by Rick Riordan
“It would seem," I said, "that I’m looking for a job."
"Always need counter help," Pappy said, grinning. I promised to keep it in mind.
Back at home, I found the list of leads Maia had given me and starred making calls. After an hour on the phone, I had talked to a dozen voice mail services, one receptionist who couldn’t spell my name but was free on Saturday night, and two personnel directors who promised not to throw my résumé in the trash if I mailed it in.
"And you say you’re a paralegal?" the last man on the list asked me. He had graduated from Berkeley with Maia.
"Not exactly."
"Then—what is it that you do?"
"Research, investigation, I’m bilingual, English Ph.D., martial artist, congenial personality."
I could hear him tapping his pencil.
"Maia employed you for what, then—discussing literature? Breaking arms?"
"You’d be surprised how few people can do both."
"Uh-huh." His enthusiasm was not overwhelming.
"Do you have a Texas P.I. license, then?"
"My work for Terrence & Goldman was more informal than that."
"I see—" His voice seemed to be getting farther and farther away from the receiver.
"Did I mention I was a bartender?"
To prove it I started giving him the recipe for a Pink Squirrel. By the time I got to the sugar on the rim he had hung up.
I was taping over the hole in my wall and pondering my limitless job opportunities when Carlon McAffrey called from the Express-News.
"Shilo’s," he said. "One hour. You’re buying."
When I got there at one o’clock the little downtown deli was still packed with businessmen gorging themselves on the pastrami and rye lunch special. The air was so thick with the smell of spiced meats you could get full just breathing it.
Carlon waved at me from the counter. He’d put on at least twenty pounds since I’d seen him last, but I could still recognize him by his tie. He never wore one with fewer than twelve colors. This one had enough pastel to repaint half the West Side.
He smiled and pushed a thick manila envelope across the counter toward me.
“When the mole people start digging they don’t mess around. I got everything, even some copy from the Light. We inherited most of their archival material when they went defunct."
The first thing I pulled out was a picture of my dad, taken the last year he had campaigned for sheriff. Those gray, mischievous eyes stared back at me from under the rim of his Stetson. He had an amused look on his face.
I always wondered how anyone could see a photo like that and willingly vote this man into public office. Dad looked like the quintessential third-grade class clown, only older and fatter. I could imagine him cutting off little girls’ ponytails with his school box scissors, or throwing spitwads at the teacher’s back.
The counter waitress came by. I decided to skip the lunch menu and go straight for Shilo’s cheesecake, three layers thick, any of which by itself would’ve been the best cheesecake in the world. I ate it while I skimmed through the rest of Carlon’s envelope.
There were lots of headlines about my dad’s last big project in office—a multi-department sting operation against drug trafficker Guy White that had eventually gone down as the most expensive failure in Bexar County law enforcement history. According to the articles, the case against White was finally thrown out of court on a ruling of entrapment, just weeks before my father’s murder. Dad won lots of friends on the federal level by telling the press that the FBI had botched the whole operation.
There was an ongoing series of "guest editorials" from the Light written by another of my father’s great admirers, Councilman Fernando Asante. He blasted my father for everything from abuse of police power to poor taste in clothes, but mostly Asante focused on the Sheriff’s opposition to Travis Center, a proposed hotel-tourist complex for the southeast side of town. Back in ’85 Asante was making Travis Center the centerpiece of his first campaign for mayor—pushing the idea that the complex would generate tourist dollars in the poor, largely Hispanic section of the city. My father opposed the project because it would require the annexation of county lands, and more importantly because it was Asante’s idea.
Then there was a report on the fall ’85 election results, which Dad didn’t live long enough to see. The voters showed a healthy sense of humor by voting against Asante for mayor five to one but approving his Travis Center bond initiative by a landslide. Now, ten years and umpteen million dollars later, Asante was still just a councilman and Travis Center was finally complete. I’d seen it from above on my plane’s final approach-a huge bulbous structure, hideously painted pink and red, cutting a gash in the hills on the edge of town like a giant flesh wound.
Finally there were stories about the assassination. There in black and white were all the front page headlines I had nightmares about, plus pages of follow-ups I’d never had the stomach to read. The murder scene, the investigation, the memorial services—all reported on in microscopic detail. Several articles talked about Randall Halcomb, the closest thing to a real suspect the FBI ever discussed in public. An ex-deputy, Halcomb had been fired by my dad for insubordination in the late seventies, then arrested in 1980 for manslaughter. Halcomb was paroled from Huntsville a week before my dad’s murder.
Convenient. Only by the time the FBI found him, two months after Dad`s death, the ex-deputy was curled up in a deer blind in Blanco, shot between the eyes. Inconvenient.
The last thing in Carlon’s files was a photo of my father’s body covered with a blanket, his hand sticking out the side like it was reaching for a beer, while a grimfaced deputy held up his hand to block the camera, a little too slow.
I resealed the envelope. Then I stared at the neon beer signs over the bar until I realized Carlon was talking
to me.
"—this personal vengeance theory," he was saying, “just some ex-con with a score to settle. That’s bullshit. Christ, if Halcomb was acting alone, how come he turned up with a bullet between his eyes once the Feds start looking for him?"
I ate a piece of cheesecake. Suddenly it tasted like lead.
"You’ve been doing your homework, McAffrey. You stay up last night reading these?"
Carlon shrugged. “I’m just saying. There had to be a cover-up here."
“Maybe that’s the journalist in you talking."
“My ass. Your dad was murdered and nobody ever did time for it. Not even a fucking trial. I’m just trying to help."
Years of good living had softened Carlon’s face a little, but you could still see the hard edge in his smile. His eyes were cold and blue. There was energy there, self-confidence, a harsh kind of humor. Nothing that might pass for compassion. He was still the same college kid who pushed cows down hills for fun and laughed shamelessly at racial jokes and broken limbs. He came through for his friends. He probably meant what he said about helping. But if you couldn’t use it for fun or profit it meant very little to Carlon McAffrey.
“Halcomb had his own motive," I reminded him.
“Assuming he’s the one who did the shooting, he wouldn’t have needed anyone pulling his strings."
Carlon shook his head. "My money’s on the mob. My sources at the SAPD tell me I’m right."
"I heard that from the SAPD too. Doesn’t exactly inspire my confidence?
"Your dad died right after he brought Guy White in for trafficking, Tres. Don’t tell me that was coincidence."
"Why should the mob target a retiring sheriff? That would be pointless. The charges against White had already been thrown out."
Carlon wiped a piece of sauerkraut off his cheek. He was looking over my shoulder now, toward the booths on the east wall of the restaurant.
"Good question," he said. “Go ask him."
“Who?"
Carlon pointed with the bottom of his beer bottle.
“Guy White, man."
The booth Carlon was pointing at had two men in it. The one wi
th his back toward me was a skinny, middle-aged Anglo whose mother dressed him funny. His slacks rode up at the ankles, his beige suit coat was too big around the shoulders, and his thinning brown hair was uncombed. He had finished his meal and was now tapping a quarter slice of pickle absently on his plate.
The man sitting across from him was much older, much more carefully dressed. I’d never seen Guy White in person, but if this was him the only thing white about him was the name. His skin was carefully bronzed, his suit light blue, his hair and eyes as rich and dark as mole sauce. He had to be the best—looking man over sixty I’d ever seen. Mr. White was about halfway through with a club sandwich and appeared to be in no hurry to finish the rest. He was chatting with the waitress, smiling a Colgate smile at her, gesturing every so often toward his associate across the table. The waitress laughed politely.
Mr. White’s poorly dressed friend did not.
"He comes in here twice a week to be seen," Carlon told me. "Clean-nosed celebrity these days--bailed the symphony out of bankruptcy, goes to the Alamodome for all the games, supports the arts, gets his picture taken with Manuel Flores at charity garden shows. Gone downright respectable. If something new came up in your dad’s case, something that screwed White’s public image to hell, that’d make a nice story."
I shook my head. "You expect me to walk over there right now and confront him?"
"Where’s that old college try? The Tres Navarre I knew would go up to an ROTC captain during live ammunition practice and tell him his girlfriend—"
“This is a little different, Carlon."
“You want me to do it?"
He started to get up. I pushed on his shoulder just enough to sit him back down on his stool.
“What then?" Carlon said. “You asked me for the files. You must have some kind of theory."
I took one more bite of cheesecake. Then I stood, put the manila envelope under my arm, and left my last twenty on the counter.
"Thanks for the info, Carlon," I said.
"Suit yourself," he said. “But you want this thing covered in a friendly way, you know where to come."
I looked back at him one more time as I left. He had pocketed my twenty and was ordering another beer on the Express’s expense account. For a minute I wondered why he had never gone into straight news reporting. He seemed disturbingly well suited for it.
Then it occurred to me that he was probably thriving right where he was, catering to the interests and appetites of the city in the entertainment section. That thought was even more unsettling.
12
Twenty minutes later I’d reparked my VW at the top of the Commerce Street Garage, one row down from the dark green Infiniti in Guy White’s reserved monthly space.
I knew White parked in the garage because it was the only logical place to park if you’re going to Shilo’s. I knew he had a regular space because ten minutes earlier a nice parking attendant had shown me the list of monthly parkers. In fact he’d shoved it in my face, exasperated, trying to convince me that my name, Ed Beavis, was not registered. Normally I would’ve bribed him for the information I needed, but poverty makes for creative alternatives.
A few more minutes of waiting and the elevator door shuddered open. Mr. White’s skinny associate in the ill-fitting beige suit walked out first, bouncing car keys in his right palm. He wasn’t any handsomer from the front. His face had that sandblasted look farmers tend to get—dark pitted skin, permanently squinting eyes, features worn down to nothing but right angles. Mr. White strolled a few steps behind, reading a folded newspaper in one hand and smiling contentedly like there was nothing in there but good words.
We started our cars. Making no effort to hang back, I followed the Infiniti out of the garage, then onto Commerce and east for a mile to the highway. I couldn’t see anything through the silvered rear window of Guy White’s car, but once in a while my friend the driver would glance back at me in his sideview mirror.
Tailing someone well is extremely hard. It’s rare that you can strike the right balance between being far enough away to look inconspicuous and being close enough not to lose the subject. A full ninety percent of the time you’ll lose the person you’re tailing because of traffic or stoplights, nothing you can do about it.
Then you have to try, try again, sometimes for seven or eight days.
That, of course, is assuming you don’t want to be seen. Tailing someone badly is very easy.
When I got about fifteen feet behind the Infiniti in the center lane of McAlister, the driver looked in his side mirror and frowned. I smiled at him. He said something to his boss in the backseat.
If they’d sped up they could’ve easily left me in the dust, but they didn’t. I guess one guy in an orange Volkswagen wasn’t their idea of terrifying. The Infiniti kept cruising at an easy fifty mph, finally taking the Hildebrand Exit and turning left onto the overpass. I followed it into Olmos Park.
Mansions started rising out of the woods and hills. Bankers’ wives jogged by in warm-up suits that cost more than my car. The natives seemed to smell my VW as it went by. It looked like their noses weren’t pleased.
We passed my father’s old house. We passed the police station. Then we turned off Olmos Drive onto Crescent and the Infiniti pulled into the red brick driveway of a residence I knew only by reputation: the White House.
It wasn’t just called that because of the man who lived there. The facade was an exact replica—wraparound porches, Grecian columns, even the U.S. flag. It was an egomaniac’s dream, except the whole building was scaled down to about half the size of the original. Still impressive, but after you looked at it for a while, it somehow seemed pathetic. It was a Volvo trying to look like a Mercedes, a Herradura bottle filled with Happy Amigo tequila.
I pulled over on the opposite side of the road, where the cactus and wild mountain laurels sloped down toward an old creek bed. The driver of the Infiniti got out and started walking toward me. Mr. White got out next. He brushed some invisible speck off his powder-blue suit, then folded his newspaper under his arm and began walking leisurely toward his front door, not looking back.
The skinny guy came down the presidential lawn and across the street. He put his right hand on the side of the car and leaned in toward me. When his coat fell open I got a pretty good view of the .38 Airweight in the shoulder holster.
"Trouble?" he asked. The number of vowels and syllables he packed into that one word told me he was a West Texas boy, probably hailed from Lubbock.
"No trouble." I gave him a winning smile.
Lubbock ran his tongue around his lips. He leaned in closer and gave me a short laugh. “I’m not asking if you got trouble, mister, I’m asking if you want it."
I feigned bewilderment, pointing to my own chest.
Lubbock’s face turned into one big sour pucker.
"Shit," he said, a three-syllable word. "You a retard, mister? What the hell you want following us like that?"
I tried another dashing smile. "How about a few minutes of Mr. White’s time?"
“That’s about as likely as pig shit."
“Tell Mr. White that Sheriff Navarre’s son is here to see him. I think he’ll agree to talk."
If the name Navarre meant anything to Lubbock, he didn’t show it. "I don’t give a damn whose damn son you are, mister. You’d best get out of here before I decide—"
“You’ve never been a highway patrolman."
He scowled. It didn’t improve his looks any.
“What?"
Before he knew what had happened, I’d grabbed the handle of his .38 Airweight and twisted it, still in its holster, so the barrel was angled into the side of Lubbock’s chest. His arms jerked up instinctively, like he was suddenly anxious for his armpit deodorant to dry. All the tight lines in Lubbock’s face loosened and most of his color seemed to drain into his neck.
“When you’re stopping somebody in a car," I explained very patiently, "you never wear a shoulder holster. Much too easy to reach."
Lubbock raised his hands, slowly. His mouth was twitching in the corner.
“I’ll be goddamned," he said. Too many syllables to count.
I got the Airweight free of its holster, then opened the car door. Lubbock stepped back to let me out. He was smiling in earnest now, looking at the gun I had leveled at his chest.
“That’s the ballsiest son-of-a-bitch move I’ve seen in a while, mister. I’ll be damned if it wasn’t. You just put, yourself in so much deep shit you don’t even know."
"Let’s go see about getting you that raise," I suggested.
The front door was painted white, with a bathtub-sized piece of beveled glass in the center. Lubbock led me through into a spacious entry hall, then left to a pair of double oak doors and into a private study. Some where along the way he must’ve pressed a security buzzer with his foot, but I never saw it.
Things were going very well until the guy behind the coat rack clicked the safety of his gun off and stuck a few inches of barrel in my neck.
Lubbock turned around and repossessed his .38 Air-weight. He never stopped grinning. The man behind me stayed perfectly still. I didn’t try to turn.
"Good afternoon," I said. “Is Mr. White at home?"
"Good afternoon," the man behind me said. His voice came out smooth as honey over a sopapilla. "Mr. White is at home. In fact, Mr. White is about to kill you if you don’t explain yourself rather quickly."
I put my hand over my shoulder, offering to shake.
"Jackson Navarre," I said. "The Third."
I counted to five. I thought that was it. I started to make peace with Jesus, the Tao, and my credit card agencies, then I heard the safety click back on. Guy White took my hand.
“Why didn’t you say so?" he asked.
13
“Would you pass me the Blue Princess, Mr. Navarre?"
Guy White pointed with his trowel to the flat of baby plants he wanted. I passed them over. For his gardening ensemble, White had changed into a newly-pressed denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, Calvin Klein jeans, huaraches on his perfectly tanned feet. He’d traded the 9mm Glock for pruners and trowel. Shadows from the brim of his wicker hat criss-crossed his face like Maori tattoos as he knelt over a five-foot plot of dirt, digging little conical holes for his new babies.
