In Big Trouble

Chapter 7

The front desk clerk at the Marriott in downtown San Antonio took one look at Tess, with her wrinkled T-shirt and unraveling braid, and announced he had nothing for her. Esskay's presence probably didn't help her cause, but the dog had howled so piteously when Tess tried to leave her in the car.

"No room at the inn. No room at any inn," he said, showing off his teeth in a ravishing smile. He was a handsome young Latino, a type Tess had always found attractive, perhaps because it was in such short supply in Baltimore. But this man's charm was perfunctory and impersonal, a wall with no footholds.

"There has to be a hotel room somewhere," she said. The highway into the city had been one long red blur of No Vacancy signs, so she had headed for downtown, assuming the larger, expensive hotels would be more likely to have rooms available. So far, she had been turned away at three of them.

"Sorry. La Posada came early this year."

" La Posada?"

" La Posada. The inn. Around here, it's the reenactment of the Mary and Joseph story. The kids go from hotel to hotel on the Riverwalk, getting turned away. At least they get hot chocolate at the last hotel. All I can give you is some candy." He pushed a dish of brightly wrapped sour balls and Hershey kisses across the counter.

Tess sighed and, hating herself for it, called on those powers granted every reasonably attractive woman between the ages of thirteen and death. Her eyes widened, her voice sweetened, the coffee cup on her Cafe Hon T-shirt expanded just a little bit. "Are you sure there's nothing you can do for me?"

"Oh, there's a lot I could do for you," he said amiably, without a flicker of interest. "I just couldn't find a hotel room to do it in."

Aware that it would be hypocritical to be insulted-she had put the ball into play, after all-Tess rested her upper body on the counter and tried not to whimper audibly. The long day, with its singular events, was beginning to take its toll. All she wanted was a place to sleep for a little while. A place with room service, where she could shower and put on CNN at full volume, hoping it would drown out the night's sounds and the day's images.

"What's the deal, anyway?" she asked. She had been shooting for plaintive, but ended up whiny. "Why are all the hotels full?"

The clerk thawed a little then, as if he had been merely waiting for her to drop the bullying and bullshit. "There's a medical convention in town and then the All Soul Festival starts up mid-week. You won't find a room anywhere downtown. Especially not with that," he said, jerking his chin at Esskay. The dog reared up on her hind legs and propped herself on the front desk next to Tess, as if she were going to demand to speak to a manager. Instead she helped herself to a hard candy from the dish.

"She'll never be able to eat that," the attendant said. But he must have liked dogs better than humans. He stroked the dog's snout and scratched behind her ears, crooning something in Spanish.

"She eats charcoal briquets, too," Tess said. "Look, isn't there anywhere I can find a room? It doesn't have to be downtown. All I need is a place with a phone and a bed, something clean and safe."

Esskay coughed up a gnawed piece of red candy. Cinammon, Tess guessed. She didn't like spicy things.

"How loose are your standards on cleanliness and safety?" the attendant asked, as he looked for something to wipe up the pinkish drool on his counter. "I know a place maybe fifteen minutes from here, on Broadway next to the park. Look, I'll even call ahead for you, make sure they hold something."

"Great," Tess said. "What's it called?"

" La Casita. Ask for the daily rate. It's a better deal."

"As opposed to the weekly?"

He stifled a laugh. "As opposed to the hourly."

Mornings were quiet at La Casita, in marked contrast to the nights. Tess woke to the sound of a local news program, coming in on the television's only working channel. The television was bolted to the stand, just in case anyone developed a hankering for a 15-year-old Samsung sans remote.

Tess rolled out of bed and put on fresh clothes, taking a perverse pleasure in the spareness of her surroundings. Her clothes, her toothbrush, her copy of Don Quixote. It was Friday, she realized as she pulled on that day's allotment of underwear. She'd have to buy some Woolite, or drop in at a laundromat soon.

For a hooker motel, La Casita was nice enough, a Southwestern version of the Route 40 motor court that Tess had camped outside not even two weeks ago. Funny, it seemed like months had passed since that day, although in the wrong direction. When she cracked open the door of room number 103, the warm Texas autumn was so much like summer that she felt as if she had gone backward in time.

"Is it safe to walk around here?" she asked the elderly Vietnamese woman who sat in the front office, behind a Plexiglas shield with a pass-through for keys and money.

"Very safe, very safe," Mrs. Nguyen said. "Even in the park, very safe. Chris Marrou on Channel 5 said. You can walk to the river from here, walk to zoo, ride in the little cars on the wires, the ones above the trees."

"Sounds good."

Mrs. Nguyen shook her finger at her through the bullet-proof glass. "But don't talk to strangers, bad boys who ask you to go for ride, drink beer. They not good. Not good. They do things to girls who go with them. Chris Marrou said."

Although Tess didn't know this local oracle, Mrs. Nguyen's warning made her feel cozy and cared for. She headed up Broadway, in order to get her bearings before trying the park. The neighborhood around La Casita wasn't seedy, but it had a jumbled look to it, as if it wasn't quite sure what it was, or what it wanted to be. There were inexpensive ethnic restaurants, the familiar fast-food chains, some upscale antiques stores, a secondhand book store, and the clothing store opened by Selena, the young Mexican-American singer killed by her own fan club president a few years back. Maybe Tess would go back to Baltimore with a sequined halter.

Within a few blocks, she came to a large museum set back from the street. The Witte Natural History Museum, according to its sign. She and Esskay walked around this and found themselves in a shadowy lane parallel to Broadway, on the park's edge. The zoo must be nearby-she had been able to hear a lion's roar last night. At least, she hoped it was a lion. Where was the river, though? If it were like Austin's Town Lake, maybe she could rent a scull somewhere. She missed rowing, her day felt unfinished without it.

But the San Antonio River proved to be a narrow, sluggish channel, smaller and shallower than the streams back home. "I thought everything was supposed to be bigger in Texas," she scoffed to Esskay. She'd be running and jumping rope for exercise as long as she was in San Antonio. She scouted a route and found a long, steep hill that ran above an amphitheater and past a Japanese-style garden.

Funny-she was worrying about running for exercise, when she should be worried about the fact that she was on the run. She would have to call Kitty, or Kitty's machine, and leave a detailed message about what to say if a certain sheriff called. Keith would play his part perfectly, for he truly believed she was heading back to Baltimore.

At the foot of the park, on a street called Mulberry, she stopped at a convenience store and bought breakfast-a large cup of coffee, a pint of orange juice, and a bag of Fig Newtons-and some dry dog food, dog treats, and a spiral-bound map book. It occurred to her she had gone almost five days without a bagel, and this single fact made her feel truly dislocated.

Back in the gloom of La Casita, she and Esskay stretched across the synthetic flowery spread and nibbled on Fig Newtons together as Tess paged through the phone book, which was thicker than she had expected. Even so, she found what she was looking for easily enough. Marianna Barrett Conyers lived on a street named for a sock, Argyle. There was no husband's name twinned with hers, and no coy initials to disguise the fact of a woman alone. Tess liked that in a woman, but only because it made a private investigator's job easier. She wouldn't have her own home number in the phone book for anything. Like most people who made their livings invading the privacy of others, she had become intensely protective of her own.

"Don't people know how easy it is to find them?" she asked Esskay. The dog appeared to think about this for a moment, then nudged Tess with her nose, demanding another cookie. Tess gave her a liver treat instead.

"Most people," Tess amended. "Everybody but the one person we want to find."

As it happened, Marianna Barrett Conyers wasn't quite that easy to find. According to the map, her house sat somewhere among a curving grid of streets in a place known as Alamo Heights, but Tess kept ending up on a long, narrow road below a flood plain, which took her away from the neighborhood and into another, similar-looking one on the wrong side of the highway. Finally, after she had crossed back for the third time, she found the right house.

It looked shy, if a house could be called that. The stucco exterior had been painted a soft olive green, the trim just one shade darker, allowing the house to disappear into the trees and plantings around it. Don't notice me, the house murmured. Drive on by, leave me alone.

A maid in a gray uniform answered the door, a tiny Mexican-American woman brandishing a broom. She looked at Tess as if she were a piece of dirt she wanted to sweep away as quickly as possible.

"You want to see Mrs. Conyers? What for? Who are you? She know you? I didn't think so. What do you want?"

Although the maid barely came up to her collarbone, Tess found herself taking a step back, out of arm's length, if not broom's length. "It's about what happened up at her country place," she said when the maid finally ran out of breath. She assumed Sheriff Kolarik had been in touch by now, that she need not go into too much gory detail.

"They've been here. She knows. It's got nothing to do with her. Goodbye. We don't want any." The maid started to close the door on her, as Tess braced it with her foot. She didn't want to come on too strong, but she wasn't leaving without making her best effort.

"There are still things that have to be…discussed." Tess was trying to imply an official role without claiming one. "I was the one who found the body, you know."

"Really?" The maid was intrigued, but only for a moment. "So what?"

A voice called out from somewhere within the house. "Oh, let her in, Dolores. I guess I can stand two callers in one day."

Reluctantly the maid opened the door so Tess could pass, watching her to make sure she wiped her feet. Tess had thought she looked neat and professional, in her narrow, ankle-length skirt of blue plaid and a simple white T-shirt. She had even borrowed an iron from Mrs. Nguyen and gone to the trouble of putting her hair up. Dolores's sour gaze made her feel grubby and mussed.

Although the pale peach walls of the foyer were unadorned, the small study to which Tess was escorted looked as if a particularly ghoulish souvenir shop had exploded among the plain furnishings. Tess couldn't understand why anyone as wealthy as Marianna Barrett Conyers appeared to be would fill her home with such tacky, morbid things. One item might have suggested a certain camp sensibility, but this was true overkill, a virtual gallery devoted to death and rot.

A life-sized skeleton in 1890s garb walked a skeleton dog, grinning mouth clamped on a cigar, a corseted lady friend at his side. Other skeletons gazed from old woodcuts, while the built-in bookshelves held even more of their bony kin. There was a skeleton Mexican mariachi band, a skeleton bride and groom, a skeleton typing maniacally at a desk, her fluff of cotton ball hair standing on end, her head bouncing on a coiled spring of a neck.

Yet the skeletons proved to be the least ominous offerings here. A bright sun leered from the wall, a gaudy ceramic cathedral rose in the corner. But the most hideous piece by far was a flat-chested mermaid, wings sprouting from her bony shoulder blades, face frozen in a Munch-like scream. Just having this thing was in her house would give her nightmares, Tess thought.

"Do you like her, my little la sirena?" asked the woman sitting in a wing chair near the window.

Tess's high school Spanish was no help, but the context was obvious. La sirena, the siren. "Well, she's literally neither fish nor fowl, isn't she?" Tess took a seat on carved pine chair. The furniture, at least, was normal. "Interesting. All your things are…so interesting."

"Yes, I've been collecting for years." It was hard to see the woman's face, for the trees around the house kept the room dark. She had a glass of ice water at her side and a book in her lap, but Tess didn't see how she could read a single word in such deep shadows.

"I'm Marianna Barrett Conyers," the woman added, as if Tess might not know whose doorbell she had rung.

"I'm Tess Monaghan. I found the body, up at your country place yesterday."

"Yes."

Yes, what? Yes, you're Tess? Yes, you found a body? Yes, I have a country place?

"I told the deputies that I had gotten lost. That's not exactly what happened."

"Yes." A little less emphatic this time, more of a question.

"I was looking for someone. Someone who's been staying at your house."

She merely nodded at this piece of information and took a long sip from her water glass. Marianna Barrett Conyers was probably in her late forties, not much older than Kitty, but she seemed to cultivate the dress and aspect of an older woman. In Tess's admittedly limited experience, upper-class women knew how to be young and they knew how to be old, but few settled comfortably in their middle years. They either clung to a kittenish, jejeune look, with a little help from a friendly plastic surgeon, or they chose to mummify themselves prematurely. Mrs. Conyers's hair was set in stiff, careful waves, and her makeup was expertly thorough. Not just a little lipstick and mascara, but the whole deal, from foundation to eyebrow pencil. For all that, she was a woman better described as handsome rather than pretty, with blunt features that looked like a hasty first draft for a face.

"You were looking for someone," she repeated, as if thinking about this. "But you didn't tell the sheriff that."

"No."

"Why not?"

Tess needed only a second to come up with a plausible lie, but she had a feeling Marianna noticed that second. "My relationships with my clients are privileged."

"You're a lawyer, then?"

"No, but I work for one."

"A private investigator."

"Yes."

"Not from here."

"No."

"This reminds me of a game," said Marianna, closing her book and resting her chin on her palm. "Twenty questions. How many do I have left?"

"How about if we take turns and I ask a few? Did you have anyone staying at your house this summer?"

"Obviously I had at least one guest, the gentleman who was staying in the pool house." She smiled, pleased with herself.

"Did you have any invited guests?"

"Not precisely."

"Imprecisely."

Whatever delight Marianna had found in this conversation had disappeared as it quickly as it had arrived. She was bored now, uninterested.

"My goddaughter has a key, she's allowed to come and go as she pleases. Someone might as well get some use out of the place. I haven't been up there for years, and I don't have any children of my own."

"Is your goddaughter a young blond woman named Emmie, who sometimes goes by the name of Dutch?" Tess decided to leave out the other details, the contradictory descriptions of china dolls, psycho bitches, and anorexic waifs.

"Dutch." Marianna smiled. "She hasn't used that name for years."

"She was using it up in Austin."

"Oh, yes, her music thing. Her real name is Emily Sterne. Emmie to the family. Why are you looking for her? Did…did something happen in Austin?"

"I'm not looking for her. I've never met her." Tess pulled out the photograph of Crow, the more recent one, the cutout with the words "In Big Trouble" above his head. "This is the man I want to find. He was in Twin Sisters with her, last I heard."

Marianna barely glanced at the photo. "And you're looking for him because of this-because it says he's ‘in big trouble.'"

"Partly, yes. His parents haven't heard from him for more than a month, and they're worried."

"Parents always worry."

"I thought you said you didn't have children."

"No, but I had parents, didn't I? Did you think I came out of an egg?" Tess had touched some nerve. "Even Athena had parents, despite coming out of her father's head fully formed. It was Aphrodite, the goddess of love, who appeared out of the ocean with no explanation. She was the one to be feared, if you ask me. No, I had parents, and I caused them plenty of worry in their time. Yet here I am, a middle-aged woman, my life so safe and boring that it must be beyond their wildest dreams. They live in one of those senior residences. ‘Assisted living.' Wonderful term. As if the rest of us can muddle through without assistance."

Tess tried to pull the conversation back on track. "This young man-his parents aren't overly protective. But he's never gone so long before without being in touch."

"I wish I had listened to my parents," Marianna muttered, reaching into a thick pile of newspapers in a leather-and-wood rack by her chair. She sorted through them, stopping to search what appeared to be a tabloid entertainment section, the kind that almost every newspaper publishes for the weekend. Tess noticed that the cover on one mentioned the All Soul celebration, the thing that the Marriott clerk had blamed for filling all the hotels. But Marianna rejected that one and kept going, almost to the bottom of the pile before she found what she wanted.

"Context is everything, don't you think? Miss-what was your name again, dear?"

"Tess Monaghan."

"Where are you from, anyway? I can't place your accent."

Tess hadn't known she had an accent. She definitely didn't have the drawn-out O's and misplaced R's of a typical Baltimorean. Then again, Marianna didn't have the Texas drawl she had expected. So far, no one here had sounded like what Tess thought a real Texan might.

"I'm from Baltimore."

"I could tell you weren't from the Southwest before you said a thing, by the way you reacted to my friends." She gestured to all the grinning skeletons. "You don't really like them, that's apparent. Not even my little mermaid."

Tess tried not to wince at the gruesome merwoman. "She's not so bad."

"Context is everything," Marianna repeated. "You see my art and it makes you think of Halloween and other morbid things, but it's really all quite whimsical and sweet if you understand the Mexican traditions. Hopeful, even."

If you say so. But Tess just nodded politely.

"You see a photograph that says your friend is ‘in big trouble' and you assume he must be."

Marianna was still flipping through the pages of the newspaper section. Finally she stopped, holding out her hand. Tess understood she wanted the photograph of Crow. Marianna took it and placed it down over the page in front of her, and turned it so Tess could see. Then she pulled the card away, and all was revealed.

It was as if the clipping she had been carrying was part of a jigsaw puzzle. For Crow now stood with three others, in what was obviously a publicity shot for a band. And "In Big Trouble" was part of a headline: LITTLE GIRL IN BIG TROUBLE AT PRIMO'S TONIGHT. To Crow's right stood a blond woman with big eyes and a short bob. Her various personalities could not be discerned, but she was extraordinarily pretty. Beautiful, even.

"That's Emmie, of course."

"Of course." Tess placed an index finger on the young woman's likeness, as if that might tell her more about who she was, or where she was. "Did they call her Dutch because she looks like the boy on the Sherwin-Williams paint can?"

"The paint can?" Marianna laughed. It was a short, not particularly infectious laugh, the laugh of a woman who rationed amusement to herself. "Oh no, the nickname isn't about being Dutch. The Sternes are German. Their family goes almost as far back as mine in San Antonio. The family cook, Pilar, called her Duchess when she was a baby, because she acted so imperious, and we shortened it to Dutch. I remember, she wasn't quite two, and she was so bossy, she tried to tell every-what to do. Pilar finally said, ‘You'll be a duchess soon enough, for now you will listen to me.'"

She kept laughing, as if this were the funniest thing in the world. Tess felt the laugh went on a little too long and that it was a little too loud. It felt forced, artificial, like a middle-school girl on a giggling jag.

"I don't get it," Tess said. "Why would she be a duchess?"

"See, you need more context. San Antonio has a celebration, Fiesta, each spring, and girls are named to a court called the Order of the Alamo. There's a queen, a princess and all the rest are duchesses. Lollie and I were duchesses together almost thirty years ago. As it turned out Emmie was a princess-the Court of Dramatic Illusions, or Arabian Dreams. Something about dreams, I'm almost positive. Her dress will go to the Witte Museum."

Except for knowing what the Witte was, Tess was thoroughly lost. The Court of Dramatic Illusions, duchesses, princesses?

"Lollie?"

"Emmie's mother. She spoiled her so. Everyone did. First Lollie, then her cousin Gus, who raised Emmie after Lollie died. Pilar was the only one in the family who ever stood up to that little girl."

"How did Emmie's mother die?"

She hadn't meant for the question to sound cold and rude, but apparently it came off that way.

"In an accident," Marianna said stiffly. "A car accident. She hasn't had a happy life, Emmie. Both her parents were dead before she was three and she never even knew her father. Lollie ran off with him at the end of her junior year in college and came back to San Antonio six weeks later, the marriage annulled, Emmie on the way. He was from El Paso, from a good family, but he was a careless man. Died in a hunting accident." Marianna frowned. "I never figured him for Lollie, not even in a momentary lapse. He was rather crude, really. Reckless. My latest mistake, she called him. That's what she called all her boyfriends. My latest mistake."

"How old is she now?"

"Emmie?" Marianna had been lost in her own thoughts, and needed a second to count up. "Twenty-three. She came into her trust fund five years ago. Gus wanted her to go to college, of course, but she wouldn't hear of it. She wants to be a singer. She is talented. A major record company tried to sign her when she was seventeen. Gus wouldn't give his consent. Perhaps that was the beginning of the end for them-they had a falling-out when she was eighteen and refused to go to college. But she seems happy. She bounces back and forth between Austin and San Antonio, changing bands and styles almost every month, it seems to me. She's very committed to her work, but she doesn't particularly care about commercial success."

It's not hard to keep your artistic integrity when you have an inheritance, Tess thought. "So now she's in a band with Crow?"

"Crow? Oh, your friend. Apparently so. You saw the photo. Although she changes band mates and band names almost as often as she changes clothes. Little Girl in Big Trouble was last month's incarnation. Who knows what she is today?"

"Did you know she and Crow were using your place this summer?"

"No. As I said, she's free to come and go as she pleases."

"Did you tell the sheriff that she had a key, that she might have been there?"

"Why should I?"

"Because a man was found murdered on your property."

"A man murdered somewhere else, according to the sheriff," Marianna pointed out. "Just another coincidence, Miss Monaghan, another situation requiring context. You think the two things are related because they're connected in your mind. You're like the old fable about the seven blind men, each trying to describe an elephant from feeling one part of it."

Tess took the newspaper from Marianna's hands.

"Is Little Girl in Big Trouble playing somewhere tonight?"

"I wouldn't know. I kept that because of Emmie's photo, but the paper is a month old, as you can see. I don't recall seeing a listing for them in today's paper, though." She frowned, gave a convulsive little shudder. "I hate that name. I hope she has changed it by now."

"What's wrong with Little Girl in Big Trouble?"

"She took it from a headline in the paper, an old one from when the local press was more, well, colorful. She thought it was funny. I think it's bad luck to make fun of people's pain."

A strange superstition for someone who sat in a room full of skeletons. "About Dutch-Emmie-and Crow. They're in this band together, but are they, well, together-together?"

"Are you asking me if they're romantically linked? I don't know. I'm not Emmie's confidante in these matters. No one is. She's always been very private."

"But what do you think?"

"What do I think about what?" Marianna's smile was borderline cruel and Tess felt like a mouse being batted back and forth between a cat's paws. It was as if the woman was forcing her to say the words, to face the reality she was just beginning to realize she so dreaded.

"Are they in love?"

"I hope so," Marianna said, her voice strangely fervent. "I truly hope so."