The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan (42 page)

Anthony "Zeta" Sanchez was still in jail on
charges of shooting Gerson and resisting arrest, but was not expected
to be charged with any higher crimes. The SAPD brass and the D.A.'s
office were praising the homicide detectives in charge of the
investigation.

"This is a case where extra diligence paid off,"
their PR lady told TV viewers. "If we hadn't gone the extra
mile, if the detectives involved had settled for the easy solution—"

A reporter interrupted, asking if SAPD detectives had
ever settled for the easy solution before, if there'd been any
pressure from the D.A.'s office to wrap up the Professor Aaron
Brandon murder case quickly. The PR spokesman said, "Of course
not."

A last strange twist on the case — Aaron Brandon's
widow Ines had come forward and admitted to having a prior
relationship with Aaron's supposed killer, Zeta Sanchez. She had, at
one time, gone by the name of Sandra Mara-Sanchez. The local news was
still chewing on that piece of information, not sure what to do with
it, but they reported that Ines Brandon was not at present charged
with any crime. After questioning, she had been released to be with
her son. In the short clip they showed of Ines, I saw Erainya in the
background, along with several high-powered defense lawyers.

I turned off the TV.

Harold Diliberto had failed to make the news, unless
you count the early morning coffee crowd at the Sabinal General
Store. Harold would live, and as Dr. Janice Farn succinctly put it,
"He'll only be a little uglier than he was before."

The hospital room hadn't been quiet for two minutes
when my mother appeared in the doorway with a wicker picnic basket.
George was snoring, his Panama hat pulled down over his trach tube.
Mother was dressed in a beaded denim dress, her neckline dripping
with trouble dolls and Zuni fetishes. Her black hair was pulled back,
also beaded. She looked like a Shopping Channel advertisement for the
Bead-O-Matic appliqué kit.

"You look fine, dear." She sat down,
hoisting the basket onto her lap. "You have a little color
back."

"I feel colorful. And you don't have to whisper.
When George sleeps, he sleeps."

She patted my wrist, then helped me raise the bed to
a forty-five-degree angle. "You'll be ready for release this
evening, I hear."

I tried to sit up and immediately regretted it. My
bandaged shoulder screamed like it was being repierced with a hot
glue gun. My not-very-funny doctor had asked me, after some
successful minor surgery,  whether I'd be wanting a stud or a
dangle for the hole.

"Don't worry," my mother said. "This
will cheer you up."

Out of a little lap table she brought a ceramic plate
and soup bowl, a spoon and napkin, a vase filled with baby's breath
and dried roses and incense — the whole Bohemian breakfast-in-bed
kit. Then with a flourish she extracted a foam cup the size of a Bill
Miller extra-large iced tea (which is to say, awfully big).

The white top was scotch-taped in place, dripping
with steam.

"Caldo res from El Mirador," she announced
proudly.

I stared at her blankly. "But it's not
Saturday."

One of the many absurd rules Texans learn to live
with — El Mirador's famous soup cannot be had for love or money
except on Saturday.

"I had a premonition," Mother told me. "I
just knew I had to get an order to go this week. It reheated
beautifully."

"Thank you."
 
Mother
smiled, gratified. She spooned the concoction into my bowl, and
watched, pleased, as I slurped it mouthful by greedy mouthful,
spilling a good deal of it on my napkin.

Afterward I sat back, enjoying the warmth, even
enjoying my mother's quiet company.

It seemed like hours before she said, "Jess
isn't coming back."

Her jaw was set, her lips were pressed together in
resolution. Her eyes were ever so slightly rimmed with red — from
sleeplessness or anger or maybe crying — but she sounded confident,
even upbeat.

"Apparently he came by and got the last of his
things while I was doing my installation at the Crocker Gallery,"
she continued. "It's amazing — three years together, and
amazing just how little he really made a mark on that house."

"That house," I assured her, "could
never be anything but yours."

She nodded tentatively.

"And nobody makes a mark on my mama," I
added.

She cracked a smile.

She gathered her things, replaced the items in her
purse, and sat up in a glittery readjustment of denim and black hair
and beads.

"I don't suppose I need to tell you," she
said, "you scared me to death again."

"No, you don't."

We agreed on dinner next Monday.

Then Mother left me alone with the afternoon light
growing long on the walls of the hospital room. I lay there for a
long time, listening to George Berton contentedly mumbling his dead
wife's name.
 

FIFTY

To my knowledge, Ralph Arguello had never lived in any one
location for longer than six months. He began life moving from shack
to shack in the slums of Cementville, a factory-run shanty town where
his father worked. After his father's death and his mother's success
as a maid, they moved into a small cottage off Basse, behind the
Alamo Gun Club, but Ralph, as much as he loved his mother, was
constantly shifting from friend's house to cousin's house to God
knows where, lying low when the cops were around, making money any
way he could.

The habit proved hard to break once Ralph became a successful
pawnshop king. Today, he would still move into the offices of
acquired shops for a few weeks, to get a feel for the land, he
claimed, and then move to another apartment or rental house. He had
several homes in his name, several more in other names, but none of
them were his home. He traded in and out of living quarters with the
same kind of rootlessness the items in his pawnshops experienced.

Ralph's inseparable possessions were few.

This week he was living in the old Broadway Apartments in Alamo
Heights. The units were dingy blocks, with narrow, perpetually shaded
courtyards smelling of chinaberries and Freon and damp earth. The
metal window frames had not been replaced since the Johnson
administration. It was a place you could drive past a thousand times
and never notice, which is exactly what appealed to Ralph, I was
sure.

I paid off the taxi driver and walked through the courtyard of the
nearest building. On the sidewalk, a couple of Anglo boys in striped
shirts and corduroy shorts and paper Burger King hats were fighting
over a Mr. Potato Head. There were fiesta leftovers scattered across
the ground — colored eggshells and confetti from busted cascarones.
A Night in Old San Antonio T-shirt was hanging over somebody's wall
AC unit.

Ralph answered the buzzer at number five. He looked relaxed, his
braid over his shoulder, his green Guayabera pulled sideways so his
buttons made a diagonal line, his slacks wrinkled, his boots nearby
on the carpet, and his feet in black socks. His glasses were in his
shirt pocket, so his eyes again had that large, dark look that made
me think of a night animal — a raccoon or a possum, something cute
and silent and vicious.

"Come on in, vato."

The place had obviously come furnished. Brown shag carpet, white
plastic furniture in seventies outer-space mod, an old Sony TV, a
walnut veneer bookshelf that was mostly empty. The kitchen smelled
like beer and fresh tamales and copal incense — three of Ralph's
essentials.

I followed Ralph into the living room. The sliding-glass door was
open and the small back porch was ringed in stone, furnished with an
enormous jade plant and a hibachi grill, on which two pieces of flank
steak were grilling. Ana DeLeon sat on the stone wall, drinking a
glass of red wine and watching me approach. She looked beautiful. Her
short black hair was cowlicked on one side. She wore black leggings
and one of her white silk blouses, untucked, the top two buttons
undone to reveal the inward curves of her breasts. She was barefoot.

She said, "Tres."

I nodded.

Ralph said, "I'll get you the Barracuda keys."

He left for the kitchen.

"You didn't return my calls," I told Ana.

The steaks hissed. Music started up from Ralph's boom box inside —
the bright guitar and basso of a ranchera,

"I don't owe you, Tres."

"That's right," I agreed. "No special privileges."

"It wasn't smart — you and me."

I let the idea hang between us until Ana's anger started to
crumble. "No," she decided. "That's the easy way out.
The truth is I feel bad. But what happened out in Sabinal—"

"You won't have to live with it, Ana."

Ana stared into her wineglass. "I suppose my judgment is no
better. I don't think I can explain to you why I'm here, Tres. Or
explain it to myself." She met my eyes. We had a silent
conversation that lasted about five seconds and told me all I needed
to know. There was no anxiety, no concern for career, no real desire
for an explanation. Instead I recognized that kind of fractured heat
— that reckless energy I had glimpsed in a few women before, and on
a few very lucky occasions, seen directed toward me. But not this
time.

"I'm sorry," Ana said.

The fact that she meant it, that she wasn't just being polite,
hung awkwardly between us.

"SAPD won't hear anything from me."

She pursed her lips, nodded. Then the smell of bay rum intensified
behind me. Ralph handed me a Shiner Bock and a set of car keys.

"Back lot, vato. I got a couple of Chich's boys to touch up
the paint and wax it for you."

Ralph went to the hibachi grill and squeezed a lime over the flank
steak with a wide arcing gesture like a priest using a censer.

He winked at Ana. "Quiet neighbors here, chica. I could like
it."

She smiled. "You'd have to get better furniture."

"Don't need much," Ralph said. Then, out of nowhere, he
quoted a stanza of Spanish love poetry — a few lines about a woman
who fills a man's every empty room.

I looked at him. "I didn't know you read Neruda."

Ana fixed her eyes on the hibachi flames.

Ralph chuckled. "Can't survive on American Gladiator alone,
vato."

We sat lined on the wall, Ana, Ralph, and I, drinking and
listening to the ranchero music and the sizzle of flank steak.

"I got another one in the refrigerator," Ralph told me.
"You want to stay, vato — it isn't every day the King cooks."

"Thanks. I should go."

"I'll walk you out." Ralph stood and fished for
something in his pocket, then stopped, grinned at himself. "Ana's
going to keep me from smoking, vato. How long you think that'll last,
eh?"

"I'm not a betting man."

"But hey — you understand, vato, she ain't really here,
right? She's never here."

"Of course," I agreed. "I understand that. See you,
Detective."

Ana nodded silently, locking eyes with me with an intense message
I couldn't read. Maybe I didn't really try.

Ralph walked me to the door. He patted me on the shoulder, smiled
reassuringly.

"You still worrying. Don't, vato. It's all cool. Chich
Gutierrez got so much heat on him now, he ain't going to have time or
energy to fuck with you and me no more."

"Tell me something. How long you been impressing women with
Pablo Neruda?"

Ralph looked surprised. "Ain't the poetry, baby. It's the
whole package, you know? Why — you got a woman in mind?"

He grinned at me, and then, when I didn't answer, waved and let
the door close — shutting off the music, the dinner smells, the
sight of Ana DeLeon so completely I had the feeling I was the one
who'd never really been there.
 

FIFTY-ONE

The following morning, Ines Brandon, Michael Brandon,
and I stood at the entrance to the Bexar County Jail. Ines had
stopped at the top of the steps, her fingers wrapped around the metal
railing as if she hoped it would keep her stationary.

"I don't know if I can do this," she told
me.

Days of worry had left her face drawn, her eyes
underscored with shadows. It wasn't the legal problems. Those were
working themselves out. Thanks to the lawyers Erainya had recruited
by cashing in favors, and Ines' cooperation with investigators,
Assistant District Attorney Canright had apparently decided that
bringing charges against a widowed mother who'd assumed a false
identity for her own protection and that of her small son was not
high on his political agenda.

The main battle was yet to come, and it wasn't legal.

"You're not alone," I told Ines. "You've
got two studly guys for backup, remember?"

She gave me a weak smile.

Her hair was unwashed, tied back in a stiff ponytail
that looked like the tip of a calligraphy brush. She wore rumpled
black pants and a loose black denim shirt, both streaked with white
dust. No makeup, no perfume. Nothing to indicate she'd slept, eaten,
or changed her appearance since I'd seen her the night before for a
pep talk.

Little Michael, by contrast, had received his
mother's full attention. Ines had dressed him in gray slacks, a newly
ironed white button-down, a man's red-and-blue tie, probably his
father's, that hung well past his belt. She'd made sure Michael's
shoes were tied and his face scrubbed. Only his hair had resisted her
ministrations. Michael's cowlicks had sprung back with an unruliness
that reminded me of his uncle Del's.