Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (5 page)

Then he drove over half the Rodriguezes’ front lawn
and over the curb getting back on the street. The BMW swerved slowly
down Acacia like a drunk shark. The Rodriguez brothers looked at me
and grinned, raising their beer cans in a salute.

Lillian was in her bedroom, pretending to read.

"
Just a little man-to-man talk?" she asked
coldly. "Did you mark off your territory for him?"

"Lillian—" I started. I stopped,
realizing I sounded like Dan had a few minutes before.

She threw down her magazine. "I don’t like
being told to go to my room while the big fellas fight it out, Tres."

"You’re right. I shou1d’ve let you handle
it."

"You think I couldn’t have?"

No answer would’ve worked, so I didn’t try one.

She got up and looked out the window. Finally, she
walked over to me and put her arms around my waist. Her eyes were
still angry.

“
Look, Tres, this hasn’t been a real great day
for me. I think I need a hot bath and a night alone with a book."

"I love you, " I said.

She kissed me as lightly as you’d kiss a Bible.

“
I think we should talk more tomorrow," she
said quietly. "I don’t want any more surprises from my past."

I closed the front door quietly on my way out.

Back at home, I checked my newly installed answering
machine. Mother had called twice, upset that I hadn’t given her a
report yet on my first date with Lillian. Bob Langston had left a
cryptic message threatening me with bodily harm and legal action.

I unwrapped the ceramic skeleton-driven car Lillian
had given me and put it down on the carpet in front of Robert
Johnson. He hissed at it, puffing up his tail as thick as a
raccoon’s, then walked backward into the closet, still staring at
the new monstrosity.

Two days back home and I’d managed to mess up my
fragile relationship with Lillian, aggravate my mother, traumatize my
cat, and make at least three new enemies.

"Just about par," I told myself.

There was only one other thing I could possibly stir
up to make myself feel worse. I called directory assistance and asked
for Carl Kelley, retired deputy sheriff, my dead father’s best
friend.
 

8

“
I’ll be damned," he said. “I never
thought I’d hear from you again, son."

Years of smoking hadn’t been kind to Carl Kelley’s
voice. Every word sounded like it was being scraped across a metal
file as it left his throat.

Before I could tell him why I had called, he began a
long gravelly sentence without periods, telling me about all the
people he and my father had known who were now either dead, in the
hospital, or afflicted in their old age with ungrateful children. I
got the feeling Carl was living alone now and probably hadn’t
gotten a phone call in a long time. I let him talk.

One of God’s little jokes: as soon as I had reached
Carl on the phone the TV program somehow switched from baseball
coverage to a rerun of Buckner Fanning’s morning sermon from
Trinity Baptist. I had dragged the phone across the living room as
far as the cord would reach and was now trying to reach the
television controls with my foot, hoping I could either turn the set
off or find another channel. So far Buckner was thwarting my efforts.
Tan and immaculately dressed, he was smiling and admonishing me to
accept God.

"Yeah," I said to Carl at the appropriate
moments. “That sounds pretty bad." After a while Carl
presented me with an opening. He asked me what I was doing back in
town.

“
If I were to want some case files on Dad’s
death, who would I talk to?"

A long pull on a cigarette. A rumbly cough. “Christ,
son. You’ve come back to look into that?"

"No," I said. “But maybe now I could read
about it fresh, more objectively, maybe put it behind me."

I could hear him blow smoke into the receiver.

"Not a week goes by I don’t see him in my
sleep," Carl said, "lying there like that."

We both got quiet. I thought about that eternal five
minutes between the time my father had fallen to the ground and the
first paramedic unit had arrived, when we’d stood there, Carl and
I, watching the groceries roll down the sidewalk with the lines of
blood. I’d been completely frozen. Carl had been the opposite. He’d
started pacing, rambling about what jack and he had been planning on
doing that weekend, how the hunting was going to be, what Aggie jokes
jack had told him the night before. All the while he was wiping away
tears, lighting and crushing cigarettes one after the other. A jar of
jelly had rolled into the crook of my father’s arm and nestled
there like a teddy bear.

"I don’t know about putting it behind you,"
Carl said.

Buckner Fanning started telling me about his latest
trip to the Holy City of Jerusalem.

“
Who would I talk to to see the files, Carl?"

“
It’s in-house, son. And it’s been too long. It
just ain’t done that way."

"But if it was?"

Carl exhaled into my ear. "You remember
Drapiewski? Larry Drapiewski? Made deputy lieutenant about a year
ago."

"What about for SAPD?"

He had a coughing fit for a minute, then cleared his
throat.

“
I’d try Kingston in Criminal Investigations, if
he’s still there. He was always in debt to jack for one favor or
another. There was an FBI review of the case a few years back too. I
can’t help you there."

I remembered neither Drapiewski nor Kingston, but it
was a place to start.

“
Thanks, Carl. "

“
Yeah well, sorry I can’t help much. I thought
you were my son calling from Austin. He ain’t called in over a
month, you know. For a minute there, you sounded like him."

"Take care of yourself, Carl."

“
Nice way to spend an afternoon," he said.
"You kept me talking all the way up to 60 Minutes."

I hung up. I couldn’t help picturing Carl Kelley,
sitting in some house alone, a cigarette in his withered hand, living
for television shows and a phone call from Austin that never came. I
sat for a minute, Robert Johnson instantly on my lap, and we watched
Buckner talk about spiritual healing. Then I turned off the set.
 

9

"Little Tres?" Larry Drapiewski laughed.
"Jesus, E not the same seven-year-old kid who used to sit on my
desk and eat the custard out of the middle of my donuts."

As soon as he said that I had a vague memory of
Drapiewski—a large man, flat-topped red hair, friendly smile, a
sweating face that looked like the Martian landscape. His big hands
always full of food.

"Yeah," I said, "only twenty years and
a lot of donuts later nobody calls me ‘little'."

"Join the club," the lieutenant said. "So
what’s on your mind?"

When I told him why I was calling he was quiet for an
uncomfortable amount of time. An oscillating fan on his desk hummed
back and forth into the receiver.

“
You understand everybody has looked at this,"
Larry said. "Half the departments in town, the county, the FBI.
Everybody wanted a piece of this. You want to find something that
nobody’s caught before, it isn’t going to happen."

“
Does that mean you won’t help?"

"I didn’t say that."

I heard papers being moved around on the other end of
the line. Finally Larry swore under his breath.

"Where’s a pen?" he asked somebody. Then
to me: "Let me have your number, Tres."

I gave it to him.

"Okay," he said. "Give me a couple of
days."

"Thanks, Larry."

"And, Tres—this is a personal favor. Let’s
just keep it personal."

“
You got it."

He cleared his throat. “Yeah, well, I owed your dad
a lot. It’s just that the Sheriff is sensitive to taxpayer dollars
being used on, let’s say, nonessential work. It also doesn’t help
if it’s about one of his predecessors who beat him in three
straight elections, you know what I mean?"

I checked with SAPD next. After a few minutes of
being transferred from line to line, I finally got Detective
Schaeffer, who sounded like he’d just woken up from a nap. He told
me Ian Kingston, formerly with Criminal Investigations, had moved to
Seattle two years ago and was presently overseeing a large private
security firm. Kingston’s ex-partner, David Epcar, was presently
overseeing a small burial plot in the Sunset Cemetery.

“
Wonderful," I said.

Schaeffer yawned so loud it sounded like somebody was
vacuuming his mouth.

"What was your name again?" he asked.

I told him.

“
Like in Jackson Navarre, the county sheriff that
got killed?"

"Yeah."

He grunted, evidently sitting up in his chair.

"That was the biggest pain in the ass we’ve
had since Judge Woods took a hit," he said. "Fucking
circus."

It wasn’t exactly a show of sympathetic interest.

Seeing as I was out of other options, however, and
had to say something before the detective fell back asleep, I decided
to give Schaeffer my best song and dance.

Much to my surprise, he didn’t hang up on me.

“
Huh. Call me back in a week or so, Navarre. If I
get a chance to look at the files, maybe you can ask me some
questions."

“
That’s mighty white of you, Detective."

I think he was snoring before his receiver hit the
cradle.

By sunset it still wasn’t cool enough to run
without getting heat stroke. I settled for fifty push—ups and
stomach crunches in the living room, then held horse stance and bow
stance for ten minutes each. Robert Johnson lounged across the cool
Linoleum in the kitchen and watched. Afterward I lay flat on my back
with my muscles burning, letting the air conditioner dry the sweat
off my body and listening to the dying hum of the cicadas outside.
Robert Johnson crawled onto my chest and sat there looking down at
me, his eyes half-closed.

“
Good workout?" I asked.

He yawned.

I unpacked a few boxes, drank a few beers, watched
the fireflies floating around in Gary Hales’s backyard at dusk. I
tried to convince myself I wasn’t fighting any kind of compulsion
to call Lillian. Give her some time.

No problem. It was just a coincidence that I kept
staring at the phone.

I started digging through my box of books until I
found Lillian’s letters wedged in between the Snopes family and the
rest of Yoknapatawpha County. I read them all, from her first in May
to the one that had arrived last Thursday, just as I was packing.
Reading them made me feel much worse.

Irritated, I dug around in the box some more, looking
for some lighter reading material—Kafka maybe, or an account of the
Black Plague. What I found instead was my father’s scrapbook.

It was a huge canvas—covered three-ring binder
stuffed with just about every insignificant piece of writing he’d
ever scribbled but was too lazy to throw away. There were yellowed
drawings he’d done for me when I was live or six-stick figures of
armies and airplanes that he’d used to illustrate his drunken
Korean bedtime stories to me. There were letters that had never been
mailed to friends who had long since died. There were pages of notes
on old cases he’d been pursuing that meant nothing to me. There
were grocery lists.

I still have no idea why I’d taken the scrapbook
from his desk after the funeral, or why I’d kept it, or why I
decided to look at it again now, but I sat down on the futon with it
now and started flipping through. In several places I’d dog-eared
interesting pages, most of which I’d forgotten about. One of them
caught my
attention.

A yellowed piece of spiral paper, the kind of scrap
my dad was always leaving around the house, filled with rambling
reminders to himself. It appeared to be a list of notes for a trial
testimony he was making against Guy White, a suspected local drug
trafficker. Then at the bottom it said: Sabinal. Get whiskey. Fix
fence. Clean fireplace.

This page had bothered me the first time I read it
and it bothered me now, though I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t just
Guy White’s name. I remembered White’s drug trial vaguely, then
later some speculation that White’s mob connections might have been
behind my father’s murder, but Dad’s testimony notes revealed no
shocking secrets. The seven words Dad had scrawled at the bottom of
the page bothered me more. They sounded like a reminder of what to do
next time we went to the family ranch outside Sabinal. Except we only
went to Sabinal at Christmas, for deer season, and the notes were
written in April, a month before Dad died. I finished off my six-pack
of Shiner Bock while I read, and felt almost grateful when my
father’s shaky cursive started to blur.

I’m not sure when I actually fell asleep, but when
I woke up it was full dark and the phone was ringing. I almost
impaled myself on the ironing board trying to get to the receiver.