The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan (27 page)

"I remembered the name," Ines conceded.
"Aaron mentioned Hector Mara once, in a phone argument he was
having with Del. Months ago, before we moved to San Antonio. I don't
remember the context."

"Did you know Aaron in the spring of '93?"

She scowled. "What does that... You mean when
Aaron's father was killed?"

"Yes."

She started to ask a question, then apparently
changed her mind. Her eyes refocused on the rim of the basin. "I'd
come up from Del Rio in fall '92. To enroll at Our Lady of the Lake.
It was my first semester."

"Aaron Brandon's first semester teaching there."

"I was in his undergraduate class. We... started
having a relationship."

"And Our Lady of the Lake didn't renew his
contract."

"Not because of me. Aaron was struggling. He
didn't have any confidence. To tell the truth, he wasn't a very good
teacher. Halfway through the spring semester, he knew the university
wasn't going to ask him back. Aaron wanted to give up, go crawling
back to his father for a job at RideWorks. I couldn't just watch
Aaron give up and go back to the family business. I convinced him to
stay with his teaching, to take another job for the following year
even though it wasn't the best—"

"At Permian Basin."

She nodded. "In April, I found out I was
pregnant with Michael. That's why we got married."

"In Laredo?"

One sandaled foot kicked me not-so-gently on the
thigh. "What did you do, P.I. — ferret out my marriage
certificate?"

I reminded her about the wedding picture I'd seen in
her living room. She pursed her lips — maybe a gesture of
contrition. It didn't make my thigh feel any better.

"Our marriage was a secret, of course," she
told me. "Jeremiah was still alive then — he would've disowned
Aaron for marrying a Mexican. Never mind Jeremiah's paternalism for
the South Side 'locals.' That didn't include his son marrying one."

"But Del knew you were married."

"He gave Aaron a terrible time about me, but he
kept our secret."

"Del doesn't strike me as the type to keep
secrets. Especially Aaron's."

She laughed dryly. "Maybe he just didn't have
time to tell. Jeremiah was killed a few weeks later."

"And how did Aaron take that?"

"Aaron hardly talked about what he was feeling,
Mr. Navarre. Not even to me. But the murder had one good effect —
it resolved Aaron on going to UT Permian Basin, to get out of San
Antonio. That's what we were doing in the spring of '93. We were
getting ready to move. Getting ready to have our first child. I don't
know about his brother, but I'm sure my husband never crossed paths
with people like Hector Mara or Zeta Sanchez. An acquaintance like
that would've shown on Aaron like a bruise, he was so sensitive. In a
lot of ways, fragile."

I thought about the papers and lecture notes I'd seen
in Aaron Brandon's files — all of them obsessed with the violence
of medieval life. I thought of Aaron in the photos I'd seen — a
large man, thick-boned, dark-haired, bred from blue-collar stock, a
face as dour as his brother's. I tried to think of him as fragile. I
said, "When did things become strained between you and Aaron?"

Ines squeezed her palm until it turned mottled.
"Christmas — when he went for his final UTSA interview. Aaron
insisted on moving back to San Antonio. I hated him for being so
stubborn. I hated him for dragging us back to San Antonio. He wasn't
ready for the UTSA job or for facing his brother again. But I'd
followed him to West Texas. I'd stood by him for five years. I loved
him. He was the father of my child and he would've been a good
teacher one day. He was learning so much before we came back..."

The winch motor started up again.

I looked at Ines and believed what she said, that
this woman had what it took to sustain her husband's career on life
support those five years in the Permian Basin, until Aaron had
insisted on moving back into his family's orbit, insisted on
committing emotional suicide. I found myself growing angry at Aaron
Brandon for that.

And maybe deep down, I was jealous. Maybe part of me
was wondering how far I would've gone after graduate school if I'd
had someone in my life like Ines Brandon.

Ozzie shouted something. The tow-truck men gave the
winch another go. They operated it in short bursts until finally, on
try number four, the VW lurched forward. The wreckage of the beast
emerged reluctantly out of the muck.

"You were back home in Del Rio the night Aaron
was killed?"

Ines nodded. "Michael and I were staying with
friends. Paloma called us immediately, but — I still don't remember
how I made it back to town safely. I don't remember the drive at
all."

"And you'd never heard of Zeta Sanchez before?"

"And never want to again."

"What about justice?"

She slammed her hand against the hood of the police
car. The metallic pop was like a hunter's rifle, half a mile distant.

"Justice? Justice is something you get only
after your life has gone to hell, Mr. Navarre. It doesn't make
anything better. You can criticize me for packing up and running, if
you want, but running is the first thing I think of when I wake up in
the middle of the night — my son having night terrors down the
hall, hiding under a bunch of blankets, crying, calling for his
daddy. I just want to run, take Michael, and get the hell away from
this place. I want the past to go out with the trash. Do you blame
me?"

I watched as the tow truck dragged my upside-down VW
onto dry land, the ragtop ripped loose and trailing behind like a
mud-stained cape. I found myself thinking about Ana DeLeon in her
blue business suit, standing at the window of an abandoned house,
looking out over the untended fields of Bexar County.

"Time to pick up the children," Ines said.

For one brief, guilty instant, I let myself fantasize
that the words the children had some relevance to my life. Then I
turned and trudged back up the slope toward Ines Brandon's car.
 

THIRTY

The closer Jem and I got to the office, the less Jem
spoke. His excitement about the visit to school, his stories about
Michael Brandon and the other new friends he'd made started to drain
away, replaced by the dread of what was waiting for us back at
Erainya's. I had to force myself to turn into the parking lot.

It was Friday, but Kelly was in town anyway, sitting
at my desk. She'd washed all the purple dye out of her black hair.
Her clothes were black, too — slacks and a tank top and Doc
Martens. Her face had the freshly scoured look of recent crying. She
was on the phone with some client, telling him there would be a
slight delay in our next report.

Jem ran back to his mother's desk and climbed into
Erainya's lap. Erainya was also on the phone, talking to the
hospital. She looked up and gave me a shake of the head. No change.

Jem put his head on her shoulder and his body went
limp.

The toys had been carefully collected off the rug and
put to the side in a huge plastic bucket, making the center of the
office strangely empty. On George Berton's desk, the Styrofoam hat
holder was bald. His paperwork had been removed and added to the
stack on my desk.

When Kelly finished her call, she sat staring at the
empty space in the middle of the office. Then she looked away,
sniffling.

"We're out of Kleenex," she told me.
"Wouldn't you know it?"

I reached over and pulled one of George's silk
handkerchiefs out of his drawer. "George would probably say,
'You can wipe your nose on my hanky anytime, chiquita.'"

Kelly laughed brokenly, pinched her nose into the
handkerchief. "God, I hate this. I hate this."

"I know."

She took my hand, squeezed it hard, tried telling me
details, lists of things she'd done since she'd gotten in this
morning. She told me about her long phone conversations with Jenny at
George's title office, about scrambling to find names of George's kin
and coming up with nothing. Friends — hundreds of them. But family?
The little information anybody could volunteer was slim and
contradictory — an aunt in Monterey, a half-brother in El Paso, a
niece in Chicago. Nobody really knew. A dead wife, everybody knew.

I let her talk, only cueing into the words
occasionally.

Then the doorbell chimed and Ralph Arguello came in.

In the two years I'd worked at the office, Ralph had
come by exactly once, on an evening when he was certain Erainya would
be out. Ralph knew how Erainya felt about him and he'd always chosen
to respect her feelings. At least until today.

Ralph had forgone the usual XXL Guayabera and jeans
for a raw silk suit — milk white, with a black bolo and black
ostrich-skin boots. Under the loose cut of his jacket he could've
concealed enough weapons to arm his own cult.

His hair was braided into a tight cord. His thick
round glasses shimmered as he examined the office — Berton's
cleared desk, Erainya and Jem. He zeroed in on Kelly's hand in mine,
then after a very long half second seemed to dismiss the sight.

"Vato." He acknowledged me.

He picked off his glasses. This in itself was a rare
event, and his naked eyes looked huge and dark, as if the lenses had
somehow contained them. Ralph might've been close to legal blindness,
but his stare revealed a fierceness you never saw through his glasses
— an honest warning of the kind of violence he was capable of.

He held out his arms. Kelly went to him, tried for a
stiff, perfunctory hug, but Ralph wouldn't let her pull away. He held
her until she melted against him in earnest and started crying.

He looked at me over her shoulder. There was one
question in his face, a calm demand that I'd seen before and
understood perfectly. When?

Back at her desk, Erainya said a few weary
"thank-yous" to the ICU nurse and hung up the phone.

She ruffled Jem's hair, then stared across the room
at us. Surprisingly, she did not throw anything at Ralph to drive him
from the office. She merely said, "Mr. Arguello."

Ralph nodded, acknowledging the truce. "Ms.
Manos. Quepasa?"

"You have to ask?"

He shook his head, then disengaged from Kelly. "And
you, mi chica?"

"I'll be okay," Kelly whispered.

He gathered the back of Kelly's hair in his fist —
a gesture that would've seemed threatening, proprietary, from anyone
else. From Ralph, the gesture was still proprietary, but the
tenderness and affection for his niece was unmistakable. He let the
glossy black hair fall through his fingers, then nodded at me. "Let's
talk."

Erainya said, "Wait."

The silent demand in her eyes was as clear as
Ralph's. We will not do anything rash. We will not make things worse.

I nodded assent. "It's okay, Erainya."

She closed her hand around Jem's small fingers,
hugging his shoulder tight with the other arm. "Honey, nothing
is okay," she told me.

Outside, the afternoon was heating up, the air
scented with roasting lamb and pepper from Demo's Greek restaurant
next door.

Ralph said, "Sorry about your car."

"The car is nothing."

He looked at me dubiously. Ralph knew about me and
the VW. He'd known me when I'd first gotten it from my mother, my
third year of high school. He'd driven in it with me drunk, sober, in
danger, on dates. He'd teased me about it mercilessly while he went
yearly from luxury car to luxury car and I continued clunking along
in my mother's hideous orange hand-me-down. And he knew that the car
had been part of who I was.

"Tell me the score," Ralph said.

He listened while I told him of my last few days.

When I was done he took a joint and a lighter from
his shirt pocket and lit up. He took a long toke before speaking. "I
don't know much about the chiva business, vato. Some things, I got no
desire to learn. But I got some ideas where we can find the guy you
want."

"Chicharron?"

He nodded.

"And Chich will happily give us a confession?"

"Shit, no, vato. That we take."

The ferocity in his eyes made me shudder.

Through the office window, Kelly and Erainya were
standing by my desk now, talking. Jem was making sure all his toys
were still there in the bucket.

"I want to keep things legal, Ralphas."

Ralph stared at me.

"I want DeLeon in on what we're doing," I
explained. "I don't want to blow her case."

For once, Ralph seemed at a loss for words.

"Ana, huh?" He flicked some ashes toward
the pavement.

"You know her," I said.

"Did you ask Ana about that?"

"She said about as much as you are. You object
to her coming with us?"

He shrugged. "You want Ana to come along, vato —
good luck. You know the rules of association. How you figure she's
going to want to spend time around me?"