In Big Trouble

by Laura Lippman

  Trejo put one shiny loafer on the lowest porch step, but didn't come any closer to his one-time client. "How long you've been out of Huntsville, Al?"

  "You should know." His words came out wet and soft, as if there was too much moisture in his mean little mouth. "You was my lawyer, for all the good it did me. My mama paid you all that money, and for what? I still went to prison."

  "For two years. They wanted to put you away for twenty, remember? They were going to put you in there for a good long time, and all but plaster a bumpersticker on your ass that said ‘Honk if you love baby rapers.' Instead, you were convicted for grand theft auto."

  "So next time," Rojas said, "I won't steal no fucking car."

  "No next times. You gave your word. Remember? You sat there in my office and cried in front of your mama, and said you would learn to control yourself if you got a chance. Besides, your neighbors all got letters. They know you're back in the neighborhood, they know what you did to that little girl. The elementary school has your picture up, the bodega, the ice houses. You'll never get near another child."

  "It's a big city, abogado. There are many schools, many bodegas, many ice houses. Parks and playgrounds, too."

  "Which is why you have that thing on your ankle." Tess looked down and saw the cuff used for electronic probation peeking beneath the hem of Rojas's loose gabardine slacks.

  "Yes, more of your good work, Counselor. You were really looking out for me."

  "In fact, I was. You make any friends in Huntsville?"

  "I was a nice boy. My size, you have to be."

  "There were two men from here, Laylan Weeks and Tom Darden, pulling a long haul for kidnapping. You know them?"

  "Huntsville is a big place, bigger than some cities."

  "Yeah, but all the boys who like little boys and girls manage get to know one another, don't they? I did a little checking on Darden and Weeks. There was a rumor that they took this kid, Danny Boyd, for sex, not money. It was hushed up for the kid's sake, but the story's still out there. You know anything about that?"

  Rojas smiled. His teeth were as brown as the beer bottle he was sucking on. "They told everyone who would listen that they were in it for the money."

  "So you knew them."

  "A little. From afar. They liked to tell everyone that they were big, bad hombres who had done terrible things, important things." He sucked on the bottle—didn't drink from it, just stuck the long neck in his mouth and popped it in and out of his cheek. "Personally, I always thought they were full of shit."

  "So I guess you didn't make any plans to catch up with them when you all came home to San Antone."

  "Like I said, we weren't really friends."

  Rick pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. Rojas took it, rolled it tight as a cigarette, then blew through it, making it sound like a kazoo.

  "The cops gave me fifty," he said.

  "The cops have already been here?"

  "Oh, yeah." He smiled at Rick's consternation. "They even asked the same kind of questions, but they were nicer to me. Much more respectful."

  "What did you tell them?"

  "How can I give to you for twenty what I gave to them for fifty?" Rojas asked sweetly, as if he were a man who dedicated his life to such questions of fairness and ethics. Trejo pulled out another twenty, and a ten, which Rojas tucked into his waistband, like a stripper saving tips in a G-string.

  "They said they had money coming to them, when they got out. They said they were set for life."

  "You told the cops all this."

  "Maybe." Rojas had now unfurled one of the twenties and was edging it in and out of his teeth, like a wide piece of dental floss. Tess felt sorry for the unsuspecting cashier whose hand might one day close over this bill. "Maybe I told them more, told them about the things that Darden and Weeks bragged about, the things they never got popped for. I don't know, abogado. Every day is the same for me, you know. I just sit on the porch and watch the little children go by. It's up to me to put some variety into it. Variety is the spice of life. Or so they say."

  A woman's shadowy form appeared at the screen door. "Quienes son, Alberto?" she called sharply.

  "Señor Trejo, my wonderful, wonderful lawyer, and some grandota," Rojas replied. "Remember Mr. Trejo? The one you paid all that money, so you could have me back home, chained to you like a little monkey?"

  A torrent of Spanish poured out of the woman. At first, Tess thought Mrs. Rojas was berating Rick, but she soon realized the angry words were for her own son. They didn't seem to affect him at all. Smiling, he stood, pretended to hand one of the twenties to Rick, then snatched it back, still smiling.

  "Wouldn't it be funny, abogado, if I used this very bill to get a little girl to come into the yard?" he said. "There are a few who walk by my fence every day. All I have to say is, ‘Want to make some money? I'll give you twenty bucks. Come around to the back of the house, I have something to show you. Shhh, shhh. Don't tell. It's our secret. C'mon, it will feel so good. You make me feel good, then I'll make you feel good. But don't tell anyone. They wouldn't understand. Grown-ups don't want you to know how good you could feel. But I do. I do.'"

  He turned and climbed the porch steps, whistling a pretty little melody, letting the screen door bang behind him. His mother's harsh, frantic words rained down on him, but Rojas didn't seem to hear her.

  "My money's on his mother," Rick said, his voice light, his fists clenched at his side. "She'll never let him out of her sight again. I can only hope she outlives him."

  "How could you represent someone like that?"

  "Because it's my job," he said. "And because his mother goes to church with my aunt, and I couldn't say no when my aunt asked for a favor."

  "Still—"

  "The police caught Al driving a stolen car, then coerced a confession out of him about the assault on a neighborhood kid. The confession was inadmissible, and I got it thrown out. I have to defend all my clients to the best of my ability, Tess. I have to fight for the Al Rojases of the world as hard as I'm going to fight for Crow. Would you have it any other way?"

  For the first time in their short acquaintance, Rick's speech had lost its slightly arch, ironic quality. Tess scuffed her toes along the sidewalk, thinking about what he had said. She wanted to protest: But Crow is innocent. Nothing came out.

  Back in the car, speeding away from Mr. Rojas's neighborhood, she said: "So Texas has a Megan's law, too."

  "A what?" Rick had been lost in his own thoughts.

  "A Megan's law. One of those laws designed to inform people when a child molester moves into the neighborhood. That's some small comfort."

  "Such laws don't apply to Rojas. Didn't you hear? He had a real sharpie for an attorney, who pleaded him down to grand theft, auto. He's got no record as a child molester."

  "So how did those fliers go out with his photo? How did the school find out about him, and the local shops?"

  "I really couldn't say, although I do happen to have a brother-in-law who owns a print shop near here. Someone might have dropped off a photo of Rojas, told him when he was coming home, given him a mailing list."

  Tess smiled. "Of course, a lawyer could never do anything like that, even to a former client, because he would risk being disbarred."

  "Of course." Rick started to whistle, then stopped abruptly when he realized the melody he had picked up was Rojas's sprightly tune.

  Chapter 16

  They had breakfast at a west side cafe, a dingy place that didn't look open from the street, and didn't look particularly safe from within. Rick recommended something called migas, and the combination of cheese, eggs, and sausage was so good that Tess quickly regained her lost appetite. Rick had been right—an empty stomach was the only way to talk to Al Rojas.

  "Sorry you didn't like it better," he said, pushing away his half-eaten meal even as Tess was wiping her plate clean with a flour tortilla. She wasn't embarrassed. After all, that's what the jump-roping was for.

  "I've never had a
nything like this. Most Mexican food in Baltimore is so…perfunctory. I mean, you know you're in trouble when the best place in town has something called ‘Los Sandichos' on the menu. And the Mexican place near my house has a wait staff of Estonians. Here, I could make a meal from the tortillas alone. They're incredible."

  Rick looked puzzled. "They're flour and lard. You could make them yourself. Anyone could."

  "Theoretically." She also could solve simple physics equations if she put her mind to it, but that didn't mean she was going to start anytime soon.

  He paid the bill, helping himself to a handful of pralines and bright candies. The same "Mexican candies" the clerk in Twin Sisters had offered her, only fresher-looking here.

  "Something's bothering me," he said as they walked to his car

  "Rojas?"

  "Darden and Weeks. Twenty years is a long stretch, and Texas has an overcrowding problem. I wonder why they didn't get parole."

  "Ask Guzman."

  "I'd be happier if Guzman didn't know what we're thinking about. Guess I could call someone on my Christmas card list, see what they know."

  Rick headed back into the city, stopping in yet another neighborhood Tess had never seen, an old-fashioned business district surrounded by a residential neighborhood. The houses were large and gracious, but most of them had been converted to apartments, or made over into businesses. Rick bounded up the steps of a hot pink Victorian.

  "Y Algunas Mas," Tess said, reading from the hand-painted sign over the door. "Se venden milagros."

  "And Something More," Rick translated, his lips twitching slightly at her Spanish pronunciation. "We sell miracles."

  "Funny motto for a criminal law practice."

  "Law practice? Oh, this isn't my office. It's Kristina's shop."

  Inside, the old house's large rooms were crammed with the same hideous skeletons that Tess had seen at Marianna Barrett Conyers's house, hundreds and hundreds of them, leering cheerfully at her from every direction. But that was just a portion of Kristina's eclectic collection. The crowded store also held a menagerie of brightly painted wooden animals, huge black pots, carved saints and papier-mâché monsters that might have crawled in from one of Hunter Thompson's better drug trips.

  Kristina was pushing one of these papier-mâché creatures toward an older woman, who was trying not to recoil. "Oh I don't know," the woman said nervously. "I do love the little skeleton mariachis you told me to buy, Kris, but this—" She gestured weakly at the figure in question, which looked like some strange cross between a blowfish and a bat—"well, it's so large."

  "It's a museum-quality piece," Kristina said. "The curator from the San Antonio Museum of Art was in here looking at it the other day."

  "For the museum?"

  "For his private collection."

  "Oh, I just don't know," the woman repeated. She walked around the thing, as if it might become attractive from another angle. Tess realized the woman, despite the wealth and class indicated by her clothes and manner, yearned desperately for Kristina's approval. But she just couldn't come to terms with the monstrosity before her.

  Finally, Kristina took pity on her customer, putting the blowfish-bat on the counter and picking up a notebook-sized piece of tin, with a faded painting of a virgin. Still not Tess's idea of art—it reminded her too much of the Jesus-Kennedy kitsch hung in the living rooms and kitchens of her Monaghan relatives. But it looked genuinely antique, and had the advantage of not inducing heart attacks.

  "It's a Virgen de Guadalupe, an exceptionally nice one, possibly eighteenth century," Kristina said, catching Tess's eye. "Do you know the story?"

  She shook her head. "I've got a Catholic name, but not the character-building torture by nuns that usually goes with it."

  "It's doubtful any Baltimore nun would have told you this story. In the 1500s, a peasant, an Indian, one of the Indians indigenous to Mexico before the conquest, saw a vision. The virgen—" She used the soft h sound of the Spanish pronunciation, Tess noticed—"appeared before him and told him in his own language to gather rose petals in his cloak, then take the cloak straight to the bishop. He was to show the petals to no one but the bishop. When he arrived and unfurled his cloak, the rose petals were gone and her image was in their place. The Virgen de Guadalupe."

  "Oh she's darling," the woman cried. "How much, Kristina?"

  "This? It's only seven hundred dollars."

  Tess watched in disbelief as the woman handed over cash, then left with the carefully wrapped treasure. Rick, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, burst into laughter as soon as her Chevy Suburban pulled away from the curb.

  "You are so good, it's scary," he said. "I mean, how many times have you done the bait-and-switch with one of those alebrijes. It's genius—one of your ladies comes in, you show her something new and so damn ugly that she's scared to buy it. Then you offer her one of the antique pieces that costs ten times as much, but has the virtue of being, something that won't give her indigestion. And she leaves, feeling like she's let you down. Do you tell them that the story has been discredited? That the bishop in Mexico had to step down when he agreed there was no historical evidence that this ‘miracle' ever happened?"

  "Look, running a folk art gallery may not be the lofty practice of the law, but it has its moments," Kristina said coolly, sticking the cash in an old-fashioned cash register that had been painted bright red and studded with tiny silver charms.

  "If you married me, you wouldn't have to be a shop girl," he said.

  "I like being a shop girl, especially given that I'm one of the owners. And it's not a shop, it's a gallery." But she was smiling.

  "Phone?" he asked, smiting back at her.

  "What are you asking? Do I have one? May you use it? Be more specific, please."

  "May I yank it out of the wall in a show of brute force that will fuel all your stereotypical fantasies about Latin men, so that we end up coupling right here, as Tess watches the door?"

  "No, but you may use the phone," Kristina said in a fake-prim manner. "For a local call."

  Rick took the portable from its base, disappearing into the curtained storeroom behind the counter. Tess suddenly felt shy. She might have met Kristina first, but she now felt more comfortable with Rick, given their shared sense of purpose. As for Kristina, she was one of those poised people who didn't need to fill silences with blather. She moved around the shop, tickling her objects with a feather duster.

  "I was in a house with a lot of cra—a lot of stuff like this," Tess said, making conversation. "Emmie's godmother, Marianna Barrett Conyers." Emmie's godmother, who described the death of Lollie Sterne as an accident, and neglected to mention her husband had been involved in the same "accident."

  "One of my best customers," Kristina said. "I take new shipments to her for private showings. She has a great eye, and she doesn't haggle."

  "Do you know her well?"

  "No. I don't think anyone knows her very well, except her maid. She's so reserved. I call her the Duchess of Euphemism—she has the most tactful way of telling me she loathes something." Kristina gave Tess a knowing look. "You could pick up a few pointers from her."

  "Huh?"

  "I can tell just by the way you stand here, holding yourself, that you hate my things. It's as if you're scared you might catch something."

  "Well, they are creepy."

  "Not to me. I love every piece. They brought me to San Antonio. Four years ago, my senior year at Wisconsin—I was an art history major—I came down here for spring break. We were supposed to fly to Padre Island, but the charter plane had some mechanical problem, and we were stuck here for a day. I went into a gallery like this one, down in the King William neighborhood—Tienda Guadalupe—and I saw this wooden cross, studded with milagros."

  "Milagros? I thought it meant miracles."

  "It does, but it also refers to these charms, like these things on the cash register. See? Little hands and limbs, babies and hearts. They represent things you pray for. Any
way, I thought that cross was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. When I held it in my hand, I felt something, something warm. It was the wildest sensation. I bought it and took it back to Wisconsin. The day after graduation, I moved here. I didn't know a single person and people laughed at my Spanish, it was so fussy and academic. But from the start, I was at home here. Total GTT."

  "Gone to Texas," Tess said. "Crow said the same thing, in a postcard he sent to his parents."

  Kristina laid down her feather duster. "You don't get it, do you?"

  "His dad explained it to me. Something about what fugitives carved on their doors."

  "No, I mean the feeling. I was meant for Texas. Listening to Almas Perdidas, I sense Crow is, too."

  "Maybe," Tess said. Crow was under some spell, but she couldn't figure out if it was San Antonio's or Emmie's.

  Kristina just smiled and went back to dusting, tickling the long nose of a banana yellow ferret. Rick walked through the door, portable phone in hand, his voice in that winding-up mode that one has when trying to end a call, while the person on the other end drones on and on.

  "Uh-huh, uh-huh. Thanks. Surest thing. We should. No, we definitely should. Okay, Okay. Uh-huh. Thanks." He inched the receiver that much closer to the base. "Definitely. Till then. No, I mean it."

  At last, he hung up. "My source gave me a lead on a retired detective who worked the Darden-Weeks case, knew these guys as well as anyone."

  "Was that the detective?"

  Rick rolled his eyes and pulled at his collar as if it were choking him. "His wife. She says he went to Las Vegas on a charter, won't be back for two days. Probably trying to get away from her for a while. She talks a blue streak. Gave me a complete blow-by-blow of her health, her husband's health, their dog's health, what she had for breakfast this morning—English muffin with raisins, a little Sanka. Jesus. He probably goes gambling just to have some peace and quiet for a change."

  "See?" Kristina said. "That's how marriage works. I bet there was a time when he told her he loved her, and couldn't be without her, and now he's reduced to playing blackjack to get away from the sound of her voice. That's what marriage is, Rick. The death of romance."