by Kit Frazier
“Have you seen Mr. Buggess?” I said.
“Not hide nor hair,” Coach said. “We tried callin’ Bug at his house but it sounds like the phone’s been disconnected or off the hook or some such thing.”
“I’ve met Mr. Buggess,” I said, tucking the photo album under my arm. “I’ll swing by and check on him. About that Customs Agent. Do you still have the card he gave you?”
Mrs. Barnes blushed again and pulled the card from the pocket in her dress. I looked down at the card and tried not to smile.
“John Fiennes,” I said, like I didn’t already know.
“You want the card?” Mrs. Barnes said.
“That’s okay,” I said, giving it back. “I have one of my own.”
I re-snapped the top onto the Jeep. Marlowe and I hopped in and we hit the road with a renewed sense of energy. Every time I dug into this thing, I hit either Selena or El Patron. Heading east on Texas 71, I called Cantu to tell him what I’d learned.
“You think that was your pal, the earless guy that went to visit them?” Cantu said.
“You know why anybody else would wear a ski cap over his ears in hundred-degree weather?”
Cantu grunted. “I’ll file it and be out to see the Barnes’ this afternoon. I’m sending a uniform to do drive-bys on the house.”
“Thanks.”
“Hey, speaking of earless, the wife of the veterinarian burn victim. She wanted to know about when she could pick up his missing ear. Said she wanted to bury him whole”
My stomach did a slow, sickening turn. “You mean the one that was stuffed in my sofa?”
“Yeah, well, it’s in forensics the geeks are working on matching that up right now. Told the wife it was evidence,” Cantu said. “Sometimes I hate this job.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why you’re good at it.”
After a long pause, Cantu said, “Cauley?”
“Yeah?”
“Be careful.”
“Don’t worry. I like my ears and I don’t want a repeat performance of my evening in the lake. Tell Arlene I said hey.”
I disconnected, thinking about my next step. Maybe I’d swing by the Sentinel’s main office downtown later in the afternoon to talk to Rob Ryder. He’d done a lot of interviews with Scooter over the years, and he’d had a half a dozen bylines on El Patron. Despite the fact that the investigation on El Patron hadn’t gone past the low level guys, Ryder might have some useful insight.
Before I did anything else, I called Tanner to tell him I was taking another week off.
“You okay?” Tanner said.
“Yeah, I just need some time to get my head straight.”
“And you’re not nosing around in Barnes?”
“Me?” I said. “I’m an obituary writer.”
“Leave it, Cauley. APD still hasn’t found your bald, earless guy.”
Oh, they’re closer to finding Van Gogh than you think, I mused.
I made a noise in the back of my throat. “Tanner I can’t hear you. Must be a bad connection.”
I disconnected and called Logan and got his voice mail. I told his machine about what I’d learned and left the elder Barnes’s address and telephone number so he wouldn’t have to look it up or twist arms or use thumb screws or whatever FBI agents did when they wanted telephone numbers.
Then I took a deep breath to calm the butterflies and dialed Fiennes. I would be cool and breezy. Just another business call.
When Fiennes picked up the phone I said, “Hey, stranger, it’s me, Cauley. What are you doing?” See? Calm and casual.
“Breathlessly waiting for you to call.”
I almost dropped the phone. When I didn’t respond, he said, “Actually I’m at a reading.”
I stared at the phone. “Like a poetry reading?”
“Non-fiction. Ian Sayer.”
“A literate Customs Agent,” I said, racking my brain for literary references on Ian Sayer and wondering why I was constantly surprised by the men in my life.
“We’ve got some new developments,” I said.
There was a long pause. “I thought you were off Barnes.”
“Yeah, I thought so, too,” I said, watching through the windshield as storm clouds gathered on the horizon. “There was an act of God.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Can you meet me at The Blue Parrot at nine tonight?”
I glanced at the clock glued to the dash. Nine would be cutting it close, but it would give me a good excuse to cut my interview with Ryder short. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll call if I’m going to be late.”
“Nine, then,” he said. “And Cauley?”
“Yeah?”
“Wear black.”
I stared at the phone. “For profession or pleasure?”
“Who says we can’t have both?”
Chapter Nineteen
I dropped Marlowe at home, and after a brief altercation over who was boss and a big distraction involving a ham sandwich, I zoomed downtown. I nearly swore when I hit Loop One just before afternoon crush and sat in traffic for nearly an hour. Lots of people visit Austin. No one seems to leave.
I pulled onto Congress Avenue and slid into the parking garage at the Sentinel’s main office, squared my shoulders and marched through the revolving doors of the sprawling, Lloyd-Wright-looking Sentinel building. I badged the security guard, signed in and headed for Editorial on the fifth floor, armed with the yellow pad with dates and headlines that Logan and I had pieced together. The Barnes’ had asked me to find the truth about what happened to their son, and I was prepared to resort to drastic measures.
“Well, if it isn’t the Obituary Babe.”
I didn’t have to find my drastic measure. It found me.
Rob Ryder came sauntering down the hall, carefully rumpled in that annoying, Polo-way that only a real News Boy can master. His blue shirt matched his eyes, his shirtsleeves were rolled up, and his trendy tie was carefully askew. Ryder’s one of those rare breeds of male who can talk most women out of their panties and purse and make them feel like he’d done them a favor.
He stood in the spacious, carpeted hall, looking at me. He had a file tucked under one arm and he was eating an apple.
“Hello, Ryder,” I said. “Still seeing Miranda?”
He laughed like I was being ridiculous. “What brings you to the corporate jungle?”
I smiled winsomely, stopping just short of batting my eyelashes. Two could play the charm game. “Just tying up some loose ends. Hey. You still have your notes on El Patron?”
Ryder’s eyes sparked as he tried to figure out how to play me. “El Patron?” he drawled like he was thinking it over. “You were on that one for awhile, too, weren’t you?”
“Strictly research. I hit a dead end and got reassigned.”
“I think I still have some notes and interviews,” he said, his eyes narrowed. “Want to see?”
Did I.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound bored. “What I really need are solid dates. I’ve got a list of approximates. The other stuff I can look up in the Morgue.”
“Resource Recovery?” he said. He stopped walking, giving me his full attention. “Why aren’t you using your own office?”
“Long story.”
He nodded and I could practically hear his brain churning as he tried to work an angle. “I was about to knock off for the day, but I could stay for you. Need some help?”
I narrowed my eyes.
“Now, Cauley,” he said, sliding an arm around my shoulders so that his file folder brushed my waist. “We work for the same paper. We’re on the same team.”
Journalists guard information the way a pit bull guards a pork chop. Especially when they’re on the same team. I didn’t want Ryder horning in on me. But I needed to pump him for information, a sort of informal interview.
Drastic measures.
“Yeah,” I said. “Help would be great.”
Untangling myself from h
is grip, I followed Ryder through the cavernous hallway back to his office, where his Texas Press Association awards gleamed neatly on the wall behind his European-style desk. An air purifier hummed quietly in the corner, and a state-of-the-art police scanner buzzed quietly from the sleek bookshelf.
The view from his office was exquisite. Downtown Austin, complete with glittering glass cityscape and the sparkling blue ribbon of Town Lake. I supposed this is what your office is supposed to look like when you grow up.
Ryder moved behind his desk, gesturing me to follow. He caught my gaze and took a loud, obnoxious bite of the apple he’d been carrying, which I assumed was supposed to be sexy.
“Want a bite?” he said, holding the apple out to me, so close to my nose I could smell ripe fruit and expensive aftershave.
I wanted to say, I wouldn’t eat after you if I was armed with a Kevlar vest and a can of Raid, but I said, “No thanks. I already ate.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, and tossed the rest of the apple through a miniature chrome basketball hoop over a shiny chrome wastebasket.
Ryder booted up a very expensive computer and I stood behind him, peering over his shoulder at the screen as he logged on and ran a LexisNexis search for El Patron. The search didn’t take long, but Ryder’s screen saver flashed as the hard drive whirred, and a photo of Ryder and a well-built blonde frolicking on a sunny beach flashed into view. I rolled my eyes.
I supposed there were worse things in life than spending an afternoon with Rob Ryder. I would rate it somewhere between roasting in hell and rubbing my knuckles on a cheese grater.
But Mark Ramsey had taught me to start an investigation with people who’d walked the scene before you got there. And the people who walked the scene first were cops and news hounds. I stared steadily at Ryder. I hadn’t handled anything right since I’d stepped foot in that shed, and I was determined to get it right, even if it meant rubbing noses with the devil.
“El Patron came to Texas through Argentina, and what’s interesting is that they’re more of an old style family business they buy up vulnerable businesses, you know, bars, restaurants and car washes, wring “em for everything they’re worth and then torch “em for insurance, but occasionally, they keep “em around to clean the money,” Ryder said. “I think they also do some small-time corporate takeover stuff and use the legitimate businesses to cover some of their more shady dealings.”
“Like smuggling?”
“Peripherally they’ve been busted twice for smuggling small time stuff through a dirty shipping company name of Herrera Shipping. Some guns and dope that landed in Northeast Austin via Buenos Aires. The Feds pulled Herrera apart at the seams. But the long arm of the law never went above El Patron’s low-level guys. When El Patron ran into trouble with Herrera, they shut that down and took over a little mom-n-pop shipping company, CenTex Distribution, and I guess it’s legit. It’s still up and running.”
“Shipping.” I thought about Scooter’s exotic pet shop. “Did the old shipping service ever get busted for smuggling animals?”
“Animals? Not that I ever found. I tried to change the angle of the story during the last pitch meeting.” He gazed out the wide windows overlooking downtown Austin. “There’s something there, I can smell it.”
“You got yanked off the assignment?”
Ryder scowled. “It was a mutual agreement.” Turning back to his desk, he pulled up an Excel program filled with interview dates, times and information. They were all color-coded and in alphabetical order. I stood, staring at the screen.
“Do you do this with all your interviews?” I said. I couldn’t have been more awestruck if the man just told me he was double jointed.
“Of course. How do you organize your data?”
There was no way to say “In a great big pile on my living room floor” and still look professional, so I said, “I’m in the process of developing my own system.”
Ryder grinned. “You gonna tell me what this is all about?”
I had to tell him something. He was, after all, helping me. But I knew if I told him the whole truth the rat bastard would try to scoop me. But I had a couple of things going for me, and it would take Ryder a long time to trump an FBI agent, a Customs guy and the entire Barnes family. Not to mention an up-close and personal relationship with an earless maniac who wanted me dead. You just can’t cultivate better sources than mine.
I blew out a long breath. “I don’t think Scott Barnes committed suicide,” I said, and watched as Ryder’s face remained carefully composed. He blinked rapidly, but otherwise, showed no outward sign that he wanted to turn cartwheels in the middle of his office.
“And you think he’s tied to El Patron?”
“I don’t have proof,” I said.
Ryder adjusted his tie, never breaking eye contact. “What makes you think there’s a connection?”
“Nothing concrete. But every time I dig around in the Barnes thing, I keep running into El Patron. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Barnes called me the morning he holed up in the shed. He was my friend. He knew I’d done some of the legwork for your articles on El Patron.”
“And you don’t think Barnes committed suicide?”
“I’ve got some German guy chasing me around, threatening to chop off my ears if I don’t tell him what Scooter said in the shed which was the last anybody saw him alive in public.”
Ryder tried to contain his excitement and almost succeeded. “Oh Yeah? What did Barnes tell you?”
“That’s the bitch of it. He didn’t tell me anything.”
“Why didn’t I hear about the German guy on the scanner or see it in the beat report?”
“Cantu came to get me off the clock so the initial incident didn’t make the scanner and you probably didn’t know what to look for in the beat report.”
Ryder looked at me the way my mom looks at the expiration date on questionable lunchmeat, but he pulled up another Excel document, did a couple of merges and created a new document. He hit print and pulled the three documents from his laser printer.
“You want to access the Morgue from my computer?”
My fingers itched at the thought of skimming across that ergonomically correct keyboard. But every document that crosses a screen is accessible in the hard drive, even if you delete it. And the Sentinel had a battalion of computer geeks who had wet dreams over that kind of thing. It would be just like Ryder to cyber-siphon my research.
“Um,” I stalled. “I need outside resources.”
He frowned. “Outside of LexisNexis?”
“I want pictures,” I said. “I’m heading to the main library.”
“Hold up,” Ryder said, grabbing his jacket. “I’ll go with you.”
I got a sinking feeling as Ryder followed me down Congress to Seventh and onto Guadalupe, but it was still a free country and I couldn’t stop him from tagging along. I could, however, fake, deceive and down-right lie if it came down to him horning in on my research. Besides, he’d worked this thread longer than I had. Maybe I could learn something.
Armed with the dates of pertinent articles, Ryder followed me up to the second floor of the main library, where the city archived magazines, newspapers and other bits of obscure information on outdated microfiche. I stopped at the top of the stairs and breathed deeply of historic headlines and the peppery smell of vintage paper. I just love libraries.
Settling in next to the big, metal file cabinets, I browsed through the notes I’d taken when Logan and I had reconstructed my original, stolen Barnes file. I’d also brainstormed names of reporters and approximate dates for a timeline, which I added to the dates Ryder and I’d found in his Excel documents.
I pulled the old-fashioned microfiche according to date, skimming the teasers under the projector. Anything related to Scooter’s marriage, social obligations and charity functions would be in the society pages, football and the knee injury in sports, pet shop in business. Anything on El Patron would most likely be State/Metro, since
there hadn’t been any big, federal breakthroughs on the growing crime syndicate.
Ryder had a file drawer out, doing his own search. Staring at me with a practiced, lascivious stare, he said, “Hey, Cauley. How come you and I never…you know?”
“Because I have taste,” I said, zipping through files.
“You ever thought about how beautiful our kids would be?”
“Every waking moment,” I said. The machine rattled and I squinted at the flying typeface on the microfiche, scrutinizing until my eyes hurt. I glanced up at the clock. I was supposed to meet Fiennes in two hours.
“I’ll get the articles I wrote, I know where they are,” Ryder said. He moved to a nearby aisle as I flipped madly though Metro sections in papers dated close to the dates I’d written down.
I found an article on El Patron that Ryder hadn’t written, pulled some change out of my pocket and made a copy, then thumbed through the rest of the fiche I’d retrieved. If I could make copies and spread it out on my living room floor, I could look for connections.
“Hey Cauley, you got any change?” Ryder said, and as I dug into my jeans for a coin something hit me like a runaway delivery truck.
The coin.
“Ryder,” I said. “Didn’t you write and article about some rare coins found in Bastrop? Auschwitz Eagle or something.”
Ryder stopped rifling through files. “Anschluss Eagle,” he said. “Why?”
“Just curious. What’s so hot about this coin?” I said, trying to look innocent, which is harder than it sounds.
“There were only nine-hundred-ninety-nine minted,” he said, “but what makes them valuable is that they were cast by an Austrian jeweler in Anschluss, the day the Nazi’s marched into Vienna.”
I got a sick feeling in my stomach. “You’re saying those coins are Nazi gold?”
Ryder shrugged. “In a manner of speaking. They found a small jar of the coins buried out behind a vet clinic in Bastrop.”
“I remember the article,” I said. “But how on earth did the cops find the gold?”
Ryder grinned. “The guy’s wife saw him buckle-rubbing with some big girl in a honkytonk and dimed him out.”
“Don’t mess with Texas women,” I said, but I was thinking about the coin Scooter had given me, which was now languishing on the bottom Lake Austin and wished I’d gotten a better look at it. Could that coin been one of those weird Eagle coins? It had to be, and the connection between the Bastrop veterinarian couldn’t be a coincidence. And if Scooter had something to do with stashing those coins, it explained why everybody and his brother wanted to chop my ears off to find out what Scooter told me in the shed.
