"Not just me—"
"Clay, too, of course. But not Lollie, or her death. You never really knew your mother. But you knew Clay. You loved him. And he chose his father over you."
Emmie scratched furiously at her legs, but gloved fingers couldn't draw fresh blood through her pink tights. Clay looked at Tess with undisguised revulsion. She didn't care. She watched Steve's eyes dart nervously around the room. His plan was unraveling, slipping through his hands like so much string.
"Shut up," he said. "Just shut up."
"You do understand, Emmie, he's going to kill Clay," Tess continued in the most conversational tone she could muster. "He has to. In fact, I think he always intended to kill Clay. Oh, sure, he told he would kill Gus, then let you jump in the confusion. With your body broken, and such an easy solution at hand—Gus Sterne's homicidal cousin finally does him in after years of trying—they won't look too closely at the physical evidence. I bet Steve even had you write a letter, confessing to everything, telling Guzman how you figured out that Gus Sterne was the man who hired Darden and Weeks to kill Frank Conyers."
"There is a letter," Emmie muttered, almost to herself. "But to Clay—I wrote you a letter, Clay. So you'd know, so you'd understand. I'd do anything for you, anything."
"Clay's not going to be reading any letters," Tess said.
"Stop talking," Steve ordered, waving the rifle at both of them. "I can't hear myself think, with all this chatter."
Tess looked at Steve. "How many fingers did you have to cut from Weeks' hand before he confessed, before he gave you the name that Emmie already knew? All ten or was that simply for show? Did you have to stuff Crow's T-shirt in his mouth to keep his screams from being heard, or did you and Emmie bring that back later, when your first attempt to frame Crow failed? Not that I blame you for your methods. After you killed Tom Darden, Weeks was your only chance to find out for sure if Gus Sterne had arranged the murders."
"I'll kill him," Steve said, pointing his rifle at Crow. "I'll put his brains in your lap if you don't stop talking."
"No, no, no, no, no," Emmie sang to herself, covering her ears. "No, no, no, no, no."
Tess took a deep breath, exhaling the way one does on a difficult weight exercise. "Go ahead," she said. "Show Emmie who you really are. Kill Crow. Kill me. My only regret is I'm not going to live long enough to watch you try to convince Emmie that Clay has to die, too, and by her hand. But he always was the target, wasn't he? That's why you dragged him in here when you saw him waiting outside. You don't want to kill Gus Sterne. You want him to live, the way you've lived. You want him to grieve."
"Steve?" Emmie asked.
"Don't listen to her. She's trying to turn you against me. I'm the only one who ever understood you, Emmie. The only person who doesn't think it's crazy to die for love."
"You're killing for it, not dying," Tess said. "There's a difference. If you want to die for love, I won't stop you."
But Steve was calming down now, taking time to analyze his options.
"Bring me the knife, Emmie. And her knapsack. She has a gun in there."
Another small mystery solved. "You were the man Mrs. Nguyen let into my room that day," Tess said. "Emmie gave you the photograph from Crow's things."
"One of the first rules of war is reconnaissance," he said, stumbling a little over the last word. "The knapsack, Emmie. Take it off her back and bring it over here. No—don't lift your arms. Let Emmie slide it off, one strap at a time. Keep your hands where I can see them."
Trancelike, Emmie did as she was told, dragging the knapsack behind her on the floor, holding the knife awkwardly in her right hand. But instead of returning to Steve's side, she suddenly threw herself, weeping, into Clay's arms. "It's all your fault. None of this would have happened if you hadn't stopped loving me. Why can't you just love me again?"
He put one arm around her and rocked her. "I do love you, Emmie. I'll probably never love anyone else the way I loved you."
Her sobs were wild, convulsive spasms, shaking her whole body. "He's my father, isn't he? He loved Lollie, and she ran away from him when she got pregnant, then made up the story about Horace Morgan. That's why he won't let us be together."
Clay stroked her hair. "I wish it were that simple. No, your father really was some stupid El Paso boy who killed himself for love of your mother. But you're right—when they were our age, Gus loved Lollie, and she loved him. Then she stopped, but he couldn't help believing she would start again, even as they married other people, and went on with their lives. He always thought she would come back to him. Then one day, Lollie told him she had fallen in love with Frank Conyers, and he was going to leave Marianna for her. They were going to move up to Austin, open their own restaurant there. Gus thought if something happened to Frank…" Clay looked at Steve over Emmie's head. "He never meant for Lollie to die, much less Pilar. They weren't suppose to be there."
"But she did die, didn't she," Steve said. "That's all that matters."
"He made me choose, Emmie," Clay said, cupping her face with his right hand, his left still clasping his book. "When he found out we were seeing each other again, he told me everything he had done, and he made me choose. You or him. If I kept seeing you, he was going to turn himself in, confess to everything he had done. I couldn't let him do that. It's a death penalty crime."
"He was jealous," Emmie wailed. "He didn't want us to be happy because he could never be happy."
"No, he believed we would end up as he and Lollie had, with one of us killing the other. He said it was our legacy, and we could never outrun it. You loved the way he loved, and he knew how that story ended. He saw himself in you. He wasn't far from wrong, was he?"
Tess remembered the look on Gus Sterne's face, the way he stared at Emmie as if he had seen a ghost.
"We could be together," Emmie insisted to Clay. "It's not too late."
An accomplice in two murders, and she still thought her future was as wide open as the window through which she had planned to jump up until five minutes ago.
"Don't let him go through with this, Emmie," Clay pleaded. "I'll make Dad tell the truth, face the consequences for what he's done."
"He won't," Steve scoffed. "He told you the truth to bind him to you, to make you do what he wanted. He'll never admit his crimes to anyone who counts."
"He will do the right thing," Clay said. He was trying hard not to cry, but a few tears slipped down his cheeks. "I'll make him. But don't kill my father. He's all I have."
A huge cheer went up from the street below, and Steve glanced out the window. In the split-second his head was turned, Tess saw Emmie slide the knife along Clay's spine, into the waistband of his khakis.
"Here comes Gus. You're up, Emmie," Steve said. "You can jump, or I'll kill you—but not before I kill your cousin. I've got no problem with letting Al Guzman wrangle over a mysterious quadruple murder for the next twenty years."
"Please," Clay said. Emmie broke their embrace and backed away from him. "We'll go to the police. My dad will confess. At the very least, he'll have to tell the grand jury."
"What grand jury?" Steve asked.
"The one that's convened whenever a cop is killed."
Clay hurled his book at Steve's face, and the young cop reflexively put up a hand to deflect it. "What the—" Steve didn't drop the rifle, but with one hand swatting at a book, there was no way he could get a shot off. He was thrown off-balance for no more than a second or two, but that proved to be all the time Clay needed. With a speed that surprised everyone, perhaps himself most of all, Clay pulled the knife from his waistband and ran forward, jamming it through the bullet-proof vest and into Steve's chest with one sure thrust.
Steve Villanueve died surprised.
Surprised that all his reconnaissance had not paid off. Surprised that bullet-proof vests only stop bullets. Surprised that all his careful planning had come to naught. He slumped to the floor, only a few seconds of life left in him, and nothing left to say.
"Clay, get the cell phone from my knapsack and dial 911," Tess called to him, for he was staring stupidly at the dead man at his feet, and she still had her hand pressed to Crow's midsection. "I just hope they know how to get an ambulance to us with most of Broadway blocked off."
Clay took the knapsack from Emmie, dug out the cell phone, and punched in the number. As he turned his back on the window, covering one ear so he could hear over the parade noise, Emmie began moving like a sleepwalker, her blue eyes empty. She stepped around Steve's body as if it weren't there, then clambered to the ledge behind him.
Later, Tess would wonder if she did the right thing. Wasn't Emmie Sterne entitled to her death wish? She was broken, and all the king's horses and men and money couldn't put Emmie together again. Did Emmie even have a life left to save, given that her fate was now a narrow destiny limited to a prison or a psychiatric hospital? But these questions came later, when there was time to think. In the moment, without the luxury of contemplation, she hurled herself across the room and caught Emmie by the knees just before she launched herself into the sky.
If Emmie had weighed a little more, she might have dragged Tess out the window with her. As it was, she kicked and twisted and screamed, begging to die, clawing at Tess's face. Clay dropped the phone, ran forward, and grabbed Tess, and the three fell backward together in a pile, even as a silver Lincoln glided into the intersection below.
They could hear the crowd cheering the benefactor who had brought them this beautiful day, this wonderful parade, all this good food and good music. Of course Gus Sterne waved back, they knew that without looking down. What they couldn't know was if he ever noticed those few spectators who had screamed and pointed upward as Emmie and Tess dangled above him. On Channel 5's early broadcast that night, Mrs. Nguyen would later tell Tess, it was reported that two drunken women had been seen cavorting in a dangerous fashion on a window ledge in the old Sun building. No one was believed to be hurt. It had to be true. Chris Marrou said.
Chapter 30
The emergency room at the county hospital was filled with the usual parade detritus. Children who had fallen on broken bottles, men who had fought over the stupid things that men fight over, pregnant women who had gone into premature labor. Guzman told Tess he could find her a quieter, more private place to wait, but she preferred to stay here, pressing a piece of gauze into her elbow, where a nurse had taken her blood at her insistence. She wasn't sure how these things worked, but Crow was going to need blood, lots of it, and she might as well make the first deposit into his account.
Guzman kept trying to get her to drink a soda, or eat a cookie, but she refused this offer, too. She couldn't imagine anything staying in her stomach, although she was achingly hungry. The last thing she had eaten must have been her breakfast of beans, cold from the can.
"You got a stab wound, this is the emergency room where you want to come," Guzman said. "They see a lot of stab wounds here."
"Humph," she said. Tell the Chamber of Commerce to put it in the brochure.
"Truth is, I've seen a lot of stab wounds, and your friend—well, if you're going to get a knife stuck in your belly, that's the way to go. If anything was hit, it was the appendix, and who needs that anyway? He did lose a lot of blood—"
"Tell me about it," said Tess. She had tried to wash, but the fingernails on her left hand looked as if they had rusted. "He was half-empty when they finally got him in here."
"Now if you were an optimist, you'd say he was half-full."
To her own surprise, she almost laughed, but it was a mirthless, barking sound that veered dangerously close to a sob. She bit her lip. Whatever happened, she didn't want to cry in front of Guzman.
"You know, I don't think I've ever heard you laugh," Guzman said.
"You still haven't."
Guzman scratched his head. "That's fair. Yeah, I guess that's fair. We haven't been having a lot of fun, have we?"
He walked away, toward a bank of phones at the end of the hall. He had been going back and forth to the pay phones since arriving here. Damage control, Tess assumed. The press was all over the story, they just didn't know what the story was. The paramedics had put the call out as an officer down, and every newsroom in town had jumped when that code went across. According to the television bolted high on the waiting room wall, four people were in custody for the stabbing death of an off-duty police officer. It was easier, Guzman had told her, not to try to set the record straight tonight. They'd atone on Sunday morning. Until then, let the city have another night of innocence, let B. B. King and Etta James sing, let the free barbecue flow. Perhaps no one would notice that Gus Sterne was not there to preside over his happy kingdom.
The one good thing about Guzman was that he had instantly grasped what really happened from the moment he arrived at the hospital. "Pilar Rodriguez was Steve. Villanueve's grandmother," Tess had said, and he had nodded sadly, with no need to have anything else explained to him. Then again, he didn't bother to admit she had been right about Gus Sterne, either.
He came back from the phones and settled next to her in one of the hard plastic chairs.
"Whose butt is shaped like these chairs, anyway? Not mine."
"It's not like you'd relax here under any circumstances. A comfortable chair would be a waste."
"Good point," Guzman said. "I never thought about it that way."
Oh shut up, Tess thought. Just shut up. And she heard Steve's voice in her head, saying the same thing.
"You know, Steve was a good cop," Guzman said, although he couldn't possibly know what she had been thinking. "Or so it seemed. Now I find myself wondering when he crossed that line. Did he become a cop to avenge his grandmother's death? Or did the opportunity present itself once he was on the force and began to hear about the information we had developed on Darden and Weeks? I guess we'll never know. But these things usually happen in degrees. A young man starts off trying to catch his grandmother's killer. Who could argue with that? Then one day, he's cutting a man's fingers off in a deserted restaurant, and setting up a deranged young woman to take the fall for everything he's done."
Tess thought Guzman might apologize now, but his voice trailed off and he stared at the beige walls.
"Why can't you admit I was right?" she asked fiercely. "I may have gotten parts of it wrong, but I handed you the solution. Gus Sterne hired Darden and Weeks. To kill Frank, not Lollie and Pilar. But I was close enough."
"You think if I had listened to you that night, this wouldn't have happened? Maybe you're right."
No maybe about it.
"So let's say I had. Only think back. You fingered Gus Sterne, but for the wrong reasons and for crimes he didn't commit. Remember, you thought he had killed Darden and Weeks, too."
"Still—"
"Bear with me. This is your wonderful life, Tess Monaghan. Just like the movie. If you're not here, we got an even sadder ending than we have right now. Let's say I arrest Gus Sterne—you think I was going to keep him overnight? No way. So the parade goes on, and everyone shows up to play their part. Except you're not there, because you didn't go search for Crow. Because you're not there, Clay's not there. Crow still gets stabbed, because Steve can't leave any witnesses. Emmie jumps, and Clay Sterne is shot, and Steve Villanueve gets promoted for responding so calmly in a crisis. Is that how you wanted this to end?"
Tess uncrooked her elbow, let the cotton gauze drop to the floor, put on the Band-Aid the nurse had given her. Donating blood usually made her queasy, but watching the syrupy blood slide into the tube had seemed fairly anticlimactic today.
"Still, you might have listened to me."
Guzman nodded, but he wasn't listening, not even now. His attention was focused on the automatic doors at the emergency room's entrance. Marianna Barrett Conyers stood on the threshold, not moving, the doors opening and closing, opening and closing, so she was revealed to them again and again. The effect was of a child playing peekaboo. Dolores stood at her side, still in her gray uniform, trying to
urge her employer forward. Finally, Marianna crossed the threshold, but alone.
"Don't look now," Guzman said, "but the last piece of the puzzle just walked in."
Marianna's manner was stiff, her pallor ghostly. Tess couldn't help thinking of Boo Radley, lured out of his house to save the lives of the two children he had come to love.
Except Boo wasn't as creepy as Marianna.
"You wanted to see me, Sergeant Guzman?"
"What I really wanted was for you to come down here and thank someone."
"For saving Emmie's life? Yes, I am grateful—"
Guzman held up a hand. "No more bullshit. After twenty-one years, could we just stop with all your bullshit? I mean, sure, you can thank Tess for keeping your goddaughter from going airborne if you like. But I think you owe her a bigger debt for finally closing the case in which you were the number one suspect."
It was Tess who looked at Guzman in surprise, not Marianna. She merely sniffed the air and made a face, as if she had detected something distasteful.
"All those times I asked you over the years, and you always said you didn't know anything. Always said there was nothing going on, that it was just cheap gossip. You sat on the motive for your own husband's death for two decades. Why?"
"I had my…suspicions," Marianna said stiffly. "I am not one to repeat innuendoes and malicious stories."
"Well, here's my suspicion. You went to Espejo Verde that night. You were going to have it out with your husband and your best friend, for cheating on you. But they were beyond hearing anything when you got there, right?"
Marianna had refused to sit down, so she was still standing above them, hands folded primly over the purse she carried, her face determinedly blank.
"I went to see if something could be worked out. Lollie tired of men easily. She would have tired of Frank, too. There was no reason to take him, if she was going to end up throwing him over. If it was money she wanted, a chance to start a restaurant somewhere else, away from Gus, I could give her that. I just didn't want to give her my husband. But Lollie was already…gone when I arrived."
In Big Trouble Page 29