by Rick Riordan
Inside the house, a Bob Dylan track played through. Faye Ingram reappeared. She carried a brown leather binder the size of an Oxford English Dictionary volume. Two sweaty glasses of tea sat on top.
"My manners need polishing," she apologized. "Except for the herb society, I don't entertain many guests."
We thanked her for the tea.
Ms. Ingram's smile started to reform as she ran her fingers over the old brown binder, smearing the rings of condensation.
I finally realized why her face seemed familiar. She looked like the picture Jimmy had kept on his mantel-her sister Clara. The resemblance wasn't much-a faraway look in the eyes, frailness in the smile, features too delicate to maintain much emotion.
She opened the binder, carefully extracted a photograph.
"This is Clara and James-Jimmy's father."
The photograph paper was parchmentthick, the colours hand tinted in late 1950s pastel. Clara Doebler wore a satin bride's dress. Her smile was perfunctory, her hair done in a beehive the same unnatural copper colour as Faye's hair today. At Clara's side was the groom-a roughcut man with unruly Elvis hair and a rakish face that reminded me pleasantly of Jimmy's.
"James died of tuberculosis when Jimmy was only three years old," Faye Ingram told us. "More than anything, that event fractured Clara. She'd always been… brittle.
Prone to depression. She'd allowed the family to arrange her marriage with James, and then she blamed them for leaving her a widow. She refused to remarry, took back her maiden name for herself and her son-something you just didn't do in Travis County in 1960. She became extremely possessive of Jimmy, how he would be raised.
She became… contrary. Erratic. The family was concerned enough to bring legal action to gain custody of Jimmy. It was W.B.'s father, William B. Senior, who pulled most of the reins of power back then. It was a horrible mess, but finally, of course, the Doebler money won. Clara couldn't compete."
From her tone, I couldn't tell if Faye admired her sister, or was simply expressing fascination, the way a child is fascinated by peeling off BandAids.
She pulled out a second photo, handed it across. "That is the man Clara called her second husband, although they were never actually married. His name was Ewin Lowry."
Lowry-the name Jimmy had specified as the father's name on his search for birth certificates.
Ewin Lowry was as different from James Doebler, Sr., as two men could be. Lowry was small, slightly potbellied, darkcomplexioned. His hair and moustache were thick and black, his eyes predatory. The gypsy charmer. The man you watched carefully at poker, never introduced to your wife, and certainly never let marry one of your daughters. In the photo, Ewin and Clara stood together in front of a red '65 Mustang.
The two of them looked happy.
"Ewin was charming," Faye continued. "Something of a poet. Affectionate when it suited him. Sometimes violent, though never with Clara. The rest of the family-our parents, our grandparents, the aunts and uncles on W.B.'s side of the family-they tolerated Ewin and Clara, but only barely, and only for a while. When Clara became pregnant for a second time-this was in '67-she announced her intentions to marry Lowry."
"Pregnant," I repeated.
Faye nodded. "The family went into war mode. To make a long story short, Clara lost.
William B. Sr. drove Ewin Lowry away by a combination of threats and bribes. Clara was convinced to have an abortion. She never recovered from that. She cut all ties with the family, did a lot of travelling to the West Coast and to Europe, but she couldn't bring herself to leave Austin for good. She and I kept in touch, but I'm ashamed to say-Clara scared me. She was so… intense, so sad and angry. When she killed herself, I wasn't surprised. Reuniting with Jimmy was her only comfort for all she'd lost, and in the end, even that wasn't enough."
Daylight filtered through the oak tree, the leaves a mesh of green and yellow. Looking up, I felt like I was under the weight of a giant gumball machine.
Maia said, "I'm sorry for your loss, Ms. Ingram."
The older woman smiled. "My loss is nothing, Miss-"
"Call me Maia."
"I'm used to being alone, Maia. I hope you have many happy years with your soul mate, dear, but that just doesn't happen for some women. I accepted that long ago. My sister never did. Compared to Clara, I lost nothing."
I concentrated on the heat vapour rising from the flagstones, the reflections of the sun tea jars.
"When Jimmy called," Faye murmured, "I told him I couldn't help him. He was so insistent."
"He didn't believe the abortion happened in '67," I said. "He thought Clara had the child."
Faye Ingram stiffened. "How did you know?"
I told her about the paperwork at Jimmy's house, the birth certificate search.
She folded her hands in her lap. "Jimmy was quite irrational about it. His mood reminded me-I hate to say this-he reminded me of Clara. He claimed someone had told him about her pregnancy, told him the child had been given away for adoption."
"Who told him?" Maia asked. "How recently?"
"Jimmy wouldn't say. But I was with Clara in 1967, dear. I know the abortion happened." Ms. Ingram turned a page in her binder. "It would've been better for Jimmy if he hadn't dug into all that," she said softly.
She brought out a yellowing document with a rusty paper clip mark at the edge. She studied the paper, then looked up at Maia and me. "We kept Clara's suicide out of the press, but naturally I was curious. I asked for the police report. Take it. W.B. can hardly crucify me now."
Maia took the report, thanked her. "Ms. Ingram, would anyone want to kill Jimmy?"
"I didn't know my nephew very well, I'm afraid. Not since he was a child."
"Whatever happened to Ewin Lowry?"
She shook her head. "I don't know. There was a time, back in the mid1980s, when Clara got a scare. She thought he'd resurfaced, but nothing ever came of it."
"A scare," I said.
"Ewin called her-1987, this would have been, the twentieth anniversary of the day he left her. It was a horrible call. He caught Clara at a vulnerable moment. Ewin threatened to kill her, demanded money. He said he would be coming to find her. It was the last time Clara ever came to me for help."
"You went to the police?"
"Clara didn't trust them to help. She said she needed money, wanted to hire a private investigator to find out where Ewin was.
We tried that, had no success. A few weeks later, a letter from Ewin arrived in the mail.
And that was the last we heard from him."
Ms. Ingram sighed, fished around in her binder again. "You'll think me a ghoul, but here it is, that letter."
Sure enough, it was postmarked May 1987 from Waco, Texas. It was typed-no signature, no return address. It said,
Clara,
Don't think I have forgotten you. Soon we'll discuss retribution.
Simultaneously, Maia and I said, "May we keep this?"
We glanced at each other.
Faye Ingram looked amused. "You may keep it. You two are an interesting pair."
"Ms. Ingram," Maia said, "is there anyone else in the Doebler family who might be willing to help us? Anyone who might've spoken with Jimmy about your family history?"
Faye reached toward her oak tree, plucked a brown pod from the creeper plant. The berries inside the pod were splitting out, fat and neon orange as jawbreakers. She cracked the pod, held up one orange orb.
"Coral bean," she said. "Can you imagine anything prettier? Hard to believe they use these as fish and rat poison, isn't it?"
"Ms. Ingram?" Maia asked.
"I don't know, dear. You could try to speak with W.B. He would merely refer you to his lawyers. I'm afraid that unlike Jimmy, unlike me for that matter, W.B.'s very much a Doebler. He's become just what the family wanted him to be."
There it was again, the undertone of fear I'd heard the first time we spoke on the phone.
Maia said, "How old would Ewin Lowry be now, Ms. Ingram?"
"I don't think Ewin is still in the world, dear. I can't imagine he would've lived to be this old, with his knack for causing trouble. The private eye we hired took our money and vanished, stopped returning our calls. He never told us a thing of importance, though he did seem a rather incompetent sort." She looked at me. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be," Maia assured her. "Most of them never complete a proper training."
We traded collegial smiles.
Faye Ingram said, "You two work well together, don't you? Despite the bantering."
Neither of us responded.
Faye closed her old leather binder. One hand still gripped her bean pod full of poison.
"I have a sense for these things. You're very pleasant people. Thank you for having tea with me."
I looked at the tea glasses, which neither Maia nor I had touched.
We thanked Ms. Ingram for her time, left her sitting at her patio table, arranging coral beans into a loose necklace on its surface.
As we walked through Faye's house, Blood on the Tracks was winding down to the final, desolate chords of "Buckets of Rain."
Maia and I went out to my truck, Maia reading the police report as she walked. She got into the Ford. I got into the driver's side.
"Supposedly we work well together," I said.
"An amateur's deduction."
Maia flipped to the back page of the police report, scanned it, then handed it to me.
"The first officer at the scene of Clara Doebler's death-how do you read that signature?"
I looked at the bottom of the paper. The signature stood out like a familiar spider-one I'd hoped I'd squashed. "Looks like Deputy Victor Lopez."
"That's what I thought," Maia said.
We sat there, watching dragonflies going giddy above Faye Ingram's sage plants.
CHAPTER 18
Detective Lopez wasn't answering his phone. Probably keeping his lines open for Garrett's confession.
After some deliberation, Maia and I decided to swing by Tech san's offices, see if we could find Garrett, maybe take a look around before Matthew Pena claimed his billiondollar prize.
If you think of Austin as a Rorschach test, downtown would be a little blob in the centre, framed above and below by enormous, mirrorimage crescents of black-Research Boulevard to the north, Ben White to the south.
Both were former country roads transformed into multilevel highways. Both had superheated with development over the last two decades, and there seemed to be some unspoken rule that the two areas had to be developed at equal speed. If a new chain store went up in the north, an identical store had to open in the south, as if the developers were afraid lack of balance would tip over the city.
Construction spilled into valleys and over hills like a stuccoand limestone fungus, leaving small islands of ranch land surrounded by apartment blocks, shopping centres, industrial parks. An occasional horse pasture gasped for life between a Starbucks and a Best Buy? turkey buzzards circled over ravines once full of coyotes, now crammed with office buildings.
Techsan Security Software had commandeered space in one such facility in the southern sprawl.
The building was a wedge of red brick and blackmirrored glass, rising from a hillside in the middle of ten wooded acres. The sign out front bore the name of a bankrupt software company.
Garrett's van sat at the curb in a red zone, the side door open.
I parked next to a Lexus with a SOUTH PARK bumper sticker and a Ren and Stimpy suckercup animal on the window. Give an adolescent screen head $80,000 a year to start and you'll get cars like that.
A few gangly developer types who looked like they hadn't seen the sun in months were shooting hoops on the outdoor basketball court.
In the front lobby, the directory was an object lesson in Austin high tech. The building's original occupants had confidently engraved their names on brass plaques. All those names had since been covered with masking tape. For the replacement companies, a newer set of cheap, plastic plaques had been mounted. These in turn were taped over, replaced with printed cardboard signs of the thirdgeneration businesses, and three of these were crossed out. One of the crossouts was Techsan.
Matthew Pena had wasted no time moving in, and he hadn't opted for cardboard. A large red and gold canvas banner, pinned above the elevator, read AccuShield, Austin Division, Top Floor.
"He commissioned that back in March," I told Maia. "What do you bet?"
She nodded. "Probably got Tshirts made, too. Let's go see."
The fourthfloor hallway was Lshaped, with the reception office at the crook. Maia and I walked past the entrance, turned, went to the other end of the hallway. Restrooms, a stairwell, an employee door with a combination lock.
Under normal circumstances, Maia and I would've gone through the front, simply asked the receptionist if we could see Garrett. AccuShield's banner out front had changed that. Without any discussion, Maia and I both understood we did not want to enter these premises on Mr. Pena's terms.
I tried the employee entrance. It was locked.
Maia punched 12345, turned the knob. No luck. We hung out at the stairwell for a minute, hoping somebody would come out the door. Nobody did.
"Plan B?" Maia asked.
I took off my tie, tossed it to her. "Be right back."
I walked down to the receptionist's office.
The receptionist had a novel propped on her desk like a shield between her and any potential interruptions. The cover said THROBBING EDEN in gold letters on a field of roses. Either a romance novel or a frightening new trend in inspirational literature.
There were two empty desks, an interior door with a deadbolt, and a corner table heaped with technical manuals and donut boxes and brochures. Draped over one of the empty desks was an extra red and gold AccuShield banner, just in case morale got so high somebody wanted to run down the hall waving it.
The receptionist's computer screen saver was bouncing around the words Ms. Negley.
I knocked on the open door. "Hey, Ms. Negley?"
She checked me out over the top of her book, smiled. She was brunette, midtwenties, a hundred ten pounds with an extra fifteen in makeup and hair spray. Her fingernails were royal purple. She said, "Hey, yourself."
"I'm supposed to move out the rest of that old Techsan hardware and I can't remember what the hell they told me for the combination. Do you want me to just lug it through the front?"
Her eyes got very wide. "No, no. Mr. Pena would kill me. 55555. How could you forget that?"
I slapped my head. "And here I am trying to remember-jeez. Thanks …"
"Krystal," she offered.
Aha. The famous Krystal.
I pointed to my chest. "Tres. Guess this means I have to haul that stuff out after all."
"Guess so."
"Friday yet?" I asked.
She laughed.
I went back to the employee entrance, smiled at Maia, and let us in.
The door opened into the network centre-a walkin closet with a blinking hub, splays of cabling, backup units for the software.
The next door opened into the main work area.
It was big enough to play soccer in-cool, dark, nearly empty. Low ceilings, fluorescent lights, chocolate brown dividers breaking the room into cubicles. The fact that Garrett and his partners had leased such a large space told me a lot about their early optimism, and their acute lack of business acumen.
A young Latina was hunched over a glowing screen, quietly clacking at a keyboard. A few more cubicles down, two Anglo guys in their twenties were leaning over another guy, looking at something on his computer screen. All three of them had dyed purplish black hair, cut like halfeaten artichokes. They wore gold and red AccuShield Tshirts, oversized khakis, love beads. DVD players were clipped to their belts, headphones around their necks.
The only other people in the room were packing up their boxes-Techsan's dazed temporary employees, learning what temporary means.
On the far wall, shadows moved behind
frosted glass windows of a conference room.
Maia gestured in that direction. I was about to follow when my brother wheeled himself out from behind a cubicle at the far end of the room, dumped some books into a cardboard box.
"Garrett," I called.
He watched us approach as if each of our steps inflicted a small amount of pain in his right eye. "You trying to make things worse, little bro?"
His cubicle was a corner spot, the window behind him looking out over live oaks and the basketball court and rolling hills. Through the heavily tinted glass, the scene looked like a winter evening. Not an executive office, but a definite step up from Garrett's old box at RNI.
His bookshelf held a potted fern in an advanced stage of mummification, several tomes on C++ Visual Basic and Java, and a careful lineup of Chinese bronze warriors. He'd stuck his carving knife in the side of his cubicle wall, impaling this morning's newsAccuShield to Buy Out Troubled Techsan.
I pointed toward the conference room door. "Pena in there?"
"With the Securities and Exchange guys. Picking over my carcass."
A few cubicles down, the young dudes with the artichoke hairdos were laughing, trying different commands on the keyboard. One of the guys glanced toward Garrett, then back at the monitor.
"Screenheads," Garrett mumbled. "They should just upload themselves and get it over with."
Garrett went back to packing. He was sorting through computer manuals, throwing the keepers in his box. When he found one he didn't need, he took out a permanent Sharpie, wrote PENA SUCKS! on it, threw it back on the desk.
Maia pulled up a chair. "We need to go see Lopez today, Garrett. I know you don't want to, but we've got to make him think we're cooperating."
"That's me." Garrett tossed another manual into the box. "Mr. Cooperation."
"We have some leads." I appreciated Maia's we, appreciated that she was trying to put a positive spin on some pretty sketchy information.
She told him about our conversation with Faye Ingram, about the man from the past, Ewin Lowry, who had once threatened Clara. Maia mentioned that someone, possibly Pena himself, had dug into Jimmy's past, unsettled him by suggesting he had a missing sibling. She told him about the catfish on my doorstep.