The widower’s two step tn-2

by Rick Riordan

  "That I was handling it wrong anyway. End of case."

  "What did you say?"

  "I quit."

  After a moment of stunned silence Carolaine looked at her watch. Then she took her purse off the counter and rummaged for something inside. She was trying not to let it show, but I could see the relief loosening up her shoulder muscles.

  "So what now?" she asked.

  "I don't know. It depends on what Milo Chavez wants."

  "You mean you might keep working for him, unlicensed-like the work you did before?"

  She said before like it was a euphemism for something one didn't talk about in polite company.

  "Maybe," I admitted.

  "The last time you did this man a favour it almost got you killed, yes?"

  "Yes."

  "I don't understand-I don't see why you can't just…"

  She stopped herself. The corners of her mouth tightened.

  "Say it," I told her. "Why can't I just use my degree and get a real job teaching English somewhere."

  She shook her head. "It's not my business, is it?"

  "Carolaine-"

  "I have to leave, Tres." Then she added without much optimism, "You could come back to the studio with me. We could get takeout, spend the afternoon in my dressing room like old times. It might do us some good."

  "I have to call Milo."

  The frost set in. "All right."

  Carolaine closed her purse, then came up and kissed me very lightly without ever really looking at me. She smelled like baby powder. There were a few freckles on her nose that the makeup hadn't quite covered.

  "Sorry I bothered you," she said.

  The front door slammed behind her.

  Robert Johnson came out of the closet as soon as he heard Carolaine's car start. He looked out the window suspiciously, then gave me a look of death he must've learned from Erainya Manos.

  "You want to play Anne Frank when people come over," I said, "don't blame me."

  He came over and bit me on the ankle, lazily, then headed for the food dish.

  Some days everybody wants to be your friend.

  5

  At sunset the sky turned the colour of cooked eggplant. Seven million grackles descended for a convention in the trees and phone wires above the city. They sat there making a scratchy highpitched sound that was probably screwing up the sonar of every submarine in the Gulf of Mexico.

  I stood in the kitchen reading the ExpressNews late edition. I had just started on my third Shiner Bock and was starting to get mercifully numb in the extremities.

  Julie Kearnes had had the good sense to get murdered on a slow news day. She merited a small story on A12. I received honourable mention for making the 911 call.

  The staff writer had done some homework. He wrote that readers might remember Kearnes for her song "Three More Lonely Nights," recorded by Emmylou Harris in 1978, or for Julie's more recent work as fiddle player and backup singer to rising local star Miranda Daniels. The police had no leads in the killing, no murder weapon, no useful witnesses.

  The writer mentioned nothing else about Julie Kearnes-none of the immaterial stuff I had learned from following her around town, talking to her neighbours, going through her garbage. For instance that Julie's favourite food was Thai. That she shopped at the same New Age stores my mother liked. That Julie had played fiddle in country bands since she was six but secretly, at night, preferred to listen to Itzhak Perlman. That she drank cheap white wine and owned a parrot.

  None of that made it into the ExpressNews-just the fact that Julie Kearnes now had a hole in her head.

  The last part of the article talked about what a pain it was having the SAC parking lot cordoned off all morning for the investigation. It quoted some grumpy students who'd had to park several blocks away from class.

  I thought about Julie Kearnes all dressed up nice, fiddle beside her in the '68 Cougar.

  I thought about the real downside of surveillance-not the boredom, like most P.I. s will tell you, but the times when the subject starts to become a real person to you.

  I drank more beer.

  I'd had no luck with the telephone. I'd paged and left messages for Milo Chavez but his secretary Gladys insisted that he couldn't be reached. Milo was somewhere in Boerne, working on a major event. Gladys acknowledged that a major event in Boerne was an oxymoron, but she still said there was nothing she could do for me. Yes, she had heard the news about Julie Kearnes. Yes, the police had been by. Yes, she had left messages for Milo about it. No, she still couldn't reach him. No, reaching Les SaintPierre himself, God of Talent Agents, was out of the question. Why not try back tomorrow?

  I thanked her and hung up the phone.

  I was ready to turn in for the day. Unfortunately, time and tide and my weekly dinner at Mother's house would wait for no man.

  I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror.

  "You can do this," I said.

  Robert Johnson looked up at me sideways from the leaky faucet that doubled as his watering hole. He offered no words of encouragement.

  I showered and dressed fancy-jeans with no holes, my Bay to Breakers Tshirt, my deck shoes, the newer ones that didn't yet resemble baked potatoes.

  Then I put the top down on the VW and headed north on Broadway toward Vandiver Street, blasting tinny con junto music from my AM radio all the way through downtown Alamo Heights. When I stopped at the light on the corner of Austin Highway a couple of guys in tuxedoes and Stetsons in the Mercedes next to me looked over and stared.

  Once you get to Vandiver it's easy to find my mother's house, even in the dark. You just go down the row of white postWW II houses until you find the pink adobe bungalow with the green porch light. Understated.

  Nobody met me at the door so I let myself in.

  Mother was burning frankincense tonight. The Christmas lights were blinking in the pencil cactus, and the hot tub out on the deck was bubbling happily to itself, ready for a party. The general theme of the house was Ethnic Eclectic-Mexican curios next to Japanese kimonos next to African burial masks.

  Two guys I'd never seen before were playing pool in the dining room. They were about my age. They wore tight jeans and boots and denim shirts with the sleeves rolled up to show their triceps.

  They nodded at me and kept playing.

  I went down the steps into the kitchen, where Mother and Jess were watching TV.

  Carolaine was on, doing an advertisement for the ten o'clock news. She said she'd have the latest on the North Side apartment fire.

  "Tres, honey." Mother got up, squashed my cheeks together with both hands, and kissed me. "I hope tortilla soup is all right."

  Mother was dressed for Zimbabwe. She had on a multicoloured caftan and a long black shawl. Her ebony earrings were shaped like the stone heads on Easter Island and her forearms had so many silver bangles on them they looked like Slinkys. She was around fiftyfive and looked thirtyfive, tops.

  Jess told me howdy and went back to watching the Oilers game. Jess graduated from Heights a couple of years before I did. We played varsity together. I think he was Young Boyfriend number three or four since my mom had gotten her divorce, burned her pot roast recipes, and reinvented herself as a New Age artiste.

  "I expect a full report," Mother was saying. "How is Carolaine? We never miss the KSAT news anymore. You should tell her to wear that green dress more often, Tres.

  It's very flattering."

  I told her Carolaine was fine and no we were not living together yet and no I didn't know when or if we would be. Mother didn't like the "if" part very much. She looked disappointed that I wasn't living in sin yet. She told me she recommended it highly.

  "Huh," Jess said. He kept his eyes on the ball game.

  Mother went to stir the soup. She added a bowl of boiled chicken and stewed tomatoes to the broth. I came over to the counter and started chopping cilantro for her.

  "And work?" Mother looked sideways at me, intently.

  "
Maybe not so great. I've got one job to finish. After that…"

  She nodded, satisfied, then pushed a strand of black hair back over her ear.

  Out of habit I tried to spot any sign of gray. There wasn't any. God knows I'd snuck plenty of looks into her medicine cabinet for Miss Clairol and never found anything more incriminating than vitamin E, rosemary essence, and a few healing crystals.

  Mother looked at me again and smiled, like she knew what I was thinking and enjoyed it. It was a game she'd been winning for a good fifteen years.

  "Well," she said, "I happened to talk with Professor Mitchell at UTSA."

  I chopped the cilantro a little harder. "Mother-"

  "Please, dear, we were just touching base."

  "Touching base."

  "Of course. It must've been ten years since I did that art show with his wife."

  In the other room one of the young rednecks broke a setup and the other one whistled appreciatively. Jess tossed his beer can toward the trash and made it. The Oilers were winning.

  "So you just happened to run across Mitchell's phone number in your book."

  "That's right."

  I slid the cilantro off the knife blade and into the pot. The cebollas were already grilled and the sour cream was ready. Strips of fried corn tortilla were in a bowl to the side, ready to be stirred in.

  I wiped off my hands.

  "And while you were on the phone-" I prompted.

  Mother shrugged. "All right. I did ask if there were any openings in the English department."

  I looked down longingly at the big knife I'd been using.

  "Well, really, Jackson. He was very helpful."

  Only my mother calls me by my first name and lives. She likes to put me in my place next to the first two Jackson Navarres-my father and my grandfather. The third in a long line of hopeless males.

  The phone rang. My mother tried to look surprised and failed miserably.

  "Good Lord, who could that be?"

  I bowed to the inevitable and said I'd get it. Mother smiled.

  I took the phone out onto the deck next to the hot tub, picked up the receiver, and said,

  "Professor Mitchell?"

  A moment of surprised silence on the other end, then a fatherly voice said, "Now this isn't Tres, is it?"

  I told him it was. He laughed and gave me the standard kneehightoagrasshopper reminiscences about how long it had been and how glad he was I'd gotten out of puberty. I said I was too.

  "Your mother told me you were job hunting," he said.

  The Widower's Two it Step 31

  "Yeah, about that-"

  I wanted to apologize for my mother thinking that college teaching jobs grew on trees and fell when ripe as soon as one's parents made phone calls to old friends.

  Before I could, Professor Mitchell said, "I made your appointment for eleven o'clock Saturday. It's the only day we're all available to interview."

  I hesitated, then closed the glass door to the kitchen to shut out the pool game and the TV.

  "Pardon?"

  "Your mother's timing was perfect as usual," Mitchell said. "Big stirup in the department, the hiring committee just forming. So happens I'm on it. Eleven o'clock.

  Will that time work for you?"

  A polite no would've done just fine. Sorry, my mother's just meddling in my life again and I have a very bright future in private investigations. I kept waiting to hear myself say no. I watched through the glass door as Carolaine came on the television again, this time for a newsbreak.

  Maybe what made me weaken was Carolaine's face. Maybe it was a week with almost no sleep, doing surveillance, minding a fouryearold. Or the fact that whenever I closed my eyes now I saw Julie Kearnes in her '68 blue Cougar, people with white rubber gloves picking fragments out of her hair with tweezers. When I finally responded to Professor Mitchell I didn't say no. I said, "Eleven o'clock Saturday. What the hell."

  My mother's voice came on the upstairs phone line. She sighed and said, "I've died and gone to heaven."

  Professor Mitchell started laughing.

  6

  The good news Tuesday morning was that Gladys the secretary was able to negotiate a lunch meeting for me with Milo Chavez. Actually, Milo was meeting with somebody else, but Gladys figured it might be okay if I dropped in for a few minutes-seeing as there was a homicide to talk about and all.

  The bad news was that lunch would require money.

  I tried the ATM on Broadway and Elizabeth but it played stubborn with me. It told me my checking balance was insufficient for the minimum twentydollar withdrawal. I tried for a cash advance from credit. Somewhere in New Jersey, the people at VISA laughed long and hard.

  Plan C. I called my old friends at Manny Forester amp; Associates. By ninethirty I had three subpoenas Manny's normal errand boys had been unable to serve. By eleven o'clock I'd found two of the invisible men, dropped the papers at their feet, and gotten away with no more than a few cuss words and a steak knife waved in my face. Not my idea of fun steady work, but at fifty dollars a subpoena it wasn't bad emergency income.

  The third delivery was for a repeat customer-William Burnett, a.k.a. Sarge. I served process on him at least once a month thanks to Manny Forester's zealous efforts on behalf of Sarge's wife and creditors. Sarge just kept on smiling and lighting his cigars with the subpoenas, moving from downtown bar to downtown bar. He and I were to the point now where we took turns buying each other beers every time I tracked him down.

  He'd tell me all about his days in the coast guard down in Corpus Christi.

  Thanks to Sarge's stories and the hospitality of the Cantina Azteca I was thirty minutes late for lunch.

  When I finally got to Tycoon Flats on North St. Mary's, the tables in the burger joint's courtyard were filling up with college kids from Trinity and lunchhour businessmen. It was overcast and humid. Heavy kitchen smoke drifted through the mesquite trees into the laundry lines of the unpainted houses behind the restaurant. The whole neighbourhood smelled like welldone bacon cheeseburgers.

  Milo Chavez wasn't hard to spot. At a green picnic table halfway across the courtyard sat 350 pounds of human boulder, neatly packaged in fiftytwoinch pleated gray trousers and a white dress shirt that had probably been customtailored from most of a hot air balloon. He wore gold accents from his stud earring to his Gucci loafer buckles.

  His hair was newly razorcut to a thin black stubble, which made his coppery face seem even more huge. The Latino Buddha, with fashion sense.

  Sitting across from Milo was an older Anglo man who was trying to impersonate a navy pilot. I might've fallen for the pressed khakis and aviator's glasses, but the leather flight jacket was overkill. His mouth was too soft, his grayblond eyebrows a little too twitchy and nervous for a navy man.

  He was frowning and holding out his fingers in Cat's Cradle position and speaking to Milo in low but insistent tones. I caught "I will not" several times.

  I tried to read Milo's face, but there was nothing there except Milo's standard sleepy, almost bovine calm.

  Of course that didn't mean anything. Milo had looked calm when he'd run into me at Mi Tierra the week before and told me about the demo tape problem that might lose his agency a milliondollar contract. He'd looked calm at our high school senior party when he'd shoved Kyle Mavery's face into the sour cream dip for making snide comments about Chavez's parents having green cards. He'd looked calm in college after we'd just been shot at by a Berkeley house owner whose neglected dog Milo and I had decided to liberate. He'd even looked calm two years after that when he was fired from his first job at Terrence amp;c Goldman Law Offices, after Milo's brilliant idea for tracking down a material witness had landed me in the IC unit at San Francisco General. After many years of onandoff friendship, I still could never tell when Milo was about to crack a joke or erupt into violence or convince me to do something dangerous and stupid that would sound, coming from Milo, like the sanest course of action in the world. Hanging around him for any length
of time did not rate highly on the Tres Navarre funometer.

  I plopped down with my Shiner Bock longneck and my basket of curly fries next to the pilot. I flicked him a salute. "Permission to come aboard?"

  The pilot stared at me. "Who the hell-"

  Milo gave me a slight shake of the head. "Tres Navarre, meet John Crea. Miranda Daniels' producer."

  "Exproducer," Crea amended.

  "Pleased as punch." I looked at Milo. "I've been calling you since yesterday morning, Chavez. I'm beginning to feel unloved."

  Milo raised his hand, then returned his attention to Crea. "You can't walk away from this, Johnny. You going to give up your ten percent of the final project?"

  Crea laughed. His eyebrows twitched. "There isn't going to be any final project, Chavez. You're talking about fifty more hours in the studio by next Friday. Only spec time. That's crazy. Even if I wasn't fed up with the fucking redneck scare tactics-Jesus, did you see the bullet hole, Milo?"

  "Les is working on things," Milo promised.

  Crea stabbed the picnic table with his middle finger. "If Les is working on things I want to know why he's unreachable while I'm getting shot at. Where is the son of a bitch?"

  "I told you. Nashville. The developmental deal with Century-"

  "The developmental deal is history. I came here to see Les, and some money, and some serious signs that I'm going to get protection." He glanced at me briefly, snorted.

  "I don't see anything like that. I've got other things to do, Milo. Adios."

  John Crea got up, straightened his jaw and his aviator glasses and his flight jacket, and left in a wake of Old Spice. He did it so fast I forgot to come to attention.

  Milo stared at his food, then at mine. He reached over, appropriated the largest fry in my basket, and began uncurling it meticulously between his massive fingers.

  "He dresses almost as snappy as you," I said.

  Milo's features move slowly if they move at all. You pretty much have to rely on his eyes. Now they were dark and concentrated. Angry.

  "Johnny used to manage Mel Tillis," he told me. "They did a show once on an aircraft carrier, the whole road crew got those flight jackets. It kind of went to Johnny's head."