In Big Trouble

Chapter 19

Technically, Tess awoke to the phone the next morning, but it was really Tyner's voice that roused her, its volume unaffected by the distance it had to travel. As she was no longer sitting in the back of a patrol car, she wasn't quite so nostalgic for the sound.

"You sure have made a mess of things here," he began. No hello, no how are you. Tyner liked to surge into a conversation the way rowers jump across the start in shorter races. "How is that everyone knows to call my office since you skipped town?"

"I changed the message on my machine, then used call forwarding, activated long-distance. Isn't technology great?" She drew out the vowel sound in the last word until it became two, three syllables, the way the women here did in the impossibly glossy grocery stores. Look at this mango. Isn't it great? Look at these tuberoses. Aren't they great? Look at all that Gulf Coast shrimp isn't it greaaaaaaaaate?

"Trust me, it wasn't that great when Mr. Cesnik showed up on my doorstep, yelling about sausages."

"Pierogies," Tess corrected. "Cecilia's dad, remember? I told you about him. He added a little restaurant to his tavern this summer, started serving authentic Polish food. He did so well that Casimir Cudnik, his biggest competitor, copied him. But he's using frozen pierogies, and passing them off as homemade. I did a Dumpster dive two weeks ago and found the boxes. But you know, Cudnik could accuse us of putting them there. I guess it doesn't constitute proof. What do you think?"

"I don't give a damn about pierogies, frozen or fresh. You have a business to run, and you better come back here and run it. Why are you still there, anyway? Kitty told me you found Crow last week."

"Crow wasn't the first thing I found here," Tess sighed. She was beginning to understand Marianna's reluctance to repeat the same story over and over again.

Still, it was strangely clarifying to rehash everything for Tyner. She worked in a simple, chronological order, and in her mind she saw one of those old-fashioned movie maps, a dotted line tracking her progress from Charlottesville to Austin, then to Twin Sisters and San Antonio. Tyner listened without interrupting. When he wasn't shouting, he was a wonderful listener.

"So Crow has gotten himself mixed up in these murders, old and new," Tyner said at last. "And he keeps giving you every indication that something's going to happen this weekend, but you don't know what, or why."

"You got it."

"Has it occurred to you that Crow is being reticent about Emmie not out of misplaced chivalry or blind love, but because he's involved, too?"

"Crow would never be mixed up in a murder," she said, hoping her voice conveyed more conviction than she felt. "This is a guy who couldn't put out a mousetrap."

"It wouldn't be so very hard to justify killing a man like Tom Darden, if you believed he was a killer."

"But that was information Emmie didn't have, only the cops."

"This detective, Guzman, said he didn't tell the family members what he suspected. But there are few true secrets in the world. San Antonio sounds like a small-big city, just like Baltimore."

"I wish I were in Baltimore," Tess said.

"Why?"

"Because then I could go to the Brass Elephant, rest my head on the bar, and moan softly until Victor made me a double." A Victor double was another bartender's quadruple. "Then I'd call Feeney over at the Beacon-Light, and he'd help me figure it out. He always has little bits of information stored away, like a squirrel."

"So all you need is a South Texas Feeney," Tyner said.

"Too bad I don't know one. There was this old hack, Jimmy Ahern, who wrote that book I was telling you about, but I haven't seen his byline in the Eagle. He's probably dead, or retired. On the other hand-" She felt like a deep sea diver, going after a tiny pearl somewhere deep in her memory banks. "I do know a reporter down here who helped me, when I was doing that background check on Rosita Ruiz. He might still be around. A. J…Sheppard."

"Now you're thinking." Tess knew if she could see Tyner on the other end of the line, he would be tapping his forehead with his index finger. Add that to her list of reasons to be glad the videophone had never caught on.

"Silly me. I thought I was thinking all along."

He wasn't finished with her. "Now, how are your workouts going?"

"They're going. No shell, and no river even if I had one, but I'm jumping rope, running, doing pushups and situps."

"How far did you run yesterday?"

"I didn't run yesterday, exactly-"

"Six miles," Tyner said. "Interval training. Are there any hills around there? I always imagine Texas as flat and dusty."

"Actually hillier than Baltimore in some places. In fact, San Antonio is really a very pretty city. But Tyner-"

"Six miles," he repeated. "Meanwhile, I shall handle the pierogi wars of East Baltimore."

"Hearing footsteps" is not an empty sports cliché for women joggers in lonely places. Tess, who had been running for more than half her life, never felt as vulnerable as she did on a deserted path, an unseen runner closing the gap, breath ragged and hard, feet striking the ground harder still. Was it someone trying to pass you? Or someone trying to catch you? Fifteen years of uneventful runs didn't keep Tess from worrying about the worst-case scenario. Bad luck overtook most people eventually. She could only hope it wasn't coming up on her left flank as she pounded down a path in Brackenridge Park.

She drifted to the right, the protocol for allowing a faster runner to pass. But the unseen runner was slowing down now, content to stay even with her. In her peripheral vision, she caught a glimpse of a man just about her height, a little stocky through the torso, with short, thin legs working very hard to match her stride for stride. She was dogging it, running a nine-minute mile, but the pace was clearly taxing him.

"Mind if I join you?" he asked, and she had to make eye contact then. It was Steve Villanueve, the bouncer who was really a cop.

"Be my guest. You live around here?"

"No, but I like to run here in the mornings. In the summers it's worth the drive to have the shade. How much farther for you?"

She glanced at her watch. "At least twenty more minutes."

He tried to look enthusiastic. "Great."

"Let's pour it on."

She increased her speed, heading for the long steep hill she had noticed on her first day here, the one behind the curious Japanese-style garden.

"These are the Japanese Tea Gardens," Steve said as they climbed. Talking-while-running obviously wasn't easy for him, but he seemed determined to make the effort. "They've come full circle. They began as the Japanese Gardens, then the name was changed to the Chinese Gardens after Pearl Harbor. Then they were the Sunken Gardens, which really made no sense. They finally gave up and went back to the original name. Who knows, maybe"-a few quick, almost asthmatic pants-"Texas will be Tejas again in my lifetime."

Tess nodded. There's a school of thought that you should be able to hold a conversation while running, if only to prove you were working at an aerobic rate, instead of an anaerobic one. But it wasn't a mandate. For her, part of the pleasure of working out was the quiet, the time to think and recharge.

"They get good concerts down in the amphitheater sometimes." Another pause, another round of harsh breaths. "The first concert I ever saw was when I was just four years old. Some born-again Christian group with Little Ricky as the drummer. You know, Little Ricky from the old I Love Lucy show? Babalu!"

Tess tried to think of something to say, if only to be polite, but nothing occurred to her.

"They were probably awful, in…retrospect." He groped for that last word. There was a slight hesitation to his speech that couldn't be explained by his panting, an exaggerated deliberateness, like a cured stutterer. She wondered if English was his second language. Unlike glib Rick, whose self-mocking repetoire of accents ran from redneck hick to Frito Bandito, Steve tried to speak in a bland newscaster's tone. "But it was the first concert I ever saw, and I loved it. Got a guitar, of course, like every other boy in America, but I couldn't play a lick. Can't sing, either. Or dance. Born to be a fan, I guess. Someone has to be, right?"

They crested the summit. One of the great ironies in running is that going downhill simply punishes the parts of the body that had it easy on the ascent. Gravity pulled on her quadriceps, teasing them, testing them, setting her up for a fall. Gravity was a bitch, in Tess's opinion, a much bigger enemy than time. It was gravity that pulled the body apart, made everything droop and fall.

"So do you do security for the money or the access?" she asked Rick, trying to give him a chance to breathe.

"Both, I guess. I like the money. I like the music."

"Especially Emmie's."

She glanced at his face. The deep color in his cheeks wasn't purely from exertion. "Emmie's good."

A short silence, as they hit bottom. "Want to knock off early?" he asked. "We could grab breakfast on Broadway, near where you're staying."

Tess stopped abruptly. "I didn't tell you where I was staying."

"Sure you did-" He had stopped, too, and was bent over, his hands on his knees as he sucked in air greedily.

"No, Steve, I'm very careful about such things. My father's training. I've never listed my home address in the phone book, and I wouldn't casually broadcast my whereabouts in a strange city. I suppose you could have gotten it off the police report from this weekend-"

"Oh, were you down at the station?" he asked. His acting was on a par with his running.

"-but that still doesn't explain why you're here today, chatting me up, trying to get me to go to breakfast. Guzman's idea? Or is this a little ad hoc plan concocted by a patrolman who wants to move up to detective?"

"I don't want to write tickets forever," Steve said, straightening up. "Besides, Guzman has his ambitions, too. If I could help him solve the triple murders, everyone would get what he wanted, and that would be a good thing." The last sounded like a child repeating something an adult had told him. "Guzman was so close, until Darden turned up dead. Now the other one, Laylan Weeks, has vanished without a trace, and Emmie is missing, too. He thought…I thought…"

"He thought he could send you to spy on me, the way you've been spying on Emmie at the Morgue and Hector's. Did you work at Primo's, too? Didn't Emmie ever get suspicious, seeing you at every gig? But I guess that's what the whole lovesick-puppy thing was about. You pretended to have a crush on her because it made it plausible that you'd be hanging around, watching her every move. She thought you were a groupie. You're really a spy."

"Doing my job," he pleaded. "Just doing my job."

"Consider it done," Tess said. "I'll make you a deal-you stay away from me from now on, and I won't let Guzman know how badly you botched this particular assignment."

"You'd go to Guzman?" He was scared. The sweat on his brow was fresh, his round cheeks were flushed anew. She couldn't blame him. She wouldn't want to be on Guzman's shit list either.

"If I see you anywhere near me, I'm on the phone to him. But if you stay away from me, this will be our little secret. Now scoot. I still have a real workout to do."

He backed away from her, then turned and began sprinting toward the path that wound along the zoo. His bright white, perfectly plain T-shirt became smaller and smaller, until it was little more than a tiny flag of surrender, waving at her from a great distance. Tess felt like a bully. It wasn't the worst feeling in the world.