Half a Mind (The Kate Teague Mysteries)

by Wendy Hornsby

  “It’s late.” Tejeda pulled off his shirt and started the hot water in the shower. “I need to talk to Kate. Would you ask her to come in here?”

  Richie cut off a yawn and gave his father a worldly leer. “In here?”

  “Please. And you go get some sleep.”

  Tejeda turned on the massage jet and stood under the hot water, letting it pound his back. He was tired and worried about his kids. He tried to focus his thoughts, but the questions he had for William Tyler at San Quentin ran in a continuous cycle through his head until they became nothing but a blur.

  He was squeezing shampoo onto his head when Kate opened the shower door.

  “You’re letting out my steam,” he said.

  “Tough.” She began to strip and he wanted to watch, but shampoo kept running into his eyes. When he finally had the stuff rinsed out, she was sitting on the tile bench at the end of the shower, looking sleepy and irresistible through the mist.

  She yawned. “I suppose there’s no point trying to talk you out of going to San Quentin this morning.”

  “None.”

  “You need to sleep, Roger.”

  “I’ll sleep on the plane.”

  “Right,” she said. “It’s a fifty-minute trip.”

  “If there’s no weekend tie-up on the Golden Gate Bridge, I should be back by noon.” He took her hand and drew her up to him. “After lunch, we’ll take a nap.”

  “I’ve taken naps with you before,” she smiled, picking up the bar of soap and lathering his belly. “And they never had much to do with sleeping.”

  He put his arms around her and held her close, the soap and the water slippery between them. “We have a whole lifetime for sleeping.”

  “When I arranged your airline tickets for San Francisco, I ordered you a car and a driver.”

  “Spud can drive.”

  “Better you should both rest,” she said, rivulets of water coursing down her chin and onto her chest. “Especially you. I don’t want you too tired for a nice long nap.”

  Kate managed to find space in the breakfront for the stacks of china dinner plates. Yesterday everyone had been so festive, and then after Sean was dead they had all seemed ashamed that they were ever happy. She wanted to get the last of the dishes put away before the others saw them, to spare them the reminder, the way a mortuary sweeps away the wilted flowers after a funeral.

  It had been early still, barely six, when she got back from taking Tejeda to the airport. And, fortunately, everyone in the house except Trinh was still upstairs.

  The mantel clock chimed once for the half-hour: six-thirty. Tejeda should have landed by now and be on his way up the Bayshore Freeway. In some ways she was glad he had gone. She wished he would stop challenging the obvious limits of his endurance, though she admired his gutsiness, because she wanted to have him around for a long time. She saw this trip as a break; in the back seat of a limo, under the protective wing of Eddie Green, how much trouble could he get into? By the time he got home, she hoped to have at least some of the extraneous problems out of the way.

  In the meantime, there wasn’t much she could do until people got out of bed. She took a sip of tepid coffee and despaired of squeezing in the candlesticks. It would be much easier, she thought, to stash everything left over into the pantry and close the door. But she needed something mundane to keep herself occupied, to keep her mind off what had happened until she could do something about it.

  All of these dishes had come out of the breakfront, she thought, so there had to be room for them all to go back in. She picked up a candlestick and looked at the cupboard space: it was a matter of manipulation. Like what was happening to their household and the O’Shays and the Morrows. They were all being walked through some strange scenario like marionettes. And she hated it, hated being so easily manipulated.

  She closed the breakfront, scooped up a load of silver, and carried it into the pantry. No more, she thought as she shoved aside boxes of cereal and canisters of rice and flour to make room; somehow she was going to cut the strings.

  With only a modicum of care, she deposited the silver and went back to the dining room for another load.

  “ ’Morning.” Mike Rios was taking camera equipment out of a bag on the floor. “Have a nice Thanksgiving?”

  “You’re out early.” She stood holding the edge of the door for a moment, alarmed for no good reason she could think of. Then she remembered telling him he could come on Friday morning to take pictures of the ceiling moldings.

  “Will you be long?” she asked.

  “No. This whole exercise is a waste, anyway.” He screwed a macro lens onto his camera. “Carl will never find a craftsman who will duplicate this in wood for less than thirty, forty thousand. Resin castings would be a hell of a lot cheaper and easier. And I wouldn’t mind earning the money myself.”

  “If it will be too expensive, why bother with the pictures?” she asked, picking up another armload of dishes.

  “He thinks he wants it. So I’ll cost it out for him. Hell, anyway it’s his money.”

  “Right.” She backed through the swing door. “Excuse me.”

  Carl had money. If he wanted to duplicate the moldings badly enough, Kate thought, the cost wouldn’t stop him. Then she shrugged; even if he didn’t have money, if Carl wanted something badly enough, he would find a way to get it.

  Mike Rios was up on a chair focusing his lens when she returned. He had made a space among the crystal goblets at the end of the table for his sketchbook. As she loaded the goblets onto a tray, she glanced at the top page of sketches he had made of the moldings on his first visit. They were exquisite, showing every detail of the carved patterns.

  “You’re very talented,” she said. “Do you mind if I look through your book?”

  “No.” He nodded as if it didn’t matter, but he flushed a deep red. After snapping a few more photographs, he came down and looked over her shoulder while she flipped the stiff pages.

  His book was full of architectural sketches, many of notable old buildings around Santa Angelica. He had captured the personality of each building in clean, simple line drawings. The details of frescoes and friezes and peeling window frames filled the edges of his pages, like cameos, each one a tiny masterpiece on its own.

  He had made studies not only of the grander buildings but also of a well-weathered barn, the ancient beach cabanas at the yacht club, a squatter’s cottage up in a canyon beyond town.

  When she was about halfway through the sketchbook, he took it from her and flipped to the back.

  “You might recognize these,” he said.

  Her first reaction was a possessive lust. He had made a six-page study of her estate, the three houses, the garages, the beach stairs. The draftsmanship and detail were impressive on all of them, but his sketch of the gazebo framed by a stormy sky was absolutely masterful.

  “I’m impressed,” she said. “Where did you study?”

  “Nowhere, really.” He closed the book. “I had a pretty good teacher in high school, and I took a couple of architectural-rendering classes at the community college. But that’s it. Art school’s pretty expensive. And there isn’t a good one around here.”

  “Did you look into scholarships?”

  “Yeah.” She heard bitterness in his laugh. “I always thought I had it made. My brother was supposed to graduate from college, get a job, and help me through. But it didn’t work out that way, and now I’m helping him.”

  She smiled. “Life’s full of curve balls, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would you consider selling me the sketches of the estate? I would love to have them.”

  “Price would be pretty high.”

  “It should be.”

  “Yeah?” He was disassembling the camera, not looking at her. “I’ll think about it.”

  Kate went back to the tray of glasses, thinking about how perfect the sketches would be in the study, framed, hanging by the French doors from where the s
ubjects of several of the drawings were visible. Especially the gazebo. She was trying to figure out a decent offer to make him when he snapped his camera case shut.

  “Finished?” she said.

  He shouldered the capacious bag. “You know, I never could figure what you had in common with that guy Carl.”

  “You’re not alone.” She smiled.

  “I thought of one thing.” His grin was sardonic. “Money’s no object.”

  19

  The uniformed limo driver held up a tastefully small card with “Little Rigo” printed in neat block letters. Tejeda took a look at the car and smiled, admiring Kate’s restraint. This was no rock star’s showy stretch Cadillac. She had arranged for a stately black Mercedes.

  He nudged Eddie Green as they walked toward the passenger loading zone in front of the airline terminal. “Think the department will reimburse us for transportation?”

  “Yeah. Fifty cents a mile.”

  “Should just about cover breakfast. I’ll ask the driver to drive through the first McDonald’s.”

  At that hour, the San Francisco airport was nearly deserted. The driver, seeing the only likely pair of men approach, opened the back door of the limo. “Lieutenant?” he said, touching his cap.

  “Can you find your way to San Quentin?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said snappily, his posture Central Casting straight. “The trip should take less than two hours, giving you an hour to spare before your appointment. If you would like to stop anywhere along the way, perhaps for sightseeing, just buzz me.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Peters, sir.”

  “Okay, Peters. We’re hungry.”

  “I believe, sir, that you have been anticipated.”

  Tejeda interpreted Peters’ bow as an invitation, and stepped into the car with Eddie close behind. The first smell was leather, the second was fresh coffee.

  With the efficiency of an airline hostess, Peters leaned into the car, pulled down lap trays, and served them from covered dishes: steaming eggs Benedict, juice, croissants, coffee, with Godiva chocolate mints in a tiny silver basket.

  “What?” Eddie said, tucking a starched napkin under his chin. “No Grape Nuts?”

  Peters actually smiled as he closed the door and went around to the driver’s seat.

  Eddie dabbed at a blob of egg yolk on his chin as they accelerated up the freeway on-ramp. “Don’t you think this is a little too much? Pass me the coffee, will you? A rental Ford would have sufficed.”

  “Kate wanted you to get some rest.”

  “She wanted me to get some rest? That’s a hoot.”

  “Think about it. Who would be driving the rental Ford while I slept?”

  “Right,” Eddie mused, sloshing cream into his cup. “Tell Kate I think she’s okay.”

  “Tell her yourself.”

  Tejeda finished his breakfast, popped a mint into his mouth, pushed the tray aside, and slid down against the deep seat. He was asleep before the mint was half-dissolved. He roused once, long enough to see hazy sunlight on the boats around Sausalito and to remind himself to take notice on the way back. Peters was a pro and the car rode like a baby’s cradle; Tejeda didn’t stir again until Eddie shook his shoulder.

  “Next stop, San Quentin,” Eddie said, pouring out the last of the coffee.

  Tejeda sat up and tried to shake off the lingering drowsiness, the dull throb in his head. He sipped some ice water and held the cold glass to his head and watched the scenery slip by.

  They were off the freeway, winding through the dry hills along the waterfront. Ahead, there was a cluster of dull green barracks wedged into the face of a stony brown bluff that overhung Richmond harbor. That innocuous cluster was San Quentin State Prison.

  There had once been a village called San Quentin outside the prison walls, modest houses, a few bars and shops, a public school for kids whose fathers were locked up inside, and for the kids of their jailers. But it had been absorbed by time and the encroachment of chain discount outlets oozing off the southern edge of the city of Richmond. The prison was simply a part of the blighted landscape, no more noticeable, or ugly, than the electric-power plant below or the huge cranes off-loading cargo ships in the harbor.

  Tejeda always thought that the walls of San Quentin seemed to sweat. Or cry. He blamed the climate of the entire Bay Area, too damp and cold for his taste. And today, altogether too far away from Kate.

  The warden cut through the usual preliminaries quickly—a search, a fast exchange of bullshit—and had Eddie and Tejeda escorted to the cellblock that comprised California’s Death Row. It was early and the prison was understaffed on the weekend; the interview was to take place in the corridor outside William Tyler’s cell.

  At last count, there were two-hundred and forty-one men waiting for their turn in the gas chamber. Walking along the catwalk toward an isolation area at the far end of the third tier of cells, Tejeda recognized at least a dozen familiar faces looking out through the bars, a sort of all-star lineup of California murderers. A few even nodded back.

  William Tyler sat alone in an end cell in an area segregated by an extra set of barred doors, waiting for his early-morning guests. While the jailer arranged two chairs outside his cell, Tyler watched with eyes so dark and cold Tejeda couldn’t see his pupils. He had aged more than the three years he had been inside.

  The last time Tejeda had seen Tyler was at his sentencing. Tyler had been defeated somewhat then, but he had still been a hard-muscled bantam cock of a man. Something had happened at San Quentin to loosen his tightly wound springs.

  “I only get two visitors a month,” Tyler said, sitting on the edge of his bunk and looking out through his green bars. “My lover’s coming up today. I haven’t seen him for a while. I hope this visit of yours hasn’t fucked me up.”

  “Be nice,” Tejeda said, “and we’ll clear your boyfriend with the warden.”

  There was an almost tearful waver in Tyler’s sigh.

  “How have you been, Willie?”

  “Not too bad, all things considered. Lots of time to read. I’m finishing another master’s by mail. Physics this time. Not that I can do anything with it, you know.” He shrugged, but he seemed less depressed the more he talked. “I miss getting around. I miss my lover. But I figure that at an average of six inches per, there are forty yards of dick on Death Row. Until I got sent down here to isolation, I probably took in fifteen yards of it.”

  Eddie crossed his legs. “Is that why you’re locked up in Siberia?”

  “Indirectly. I’m HIV-positive.” He rolled up his sleeve and showed a four-inch patch of blue skin—a nasty lesion of Kaposi’s sarcoma, an early symptom of full-blown AIDS. “Guess I have a double death sentence. It’s just a matter of which takes me first.”

  “I’m sorry, Willie,” Tejeda said.

  “Don’t be. What do you want?”

  “Someone is trying to duplicate Arty Silver’s murders again. Arty thinks you might know something about it.”

  “Not me.”

  “You never told us how Arty persuaded you to kill for him.”

  “I don’t have to talk about that anymore. I confessed, I got sent up. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.”

  “It isn’t over for us.” Tejeda leaned closer to the bars. “What was your relationship to Arty?”

  “Read my transcripts. We were friends in high school, in the math club together. He spent a lot of time at my house.”

  “Were you lovers?”

  “No. I tried to help him come out. But he was so afraid of his old man, he kept it secret from his family until he was arrested.”

  “What did he think his father would do?”

  “Kill him,” Tyler said baldly.

  “What sort of kid was Arty?” Tejeda asked.

  “Ask a shrink. I only know what I saw. He was a good student—all the kids in the family are really bright, not that they ever did anything with their brains. He spent a lot of time in the library,
or just hanging around, trying to stay out of his father’s way.”

  “I heard all this a dozen times during your trial. You haven’t been kids for a long time, Willie. And Arty hasn’t lived with his father for twenty years. What I have never been able to understand is how he got someone as intelligent as you are to kill for him.”

  Willie shrugged. “I don’t know myself. Guess I’m a loyal kind of guy.”

  “But you’re not stupid.”

  “Don’t be too sure.”

  The jailer took a call in his cubicle, then came out with a card in his hand. “Hey, Tyler. Put your clean shirt away. Your visitor can’t make it today.”

  Tyler sulked. “I didn’t want to see him anyway.”

  “Your lover?” Tejeda asked.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Sure it does,” Eddie said. “You were hot to see him.”

  “I’m tired. I don’t want to see anybody.”

  “Who were you expecting?” Eddie pressed.

  When Tyler didn’t answer, the jailer looked at his card. “Donald Kelley,” he read.

  “Wouldn’t you know?” Eddie took the card to read for himself. “The further I get into this, the crazier it gets.”

  Tejeda had been watching Tyler sink into a spiritless heap. “Are you trying to protect Don Kelley, Willie?”

  “Why should I? He doesn’t care about me.”

  “But he did once?”

  Tyler only shrugged dispiritedly.

  “Don know anything about the murder you were sent up for?”

  “I thought he did, but I was wrong.”

  “Shit, Tyler.” Tejeda rubbed his eyes. “What have you done?”

  Willie looked up at the ceiling for a while; then he sighed and spoke in a very soft voice. “I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone before. And if you repeat it, I’ll deny I said it.”

  “Okay.”

  “I never killed anyone in my life.”

  “The fuck you didn’t,” Eddie spouted, but Tejeda put out a restraining hand.

  “Go ahead, Willie,” he said. In the back of his mind he had been expecting something like this for a long time. Almost every other man in this cellblock claimed his own innocence with boring insistence, and would likely continue to do so until the cyanide pellets dropped into the bucket under his chair. Anyone who had heard enough of them knew they were just blowing empty air. But with William Tyler, Tejeda felt, this profession of innocence was different. He had never been able to cast Tyler as a killer.