In Big Trouble

by Laura Lippman

  "She was fucking dead," Guzman said. "Could you, just once in your life, use the real words for things?"

  Marianna didn't try to disguise her contempt for this man. She might speak in euphemisms, Tess thought, but deep down she was a mean and contemptuous bigot. For her, class distinctions were more important than racial ones. She hated the fact that a cop was speaking to her this way.

  "It was dark, and I tripped over Lollie's body when I came through the door. Hers or Pilar's, I was never sure. I know I came up with blood on me—on my hands and knees, my suit. I went into the kitchen, and that's when I saw Frank."

  Tears had started down her face, eroding the top layer of makeup. She didn't seem to notice she was crying. "Someone hurts you and you say to yourself, ‘I wish they were dead,' and then you see what dead is. And you feel guilty, as if your wishes made it so. I don't know how long I stood there before I realized Emmie was crying, in the little room off the kitchen. She was wet. I changed her diaper. That must have been when the blood got on her. She was scared and nervous—she clung to me, she was just a little girl, left alone in the dark, and no one had come as she cried and cried. I got her back to sleep and then I left. An hour later, after I had changed and was on my way to Gus's house for the party, I called the police from a pay phone and told them I could hear a baby crying at the restaurant."

  Tess sat there, trying to absorb all this, Marianna had found the bodies, Marianna had left the blood on Emmie. The little girl had not seen anything, she had no hidden memories to recover. Everything Emmie thought she knew about blood and death had come straight from her own imagination.

  "I could have used that information," Guzman said. "Twenty-one years ago, ten years ago, even last week—I could have done something with that."

  "But I didn't really know anything. It never occurred to me Gus was behind the killings, I honestly thought it was a robbery. And if it had gotten out about Frank and Lollie…well."

  "What?" Guzman asked.

  "People would have talked."

  Tess rubbed her eyes, wishing Marianna would be gone when she opened them again. She knew pride could make people do stupid things—it had kept her, for example, from doing anything when Crow's postcard had first arrived. A week had gone by from the day of that first veiled plea for help and her decision to pick up the phone and call his mother. If she had started looking for him sooner, would things have turned out any differently? Where would she be? Where would he be?

  A doctor was walking toward them down the hall, still in surgical scrubs. Did Tess only imagine it, or was he shaking his head ever so slightly from side to side?

  "Miss Monaghan?"

  "Yeah," Guzman answered for her.

  "He's conscious, but he's very weak. You can see him"—a warning look for Guzman—"but the officers aren't to speak to him, or try to get him to speak."

  Tess jumped to her feet, then wished she hadn't. What with giving blood and boycotting Guzman's cookies, the sudden movement made her woozy. She was going to black out, and she was furious. Her next-to-last conscious thought was that Crow was conscious, and now she wasn't, and wasn't there some weird symmetry in that? She reeled backward, into Guzman's arms, just like that stupid touchy-feely trust exercise. She fell, insisting to herself that she wasn't so foolish as to trust anyone ever again. Except, perhaps, Crow. It was just gravity, she told herself. Just goddamn gravity, up to its usual tricks. She was falling, helpless, incapable of doing anything about it.

  That was her last conscious thought.

  Epilogue

  I always loved him,

  I was just waiting for him to figure that he loved me. It finally happened the night of the Coronation, when I was presented as a Princess of the Court of Shattered Illusions. Well, maybe that wasn't the name, I don't remember everything. But I remember the important things. I said to him, just before my turn: "I'm not going to take your arm." He didn't understand at first. "What?" "I'm not going to take your arm. When I do the curtsey. I'm going to get up by myself. They applaud louder if you do it by yourself." You see, the curtsey we do is really more of a bow, extending one leg all the way out behind, while practically touching one's forehead to the floor. And the dresses are so heavy it's hard to stand. Most of the girls need their escort's arm to get back up. But I didn't, did I? I got the loudest applause of all, and when I stood up, I saw in Clay's eyes that I was a princess to him at last.

  There was a party after. It was at the Maguires' house in Monte Vista, a place we knew, we had grown up playing with their kids. The yard was huge, and it was full of secret places, places where women in high heels and men in pumps weren't likely to go. It had rained all week, and the ground was soft. I slipped off my shoes and took his hand and led him into one of those secret corners, a place where the Maguire kids liked to build forts, screened by the pecans and the poplars and the cottonwoods. I kissed him. He was scared at first, and then he didn't want to stop. The old folks band was playing some song. "I Concentrate on You." It would have been enough, just to kiss him. But I took off my dress—not my princess dress now, just an ordinary dress from Neiman Marcus—and hung it on the tree. "What are you doing?" he asked. "If we don't take our clothes off, they'll get dirty," I told him. He had been with only one girl—this stupid, bookish grind. She didn't count. I had been with other boys, but they didn't count. Now I had him, I knew he wouldn't want anyone but me. All I had to do was wait, and see if he would come to me, on his own. Two nights later, he did. He came to my room in the middle of the night, but he didn't dare make love to me there, in the house, where Gus might hear us. We went to the garage and climbed into the old Lincoln, like two teenagers who didn't have anywhere else to go. If you think about it, we were two teenagers who didn't have anywhere else to go.

  The sun was coming up by the time we finished, my necklace had broken, and we were picking the beads out of the upholstery, laughing, wondering what Gus would think if he found one. That's when Clay asked me: "Have you ever had breakfast at the Alamo?"

  And that was the happiest moment of my life. People say that all the time, but they don't mean it. They can't know it. I do. I am twenty-three years old, and the world seems intent on keeping me alive, even though the happiest moment of my life came six years ago, when Clay took me to breakfast.

  I'm sorry for the pain I caused, the damage I did—not to Darden and Weeks, who only got the punishment they deserved, and only after I had laid beneath them, letting them inside me, wearing them out so they would sleep and then Steve could take them away, and do what he had to do. But I am sorry I almost took from you the person you love. That was never my intent. I sent you the postcard, thinking you could save him. I didn't know it would take so long, that Steve would try so hard to get rid of him, that Crow would prove so determined to take care of me.

  I hope the happiest moments of both your lives are still to come.

  Tess folded up the letter and tucked it under her water glass, so it wouldn't fly off in the strong breeze. Eating outside in mid-November—now this was a Texas concept she could embrace. It was seventy-five degrees with a bright blue sky. Larry McMurtry, whose work had been filling her time over the past two weeks, had written it was the sky that made Texas distinctive. Among other things, she thought. But you could almost fall in love with Texas on a day like today, in a restaurant like this one, La Calesa. It occurred to her that it was only now, when she had completely given into San Antonio and its charms, that she would be able to leave it. She had fought the city so hard, and it had fought her back.

  She wondered if it would fight her for Crow as well.

  "So who gets Emmie?" she asked Rick. "The courts or the hospital?"

  "Her competency hearing won't be held for another few weeks. She seems determined to prove she's sane, which may be the best evidence that she's insane."

  "And Gus?"

  "He's been charged, and I'm sure he'll be indicted. I'm not so sure he'll be convicted. I hear that the city's most influential residen
ts are lining up to be character witnesses. But Clay will testify against him. In the end, it's Gus's confession to his own son that will be the most damning evidence. With Darden, Weeks, and Steve Villanueve dead, everything else is hearsay, or strictly circumstantial. It's not a slam dunk by any means. Still, I'm glad I'm not Gus Sterne's lawyer."

  "There was a time," Kristina put in gently, "when you would have salivated for a case like this."

  "That was before I had to devote all my energies to getting my fiancé acquitted on charges of theft and criminal mischief. Not to mention assault."

  "Assault?" asked Crow, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, picking at his food with no real appetite.

  "Ketchup counts," Rick said, and kissed Kristina's hand, the left one, the one with the diamond ring on it, the one he never seemed to let go of. Crow started to laugh, then winced. Tess's heart went out to him. There was nothing worse than having laughter remind you of how fragile you were, how thin the membrane was between life and death. It had happened to her last spring, and her injury had been nothing more than a bruised rib. For Crow, the memories would last much longer.

  "Are you coming back for our wedding?" Kristina asked.

  "Are we both invited, or just Crow?"

  "Both." She paused. "Although you'll probably be seated on the groom's side."

  "We'll see," Tess said. "It's still a year off. A lot can happen in a year."

  "Yes. I'm sure Kris and I will break up at least six or seven times before then," Rick said. Then very casually, too casually, he asked: "So what are you guys going to do?"

  "First I have to break it to Mrs. Nguyen that Esskay is relinquishing her role as La Casita's mascot. That's going to be hard on both of them. But we've got to drive Crow back to Charlottesville, where he can reunite with his parents."

  "Then what?"

  "Yes, Tess?" Crow looked up. His face was so thin, his color so pale. How Felicia would love putting twenty pounds back on him. "Then what?"

  "My business is in Baltimore, I have to go back there. My place is in Baltimore. But I thought you might want to come back, too. Eventually. Charm City could use some avant-garde polka music, too, you know."

  "Give up all this"—he waved a hand at the beautiful day, at their food, at the slyly seductive city that surrounded them—"for Baltimore?"

  "You'd also get me in the deal. If that's what you want."

  "Is it what you want?"

  "Yes."

  "And we'll live together?"

  "No." She couldn't help smiling at the shocked look on his face. "Life at Bond and Shakespeare streets is much too complicated these days, what with Tyner having a toothbrush on the premises—although not for long, I hope. Besides, living together, even unofficially, was what tripped us up the last time. We were playing house, which allowed me to play at our relationship. If I ever decide to live with you, I'll go whole hog. I'll get down on one knee and ask you to marry me."

  Crow's mouth was a tight line. "I would like to point out that, traditionally, it's the man who gets down on one knee and does the asking. Even these days."

  "I'd like to point out that, traditionally, it's the man who rides to the damsel's rescue," Tess said. "Even these days."

  Kristina and Rick laughed, but Tess had never been more serious. Neither had Crow, it seemed. He sipped his iced tea—the others were drinking Tecates, but his antibiotics couldn't be mixed with alcohol—and cut his quesedilla into careful fourths, then eighths, still not eating any of it.

  "Okay, your terms," he said. "But I have a condition, too. One day, I get to save you."

  "Oh Crow—" She reached out and took his hand. The world was almost unbearably vivid. She was aware not only of the blue sky above them, but the coolness of his hand in hers, the peppers in the thin brown salsa, the lime in her beer, the prisms of light refracted by Kristina's diamond. It was enough. It was too much. Plentitude. She finally got it.

  "Oh Crow," she repeated. "I think you just did."

  About the Author

  LAURA LIPPMAN was a newspaper reporter at the Baltimore Sun for fifteen years. Her Tess Monaghan novels—Baltimore Blues, Charm City, Butchers Hill, In Big Trouble, The Sugar House, and The Last Place—have won the Edgar, Agatha, Shamus, Anthony and Nero Wolfe awards, and her novel, In a Strange City, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her latest standalone crime novel, Every Secret Thing, was published by William Morrow in September 2003. You can visit her website at www.lauralippman.com.