The widower’s two step tn-2

by Rick Riordan

  When I finished talking, Garrett shook his head slowly.

  He blew smoke up toward the parrot. The parrot leaned into it.

  "You scare me sometimes, little bro."

  "How do you mean?"

  Garrett scratched his jaw line under the beard, using all ten fingertips. "I see you sitting in that chair, drinking and talking about your cases. All you need is a cigar and about a hundred extra pounds."

  "Don't start, Garrett. I'm not turning into Dad."

  He shrugged. "If you say so, man. You keep playing detective, hanging out in the Sheriff's old territory, working with his friends on the force-the Man's dead, little bro.

  Murder solved. You can take off the Superman cape, now."

  I tried to muster some irritation but the tequila and the easy chair were working against me. I stared at the tips of my deck shoes.

  "You think I like being known as Jackson Navarre's kid every time I work a case? You think that makes it easier on me?"

  Garrett took a toke. "Maybe that's exactly what you like. Saves you the trouble of growing up and being something else."

  "My brother, the expert on growing up."

  He grinned. "Yeah, well-"

  I leaned back farther in the recliner.

  Garrett noticed how short his joint was getting and reached behind him to get a roach clip out of the ashtray. His left leg stump peeked out briefly from his denim shorts. It was smooth and thin and pink, like part of a baby. There were no signs of scars from the train tracks that had long ago severed Garrett's lower third.

  "You remember Big Bill?" he asked.

  Garrett's favourite strategy. When in doubt, bring up something embarrassing from Tres' childhood.

  "Gee, no I don't. Why don't you remind me?"

  Garrett laughed.

  Big Bill had been a roan stud Dad used to keep out at the ranch in Sabinal. Randiest, meanest sonofabitch stallion ever born. The horse, I mean, not my dad.

  The Sheriff had insisted that I learn to ride Big Bill when I was a kid on the theory that I could then handle any horse in the world. Each time I tried, Big Bill would intentionally head for lowlying tree branches to try and knock me off. On our third ride together he succeeded, and I'd gripped the reins so tightly as I fell that I couldn't let go when I hit the ground. My hands stayed wrapped around the leather straps as Big Bill galloped on for a good quarter mile, dragging me through as many cactus patches as he could find. When I returned home with half the back forty stuck to my clothes and my hair, my father had judged the ride "a little too wild."

  "I found his saddle at the ranch last month," Garrett said. "Had it polished up. I've got it back in my bedroom if you want to see it."

  "For the biker women, no doubt."

  Garrett tried to look modest. "Actually it made me think of my little brother. I still got this image of you, man-nineyearold kid being dragged behind a runaway horse."

  "Okay. I get the point."

  "How old are you now, twentyeight?"

  "Twentynine," I said. "There's a difference."

  Garrett laughed. " 'Scuse me if I don't feel sorry for you. Just seems to me you got time to try some different things, little bro. Maybe you could get yourself a life that doesn't get you shot at so often and your girlfriends pissed off and your old brother kicked out of bars when you come to visit."

  "I'm good at my work, Garrett."

  "That what your boss says-you're good at your work?"

  I hesitated.

  "Yeah," Garrett said. "Like I said, you never could let go when you needed to."

  "You saying I should've been like you-hop a freight car every time things at home started to get bad?"

  It was a mean thing to say, but Garrett didn't react. He just kept smoking and looking at a point somewhere above my head.

  After a while the heavy metal music from the downstairs neighbour started up again, rattling the halfempty tequila bottle on Dad's army footlocker that Garrett used as a coffee table.

  Garrett looked down at the floor with tired resignation, then he reached over to pick a new CD.

  "Hope you can sleep to music," he said.

  17

  "Mr. Navarro, isn't it?"

  Miranda's dad shook my hand with both of his ^r and most of the rest of his body. This was a good trick, considering that to do it he had to put his walking stick in the crook of his arm and lean on his good leg and still keep from falling over.

  "Navarre," I said. "But call me Tres."

  Willis Daniels kept shaking my hand. His face was bright red, beaming like he'd just run the Iron Man triathlon and loved every minute of it.

  "Course. Navarre. I'm sorry."

  "No problem," I said. "San Antonio. Navarro. Historical connection. I get that all the time."

  We were standing in the doorway of Silo Studio on Red River near Seventh. The studio was a singlestory refurbished warehouse with metalframed windows and brown stucco outer walls the texture of shredded wheat. The main door was at the rear of the building, where the parking lot was.

  The Widower's Two it Step 119

  We were standing right in the doorway, me on my way in and Mr. Daniels on his way out and the guy with a dollyful of electrical equipment waiting two feet behind Daniels shit out of luck. Daniels didn't seem to notice him.

  The old man squinted and leaned his face into mine, like a preacher about to offer me important words of comfort as I filed out of church. He smelled like wet leather and Pert.

  "I apologize for last night," he said. "Hard situation, Cam getting out of control like that.

  I surely didn't mean to misjudge you."

  "Don't mention it."

  "Cam was fired, of course."

  I nodded amiably.

  The guy with the dolly cleared his throat loudly. Daniels kept beaming at me.

  With the solid red flannel shirt and black jeans and the curly gray hair now minus straw hat, Daniels looked even more like Santa Claus than he had the night before. He was mighty perky for somebody over sixty who'd played music until two that morning.

  "You know you do look Hispanic," he decided. "I suppose that's why I thought Navarro.

  It's the dark hair. Bit of a swarthy complexion. You don't mind me saying so?"

  I shook my head. Swarthy. Maybe I should have kept the parrot. Gotten myself a cutlass.

  "I hear you might be coming to our party tomorrow night," he continued. "I surely hope you can make it."

  "Do my best."

  "Fine."

  We nodded at each other, both smiling.

  I pointed to the parking lot, the way he'd been heading. "You're not helping with the recording today?"

  He looked surprised, then chuckled and let out a whole string of little no's. "Just dropping off Miranda. Old man like me couldn't keep up."

  He said his goodbyes with more handshaking and smiling and then finally noticed the guy with the dolly. Daniels made a big deal about getting out of his way and telling him to have a good day.

  I watched Daniels drive off in a little red Ford sedan. The guy with the dolly disappeared around the corner of the building.

  I crouched down and looked at the cement steps at my feet. Nothing. I looked up at the sides of the walls. The bullet hole was a puttycoloured gouge in the brown stucco, about four feet up, just inside the doorway. My index finger fit up to the first joint. The rim of the hole was scarred where the police had removed the slug but I could still get the basic trajectory. I looked south and up. Parking garage next door. Probably the third floor. Probably a. 22-a stupid shot from so far away, more effective at scaring than killing, unless you got lucky. The police might've been up there looking for casings. Still…

  I took a fiveminute excursion next door. I had a nice talk with a parking attendant about garbage collection days, then went up to the third floor and found what I wanted on the first try, right by the elevator. I put my prize in my backpack and walked back to Silo.

  The studio's lobby was a remodelled loadi
ng dock. There was one door on the far wall marked PRIVATE and a sickly ficus tree in the corner that apparently doubled as an ashtray.

  Next to the ficus tree, an Anglo guy in a sleeveless Hole Tshirt and Op shorts was leaning against the wall, reading Nashville Today. His head bobbed up and down like he was listening to a Walkman.

  "Help you?" he asked.

  "Gold records."

  He looked up with just his eyes, his face still bent over the magazine. "What?"

  "There's supposed to be gold records on the walls."

  He scratched his nose, then made a small sideways nod to the door marked PRIVATE, the only other exit from the room. "Studio's that way."

  "Thanks. I might've gotten lost."

  His obligations to building security fulfilled, he went back to his magazine and his invisible Walkman.

  I walked down a long hallway with several cheaply panelled doors on either side. Each had an identical PRIVATE sign. Someone must've gotten them on sale.

  The hallway ended in a black curtain so thick it could've been sewn together from flack jackets. I squeezed around the edge into a large circular room where I could hear Miranda singing but at first couldn't see her.

  The place smelled like burnt Styrofoam. Ducttaped cords ran along the floor, overhead among the fluorescent lights, up the walls that were apparently constructed from egg carton material.

  Spaced here and there around the recording area were gray portable partitions, poofy and overstuffed so they looked more like vertical pillows than walls.

  In the centre of a V made by two of these was Miranda Daniels. She wore huge black headphones that doubled the size of her head. One large boxy mike was pointed toward her face and another angled down toward her guitar, and with all the wires and cords and the people looking at her from the glassedin control room I couldn't shake the impression that I was watching some kind of execution.

  I skirted the room and walked up five steps into the control area, where Milo Chavez and three other guys were standing at a recording console that looked suspiciously like a Star Trek energizer.

  Miranda was midsong-one of the faster numbers I'd heard the night before. The sound was crisp and clear from the two shoeboxsize wall speakers, but it seemed thin with just Miranda's voice and the guitar. The studio acoustics seemed to suck all the excess sound out of her voice so the words just evaporated as soon as they left her mouth.

  Milo glanced at me briefly, mumbled a greeting, then continued glaring through the Plexiglas.

  One of the engineers was hunched so low over the console I thought at first he was asleep. His head was cocked sideways, his ear only an inch from the knobs like he wanted to hear the sound they made when he turned them. The other engineer was keeping a close eye on the computer monitor. More accurately, he was keeping a close finger on it, tapping the little coloured bars as they flickered, like that would somehow affect them. You could see from the greasy smudges on the monitor that he did that a lot. The third man was standing slightly back from the console. From his demeanour and the orders he gave the engineers I guessed he was the new producer, John Crea's replacement, but he looked more like a vice principal-blue polyester shirt, doubleknit slacks, white socks with dress shoes. His hair was gray but worn too long, seventies conservative. He had his meaty, furry arms crossed and a frown on his face that made me want to apologize for coming in tardy. A little goldtinted American flag was pinned on his shirt pocket.

  Milo mumbled, "Sorry I missed you last night. I heard you made friends with Cam Compton."

  "Somewhere in San Antonio," I said, "there's a big and tall store with a bronze plaque inscribed to you."

  Milo frowned and looked down at his outfit-rayon camp shirt, black slacks, oxblood deck shoes that made mine look like poor country cousins. His braided gold neck chain would've hunchbacked a lesser human being.

  "You have to get all your clothes custommade," he said, "you might as well get them made nice. Some of us can't just throw on yesterday's jeans and Tshirt, Navarre."

  I checked my Triple Rock Tshirt for stains. "I have two of these. What was the crisis that came up last night?"

  Miranda kept singing. She opened her eyes every once in a while to glance up nervously at the control booth, like she knew how she was sounding. She looked like she was singing her heart out-taking huge breaths from her diaphragm, scrunching up her face with effort when she belted out the words, but none of the energy of the night before was coming through the speakers. The first engineer tilted his head a little more and said, "I told you she was miked wrong. You and your damn V87s."

  The vice principal grunted. The second engineer tapped at the computer monitor a little more.

  Milo pointed left with his thumb. We moved a few steps toward the door? just out of earshot from the studio guys.

  "Tell me you've decided to help us out," he insisted.

  "What happened with you last night?"

  He scratched the corner of his mouth, found some invisible particle that displeased him, rolled it in his fingers and flicked it away. "I had a great day. I called around, gently explaining to people that maybe I wasn't exactly sure where Les is. Several major clients bailed. The cops were thrilled. They were about as excited as I thought they'd be. As soon as they get through yawning I'm sure they'll launch a massive manhunt."

  Milo glared at me accusingly.

  "Honesty is next to godliness," I consoled.

  "Then I got a call from our accountant. Not good."

  "How not good?"

  The two engineers were arguing now about the isolation qualities of wide compression mikes.

  "Does she have to sing with the guitar?" the monitor tapper pleaded.

  The vice principal shrugged, keeping his eyes sternly on the imaginary detention hall below him. "Lady said she felt more comfortable that way."

  The other engineer grumbled. "Does she sound like she's comfortable? "

  Milo kept staring forward. "Apparently Les hasn't been telling me everything. Some of the commission checks haven't been going into the main account. A few days ago one of our checks for some equipment rentals bounced. There are also some creditors I didn't know about."

  "Bad?"

  "Bad enough. The agency costs fifteen thousand a month to run. That's barebones-phone bills, transportation, property, promo expenses."

  "How much longer can you keep afloat?"

  Milo laughed with no humour. "I can keep the creditors at bay for a while. I don't know how long. Fortunately our clients pay us? we don't pay them. So they don't have to find out right away. But by all rights the agency should've folded at the start of the month.

  Les had made arrangements to pay our bills then and there's no way he could have."

  "About the time he disappeared."

  Milo shook his head. "You had to put it that way, didn't you?"

  Miranda strained her way through another verse.

  "Look," one of the engineers was saying, "it's a Roland VS880, okay? Pickup isn't the problem here. You don't need the goddamn digital delay if she's singing it right, man.

  The lady's a cold fish."

  "Just try it," the vice principal insisted. "Put a little through her headphone mix, see if that warms her up."

  Finally I told Milo about my last two days.

  Milo stared at me while I talked. When I finished he seemed to do a mental countdown, then looked out the Plexiglas again and sighed.

  "I don't like any of that."

  "You said Les joked about running off to Mexico. If this plan he had to get Sheckly was dangerous, if it went bad-"

  "Don't even start."

  "Stowing away funds from the agency, pulling deceased identities from personnel files-what does that sound like to you, Berkeley Law? "

  Milo brought his palms up to his temples. "No way. That's not-Les couldn't do that. It's not his style to run."

  Milo's tone warned me not to push it. I didn't.

  I looked back down at Miranda, who was just fini
shing the last chorus. "How bad will all this affect her?"

  Milo kept his eyes closed. "Maybe it can still work. Silo's been paid through next week.

  Century Records will need some heavy reassurances, but they'll wait for the tape. If we get a good one to them on time, if we get Sheckly off our backs…"

  Miranda finished her song. The sound died the instant she stopped belting it out.

  Nobody said anything.

  Finally the engineer asked halfheartedly, "Do another take? We could try to feed her just the basic tracks. Move the baffles around."

  Miranda was looking up at us. The vice principal shook his head. "Take a break."

  Then he leaned over the console and pushed a button. "Miranda, honey, take a break for a few minutes."

  Miranda's shoulders fell slightly. She nodded, then started slowly toward the exit with her guitar.

  Milo watched her go out the black curtain.

  "You wanted to talk to her," he mentioned.

  "Yeah."

  "Go ahead, first door on the left. I'd have to be positive with her. Right now that's not possible."

  He turned and concentrated on the recording console like he was wondering how hard it would be to lift and throw through the Plexiglas.

  18

  Miranda was lying on a cot with her forearms over her face and her knees up. She peeped out briefly when I wrapped my knuckles on the open door, then covered her eyes again.

  I came in and set my backpack on the little round table next to her. I took out my bag of Texas French Bread pastries and a. 22 Montgomery Ward pistol. Miranda opened her eyes when the gun clunked on the table.

  "I thought you could use some breakfast," I said.

  She frowned. When she spoke she exaggerated her drawl just a little. "The croissants put up a fight, Mr. Navarre?"

  I smiled. "That's good. I wasn't sure you'd have a sense of humour."

  She made a square with her arms and put them over her head. She was wearing a cutoff white Tshirt that said COUNTY LINE BBQ on it, and there was a small oval of sweat sticking the fabric to her tummy where the guitar had been. The skin under her arms was so white that her faint armpit stubble looked like ballpoint pen marks.