Laura Lippman (17 page)

“I really couldn’t say, although I do happen to have a brother-in-law who owns a print shop near here. Someone might have dropped off a photo of Rojas, told him when he was coming home, given him a mailing list.”

Tess smiled. “Of course, a lawyer could never do anything like that, even to a former client, because he would risk being disbarred.”

“Of course.” Rick started to whistle, then stopped abruptly when he realized the melody he had picked up was Rojas’s sprightly tune.

T
hey had breakfast at a west side cafe, a dingy place that didn’t look open from the street, and didn’t look particularly safe from within. Rick recommended something called migas, and the combination of cheese, eggs, and sausage was so good that Tess quickly regained her lost appetite. Rick had been right—an empty stomach was the only way to talk to Al Rojas.

“Sorry you didn’t like it better,” he said, pushing away his half-eaten meal even as Tess was wiping her plate clean with a flour tortilla. She wasn’t embarrassed. After all, that’s what the jump-roping was for.

“I’ve never had anything like this. Most Mexican food in Baltimore is so…perfunctory. I mean, you know you’re in trouble when the best place in town has something called ‘Los Sandichos’ on the menu. And the Mexican place near my house has a wait staff of Estonians. Here, I could make a meal from the tortillas alone. They’re incredible.”

Rick looked puzzled. “They’re flour and lard. You could make them yourself. Anyone could.”

“Theoretically.” She also could solve simple physics equations if she put her mind to it, but that didn’t mean she was going to start anytime soon.

He paid the bill, helping himself to a handful of pralines and bright candies. The same “Mexican candies” the clerk in Twin Sisters had offered her, only fresher-looking here.

“Something’s bothering me,” he said as they walked to his car

“Rojas?”

“Darden and Weeks. Twenty years is a long stretch, and Texas has an overcrowding problem. I wonder why they didn’t get parole.”

“Ask Guzman.”

“I’d be happier if Guzman didn’t know what we’re thinking about. Guess I could call someone on my Christmas card list, see what they know.”

Rick headed back into the city, stopping in yet another neighborhood Tess had never seen, an old-fashioned business district surrounded by a residential neighborhood. The houses were large and gracious, but most of them had been converted to apartments, or made over into businesses. Rick bounded up the steps of a hot pink Victorian.

“Y Algunas Mas,” Tess said, reading from the hand-painted sign over the door. “Se venden milagros.”

“And Something More,” Rick translated, his lips twitching slightly at her Spanish pronunciation. “We sell miracles.”

“Funny motto for a criminal law practice.”

“Law practice? Oh, this isn’t my office. It’s Kristina’s shop.”

Inside, the old house’s large rooms were crammed with the same hideous skeletons that Tess had seen at Marianna Barrett Conyers’s house, hundreds and hundreds of them, leering cheerfully at her from every direction. But that was just a portion of Kristina’s eclectic collection. The crowded store also held a menagerie of brightly painted wooden animals, huge black pots, carved saints and papier-mâché monsters that might have crawled in from one of Hunter Thompson’s better drug trips.

Kristina was pushing one of these papier-mâché creatures toward an older woman, who was trying not to recoil. “Oh I don’t know,” the woman said nervously. “I do love the little skeleton mariachis you told me to buy, Kris, but this—” She gestured weakly at the figure in question, which looked like some strange cross between a blowfish and a bat—“well, it’s so large.”

“It’s a museum-quality piece,” Kristina said. “The curator from the San Antonio Museum of Art was in here looking at it the other day.”

“For the museum?”

“For his
private
collection.”

“Oh, I just don’t know,” the woman repeated. She walked around the thing, as if it might become attractive from another angle. Tess realized the woman, despite the wealth and class indicated by her clothes and manner, yearned desperately for Kristina’s approval. But she just couldn’t come to terms with the monstrosity before her.

Finally, Kristina took pity on her customer, putting the blowfish-bat on the counter and picking up a notebook-sized piece of tin, with a faded painting of a virgin. Still not Tess’s idea of art—it reminded her too much of the Jesus-Kennedy kitsch hung in the living rooms and kitchens of her Monaghan relatives. But it looked genuinely antique, and had the advantage of not inducing heart attacks.

“It’s a Virgen de Guadalupe, an exceptionally nice one, possibly eighteenth century,” Kristina said, catching Tess’s eye. “Do you know the story?”

She shook her head. “I’ve got a Catholic name, but not the character-building torture by nuns that usually goes with it.”

“It’s doubtful any Baltimore nun would have told you this story. In the 1500s, a peasant, an Indian, one of the Indians indigenous to Mexico before the conquest, saw a vision. The
virgen
—” She used the soft h sound of the Spanish pronunciation, Tess noticed—“appeared before him and told him in his own language to gather rose petals in his cloak, then take the cloak straight to the bishop. He was to show the petals to no one but the bishop. When he arrived and unfurled his cloak, the rose petals were gone and her image was in their place. The Virgen de Guadalupe.”

“Oh she’s
darling
,” the woman cried. “How much, Kristina?”

“This? It’s only seven hundred dollars.”

Tess watched in disbelief as the woman handed over cash, then left with the carefully wrapped treasure. Rick, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, burst into laughter as soon as her Chevy Suburban pulled away from the curb.

“You are so good, it’s scary,” he said. “I mean, how many times have you done the bait-and-switch with one of those
alebrijes
. It’s genius—one of your ladies comes in, you show her something new and so damn ugly that she’s scared to buy it. Then you offer her one of the antique pieces that costs ten times as much, but has the virtue of being, something that won’t give her indigestion. And she leaves, feeling like she’s let you down. Do you tell them that the story has been discredited? That the bishop in Mexico had to step down when he agreed there was no historical evidence that this ‘miracle’ ever happened?”

“Look, running a folk art gallery may not be the lofty practice of the law, but it has its moments,” Kristina said coolly, sticking the cash in an old-fashioned cash register that had been painted bright red and studded with tiny silver charms.

“If you married me, you wouldn’t have to be a shop girl,” he said.

“I like being a shop girl, especially given that I’m one of the owners. And it’s not a shop, it’s a gallery.” But she was smiling.

“Phone?” he asked, smiting back at her.

“What are you asking? Do I have one? May you use it? Be more specific, please.”

“May I yank it out of the wall in a show of brute force that will fuel all your stereotypical fantasies about Latin men, so that we end up coupling right here, as Tess watches the door?”

“No, but you may use the phone,” Kristina said in a fake-prim manner. “For a local call.”

Rick took the portable from its base, disappearing into the curtained storeroom behind the counter. Tess suddenly felt shy. She might have met Kristina first, but she now felt more comfortable with Rick, given their shared sense of purpose. As for Kristina, she was one of those poised people who didn’t need to fill silences with blather. She moved around the shop, tickling her objects with a feather duster.

“I was in a house with a lot of cra—a lot of stuff like this,” Tess said, making conversation. “Emmie’s godmother, Marianna Barrett Conyers.”
Emmie’s godmother, who described the death of Lollie Sterne as an accident, and neglected to mention her husband had been involved in the same “accident.”

“One of my best customers,” Kristina said. “I take new shipments to her for private showings. She has a great eye, and she doesn’t haggle.”

“Do you know her well?”

“No. I don’t think anyone knows her very well, except her maid. She’s so reserved. I call her the Duchess of Euphemism—she has the most tactful way of telling me she loathes something.” Kristina gave Tess a knowing look. “You could pick up a few pointers from her.”

“Huh?”

“I can tell just by the way you stand here, holding yourself, that you hate my things. It’s as if you’re scared you might catch something.”

“Well, they are creepy.”

“Not to me. I love every piece. They brought me to San Antonio. Four years ago, my senior year at Wisconsin—I was an art history major—I came down here for spring break. We were supposed to fly to Padre Island, but the charter plane had some mechanical problem, and we were stuck here for a day. I went into a gallery like this one, down in the King William neighborhood—Tienda Guadalupe—and I saw this wooden cross, studded with milagros.”

“Milagros? I thought it meant miracles.”

“It does, but it also refers to these charms, like these things on the cash register. See? Little hands and limbs, babies and hearts. They represent things you pray for. Anyway, I thought that cross was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. When I held it in my hand, I felt something, something warm. It was the wildest sensation. I bought it and took it back to Wisconsin. The day after graduation, I moved here. I didn’t know a single person and people laughed at my Spanish, it was so fussy and academic. But from the start, I was at home here. Total GTT.”

“Gone to Texas,” Tess said. “Crow said the same thing, in a postcard he sent to his parents.”

Kristina laid down her feather duster. “You don’t get it, do you?”

“His dad explained it to me. Something about what fugitives carved on their doors.”

“No, I mean the
feeling
. I was meant for Texas. Listening to Almas Perdidas, I sense Crow is, too.”

“Maybe,” Tess said. Crow was under some spell, but she couldn’t figure out if it was San Antonio’s or Emmie’s.

Kristina just smiled and went back to dusting, tickling the long nose of a banana yellow ferret. Rick walked through the door, portable phone in hand, his voice in that winding-up mode that one has when trying to end a call, while the person on the other end drones on and on.

“Uh-huh, uh-huh. Thanks. Surest thing. We should. No, we definitely should. Okay, Okay. Uh-huh. Thanks.” He inched the receiver that much closer to the base. “Definitely. Till then. No, I mean it.”

At last, he hung up. “My source gave me a lead on a retired detective who worked the Darden-Weeks case, knew these guys as well as anyone.”

“Was that the detective?”

Rick rolled his eyes and pulled at his collar as if it were choking him. “His wife. She says he went to Las Vegas on a charter, won’t be back for two days. Probably trying to get away from her for a while. She talks a blue streak. Gave me a complete blow-by-blow of her health, her husband’s health, their dog’s health, what she had for breakfast this morning—English muffin with raisins, a little Sanka. Jesus. He probably goes gambling just to have some peace and quiet for a change.”

“See?” Kristina said. “That’s how marriage works. I bet there was a time when he told her he loved her, and couldn’t be without her, and now he’s reduced to playing blackjack to get away from the sound of her voice. That’s what marriage is, Rick. The death of romance.”

“That’s not what marriage to me would be like,” he said, circling her waist and kissing her neck. Kristina never missed a beat in her dusting.

“
Two
days,” Tess complained, feeling awkward. “What do we do until then? I don’t want to sit around La Casita, watching Esskay sleep.”

“Look for Emmie,” Rick said, still holding fast to Kristina, who continued to ignore him. “That’s what you said you wanted to do in the first place. Got any ideas where to start?”

“In fact, I do,” Tess said, eyeing the skeletons, which seemed to he laughing at her. “I think I’ll see if the Duchess of Euphemism would like to take tea with me this afternoon.”

M
arianna Barrett Conyers was in the garden behind her house when Tess returned to Alamo Heights early that afternoon. Given the trees and the high stone wall, the garden was as dark as the interior of the house. It seemed unlikely that the sun ever penetrated here. Yet Marianna wore a large hat and was carefully applying sunscreen to her face and hands. She sat at a wrought-iron table, an authentic version of the ones that had come back into style. A blue-rimmed pitcher of iced tea and matching glass completed the Martha Stewart perfection of the scene.

“It’s one of the things I’ve done right, taking care of my skin,” she volunteered, although Tess had asked for no explanation, had not yet even reintroduced herself. “I never sunbathed like the other girls.”

Marianna held out her tube of Estée Lauder sunscreen to Tess, whose face was tanned and freckled from a summer’s worth of rowing. Tess shook her head. Too little, too late. Although now that she was thirty, she probably should got serious about moisturizer. Not that Marianna’s complexion was particularly impressive. Her pores were large, her color was uneven, and age spots had begun to creep along her jawline.

“You’ll be sorry,” she said. Marianna wasn’t good at playfulness, and the warning sounded almost too ominous.

“Probably,” Tess agreed. “Did Lollie Sterne sunbathe?”

If Marianna was startled by the question, nothing in her face betrayed this. She capped her Estée Lauder tube, then rubbed her hands together to absorb the extra lotion. When she was done, she patted the cushioned chair opposite her, inviting Tess to sit. Commanding her, really. Tess didn’t like being directed by anyone, but she wanted Marianna to think she was in control of the situation, at least in the beginning. So she sat.

“You’ve been busy,” Marianna said.

“Very,” Tess agreed.

“How old are you? Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight?”

“I was thirty in August.”

“Still young. Too young to know there are stories you will grow weary of telling. Especially when it’s the only story anyone knows about you. Or cares about.”

Tess smiled and nodded. She had no idea where Marianna was heading with this.

“I am a survivor. Not in the new sense of the word, which implies triumph over self-inflicted adversity, followed by public redemption in the chapel of some talk show host. I am a ‘survived by.’”

“Survived by whom?”

“No one, that’s just it. I’m the one in the list at the end of the obituary.
So-and-so is survived by
. I’m the official mourner, and my past is as noisy as Marley’s chains. I am Frank Conyers’s widow, I am Lollie Sterne’s best friend. That’s the sum and total of who I am. People no longer remember that my father’s people were related to William Barrett Travis, the commander at the Alamo. Distantly, but related nonetheless. They don’t recall the things my father did for this city, how almost every building here has a foundation poured by his concrete company. There was a time when I would have given anything to he known as someone other than my father’s daughter. Be careful what you wish for.”

“By withdrawing from the world, you made it worse,” Tess said. “You’ve frozen yourself in time. If you want to compare yourself to a Dickens character, try Miss Havisham.”

Marianna shook her head impatiently.

“If you want to listen to my story, then you have to
listen
. Don’t you know how many reporters have tried to get me to tell this to them? Usually at this time of year, too. Right before what they call the ‘anniversary.’ As if I might be having a cake and a party. They called the first year, and the second. The fifth and the tenth, the fifteenth and the twentieth. It’s not just the local media, either, but reporters from Dallas and Houston, and
Texas Monthly. Unsolved Mysteries
even showed up on my doorstep one time. This year, the twenty-first will probably be a little quieter than some. But someone will come by. Someone always does.”

She stopped, her eyes fixed on some spot in the garden wall. Tess knew to leave the silence alone.

“And then one day, someone shows up who doesn’t know anything. A young woman with an accent as flat and matter-of-fact as she is. A young woman whose ignorance allows me, for a moment, to not tell the story I thought everyone knew. Yes, I rewrote history for a day. Horace dead in a hunting accident. Well, it happened in a hunting camp. Lollie, Frank, and Pilar, dead in a car accident. “Suddenly, brightly: “Did they tell you they tortured him?”

“Who?”

“My Frank.” She held a finger to her lips. “Only we’re not allowed to say how. That’s something only the killer knows.”

Jimmy Ahern’s book had hinted at details about Frank’s death that had never come to light, but Tess had assumed he was a bad reporter.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“—know. You didn’t know. Exactly. That was your charm.”

Charm. The Duchess of Euphemism had struck again. What Tess had been was stupid, even arrogant.

“So you knew who Tom Darden was all along.”

“No, I was truthful on that count. When you came here on Friday, Tom Darden was nothing more than a corpse on my property. Yesterday was the first I heard that he was thought to know something about how Lollie and Frank…died.” She smiled ruefully. “You should understand the Sternes and I have not been kept informed about all the developments over the years. Perhaps we should have been less critical of the police investigation. But they made such a mess of things, at first.”

“How so?”

Marianna looked weary and pale beneath her careful makeup. Tess was beginning to understand why she had permitted herself the lies that allowed her to avoid this topic, at least for one afternoon.

“Small things. Probably unimportant things. But when it’s you, and it’s your husband—or your first cousin, and the servant who all but raised you, in the case of Gus Sterne—there are no small things. All I know is they never came close to making an arrest, and they didn’t seem to have many satisfactory explanations as to why. Now the detective tells me Darden and this other man were in prison all these years, so the case ‘lacked urgency.’ Well, it never lacked urgency for me.

“What about Emmie?”

“What about her?”

“Could she have known about Darden?”

“I’m sure Emmie would like to see justice done, but Lollie’s death has never preoccupied her.”

Tess leaned forward. “I thought today was the day you weren’t going to tell lies. If people associate you with your husband’s death to the exclusion of almost everything else, then the murder of Emmie’s mother must be the central fact of her existence as well.”

“That sounds logical, but it didn’t work that way. Enunie didn’t have a before and after. Her life is all aftermath. She never knew Horace, and she accepted the family’s explanation that he died in a hunting accident. When Lollie died, she was only two. The truth is, she doesn’t even remember her mother. She’s like a child who had a bad dream and woke up to find herself safe and warm in a house where everyone loved her. Gus did a very good job of protecting her while she was growing up. It was her mother’s absence that scarred Emmie. Gone is gone.”

“However you want to “plain it, she’s clearly disturbed. Did she ever get professional help?”

Marianna sipped her tea. Tess had worded the question as carefully as she could, but it obviously was too blunt for Marianna’s sensibilities.

“When she was a teenager, Emily began…acting out in various ways,” Marianna began cautiously. “She saw various counselors and doctors. One decided she could recover Emily’s memory of what happened the night of the murder. I’m sure she thought she’d solve the crime and be a big hero. At any rate, she put Emily under hypnosis. When Emily couldn’t remember anything, she became hysterical, convinced something was wrong with her. Gus gave up on doctors after that.”

“How was she ‘acting out’?” Marianna’s habit of casting other’s words in invisible quotation marks was catching.

“Pardon?”

“You said Emily was sent to all these doctors because of her behavior. What was she doing?”

“Oh, typical adolescent rebellion. Truthfully, I think Gus over-reacted. His son, Clay, is so well-behaved, he makes normal children look out of control. Emily is a Sterne through and through, very headstrong. Clay’s genes were watered down by his mother. She was a Galveston girl, pretty enough, but weak-willed. I think eating all that shellfish thins the blood.”

“‘Was’? Is she dead, too?”
Jesus, how many “accidents “could one family have
?

“Oh no, she and Gus divorced about ten years ago, and she settled in California. Another blow for Emmie. She ended up losing two mothers before she was thirteen.”

“I don’t imagine it did much for her son, either.”

Marianna lifted one shoulder in a tiny, ladylike shrug, as if Clay’s problems were of little interest to her.

“Would Emmie go to her uncle if she were in trouble?”

“I told you the first time we met that they haven’t spoken for five years.”

“You told me lots of things the first time we spoke,” Tess reminded her.

Marianna Barrett Conyers’s face had a way of clicking off abruptly, like a coin-operated television set in a bus station.

“Waste your time if you like. Sterne Foods is on the Austin Highway, not that far from here. It runs off Broadway, near an old Mobil Station, the one that was a dress shop. You’ll find it easily. But don’t be surprised if you have trouble getting in. Security is very tight just now.”

“Why does a restaurant chain need security? Is someone trying to get the recipe for the secret sauce?”

“I wouldn’t know.” And Marianna Barrett Conyers tilted her face toward a nonexistent sun, her part of the conversation clearly over.

Tess liked roads that told you where they went. Back home, it was York Road, Frederick Road, Harford Road—not to be confused with Old York Road, Old Frederick Road, and Old Harford Road. They weren’t the fastest routes to their namesakes, but they were always more interesting than the interstate. Here, it was Fredericksburg and Blanco and Castroville. And if the Austin Highway was no longer much of a highway, it seemed cheerful about its demotion. Tess stopped for lunch at a place called the Bun and Barrel, on the theory that any restaurant configured to look like its namesake was always worth a visit. Although only the barrel was present here, and it was just a little decoration on the roof, the theory still held. It was almost two when she finished her burger and drove a little farther up the highway, to the fortress that was Sterne Foods.

One of the older buildings along this stretch of road, it had a fierce spick-and-span quality. The squat stucco rectangle was blinding white, with a red trim that was so shiny it looked wet. The cyclone fence—and the razor wire stretched across the top—shimmered in the midday sun. The grass was bright green and sharply edged, the flower beds severely symmetrical. No risk of E. coli here, Tess thought. Sterne Foods put the process in processed foods.

The only scruffy note was a slow-moving line of protesters in front of the fence. With union members on both sides of her family, Tess automatically assumed these were disgruntled workers. But their placards told of a much deeper dissatisfaction with Sterne Foods.
SAVE YOUR OWN SOUL—DON’T EAT MEAT
, read one sign.
COWS DON’T DESERVE THE DEATH PENALTY. HUMANITARIANISM DOESN’T STOP WITH HUMANS
. And, a little mysteriously,
CHRISTMAS IS CARNAGE
. Tess couldn’t let that one go.

“Christmas? It’s not quite Halloween.”

“It’s from
Babe
,” said the picketer, a stringy woman with yellow-orange skin, the color of an expensive pepper. “You know, the movie about the pig who wants to herd sheep.”

“A classic,” Tess agreed. She and Esskay had watched it on video several times. “So what’s your beef with Sterne Foods?”

The picketers looked alarmed, as if even the metaphorical use of the word was forbidden to them.

“We’ve been out here every day for a year, since the city gave Gus Sterne permission to stage the All Soul Festival,” said the stringy woman, who seemed to be the leader. “He calls it a celebration of food and culture, but it’s really just a way to promote his chain of barbecue restaurants. Oh, sure, he’ll give all the profits to local charities, but he’s still responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of cows. He’s made his millions off animal genocide, but no one ever talks about that.”

“Eating meat is legal.”

“That doesn’t make it moral. Or safe.”

A young man leaned into the conversation. “Cigarette smoking was acceptable, too, once. We want to marginalize meat eating in the same way, with additional taxes and more truth in labeling.”

Tess had a sudden image of the office building of the future, with workers standing in little clusters, some smoking, others hunched over roast beef sandwiches.

“You didn’t pick an easy state to start your fight, I’ll give you that much.”

She had meant to appease the group, but the stringy woman took offense.

“We aren’t interested in easy battles. San Antonians think it’s not a celebration unless meat is consumed. We’re petitioning city hall for meatless, cruelty-free venues at all the major festivals here.”

“Life is cruel. Existence is predicated on destruction.”

“Those are very fancy rationalizations for being a flesh-eater,” sniffed the human yellow pepper.
I wouldn’t want to be in the Donner Party with you
, Tess decided. Although her lack of body fat would probably doom her early on, she’d be much too lean to support those left behind.

“I had a cheeseburger for lunch,” Tess announced sunnily. “Medium rare.”

Some of the people in the group took a few steps backward, as if they might catch something from her, but the stringy woman held her ground.

“This isn’t a joke,” she said. “We’re willing to go pretty far to press our agenda. I wouldn’t plan on having too good a time at the All Soul Festival, if I were you.”