away and the beach had been almost as wide as I remembered it from my childhood, before storms and tides had carried most of the sand out into the Gulf.
 
But after only a couple of years the beach had begun shrinking again.
 
Nothing stays the same.

Nothing, that is, except for the Galvez Hotel, all two hundred and fifty rooms of it.
 
It's been sitting right there behind the seawall just across the street from the beach since 1911.
 
There are some people who think the hotel is even older than that, that it survived the big storm of 1900, but it didn't.
 
In fact, one of the reasons it was built was to help Galveston recover from the devastating economic effects of that storm.

It did survive the hurricane that roared out of the Gulf in 1915, however.
 
That storm wasn't nearly as bad as the one fifteen years earlier, but it was bad enough to tear four-ton granite boulders out of the jetties and toss them over the seawall while dancers in the Galvez's ballroom swirled and turned as if they didn't have a care in the world.

The Galvez is a huge white building, a lot like one of those resort hotels that you see on old picture postcards, with palm trees and couples dressed all in white playing croquet on wide expanses of lawn.
 
Lots of famous people have stayed there.
 
Phil Harris and Alice Faye — remember them? — were married there, a long time ago.

The Galvez doesn't have much of a lawn, but there are palm trees, all right, except that today the trunks of the palm trees in front of the hotel were ringed from bottom to top with white Christmas lights.
 
Christmas lights on palm trees had always struck me as pretty strange, but it didn't appear to bother anyone else as far as I could tell.
 
Certainly not Dino, who didn't even seem to notice.
 
He turned his big old Pontiac off Seawall Boulevard and pulled around to the back of the hotel to enter the parking lot.

He locked the car when we got out, and we walked past the BFI Dumpster to the back entrance.
 
There were several chartered buses parked along the walk.

"Dickens on the Strand," Dino said.

I'd forgotten about that.
 
Every year, one weekend early in December, there's a pseudo-Victorian Christmas celebration along The Strand, an area of restored buildings and shops near the docks.
 
I've never participated in the festivities, and I was willing to bet that Dino hadn't, either.
 
Plenty of tourists showed up for the fun, however, as the chartered buses, from San Antonio, Waco, and Dallas, proved.

We went through the doors and up the steps into the lobby, where there was a fifteen-foot-tall Christmas tree, decorated with gold ribbons and red balls.
 
To our right were the elevators and the check-in desk, and on our left hand bells of all sizes lay atop a long table covered with a red cloth.
 
A sign informed us that a hand bell choir would be playing in about an hour.

"Maybe we can finish up before they start," Dino said hopefully.
 
"Or maybe we won't be able to hear them from the bar."

He wasn't exactly in the Christmas spirit, not unless you thought Ebenezer Scrooge was an appropriate role model.

I said, "The bar?"

"That's where Tack and his wife are meeting us."

"You were pretty sure of me, weren't you?"

"I figured you wouldn't turn down an old friend, even if you hadn't always had a great time doing me favors.
 
And if you didn't want to help, I could always use a free drink.
 
Tack can afford it."

So could Dino, who probably could have bought the hotel if he'd wanted it, though you wouldn't guess it from looking at him.
 
He had on a pair of faded Levi's, and a wrinkled white cotton shirt that he strained at the shoulders because he worked out all the time on exercise equipment he bought after watching infomercials.
 
He was also wearing a pair of scuffed Bass Weejuns that he'd probably bought when he was in college.

I didn't look any better.
 
I was wearing an old sweatshirt with a picture of Bevo, The University of Texas mascot, on the front and a pair of jeans as faded as Dino's.
 
My blue and white Etonic running shoes were practically new, though.
 
I thought they gave the outfit a touch of class.

The lobby was full of people who were dressed a lot better than we were.
 
They were considerably older than we were, too, past retirement age, and they were no doubt waiting to go somewhere on one or more of the tour buses.
 
Either that, or listen to the hand bell choir.

We made our way through them, hardly attracting a curious glance. Anyone who's been in Galveston more than half an hour knows that the dress code on the Island is pretty lax.
 
Even in a place like the Galvez.

Dino led me past the hotel's restaurant and down a hallway to the bar, which was fronted by huge glass windows that looked out over the seawall and into the Gulf.
 
I could see The Island Retreat, a ramshackle building that extended out over the water on its rickety wooden pier.

I imagined what the building had been like at Christmas all those years ago, when half the high-rollers in Texas would have been there to spread a little Christmas cheer and win a little money.
 
Or lose some.

There would have been cars lining the seawall for blocks, big cars like Cadillacs and Buick Roadmasters and Chrysler Imperials.
 
Maybe a Packard or two.
 
There would have been women wrapped in furs, even if the weather had been as warm as it was today.
 
And maybe a national TV star or two.

There was nothing like that now.
 
The street was nearly deserted, and I could see the realtor's sign nailed to the front door.
 
The sign was fading now, and I wondered if the building would ever be sold or whether it would just stand there until some wild storm surge dragged it down into the Gulf.

A man stood up at a table near the front of the bar and waved us over.
 
He was big enough to have played football, all right, but he hadn't been in shape for years.
 
He had a hard belly that jutted out over his belt, and his shirt looked uncomfortably tight.
 
His thick, curly gray hair tumbled over his forehead.
 
His face was puffy, and his voice was a little too loud.

"Hey, Dino," he said.
 
"Come on over."