Kent Conwell - Tony Boudreaux 09 - The Crystal Skull Murders (8 page)

Danny shrugged. “None of my boys heard a peep
about it on the streets. If someone had planned to torch
it, they didn’t get help from any of the locals.”

I touched the Band-Aid over the knot on my forehead. I couldn’t help wondering if the goon who had
slammed me into the wall earlier that day was a local or
someone from outside. I still couldn’t shake the feeling
that the torching was a cover-up for Rosey’s murder.

After licking the thick, sweet sauce from his fingers,
Danny nodded and said, “I know Patsy Fusco good, too
good. He’s ambitious, and he wants to get a toehold in
Austin. Eisen, I don’t know, but Joe Vasco over in New
Orleans probably has a handle on him. I’ll get back
with you tomorrow. Abe Romero is a small-time staker
looking to step up. I can figure him wanting the HipHop, but not even Abe is stupid enough to burn down
something he wants”

I glanced at Doreen who was hanging on to every
word Danny uttered about the case. “Abe’s here in
town?”

“Yeah. Last I heard, he hangs out at the Texas Star
over in Elgin.”

“What about Calvin Engel? He owns Jimmy’s Bistro
next to the Hip-Hop.”

Danny shrugged. “What about him?”

“I heard he was sort of what you would call an entrepreneur. He has his finger in a bunch of pies.”

“Small time. Hustles stolen goods from time to time.”

“What about drugs?”

“Probably. I never heard, but busters like Engel will
stoop to about any level”

Doreen pushed back from the table and excused herself. As she headed for the Ladies’ Room, Danny’s perpetual grin faded. He gulped some beer and shook his
head. “She’s kinda uptight, huh?”

I grinned. So he had noticed. “She’s different, believe me”

“She really work with you?”

“Yeah.”

“How long?”

I started to say a month. That’s how long the day had
seemed. “Just this morning.”

He grinned knowingly at me. “Bet it seems like a
month, huh?”

I grinned back. “You’re in the wrong business,
Danny. You should have been a mind reader.”

When I dropped Doreen off at her Jaguar that evening, I asked if she would be all right getting home.

She grinned crookedly. “Not worried about me, are
you?”

“Hey, you’re my partner. I always worry about my
partner.”

She looked at me curiously, then nodded. “I’ll be just
fine.”

Back in my apartment, I fed A.B. and booted up my computer and planned an itinerary for the next day. I
stuck Eisen and Fusco at the end of the list. I needed to
see the fire marshal’s report on the fire, to see what incendiary agents the arsonist utilized. Then I wanted to
run down Abe Romero. See where he was on Tuesday
the nineteenth, the night the Hip-Hop burned. I also
wanted to make another run through the storeroom.
Though I had no reason, the more I considered the matter, the more I figured the ticket had to be hidden somewhere in that building.

If we couldn’t find the ticket, then the next step was
to hit the pawnshops within walking distance of Sixth
Street and see if anyone remembered Rosey.

I paused, staring at the monitor, disappointed that I
had accomplished so little that day. But then I reminded
myself that maybe I had accomplished more than I
knew for not only had someone tried to slam my head
through a brick wall, someone, maybe that same someone, had tried to leave tire marks on my brand-new
sports coat.

Finally I booted off and plopped down on the couch,
propped my feet on the coffee table and watched a John
Wayne Western on TV.

The jangling of my telephone jerked me from the
exhausted slumber into which I had fallen. It was Janice Coffman-Morrison, my on-again, off-again Significant Other reminding me of our dinner date the next
night.

Next morning, Doreen was waiting for me at my
desk when I arrived. She was wearing a dark brown
suit. While I’m no expert, it appeared she had applied
some makeup.

I uttered a soft curse when I saw her. I was hoping to
arrive before her so I could talk to Marty. Jerry Blue’s
remark about her not liking men still bothered me. I’d
just have to catch him another time. I grinned at her.
“Ready for another day?”

She pushed to her feet. “I’m ready”

“In just a minute.” I reached for the phone and dialed
the Austin Police Department. Chief Pachuca was out,
so I left my cell number. Doreen looked on curiously,
so I explained, “We need to see the fire marshal’s report
on the fire at the Hip-Hop. See what kind of agent was
used to start the fire. It was probably kerosene or gasoline.”

Marty stuck his head out of his office. “Tony, before
you leave, I need to see you about the International Insurance lawsuit. Bring the file on them”

“Okay” I glanced at Doreen who started to rise and
follow me. “Do me a favor. Look up the address of the
Texas Star Bar and Grill out in Elgin while I talk to
Marty.

She nodded. “Abe Romero?”

“You got it.”

After laying out the file on International Insurance
and answering Marty’s questions, I asked him one of my own. “Yesterday, I talked to Jerry Blue over at Texas
Investigations. He told me why they fired your sister-inlaw. Said she was hard to work with. She was hostile.
But he also made the remark that she didn’t like men”

He laughed. “Yeah. He’s right. She hates men. Her
husband slapped her around. After they divorced, she
had a few bad experiences, and now she thinks men
should suffer the same fate as a cockroach, to be
stomped under the heel of her shoe”

Now her behavior, her demeanor made sense. I
didn’t agree with it, but at least I knew where she was
coming from. I could understand the defensive posture
she adopted.

He stopped me when I turned to leave. “How’d she
do last night?”

I thought about the previous evening. “All right. She
did okay” And the truth was, she had.

To my surprise, Doreen climbed into the pickup
without arguing. “Where to first?” she asked.

I glanced at her Jag, then grinned to myself. “You get
the address of the bar over in Elgin?”

“Yes” She patted the pocket of her jacket.

“Those dives don’t open until around ten or so. I
want to go back to Sixth Street first and run down the
rest of Rosey’s buddies and check the storeroom again.
I can’t shake the feeling the pawn ticket is hidden in
there somewhere”

I’ve heard about poor old boys so unlucky that they
run into accidents intended for someone else. The other
edge of that sword is that some people are lucky enough
to reap the benefits of an unexpected windfall.

Believe it or not, we got the benefit of a surprise windfall although I didn’t really know what to make of it.

During the drive down to Sixth Street, Doreen asked,
“What happens if we don’t find the pawn ticket?”

With a shrug, I replied, “Then we’ll just have to rely
on legwork.”

She paused a moment, then with a hint of satisfaction in her tone, said, “That’s what I figured, so last
night after I got back to my apartment, I made a list
of all of the pawn shops within a dozen blocks of
Sixth Street. I figured that was about as far as one of
those street bu-I mean, street people would want to
walk.”

I looked around in surprise. She wore a smug little
smile. “Good idea,” I replied. “Good idea.” Her smile
grew wider.

The sidewalks were deserted except for one or two
merchants sweeping the walk in front of their places of
business. We pulled around the corner of Sixth and San
Jacinto into a parking space next to the alley.

Before we climbed from the pickup, I spotted Goofyfoot and Pookie coming out of the alley across the
street. They ignored the pickup until I called to them.
For a moment, they hesitated, but then recognizing me,
angled across the street.

I climbed out to meet them while Doreen remained
in the pickup. “Hi, boys” I nodded. “Heading anywhere in particular?”

Three or four layers of clothes gave Pookie a robust
look, one that his emaciated face instantly disputed. He
pointed to the Dumpsters lining the alley. “See what
was tossed out last night.” He patted his belly.

“Just get up?”

Goofyfoot nodded. “Yep. Slept down at the convention center last night. Good and warm”

I hooked my thumb over my shoulder. “I thought you
bunked in the storehouse over there.”

Pookie arched a bushy eyebrow. “I ain’t staying there
no more, not after yesterday.”

Goofyfoot grunted. “Reckon he’s right. It ain’t a
good place no more. Getting the wrong crowd of people hanging in there.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Pointing a bony finger at the storehouse, Pookie added, “Someone done tore the innards out of the place. They
musta been looking for something.”

“Probably the same one I saw running from it yesterday,” Goofyfoot added.

My ears perked up. “Yesterday? What time yesterday?” Absently, I touched my fingers to the Band-Aid
on my forehead, hoping we were talking about the same
time frame.

He frowned at the urgency in my voice. “I-I don’t
rightly know,” he stammered.

“Think hard, Goofyfoot. Before or after lunch. It’s
important.”

He pondered the question a few moments. I resisted
the urge to hurry him. “Let’s see. It was before-no, it
was after lunch. I’d found me some almost whole
Subways down behind Fat Sal’s Deli and I was coming back to the storehouse to eat them when some
dude in a fancy suit busted out of the door and run
across the alley right into the back door of the Red
Rabbit.”

I stared at him in disbelief. Talk about luck. When I
regained my wits, I waved Doreen over.

The two old men watched curiously as she came
around the front of the pickup.

“Listen to this,” I said to her. “Okay, Goofyfoot. Tell
us again what you saw.”

He repeated his story. Doreen looked at me in surprise.

I grinned at the old man. “Do you remember what he
looked like?”

He scratched at his temple, and I saw flakes of thick
dandruff fall to the worn shoulders of the grimy topcoat
drooping from his thin frame. “Didn’t get that good a
look at him except he was a big dude”

“What was he wearing? You remember?” In the back
of my mind, I remembered Getdown’s remark about
the “fancy set of drapes” the dude was wearing.

“Yeah. Like I said, a fancy suit.”

“What do you mean, fancy?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It was blue. That’s about
all I know. Oh, yeah, he had long hair hanging down his
back.”

I cut my eyes to Doreen. She nodded.

In my mind, I felt he was telling the truth, but at the
same time, when I managed to stumble out into the alley yesterday, no one was around, not the goon who had
hit me nor Goofyfoot. “Sounds like the same one we
ran into inside the storeroom, but where’d you go? I
didn’t see you in the alley”

He looked at me as if I’d lost my senses. “Not me.
Whatever was happening wasn’t none of my business. I
got out of there fast”

“But, you’re certain it was the Red Rabbit the guy
ran into?”

“I should be. We find good stuff out in Buck’s Dumpster.”

I chuckled and fished a sawbuck from my pocket and
offered it to Goofyfoot. “Here. You boys go buy yourself a hot breakfast”

Pookie snatched it from my fingers. “Thanks,
Boudreaux. Me and Goofyfoot will sure do that”

As they disappeared around the corner on Sixth Street,
with a wry edge in her voice, Doreen remarked, “You
know what they’ll do with that ten, don’t you?”

I laughed. “Buy as much cheap wine as they can and
sleep the day away.”

Pookie hadn’t lied. The storehouse had been ripped
apart. Shelves had been torn from the walls and dismantled piece by piece, the contents of the boxes on the
shelves were strewn about, and the mattresses were
shredded.

Her fists jabbed into her hips, Doreen studied the
chaos. “Looks like somebody came back after we left.
Do you think they found it?”

“Beats me. If it had been here, I think we would
have found it yesterday. I’m guessing they didn’t find
it either.”

“But we can’t be sure”

I arched an eyebrow. “You’re right. As far as I know,
they might be redeeming whatever it was right now. All
we can do is keep looking.”

A frown wrinkled her forehead. “You mean here?”
She gestured to the storeroom.

“No. We might have overlooked it yesterday, but
whoever did this-well, I figure this place is clean. You
still have that list of pawn shops?”

She patted her pocket. “Right here”

“All right. Let’s see Buck first, then we’ll start hitting
the pawn shops”

Wearing a sparkling new serving jacket, Buck looked
up from behind the bar where he was packing beer in
the coolers. A single customer sat hunched over the bar,
both hands wrapped around a mug of draft beer. Buck
grinned. “Hey, Tony, Doreen. How about some coffee?”

“Why not?” I slipped up on a stool and Doreen took
the one beside me. I nodded to the jacket. “What’s the
occasion?”