Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

A Good Day’s Work by Rick Riordan

Rick Riordan’s Edgar-winning Tres Navarre series debuted in 1997 and won both a Shamus and an Anthony award. Three more books followed, the most recent, The Devil Went Down to Austin, again claiming nominations for the Anthony and the Shamus. The Texas author took a break from Navarre to produce 2003’s stand-alone thriller Cold Springs, a book ALA calls one of the year’s top ten crime novels. Until Navarre’s return in a novel (’04), the author plans to feature him in stories.

“I’d just as soon show you the door,” Dr. Pauerstein told me. “But since my wife insists...”

He tossed a stack of twenties on the kitchen table, right on top of Alva Cruz’s picture.

He was obviously used to dealing with hirelings this way. Cash up front, no muss with taxes, no questions about green cards. Hedge my lawn. Wash my matching BMWs. Find a missing girl. Just don’t bother me.

He wiped under his nose with a gold-ringed finger, then went back to sorting his plastic-surgery photos.

His wife tried not to react when he dropped a new one next to her breakfast plate — a glossy eight-by-ten of a nip-and-tuck, sliced cheeks lifted from the face like pocket flaps. I wondered if Mrs. Pauerstein ate breakfast with these faces every morning. Maybe that’s why she wore a permanent wince.

“Please, Mr. Navarre,” she said. “It’s been two weeks.”

Next to her, the maid Zuli, the mother of the missing girl, sat silent. She hadn’t looked at me since I’d arrived.

I brushed the money off her daughter’s picture.

Alva Cruz was a striking young woman — long black hair, amber eyes, Spanish complexion very different from her mother’s mestizo features. In the photograph, Alva was sitting on the hood of one of the green convertible BMWs I’d seen in the Pauersteins’ driveway. Her smile was a challenge — You gonna make me move? I could see how she might attract the wrong kind of attention in a bar.

The doctor glanced up at me, frowning that I was still in his house. “Well? There’s the money.”

“I haven’t taken the job yet.”

“Then get the hell out,” he growled. “And don’t expect to work again. I’ll make sure everyone in town knows you’re a waste of time.”

Meaning, of course, everyone he knew. Nobody else counted.

But there was a twitch in his eye that I didn’t quite understand, a hint of relief in his voice that I might be leaving. That alone made me want to stay.

“Angelito’s,” I said to Zuli. “That’s the bar on South St. Mary’s?”

“I... I don’t know, sir.”

“What did the police say?”

“They were no help,” Mrs. Pauerstein put in. “They found a witness who saw Alva leave willingly with a short Hispanic man, about five foot four. She got in his yellow pickup truck and they drove away. That’s all the police know. They aren’t concerned. They told us she would turn up eventually.”

I looked down at Alva’s picture — that challenge of a smile. Well, hot shot?

“Mrs. Cruz, you didn’t report her missing for three days. Why?”

Zuli seemed to be turning to stone. “She’s done this before, sir. With men. But not for so long. Something has happened.”

“Please, Mr. Navarre,” Mrs. Pauerstein said again. “You came highly recommended.”

“By some idiot at your day spa,” the doctor grumped. “Don’t beg this man, Beth!”

“Zuli has been with us almost twenty years,” she persisted. “We’ve known Alva since... since she was a child. We want to help.”

“This is absurd,” Dr. Pauerstein said. “I’m sorry, Zuli, but Alva’s a grown woman. We can’t go chasing after her every time she throws a tantrum.”

“A tantrum?” I asked.

No one volunteered an explanation, but I felt the history there, deep as well water.

I was thinking over the bad possibilities, the bad things that could happen to a pretty girl in a West Side bar on Halloween. I didn’t like the description of the guy she’d left with, either — a short man in a conspicuous yellow truck. Not a happy camper. Not a person who would be nice to women.

Then I looked at Dr. Pauerstein, who was silently urging me to refuse. And Zuli, who was hurting, suffering, and had only these people, whose countertops she’d been scrubbing for twenty years, cleaning carefully around Dr. Pauerstein’s pictures of cosmetically mutilated faces.

Or maybe I just thought about my rent, which was due that week.

I said, “I’ll find Alva for you.”

Later that morning I found the police’s witness — Luisa Rodriguez, a girlfriend of Alva’s who’d been with her on Halloween. Luisa couldn’t remember anything she hadn’t already told the cops, but she said it didn’t matter. Alva had been looking for trouble for years. She found it. Screw her. Who cared?

“Her mother,” I answered.

“Chingate,” Luisa spat. “Her mother gave a shit, she would have gotten Alva out of that trap a long time ago.”

“What trap?”

She gave me a hard look. “You were at the asshole’s mansion, you didn’t notice?”

“Dr. Pauerstein and Alva didn’t get along?”

She laughed. “They got along since Alva was fifteen. You think he kept Zuli around because she cleans good, mister?”

I let that sink in, and started wondering how Dr. Pauerstein might look if I gave him some of my own complimentary facial reconstruction.

“Alva was getting angry about being used,” I guessed. “There was some kind of big argument at the Pauerstein house. Had she threatened to go public?”

Luisa shrugged, but I could see an unsettling thought forming behind her eyes.

“So you’re mad at her,” I said. “Mad enough you wouldn’t care if she’s dead?”

“I don’t know anything.”

“If Pauerstein did something to her, I’ll crucify the asshole. I wish you’d help.”

I started to leave, but she called me back.

Her eyes were wet.

“We were supposed to go to college together,” she told me. “We were going to be business majors, open a restaurant someday. Instead, she stayed out of school, kept waiting for that asshole to divorce his wife. The day before she disappeared, she said she was giving up on him. She was going to tell the whole town she’d been raped as a child, throw as much shit in his face as she could. She’d told me all that before, but this time... I don’t know, maybe she was serious.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah.” She wiped a streak of mascara off her eyelid. “You doing anything Friday night?”

I spent the afternoon at Angelito’s Cantina, buying beers with Dr. Pauerstein’s money. One guy, Iago, tried to kill me with a pool cue, and then — with his face pressed against the corner pocket — admitted he might know the short guy I was looking for: Frankie somebody. A minor-league hit man.

That led me to my friend Ralph Arguello, who sat in his pawn-shop office posting merchandise on eBay. At any given time, Ralph had five to ten thousand items cooking on the Internet, but that was nothing compared to the list in his head — names, addresses, incriminating dirt on every player in San Antonio. Ralph could tell you who was buying, who was selling, and who was controlling the bids.

I said, “Hit man named Frankie. Short Latino, yellow truck.”

“Frank Tejeda,” he said. “Been on his way down, staying at the Salado Inn. You know it?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Ralph grinned, gesturing toward his wall of pawned weapons — assault rifles, bayonets, samurai swords. “Cut you a deal, vato?”

The Salado Inn bordered a dry creek bed on Highway 90, on the outskirts of Bexar County where worn-out subdivisions gave way to worn-out ranch land. Ten dilapidated red cabins formed a U around a gravel courtyard. Even the soft light of dusk couldn’t make the place look good.

Over the years, it had enjoyed an illustrious history as an Asian massage parlor, a heroin-junkie commune, and a training camp for low-budget evangelists. Now, in its old age, it had settled down as a residence motel, a sign out front promising good rates by the month, year, or decade.

There was no yellow truck parked anywhere that I could see.

Behind Cabin One, I found an old guy with a chain saw sculpting four-foot-tall armadillos out of juniper logs. After some compliments on his artwork, and a twenty-dollar bill, he was willing to tell me that Frank Tejeda — “oh yeah, the short spic” — stayed in Cabin Four.

“Hasn’t been around in a couple weeks,” the old man added. “Since that woman, awhile back. That was the last time.”

“What woman?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Ask him.”

Then he revved up the chain saw and went back to expressing himself.

Frank Tejeda’s cabin was unlocked, the inside depressing even by slum standards — one gray room with a tiny bathroom and kitchenette in back, a card table, a chair, and a stripped bed that sagged like a relief map of the California Central Valley. The sink was full of dishes. The back door was a sheet of plywood postered with pages from an old Chinese restaurant calendar. Strewn around the floor were men’s clothes, ammo boxes, beer bottles, and Taco Cabana bags.

It was hard to know, in the disaster area, whether anything was out of place, but I found no suitcase, no gun locker, no valuables. Nothing I would expect to find if Tejeda planned on coming back. Gone about two weeks — about when Alva Cruz disappeared.

I stood in the center of his room, listening to the sounds of the chain saw and the highway, trying to imagine Alva Cruz coming here of her own will. A good-looking young woman with plans to go to college, with a mom who cared about her — surely she wouldn’t hate herself so much that she’d spend the night with someone who lived here.

Then I saw a glint on the floor by the back door.

I knelt to look. A silver earring — an angel — was snagged in the grimy crack between doorjamb and threshold. A long strand of black hair trailed from the hook.

I had to jostle the back door’s makeshift lock to get it open.

When I finally did, I realized the neighbor’s chain saw had been loud enough to cover the sound of a car pulling up — a yellow truck, in fact, parked right behind the cabin, between the back door and the woods of the creek bed.

A short Mexican man stood on the back step, pointing a shotgun at my heart.

He said, “You need to die.”

“Ralph Arguello sent me.”

I wondered what level of hell I’d go to if I died violently with a lie on my lips, but it was a good lie. Ralph’s name had been known to cause hesitation even among psychopaths.

Frank Tejeda furrowed his brow, his finger tense on the trigger.

I could see why nobody had given a good description of him — there just wasn’t much special about him, except that he was short and about to kill me. He had the typical weathered face, the sour demeanor, the dusty flannel-and-jeans look of a hundred thousand guys on the West Side.

Of course, having somebody point a shotgun at you does sharpen your focus. I spent the next eternal second studying Frank Tejeda’s St. Christopher medal, the bloodshot vein like a river delta in his left eye.

“Inside,” he said at last. “Back up slow.”

When we were standing in the bedroom, Frank apparently satisfied I hadn’t brought a date with me, he said, “What’s Ralph want?”

“Alva Cruz.”

The barrel of the gun dipped, but not long enough for me to act. “Who?”

“You picked her up at Angelito’s,” I said. “Halloween night.”

“Hell I did.”

“You didn’t clean up, Frank. You killed her, dragged her out the back — her earring is snagged over there on the doorframe.”

When he looked, I grabbed the shotgun barrel and kicked him in the face.

The gun fired into the wall behind me. Completely deaf, I wrestled Frank to the ground and got my knee between his shoulder blades.

I frisked him, came up with some brass knuckles, a switchblade, and a pack of Chiclets.

“I didn’t do it,” he said. “¡Lo juro!”

“Uh-huh.”

“Take me to Ralph. I’ll tell him—”

“Ralph doesn’t have a damn thing to do with this, Frankie. This is about you and me and a dead young girl you dragged out your back door. Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

A little more knee-pressure on his spine and he started yelling that maybe he did know, after all.

I hauled him off the floor and together we took a walk out back.

Alva Cruz was heartbreakingly close.

Fifty yards down in the creek bed, inexpertly wrapped in black Hefty bags, the maid’s daughter was slowly being shrouded with yellow acacia leaves. One pale hand had escaped the plastic. Her fingers curled delicately toward the sky, the nails painted orange in honor of her last holiday.

Cold temperatures had reduced the stench of death, but it was still there — a little stronger than your average roadkill, which the Salado Inn residents had probably mistaken it for.

“You son of a bitch,” I said.

“I swear,” Frank said. “I wouldn’t—”

His eyes slid from my face to the shotgun, which I’d taken the liberty of reloading.

“Shit, man.” He swallowed. “She and me were getting along good that night. I left her before dawn ’cause... ’cause I had a job to do, right? I figured I’d let her sleep. I came back that afternoon, she was dead.”

“How?”

“Shot in the chest — once, like a handgun, close range. I’m on probation, man. Killed my ex-wife ’bout five years ago — manslaughter. The police weren’t gonna believe me.”

“So you dumped her.”

“I freaked, man. Two weeks I’ve been hiding out, but nobody looked for me. There was nothing on the news. So I came back tonight. Figured I’d do a better job. But shit, I wouldn’t kill her! We had plans. She was gonna...” He hesitated, staring down at the glistening black bundle that used to be a young woman.

“She was going to what?”

He licked his lips. “Blackmail. This rich guy, been sleeping with her since she was a kid. Guess his image was important to him. She told him a hundred grand, or she was gonna tell the town, cause a big scandal. She was sure he’d pay, told me she’d cut me in.”

Tejeda looked up. He must’ve sensed my anger turning elsewhere. “You believe me, don’t you? Hell yes. It was the rich guy that killed her. I don’t know shit, man. I just met her. Hell, I contract for money. Last thing I would do is invite a hit to my home.”

“Either you killed her,” I said, “or you messed up the crime scene so bad the real killer might never be caught. Either way, you deserve the police. Get back up the hill.”

He protested, pleaded, threatened, begged. But I had the shotgun.

After I’d tied Frank’s hands and ankles, I called the Bexar County Sheriff’s Department. Then I called the Pauersteins’ home number.

Zuli Cruz answered.

There wasn’t much choice, so I told her the news.

I would’ve been okay had she wailed out her grief, but she took the news of her daughter’s death in stony silence. Five cars went by on the highway before she spoke.

“You have the killer?” she asked.

I told her about Frank Tejeda, his plea of innocence, his story of blackmail.

“The police won’t believe him,” I said. “Do you?”

More silence.

“Zuli, I’m sorry. But how long have you known Dr. Pauerstein was sleeping with your daughter?”

She hung up the phone, and my mouth tasted like sand.

A few minutes later, the old man with the chain saw came over to see what was going on. Why had I hogtied his neighbor on the front porch?

I told him.

“Damn,” he said. “I thought the woman left.”

“No. She’s dead by the creek. I just saw her.”

The old man scratched his head. “But I saw her drive away. Came in after he did that night. Left after he did the next morning. Don’t see a car like hers too often here, reason I remember.”

The world did a little shift. I said, “Describe the car.”

“BMW. Green convertible BMW.”

“Hold Frank for the police,” I told him. “He moves, use the chain saw.”

“Where the hell you going?”

But I was already running for my car.

I should’ve known something was wrong from the stillness of the Pauerstein house. In the darkness, its two front windows blazed yellow, so the place seemed to be watching, alert like an owl on the hunt. Only one of the convertible BMWs was in the driveway. I hoped that meant Dr. Pauerstein was still at work.

I found Mrs. Pauerstein and Zuli sitting in the spotless kitchen, staring despondently at a .45 automatic on the table between them. My first impression: They had known where Dr. Pauerstein kept his gun. They’d taken it from its hiding place. Now they were trying to decide what to do when he came home. They looked like wax figures of people on their way to the guillotine.

“My husband,” Mrs. Pauerstein said, without looking up. “If it’s true, I won’t defend what he did.”

“You don’t have to,” I said. “He didn’t kill anyone.”

Zuli looked at me, then, for the first time. I couldn’t tell if she’d been crying. Her eyes were as dark and inscrutable as a dust storm.

Her sleeves were rolled up, her meaty hands almost white with cleaning-chemical residue. The grip of the .45 was also dusted white. She must have been the one who retrieved the gun.

“Mrs. Pauerstein, you killed Alva,” I said. “You followed her to the bar on Halloween night, watched her leave with the man in a yellow truck, trailed them to the Salado Inn. You stayed outside in your car all night, nursing your anger, trying to decide what to do. Then the man left, just before daylight. You went into his cottage and shot Alva Cruz in his bed.”

Zuli stared at her employer. It was as if the maid had just noticed something horrible that had been under her nose for years — as if Mrs. Pauerstein were one of the doctor’s photographs, a face that had been cut away from the muscle, stretched into a mask.

“Alva had threatened to make a scene,” I said. “She demanded money, or she’d tell the town that she’d been your husband’s lover since she was a minor. Maybe she could prove it, maybe she couldn’t. But it wouldn’t matter. It would hurt his image. More importantly, it would hurt yours. You wanted her dead. You’d probably wanted her dead for years — the family’s dirty little secret.”

“All right.” Mrs. Pauerstein corrected her posture, directed a steely look straight at Zuli. “Well? He’s right. I knew this man Alva slept with would be good to take the blame. After all, she only slept with brutes. That’s why I insisted we hire Mr. Navarre. I wanted you to know she was dead. I wanted my husband to know she was dead. And I will not be arrested, Zuli. I will not.”

I wished things were different — that the girl was alive, that Dr. Pauerstein, the real asshole who had set this poison in motion, would be the one to get punished. Most of all, I wished I could poke a hole in Mrs. Pauerstein’s sense of impunity, but I knew the kind of lawyers Dr. Pauerstein’s money could buy. I knew the mileage they would get from the mangled crime scene, the two weeks that had passed, the criminal history of Frank Tejeda. It wouldn’t matter what I said. Even the gun could be tested as inconclusive if you hired the right ballistics experts.

There were sirens in the distance — an ambulance, probably, coming this way.

“The wrong person,” Zuli muttered. “I will go to jail.”

“No,” I told her. “You allowed him to use your daughter. You didn’t have the courage to stand up to him. But you won’t go to jail for that.”

Zuli stared at the gun, which was much closer to her than it was to Mrs. Pauerstein. I knew what Zuli was thinking, and I didn’t blame her, but I also sensed that she wouldn’t act on her anger, at least not while I was there. I could feel her convictions the way you might feel the deep grain of a weathered oar, and I knew she would find it unseemly, disrespectful, to show such intimate hatred in front of a stranger. Mrs. Pauerstein seemed to know this, too.

“You don’t understand what my maid is saying.” Mrs. Pauerstein smiled at me, and for the first time I understood how completely this woman’s soul had shattered. “After you called, Zuli took the gun from the kitchen drawer. She went upstairs, where my husband was working on his treadmill. He’s dead, Mr. Navarre, shot through the heart. The police are on their way. Now — how much do I owe you for a good day’s work?”

Later, I would read about the double murder. I would have time to lie awake, stare at the ceiling, and wonder about my choices. I would visit my neighborhood priest and confess, and I’d wonder if there was any satisfactory absolution this side of God.

But at that moment, in the Pauersteins’ kitchen, I didn’t hesitate.

Some conclusions cannot have an audience. They must be a silent dialogue between the two principals whose souls have been stripped like electrical wires.

From my pocket, I fished the rest of Dr. Pauerstein’s cash. I threw the money on the table. “This one’s on me.”

I rose to leave, Mrs. Pauerstein’s face falling as she realized her last hireling had just abandoned her.

Then I went outside to wait for the police, and heard the dry crack of gunfire behind me.