Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (18 page)

Whatever bad investments Mr. Cambridge might’ve
made back then, he seemed to be doing pretty well these days.
Crockett Savings and Loan had moved its corporate offices from a
small strip mall in Alamo Heights to a four-story glass and brick
office building on Loop 1604, and Grace June, the old secretary with
the beehive and the horn-rims, had been replaced in the front office
by a young blonde in a silk blouse and Claiborne skirt. I nodded at
her, told her I was expected, and walked on through.

"Um, but—" she started to say behind me.

The two-ton leather chair was still in Mr.
Cambridge’s office. His plaques from all the right clubs still hung
on the wall—Rotary, Republican State Steering Committee, Texas
Cavaliers. The butter toffees were still on his desk. Only Zeke
Cambridge had changed. He looked smaller than I remembered, less
ogreish. His black suit fit a little looser and his rectangular face
had started to sag at the corners. His pointed nose, one of the only
things Lillian had inherited from him, had collapsed into a network
of red veins.

Mr. Cambridge looked up from a stack of legal papers
as I came in and started to ask me a question. When he saw that I
wasn’t the secretary, he scowled and got up from his chair, a
little unsteadily.

Then he showed the other thing Lillian had inherited
from him—his temper.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

Behind me, the secretary barely stuck her head in the
door, as if she were afraid of having it shot off. "Mr.
Cambridge? "

He glared at her over the top of his bifocals, then
back at me.

"It’s all right, Cameron. This won’t take
long."

Cameron closed the door. I think she made sure it was
locked. Zeke Cambridge stared at me for a long time, then grudgingly
gestured me toward the leather chair. He threw his bifocals onto the
stack of papers.

"What right do you have coming into my office,
boy? Haven’t you done enough damage?"

There was a time when those words would’ve been
bellowed loud enough to shake the furniture. I would’ve apologized
for bringing Lillian home late, for using my horn in the driveway,
for wearing the wrong clothes in front of their friends, just for
fear of being murdered by this man. Now when he spoke, the words were
more like hammer strikes on a saw blade, loud but shaky, so watery
they were almost absurd in their force.

"I had a feeling you would’ve refused to see
me, sir."

"You’re damn right."

“
It’s about Lillian."

His jawline trembled slightly. "Of course it
is."

“
Mrs. Cambridge told me— — "

He banged his fist on the desk. "Haven’t you
done enough to my family, damn it?"

The framed pictures didn’t rattle. The bowl of
toffees didn’t move. He sank down into his chair and pounded the
desk again with even less force. The anger in his face dissolved into
simple frustration.

“
Leave my wife alone."

It was strange being able to meet his stare. His
green irises had washed down to olive over the years, and his lower
lids had loosened so they could barely contain the moisture in the
corners of his eyes.

"Mr. Cambridge, I want to help."

"Then leave. Go the hell away."

"If you’d tell me what the police said, maybe
I could—"

"The police said nothing. They talk about
Laredo. They talk about Lillian being an adult. I’ve been convinced
. . . to wait."

"By the police?"

He glared up at me, his jaw still shaking. "By
many people."

“
But you don’t believe they’re right, " I
said. "Neither do I."

"What I believe is that Lillian had a chance at
happiness, boy. What I believe is that you took that away from
her—again." He spoke like a man who had just swallowed sour
milk.

The words weren’t new to me. They brought back
years of Thanksgivings, Christmases, birthdays where the conversation
had always eventually turned to what I wasn’t doing for Lillian.
The only difference was that Mrs. Cambridge wasn’t here now to
steer the conversation someplace else. And this time, maybe, I
couldn’t argue with him.

Mr. Cambridge nodded, as if agreeing with my
thoughts. "They said it might be because of you. The police said
that. If it is, boy—"

"Detective Rivas said this?"

Cambridge waved his hand dismissively. "If it
is—"

He didn’t have to tell me about his younger days in
the Navy. I heard the threat just fine.

"Sir, I’d like to have your help, but I’ll
find Lillian with or without it."

"So help me God, if you interfere—if you make
it any harder to get my girl back—"

"It is true she had a falling out with Dan?"

His head was trembling more now. "Nothing that
couldn’t be mended."

"And you knew that Lillian was leaving the
gallery she shared with Beau Karnau?"

He liked hearing Karnau’s name about as much as a
diminished chord. "She made the right decision--leaving that
gallery. It was never right for her. But God damn it, I’ve always
supported her. I never said a word. I’d do anything for my family,
boy. I’ve seen them through. What have you done besides making the
hard times worse for her?"

I don’t know why. Something in his tone made me
uncertain which "her" he was talking about. I thought about
Lillian, refusing to say a negative word about her father, hugging
him when he came in the door, blaming his terminal bad temper on
investments. I thought about Angela Cambridge, probably still sitting
in her dark room surrounded by her parakeets, crying, hugging an old
shoe box full of dead memories.

Then I thought about Zeke Cambridge coming home to
that every night for forty years, his determined green eyes
eventually washing out with old age, fading a lot faster than that
photograph of a pilot who’d never come back. Investments, my ass.

I didn’t say anything, but when I looked him in the
eye again he heard the pity as clearly as I’d heard his threats.
Face trembling, he slapped his stack of legal papers and his bifocals
off the desk.

"Get the hell out," he said, his voice
surprisingly soft. I stared at the cracked armrest of the leather
chair. I swear I could still see the impressions a sixteen-year-old’s
nervous fingers had made there, waiting for his driver’s license to
pass inspection. When I looked back up I almost hoped to see the
marble features I remembered, the fierce disapproval. Instead, I saw
an old man whose last shot at dignity was making the bowl of butter
toffees rattle on his desk.

I got up to leave.

As I closed the door Zeke Cambridge kept staring
straight ahead, looking more like an undertaker than ever, one who
was getting old and angry and still hadn’t successfully buried his
first client.
 

26

Just to piss off Jay Rivas, I spent the rest of the
afternoon at SAPD looking through the blotters for any recent mention
of the names in Drapiewski’s police files. They can’t keep you
out of the blotters, but they didn’t have to like it. My charming
guide, Officer Torres, kept glaring at my jugular and making little
growling noises in the back of her throat. I almost asked her if I
could put a bow on her neck and send her to Carlon McAffrey for
Christmas.

After that I visited the mole people at Carlon
McAffrey’s much-touted newspaper morgue, then the County Bureau of
Records.

Never let them tell you an English Ph.D. is useless.
True, I don’t get many calls to discuss the dirty jokes in The
Canterbury Tales, even if that was my dissertation topic, but I can
research rings around your average P.I. Terrence & Goldman always
loved me for that. By five-thirty when the clone of my third-grade
teacher kicked me out of Records, I’d whittled Drapiewski’s list
of twelve FBI suspects in my father’s murder down to four viables,
or at least questionables. Three others were in Huntsville for life
without parole. Four were dead. One was awaiting trial on federal
charges. None of them were going anywhere for quite a while, nor
could they have been up to anything since I had come back to town. I
looked at my four possibles, trying to imagine one of them behind the
wheel of a ’76 Pontiac with Randall Halcomb. I waited for a
volunteer to jump out at me. Nobody raised his hand.

I picked up the tail on Broadway, just as I passed
the Pigstand Coffee Shop. Despite local lore, there were no pigs
present.

"Never when you need one," I said to the
rearview mirror.

The tail was a black Chrysler, early eighties model.
I cursed the lenient Texas regulations on window tinting. I couldn’t
see the car’s interior worth a damn. Problem number two with
driving a VW bug: Unless your tail is driving a very old Schwinn with
less than ten gears, you can pretty much forget losing them.

They weren’t interested in hanging back, either. I
hadn’t even had enough time to say a "Hail Mary" before
the Chrysler pulled around the intervening cars and went into high
gear, coming around on my left. When I saw the shotgun window roll
down I remembered why they call it the shotgun window. Then I yanked
on the wheel, hard.

I’ll say this for the VW. It handles sidewalks a
lot nicer than your average Chrysler. I was across two front lawns, a
parking lot, and into an alley before the enemy managed to pull their
boat around. Thank God for my high school years, revving around these
streets with Ralph like we were James Dean’s drunk and ugly younger
brothers. I still knew the turns and I took them. Another good thing
about the VW: The engine’s in the back so you aren’t blinded when
it starts burning to hell and billowing black smoke.

After ten minutes without seeing the Chrysler I
slowed down to fifty in the twenty zone on Nacodoches and took
inventory. That’s when I noticed the new ventilation in the ragtop.
Three holes the size of .45 bullets on the left side, three identical
holes on the right side. The nearest one was about six inches south
of my head. I hadn’t even heard them.

"So much for not being willing to kill me,"
I said, cursing Maia Lee.

I’d like to say I was calm when I got back to Queen
Anne. The truth was, when I found that Robert Johnson still hadn’t
eaten his Friskies taco, I kicked it across the living room. The
dish, that is, not Robert Johnson.

"Enough is enough, " I told him.

Something under my dirty laundry in the closet said:

"Row."

Then the phone rang.

I must have sounded like a man who’d just gotten
shot at and spurned by his pet, because Ralph Arguello paused for a
second before responding: "Mother of God,
vato
.
What
cavron
spit in
your
huevos
this
morning?"

Behind him, the sounds of the Blanco Cafe were all
much louder than they had been that morning—more shouting
waitresses, more customers talking, more blaring
conjunto
from the jukebox.

"I’ve had a great day, Ralph," I said.
"Somebody just drilled me a skylight in the VW with a .45."

There were a lot of ways somebody could respond to
that. For Ralph there was only one choice: he laughed long and hard.

"You need a beer and a shot of real tequila,"
he suggested. "Come out with me tonight."

"Maybe another time, Ralphas."

I could almost hear his Cheshire cat grin over the
phone.

"Even to a little
cantina
where your lady friend was on Sunday night?"
he said.

Silence.

"What time?" I asked.
 

27

Ralph’s maroon Lincoln slid down South St. Mary’s
like a leather-upholstered U-boat.

" ’Scuse me if I hit a few pedestrians,"
he said. He laughed. I didn’t. With the black window tinting, the
moonless night, and the haze of bay rum and
mota
smoke in the car, I couldn’t see a damn thing out the front
windshield. And I didn’t wear prescription glasses. Ralph just
smiled and took another hit off his cigar-sized joint.

We turned down Durango and cruised through a
neighborhood of neon-colored clapboards. Their front  yards, not
much bigger than Ralph’s backseat, were decorated with cola caps in
the trees, statues of saints in the painted gravel, plastic milk jugs
filled with colored water along the sidewalks. An old lady in a
worn-out muumuu stood in the orange square of porch light on her
front steps, slicing potatoes and watching us as we passed by.

Ralph sighed like a man in love. "Home again."

I stared at him. "You were raised North Side,
Ralphas. You went to Alamo Heights, for Christ’s sake."

His smile didn’t waver. "All that means is my
momma cleaned for a better class of folk,
vato
,"
he said. "Doesn’t mean shit about where your home is at."