Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (10 page)

Then I heard the clump of skates on the hardwood
floor behind me. One of the Rodriguez children rolled into the
bedroom doorway and grabbed the doorjamb to steady herself. She had
stringy hair and small dark eyes, glittering as she looked at me. She
was wearing a red and white striped dress with teddy bears on it.

I must have had a startled look on my face. She
giggled. as I was still trying to frame a question when she skated
back toward the front door, letting out a happy squeal as if she
expected to be chased. She turned at the door and looked back,
grinning mischievously.

“
Do you know Lillian?" I asked, still in the
bedroom doorway.

I’m not great with kids; I can’t handle the eerie
resemblance they bear to human beings. She cocked her head like a
curious dog might.

"You’re not the same man," she said.

Then she was gone, the screen door slamming behind
her.

Now what the hell had that meant? I should’ve
followed the child and asked her more questions, but the idea of
chasing a group of prepubescents on roller skates down the sidewalk
in the dark was more than I could handle just then.

Maybe she was talking about Dan Sheff. The neighbors
would have seen him here many times, no doubt. Or maybe she’d seen
someone else come into the house. I turned and stared at Lillian’s
bed. The burning feeling got stronger in my chest.

"Wait for tomorrow morning," I told myself.

Maybe she had decided to stay an extra night in
Laredo; maybe she was on her way back right now. I pictured her
coming home and finding me in her house uninvited, or learning that
I’d questioned the neighbors on her comings and goings. The "I
was worried" argument wouldn’t carry much weight with a woman
who had recently accused me of trying to control her affairs.

I weighed that against the unlocked door, the unread
mail and newspapers, the ha1f-washed dishes. I didn’t like it. On
the other hand, it wasn’t totally out of character for Lillian to
leave any of those things in her wake. I locked the front door behind
me.

The thunderstorm was directly overhead now, but there
was no rain, just churning dry electricity. The Rodriguez children
had finally abandoned the street. Exhausted as I was, I still
couldn’t face the idea of going back to Queen Anne and trying to
sleep. I drove back to the Olmos Dam, then parked the car where there
really wasn’t a shoulder and sat on the edge of the drop-off with
my bottle of Herradura, my feet dangling above the treetops.

I watched the storm move south for almost an hour. I
tried not to think about where Lillian was, or about my earlier
soiree
with Red and
Tattoo, or about the package of clippings on my father’s murder. It
felt like there was a huge slow spider crawling back and forth inside
my head, trying to connect those things with tenuous, unwelcomed
threads. Every time something started taking shape, I took another
drink of tequila to wash it away.

I’m not sure how I got home, but when I woke up
early Wednesday morning the ironing board was ringing. I yanked it
down from the wall and fumbled with the receiver. ·

"
Hola, vato
,
" the man on the other end said, then he insulted me rapidly in
Spanish.

I rubbed my eyes until the walls came into focus. It
took my brain a second to switch languages, then I placed the voice.

“
That doesn’t sound like a real hygienic
position, Ralph," I said. "Haven’t you guys heard about
AIDS?"

Ralph Arguello laughed.

"So I heard right," he said. "You’re
back in town and speaking Espanol, no less. How the hell am I
supposed to insult you to your face now?"

If there had been a spider in my head last night,
this morning it felt like the thing had crawled into my throat and
died. I sat on the floor and tried not to throw up.

“
So how’s the pawnshop business, Ralphas?"

I’d known Ralph since varsity in high school. Even
then he was a con man of epic proportions. He’d once stolen the
coach’s pickup truck and sold it back to him in a different color,
so the legend went. About the time I went off to college Ralph had
started buying pawn-shops all around the West Side, and by the time
I’d gotten my BA, I’d heard rumors that Ralph was worth a million
dollars, not all of it from honest loans.

“
How do you feel about visiting my side of town
today?" Something in his tone of voice had changed. It made me
wish I could concentrate more on his words without the pounding in my
head.

"There’s a lot going on right now, Ralph.
Maybe we cou — "

“
Yeah," he interrupted, "I heard about
Lillian, and I heard she’s out of town. This isn’t exactly a
social call."

I waited. It didn’t surprise me that Ralph knew all
this, any more than that he’d known I could now speak Spanish.
Ralph could just drive through town and news would cling to him the
way lint clings to velvet. Still, the mention of Lillian’s name
woke me up fast.

"Okay," I said finally. "What is it?"

“
One of my girls just showed me a purse she found
out on Zarzamora a few nights ago. It’d been run over a couple of
times. The driver’s license says ‘Lillian Cambridge’. "
 

16

By the time I parked the VW on the curbless street in
front of the Blanco Cafe, my hangover had been replaced by a colder
kind of nausea. I was afraid I’d go completely numb with it if I
didn’t keep moving.

A sign inside the grimy window of the cafe read
"Abierto." I stepped over two emaciated brown dogs that
were snoring in the doorway and went in.

The air inside was thick, lubricated with the smell
of peppers and old grease. It was only seven-thirty in the morning,
but at least twenty men crowded the counter along one side of the
tiny room to wolf down steaming fried
migas
and black coffee. Huge waitresses, their hair the color of
chorizo
,
were shouting at each other in Spanish. They carried plates the size
of hubcaps four at a time from the kitchen. It was the only place in
town I knew where you could get a meal two plates wide that cost
under three dollars.

Some of the men at the counter looked over at me,
their brown eyes sleepy, slightly annoyed when they saw I was a
gringo. Then they went back to their
migas
.
Only one person was sitting away from the counter. At a yellow
Formica table in the back corner, under a huge black velvet painting
of a Mayan warrior, Ralph Arguello was drinking a Big Red. He was
grinning at me.

“
Vato, " he said, then motioned for me to come
back.

If John Lennon had been born Hispanic and then
overfed on buttered
gorditas
,
he would’ve looked like Ralph. His hair was long and tangled,
parted in the middle and tied back in a ponytail, and his eyes were
invisible behind the sheen of his thick round glasses. Ralph’s face
was as round and smooth as a baby’s, but when he smiled, there was
a demonic glee there that made men nervous.

Ralph dressed more expensively than Lennon ever had,
though—today he was wearing a white linen guayabera that almost
managed to hide his belly and a gold chain around his neck so thick
you could lock up a bicycle with it.

He held out a meaty hand. I shook it.

Then he sat back, still grinning. His black eyes swam
around beneath several inches of prescription glass. Maybe he was
looking at me, maybe at the stack of business papers in front of him.
I couldn’t tell.

When he spoke it was in Spanish.

"You remember jersey and those other
pendejos
came after me for slashing their tires?"

I was thinking about Lillian, about her empty bedroom
lit up the color of blood. I wanted to scream at Ralph to get to the
point, but that wasn’t the way he worked. He talked in circles and
you just had to hang on for the ride.

I sat down.

"Yeah," I said. "They came at us
outside Mr. M’s, didn’t they, right after school."

"Us?"

He laughed—a small, sharp sound like a cat’s
sneeze.

"You could’ve walked," he said. “Never
figured out why this scrawny white boy was stupid enough to back up
my Mexican ass against four redneck linebackers."

"I knew someday you’d be rich and famous,"
suggested.

"Damn right. "

“
And there were only three of them."

Ralph shrugged. “That’s what I said. Ain’t that
what I said?"

He shouted at the waitress for two more Big Reds.
Then he leaned forward and put his elbows on the table, his smile
gone. I caught the distinct, heavy smell of bay rum on his clothes.

"So last night," he said, "I’m
talking to this girl who owes me some . . . back rent, you know?"

I nodded. Ralph paused while a waitress clunked two
sweating soda bottles in front of us.

“
And this girl says she’s low on cash but she’s
come across some credit cards maybe I can use. I tell her maybe so.
Then I see the name on the cards and it rings a bell. I think about
you."

Ralph spread his hands in a “what could I do?"
gesture.

"She’s a good lady, this friend of mine, but
you know, sometimes she needs encouragement to stay honest. So we
talk for a while about how she really found this stuff, but it seemed
to me like she was telling the truth—out on Zarzamora like I said."

Ralph put the wallet on the table. It was a
Guatemalan billfold, now stained and muddy, embroidered with blue and
green trouble dolls. It was Lillian’s. Ralph took out several
credit cards, then her license. Lillian’s face stared up at me from
the yellow Formica—a bad picture, washed out and unfocused, but it
still captured her lopsided smile, her amused multicolored eyes.

"Was there any money?" I asked.

Ralph shrugged. "Cash evaporates fast with this
lady friend of mine; you know how that is. But yeah, I think there
probably was."

“
Then the wallet wasn’t stolen. She dropped it,
or somebody dropped it."

“
Vato
, billfolds full of
credit cards and money don’t sit very long in the middle of the
road. Especially my side of town. Couldn’t’ve been dropped too
long before my friend picked it up—a little before midnight on
Sunday, say."

“
Could you find out anything else?"

Ralph showed his teeth. "Maybe I could ask
around. Sunday night not too many white girls are strolling around
the West Side,
vato
.
If it was really her that dropped it, could be somebody saw her."

The cold from the Big Red bottle was going into my
fingers now, spreading up my arm toward my chest. I was trying to
imagine Lillian on Zarzamora late at night, or other ways her wallet
could have traveled there without her. I thought about the sudden
trip to Laredo that Beau had told me about, the unused car in the
driveway, the half-wrecked house.

"I can’t pay you anything, Ralphas," I
said.

He grinned, tapping Lillian’s Visa card against the
Formica. "Maybe I’ll just put it on the lady’s tab if you
find her, eh? Now tell me what’s going on."

“
I wish I knew."

But he waited, and twenty minutes and two Big Reds
later I had told him everything that had happened my first week in
town.

Talking to Ralph was like talking to a priest. He
knew how to listen. He’d heard the sins of man so many times
nothing could shock him. His grin never changed. With the priest,
whatever you said went straight to God. With Ralph, it went straight
into public domain. Therein lay the absolution. At least I figured
the rest of the town would listen. With God I wasn’t so sure.

"Hard to go to Laredo for three days without
your wallet," Ralph said when I’d finished. “Hard to
disappear anywhere, unless somebody makes you disappear. "

I couldn’t even nod.

Ralph studied Lillian’s Visa card. He said: "Your
friend Detective Rivas was in El Matador night before last. He
mentioned about your dad’s death. Said you wanted to kick up some
very old dust in a lot of people’s faces."

"Rivas is full of shit."

"
Vato
,"
Ralph said, "you think about putting two and two together, eh?"

When he said what I’d been thinking, it made it
seem less outrageous. That made me want to shut out the idea even
more.

“
Why would somebody take Lillian to get at me? What
the hell for?"

Ralph spread his hands. "You think about your
papa’s enemies—Mr. White’s familia, one; the whole city
council, two; half the SAPD, three. Some paranoid people with things
to lose, man. If you scared somebody bad enough—"

“
How?" I interrupted, a little louder than I
meant to. "I don’t have shit on anybody, Ralphas."