Murder Once Removed
Page 3
That only earned me two snickering officemates and one wickedly grinning friend of my ex-boyfriend.
Josephine gave Walter a playful shove off my desk for me anyway, saying, “I’ve never seen you so smashed either, darling. This is definitely an event. Forward me that snap, Serena, will you?”
“Send it my way, too.” Walter said. “I’m going to text it to Nick as proof that I’ve seen you wasted.”
“You wouldn’t dare!” I said. Then I pitched sideways hard enough that Josephine had to push me back into my desk chair.
“She actually believed you, Walter,” she said, laughing.
“Yep, that means she’s really drunk,” Serena replied.
“Am not,” I said, holding the edge of my desk to keep still while thinking irritably that this was one of the times I wished I could afford my own office. Nobody teases you about being a couple of sheets to the wind when you don’t have officemates—including one blonde who, over the last fifteen-plus years, has been your teenage partner in crime, sorority sister, postmatriculation travel buddy, and former roommate.
The few brain cells I had that were still sober were quick to remind me that, one, I adored my officemates, and two, Austin is nowhere near a cheap place, with rent for either commercial or residential space being some of the most expensive in the state of Texas. Even my drunken cells knew I couldn’t afford an office—much less one in such an amazing location—without them. I’d been lucky enough to find this space three years ago, after Serena and I had met Josephine at a conference for small-business owners. It was known locally as the Old Printing Office because members of the Texas Legislature had operated a printing press out of the building in the early 1900s, and we’d realized we could go in together and rent out the entire third floor of the brick walk-up at Tenth Street and Congress Avenue, just one block down from the state capitol.
“The entire third floor” was a relative term, though, since it encompassed all of five hundred square feet.
Yet our office, with its high ceilings and wood floors—some that still bore ink blotches—was more than enough space for each of us to have our own section of the room. The building gave us a fantastic downtown location at a reasonable rent, too—but mostly because there wasn’t an elevator in the building, the bathroom was down on the second floor, the door hinges all squeaked unless oiled regularly, and the air-conditioning system would start knocking when it got overworked in the summer heat. Still, we had an east-facing balcony that was big enough for three lounge chairs, making for a lovely spot to watch the world go by with an after-work cocktail. That fact alone made listening to the rattling A/C worth it.
Josephine’s phone rang and she looked at the number. “Hmmm, let’s see … oh, it’s Italy.” She picked up the phone. “Traduzioni di Josephine Haroldson. Posso aiutarti?”
Italian was one of seven languages Josephine spoke, which was helpful, of course, when running a translation business. Besides English, she was also fluent in French, German, Spanish, Dutch, and Farsi. She spoke passable Afrikaans as well, which she’d picked up from her Namibian maternal grandparents. She didn’t list it on her résumé, though, since she’d never actually studied it.
I heard Walter’s voice from behind me. “That was hilarious,” he said to Serena. “She totally believed I’d send Nick that picture of her looking like a hot mess. Right, Lucy?”
Why did it sound like he was talking through a fog?
“Didn’t really believe it,” I protested thickly as I lowered my head to my desk, my cheek reveling in its cool, wooden surface. “Not for a second.”
* * *
“Lucy … Lucy, wake up.”
A hand gently shook my shoulder. My eyes opened blearily to a dim room and the annoying, flickering lights of a television that only intensified the pounding in my head.
I groaned and turned my head away, my nose going into soft chenille. Sofa … Break room, my brain registered. After another moment, I turned back, my eyes slowly focusing on the club chairs in soft gray velvet that faced the sofa. A glass coffee table was nestled in between and a seagrass rug on the floor defined the compact seating space. Completing our break room was a counter with a sink, mini-fridge, microwave, coffeemaker, and two-burner hot plate. The flat-screen television was on the far wall, to the left of the glass door that led onto our balcony. The whole area was then separated from the main office by upholstered screens in creamy white linen. It wasn’t fancy—every piece of furniture was from yard sales and we’d all chipped in to have them recovered in whatever fabric we found on clearance—but it was a nice place to relax and a comfortable area to have meetings with clients.
Seemed it made a decent place to sleep off a once-in-a-blue-moon bender as well.
The same hand—Josephine’s—handed me a bottle of water and put a small plate on the coffee table. On it were a couple of saltine crackers and two acetaminophen tablets. Before my stomach could say no to any of it, I downed the meds and started chewing on a saltine.
“Thanks,” I croaked as I sat up. “How’d I get to the sofa?”
“Walter,” she said. “He barely caught you before you fell out of your chair.”
“Oh, jeez,” I groaned and pulled out my hair elastic, releasing my mussed ponytail. Glancing out into the main part of our office through the walk-through gap in the upholstered screens, I saw Walter had left; back to work, no doubt. Then I realized Serena was gone, too. A glance at my watch told me why: it was six forty-five in the evening.
I looked up at Josephine, who had straightened her hair today so it fell in a hazelnut-toned sheet just below her collarbone. Born in Shropshire, England, and raised in London, her ancestry was one-half Namibian, three-eighths English, and one-eighth French, giving her statuesque beauty, gorgeous skin, and clear brown eyes flecked with green.
“Did you stay here all this time for me?” I asked. “You should have woken my butt up and sent me home in an Uber, Jo.”
She waved me off. “I had a conference call with one of my Dutch clients and a company in Darwin, Australia, which is fourteen hours and thirty minutes ahead of us. It was an eight thirty A.M. call, Darwin time, which meant six P.M. here. Worked out perfectly.”
She took up the TV remote and said, “I would have let you sleep longer, too, but I knew you’d want to see what came on the news a few minutes ago. I had the telly on mute so it wouldn’t wake you up, but I could see the closed-captioning. I recorded it with the DVR as soon as I saw the newscasters’ introduction to the story.” She turned toward the TV and hit the button to play back the recording.
To be honest, I was only half listening because I was giving myself a scalp massage in an attempt to stop the throbbing in my skull. I wasn’t really watching, either, because my long hair was spilling in front of my face as I used the tips of my fingers to rub small circles all over my head. I did vaguely hear the newscasters talking about a cold-case murder, and something about two famous Texas families.
But I snapped to attention when I heard a familiar gruff voice. It was projecting and inflecting as if giving an impassioned sermon from a pulpit.
“My great-great-grandmother Jennie Epps Halloran said for her entire life that her husband, my great-great-grandfather Seth Halloran, had been murdered on the dirt streets of San Antonio on that fateful day in 1849, but no one listened. She was branded back then as nothing more than a grieving widow who didn’t know what the truth was, simply because she was a woman.
“But now—over a hundred and sixty years later—the Halloran family has proof that our ancestor was murdered. We have undeniable proof in the form of a photo taken by a local photographer of the time named Jebediah Inscore.”
I stood up slowly, pushed my hair behind my ears, and stared at the television. Gus Halloran looked exactly as I’d seen him at lunch, in a three-piece dark suit with a royal-blue tie. Standing straight-backed as always, his eyes fixing onto the reporter like lasers, he was an imposing figure worthy of the Halloran legacy.
“The original daguerreotype is with renowned historical curator Dr. Winnie Dell at UT’s Hamilton American History Center, where she’ll be seeing to its proper cleaning and restoration,” he said.
It was true. Along with Jeb Inscore’s photos of the Alamo, I’d taken the daguerreotype, still safely in its metal case, to Winnie’s office two days ago. As for Jeb’s journals, including the one from 1849 that proved Seth Halloran had been murdered, I’d left them at Betty-Anne’s house, neatly packed in a new, acid-free archival box, where they were due to be picked up early next week by a San Antonio–based digital-specialist company recommended by Winnie. The specialists would take each journal and produce high-quality scans of every page so the Inscore family would have their ancestor’s words preserved for anyone to read without the possibility of damaging the fragile pages—or damaging them further, since most had a good bit of foxing and some had tears or minor water damage. Naturally, the 1849 journal was due to be scanned first. Should Winnie decide to use the daguerreotype in an exhibit, Jeb’s written description of how Seth died would give the photo an amazing provenance the likes of which few other such historical photos could boast. Even in my hungover state, the thought that something I unearthed in my research would possibly be in a Hamilton Center exhibit gave me happy chills.
The camera went to a wide shot. I saw Gus’s wife, Phyllis, and a couple of other Halloran relatives standing outside in the still-warm October afternoon. With a jolt, I realized they were standing on Eleventh Street, just outside the gates of the Texas Capitol, a mere block north from where I now stood in the Old Printing Office building. Something about the scene was pinging me as familiar.
“We also have Mr. Inscore’s journal entries,” Gus intoned, his Texas drawl more pronounced, “in which he wrote at length about what he saw seconds after my great-great-granddaddy was stabbed to death. Mr. Inscore tells us of how he tried to come forward with the truth, but a certain very powerful man threatened him, his wife, and his family with a—and I quote—‘horrible death,’ if Mr. Inscore did not testify that Seth was trampled to death by a loose horse.”
“Does Inscore tell you who this man was?” a reporter asked.
Gus took off his glasses and stared at the cameras. “Not expressly, no. Jeb refers to him only by the initials ‘C.A.’ However, he does throw out hints as to C.A.’s identity in later entries.”
He slowly put his glasses back on, and I could practically feel the reporters’ bated breaths.
Damn. He’s good.
“Jeb mentions that C.A. was a member of the Texas Legislature as well as ‘a decorated participant in our war for independence’—meaning our Texas Revolution of 1835 to 1836.”
I nodded, recognizing the clues about C.A. that I’d explained to Gus and had highlighted in the journal scans. Gus only glanced at the pages briefly each time before looking straight into each camera as he spoke, his expression one of calm confidence.
“A trained photographer, Jeb was also observant, and noted that this man he called C.A. had passed along a particular family trait to his children.” Gus put a finger on one side of his nose and said, “This powerful family also had powerfully large noses.”
The nearest reporter called out, “Mr. Halloran! Are you saying that you know the identity of the man called C.A.?”
Gus focused on the reporter, held up the journal scans, and said, “Admittedly, there are two men who fit the descriptions laid out in these pages, but my money’s on one man in particular whom I know had dealings with my great-great-grandfather.”
“Tell us who it is!” urged another reporter.
With a grim nod of acquiescence, Gus said, “I believe the C.A. to whom Jeb Inscore refers was none other than Caleb Applewhite.”
I gasped.
“You mean one of the first senators of Texas, Caleb Applewhite?” shouted one savvy reporter. “The ancestor of current United States senator Daniel Applewhite, who’s running for re-election against your son, Pearce Halloran?”
Gus looked somberly into the camera. “Yes. I’m saying it was an Applewhite who was responsible for the murder of my great-great-grandfather Seth Halloran, and the cover-up of that heinous crime.”
“No,” I protested weakly to the television. “No. It could have been either of them.”
On screen, Gus suddenly smiled. “Now I’d like to introduce y’all to the intrepid genealogist responsible for the Halloran family’s newfound justice.”
My jaw dropped as I saw Gus step aside and pull a person who’d been standing behind him to the forefront. A petite woman with dark brown hair in a slightly disheveled low ponytail and wearing a navy blue dress with gold accessories, to be exact.
“Lucy,” I heard Josephine say, “did you know Gus was going to hold a press conference before your lunch à la martinis et allergy meds?”
“Of course not,” I whispered, shaking my head, as Gus said in hearty tones to the cameras, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Austin’s own Lucy Lancaster of Ancestry Investigations.” Gus turned to address me. “Ms. Lancaster, would you please tell this group of interested peoples how you came to solve the mystery of my great-great-grandfather’s murder?”
Josephine put her hand over her mouth and I sunk limply back down onto the sofa as I watched myself swat at a microphone that had been thrust into my face and say, “Certainly, Gus. This is how I followed the trail…”
FOUR
The bright morning sun was trying to pierce my eyeballs as Serena closed down my iPad and the link to yesterday’s six o’clock news segment featuring Gus, several Hallorans, and me, the drunken zombie masquerading as a sober genealogist in a cute navy dress. I’d watched it more times than I wanted to last night, each time feeling more humiliated than the time before, prompting this morning’s damage-control breakfast. Prior to embarking on her self-employed life as a personal shopper, my best friend had cut her teeth as an image consultant for a high-powered public relations firm, with her specialty being the often-unsavory antics of people in the spotlight. If anyone knew when someone was looking bad in the public eye, it was Serena Vogel.
“You were articulate and composed, for the most part, Luce,” she said, picking up her coffee mug. “Well, except when you thought the microphone was a giant mosquito. Oh, and the fact you kept saying ‘Seff’ Halloran instead of ‘Seth.’ But I’m sure people will just think you’ve got a little issue with the way you say certain words.”
I turned up the collar of my hot-pink trench coat. In typical Texas fashion, the late-October weather had gone overnight from humid upper seventies to brisk low sixties, but Serena and I were lumping it and sitting at one of Big Flaco’s Tacos’s outside tables in a swath of quiet sunshine. We’d first attempted our favorite barstools inside the taqueria, but the combination of peppy Tejano music and the usual morning crush of college students had made it hard to hear all the times I’d mangled Seth’s name on camera. Occasional shivers aside, the cool weather had decreased the ragweed levels to the point the regular-strength allergy meds I generally took were doing their usual decent job, which was helpful as I wasn’t ever taking those prescription ones again without a sober companion following me around.
“Great,” I said, adding more salsa fresca to my chorizo-and-egg taco. “Because that’s what I want to be seen as, the crazy genealogist with the occasional speech impediment.”
Serena’s laugh was always a mixture of loud and slightly husky, and today it lit up her eyes to where they matched the azure sky. “No, Luce, I’m saying most people out there will simply think you pronounce the occasional word improperly. Like my uncle Morty, who can’t say the word ‘supposedly.’ It comes out suppose-ev-blee every time, no matter how many times I tell him he’s butchering a simple word in the English language.”
Before I could reply,
a hairy arm reached across the table with a pot of coffee and refilled Serena’s cup. “Butchering the Inglés? You know I do no such thing.”
Only as the deep voice carried a strong Mexican accent, it came out sounding like, “Bootchering dee Inglés? Jou know I do no such ting.”
“Morning, Flaco,” Serena and I replied in unison, smiling up at the beefy Mexican man sporting aviator sunglasses and a full handlebar mustache. Despite the cool weather, he was wearing his usual attire: a lurid Hawaiian shirt (today it was bright orange with multicolored parrots) over wrinkled, knee-length khaki shorts and black Crocs with the Mexican flag painted across the toes.
The fairly substantiated rumor was that Julio “Big Flaco” Medrano, when he was as skinny as his nickname implied, had once been one of the leaders of an up-and-coming drug cartel in the Mexican city of Guanajuato and still had lots of connections who’d just as soon stick a gun in your face as bid you buenas días.
I’d asked him once why he left his hometown when he was a wealthy big shot over there, to come to Texas and struggle for more than twenty years before his little taqueria at Ninth and Colorado Streets was finally discovered by Austin’s legions of foodies. He’d simply told me, “Ay, chiflada, Lucia. I did not like that life. The only thing I’ve ever wanted to sell was food. That’s all you need to know.”
“I saw you on televisíon last night, Lucia,” he told me, pouring fresh coffee into my cup. “You need some menudo this morning for your hangover?”
I raised an eyebrow Serena’s way.
“Hey, I didn’t say people who know you well wouldn’t be able to tell you were blitzed,” she said, making Flaco chuckle.
“No, thank you,” I said to Flaco, my still-weak stomach rolling at the thought of consuming tripe in a chili-based broth, no matter how good for you it was said to be. “I’m doing just fine with my tacos and coffee.”
“¿Estás seguro?” Flaco asked me. “There is no better cure for a hangover than menudo.”