In Big Trouble

Chapter 16

They had breakfast at a west side cafe, a dingy place that didn't look open from the street, and didn't look particularly safe from within. Rick recommended something called migas, and the combination of cheese, eggs, and sausage was so good that Tess quickly regained her lost appetite. Rick had been right-an empty stomach was the only way to talk to Al Rojas.

"Sorry you didn't like it better," he said, pushing away his half-eaten meal even as Tess was wiping her plate clean with a flour tortilla. She wasn't embarrassed. After all, that's what the jump-roping was for.

"I've never had anything like this. Most Mexican food in Baltimore is so…perfunctory. I mean, you know you're in trouble when the best place in town has something called ‘Los Sandichos' on the menu. And the Mexican place near my house has a wait staff of Estonians. Here, I could make a meal from the tortillas alone. They're incredible."

Rick looked puzzled. "They're flour and lard. You could make them yourself. Anyone could."

"Theoretically." She also could solve simple physics equations if she put her mind to it, but that didn't mean she was going to start anytime soon.

He paid the bill, helping himself to a handful of pralines and bright candies. The same "Mexican candies" the clerk in Twin Sisters had offered her, only fresher-looking here.

"Something's bothering me," he said as they walked to his car

"Rojas?"

"Darden and Weeks. Twenty years is a long stretch, and Texas has an overcrowding problem. I wonder why they didn't get parole."

"Ask Guzman."

"I'd be happier if Guzman didn't know what we're thinking about. Guess I could call someone on my Christmas card list, see what they know."

Rick headed back into the city, stopping in yet another neighborhood Tess had never seen, an old-fashioned business district surrounded by a residential neighborhood. The houses were large and gracious, but most of them had been converted to apartments, or made over into businesses. Rick bounded up the steps of a hot pink Victorian.

"Y Algunas Mas," Tess said, reading from the hand-painted sign over the door. "Se venden milagros."

"And Something More," Rick translated, his lips twitching slightly at her Spanish pronunciation. "We sell miracles."

"Funny motto for a criminal law practice."

"Law practice? Oh, this isn't my office. It's Kristina's shop."

Inside, the old house's large rooms were crammed with the same hideous skeletons that Tess had seen at Marianna Barrett Conyers's house, hundreds and hundreds of them, leering cheerfully at her from every direction. But that was just a portion of Kristina's eclectic collection. The crowded store also held a menagerie of brightly painted wooden animals, huge black pots, carved saints and papier-mâché monsters that might have crawled in from one of Hunter Thompson's better drug trips.

Kristina was pushing one of these papier-mâché creatures toward an older woman, who was trying not to recoil. "Oh I don't know," the woman said nervously. "I do love the little skeleton mariachis you told me to buy, Kris, but this-" She gestured weakly at the figure in question, which looked like some strange cross between a blowfish and a bat-"well, it's so large."

"It's a museum-quality piece," Kristina said. "The curator from the San Antonio Museum of Art was in here looking at it the other day."

"For the museum?"

"For his private collection."

"Oh, I just don't know," the woman repeated. She walked around the thing, as if it might become attractive from another angle. Tess realized the woman, despite the wealth and class indicated by her clothes and manner, yearned desperately for Kristina's approval. But she just couldn't come to terms with the monstrosity before her.

Finally, Kristina took pity on her customer, putting the blowfish-bat on the counter and picking up a notebook-sized piece of tin, with a faded painting of a virgin. Still not Tess's idea of art-it reminded her too much of the Jesus-Kennedy kitsch hung in the living rooms and kitchens of her Monaghan relatives. But it looked genuinely antique, and had the advantage of not inducing heart attacks.

"It's a Virgen de Guadalupe, an exceptionally nice one, possibly eighteenth century," Kristina said, catching Tess's eye. "Do you know the story?"

She shook her head. "I've got a Catholic name, but not the character-building torture by nuns that usually goes with it."

"It's doubtful any Baltimore nun would have told you this story. In the 1500s, a peasant, an Indian, one of the Indians indigenous to Mexico before the conquest, saw a vision. The virgen-" She used the soft h sound of the Spanish pronunciation, Tess noticed-"appeared before him and told him in his own language to gather rose petals in his cloak, then take the cloak straight to the bishop. He was to show the petals to no one but the bishop. When he arrived and unfurled his cloak, the rose petals were gone and her image was in their place. The Virgen de Guadalupe."

"Oh she's darling," the woman cried. "How much, Kristina?"

"This? It's only seven hundred dollars."

Tess watched in disbelief as the woman handed over cash, then left with the carefully wrapped treasure. Rick, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, burst into laughter as soon as her Chevy Suburban pulled away from the curb.

"You are so good, it's scary," he said. "I mean, how many times have you done the bait-and-switch with one of those alebrijes. It's genius-one of your ladies comes in, you show her something new and so damn ugly that she's scared to buy it. Then you offer her one of the antique pieces that costs ten times as much, but has the virtue of being, something that won't give her indigestion. And she leaves, feeling like she's let you down. Do you tell them that the story has been discredited? That the bishop in Mexico had to step down when he agreed there was no historical evidence that this ‘miracle' ever happened?"

"Look, running a folk art gallery may not be the lofty practice of the law, but it has its moments," Kristina said coolly, sticking the cash in an old-fashioned cash register that had been painted bright red and studded with tiny silver charms.

"If you married me, you wouldn't have to be a shop girl," he said.

"I like being a shop girl, especially given that I'm one of the owners. And it's not a shop, it's a gallery." But she was smiling.

"Phone?" he asked, smiting back at her.

"What are you asking? Do I have one? May you use it? Be more specific, please."

"May I yank it out of the wall in a show of brute force that will fuel all your stereotypical fantasies about Latin men, so that we end up coupling right here, as Tess watches the door?"

"No, but you may use the phone," Kristina said in a fake-prim manner. "For a local call."

Rick took the portable from its base, disappearing into the curtained storeroom behind the counter. Tess suddenly felt shy. She might have met Kristina first, but she now felt more comfortable with Rick, given their shared sense of purpose. As for Kristina, she was one of those poised people who didn't need to fill silences with blather. She moved around the shop, tickling her objects with a feather duster.

"I was in a house with a lot of cra-a lot of stuff like this," Tess said, making conversation. "Emmie's godmother, Marianna Barrett Conyers." Emmie's godmother, who described the death of Lollie Sterne as an accident, and neglected to mention her husband had been involved in the same "accident."

"One of my best customers," Kristina said. "I take new shipments to her for private showings. She has a great eye, and she doesn't haggle."

"Do you know her well?"

"No. I don't think anyone knows her very well, except her maid. She's so reserved. I call her the Duchess of Euphemism-she has the most tactful way of telling me she loathes something." Kristina gave Tess a knowing look. "You could pick up a few pointers from her."

"Huh?"

"I can tell just by the way you stand here, holding yourself, that you hate my things. It's as if you're scared you might catch something."

"Well, they are creepy."

"Not to me. I love every piece. They brought me to San Antonio. Four years ago, my senior year at Wisconsin-I was an art history major-I came down here for spring break. We were supposed to fly to Padre Island, but the charter plane had some mechanical problem, and we were stuck here for a day. I went into a gallery like this one, down in the King William neighborhood-Tienda Guadalupe-and I saw this wooden cross, studded with milagros."

"Milagros? I thought it meant miracles."

"It does, but it also refers to these charms, like these things on the cash register. See? Little hands and limbs, babies and hearts. They represent things you pray for. Anyway, I thought that cross was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. When I held it in my hand, I felt something, something warm. It was the wildest sensation. I bought it and took it back to Wisconsin. The day after graduation, I moved here. I didn't know a single person and people laughed at my Spanish, it was so fussy and academic. But from the start, I was at home here. Total GTT."

"Gone to Texas," Tess said. "Crow said the same thing, in a postcard he sent to his parents."

Kristina laid down her feather duster. "You don't get it, do you?"

"His dad explained it to me. Something about what fugitives carved on their doors."

"No, I mean the feeling. I was meant for Texas. Listening to Almas Perdidas, I sense Crow is, too."

"Maybe," Tess said. Crow was under some spell, but she couldn't figure out if it was San Antonio's or Emmie's.

Kristina just smiled and went back to dusting, tickling the long nose of a banana yellow ferret. Rick walked through the door, portable phone in hand, his voice in that winding-up mode that one has when trying to end a call, while the person on the other end drones on and on.

"Uh-huh, uh-huh. Thanks. Surest thing. We should. No, we definitely should. Okay, Okay. Uh-huh. Thanks." He inched the receiver that much closer to the base. "Definitely. Till then. No, I mean it."

At last, he hung up. "My source gave me a lead on a retired detective who worked the Darden-Weeks case, knew these guys as well as anyone."

"Was that the detective?"

Rick rolled his eyes and pulled at his collar as if it were choking him. "His wife. She says he went to Las Vegas on a charter, won't be back for two days. Probably trying to get away from her for a while. She talks a blue streak. Gave me a complete blow-by-blow of her health, her husband's health, their dog's health, what she had for breakfast this morning-English muffin with raisins, a little Sanka. Jesus. He probably goes gambling just to have some peace and quiet for a change."

"See?" Kristina said. "That's how marriage works. I bet there was a time when he told her he loved her, and couldn't be without her, and now he's reduced to playing blackjack to get away from the sound of her voice. That's what marriage is, Rick. The death of romance."

"That's not what marriage to me would be like," he said, circling her waist and kissing her neck. Kristina never missed a beat in her dusting.

"Two days," Tess complained, feeling awkward. "What do we do until then? I don't want to sit around La Casita, watching Esskay sleep."

"Look for Emmie," Rick said, still holding fast to Kristina, who continued to ignore him. "That's what you said you wanted to do in the first place. Got any ideas where to start?"

"In fact, I do," Tess said, eyeing the skeletons, which seemed to he laughing at her. "I think I'll see if the Duchess of Euphemism would like to take tea with me this afternoon."