In Big Trouble Page 9

  "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."

  Chapter 8

  Primo's, the bar where Crow's band had last played, was a local place, but it was so cheesy and soulless that it might as well have been part of a national chain. Tess's own neighborhood back in Baltimore had more than its share of these desperately zany places, where fun had to be planned and delineated with great care, and where the anti-bacterial cleansers overwhelmed the yeasty beer smell that a bar should have. They even had the same "theme" nights: Ladies' nights, mambo nights, Jamaica nights, Super Bowl night, cigar nights, two-for-one shooters, bottomless maragaritas.

  Yet every night was the same. These bars were the cruise ships for Generation Whatever, the sullen young things for whom Tess had babysat when she was in her teens. Now that they had attained their majority—or, in the case of Primo's, attained the fake IDs that claimed they had attained their majority—they didn't know how to do anything but watch, complain, and repeat punch-lines from the sitcom of the moment. Kids today, she thought contemptuously, eyeing the morose happy-hour crowd.

  "The manager here?" she asked the bartender, who was whistling as he worked. At least he seemed to be enjoying himself. He winked and gave her a raffish smile as he jerked his head toward a nearby door.

  "In there," he said. "And if you want to be his friend, I hope you're packing some raw meat in your bag."

  The man wedged behind the desk in the tiny office was startlingly huge, three hundred pounds plus. He didn't get up when Tess entered, a lack of politesse for which she was grateful. She couldn't help thinking the desk functioned as a retaining wall for his girth and that if he stood, his huge stomach would come rolling toward her like a tidal wave.

  "Yeah, they played here," he said, barely glancing at the page from Marianna Barrett Conyers's newspaper. A nameplate, a dusty pink lei looped over one end, provided the name he had neglected to give, Don Kleinschmidt. "Now they don't."

  "Weren't they any good?"

  "They're great, if you want some chick up there singing stuff nobody's ever heard of and nobody can dance to. All the little girls want to be Fiona fucking Apple these days. Which is okay, if you want your own goddamn Lilith Fair every night. But chick music doesn't bring the guys in, and the guys are the ones who drink. If I wanna sell cranberry juice, I'll get me a Snapple franchise."

  Kleinschmidt lit a cigarette and looked around for an ashtray. A bright orange oval one sat on some bracketed shelves on the wall to his right. He could have reached it if he stretched. Apparently, Kleinschmidt had decided that a man's reach shouldn't exceed his grasp, for he flicked the ashes into a half-empty glass of Coke instead, then dropped the hand holding the cigarette behind the desk, as if fearful that Tess might demand a puff. Such stinginess seemed instinctive to him, Darwinian even. He hadn't gotten to his current size by sharing.

  "I need a band that plays covers, dance tunes," he continued. "Oldies like ‘Wooly-Bully,' ‘Louie, Louie,' and whatever crap is on the radio right now. If the band has a girl singer, she can make like Alannis every now and then, but it's gotta be familiar. People come here to hear music they already know and eat food they already like. The only strange they want is on their pillow, after they leave. Get me? Get me?"

  She got him. "And this band, Little Girl in Big Trouble, couldn't do that."

  "Wouldn't do it. They said if they were going to play crap, there were people in town who would pay them more money to do it. So they walked. Prima fucking donnas."

  "The girl was difficult?"

  "No, it was him, mostly." He tapped a ridged, nicotine yellow fingernail on Crow's face. "Fast Eddie here. He didn't like me talking to the girl. He didn't like anyone talking to her. Jealous little schmuck. Almost started something with a customer one night. That was the end of it, you wanna know the truth. We might have worked out our artistic difference
s, but I draw the line at trying to beat up customers."

  Pacifist Crow must be on on a real Sir Galahad trip with his new girlfriend, trying to impress her. "Do you know if they're playing anywhere else in town?"

  Kleinschmidt smirked, sucking on his cigarette, then dropping it behind his desk again. His mouth was tiny but full, a child's pink rosebud, incongruously pretty. It made him look as if he had just eaten a small boy, who was now trapped in those mounds of fat. Don't be a fatist, Tess scolded herself. Kleinschmidt would be disgusting at any weight.

  "What's the information worth to you?" he asked.

  It would have been easy enough to slide a twenty his way, even a fifty. Tess's per diem was based on the understanding that the occasional bribe was one of her operating costs. But she hated the idea of giving this man anything.

  "How about if I don't come back here tonight and help the cops pick out all the underage kids at the bar? How much is that worth to you?"

  Kleinschmidt shrugged and stole another puff from his cigarette. "I can't be checking IDs too closely. Trinity University is our bread and butter here on St. Mary's Street. I'm flexible with the chronologically challenged. That's why I'm still here after fifteen years, while almost every other place along here has bit the dust."

  "I'm waiting," Tess said.

  He sucked on his cigarette as if it were a straw in a glass with just a few drops of soda left. "Last I heard, they were playing at the Morgue."

  "The Morgue?" First Marianna's house of horrors, now this. Tess was beginning to think San Antonio was one death-obsessed burg.

  "Not morgue-morgue. Newspaper morgue. The developer picked up the old San Antonio Sun building cheap, thinking he'd make it into a mini-mall. You know, shops on the bottom, professional offices up above. But he couldn't get the right mix of tenants. So now it's like five music clubs in one. There's a big room downstairs for headliners, then lots of little rooms that can change their personalities to fit whatever nostalgia craze is under way."

  "How do you change a room's personality?"

  "That's the beauty of it—the decor is totally minimal. All he needs to do is frame a few front pages to change the era. Like, a disco room, with front pages from the seventies—Watergate, Nixon resigns, blah, blah, blah. Eighties? Stock market crash of '87. He's making money hand over fist, the lucky bastard. I heard he based it on someplace up north."