In Big Trouble Page 15

  Guzman was still talking to her, she'd better listen.

  "So you see, when Tom Darden turns up dead on a ranch where Emmie Sterne has been known to go, and a gun from that ranch ends up under your friend's bed in the house he shares with her—well, a person has to make some connections, don't you think?"

  "Only if Emmie knew about Darden and Weeks." Her response had been automatic, but something twitched in Guzman's face, and she knew she had found a weak spot. So she pressed. "She doesn't, does she? The family doesn't know about this lead you developed. You probably sat on it, waiting, hoping to surprise them with an arrest."

  "I'm not telling you everything we know," Guzman said sullenly.

  "And I don't know anything. It's Emmie Sterne you need. Not me, and not Crow."

  "Good idea. Do you happen to know where we can find her? There are only two roads into that neighborhood, and I've had a cop stationed at each one all night, waiting for the two roomies to come home. You swam into our net eventually. But she never came home."

  Breakfast at the Alamo, Tess thought, but she didn't volunteer the information. At this point, she wasn't sure if finding Emmie would help or hurt Crow.

  Guzman was still waiting for her answer, allowing another silence to fill the room, when the policeman who had been watching the door poked his head in and motioned to the detective. The two left the room together, shutting the door behind them. Tess couldn't make out the words, but she heard Guzman's voice getting louder and angrier. The door opened again, and his kind face had been transformed into a furious one.

  "You can go," he said curtly.

  "Go where?" Her car was at Crow's duplex, which she wasn't sure she could find again. She knew the place was close to La Casita, somewhere in the folds of the park, but she didn't remember much from the trip, except the feel of Crow's hands on her body, his mouth on her neck.

  "An officer will take you to your car."

  "No, we'll take her, Detective." Rick Trejo was leaning against the door jamb. He wore the preppy clothes and cowboy boots of the night before, but Tess was sure these were different, cleaner versions. He was freshly shaven, too, and his face had the smooth, rested look of someone who had enjoyed at least a few hours of sleep. If she hadn't been so relieved to see him, she might have hated him for looking so well-rested. She hated everyone who had slept in the last eight hours.

  "It's no trouble," Guzman said.

  "I'm sure it's not. I'm sure you'd love to have her in a patrol car just a little while longer, ask her a few more questions. I'd prefer to have her come with me and my client. It's her choice, of course. But if she's free to go, she's free to choose how she goes."

  "Yeah, well, tell your client not to leave town anytime soon. I bet we have him back down here before the week is out."

  "Detective, you can talk to him anytime you want—as long as I'm with him. I only hope you won't drag him down here again unless you're prepared to charge him." Trejo smiled at Guzman. "Cheer up, buddy. It's not my fault that the DA says you fucked up. He sounded kinda mad, by the way. Not that I talked to him. I just could hear how loud he was screaming when your boss was on the phone with him. C'mon, little Yankee gal. Vamanos."

  Tess, thoroughly confused, followed him. She felt guilty somehow, as if she had chosen the slick lawyer over the earnest cop, but she didn't see what choice she had.

  "How did—" she began to ask in the hall.

  "Not here," Rick said quickly. "We'll talk in the car."

  "He's not charged with anything?"

  "The search was no good. They had a warrant for his arrest, but they didn't have a search warrant, and they didn't have any reason to enter the house—Crow was outside, remember?"

  She remembered.

  "If the shotgun had been out in plain view, things might be different. But it wasn't. And the gun was all they had, which wasn't much to begin with—you can't match shotgun pellets the way you can bullets. The DA knows they can't use it, so they're going to have to build a case without it. End of story. For now."

  Crow was sitting in the lobby with Kristina, who was beaming as if bailing out her favorite musician was the realization of some long-held dream. Crow looked dazed and frightened, yet grimly resolute. Tess had a feeling that Guzman had not been so kind and gentle with him.

  "How did you know we were here?" Tess asked Rick.

  "I have sources," Trejo said. "There are people here who let me know when there are, um, interesting cases in which representation might be required."

  "He pays people," Kristina said.

  "Kristina—that would be illegal. I simply am a generous man with a very long Christmas list. Anyway, Sam from Hector's called me, after Crow called him."

  "We have to go," Crow said, rising to his feet. "It's already past eleven."

  "Go where?" Kristina asked.

  "In the car," Rick said, before Crow could say anything more, indicating the desk sergeant with a slight lift of his chin. "Let's confine all our chatter to the goddamn car."

  Once in the car, a Lexus the same flan color as his skin, Rick wanted to take a meandering course through downtown to make sure the police weren't following them. Crow was much too impatient for that.

  "We don't have time," he said, pressing his hands against the glove compartment as if he could push the car through the streets. "She's probably already gone."

  "Who's gone where?" Rick asked.

  "The Alamo," Crow said, which didn't answer Rick's question, but told Tess everything she needed to know. "Just drop me off at the Alamo."

  "Let's show a little discretion, okay? I'll let you off at Rivercenter Mall. Where you go from there is your own business. Just make sure you're not followed."

  Crow didn't ask Tess to accompany him, but when he leaped from the car, she was a half-step behind. He scurried ahead, trying to lose her, but he couldn't break into an all-out run without attracting attention, so she had no problem keeping pace. At last, she could feel a little adrenaline moving through her body.

  They left the mall by another entrance, Crow practically jogging now, a determined salmon swimming upstream through the schools of sluggish tourists. In less than a block, they were behind the walls of the Alamo, in a pretty, shaded garden. Crow stopped at a bench, then turned in a circle. He was looking, Tess knew, for a bright blond head, and there were plenty of those to be seen. But it was just a group of Germans passing through, eyes and mouths round with reverential awe. Who had told her, some time ago, that Germans loved the whole cowboy-frontier thing? It had been Crow.

  "She's not here," he said. "She's not here."

  "Maybe she's back at the house?"

  "The cops would have gotten her, then. No, she's gone, and now everything's ruined." He looked at Tess balefully. "Everything's ruined because of you. You brought the cops right to us. All I needed was a week to make everything okay and you wouldn't even give me that. One goddamn week. Why couldn't you stay away? Why did you have to come to Hector's and set all this in motion? You know, I keep thinking you won't disappoint me if I don't ask for too much. But I'm always wrong."

  With that, he turned and walked away. She could have run after him. She could have caught him, too, and told him it wasn't her fault, that the cops had simply made the same connection she had, from Marianna to Emmie to him. But she knew he was determined to be alone, or at least without her. Unsure of what to do, or how to hook up with Rick and Kristina, she sank onto a bench and looked around. So this was the Alamo.

  It was pretty, although smaller than she thought it would be.

  Chapter 14

  There comes a point when it's simply too late for sleep. Tess was now so tired that the only thing she had going for her was momentum. A book, Guzman had mentioned a book about the triple murders. He hadn't given its title, but his tone had indicated that its ambitions fell short of In Cold Blood. The library, even if open on Sundays, might not have such a book. Nor would a new bookstore.

  But Mrs. Nyguen's near-neighbor, Half Pr
ice Books, was a possibility. Tess and Esskay dropped by after their walk that afternoon.

  "That dog can come in here only if it can read," said the clerk, who appeared to be in training for angry young manhood.

  "She can," Tess said, feeling perverse. "Show her a bag with ‘kibble' written on it, and she'll go crazy."

  He called her bluff, producing a brown bag and a black marker from behind the counter.

  "Make the letters large and plain," Tess said. "Her eyesight's not so good."

  When the clerk held up the bag, Esskay began leaping around the store in a frenzy. What the clerk couldn't know was that Tess bought Esskay's food from an old-fashioned feed store in Fells Point, and it came in brown bags just like this, with black markings.

  "Gee, now you've got her all worked up. Anyway, I'm looking for this book about this triple murder here, about twenty years—"

  "The Green Glass?" Good, she had made his day, given him another reason to sneer. "We got all you could ever want. Cases of ‘em. It's a pretty sleazy book, though. Sloppy, too. The guy didn't even get the name of the restaurant right. Espejo Verde is the Green Mirror."

  "How come you have so many in stock?"

  "It was a local book, and the publisher went bankrupt a few years back. My boss bought his stock, which included more than two thousand copies of that piece of trash. Turns out Gus Sterne ordered the bulk of the first print run, sat on the books for two years, then shipped them back and demanded a full refund. The publisher couldn't cover the loss, and that started his slide into bankruptcy."

  "Interesting." And slightly at odds with the portrait Guzman had sketched of Gus Sterne as the patron saint of San Antonio. "Why go to all that trouble?"

  "I think he wanted the guy to know the boxes had never been open, that he screwed him on purpose. See, Sterne apparently told the guy he would take an order of twenty-five hundred and sell them through his barbecue restaurants, even do some advertising—if he could get a one-month exclusive on it. The guy was a small-timer, he didn't know how things worked."

  "Why did Sterne want to keep the book from distribution?"

  The young man leaned forward, his initial antipathy toward Tess forgotten. He might not like providing service, but he obviously loved sharing gossip. "I always heard he wanted to make sure that his little cousin, the dead woman's daughter, never saw a copy. Because of the photos, you know? They are pretty gross. That's why the boss won't even put it out on the floor."

  "Can you sell me a copy?"

  "Sure." The clerk looked at her shrewdly. "But it's a collectible, you know. Twenty-five bucks. Cash."

  Tess left Esskay behind the protective glass, curled around Mrs. Nguyen's ankles, then walked across the street to the Vietnam, the one Broadway eatery Mrs. Nguyen never patronized. ("Why should I?" she asked. "I make that myself.") Midafternoon on a Sunday, the tiny, almost decor-free restaurant was a blessedly quiet place, and the wait staff seemed unperturbed by the braided Occidental who lingered there, drinking sweetened iced tea long after her lemon chicken was gone.

  The paperback for which she had paid twenty-five dollars had sold for two dollars when it came out, and that was still a dollar more than it was worth. The Green Glass: An Inside Look at San Antonio's Unsolved Triple Homicide was a failure even on its own low terms. Much too late to be a quickie book—it had been published almost five years after the murders—and without the virtues found in great true-crime writing, it was a shallow, vapid piece of work, with more padding than a training bra. Then there was the bonus of those black-and-white photos from the murder scene. Yummy.

  The writer, a local journalist named Jimmy Ahern, spent the first hundred pages explaining—repeatedly—how important the Sternes were in San Antonio, and how common tragedy was in the family. "Bad luck stalked them," he had written, "as relentless as any serial killer." It was one of his more inspired lines.

  The Sterne money had started in meat: They had been butchers whose small shop had grown into the supplier for the city's finest steakhouses after World War II. August Frederick Sterne and Loretta Anita Sterne—Gus and Lollie—had been first cousins, raised as brother and sister by their grandparents when both sets of parents had been killed in a private plane crash off Padre Island. Lollie—"the vivacious blond beauty," as Ahern wrote reflexively at every mention of her name—had married Horace Morgan of El Paso while in college, but they separated while she was pregnant with Emmie. He had not left a note when he committed suicide in his family's hunting camp, which freed Ahern to speculate freely that he was despondent over Lollie's desertion.

  Meanwhile, sober, serious Gus had skipped college and gone straight to work at Sterne Foods. This made him "the last of the self-made men," although Tess couldn't see how bypassing school to run your grandparents' business qualified one for Horatio Alger status. But Gus had put his mark on Sterne Foods, convincing his cautious grandfather to move away from supplying other restaurants and to start their own steakhouses.

  A string of small diners had followed, then a successful German restaurant that Gus had tried to take national. That venture had failed so miserably that the privately held company almost had to seek outside investors. Then Lollie opened Espejo Verde and its cash flow, although relatively modest, helped Sterne Foods regain its footing. "People flocked to Espejo Verde not just for the food, but for Lollie, whose vivacious blond beauty drew them like moths to a flame," Ahern had written. Torturous prose, yet Tess thought she understood what he was trying to say. Emmie had that same quality.

  "Lollie brought a new brand of showmanship to San Antonio's restaurant business, and a new kind of flair to her family's business." Sadly, Ahern didn't provide many examples of that showmanship, although he did note that Lollie once had her hands insured by Lloyd's of London for one million dollars. A publicity gimmick, it was intended to counter another restaurateur's bitter claim that she was a spoiled rich girl who spent all her time in the dining room, playing hostess, while others prepared the meals for which she was celebrated. "But nothing could dim Lollie's success—until the night of December third."

  Cue the spooky organ music. Now that she finally had arrived at that seminal event, Tess found herself less than eager to read about the murders. She skipped ahead to the inevitable "Where are they now?" epilogue at the book's end. Five years after the murders, Gus had started the Barbecue King, with such great results that the Sterne fortunes had quadrupled, and he was one of the city's leading philanthropists. The baby christened Emily Sterne Morgan was now known as Emmie Sterne, although she had never been formally adopted by her cousin. Patrolman Al Guzman had made detective. Marianna Barrett Conyers had become a virtual recluse, who would never speak of the night in question. That was Aherne's phrase, the night in question. Tess couldn't see how Emmie's godmother figured into the story, even if she had been Lollie's best friend. More padding on Ahern's part, she assumed.

  Sighing resignedly, Tess flipped back to the descriptions of the murder, which took up the middle third of the slender book. Ahern's prose puffed and panted, but his ability to describe blood in varied ways could not disguise the fact that he had no firsthand information—and that the investigation of the crime had stalled almost immediately. The murder scene was all Ahern had, and he kept returning to it. The word "grisly" figured largely.

  Lollie had been found near the door, killed by one shot to the back of the head. The cook, Pilar Rodriguez, was nearby, also killed execution style. Frank Conyers, chief financial officer of Sterne Foods, was in the kitchen, where he had been going over the books at a long wooden table. Nearby cans of gasoline and a pile of rags indicated that the killers had planned to burn the restaurant, perhaps to hide their handiwork. Their failure to go through with this part of the plan could only be attributed to Emmie, not quite two, in her playpen in Pilar's small bedroom off the kitchen. She had blood on her hands, elbows, and right cheek, but it wasn't hers. Police had never said how Frank Conyers had been killed, only that he had been stabbed instead of sho
t.

  Tess's tired mind caught the name on the second mention: Frank Conyers. Because everyone used all three names when they spoke of Marianna—and because "Barrett" seemed to provoke so much more awe and respect than "Conyers"—she had missed the connection. Frank was Marianna's husband. She had not only lied about the circumstances of Lollie's death, she had neglected to mention her own husband had been involved in the same "accident." But why? The book said only that Marianna, Gus, and virtually everyone in their social set were at a Monday Night Football party, watching the Dallas Cowboys play the Redskins. "The party at Gus and Ida Marie Sterne's home on Hermosa had a ‘South of the Border' theme," Jimmy Ahern had written, probably cribbing from the society columnist. "The menu included fajitas, borracho beans, and, ironically, a guacamole salad made from Lollie Sterne's very own secret recipe."

  Just holding this book in her hand made Tess feel dirty. She would have tossed it into a trash can on her way out of the Vietnam, but it was hard to throw away something that had cost twenty-five dollars. She still couldn't fathom why Marianna had misled her so thoroughly, but Tess could see why Gus Sterne had tried to kill this ugly little book, as well as its publisher. The Barbecue King. She was reminded of another king, who had tried to rid his country of spindles so that Sleeping Beauty might not prick her finger. Ah, but there was always a spindle waiting somewhere in the kingdom, in some forgotten tower. In the end, kings could never protect their princesses.

  A ringing phone woke Tess from a not very restful sleep. Her mind seemed to be stuck, like a video machine playing back the same scene over and over again. She kept hearing Crow's words, yet it was the black and white photos from the old murder scene that ran across her mind. Ruined everything, ruined everything, ruined everything.

  "Hello?" she asked the receiver. Then she figured out it worked better if you picked it up. "Hello?" With the curtains drawn, the room was dark, so the bedside clock proclaiming it was eight o'clock wasn't much help. She could have been sleeping for four hours, or sixteen, or even twenty-eight.