In Big Trouble Read online

"I'll still call." Crow sighed, and his shoulders slumped a little. "I'll call and give them my number, and we'll take it from there. But I can't take their money anymore, Tess. And they can't not send it. That's their peculiar weakness. They love me too much to let go. I've had the longest adolescence in history. It's gotta end."

  Tess thought back to the house in Charlottesville, the carefully preserved boyhood room. From the beginning, from his very conception, Crow had been central to his parents' lives. Perhaps he had been too central? Tess began to see some advantages to having parents who converted your room to a sewing room the moment you left home.

  "I have to tell your parents I found you," she said slowly, thinking as she spoke, trying to figure out a way to make everyone happy. "They paid for that information, they deserve it."

  "Okay," he said, throwing his hands up dismissively. "Okay. Guess I was crazy to think you wouldn't let me down. Again."

  "They also deserve a son who's more considerate of them, but I can't help them with that."

  "You do what you have to do."

  "I always do."

  "You always did," he agreed. "You know your way out of here? San Antonio's a little tricky to navigate. When you headed?"

  "On Broadway, near the zoo."

  Crow made a face. "That's not so far from us. What are you doing, living on the cheap so you can pocket more of your per diem? I knew it didn't ring true when you started getting all holier-than-thou about wasting my parents' money."

  That hurt, if only because it came so close to the truth of the person she had once been. I'm not that cheap anymore, she wanted to tell Crow. I make good money now.

  But all she said was: "It was the only place I could find last night"

  "It's easy enough to get to from here. Just go up Broadway."

  "I know that"

  "Tess—"

  She waited. It occurred to her it was only the second time he had used her name.

  "I love my parents, I never meant to hurt them. Please make them understand that. I hope—I hope they're going to be proud of me, that they'll understand why I needed this time to be on my own."

  On your own, with Emmie. But she merely nodded.

  Her stomach reminded her that she had not eaten anything since late afternoon, when she had polished off the rest of the Fig Newtons. She stopped at an all-night taco stand on Broadway, a bright pink one, only to be overwhelmed by the unfamiliar choices. Baltimore had not prepared her for the range of possibilities in tacos. What was carne guisada? Carne asada? Barbacoa would be barbecue, of course, but the sign said this was served on Sundays only. She settled for a fajita, feeling wimpy and defeated for settling for something she could have gotten back home.

  Even so, it was so much better than anything she had ever eaten in Baltimore that she ordered two more. Charm City's inability to serve a decent taco remained one of its eternal mysteries. However, the Mexican beer, a Bohemia, was an old friend. Dark and flavorful, it smoothed the jagged feelings that seeing Crow had aroused.

  What had she expected? What had she wanted? For him to fall into her arms and declare his undying love for her? For her to ride to his rescue, extricate him from whatever mess he gotten himself into, and thus settle the old debts between them? She wasn't sure. Something between the two. But Crow was fine, caught up in nothing more than the inevitable rebellion against one's parents, even if he had come to it much later than most. The pictures in his parents' home may have suggested unfinished business between the two of them, but that was five months ago. Some fruit flies lived longer than Crow's passions.

  She looked down at the beef that had fallen from her tacos, and the image of the man in the pool house boo-meranged into her consciousness. How quickly Tom Darden had been dismissed by Emmie and Crow, how incurious they had been. She believed Crow's mystification, believed him when he said he knew nothing about the man, or how he had come to be there.

  Emmie—Emmie was another matter. In Emmie's case, it wasn't clear if it was the body that had caught her off guard, or the body's location "at Marianna's place?" she had asked, her voice scaling up.

  And neither one had bothered to ask whose body it was.

  Chapter 10

  A telegram—now there was a concept. In a world of cell phones, e-mail, faxes, and beepers, Tess knew Western Union existed only because it advertised its money-wiring service on television. But did it still do telegrams? She couldn't even find a Western Union in the telephone book, just a list of "offices" at the local grocery chain, HEB.

  The closest one was only a mile up Broadway, but it seemed more like a food amusement park than a grocery store. In fact, groceries seemed an afterthought here, what with chefs whipping up pasta dishes on demand, a full menu of cooking classes, a walk-in-humidor, and a wine section that needed two aisles just for South America. Tess scuffed her feet on the rough floors—painted, a helpful clerk told her, to create the feeling of an old European market—filled with an intense and sudden hunger for things she had never heard of. She was enraptured, she was repulsed, she wanted to get a little cot and set up housekeeping, preferably near the flowers. Baltimore's upscale grocery stores—Eddie's and Graul's and Sutton Place Gourmet—were pathetic compared to this temple of food. She couldn't decide if the grandeur was driven by the Texas phenomenon of big-bigger-biggest, or whether it was the inevitable overcompensatory impulse of a founder who had been born with the moniker of Henry E. Butt.

  Eventually, she shook off the store's decadent spell and asked someone where she could send a telegram.

  "It's cheaper to call," the girl at the front counter said, examining her nails. She had on a new kind of polish that could be peeled off, and she was slowly liberating her synthetic talons from a coat of celery green. "I mean, you can buy a long distance card at the ice house. I got one there last week. It had a picture of David Robinson on it."

  "No, it has to be a telegram," Tess said. No one could talk back to a telegram, ask it questions, or track its number through Caller ID.

  "It's like my first week," the clerk said. "I don't know how to do everything."

  "I'm patient," Tess lied.

  The clerk sighed dramatically and rustled around until she found the form she needed.

  Tess began to dictate: "Crow found—stop. Will call soon—stop."

  "Why do you keep telling me to stop?" the girl asked fretfully. Then, as an afterthought: "You're sending a telegram because you found a crow? Don't they have those where you came from?"

  "You say stop to indicate the end of a thought," Tess said, although everything she knew about telegrams she had learned from old movies. "It's like a period."

  "Are you sure?"

  Eventually, they collaborated on a mutually acceptable document to Charlottesville, Virginia. It read, in its entirety: Crow fine. In Big Trouble name of new band. Will call in one week. Staying here till then. The last line had been a last-minute inspiration, and Tess wasn't sure where it came from, or even if it was true. But seven days seemed little to spare to make sure that Crow wasn't going to use the time he had requested to run again. Besides, she wanted to see where the local authorities were going with the investigation into the death of her Hill Country pal.

  "Where's the library?" she asked the girl.

  "Enchilada Roja, you mean?"

  Now that was Tess's kind of Spanish. "You call your library the red enchilada?"

  "Yeah, and it didn't get its name for nothing. It sticks out on the skyline north of downtown, like a sore thumb. Or a big red enchilada, I guess. You can't miss it." She smiled for the first time. "They got computers there. You could zap your friends an e-mail, if you have an AOL account."

  "Just send the telegram, okay?"

  Enchilada Roja was easy to spot on the horizon, but it seemed to keep shifting as Tess drove toward it. She took several turns through a warren of one-way streets before she found her way into the pay parking lot outside the gleaming new library. Outside and in, it was the antithesis of her beloved Eno
ch Pratt—gorgeous appointments, state of the art computers, even a room dedicated to genealogical research. The only thing in short supply was books. The shelves yawned with empty spaces.

  "Do you keep a lot of your collection in the stacks?" Tess asked the librarian who showed her where to find the local newspapers.

  "What you see is what you get," the young man said. He had a long silky ponytail and Bambi eyes. Tess noticed the periodical section seemed unusually crowded, with a large number of high school girls peering at the librarian over the tops of Teen People, but her guide seemed oblivious to his fan club. "I guess they thought if they built the building, the books would take care of themselves."

  At least civic thinking was the same everywhere. Float the bonds for the construction projects and hope everything else took care of itself. Tess settled down with a stack of local newspapers, looking for any mention of the body in Marianna Barrett Conyers's pool house.

  The Blanco paper was a weekly, so its cycle had yet to catch up with the story. The New Braunfels paper reported the discovery on page one, but its focus was on public safety. A killer, believed to be dangerous, was still at large, the paper warned its citizens. As opposed to non-dangerous killers?

  The San Antonio Eagle's front page was full of pie-in-the-sky dreams for a new basketball arena which would transform the city's northeast side into a land of milk and money. Close your eyes and you're in Baltimore, Toto. Tess had to search the skimpy local section for a short item, which said only that a body had been found on the property of Marianna Barrett Conyers of Alamo Heights. It was noted the apparent victim, ex-felon Tom Darden, also had made his home in San Antonio, before he was sent away on a kidnapping charge twenty years ago, along with Laylan Weeks. The sheriff had mentioned Weeks, too, Tess recalled. "The infamous Danny Boyd case," the paper called their crime, but the reporter didn't bother to explain the infamy for those who hadn't been around twenty years ago. In fact, the article's emphasis seemed to be on the terrible inconvenience of having a corpse in one's pool house, especially a body as undesirable as Darden's. He had been found, the nonbylined piece added almost as an afterthought, by a drifter.

  "A drifter!" Although Tess spoke aloud, in a rather emphatic tone, no one shushed her. Perhaps this was because no one could really hear her in the happy Saturday morning bustle. The teenage girls were whispering and giggling, while small children trotted in circles, shouting for their parents. Adolescent boys hunkered in front of the computers, playing games, probably trying to figure out how to bypass the cyber blocks and download porn. Who needed Chuck E. Cheese when there were libraries around?

  Before she left Enchilada Roja, Tess used the computer's Netscape browser to glide home to the Baltimore Beacon-Light's Web page. She had never thought she would miss the Blight. The Eagle was a little gaudy for her tastes, although she recalled Marianna had said something about its tabloid days, suggesting it had once been more sensational still. The Blight's Web site was a mess, done on the cheap, but it was a joy to read about meetings and crimes set in places she could visualize, in a typeface she knew. A robbery on Lombard Street, a homicide on Lanvale, a fire on Waltherson. It all combined to make her homesick.

  She stopped at a laundromat, then, against all odds, found her way back to Broadway and La Casita, her home away from home. Someone was sitting on the curb in front of her room, arms hugging her body as if she were cold on this sunny, breeze-less day. Tess couldn't see the face, but the hair was butter yellow in the sun and cut in a Dutch-boy bob.

  "Hey," Emmie said.

  "Brace yourself," Tess said, stepping around her with her duffel bag of clothes and unlocking the door. "I'm going to release the hound."

  Esskay came bounding out of the motel room, greeted Tess as if they had been separated for days, then began inspecting the stranger on the curb. Emmie hunched her shoulders, as if frightened of dogs, but held her ground.

  "I thought you might have left by now," she said.

  Thought or hoped?

  "I could," Tess said. "I've done what I was hired to do."

  "What was that, exactly?"

  "Find Crow."

  "Oh." She appeared to be thinking about something, but her expression was inscrutable. "We're not together."

  "Pardon me?"

  "Ed and I. We're not together. We were—at first, up in Austin—but now we're not."

  Tess held up her hand, traffic cop style. "None of my business."

  Emmie was still sitting on the curb, hugging her knees to her chest, scratching her shins. She had drawn blood, Tess noticed, but she kept scratching, oblivious. There was scabs on her calves and pale, thin scars that would probably never quite fade.

  "He keeps up with you, you know," Emmie said, after scratching a while longer. Esskay, usually so friendly, was keeping her distance from this visitor, as if even she could smell the craziness on her.

  "What?"

  "He has a file, of newspaper clippings. There aren't that many, maybe three or four."

  "I haven't done much to write about."

  "No, I guess you haven't." Emmie didn't sound rude, merely factual, the way children do before grown-ups school them in the art of the polite lie. "Have you ever killed someone?"

  "What?" Tess felt as if she was saying this a lot.

  "I mean, you've been in some real strange situations, but I don't recall if you ever killed someone. Have you?"

  "No. I've seen someone die. I've seen dead people. But I haven't killed anyone."

  "Hmmm." Emmie frowned. "And you can remember it, I suppose, all the gory details. All the blood. Assuming there was blood. Would you like to go to lunch?"

  "Excuse me?" Tess had thought she was bad about jumping from topic to topic, but Emmie's synapses were misfiring like the cheap caps that kids play with on the sidewalk.

  "Lunch. Aren't you hungry? Ed said you could eat a lot. You know what? I'm going to start calling him Crow. It suits him."

  "Does Crow talk about me often?"

  Emmie gave this serious consideration. "Not so very often. Sometimes. When it's so late that it's early, and we've played really well, so we're all drained, and he's had a couple drinks maybe, and we go to Earl Abel's for pie, and the sun is just coming up—his memories come up, too. Is it true you ate the same thing for breakfast every day?"

  "Well, not every day."

  "Do you think that means you're naturally monogamous?"

  "What?"

  Emmie held her fingers to her mouth, as if to taste the blood rimmed beneath her fingernails. "I would think someone who could eat the same thing for breakfast every day would be pretty dependable. Then again, maybe that's the kind of person who just loses it, you know. Goes postal, burns down the house, hits the road because she suddenly realizes she can't face another bowl of Frosted Flakes. So, do you want to go to lunch or what?"

  "Why not?" At least it was a question she understood.

  Tess wasn't sure where she had expected Emmie to take her to eat, but this lunch counter at the old-fashioned drugstore, the Olmos Pharmacy, was a pleasant surprise.

  "Get a milkshake," Emmie instructed her. "They're the best in the world."

  "My grandfather made the best shakes in the world, at his lunch counter." But Tess added a shake to her order of grilled cheese and bacon. She had never seen a milkshake served this way: The counter woman set small plastic tumblers of whipped cream in front of them, then left behind the sweating metal container from the old-fashioned Hamilton mixer. Emmie poured the thick concoction over the whipped cream, stirred, then dug into hers with a spoon. Although it was possible to coax the thick liquid up a straw, it wasn't very easy. A spoon was definitely the way to go.

  "This was my high school hang-out," Emmie said. "The local malt shop. Isn't that sweet?"

  "You make it sound as if that were forty years ago."

  She nodded dreamily, licking her spoon. "It feels that way. We lived in Olmos Park, on Hermosa. Handsome street. Now here's a riddle—Can ugly things happen
on a street called handsome?"

  Emmie's crazy act was beginning to seem just that, an act. "I think I drove through there. I kept ending up in Olmos Park when I was trying to find your godmother in Alamo Heights."

  "San Antonio is tricky that way."

  It sounded like a warning, but Emmie's face was all innocence as she dipped her spoon in and out of her malt. She was not what Tess expected. She couldn't say what she was exactly, just that she wasn't what Tess had expected.

  "Why are we here?" Tess asked her.

  "That's a pretty big question, isn't it? One of the biggies. Why are we here? The thing is, we are here, right, and we just have to make the best of it, until we're not."

  "No, why are we having lunch? Why did you come find me today? How did you find me, for that matter?"

  "You told Crow you were staying at La Casita. Crow tells me everything."

  "Everything?"

  "Everything I want to know. I asked him this morning if he knew where you were."

  "Why?"

  "I told you. I wanted to tell you there's nothing between us. Between Crow and me."

  "Okay, I know. So what?"

  "Sew buttons," Emmie said, blowing into the straw in her water glass, making bubbles like a little kid.

  "Emmie, do you know a man named Tom Darden, or Laylan Weeks?"

  Tess had deliberately omitted any context with the names, but Emmie's face was a careful blank. "No. Who are they?"

  "Darden is the man I found at Marianna's place. Weeks is the person they think he was with before he died. They're from here, but they've been in prison for a pretty long time."

  Emmie put on a pretty pout of concentration, as if thinking hard. "Did they go to Alamo Heights High School?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Then I guess I don't know them."

  "Do you know what brought me here?"

  "Now that's another one of those big questions, isn't it?"

  Tess pulled the clipping of Crow from her datebook. "I know now this was cut out of an old newspaper ad, and the headline is nothing more than a fragment of the band's old name. But it doesn't mean he isn't in big trouble. He sent me this for a reason."