by Rick Riordan
I couldn’t get White’s attention away from his imaginary tomato patches. His tone stayed pleasantly distracted.
"As I said to you before, my boy, faulty assumptions?
"So you have no relations with Sheff Construction," I said. "No knowledge of how their business changed in the mid-eighties." I finished my mimosa. "I’d’ve thought about that time you would’ve been looking for less high-profile opportunities yourself. The drug trafficking trial, the investigation of my father’s murder. It must’ve been very . . . tiresome."
I warranted only a strained sigh from our host, but you take what you can get.
“All I can tell you about Sheff Construction, my boy, is that Mr. Sheff, that would be Mr. Sheff, Jr., has little to do with the—shall we say the day-to-day running of business. Perhaps—" He raised a finger, as if he’d finally spotted the ideal place for some pink azaleas. "Perhaps you should speak to Terry Garza, the business manager. That might be more enlightening."
"We’d made arrangements," I said. "They were canceled last night, when we found him with an anticucho skewer sticking out of his neck."
That did it. White lifted his eyes off his future garden and stared at me. I think he was genuinely surprised. Then it passed.
"How unfortunate."
"Once the police come to question you, yes."
I put the photo we’d found in Garza’s trailer on top of Guy White’s newspaper, facing toward him. "What I think," I told him, "is that you are either in this photo, or you know who is. Sheff Construction started some extremely lucrative and extremely questionable dealings with city construction contracts ten years ago, Mr. White, and it’s an arrangement which is still going on. I would be surprised if anything that large could’ve escaped your notice. Either you were involved directly, or you’d make it your business to know who was."
White looked over at Maia, smiled like one parent to another when their child has said something cute and foolish.
"Mr. Navarre, I do not appreciate being scapegoated. As I told you, I went through much grief ten years ago, when your father died. Much unwarranted suffering."
"You’re telling me you’re being scapegoated again?"
He stretched like a cat. "Convenient solutions, Mr. Navarre."
"Help me find Karnau, then. He’s got the answers."
White gave me a look I couldn’t quite read. Behind the bland smile, he seemed to be deciding something. He got out of his chair and surveyed his lawn one more time. Then he took an index card and a pen from his pocket. He wrote something on the card, folded it, and let it fall to the table.
"Good-bye, Mr. Navarre." He stretched again, raising himself up on his toes. “So nice to meet you, Miss Lee."
When Guy White was a half acre away, strolling past his newly planted verbena, Maia picked up the index card and read it.
“Try Mr. Karnau at the Placio del Rio tonight. "
"That’s the Riverwalk Hilton. Downtown."
Maia put her champagne glass on the table. She looked at the index card again. "Why do I feel like we’ve just been offered a sacrifice?"
"Or someone’s unwanted ballast."
I looked across the yard at Guy White, who was now stepping carefully but easily between rows of his Blue Princess like this was his minefield and he’d crossed it many times before.
42
After that, the clean air of the country felt good. By one o’c1ock we were speeding along the banks of the Blanco River in Larry Drapiewski’s jeep, and Larry was rapidly consuming the Shiner Bocks and beef fajitas we’d brought him as a peace offering.
“Three beers," Maia said. "What happened to setting a good example for your youngers, Lieutenant?"
Larry laughed. "You get as big as me, Miss Lee, then you can see what three beers does to your blood alcohol content."
Drapiewski’s red jeep seemed right at home in the Hill Country. So did Larry. Off-duty, he was wearing boot-cut Levi’s and black leather Justins that must’ve been made from an entire alligator, a red shirt that made his hair and his freckles seem a little less neon by comparison. Howdy Doody on steroids.
"So what is it you folks are expecting to find?"
Drapiewski said. "It’s been a lot of years since they pulled Halcomb out of that deer blind, son. You expect something with an orange flag on it just sitting out there all this time?"
"That’d be fine," I said.
Larry laughed. The fajita disappeared in his mouth, followed closely by most of the beer. Maia looked on in awe.
Drapiewski’s friend with the Blanco County Sheriff’s Department had the unfortunate name of Deputy Chief Grubb. We met Grubb outside the Dairy Queen, a place he had obviously frequented over the years. His white hair had a slightly greasy tinge to it, and his upper body, once that of a football player, had swollen up over his belt buckle until it bore an uncanny resemblance to a Dilly Bar.
Larry made the introductions.
“Halcomb," Grubb said, by way of introduction.
"That was a luncher."
"Meaning—? "
When Grubb grinned you could get a good feel for how much he liked his coffee. The layers of yellow on his crooked incisors were like glacial flood lines.
"Meaning we ate it, son," he told me. "Never found a damn thing."
It was a ten-minute drive from the DQ in Grubb’s unit. Along the way, he told us about a slave ranch they’d closed down a week before—seventeen Mexican migrant workers kept in a barn, chained up at night, worked with a whip and a double-barrel shotgun during the day. Then he talked about the domestic disputes he’d broken up so far this week, the new Mexican restaurant in town, the high school team’s chances next fall. By the time we’d driven to the site and walked through five acres of brush and live oaks, Maia and I knew every bit of gossip Blanco had to offer, including where to buy your duty-free liquor, what fields the marijuana planes landed in, and which local wives were likely candidates for a steamy affair. All I needed now was a place with cheap rent.
"There it is," Grubb said finally, wiping the sweat off the back of his neck. "Ain’t much."
The blind had probably been old and abandoned when Randall Halcomb’s corpse was stuffed into it years ago. Now it was just a collection of rotten planks and sheets of plywood on four wobbly posts. It had tried to fall down a long time ago but had been stopped by a nearby mesquite that was still propping it up like a sober friend trying to support a drunk. There was a frayed rope ladder hanging from the back. Even if it had held together long enough to climb, the blind would’ve collapsed under the weight of a full—grown man.
Grubb and Drapiewski started trading stories of gory hunting accidents while Maia and I poked around. Nothing was marked with an orange flag. Five cows were standing in a clump in the shadow of the blind, hiding from the afternoon sun. They looked at me with a kind of lazy resentment, wondering what I was doing there. I started to ask myself the same question. I’d been hoping, maybe, to match the terrain to Karnau’s photos, get a sense for where the shots had been taken from, why Halcomb’s employers had chosen this site for a meeting and why Karnau might’ve been here. So far nada.
"Grubb," I called.
The deputy chief came over next to me, with Drapiewski and Maia following.
I nodded at the deer blind. "Did you determine whether this was a dump site or not?"
Grubb took off his deputy’s hat and wiped his forehead on his arm.
"A lot of blood about a hunnerd yards down that way, " he said. "That’s where they killed him. Then they dragged him over here."
"They. As in two."
Grubb nodded. "Could be more. There were tire tracks down that way. FBI took some plaster mold footprints too. I don’t recall exactly what the story was."
"Cause of death?"
"Old boy got it right between the eyes at short range. Hell of a shooter. You know what a Sheridan Knock about is?"
".22 caliber single shot pistol," Maia said, almost absently. "Went out of production
in ’62; only twenty thousand were made."
Grubb and Drapiewski gaped at her. In khakis and a white tank top, her eyes invisible behind large black sunglasses, Maia looked like a safari veteran. There was a single line of sweat running from her ear to her jaw. Otherwise the heat seemed to be having no effect on her. She’d been looking toward the deer blind until she noticed that she’d become the center of attention.
She shrugged. "Just a guess."
Larry grinned.
"A Sheridan," I said. "My dad had one, actually got it right after Korea."
Grubb was back to swabbing his forehead. "Sure. They were popular with a lot of the vets. Target shooters, mostly. Thing was, it’s a mighty strange gun to murder somebody with. Very clear striations on the bullet—easy to pin down. And by ’85 they weren’t what you’d call standard street issue."
I thought about a picture I’d seen in the Sheffs’ house—Dan Sr. as a young soldier, off for Korea. I thought about the box of .22 ammo in Dan Jr.’s office closet.
"And you said it’s a single shot."
Larry whistled silently. “You got to be pretty sure of your shooting to kill a man like Halcomb with a gun like that. Pretty damn ballsy."
“Or," said Maia, “you’ve got to be not really planning on murder. You might bring a gun like that along for protection to a dangerous meeting, if it’s the only gun you have. Or for a little leverage if things got rough. But probably not for a premeditated kill. Either way you’re not talking about a pro." She looked at me. "Not the mob. They’d come a lot better prepared."
Grubb looked Maia up and down one more time, a mixture of confusion and budding respect on his sticky forehead. "What’d you say you were again, honey? Chinese?"
To her credit, Maia left his face intact. She said dryly, "That’s right, Mr. Grubb. The ones who built the railroads. You remember."
I looked back at the cows and tried to think. The cows didn’t offer any suggestions.
"Is there anything else?" I asked Grubb.
The old deputy took his eyes off Maia, looked at me, and shook his head. "Just a dead end, son."
Drapiewski shrugged. He looked sorry, but not surprised.
I could’ve left then. I had something to go on. Our two law enforcement escorts were definitely ready to get back to the air-conditioning and the Dilly Bars of a friendly Dairy Queen. But after sweating in the sunshine and swatting the mosquitoes for a few more minutes, I started walking down toward the place where Halcomb had been shot.
There were more mesquite trees down in the hollow. The dry brush was so high we had sticker burrs as thick as fur on our pants by the time we got to the murder site. It was a small clearing barely accessible by two tire ruts that led off into the woods. It was the place in Beau Karnau’s photos.
"Not a bad place for a meeting," Larry said. "Very low-profile. "
He started picking the sticker burrs out of his crotch. Maia leaned against a dead tree. Grubb just looked at me, losing patience.
"What are you thinking, son?" he asked.
I wanted to give him an answer. I didn’t have one.
"Who owns this land?" I asked.
Grubb thought about it. "Right now, I don’t know. It was pretty much abandoned in ’84. Old Mr. Baker passed on and none of the sons would move back into the house. Then in ’86 the ranch burned down. It’s changed hands plenty of times since. Nobody uses it nowadays except the neighbors’ cattle."
"What neighbors?"
“Vivians on the north, Gardiners on the south."
Neither name rang a bell.
“A ranch house burned down?"
Grubb nodded. He told me about the big electrical storm they’d had back in ’86. Lightning had caused a dozen small fires, one of them taking the old ranch house up the hill. He looked at me suspiciously.
"I reckon you’ll want to see that too."
Drapiewski laughed.
"Why not?" I said.
It took a lot of compliments and the promise of a free dinner to get Grubb up that hill, but we finally made it. There wasn’t much left of the house, just a thin place in the grass where the foundation had been. I couldn’t figure out why it looked familiar. I made a complete circuit around the place.
"Is this gonna get us something besides a suntan, son?" said Drapiewski after a few minutes.
That’s when I tripped over something large and metal. Grubb and Drapiewski came up to see while I dug it half out of the dirt—a piece of black iron piping that had been shaped into cursive writing about three feet long and a foot high. It said "Lazy B."
“Yeah," said Grubb. "I remember that. The old gates to the place. What do you know."
It took me a minute to place the name. Then something else clicked.
" ‘Lazy Bastard,’ " I said.
Grubb glared at me. "What was that, boy?"
"Miss Lee and I saw a photo of this place recently. Taken at night, during a meteor storm."
Grubb nodded, more hot now than interested, daydreaming of ice cream and shade.
Drapiewski and Maia looked at me, both of them trying to read my expression. My throat suddenly felt very dry.
“So this is the angle Karnau shot from," Maia said. "That only makes sense."
"No," I said. "Lillian said something before she disappeared. She and Karnau used to go on photography shoots, sometimes for days at a time. She mentioned camping out on a godforsaken hilltop in Blanco. She mentioned photographing a meteor shower."
“Funny coincidence," Drapiewski said, looking back into the hollow where Halcomb had been shot. I tried to imagine Randall Halcomb in the deer blind, curled up with a perfect red hole between his eyes, but I kept coming up with Lillian’s face.
"Yeah," I said. “Funny."
43
When we got back to Queen Anne Street, Maia looked tired and angry. She lay on the futon, staring into space while I wrestled off my sticker burr-covered jeans. Finally they flew across the room and buried Robert Johnson in his bed of dirty laundry. I don’t think he even noticed.
I lay down next to Maia, hugging her from behind, my face in her hair. When I reached for her hand it was a clenched fist.
After a few minutes she sighed. "Tres, get out of here with me. Destroy that damn disk if you need to, but get out of here."
I tried to pretend she hadn’t said anything. I wanted to just lie there, keep my eyes closed, listen to Maia breathing as long as I could. But she pulled away. She sat up and looked down at me. The anger in her eyes watered down to frustration.
"Two men have died because of that disk, and now you’ve started advertising you’ve got it. To me that makes the rest insignificant. Even Lillian. Especially Lillian."
I shook my head. “I can’t just leave it. And I can’t destroy it. Not if it’s about my father’s killers."
"You want to get yourself killed instead?"
There was no correct answer to that. After another minute Maia lost the spirit even to glare at me. She sank back into the cushions.
“God damn you, " she said.
I lay there for a long time, contemplating how else I could possibly screw things up. Mentally I started placing bets on who would be coming through my front door next with a gun.
But of course my life wasn’t complicated enough. The ironing board rang. When I picked up the receiver I knew I was either listening to a rock tumbler or an aging smoker trying to breathe. Carl Kelley, retired deputy, my father’s old buddy.
"Hey, son," he said. "Didn’t hear from you yet. Thought I’d call."
Yet? Then I realized it was Sunday afternoon again. I’d been in town exactly one week. In Kelley’s mind I’d started a tradition when I’d called him.
"Hi, Carl."
I settled in for the duration and opened a Shiner Bock. Maia watched me curiously while Carl launched into a discussion of the newest terminal illnesses he’d read about. He talked about how worthless his son in Austin was. Then he started mentioning past discussions we’d never had.
He repeated himself. Finally I listened more carefully to the background noises on the other end of the line.
"Carl," I interrupted, "where are you?"
He was silent for a minute, except for the breathing.
“Don’t worry about it," he said. His voice was shaky. His tone asked me to please worry about it.
"What hospital, Carl?"
"I didn’t want to trouble you," he said. "My neighbor brings me in for a cold and they say I’ve got pneumonia. Some fucking liver disease. I don’t know what all. Can you believe that?"
He started to cough so loudly I had to pull the receiver away from my ear. When the coughing subsided it took a few moments for his gravelly breathing to start up again.
"What hospital, Carl?" I said again.
"The Nix. But don’t worry about it. They’ve got a TV set up for me. I’ve got a little money left. I’m okay."
"I’ll come by," I told him.
"That’s okay, son."
He held the line for a minute longer, but he didn’t need to say anything. I heard the loneliness and the fear even louder than the hospital TV.
"What?" said Maia when I hung up.
"Somebody from my past," I said.
"Of course."
My look made her sorry she’d said it. The irritation drained out of her face. She dropped her eyes. I dug another handful of fifties out of Beau Karnau’s retirement fund and made sure Maia still had bullets in her .45.
"I’ll be back later," I told her.
Maybe Maia asked me a question. I didn’t wait to hear it.
44
The Nix looked like exactly the kind of building Superman would’ve loved to jump over in the 1940s. After saying a few Hail Marys and grinding up twelve floors in the antique elevator, I found Carl’s semi-private room at the end of a narrow blue-lit hallway.
I thought I’d been prepared to see Carl as an old man. I was wrong. I couldn’t find his face anywhere in the thinly coated skull that looked up at me. Oxygen tubes ran from his nostrils like an absurdly long mustache. If he had been any more frail they would’ve had to weight him down to keep him from floating out of bed. The only thing still heavy was his voice.