Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (36 page)

“
Carlon," I said.

Behind him I could hear glasses clinking, Motown
music, the sounds of a bar.

"All right, Navarre. I agreed to twenty-four
hours, not forty-eight. You put me off last night, man, and two hours
later Karnau gets whacked. Dead bodies cancel our deal."

My stomach twisted. "Carlon, if you’ve printed
something—"

“
Shit, man. This is getting unfunny. ‘Help’
does not include doing time as an accessory to murder."

“
So you haven’t gone to press with this?"

He laughed without much humor. “What I’ve done is
put in some footwork for your sorry ass. So you want to know where
Dan Sheff, Jr., is right now, getting himself schnockered on Lone
Star, or you want me to go ahead and start the interview without
you?"

"Where are you?"

“
Some private dick, Navarre. You have a little
patience, you do little stakeout time—"

"Where the hell are you?"

"Little Hipp’s."

“
I’ll be there in ten minutes."

"Better make it five. I got some serious
questions to ask the man and I might just—"

I was out the door before he finished the sentence,
hoping that in five minutes I wouldn’t have a good reason to break
Carlon’s face.
 

52

Little Hipp’s wasn’t so much a San Antonio
landmark as it was a surrogate landmark. When L. D. Hipp’s original
Bubble Room got demolished to make room for hospital parking spaces
back in 1980, L.D.’s son opened Little Hipp’s across the street
and inherited most of the Hipp’s menu and paraphernalia. Despite
the fact that the orange aluminum exterior made the bar and grille
look like a drive-thru beer barn, the inside was faithful to the
Bubble Room—multicolored bubbling Christmas lights, licenses
plates, tinsel and neon, netted beach balls, and 195Os Pearl ads
hanging from the ceiling. Major league tacky. You could get Hank
Williams or Otis Redding on the jukebox, Shiner or Lone Star
“gimmedraws" for pocket change, and shypoke eggs—round
nachos with Monterey jack whites and longhorn yokes, the jalapenos
hidden underneath. The whole place was maybe sixty feet square.

The after-dinner crowd was sparse, mostly off-duty
medical workers and a few assorted white collars. I spotted Carlon
McAffrey at a table by the barber’s chair. He was dressed in what
he probably thought was camouflage—dark glasses, khaki shirt and
slacks, and a tie with only three colors. As I started over, he shook
his head, then pointed at the bar.

Dan Sheff occupied one of the three stools. He was
hunched over a line of empty Lone Star bottles, ignoring the
bartender’s attempts at conversation. Dan’s custom-made business
suit was rumpled and one of his hand-stitched shoes was untied. He
looked like he’d slept in his car last night.

A
tai chi
principle: If you don’t want someone to run away from you, run away
from them first. Become yin to make them become yang. I’m not sure
why it works, but almost always they’ll follow you like air filling
a vacuum.

I walked up to Dan and said: "I’ll be over
there."

Then I retreated to a corner booth on the other side
of the room from Carlon and ordered a Shiner Bock. I didn’t look at
the bar. One hundred twenty-two seconds later Dan slid onto the bench
across from me.

He looked even worse close up. In the shadows his
face looked half-dead, unshaven, the skin loose around his eyes and
his short-cropped hair sickly white instead of blond. He’d been
continually twisting his gold ring around on his finger until there
were red grooves worried into the skin. He looked at me and tried to
maintain some anger, or at least some suspicion, but it was too much
effort. His expression fractured into simple grief.

"I didn’t," he said.

"Beau?"

He closed his eyes tightly, opened them, then nodded.
He looked around for a beer and realized he’d left it at the bar.
He almost got up. To keep him there, I started telling him what had
happened after he’d run from the Hilton, what I’d told Schaeffer.
I didn’t mention the decade-old letter from his mother that was
still in my pocket. When I was finished he just stared forward like a
sleepwalker.

"It’s only a matter of time before they ID
you, Dan. There were cameras rolling, for God’s sake."

He kept turning the gold ring like it was a screw
that just wouldn’t tighten.

"How much do you want?" he said.

I shook my head. “I’m not Karnau, Dan."

He accepted the rejection with a listless shrug. He
looked down at the checkered tablecloth.

“H
e was lying there, you know? I came in angry,
saying I was going to kill him." He laughed weakly, wiping the
water off his lower eyelids. “And then all I could think of was to
hold the wound, but it was his head, and I couldn’t—"

The waitress came up. She was about fifty, with a
beer gut and a golf hat that had been through the wash too many
times. She got out her order pad. Then she noticed Dan’s
expression.

I held up my Shiner Bock bottle and two fingers. The
waitress disappeared.

“
I’m supposed to be at a damn party tonight."
Dan laughed again, almost inaudibly. “Mother’s invited the mayor,
everyone important. I’m supposed to drink champagne and dance with
their wives and all I can think about is—I mean—"

He shrugged, unable to finish the thought.

“
I know about the photographs, Dan. Three times
I’ve seen you with Karnau. The second time you hit him. The third
time he ended up dead. You want to avoid taking the fall, you’ve
got to level with me."

The waitress came with our beers. When she left, Dan
was staring nowhere again, getting lost in the memory of that hotel
room. He got teary and drooped his head like he was going into shock.
I reached across the table and pressed my thumb on the meridian point
in the base of his palm. The jolt registered in his face like a cup
of strong coffee.

"Tell me about the photographs, Dan."

His eyes refocused on me, a little irritated. He
pulled his hand away.

“
Last spring I was looking through the finances.
Garza had said something that made me angry, something about me and
my mother taking up space."

"He said this to his employers?"

Dan’s focus drifted down to the tabletop and stuck
there, like he was trying to drill a hole through the wood with his
eyes.

"Garza worked for my dad for years. He gets
"—Dan squeezed his eyes shut—“he got a lot of leeway.
Mother insisted on that. But I looked at the accounts and saw--I mean
it wasn’t hard to find—"

“
You saw the ten thousand dollars a month that was
going to Karnau."

The jukebox cranked out a Merle Haggard song.

“
I couldn’t believe it. All my mother would tell
me is that Karnau had been threatening to publish some old photos of
my father. I don’t know where he got them. She said the photos
could ruin us. She told me not to get involved; she wanted to protect
me."-

When he talked about his mother he started mumbling,
head down. It was as if he were five years old, recounting to a
playmate how he’d gotten in trouble. I took out the photo from
Garza’s trailer and put it on the table. Dan’s forehead turned
scarlet.

"You’ve seen this before?"

"One like it. In Garza’s files."

"But you don’t know what it’s a picture of."

Dan looked down at his beer. "No. She wouldn’t
tell me. She wanted—"

“
She wanted to protect you."

Dan looked miserable.

“
You found out right before the River Parade,"
I guessed. “And you told Lillian. She didn’t take it well."

He swallowed. “I thought she had a right to know.
She was working with this guy, for God’s sake. And we were
practically engaged. I’d just given her a diamond ring. I showed
her the photo, explained what I knew to her. I told her I’d deal
with it, but—" He shook his head, blushing. “I guess I can’t
blame her. She didn’t want to see me anymore."

"Dan, did it occur to you Lillian might’ve
been shocked because she already knew about those photos? Karnau was
her partner for ten years. Maybe she just didn’t realize he was
using them for blackmail. Maybe she thought they were destroyed;
maybe Karnau had agreed to destroy them, then when she found out he
hadn’t—she didn’t know what to do. Maybe—"

I stopped. I had been thinking aloud, trying to
sculpt an answer I could live with. Dan was looking at me like I’d
just spoken in Arabic.

"Why would she have known?" he said.

I stared at him. I probably looked as dazed as he
did. “All right," I said. “You said your mother told you to
stay out of it. You obviously didn’t."

Dan tried to look defiant, but his voice got quivery.

“
It’s my damn company. My fiancée. When
Lillian,. . .when she told me to go away, it just made me more
determined to resolve things. I confronted Beau. I told him he’d
gotten all he was going to get and I wanted the photographs. I just
didn’t know—"

He rubbed his eyes slowly, like he couldn’t quite
remember where they were. A sleepless night and too many pitchers of
Lone Star were catching up with him.

"You didn’t know what?"

"Beau kept stalling. He asked for more money,
then promised he’d bring the disk, then asked for more. He promised
if I came to the Hilton that would really be it. He was leaving town.
But already he’d done something with Lillian, and then that
carpenter, then Garza. It just kept getting worse. If I hadn’t
pushed on him so hard—"

“
Wait a minute," I said. “You think Karnau
killed those two men. You think he kidnapped Lillian."

Dan stared at me. “It’s obvious." .

"Obvious," I repeated. “Who killed Karnau
then? Who else knew you were going to the Hilton, Dan?"

"No one."

“
Except your mother?"

He didn’t respond. I wasn’t sure he was even
listening.

“
When Lillian turned up missing," I said,
"your mother talked to the Cambridges. She insisted on no
police."

He frowned. "We both did. We knew it wouldn’t
help."

"That’s not why she wanted the police out,
Dan."

His eyes became unfocused. "What the hell do you
know about her? You have any idea how much strength it takes—her
husband about to die, some lowlife black-mailing her family, a
hundred damn cousins and second cousins and nieces and nephews ready
to take over the company as soon as they see the chance? She kept a
million-dollar business together, Navarre. She’s done that for me."

It sounded like a speech he’d heard a thousand
times. He recited it without much conviction.

I tried to imagine the world as Dan saw it: Beau
Karnau capable of shooting Eddie Moraga through the eyes, but scared
enough of Dan to not try anything even alone with him in a dark
alley. Dan able to save the family business single-handedly, even
though he’d looked at the books maybe once. Lillian ignorant of her
mentor’s darker side, just too delicate to handle dating a man who
was being blackmailed. The fact that Karnau was the one who’d been
blackmailing the Sheff family for a year nothing but an odd
coincidence. Dan’s mother a frail and besieged protector of Dan’s
inheritance. I wondered how many of his mother’s speeches it had
taken over the years to make that vision of the world seem obvious to
Dan. I wondered how much longer it would be before that vision caved
in on him.

“
I’d talk to your mother, Dan. She’s been
protecting you again."

The Merle Haggard song ended. Out of the corner of my
eye I could see Carlon staring over at us, trying to look like he
wasn’t.

Dan drained his beer glass.

"Get away from me," he mumbled. "Just
leave."

I stood up from the bench. I threw down a five and
started to go.

"Ask her, Dan. Go to your party tonight and ask
her if the blond man in the picture is named Randall
Halcomb."

When I stopped at the exit and looked back, Dan was
slumped over in the booth, his forehead cupped in his hands, furrows
of blond hair sticking up between his fingers. The waitress with the
beer gut and the golf hat was trying to console him, giving me a
dirty look. Carlon had left his table and was walking toward me as
quickly as he could without actually breaking into a run.

We went out together and stood next to Carlon’s car
in the nighttime heat. The blue Hyundai was parked on McCullough with
two wheels on the curb.

"So what do we know?" Carlon said.

"We don’t know much, Carlon. just that Dan’s
a victim."

Carlon laughed. “Yeah, poor guy. Forced to put a
bullet in Karnau’s head. Give me a break, Tres."

"Dan didn’t kill Karnau. He just isn’t
capable."

Carlon took off his inconspicuous tie, rolled it up,
and shoved it in the front pocket of his khakis, never taking his
eyes off me.