Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (11 page)

For a moment the talking at the counter died down.
One of the waitresses glanced over, frowning. Ralph just sat back
lazily and shrugged.

"Maybe somebody doesn’t see it that way,
vato
.
The question is, what now? You play good boy? Wait around for
orders?"

I wanted to hit something. Instead I just stared at
Ralph’s black floating eyes.

"He was my father, Ralphas. What was I supposed
to do?"

Ralph nodded. "Eh,
vato
,
you don’t have to tell me—"

Then his voice trailed off.

An older Mexican man had come into the cafe and was
walking toward our table. His balding forehead was shiny with sweat.
He was a large man, probably used to people getting out of his way,
but he shuffled toward Ralph like there was a heavy collar around his
neck. Ralph didn’t offer him a chair. He just grinned. The man
looked at me uncertainly; Ralph waved his hand in a dismissive
gesture.

"Don’t worry about him," he told the man
in Spanish, then to me: “Only speakie Inglés, eh,
compadre
?"

I shrugged my shoulders and tried to look lost. It
wasn’t hard.

I half listened while the man told Ralph about his
money problems. He needed to pay the mortgage; he’d been sick and
unable to work. Ralph listened patiently, then pulled out a straight
razor and set it on the  able. Almost absently, he unfolded the
polished blade from its well-worn black leather sheath and stroked it
with his little finger. Still in Spanish, he said, "She’s your
wife. If I hear about you getting drunk again, or yelling, or
threatening her boys, I will slice your fingers off and make you eat
them." He said it calmly.

Then Ralph laid out ten fifty-dollar bills on the
table next to the razor. The man tried to keep his hands from shaking
as he scooped up the money. He didn’t succeed. When he’d left,
Ralph looked at me.

“
My newest stepfather." He smiled. "Like
I was saying, you don’t have to tell me about dead fathers,
vato
.
I been the man in my family since I was twelve."

Then he put away his razor.

As I left the Blanco Cafe, the whole West Side was
coming to life. More working men poured in for
migas
and coffee. Old Mexican grandmothers, each one as large as my VW and
twice as loud, lumbered down the street from market to market,
haggling as they went. And Ralph sat at his table in the middle of it
all, grinning.

"I got twelve pawnshops to check on before noon,
vato
," he called
after me. "Not bad for a poor boy, eh?"

I drove away thinking about twelve-year-olds with
razor blades, about white women alone on Zarzamora Street in the
middle of the night, about a hole in a brown Stetson hat.

Conjunto
music was crying
on every car radio up and down Blanco.
 

17

After an hour of
tai chi
and a shower, my thoughts weren’t exactly clearer, but I’d
regained my balance somewhat.
Tai chi
is good that way. It teaches you to yield before you advance. You let
events push you around for a while, you keep your footing, then you
push back. And I was pretty sure now where to start pushing.

By noon I was back in La Villita, standing on the
porch of Hecho a Mano Gallery and trying to work my Discover card
across the sidebolt. I’ve never been very good with the trick, but
this time the old oak door gave up almost immediately. It swung open
with the same relieved "Arrrr” that Robert Johnson makes in
the sandbox.

I closed the door behind me. A sign had fallen off
the windowsill that read: "Out to Lunch—B. "

Never a truer word, I thought.

The lights were off in the main room, but huge blocks
of sun came in from the craftsman windows. It was enough to see that
the place was a disaster. Podiums had been turned over. Skeleton
statues lay in colorful pieces on the stone floor, hip bones not
connected to the thigh bones. The drawers were upside down on top of
Lillian’s big oak desk.

I checked the framing room and the rest room. Both
trashed. A twenty-pound wooden
milagro
-studded
cross from Guadalajara was sticking out of the shattered computer
monitor. Photographic prints of cowboys had been ripped out of their
frames. Even the toilet paper dispenser had been kicked open.

I picked up a black spiral binder from a mount of
papers fluttering around under the ceiling fan. Lillian’s datebook.
I moved into the shadows of the bathroom and started reading.

Inside, on the July page, one note indicated the day
I was coming into town. It was starred and circled. Under Sunday
night, the last time I’d seen her, Lillian had written "Dinner
8." Not surprisingly, there was no mention of a trip to Laredo
for Monday morning. In fact, no other dates at all.

I flipped back over the last few months. March and
April were full of “Dan” messages, especially around Fiesta Week.
Then they stopped. Lillian’s last date with Dan, at least the last
one she’d recorded, was for the River Parade in late April. My
number in San Francisco was written a few spaces after that. Maybe I
should’ve been flattered, but something about the timing bothered
me.

I flipped ahead. Lillian had scribbled random phone
numbers and reminders on the memoranda page at the back of last year,
but that was it. None of the information jumped out at me. I ripped
out the page anyway. I went back into the framing room and dug around
in the ruined prints. Somebody had bashed open a locked storage
closet in the corner and strewn its contents around. About the only
thing interesting was a canvas portfolio, three by three, with the
initials “B.K." on it. The laminated leaves were bent and
torn. One had a rather large shoe print on it--no grooves, pointed
toe, a boot.

The portfolio made for sad reading. On the first
page,
ArtNews
and
Dallas Herald
articles
from 1968 announced Beau’s arrival on the photographic scene: "New
Visions of the West," “Fresh Perspectives on Ancient Vistas,"
“Dallas Native Follows Dream." The last one took a
rags-to-riches angle: the tragic death of Beau’s father, Beau’s
childhood with at well-meaning but alcoholic mother, his
determination to work his way through community college in Fort
Worth, buying film for his photography classes instead of food when
he had to. The interviewer seemed to think it was charming that Beau
had actually been on welfare. In the middle of the articles Beau’s
picture stared back at me—young, dressed in black, his Nikon slung
over his shoulder, and the beginnings of smugness on his face.

I flipped through several more pages of his
photos--abandoned ranch houses, steers, dew on barbed wire. The
announcements for new shows and the glowing reviews got fewer and
further between. The last two articles Beau had clipped were from the
Austin American-Statesman
in 1976. The first, a lukewarm gallery review, commented sadly that
"the refreshingly energetic, naive quality of Karnau’s earlier
work has all but disappeared? The second, Beau’s letter to the
editor, detailed exactly what the reviewer could do with her
comments.

Beau’s more recent photographs, from his days as an
assistant art professor at A & M to the present, looked like they
could have been taken by Ansel Adams if Ansel Adams had downed enough
tequila and dropped his camera enough times. More abandoned ranch
houses, more steers, more dew on barbed wire. Finally, on the last
portfolio page, was a glitzy-looking flier for "The Authentic
Cowboy: A Retrospective by B. Karnau." A weathered cowboy peered
out at me, trying to look authentic.

The opening was scheduled for July 31 at Blue Star,
this Saturday. The list of underwriters showed how much Beau had
relied on Lillian’s social connections: Crockett, her father’s
bank; Sheff Construction; half a dozen other blue-blooded businesses
and foundations. I folded up the flier and pocketed it.

I was just about to put aside the portfolio when I
noticed the way the front cover felt between my fingers—a little
bit thicker than the back cover, a slight bulge on the inside of the
canvas. I found an Xacto knife on the floor and delivered by cesarean
two eight-by-tens sandwiched between squares of cardboard. The photos
were identical-—an outdoor shot, taken at night. Three people were
standing in knee-high grass in front of an old Ford truck, its doors
open and headlights on. One of the people was a tall skinny man with
his face turned away from the camera. His slicked-back blond hair and
his white shirt almost glowed in the headlights.

The other two people, whoever they were, had been
carefully cut out of the picture with a razor blade. Nothing was left
of them but vaguely human-shaped holes, side by side, slightly apart
from the blond man.

From the angle of the shot, and a huge out-of-focus
tree branch in one corner of the photo, it looked like the
photographer had been uphill from the scene and fairly far away,
using a telescopic lens.

The quality of the prints wasn’t bad, but the
texture of the paper was wrong for photographs. Looking closely, you
could tell they had been laser printed rather than developed. On the
back of both photos someone had written “7/31" in black pen.

I was just folding the prints to fit in my pocket
when keys rattled in the studio’s front door lock.

I moved to the door of the framing room and listened.
Two steps, a moment of stunned quiet, then Beau Karnau cursed under
his breath. He kicked something that shattered. A ceramic skull in a
pink sombrero came skittering to a. stop at my feet and grinned up at
me. When I came out into the doorway Beau was standing with one
lizard-skin boot planted on an over- turned podium, surveying the
damage. His balding forehead was bright red and yellow. It matched
his silk shirt beautifully.

I cleared my throat. He cleared about three feet,
straight backward.

“
Ah!" he said. Out of some reflex he grabbed
his ponytail and pulled it like a ripcord.

When he recognized me he didn’t exactly relax, but
his face shifted gears from sacred shitless to pissed. For a minute I
thought he might charge me.

“
What the fuck—" he said.

“
You were expecting the maid?" I asked. “Looks
like you had quite a morning rush."

“
What the fuck are you doing here?" he said,
louder this time.

“
Who did you think I was just now, Beau? You damn
near wet your boots."

His eye twitched. "What the hell do you think,
Mr. Goddamn Smart—ass? I come back from lunch and you’ve wrecked
my place. How should I act?"

“
Like you know better," I said. "Like
you’re ready to tell me what it’s got to do with Lillian."

Beau swore at me. Then he made the mistake of coming
up and pushing my chest.

“
Where the hell do you get off--"

Before he could finish the sentence he was sitting
down. From the tears in his eyes I’d say his balls connected with
the stone floor pretty hard. I put my foot on his left kneecap and
pressed down, just hard enough to keep him sitting.

He said: “Uhm."

“
Lillian is missing," I said. “Now I find
out her studio is trashed."

“
My studio," he said. He packed a lot of
hatred into those two words.

I put a little more pressure on the knee.

"Jesus!" he yelled. “You break into my
goddamn place, you assault me, you blame me when that little princess
runs out on you—leave me the hell alone!"

“
Lillian never made it to Laredo, " I told
him. “I don’t think she ever planned on going. What I’m trying
to decide now is if she really left a message Monday morning or if
you lied to me. I need to know that, Beau."

I give him credit. Beau didn’t scare easily. Or at
least he wasn’t scared of me. His neck veins were so purple I
thought they’d explode, but he kept his voice even.

"Believe what you want," he said.

“
What were they looking for, Beau?" I gestured
at the ruined artwork all around us.

“
I don’t have a clue," he said. "Nothing."

I took out one of the photos I’d found and dropped
it on his chest.

“
Nothing?"

All I saw in his eyes was his opinion of me, and I
already knew that.

"So it’s a cut-up picture," he said.
“Your girlfriend does photo-collages. You expect me to get
excited?"

He said it a little too fast, like it was an answer
he’d practiced in the mirror many times, just in case he needed it
someday.

"I expect some real answers," I said. “Like
why did Lillian decide to leave the gallery?"

I waited. Beau’s face was tightly controlled, but
the pressure on the knee ligaments must’ve been pretty bad. Little
sequins of sweat were starting to pop up all over his forehead.