Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (16 page)

"Darmy," I said, "we agree about
something."

He made a sound like a bull that’s been zapped with
the same cattle prod once too often. "Don’t call me that. And
we don’t have shit in common."

"The police don’t have a clue. I agree with
that. I didn’t come all the way back to Texas to see Lillian
disappear and then watch the police fuck up the investigation, Dan.
Think about that."

He didn’t look very convinced. Shadows from the
rain crawled across his face along with guilt, frustration, and some
other things I couldn’t read. He looked down at a more recent
picture of his father on the desk, Dan Sr. the way I remembered him.
when I was in high school: a big man in flashy clothes, the football
team’s biggest patron, or the cheerleaders’, anyway. That was
before he’d come down with his well-publicized cases of Alzheimer’s
and Parkinson’s. Now, from what Lillian had told me, the old man
was upstairs somewhere, silently withering down to a husk while the
best and prettiest nurses money could buy looked on.

"There was a time he’d say something and the
police would jump," Dan said, almost to himself. "You
remember that, Kellin?"

Behind me Kellin said nothing.

"Now . . . shit," said Dan. "They tell
me not to get too worried. ‘She might be out of town,’ they tell
me. Shit."

I thought about that. "Your mother said the
Cambridges want to keep it quiet for a while, downplay things."

Dan snorted, like that was a good joke.

"Downplay things," he echoed.

I leaned forward and picked up the picture of his
dad. The silver frame must’ve weighed ten pounds. It was just about
the coldest thing I’d ever touched. "Only child, right?"

"If you don’t count my fifteen cousins."

"And they’re all dying to inherit a piece of
the business," I suggested. "Must be tough on you."

"What the fuck do you know about it?"

His shoulders slumped; the anger in his face loosened
up into melancholy.

It was time to change tack.

"What did Beau Karnau say to you yesterday,
Dan?"

I’m not sure what kind of reaction I was expecting,
but it wasn’t what I got. I’ve never seen a man turn molten red
so fast. Dan was on his feet and if the desk had been any narrower he
would’ve had his hands on my throat. As it was he just leaned
toward me and shouted.

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"
he spat.

Kellin had come up next to me to monitor the
situation. I decided it was time to stand up, slowly and calmly.

"Look, Dan, I want to find the lady, that’s
all. You want to help, great. You want to tell me Beau Karnau got a
lift from the gallery in somebody else’s silver BMW yesterday
around one o’clock, I don’t have time to argue with you. Lillian
might not have that kind of time.

Dan stared at me. I couldn’t tell whether his
expression was incredulity or outrage. For a minute we were all
totally still, listening to the thunder.

Then Dan shut down almost as quickly as he’d blown
up.

"Lillian," he echoed. The red trickled out
of his face. He slid back into his chair with one long exhale.
"Jesus, I need a drink."

Maybe jesus wasn’t listening but Kellin was. He
took away the orange juice and replaced it quickly with a tumbler of
bourbon. Instead of drinking it, Dan pressed the glass against his
cheek like a pillow and closed his eyes.

"Beau called me," he said finally. "He
wanted—some money: He said Lillian had made his life difficult by
leaving, that he needed a few thousand dollars as a loan."

"Why you?" I asked.

I waited. Dan moved the bourbon to his lips.

"Things weren’t always smooth between
us—Lillian and me," he said into the glass. "Sometimes
Beau helped me get things back on track. Flowers, telling me her
plans, that kind of thing."

"The crazy sentimental fool," I said.

Dan looked up and frowned. "Beau is all right.
He’s been Lillian’s friend for years. He would never do . .
.anything to Lillian, nothing bad."

I’m not sure who he was trying to convince, himself
or me. judging from his tone of voice I don’t think he succeeded
either way.

“
So you agreed to see Beau yesterday," I said.

Dan looked up at me and said nothing. The rain was
dying down. Lightning flashed, and I counted almost to ten before the
thunder. Dan scowled as he drained the bourbon from his glass.

Afterward he looked up at me in surprise, as if I’d
just appeared there. He seemed to ask himself a silent question, then
nodded. He brought out a square leather account book from the desk.

"How much?" he said.

I stared at him.

"I’ll hire you, asshole," he said.
"Lillian said you did this for a living, this . . . stuff. I’ll
pay you to find her. How much?"

I felt a little slimy just for being tempted, but I
shook my head. "No."

"Don’t be a prick," he said. "How
much?"

I looked at Kellin. Kellin stared back, his face
about as expressive as Sheetrock.

"Look, Dan," I said, "I appreciate it.
I promise you I’ll find her. But I can’t take your money."

Then I turned to leave before I could change my mind.
"Navarre," he called after me.

I turned around in the doorway. From across the room
Dan looked about ten years old, dwarfed behind his father’s huge
mahogany desk, drowning in oversized maroon robes, his blond hair in
disarray as if Dad had just come by and tousled it.

"You know what it’s like," he said.
“Living in the old Man’s shadow, I mean? You know about that, at
least."

It was some kind of peace offering, I guess. Looking
back, maybe I should’ve taken it.

"Like you told me," I said, “we don’t
have shit in common."

Kellin walked me to the door, where Mrs. Sheff was
waiting to see me off. That brilliant hostess smile must’ve been
sitting in a glass in some other room, because when she spoke she
hardly opened her stern little mouth at all.

"Mr. Navarre," she said, "I would
highly recommend that you avoid my household in the future unless you
are invited."

"Thank you for the hospitality, ma’am."

I stepped out onto the front porch. The rain had
stopped and the clouds kept rolling south toward the Gulf of Mexico.
Ten minutes from now there would be nothing left of the storm but
bent trees and wet cars drying in the sun.

"I care deeply about my family," Cookie
told me. "I have a sick husband and a very dear son to look
after, along with the reputation of the entire Sheff family."

"And a rather large construction firm."

She gave me the slightest sour nod. "I will not
allow our family, or our friends, to be dragged through the mud."

"One question, ma’am," I said.

She just looked at me.

"Are you normally a spectator at your son’s
fist-fights?" I asked. "Somehow I would’ve thought you’d
fight them for him."

For a woman of good breeding, Cookie Sheff did an
excellent job of slamming the door in my face.
 

24

I waited almost two hours on the shoulder of I-10
South with no company but my AM radio before Dan’s BMW sped by at a
leisurely eighty-five miles per hour. By a combination of good luck
and bad traffic, my talk-show host and I managed to keep up with Mr.
Sheff as he headed toward downtown.

It had been a sobering moment when I had tuned into
WOAI and hadn’t turned it off immediately. Here it was two hours
later, still on. I kept telling myself it was nostalgia for those
torturous trips to Rockport with my parents. Surely I couldn’t be
interested in this stuff. Surely I wasn’t approaching thirty.

"The problem with this country," Carl
Wiglesworth was saying, "is the socialists who are running our
schools."

Ah, Texas. For a moment I wished Maia were there. She
would’ve gone into the cutest little apoplexy over Carl.

On the way downtown I watched Dan’s taillights from
a hundred yards back and thought about my quality time with the
Sheffs. First there was the problem of somebody—the cops, the
Sheffs, maybe even the Cambridges—trying to downplay things. For
some reason, Lillian’s disappearance hadn’t yet gone down as a
potential kidnapping.

Don’t worry, she might just he out of town.

No way would Rivas pull that shit on a big-name
family without a seriously good reason and a seriously  greased
palm. If he had pulled back the reins on the investigation, somebody
with heavy clout had made it happen.

Then there was Dan. He was lying about Beau. And he
wasn’t exactly stable. Maybe it was just Lillian’s disappearance
that had gotten to him, but I had the feeling there was more wrong
with Dan Sheff’s life than one lady could cause, unless that lady
was his mother.

I still needed Dan alone, away from Kellin and a
thirty-second Dominion Security response time, to ask him why he was
pursuing a relationship that Lillian’s datebook had pronounced dead
months ago.

But first, we did our day at the office.

It started at a huge construction site where Basse
Road met McAlister Highway—a half-finished strip mall on the
grounds of the defunct Alamo Cement Company, right down the street
from my mother’s house. Dan pulled in next to a trailer with Sheff
Construction’s black and white logo on its side. I looked around at
the changed terrain and said:

"God damn."

Of course my mother had told me about the real estate
changes in the old neighborhood, even sent me some news clippings
from time to time, but still I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

The Alamo Cement Company had been the largest single
piece of private property in Alamo Heights for as long as I could
remember. Its front borders along Tuxedo and Nacodoches had been
carefully sculpted with acres of trees, trails that nobody ever
hiked, and shady groves that were strictly for show behind a square
mile of storm fencing. Only if you went around back, next to the
Basse Road train tracks, did you see the uglier side of the cement
business—four beige smokestacks and a massive wedge of factory,
dusty trucks, and freight cars that never seemed to move, floodlights
that stayed on twenty-four hours and made the place look like a
rocket launch site on a particularly desolate part of the moon. In
the center of the quarry the Latino workers lived in an area dubbed
Cementville, a collection of shacks so squalid that they could have
been directly transplanted from Laredo or Piedras Negras.

Of course hardly any of the wealthy Anglos in the
neighborhood ever saw that part. We’d just seen the Cementville
kids at school—dirt-poor worker children, dark and hungry-looking,
dropped with the greatest irony into the richest public school
district in town. They would sit on the steps of the high school,
clustered together for protection, surrounded by Izod shirts and new
Cutlass Supremes. Ralph Arguello was one of the few who had broken
out of the pack by playing football. Most of them had simply
disappeared back into the quarries after graduation.

Now, four years after the land had been sold off,
only the factory itself had yet to be developed, and it looked like
the Sheffs were about to remedy that. The shell of the building and
the smokestacks were still there, as were a few broken-down freight
cars and trucks, and about twenty odd acres of weeds surrounded by
barbed wire. Everything else had already changed. The road to
McAlister Highway went right through the old plant grounds past a
huge man-made canyon, once the quarry, now lined with million-dollar
homes. The shacks of Cementville had been swept away in favor of a
golf course, a church, several restaurants. The strip mall Dan’s
company was constructing was right in the shadow of the old factory.

Dan got out of the BMW and spent about five minutes
talking to the foreman. The foreman talked slowly, going over a
blueprint, and Dan frowned and nodded a lot, like he was pretending
he understood. Then, to the foreman’s visible relief, Dan got back
into the Beamer and left.

"A day’s work well done," I said,
figuring we’d be on our way back to the Dominion now.

Only we drove the wrong way—onto I-35 and then
south, almost to the city limits, then exited into a war zone of
apartment projects. The last time I’d passed them, fluorescent
seventies’ daisies had adorned the sides of the buildings. Now it
was scrawling neon spray paint advertising the Alacranes and the
Diablitos.

"The youth of America is the key," Carl
told me.

"When will we stop accepting these deviant
lifestyles that are destroying our kids?"

"Go deviance," I told the radio.

Not looking like a tail was getting difficult now. It
hadn’t been easy to begin with in an orange monstrosity like mine.
But when you’ve covered thirty miles from one side of town to the
other, it’s almost impossible. Fortunately for me, Dan seemed about
as aware of his surroundings as a dug-in armadillo. Otherwise I might
as well have flashed my high beams and waved a lot. We drove through
the projects, past a mixture of condemned industrial lots and sickly
pastures grazing sickly cattle, toward a glass and prefab office
complex that looked about thirty seconds old. It squatted defensively
in the wastelands of the far South Side, surrounded first by thick,
ridiculously out-of-place rows of salvias and petunias, then on the
outside by a more honest ten-foot fence topped in barbed wire. A huge
white stylized "S" in a black circle was emblazoned on the
front gates.