In Big Trouble

Chapter 20

A. J. Sheppard had agreed to meet her for lunch, once he determined she was paying. Apparently San Antonio Eagle reporters didn't have the kind of expense accounts taken for granted by those reporters at Baltimore's Beacon-Light. He named a place on San Antonio's River Walk, and when Tess demurred-she wasn't a tourist, after all-he had been insistent. "When you get home, it's all anyone will ask you, anyway. Did you see the Alamo? Did you go to the River Walk?" He was strangely emphatic on this point, in the manner of a person who is strangely emphatic about the smallest matters. In the end, it was easier to concede.

The little district of restaurants and shops, a flight of stone steps below the real city, was pretty and picturesque. A cleaner Venice, decided Tess, who had never seen the real thing. The Riverwalk had begun life as a one-time WPA project, according to an old travel guide she had found in the nightstand at La Casita, then been pulled back from the edge of ruin in the early sixties. Not unlike Baltimore and its Inner Harbor project. American cities seemed in a constant state of such rediscoveries, waking up again and again to the reality that the old downtowns were aesthetic marvels, well worth preserving. The only thing Tess couldn't understand was why such developments seemed predicated on having bodies of water nearby. Not that you could really call the San Antonio River a body of water. More like a small limb.

From a patio table at Siempre Sabado, she studied the passersby, trying to pick A. J. out of the crowd. The only thing she could be sure of is that he would not be wearing a conventioneer's badge, like so many of the others she spotted here. Come to think of it, she had no idea what he looked like nor how old he was. Their fleeting acquaintance was based on exactly one telephone call seven months ago, a call he had promised to disavow. On the phone, he was loud and braying, like a deaf old man who thought he had to shout to be heard. His accent was comically broad; he would not have been out of place on Hee Haw. Try as she might, she couldn't get any visual image to adhere to that voice, except for a straw hat and a corncob pipe. This morning, when she had asked what he had looked like, even he seemed stumped. "I'll find you," he said at last.

He did, swooping down on the table like a sudden change in the weather.

"Monaghan!" He pumped her hand with a vigorous up-and-down motion, as if her arm were the lever on an old-fashioned water pump. He was a tall, lanky man with something on his face that was either an early 5 o'clock shadow, a weak beard, or crumbs from his breakfast cereal. He wore a jacket over his blue jeans, and a reporter's notebook was sticking out of his back pocket, tenting the jacket. He pulled out the notebook and threw it down on the table with a loud smack, yelling for a waitress. The staff regarded him tolerantly, if not fondly.

He squinted at her. "I thought you'd be a tough old gal, with a fedora and a trench coat, and here you are, looking like some damn cheerleader. How old are you, twenty-one?"

"I'm thirty," she said, a bit sharply. He looked about thirty-five or forty and she wanted him to know he shouldn't patronize her.

"Excuse me. Never knew you could insult a lady by underestimating her age." He picked up the menu but didn't bother to open it. "You drink at lunch?"

Tess figured no one would ask that question unless he drank at lunch. Why not? she thought. She'd sip, he'd slurp, she'd have an edge. This was not, after all, her buddy Feeney, who owed her so many favors, and who would sit on a story at her request. She'd have to tread carefully here.

"Do they have good margaritas?"

"They're the only reason to come here. That and the view. Food's pretty mediocre, compared to what else is out there. If there was any truth in advertising, they'd call it Casa So-So." He waved frantically at the waitress, his long arm slashing the air. "Two frozen margaritas."

"On the rocks for me." Frozen margaritas went down too easily.

The waitress brought the drinks and a basket of chips, with a thin, brown sauce new to Tess's taste buds. She poked the edge of a chip into it, like a shy swimmer dipping her toe in the ocean. It might be mediocre to Sheppard, but it was still awfully good by her standards.

"Tess Monaghan," A. J. said, drumming his hands on the table. "Tess Monaghan, private eye. How'd you get into this private investigator gig, anyway? I thought you worked at a newspaper up in Baltimore."

"I was working for the paper as an investigator when we spoke. But I was a reporter at the Baltimore Star, before it folded."

"That thing we didn't talk about last winter-boy, that ended pretty badly, didn't it?"

"Yes." The image of the body in the ditch was always there, waiting for moments like this to clutch at her. The white T-shirt had been so bright against the winter-brown land, the blue plastic grocery bags had looked like a bier of roses.

"This related?"

"No. I'm on a missing person case of sorts."

"Something in it for me? Remember, the newspaper is your friend. A story might flush out some leads."

"No." Perhaps she was a little too quick. But one of the few honorable things Guzman had done was not go to the media. Well, maybe not honorable-he had his own agenda, as evidenced by Steve Villanueve's botched surveillance and interrogation-but the bottom line was there had been no leaks. She wanted to keep it that way.

"I mean, I'm more interested in poking around in your archives. I thought you could help me."

"Sorry, our library is closed to the public. But if you tell me what you need, maybe I can get it for you."

He was persistent, she had to give him that. "Aren't your archives searchable on the Web?"

"Only for the last two years, and it will cost you two bucks an article to pull up more than the headline. Before then, most of the paper is stored in shoeboxes."

Tess laughed. Every newspaper reporter she had ever known took a perverse pride in denigrating their employer's resources.

"No, literally," A. J. said. "That was the old system. Shoeboxes. The old publisher cut a deal with Joske's department store, and he got these shoeboxes really cheap, which they stacked on top of each other. One day a whole wall of 'em fell over on one of the librarians, and the workers' comp claim convinced the company to modernize. Even if you could get in there, you'd never be able to find what you want."

"Probably doesn't matter, anyway. The good stuff never gets in the paper."

"Amen."

"I mean, this guy I'm looking for…Tyner Gray-he's a lawyer, disappeared with his partner's money." The lie was fun to tell, even if Tyner wasn't there to hear his name taken in vain. "I don't think it's the first time he disappeared down here, he might have even been living a double life. But as you said, the juicy stuff never sees print anyway."

He nodded, having forgotten that she was the one who had expressed this sentiment, not him. He had only seconded it. "Tyner Gray. Doesn't ring a bell."

"Oh, he's a small-timer. Probably never crossed your screen." She paused, trying to decide if she could make the transition she needed without sounding too forced. "I got excited for a moment when I saw the item about this guy, Tom Darden, whose body was found in the Hill Country. Because Gray had used the name Darden once. But I don't think there's a connection."

"Can't see that there would be, given that Darden was locked up for the last twenty years."

"Yeah. The paper called it the ‘infamous Danny Boyd case,' but I've never heard of Danny Boyd. Should I have?"

"Not unless you were around here two decades ago. Even then, there are plenty of folks who don't know what happened. ‘Infamous'-that's a kind of a code."

"Code for what?"

A. J. glanced at the tables around them, as if he were planning to break a confidence. "It was before my time, but everyone knows that Danny Boyd's kidnappers molested him. But we couldn't print that detail, because he had been identified when he was snatched, and, of course, we don't identify victims of sexual assault. Especially when he's a rich man's little boy. So it became the ‘infamous' Danny Boyd case. It's a wink at the reader, you see, a tip that there's something salacious we can't tell." He sighed. "Of course, given recent events, it's hard to remember those innocent days when there were things that newspapers didn't deem fit to print."

"I knew there was something," she said happily, as if this were a game they were playing. Read Between the Lines, Win Cash Prizes. Much better than Wingo any day. "Maybe it's the ex-reporter in me, but I always can tell if the reporter is holding something back when I read the paper. This may make me sound cynical, but I figure this Sterne guy, who's getting so much press for this All Soul Festival, can't be as saintly as he's made out to be."

"Gus Sterne? Actually, what you see is what you get, in my experience. A little arrogant, maybe, but basically a good guy for someone with that much money and that much clout."

"Still, everyone has skeletons in their closets." She was pushing too hard, A. J. was wary again. "Hey, I've been in some San Antonio homes. People here have skeletons on their bookshelves."

He smiled, but the good ol' boy veneer was gone, revealing a much shrewder man than she wanted to deal with.

"You got a lead on the murders? Because if you do, all bets are off."

The murders. Thousands of people had been killed in this city over the last twenty years, and many of those cases must have gone unsolved as well. But there was no doubt what "the murders" were.

She was grateful for the interruption of a short, plump man with an old-fashioned flash camera, who stopped at the table and asked if the gentleman would like a photograph of the beautiful, beautiful lady, to remember this magic moment always. A. J. waved him away impatiently.

"Well?" he asked Tess.

"I never heard of Lollie Sterne before my work brought me to Texas," she said, pleased to have the truth on her side, at least momentarily. "It's her daughter, Emmie Sterne, I'm looking for. I have a friend who was in a band with her, and she skipped out on him, owing him some money. End of story."

"How does that connect to the murders?" He had drained his frozen margarita and waved for another, but the drink hadn't dulled his senses as much as Tess had hoped. People who drink at lunch also tend to have a pretty high tolerance.

"It doesn't. I'm cruising for a little dirt on the Sterne family. My client really needs this money." She was beginning to buy into her own story, always the mark of a good lie.

"And you think Gus Sterne will pay his cousin's debt, if you can dig up something on him?"

"Knowledge is power."

"Then you should know they're on the outs."

"Yeah, but I figure if I go to him this week, just before his big day, tell him that Emmie has ripped off this guy and I'm willing to go to the press with the story-"

"He'll make good on her debt to avoid the bad publicity." A. J. drank from his margarita glass. He didn't use the straw, and his healthy slurp left a little pale green mustache on his upper lip. "I like how you think. But it's still a stretch. The Eagle won't touch the story. For one thing, it's Gus Sterne. Besides, you can't expect a guy to bail out the woman who tried to burn his house down."

Tess, who had just bitten into a tortilla chip, inhaled too sharply, and the chip lodged in her throat. Eyes watering, nose running, she gulped water, trying to wash it down. She recalled reading that people had died this way, choking to death on lethal little tortilla triangles that got stuck in the trachea.

A. J. was enjoying all her levels of discomfort. "You really don't know what you've stepped in, do you? Yeah, Emmie Sterne tried to burn ol' Cousin Gus's house down. What was it-four years ago, five?"

"Five," Tess said faintly. They had a falling-out, five years ago. Marianna, the Duchess of Euphemism, had struck again, backed up this time by Gus Sterne's own evasive half-truths. Clay had hinted at the rest of the story, but she had thought he was just being a petulant brat.

"So you do know. Sterne convinced the cops not to press charges, and our weak-kneed publisher really undercut us on the story. You couldn't read between the lines there, because there were no lines, except for a short on the fire itself. The insurance company wasn't so easily appeased, but they straightened it out eventually, and as long as there were no criminal charges, the paper wouldn't make it public. Gus thought he was doing the girl a favor, having her judged incompetent and packed off to some ritzy mental hospital for a few months. I hear she didn't see it that way. But she was damn lucky, I'll tell you that. If Sterne and his son hadn't gotten out of the house in time, she'd have been in prison for a double homicide."

"Emmie tried to burn his house down? The one on Hermosa?" I grew up on Hermosa. Ugly things can happen on a handsome street. Then the new looking garage and the adjoining wing had not been an addition, but the part of house that had to be rebuilt after the fire.

"She said it was an accident, but if a Girl Scout had made that little campfire, she'd have gotten a merit badge for her use of accelerants."

"When did this happen? What time of year?"

A. J. raked a chip through the salsa, took a bite, and made another pass. A double-dipper, that figured.

"It was hot. I remember I was heading up to New Braunfels to go tubing on a Saturday afternoon when I heard about the fire on the police scanner I keep in my car. June? July? No, late May, early June. I was covering higher ed at the time and it was one big blur of commencement speakers. I still remember the rack card the city editor wanted to run, before the story got spiked. ‘Murder Girl in Big Trouble.' Murder Girl! You gotta love it. The noun-noun construction is what makes it an instant classic. Like Sewer Boy or Glue Dog."

In Big Trouble. Emmie's band was called Little Girl in Big Trouble. Tess was barely listening to A. J. now, but he assumed her furrowed brow meant she wanted a more in-depth explanation.

"Sewer Boy was a kid who fell into the city's sewer system when someone stole a manhole cover. Didn't surface for twenty-four hours. The headline said: ‘Sewer Boy Still Missing.' Glue Dog was this puppy some huffers got hooked on inhalants. The county took him away. ‘Glue Dog Taken from Torturers.' That was a rack card, put over the boxes to pump up street sales. Now that we're the only game in town, we're more respectable, don't have to work so hard to sell the papers, because what else are they going to buy? Truth be told, we used to be a helluva lot more fun."

"Emmie was in a band called Little Girl in Big Trouble."

"Really? That figures, that's the original."

"The ‘original'?"

"Little Girl in Big Trouble. It was the headline, on one of the folios, back when the murders first happened. I wasn't at the paper then, but I've heard the story. A month after the murders, the investigation was going nowhere, and the story had dried up along with it. There were three newspapers then, and the Sun was beating the Eagle's ass. The Eagle reporter, Jimmy Ahern-"

"The one who wrote the book."

"Yeah, right. Anyway, he was desperate for a scoop. So he sort of goosed the story a little bit."

"What do you mean?" She wondered if it was a mistake to admit she was familiar with Jimmy Ahern's oeuvre, but the fact didn't seem to have registered with A. J.

"He had a source-at least, he said it was a source, but I think it was a voice in his head, or at the bottom of his bourbon bottle-who said Emmie was the link, the key that could unlock the murders. He got a little carried away and suggested she was a suspect-Little Girl in Big Trouble. Slapped a question mark on the end of the sucker and it led the paper. Turned out that the source really said Emmie couldn't be ruled out as a witness, despite her age. Wrong on both counts. Oh well. We ran a correction. Eventually."

Tess had thought she knew every permutation of newspaper fuck-up possible. "The Eagle printed a two-year-old was a suspect in a murder case?"

"She was there, she had blood on her." A. J.'s tone was mildly defensive. "At least, she did until the well-meaning social worker scrubbed her up at the station. Adios, el evidencio! I mean sure, they assumed the blood was from the victims, but the killer might have hurt himself, and his blood might have been on the baby. There were bloody fingerprints on her T-shirt, too-until the social worker threw that in the washing machine. It's a shame. Twenty-one years ago, you couldn't do shit with that, but if they even had a photograph of the print today, they might be able to blow it up, match it to every fingerprint on file nationwide. Yep, Espejo Verde was the most compromised murder scene of its time."

"Is it still around?"

"What?"

"Espejo Verde."

"The building is. Sterne Foods shuttered it, put a cyclone fence around it and it stands to this day on the river in Baja King William. The area is pretty hip now, and I'm sure a lot of people would like trying to run a restaurant there. But the Sternes won't sell."

"Could you tell me where it is?" Tess said. "I'd like to go see it."

"What's the point?"

"I don't know. Just morbid curiosity, I guess." And a hunch Emmie Sterne might be staying there. She had to be somewhere.

"C'mon, don't waste your time. Have another drink, order an entree."

"I'm not hungry."

"Then let me have another drink, and my chalupa, and we'll go."

"We'll?"

A. J. leaned over the table, his eyes in a squint so narrow they might as well be closed. "Look, stop fucking with me. There's a rumor going around town that Emmie Sterne is a big girl in big trouble these days. Unfortunately, the cops aren't talking. The DA's office also has a black-out on information. But something happened over the weekend. I know, because a cop got disciplined for making a bad mistake, and the union rep is just busting to tell me about it, how unfair it was, and what an asshole Al Guzman is, how he's going for this guy's balls to cover his own ass. Only he says he can't, until next week."

That time frame again. "I told you, it's no big deal, a bad debt, nothing more. After hearing all this, I'll probably tell my client to forget it."

"Then there's no problem if I want to accompany you on your little sight-seeing trip."

Tess was saved from answering by a brief commotion on one of the bridges spanning the narrow river. A man and a woman-tourist types, even Tess's inexperienced eyes had learned to pick them out here-were arguing heatedly. Drunkenly, too, judging by their liquid posture. The words were inaudible from this distance, but the body language spoke volumes. Arms windmilled, middle fingers saluted. Tess tensed up, ready to act if the man shoved or hit the woman. Her peculiar brand of sexism also dictated that she would never sit idly by when a man struck a woman.

The woman grabbed a fistful of the man's hair. He pushed her away, clambered onto the railing.

"I'd die for you, that's how much I love you," he screamed at the woman. "I'd fucking die for you."

And he jumped. The woman screamed, but everyone else seemed surprisingly blasé. It turned out the water was not even chest deep and the man bounced to the surface, stunned and sputtering. "Neeeeeeeeeeeil!" the woman screamed, and jumped in after him. They embraced in the water until a passing tourist boat fished them out. Just another beautiful love story.

"He's lucky we had some rain this fall," A. J. observed, helping himself to another chip, double-dipping yet again. "Otherwise, they'd both have broken their legs. Want another drink?"

"We already have a second round coming."

"I believe in planning ahead."

Espejo Verde. The Green Mirror. Tess had expected something fancier than this plain, dull green cinderblock building next to a muddy-brown river. Especially after seeing the other side of the King William neighborhood, which was full of restored Victorian mansions that almost lived up to A. J.'s rhapsodic descriptions. This area below Alamo Street-Baja King William, A. J. kept calling it-had some nice houses, too. In particular, she liked the purple one with the pink porch, which A. J. said had the local historical society up in arms. But Espejo Verde, even in its glory days, had been plain at best.

"What was the big attraction?" she asked.

"I always heard it was the food. Authentic Mexican, Mayan dishes like cochinita pibil. And Lollie Sterne. She was one of those people who made a party wherever she went. People liked to be around her."

Tess got out of A. J.'s car, an old Datsun that, in the tradition of reporters' cars everywhere, was a rolling garbage can. The restaurant's windows were literally shuttered, the patio ceiling had been culled of its fans-by scavengers who left behind ragged wires, little snakes hanging overhead. But there was no graffiti, and few other signs that anyone had dared to tamper here. It wasn't a place where one would trespass lightly. She imagined the neighborhood children, the stories they must tell each other about the ghosts that roam the grounds at Espejo Verde. Did they hold their breaths when they ran past, or was there some other delightful, shivery ritual to keep its evil spirits at bay?

The fence was padlocked, but Tess twisted the Master Lock and it came open in her hands. Someone had been here and closed the lock without pressing it down, so it only looked as if the chain was fastened.

"That's trespassing," A. J. said uneasily, as she opened the gate, which creaked in appropriate horror-movie fashion. But the sky was bright, the street was busy. What harm could really come to them here?

"I'm not a reporter, I don't have to follow the rules. Look-the door lock's rusted off."

After a moment of hesitation, A. J. pushed ahead of her into the old restaurant. The first things they saw were their own wavy images, reflected in a huge funhouse mirror, its surface cracked and speckled, its verdigris frame caked in dust. The Green Mirror, the restaurant's namesake. Beyond it, the room was musty and dark, with a strong smell of decay to it, but surely that was just her overactive imagination. Tess studied the empty space, trying to envision a two-year-old girl playing among three corpses until she was smeared with blood. She saw Guzman, a young patrolman when he had walked in here twenty-one years ago, and she almost felt some empathy for him. His face had probably been clean-shaven then, his stomach not so soft, his mouth not so sad. No one was ever tough enough to see something like that.

But the baby had been in her playpen, off the kitchen. How had she gotten there? Who would kill three people, only to hold a little girl in their bloodied arms, and put her to bed? What had Emmie seen, what might Emmie know? Was she on the run because she had killed someone, or because her tangled mind held the secrets to what had happened here? Recovered memory therapy was a fragile science, if a science at all. But Tess remembered things from when she was two. Okay, she remembered telling a dog to get out of their yard, but it was there, it had happened.

"She's not here," Tess said out loud. "The is the last place she would come."

"What are you talking about?" A. J. asked.

"Nothing."

He hadn't waited for answer, pushing through the old swinging door into the kitchen. He came back so fast that it was like watching a cartoon character getting caught in a revolving door, then spat out again.

"Don't," he said, holding up one hand to wave her away, while he held the other to his mouth, trying to swallow whatever had risen in his throat. Tess ignored him and tiptoed to the door, although she wasn't sure why she was worried about being overheard. She cracked it just enough to see the cowboy boots at the end of a long wooden table, the dark stain all around the body, an orange T-shirt with what appeared to be brownish splotches draped over a chair. There was something about the head, something odd-no, she wouldn't go any closer. She backed out of the room and went to sit on the floor next to A. J., who had lit a cigarette with fumbling hands, then appeared to have forgotten about it. It hung from his gaping mouth, his lips white, his face the same color as the margaritas he had been drinking.

"You never get used to seeing dead bodies," Tess said.

"I've seen plenty of dead bodies," he retorted, as if this were a point of pride. "I've seen guys on the table, in mid-autopsy. I saw a guy in a trash compactor once. But I've never seen a guy crawling with maggots, his head all but sawed off. And I've never stepped on a guy's fingers."

"His fingers?"

"All ten of them, arranged by the door so they were pointing toward the guy. As if you might not notice him otherwise."