In Big Trouble

Chapter 13

Church bells were ringing in the distance before anyone bothered with Tess at the police station. They had left her in a room, not under arrest as far as she could tell, but not free to go, either, judging by the officer posted outside her door. At last she was in the famed "box," as everyone in Baltimore knew to call it since Homicide had become the city's official religion. She had spent the balance of the night in a plastic chair, her body desperate to sleep, her mind refusing. Talk about a mind-body problem. These two were like some long-married couple-the resentful insomniac mind kept jabbing the body every time it drifted off, hissing: How can you sleep at a time like this? Body begged wearily for its due, arguing that they would both be better off if they got a little rest. And so it had gone, all night long.

She was almost crazed with exhaustion by the time a man entered the room, carrying a wax paper bag and two Styrofoam cups of coffee. It was the sad-eyed plainclothes cop from the night before, the one who had arrived late, then ridden downtown with her. She remembered he seemed angry or troubled, but that might have been the fragment of a not-quite dream.

"Detective Al Guzman," he said. "Homicide. And you're Theresa Monaghan, according to your various licenses."

She nodded, letting the full version of her name pass. She wasn't going to form words until strictly necessary. The coffee was black and bitter-she usually took hers with a generous portion of half-and-half-but she needed the caffeine, so she sipped at it. Awful. The bag held an elephant ear and she broke off several flaking layers and dropped them into her coffee to sweeten it. Guzman watched approvingly, as a mother might watch a finicky child.

"Sorry for last night," he said. "You were caught in an unavoidable confluence of events, I'm afraid. Wrong place, wrong time. Wrong guy."

She let a lift of her shoulders pass for a reply.

"You know Ed Ransome before you came to Texas, or was he just, uh, a new friend? You can tell me. There's no law here against getting involved with the wrong man. Couldn't build enough prisons to hold all the women guilty of that crime."

It was a cornball thing to say, but he smiled as if he knew it was a cornball thing to say, and she found herself thawing a little. Guzman was not a handsome man, and his body was shaped like a squash, with its narrow shoulders and paunchy midsection. But he had a kind face that invited confidences and confessions-those big brown eyes and a glossy mustache whose shape mirrored the gentle, downturned mouth beneath it. Perhaps if she told him everything she knew, she would be allowed to go home and sleep. She thought longingly of La Casita, then remembered that Esskay was there alone. Maybe they would let her call Mrs. Nguyen at least, so she could feed the dog, get one of the hookers to take her for a walk. It would be so good to crawl into bed next to her.

But what was best for Tess wasn't necessarily best for Crow.

"I'm a private detective, which you know, since you've obviously gone through my wallet. Crow-Ed Ransome to you-is an old friend. An old boyfriend." That wasn't revealing anything, given the way the police had found them. Coitus interruptus by SWAT team. At last a form of birth control that was one hundred percent reliable. "His parents asked me to find him and I did. End of story."

"I think it's just the beginning," Guzman said, then waited, with those big brown eyes and that so very sad smile. He was letting the silence do the work, hoping Tess would rush into it out of nervousness. Exhausted as she was, she couldn't help admiring the technique.

"This is really good," she said. "This elephant ear. It's the best I've ever had."

Guzman followed her little sidestep effortlessly, the Arthur Murray of the box. "It's from Mario's, in El Mercado. You been there yet?"

She shook her head.

"I keep forgetting, you're not just another tourist. El Mercado, the River Walk, the missions-those are the places the tourists go."

"And the Alamo."

"Claro que sí. Not that I have much use for the Alamo."

"Why?"

"Do I look like John Wayne?" he asked. "Or even Fess Parker?"

"Oh, yeah-your people were on the outside."

"Not my people. My people run a shoestore in Guadalajara. Besides, there were Mexicans inside, too, you know. No, it just doesn't mean anything to me. There's a lot of stuff in San Antonio like that. This stupid All Soul Festival, for example. Gus Sterne's brainchild."

"Gus Sterne?" Tess had heard of the festival, and heard of Gus Sterne, the cousin who had raised Emmie until their falling-out. She hadn't heard the two were connected.

"Yeah, Gus Sterne. I know he raises all this money for scholarships, but to me, it's a sacrilege, using Day of the Dead as some hook for another week of parties and parades that also happen to promote his barbecue restaurants. Yet the City Hall folks, the tourism gurus, say it's a big deal. They say it's going to be bigger than the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival one day. ‘As if,' my twelve-year-old daughter would say."

As if she would say as if. That locution was only a thousand years old in teen-speak. Under different circumstances, Tess might have smiled at the thought of this streetwise cop who couldn't keep up with his own daughter's vocabulary.

"Anyway, I don't care," Guzman said. "I'll make some overtime."

"Umph," Tess said, hoping it sounded like a polite, neutral agreement. Her lips were covered with pastry flakes and there was no napkin she could see. The back of the hand would have to do. But then her hand was covered with pastry, which made her giggle. God, she was so fatigued, it was like being stoned. Where had she read that British secret service agents had to undergo seventy-two hours of sleep deprivation as part of training?

"I remember when I used to make overtime working cases, not pulling parade duty. The bad ol' days. Now the homicide rate's at a twenty-year low."

"Really." Although Tess couldn't put much energy in her reaction, she was impressed. Baltimore had fallen back from its body-a-day high, but not by much. In fact, the stats indicated Baltimore's killers were simply getting more efficient: fewer shootings, but a higher fatality rate. Way to go, kids. If you can't bring up your reading scores, at least you're improving as marksmen.

"It gives us time to solve cases," Guzman said. "Old ones, as well as new ones. Today's technology can solve yesterday's murders. We cleared a twenty-five-year-old case last month. I was counting on Tom Darden to help me clear another one, one almost as old. You remember Tom Darden? You made his acquaintance up near Twin Sisters, as I recall. Stocky fellow?"

Not so stocky with his chest hollowed out by a gunshot blast, Tess thought. Somewhere in her body, a warning signal was going off, or trying to go off-it seemed almost as far away as the city's church bells. See? her body screamed at her mind. You should have let me sleep, then we could cope with this. The mind replied testily: Oh shut up and make some adrenaline.

"You know who Tom Darden is, Miss Monaghan?"

"He's the man I found."

Guzman smiled approvingly, a teacher with a slow student who had finally, after much prodding and many hints, come up with the right answer.

"That the only time you've ever seen him?"

"As far as I know. I don't really know what he looked like when he was alive."

Another smile, another nod. "Good point. They keep making bigger and better guns, but there's still nothing like an old-fashioned shotgun for ripping open some guy's face, is there? That gun we found under your friend's bed, it was old, but it could do the job, couldn't it? A beauty. Matches a gun that belongs to Marianna Barrett Conyers. I just talked to her on the phone. She confirmed that she keeps it up at her weekend place. What do you want to bet that it's not there anymore?"

Tess said nothing, but in her mind she was making another quick inventory of the limestone cottage. No bullets in any of the drawers she had pulled open, no locked gun cabinet, but she recalled a rack above the fireplace. Empty, it hadn't registered as being of any significance. Could have been a plate-holder for all she knew, or some other piece of decorative bric-a-brac. A gun rack. Go figure.

"Don't get me wrong," Guzman said. "I'm not going to shed any tears over Darden. In fact, I was counting on watching him die one day. I just thought it would be through lethal injection, a few more years down the road. The thing, is, I wanted to talk to him first about some old business, and now I can't do that. And although I'm indebted to your friend, I can't really let it go, you know? Even lowlifes have rights."

Tess started to nod, then stopped, not sure what she would be agreeing with.

"Unless-" Guzman paused as if struck by a sudden brainstorm, only he was a little too stagey. "Unless, of course, your friend killed him in self-defense. I can see that. He's staying up there with Emmie Sterne, and this bad guy breaks in. Your friend gets scared and grabs the gun. Bang, bang, bang, lots of blood and screaming. Everybody panics. It's natural. He stashes the guy in the pool house, cleans up real good, and hits the road. Then you come along, looking for your old buddy, and you find the body. Only you don't bother to tell the sheriff why you're really there. That how it happened?"

"If it did, wouldn't it be a matter for Sheriff Kolarik? His county, his body."

Perhaps the slow student was moving a little too fast now. For whatever reason, Guzman was no longer smiling and nodding at her.

"Believe me, Sheriff Kolarik would love to have you return as a guest of the county. Problem is, we know where Darden was found, but we don't know where he was killed. He was last seen alive in San Antonio, about two weeks ago, with his old buddy Laylan Weeks. Sheriff Kolarik doesn't mind if I make a few inquiries down here, seeing as the weapon appears to have shown up and all. Under your friend's bed. And seeing as Tom Darden might be the link to something where the stakes are a lot bigger."

"I hate to undermine your theory, but Crow Ransome doesn't know how to use a gun." At least, he hadn't when Tess last saw him. Or had he? Perhaps his knowledge of firearms had been something else he had mentioned in passing. My father abandoned a shot at the Nobel Prize to run off with my mother the famous sculptor and, by the way, I'm a crack shot. It was possible. Anything seemed possible just now. "He's also not stupid enough to hide a murder weapon under his own bed. Who hides anything under the bed, anymore? I haven't put anything there since I was twelve and trying to read Lolita."

"That Russian book they made into the dirty movie on Showtime?"

Tess decided not to challenge his characterization. "Yeah."

"Man, I'd jump up and down if my twelve-year-old was trying to sneak a book like that. The only thing she has under her bed is a stash of makeup that her mother won't let her wear until she's sixteen."

"If you want her to read a certain book, all you have to do is ban it. Better yet, hide it wherever you hide your own contraband-my mom used the linen closet. Your daughter will find it there and start sneaking it out, gulping it down when you're out of the house. Leave a little Balzac behind, and she'll take it from there."

"Naw. Estrella doesn't know our hiding places."

"If you've got a twelve-year-old in the house, she knows where everything is. Including the dirty videos and drugs. Well, no drugs in a detective's house, I guess. But the videos and the booze, even contraband chocolates."

Guzman blushed. "Yes, well. Anyway, you came looking for your old boyfriend. Why did he go missing in the first place?"

The postcard with Crow's picture, the one that had started this whole mess, was in the pages of Tess's datebook. She worried for a moment that some police officer might be pawing through it even as she and Guzman spoke, then remembered the datebook was back at La Casita. With Esskay and the double bed with the polyester spread, which suddenly seemed the most wonderful bed in the world to her.

"He was trying to strike out on his own, make it as a musician. Nothing sinister."

"How did he hook up with Emmie Sterne?"

"They met in Austin." Had she just been lulled into telling Guzman something he didn't know? "Or maybe here. I'm not sure. She was looking for a guitarist, he was looking for a singer."

"What about Gus Sterne, her cousin. He have any connection to this band?"

"Not to my knowledge. Someone told me they were on the outs."

"Yeah? Everyone in this town loves her cousin, and she hates his guts? That's pretty strange, don't you think?"

"I'd say it was about par for the course as families go."

Guzman extended his index finger, as if awarding a point.

"So you know the whole story about Emmie Sterne, then? The poor little princess, orphaned before she was even three years old? A daddy she never knew, a mommy she barely remembers."

"Marianna Barrett Conyers told me how both Emmie's parents died in accidents." If he had already spoken to Marianna about the shotgun, he knew she had been there. She wasn't giving him anything new.

"Accidents?" Guzman did a double-take, neat as any professional comic. "I suppose you could call it that. I mean, rich people have fancy words for everything, so why not? Horace Morgan shot his head off after his wife left him. I guess you'd call that an accident. Meanwhile, Lollie Sterne died in a really big accident. An accidental triple homicide that Tom Darden was going to help me solve."

Tess suddenly remembered where she had learned that invaluable bit of trivia about British secret service agents and sleep deprivation: It had been on the VH1 "popup" video for Duran Duran's "A View to a Kill." Gee, if only VH1 had provided more invaluable training for the up-and-coming private investigator. For example: what to do when you got hit with a fact so important, so central to everything that you had been doing, that it felt like someone had slapped you across the face with a wet towel.

"Emmie's mother was murdered?"

"Uh-huh." Guzman was really enjoying himself now. "Killed in what looked like in a botched robbery at her restaurant, Espejo Verde. It was a big deal. If you were older, I bet you'd remember it. Some local sleaze even got a book out of it. I was the first cop on the scene." He waited, as if used to people reacting when they heard that fact. "Someone had heard a child crying from the restaurant late on a Monday night, when it was supposed to be closed. It was Emmie, in a playpen in a room off the kitchen."

"Where were…Could she?" Just trying to form the right question made Tess felt queasy and prurient. Emmie's strange preoccupation with dead bodies and blood suddenly made more sense. Everything about Emmie suddenly made more sense.

"Her mother was in the dining room, along with the cook. One shot each. The third victim, a man, had been left in the kitchen. Technically, I shouldn't have touched anything, not even Emmie, but I couldn't leave that baby alone in there. My oldest boy had just been born. She wasn't crying, she wasn't even awake, but there was blood on her. Not much, just streaks on her arms and hands. As if she had crawled through it."

"The killers put her back in her playpen?"

"I don't know. There's a lot of stuff we don't know about Espejo Verde, things as basic as the motive. It looked like a robbery, but the weekend receipts would have been in the bank Monday morning, and the restaurant was closed Monday nights. Even two robbers as stupid as Darden and his buddy Laylan Weeks should have known that."

"Are you sure they did it?"

Guzman shrugged. "They were lowlifes, they ripped off convenience stores for beer money. Then, out of nowhere, they get popped for this botched kidnapping and get sent away to prison. They dropped some hints, in Huntsville, like they knew something about Espejo Verde. Twenty years is a long time, you run out of stuff to say, and they might have been bragging, trying to seem tougher than they were. But they were the only leads I had, and now one is dead and the other is missing. Meanwhile, the rifle that probably killed Darden just happens to be in the house where Lollie Sterne's daughter lives."

Tess wasn't really paying attention. She was thinking about a crying toddler, traces of blood on her baby hands. Jackie's Laylah had lost her biological mother at an even younger age, but she hadn't seen anything, and the child psychiatrists were already heaping sermons on Jackie's head about how and when to tell her about her past.

Guzman was still talking to her, she'd better listen.

"So you see, when Tom Darden turns up dead on a ranch where Emmie Sterne has been known to go, and a gun from that ranch ends up under your friend's bed in the house he shares with her-well, a person has to make some connections, don't you think?"

"Only if Emmie knew about Darden and Weeks." Her response had been automatic, but something twitched in Guzman's face, and she knew she had found a weak spot. So she pressed. "She doesn't, does she? The family doesn't know about this lead you developed. You probably sat on it, waiting, hoping to surprise them with an arrest."

"I'm not telling you everything we know," Guzman said sullenly.

"And I don't know anything. It's Emmie Sterne you need. Not me, and not Crow."

"Good idea. Do you happen to know where we can find her? There are only two roads into that neighborhood, and I've had a cop stationed at each one all night, waiting for the two roomies to come home. You swam into our net eventually. But she never came home."

Breakfast at the Alamo, Tess thought, but she didn't volunteer the information. At this point, she wasn't sure if finding Emmie would help or hurt Crow.

Guzman was still waiting for her answer, allowing another silence to fill the room, when the policeman who had been watching the door poked his head in and motioned to the detective. The two left the room together, shutting the door behind them. Tess couldn't make out the words, but she heard Guzman's voice getting louder and angrier. The door opened again, and his kind face had been transformed into a furious one.

"You can go," he said curtly.

"Go where?" Her car was at Crow's duplex, which she wasn't sure she could find again. She knew the place was close to La Casita, somewhere in the folds of the park, but she didn't remember much from the trip, except the feel of Crow's hands on her body, his mouth on her neck.

"An officer will take you to your car."

"No, we'll take her, Detective." Rick Trejo was leaning against the door jamb. He wore the preppy clothes and cowboy boots of the night before, but Tess was sure these were different, cleaner versions. He was freshly shaven, too, and his face had the smooth, rested look of someone who had enjoyed at least a few hours of sleep. If she hadn't been so relieved to see him, she might have hated him for looking so well-rested. She hated everyone who had slept in the last eight hours.

"It's no trouble," Guzman said.

"I'm sure it's not. I'm sure you'd love to have her in a patrol car just a little while longer, ask her a few more questions. I'd prefer to have her come with me and my client. It's her choice, of course. But if she's free to go, she's free to choose how she goes."

"Yeah, well, tell your client not to leave town anytime soon. I bet we have him back down here before the week is out."

"Detective, you can talk to him anytime you want-as long as I'm with him. I only hope you won't drag him down here again unless you're prepared to charge him." Trejo smiled at Guzman. "Cheer up, buddy. It's not my fault that the DA says you fucked up. He sounded kinda mad, by the way. Not that I talked to him. I just could hear how loud he was screaming when your boss was on the phone with him. C'mon, little Yankee gal. Vamanos."

Tess, thoroughly confused, followed him. She felt guilty somehow, as if she had chosen the slick lawyer over the earnest cop, but she didn't see what choice she had.

"How did-" she began to ask in the hall.

"Not here," Rick said quickly. "We'll talk in the car."

"He's not charged with anything?"

"The search was no good. They had a warrant for his arrest, but they didn't have a search warrant, and they didn't have any reason to enter the house-Crow was outside, remember?"

She remembered.

"If the shotgun had been out in plain view, things might be different. But it wasn't. And the gun was all they had, which wasn't much to begin with-you can't match shotgun pellets the way you can bullets. The DA knows they can't use it, so they're going to have to build a case without it. End of story. For now."

Crow was sitting in the lobby with Kristina, who was beaming as if bailing out her favorite musician was the realization of some long-held dream. Crow looked dazed and frightened, yet grimly resolute. Tess had a feeling that Guzman had not been so kind and gentle with him.

"How did you know we were here?" Tess asked Rick.

"I have sources," Trejo said. "There are people here who let me know when there are, um, interesting cases in which representation might be required."

"He pays people," Kristina said.

"Kristina-that would be illegal. I simply am a generous man with a very long Christmas list. Anyway, Sam from Hector's called me, after Crow called him."

"We have to go," Crow said, rising to his feet. "It's already past eleven."

"Go where?" Kristina asked.

"In the car," Rick said, before Crow could say anything more, indicating the desk sergeant with a slight lift of his chin. "Let's confine all our chatter to the goddamn car."

Once in the car, a Lexus the same flan color as his skin, Rick wanted to take a meandering course through downtown to make sure the police weren't following them. Crow was much too impatient for that.

"We don't have time," he said, pressing his hands against the glove compartment as if he could push the car through the streets. "She's probably already gone."

"Who's gone where?" Rick asked.

"The Alamo," Crow said, which didn't answer Rick's question, but told Tess everything she needed to know. "Just drop me off at the Alamo."

"Let's show a little discretion, okay? I'll let you off at Rivercenter Mall. Where you go from there is your own business. Just make sure you're not followed."

Crow didn't ask Tess to accompany him, but when he leaped from the car, she was a half-step behind. He scurried ahead, trying to lose her, but he couldn't break into an all-out run without attracting attention, so she had no problem keeping pace. At last, she could feel a little adrenaline moving through her body.

They left the mall by another entrance, Crow practically jogging now, a determined salmon swimming upstream through the schools of sluggish tourists. In less than a block, they were behind the walls of the Alamo, in a pretty, shaded garden. Crow stopped at a bench, then turned in a circle. He was looking, Tess knew, for a bright blond head, and there were plenty of those to be seen. But it was just a group of Germans passing through, eyes and mouths round with reverential awe. Who had told her, some time ago, that Germans loved the whole cowboy-frontier thing? It had been Crow.

"She's not here," he said. "She's not here."

"Maybe she's back at the house?"

"The cops would have gotten her, then. No, she's gone, and now everything's ruined." He looked at Tess balefully. "Everything's ruined because of you. You brought the cops right to us. All I needed was a week to make everything okay and you wouldn't even give me that. One goddamn week. Why couldn't you stay away? Why did you have to come to Hector's and set all this in motion? You know, I keep thinking you won't disappoint me if I don't ask for too much. But I'm always wrong."

With that, he turned and walked away. She could have run after him. She could have caught him, too, and told him it wasn't her fault, that the cops had simply made the same connection she had, from Marianna to Emmie to him. But she knew he was determined to be alone, or at least without her. Unsure of what to do, or how to hook up with Rick and Kristina, she sank onto a bench and looked around. So this was the Alamo.

It was pretty, although smaller than she thought it would be.