Half a Mind (The Kate Teague Mysteries)

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Let me see.” Kate bunched the sweater up, then pulled it back down exactly as Theresa had had it. “How’s that?”

  “Good. Thanks.” She scooped up an armload of books and finished her grandfather’s juice. “Can I drive?”

  “Okay with you, Ricardo?” Kate asked.

  “I have already survived two teenage drivers. She can’t be any worse than her father.” He dropped a lunch on top of Theresa’s books and followed her out the back toward the garage. “Besides, if I die today, I have already had a lovely, full life. I prayed to my maker last night, in case Rigo was right and we were all killed in our beds. So I am ready, Theresa, my darling. Drive on.”

  Theresa rolled her eyes at Kate. “See where Daddy gets it?”

  “Yes, I do,” Kate laughed. “And I love it. I suppose you won’t mind driving the Rolls? Reece still has my Jag.”

  “If I don’t hear anything about my station wagon soon,” Ricardo said, “I’ll have to see about renting a car. I was sure they would have found it by now—Richie needs the textbooks he left in the back.”

  Kate touched his arm. “Why would you rent a car when there are normally three in this garage?”

  “You would trust me with one of your cars?”

  “It’s only fair. You trust me with your son and granddaughter.”

  “How many tubas you think I can fit in a Rolls?”

  “Plenty. Have you ever seen the trunk?” she asked, taking Theresa’s books so that Theresa would have both hands to open the heavy garage door.

  The middle door, behind which the Rolls was parked, was the toughest. First Theresa pulled the door open wide enough to get behind, then wedged herself in and pushed. This took so much effort that she had the door halfway open before she bothered to glance inside.

  She stopped dead, staring. “Grandpa, look.”

  Kate ran to her, arriving at her side an instant before Ricardo. She looked where Theresa pointed and almost laughed, until she realized how impossible this situation was; Ricardo’s blue station wagon was parked in the space usually taken by the Jaguar.

  “How did it get here?” Ricardo asked.

  “Good question,” Kate said. “Don’t go in there, Theresa.”

  “Okay. Should I go get the policeman from the house?”

  “Please,” Kate said. “Ask him to call Eddie Green.”

  Ricardo was peering through the hatch-back window. “Everything is here. Even Lance’s bags. Help me unload the back and you won’t have to bother driving us this morning.”

  “Ricardo, Rigo would tell us not to touch the car in case there are fingerprints. We don’t know when the car was put here—before or after Lance was killed.”

  She knelt down on the threshold and looked under the cars for anything that didn’t belong there. The man who came to wash the cars every week also swept the garage floor and put away any tools that might have been left about.

  The car man had come on Friday. It had rained off and on during that day and drizzled some more on Saturday. Under the Rolls she found dried mud, and on the left, under the station wagon, a number of muddy treads that matched the absent Jag. She looked at the mud flaps behind Ricardo’s rear wheels; the mud was the same pale yellow-brown she had kicked off her shoes the night before while waiting for the Oceanside police to meet her on the freeway. It was a long way from the dark, oily color of city dirt.

  “Ricardo, there’s nothing we can do here,” she said, picking up Theresa’s books. “I want to go see Roger.”

  “What’s the matter, honey?”

  “Look there, beside your car. What do you see?”

  “Grease spot,” he said.

  “Grease spot beside the car?”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “I’m not sure I want to know. Here comes the policeman. If he’ll let us take the Rolls out, I want to go. Now.”

  Tejeda waited in a rocking chair beside his hospital bed with his small bag packed and ready beside his feet. His bruises had turned from livid purple to dull blue-gray. But the color in his cheeks was good, his dark eyes were bright. Seeing him look so healthy, Kate wished she had already dropped off Ricardo and Theresa. His two nights in the hospital had been the first time she had slept without Tejeda since he had moved in. It wasn’t the footsteps of the policeman in the hall that had kept her awake, it was the empty place in the bed beside her.

  Kate bent over him for a kiss. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Home. I have an IOU to collect, remember?”

  She kissed him again, letting her tongue slide between his lips. “The house is too empty without you.”

  “You look fine, son. But don’t push yourself this time.” Ricardo tested the springs on the bed. “Did you hear? Theresa found my car.”

  “Theresa did?” Tejeda looked up at his daughter, who was waiting impatiently just inside the room. “Where did you find it?”

  “If you’re coming with us now, can I tell you on the way to school? I’m going to be so late for my biology lab.”

  Tejeda refused the wheelchair and walked out holding Kate’s hand. His one concession was letting his father carry his bag. He had left behind a cart mounded with flowers and potted plants which a nurse said would be distributed wherever they would be appreciated.

  Theresa drove, with Ricardo beside her to apply imaginary brakes, leaving Kate and Tejeda to snuggle in the back seat.

  Though he insisted that he was just fine, Kate noticed that the short walk to the parking lot had left him a bit pale. He rested his head against her shoulder and scarcely moved during the fifteen-minute ride to Santa Angelica High School. It felt wonderful to have him in her arms, but he was so quiet Kate began to worry; Tejeda was never one to sit still for very long.

  With occasional amendments from Theresa, Ricardo recounted the discovery of his car in Kate’s garage. Tejeda just listened, offering no comments and asking for no clarifications except to say they shouldn’t have moved the Rolls. It was enough of a response that Kate began to relax.

  “Where are you getting out, Theresa?” Ricardo asked.

  “North campus, by the science building.”

  She found a spot in a loading zone and pulled the Rolls to the curb. “ ’Bye, everybody,” she said, sliding out with her armful of books. “Dad, stay in bed.” Then she looked at Kate and blushed furiously. “You know what I mean.”

  Ricardo moved around to the driver’s seat and gave Theresa’s back a quick “Shave and a Haircut” with the horn. Theresa ignored him but a dozen students stopped to applaud.

  Ricardo waved to them, laughing. “They can do that because I’m not their grandfather. Poor Theresa has the double burden of having both her grandparents on the faculty. She does a good job of avoiding us, like her father and aunt did before her. Except, of course, when she forgets her lunch money or her life falls apart before three o’clock.”

  “How’s Mom?” Tejeda asked.

  “Fine. She’s taking today off to talk to Cassie about the facts of life.” Ricardo pulled into a faculty lot and parked in a space with his name on it.

  “Rigo,” he said, “I want to show Kate my band room.”

  “The Ricardo Tejeda Museum, you mean?”

  “Only take a minute. You can wait in the car.”

  Tejeda roused himself. “I’m coming in. I could turn old and gray during one of your minutes.”

  “Suit yourself,” Ricardo laughed. He took Kate by the arm as they walked. “Did Rigo ever play the saxophone for you?”

  “No.”

  “He was a decent musician in high school. If it hadn’t been for football, he might have been damned good.” He led them into his office, a long, narrow enclosure with a glass front that overlooked the cavernous band room. “What instruments do you play, Kate?”

  “The piano, badly.”

  “I don’t suppose you went to high school here?”

  “No. My mother sent me to boarding school.”

  “I
’ve been at this school since 1952.” He showed her a wall lined with framed group photographs of kids holding their musical instruments. “Virtually every kid in town has passed through my classes, music appreciation if not band or orchestra. I see them around all the time. Usually I can’t remember their names, but I rarely forget their instruments.”

  “Phew,” Tejeda breathed. “Dad, did you leave a tuna sandwich in your desk over the weekend?”

  “Damn kids. I keep telling them to dump their lunches outside.” Ricardo was throwing his office windows open, when he stopped and pressed his face against the glass and peered into the dark band room. “Hey, who’s in here? Early practices are Tuesdays and Thursdays. Rigo, hit the switch there by the door, will you?”

  Fluorescent overheads blinked on, showing the crescent of band risers, chairs, music stands. There was a boy sitting in the third tier and to the right of the conductor’s podium. He wore clean jeans and a print shirt; his hair was neatly combed. Kate couldn’t see his face because he was sitting with his arms draped over a music stand, his chin resting on his chest. His pose seemed natural for a youngster, very loose. But he didn’t move when Ricardo called out to him again.

  “Maybe he’s sick,” Ricardo said.

  Tejeda caught his arm. “Stay here, Dad. Kate, you know who to call.”

  Kate just missed Eddie Green and Vic Spago at the house, Trinh told her. They had left less than five minutes earlier, following the truck towing Ricardo’s car. Kate called headquarters and had them paged.

  She watched Tejeda make three circuits around the boy, studying him from a wide, respectful distance, as if he were examining an unusual sculpture in a museum. The boy was dead; the smell made that clear. But there was something oddly beautiful about the tableau in the band room. She saw symmetry and grace and sadness in the way the body was arranged; this was an imitation of life. She saw the boy in a posture of profound grief.

  Tejeda had to get down on one knee to see the boy’s face. He looked. Slowly he moved away and sat down on a riser. He glanced once more at the boy, then dropped his head into his hands.

  The stench in the band room was overpowering, but Kate inured herself and went to Tejeda. His honey-colored skin had faded to an unhealthy yellow, as if he had no more blood than the boy beside him. When he raised his head, she saw tears in his eyes.

  “I can’t remember his name,” he whispered. “I can’t call his parents until I know his name.”

  “Do you want me to look at him?” Kate asked.

  “If you can.”

  She held her breath and bent over to see the face. Close up, he wasn’t nearly as clean as he had seemed at first. His skin was puffy and colorless, with dirt ground into the creases. The muscles of his jaws had knotted, skewing his features to one side. But she still recognized him.

  As she stood up, gagging, she saw the line of industrial staples inside his collar, attaching the head to the body.

  She reached for Tejeda’s hand. “Sean O’Shay,” she said.

  “Oh, God.”

  “Is he attached to Wally Morrow?”

  “Probably.”

  “This is what you were waiting for, the final act?”

  He shook his head. “I expected something very different; maybe I’ve been wrong all along. Come away. There’s nothing we can do for him.”

  The putrid smell wasn’t as noxious in Ricardo’s office, but it seemed to cling to her hair and clothes until she felt contaminated. From the other room, she had noticed Ricardo’s back and thought that he didn’t have the stomach to look at the corpse. But he seemed to be very busily searching for someone or something among the band and orchestra photographs on the wall.

  “Dad?” Tejeda said.

  “I think I’m getting close,” Ricardo said.

  Kate tried to see what he was looking for. On the whole, the photographs looked very much the same, standard eight-by-ten black-and-white glossies in thin walnut frames. But as she looked at them individually, she found a capsule history of high-school kids for the last thirty-seven years.

  The styles they wore changed from one year to the next, the shapes of collars and styles of barbering pinpointing the passage of time with as much exactitude as the dates on the frames. Ricardo had started his search in long hair and love beads and segued into designer jeans and gold neck chains.

  He took one picture off the wall and held it up to the scene in the band room. It apparently didn’t have what he wanted, and he moved on to the next semester.

  “Had a kid come in and test for the orchestra,” he said as he searched among the tiny faces. “Wanted to play flute, I think. But his family didn’t have money, or wouldn’t spend money on an instrument rental. So I loaned him what was available—a trombone. Not a bad horn, as I recall.”

  He pointed to a boy sitting in the same seat in the trombone section that Sean O’Shay now occupied. The boy’s face was small, capped with short dark hair. There were so many people in the eight-by-ten picture that each face gave only an impression of features. Ricardo looked at it closely, then moved on again.

  “His father was either a music lover or hater,” he continued. “Either way, he apparently took violent offense at the sound his son produced with that trombone, because he threw it against a wall with enough force to bend the slide. Or so I was told.”

  Throughout this search, Sean O’Shay sat in mute pantomime of the boys in the trombone sections on the wall.

  “The kid offered to work off the repair costs. So I told him the only way he could do this was by coming in early or staying after school to practice. I got the horn fixed and for a while I would see him in that chair, making the most god-awful noise while he learned to play the trombone. He had a good ear, and he was getting to be a pretty fair player. But he quit coming. Had to work after school or something. I’d pass him in the halls and he would promise me he was coming back. Always said he wanted to make things right. But he never came back.

  “Ah, here he is.” He held up the picture from the fall of 1976 and pointed to a tiny young face behind an enormous trombone, sitting in the third tier back, to the right of the conductor’s podium. “I think they called him the Kid or something.”

  Tejeda took the picture and tried to find some message in it. After a while he looked at Kate. “It wasn’t Kid.”

  She nodded. “Baby?”

  “That’s it.” Tejeda went to a bookcase and pulled out the 1976 school yearbook. He started with the freshmen and worked his way up to the junior class before he found the name he wanted, Louis Michael Silver. Kate looked over his arm while he counted, fourth name in the list, fourth little black-and-white portrait in the row.

  Kate took the book from him and studied the face closely. Louis Michael Silver was dark, with hairless cheeks and a shy, vulnerable smile; aptly named Baby. The eyes were the giveaway.

  “I saw him at your house the other day,” Ricardo said. “I remembered his instrument, but the name still doesn’t ring a bell.”

  She handed him the book. “He calls himself Mike Rios now.”

  28

  Kate unlocked the car door for Tejeda. “Where do you think Mike is now?”

  “Where he’s always been, hiding in Carl’s house.”

  “But why?”

  “To fix things.”

  “I know that. That’s his job,” she said, pulling into traffic. “But why did he do all those unspeakable things to us?”

  “Just as I said, to fix things. What motivated Lance Lumsden, the Morrows, and all of the Silver Threads to pull some damned bizarre stunts? Their lives have been turned upside down by a monster and they can’t put things right again until the monster fries.

  “Mike has the same problem, except to him, I am the monster. I took his brother from him, and his whole family came apart, just like Lance’s. We’ll probably never know what originally happened within the Silver family history to spawn Arty’s madness, but believe me, they’re a sad group now.

  “Thin
k about what we’ve heard about Baby. His big brother, Arty, protected him. Arty’s friends watched over him.”

  Kate said, “He told me that his brother had promised to put him through college, but something happened to him.”

  “Sure,” Tejeda said. “I caught him.”

  “Mike has so much talent, everyone has said so—your dad, Carl. I’ve seen it. But something always seemed to get in his way.”

  “One way or another, it was always Arty.”

  She parked the Rolls in front of her house. “What are you going to do?”

  “I need to pick up something. Will you watch the front of Carl’s house and yell if Mike comes out?”

  “Sure.”

  Running made his head hurt, pulled his stitches. The pain wasn’t so bad that he would slow down; time was of the essence. His watch said eight-thirty-five and charges were scheduled to be read against Arty Silver at ten-thirty.

  Mike had thrown him a curve this morning. He saw the return of the bodies as an offering of appeasement, a gesture of closure. Arty had always withheld some part of his victims’ remains as a way to maintain control over the emotions of the survivors; that control was a large part of his pleasure. But Mike had not only given up the remains of Sean and Wally but also handed over clues to his own identity. Tejeda remembered Ricardo asking Mike if he had ever played trombone; Mike had to know it wouldn’t take too much digging to come up with his name. Maybe it was a test, to see whether he had left any impact on a man he apparently respected.

  Even if Mike was ready to give up, Tejeda wanted a little weight behind his belt.

  He found his mother at the kitchen table grading papers, while the uniformed policeman assigned to watch over the house loaded breakfast dishes into the dishwasher. It was a very cozy scene, and it slowed him down a little. She might just as well have been in her own sunny breakfast room as here in Kate’s industrial-size kitchen, she seemed so settled in.

  “Rigo, dear.” She smiled and lifted her face for a kiss. “What a surprise. How are you feeling?”

  “Fine.” He opened the bread box where his snubnose .38 was stashed. It felt awkward, heavy in his hand. “Where’s Trinh?”