In Big Trouble

Chapter 10

A telegram-now there was a concept. In a world of cell phones, e-mail, faxes, and beepers, Tess knew Western Union existed only because it advertised its money-wiring service on television. But did it still do telegrams? She couldn't even find a Western Union in the telephone book, just a list of "offices" at the local grocery chain, HEB.

The closest one was only a mile up Broadway, but it seemed more like a food amusement park than a grocery store. In fact, groceries seemed an afterthought here, what with chefs whipping up pasta dishes on demand, a full menu of cooking classes, a walk-in-humidor, and a wine section that needed two aisles just for South America. Tess scuffed her feet on the rough floors-painted, a helpful clerk told her, to create the feeling of an old European market-filled with an intense and sudden hunger for things she had never heard of. She was enraptured, she was repulsed, she wanted to get a little cot and set up housekeeping, preferably near the flowers. Baltimore's upscale grocery stores-Eddie's and Graul's and Sutton Place Gourmet-were pathetic compared to this temple of food. She couldn't decide if the grandeur was driven by the Texas phenomenon of big-bigger-biggest, or whether it was the inevitable overcompensatory impulse of a founder who had been born with the moniker of Henry E. Butt.

Eventually, she shook off the store's decadent spell and asked someone where she could send a telegram.

"It's cheaper to call," the girl at the front counter said, examining her nails. She had on a new kind of polish that could be peeled off, and she was slowly liberating her synthetic talons from a coat of celery green. "I mean, you can buy a long distance card at the ice house. I got one there last week. It had a picture of David Robinson on it."

"No, it has to be a telegram," Tess said. No one could talk back to a telegram, ask it questions, or track its number through Caller ID.

"It's like my first week," the clerk said. "I don't know how to do everything."

"I'm patient," Tess lied.

The clerk sighed dramatically and rustled around until she found the form she needed.

Tess began to dictate: "Crow found-stop. Will call soon-stop."

"Why do you keep telling me to stop?" the girl asked fretfully. Then, as an afterthought: "You're sending a telegram because you found a crow? Don't they have those where you came from?"

"You say stop to indicate the end of a thought," Tess said, although everything she knew about telegrams she had learned from old movies. "It's like a period."

"Are you sure?"

Eventually, they collaborated on a mutually acceptable document to Charlottesville, Virginia. It read, in its entirety: Crow fine. In Big Trouble name of new band. Will call in one week. Staying here till then. The last line had been a last-minute inspiration, and Tess wasn't sure where it came from, or even if it was true. But seven days seemed little to spare to make sure that Crow wasn't going to use the time he had requested to run again. Besides, she wanted to see where the local authorities were going with the investigation into the death of her Hill Country pal.

"Where's the library?" she asked the girl.

"Enchilada Roja, you mean?"

Now that was Tess's kind of Spanish. "You call your library the red enchilada?"

"Yeah, and it didn't get its name for nothing. It sticks out on the skyline north of downtown, like a sore thumb. Or a big red enchilada, I guess. You can't miss it." She smiled for the first time. "They got computers there. You could zap your friends an e-mail, if you have an AOL account."

"Just send the telegram, okay?"

Enchilada Roja was easy to spot on the horizon, but it seemed to keep shifting as Tess drove toward it. She took several turns through a warren of one-way streets before she found her way into the pay parking lot outside the gleaming new library. Outside and in, it was the antithesis of her beloved Enoch Pratt-gorgeous appointments, state of the art computers, even a room dedicated to genealogical research. The only thing in short supply was books. The shelves yawned with empty spaces.

"Do you keep a lot of your collection in the stacks?" Tess asked the librarian who showed her where to find the local newspapers.

"What you see is what you get," the young man said. He had a long silky ponytail and Bambi eyes. Tess noticed the periodical section seemed unusually crowded, with a large number of high school girls peering at the librarian over the tops of Teen People, but her guide seemed oblivious to his fan club. "I guess they thought if they built the building, the books would take care of themselves."

At least civic thinking was the same everywhere. Float the bonds for the construction projects and hope everything else took care of itself. Tess settled down with a stack of local newspapers, looking for any mention of the body in Marianna Barrett Conyers's pool house.

The Blanco paper was a weekly, so its cycle had yet to catch up with the story. The New Braunfels paper reported the discovery on page one, but its focus was on public safety. A killer, believed to be dangerous, was still at large, the paper warned its citizens. As opposed to non-dangerous killers?

The San Antonio Eagle's front page was full of pie-in-the-sky dreams for a new basketball arena which would transform the city's northeast side into a land of milk and money. Close your eyes and you're in Baltimore, Toto. Tess had to search the skimpy local section for a short item, which said only that a body had been found on the property of Marianna Barrett Conyers of Alamo Heights. It was noted the apparent victim, ex-felon Tom Darden, also had made his home in San Antonio, before he was sent away on a kidnapping charge twenty years ago, along with Laylan Weeks. The sheriff had mentioned Weeks, too, Tess recalled. "The infamous Danny Boyd case," the paper called their crime, but the reporter didn't bother to explain the infamy for those who hadn't been around twenty years ago. In fact, the article's emphasis seemed to be on the terrible inconvenience of having a corpse in one's pool house, especially a body as undesirable as Darden's. He had been found, the nonbylined piece added almost as an afterthought, by a drifter.

"A drifter!" Although Tess spoke aloud, in a rather emphatic tone, no one shushed her. Perhaps this was because no one could really hear her in the happy Saturday morning bustle. The teenage girls were whispering and giggling, while small children trotted in circles, shouting for their parents. Adolescent boys hunkered in front of the computers, playing games, probably trying to figure out how to bypass the cyber blocks and download porn. Who needed Chuck E. Cheese when there were libraries around?

Before she left Enchilada Roja, Tess used the computer's Netscape browser to glide home to the Baltimore Beacon-Light's Web page. She had never thought she would miss the Blight. The Eagle was a little gaudy for her tastes, although she recalled Marianna had said something about its tabloid days, suggesting it had once been more sensational still. The Blight's Web site was a mess, done on the cheap, but it was a joy to read about meetings and crimes set in places she could visualize, in a typeface she knew. A robbery on Lombard Street, a homicide on Lanvale, a fire on Waltherson. It all combined to make her homesick.

She stopped at a laundromat, then, against all odds, found her way back to Broadway and La Casita, her home away from home. Someone was sitting on the curb in front of her room, arms hugging her body as if she were cold on this sunny, breeze-less day. Tess couldn't see the face, but the hair was butter yellow in the sun and cut in a Dutch-boy bob.

"Hey," Emmie said.

"Brace yourself," Tess said, stepping around her with her duffel bag of clothes and unlocking the door. "I'm going to release the hound."

Esskay came bounding out of the motel room, greeted Tess as if they had been separated for days, then began inspecting the stranger on the curb. Emmie hunched her shoulders, as if frightened of dogs, but held her ground.

"I thought you might have left by now," she said.

Thought or hoped?

"I could," Tess said. "I've done what I was hired to do."

"What was that, exactly?"

"Find Crow."

"Oh." She appeared to be thinking about something, but her expression was inscrutable. "We're not together."

"Pardon me?"

"Ed and I. We're not together. We were-at first, up in Austin-but now we're not."

Tess held up her hand, traffic cop style. "None of my business."

Emmie was still sitting on the curb, hugging her knees to her chest, scratching her shins. She had drawn blood, Tess noticed, but she kept scratching, oblivious. There was scabs on her calves and pale, thin scars that would probably never quite fade.

"He keeps up with you, you know," Emmie said, after scratching a while longer. Esskay, usually so friendly, was keeping her distance from this visitor, as if even she could smell the craziness on her.

"What?"

"He has a file, of newspaper clippings. There aren't that many, maybe three or four."

"I haven't done much to write about."

"No, I guess you haven't." Emmie didn't sound rude, merely factual, the way children do before grown-ups school them in the art of the polite lie. "Have you ever killed someone?"

"What?" Tess felt as if she was saying this a lot.

"I mean, you've been in some real strange situations, but I don't recall if you ever killed someone. Have you?"

"No. I've seen someone die. I've seen dead people. But I haven't killed anyone."

"Hmmm." Emmie frowned. "And you can remember it, I suppose, all the gory details. All the blood. Assuming there was blood. Would you like to go to lunch?"

"Excuse me?" Tess had thought she was bad about jumping from topic to topic, but Emmie's synapses were misfiring like the cheap caps that kids play with on the sidewalk.

"Lunch. Aren't you hungry? Ed said you could eat a lot. You know what? I'm going to start calling him Crow. It suits him."

"Does Crow talk about me often?"

Emmie gave this serious consideration. "Not so very often. Sometimes. When it's so late that it's early, and we've played really well, so we're all drained, and he's had a couple drinks maybe, and we go to Earl Abel's for pie, and the sun is just coming up-his memories come up, too. Is it true you ate the same thing for breakfast every day?"

"Well, not every day."

"Do you think that means you're naturally monogamous?"

"What?"

Emmie held her fingers to her mouth, as if to taste the blood rimmed beneath her fingernails. "I would think someone who could eat the same thing for breakfast every day would be pretty dependable. Then again, maybe that's the kind of person who just loses it, you know. Goes postal, burns down the house, hits the road because she suddenly realizes she can't face another bowl of Frosted Flakes. So, do you want to go to lunch or what?"

"Why not?" At least it was a question she understood.

Tess wasn't sure where she had expected Emmie to take her to eat, but this lunch counter at the old-fashioned drugstore, the Olmos Pharmacy, was a pleasant surprise.

"Get a milkshake," Emmie instructed her. "They're the best in the world."

"My grandfather made the best shakes in the world, at his lunch counter." But Tess added a shake to her order of grilled cheese and bacon. She had never seen a milkshake served this way: The counter woman set small plastic tumblers of whipped cream in front of them, then left behind the sweating metal container from the old-fashioned Hamilton mixer. Emmie poured the thick concoction over the whipped cream, stirred, then dug into hers with a spoon. Although it was possible to coax the thick liquid up a straw, it wasn't very easy. A spoon was definitely the way to go.

"This was my high school hang-out," Emmie said. "The local malt shop. Isn't that sweet?"

"You make it sound as if that were forty years ago."

She nodded dreamily, licking her spoon. "It feels that way. We lived in Olmos Park, on Hermosa. Handsome street. Now here's a riddle-Can ugly things happen on a street called handsome?"

Emmie's crazy act was beginning to seem just that, an act. "I think I drove through there. I kept ending up in Olmos Park when I was trying to find your godmother in Alamo Heights."

"San Antonio is tricky that way."

It sounded like a warning, but Emmie's face was all innocence as she dipped her spoon in and out of her malt. She was not what Tess expected. She couldn't say what she was exactly, just that she wasn't what Tess had expected.

"Why are we here?" Tess asked her.

"That's a pretty big question, isn't it? One of the biggies. Why are we here? The thing is, we are here, right, and we just have to make the best of it, until we're not."

"No, why are we having lunch? Why did you come find me today? How did you find me, for that matter?"

"You told Crow you were staying at La Casita. Crow tells me everything."

"Everything?"

"Everything I want to know. I asked him this morning if he knew where you were."

"Why?"

"I told you. I wanted to tell you there's nothing between us. Between Crow and me."

"Okay, I know. So what?"

"Sew buttons," Emmie said, blowing into the straw in her water glass, making bubbles like a little kid.

"Emmie, do you know a man named Tom Darden, or Laylan Weeks?"

Tess had deliberately omitted any context with the names, but Emmie's face was a careful blank. "No. Who are they?"

"Darden is the man I found at Marianna's place. Weeks is the person they think he was with before he died. They're from here, but they've been in prison for a pretty long time."

Emmie put on a pretty pout of concentration, as if thinking hard. "Did they go to Alamo Heights High School?"

"I don't think so."

"Then I guess I don't know them."

"Do you know what brought me here?"

"Now that's another one of those big questions, isn't it?"

Tess pulled the clipping of Crow from her datebook. "I know now this was cut out of an old newspaper ad, and the headline is nothing more than a fragment of the band's old name. But it doesn't mean he isn't in big trouble. He sent me this for a reason."

"You think Crow sent this to you?"

"Who else?"

Emmie sucked her metal spoon clean, then tried to hang it from her nose. It fell to the counter with a noisy clatter. "It never works with these spoons. I don't know why I keep trying."

"Is he in big trouble, Emmie? Are you?"

"I'm fine," she said sharply.

"Did something happen while you were staying at Marianna's place?"

"No." She gulped the last of her shake. "I have to go. We've got a late night tonight. I need to catch a few hours of sleep."

"You playing the Morgue again?"

Emmie nodded. "But on Saturdays, we have an after-hours gig in this really cool place, Hector's. It's like a shack under the highway and most of die people who hang out there are bikers. But a lot of people come there just to hear us now. We're not the Breakfast Club there, we're Las Almas Perdidas. The Lost Souls."

"Not more eighties music?"

"Original stuff. And covers, done in a conjunto style, with a little bluegrass mixed in. You'd be surprised how an accordion and a fiddle can make an old song sound new again."

Yes, Tess would. "Well, let's get me back to La Casita, so you can have your siesta."

"When are you going back to Baltimore?"

"Not sure." She was less sure of everything, the more time she spent here. "Do you want me to leave, Emmie? Is that the point of this excursion? Or are you trying to figure out if I know anything?"

"I just wanted to talk to you a little. I feel as if I know you. I know you and Crow knows-actually, he doesn't know as much as he thinks he does. But that's another story, for another day."

They drove back to La Casita in Emmie's little Nissan Sentra, not the type of car Tess would have picked for a crazy rich girl. Emmie was an unexpectedly competent driver, too, focused and aggressive, with none of the dreaminess or abrupt shifts that characterized her conversation. Tess alternated between studying Emmie and studying the landmarks. She was beginning to get her bearings.

"It's like a bow-legged woman," she said.

"What?" Emmie asked, for once the one caught off guard.

"San Antonio. It's laid out like a bow-legged woman with her legs crossed at the ankles. That's how the parallel streets of Broadway and McCullough come to intersect. Here on Hildebrand, we're about waist-high. Now that I understand that, I think I'll be able to get around better."

"Sure, on the north side. But there's more to San Antonio than the north side. The streets and highways around here are like dividing cells. They come together and break apart, they change names abruptly. Don't be fooled into thinking it's an easy city to know."

But when they stopped at the next traffic light, Emmie glanced over at Tess, and seemed to take pity on her. It was as if she knew how vulnerable it made Tess feel to be in a place where she didn't know everything and everyone.

"A bow-legged woman," Emmie said. "That's not bad, actually. Hildebrand is waist-high, you're right, and your motel is just above the knee. She must be a very fat woman, don't you think, with big thighs spread far apart? Yet her ankles are very dainty. Her best feature." Emmie laughed happily. "Yes, you might even say it ain't over until the fat lady crosses her ankles."

Tess said nothing, she was too busy looking out at the window, grimly memorizing landmarks. They had passed one college on the right, now another was on the left, where they were turning by the Southwestern Bell Building and heading down the fat lady's left leg, Broadway. And here was La Casita. Home sweet home.

"Thanks for the milkshake," she told Emmie.

"Milkshake?" she asked, as if she had forgotten their trip to the pharmacy. "Oh, de nada."

Tess checked in with Mrs. Nguyen before going to her room. "I still don't know when I'm leaving." Actually, she still didn't know why she was staying.

"No problem," her landlady said, eyes fixed on a Mexican soap opera as she ate a slice of pizza. "Your friend find you?"

"Her? She's not really a friend."

"Not your girlfriend. Boyfriend."

"I don't have a boyfriend," she said stupidly.

"Not boyfriend boyfriend. Boy. Friend. He came by, he had a picture of you, with your black dog. That's how I know he knows you. I told him you gone off, he asked me if he could see the dog. So I let him in the room. But don't worry, I watch him. I watch him carefully. Very nice boy, very handsome, he patted the dog on the head. Younger than you, yes?"

"Ye-e-e-sss." The milkshake seemed to lurch in her stomach, as if it was going for one more spin in the Hamilton mixer. "And you watched him the whole time?"

"Whole time," Mrs. Nguyen said, nodding vigorously. Then her head stopped in mid-bob. "Except-"

"Except when, Mrs. Nguyen?"

"When the pizza man came, I had to go get my purse. No more than two minutes. Maybe three. Very nice boy. He said goodbye, I locked your room. The dog looked happy to see him."

"The world's greatest watchdog bounded up when Tess opened the door to her room. Whatever Esskay knew, she wasn't telling. But she had something on her breath, some liver-ish treat that Tess hadn't given her. Heck, Charles Manson could drop by if he brought a treat. Esskay had her priorities. And she would have remembered Crow. Her long-term memory was much better than her short-term one. She still remembered the exact spot where she had once seen a cat sunning itself on a windowsill.

The room looked normal, and Tess had so few possessions that it didn't take much time to inventory everything there. Her bag of laundry was on the bed, her copy of Don Quixote on the nightstand. Her knapsack was there, too, seemingly untouched. She took out the false bottom, made sure her gun and cell phone were nestled there. This past summer, in a particularly hellish forty-eight hours, her gun had been stolen and her phone had been flung across five lanes of traffic on Interstate 95. A tailor had designed a black flap that attached with Velcro strips, but it would only fool someone who glanced inside the knapsack without picking it up. The weight would have given away its secret contents.

No, if Mrs. Nguyen hadn't mentioned her gentleman caller, she would never have known someone had been here. But someone had, and it felt as creepy as a real break-in, or a burglary. Creepier, because she knew who the perpetrator was, yet couldn't begin to guess at his motives.