Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (26 page)

Beau decided to stand up. I planted another red hand
print on the side of his face. He sat back down, in slow motion. His
head bent down into his hands.

"I’ll kill you," he mumbled, without any
conviction at all.

"The photos on the disk," I said. "They
show the same thing as the cut-up prints in your portfolio—a night
meeting in the woods, three people, something that happened between
them bad enough to warrant ten thousand a month in blackmail."

I think he nodded. It was so slight I could hardly
tell.

I picked up some of the money on the desk. "The
7/31 payment was due today, but there’s a lot more here than ten
grand. And Dan must know you’ve lost one of the disks. I’d say
you made a deal to sell him the other. You close your accounts and
run; he gets insurance that the photos are out of circulation. Only
you stalled him tonight. Maybe that’s why he hit you."

"Fuck off. "

"I’ll take that as a yes. Where the hell is
Lillian, Beau?"

Beau was shaking slightly, his head in his hands. It
took me a minute to realize he was laughing. When he looked up his
eyes had turned into puffy slits.

"You’re a fucking joke," he said. "Still
playing her goddamn protector."

My throat tightened. "You want to explain that?"

"She’s real good at that—getting people to
protect her. I tried it for years. Sheff tried it. If you’re lucky
maybe she’s dead and buried, Navarre. Maybe that’s where she is."

Maia had a hell of a grip. It was only her grip on my
elbow joint that kept me from disassembling Karnau’s face. She held
me in place until my forearm started losing circulation.

Then she leaned close to my ear. "Come on,"
she murmured. "Enough."

We left Beau collapsed in his director’s chair,
still shaking like he couldn’t control his body. I took the bag of
money.

We walked past the frowning owner in the yellow shirt
and the genie pants, down the metal stairs, and into the parking lot
of Blue Star where the black-dressed men were opening another bottle
of champagne. It wasn’t until Maia took my hand that I realized how
hard it was clenched.

We walked Carlon to his car—a new turquoise Hyundai
parked in the loading zone with a fake police light on top. He took a
silver flask off the front seat, drank half, then passed it to me.

"Remind me to put you back on my Christmas list,
Navarre. I don’t ever want you pissed at me."

I sampled the stuff and grimaced. I stared at him.

"Jesus. Big Red and tequila?"

He shrugged. "Breakfast of champions, Navarre.
You gave me the recipe."

"You ever thought about growing up, Carlon?"

Ee snorted. "Highly overrated, man. I’ll wait
for the video."

I offered Maia the flask. She shook her head.

"Now tell me the story." Carlon stopped
just short of rubbing his hands together in anticipation. "I’ve
got a gallery review to write."

“
No story, " I told him.

Carlon looked dazed, as if he were translating the
two words. Then he laughed. "Right."

I stared at him.

"Wait a minute," he said. "You bring
me out here so I can see a high-profile businessman making a payoff
to the guy who’s blackmailing him for—what, ten large a month?
You bring up Lillian. You bring up—" He paused, then smiled
very slowly as he made the final connection. " Shit. You said
Eddie. That corpse the mob drove into Sheff’s office wall. Eddie
something. And you tell me no story?"

He laughed. I didn’t.

“
Twenty-four hours," I said.

"What the fuck for?"

"Lillian’s in this somehow, Carlon. Publishing
anything might kill her."

He thought about that for a bit. "What else do I
get?"

I was tired and irritated. I stepped a little closer
to him, then picked up his Jerry Garcia tie with two fingers and
admired it.

"My name back on your Christmas list," I
reminded him.

Carlon hesitated. He was breathing so shallow now I
couldn’t even smell the garlic. His pale blue eyes looked at me
steady, calculating. We could’ve been doing a business deal.

Finally he shrugged. "Like I said before, I’m
just trying to help."

I nodded, swallowed the taste of Big Red tequila out
of my mouth, and threw the flask back into Carlon’s car. "I
knew that, Carlon. I knew that."
 

36

It was midnight when Maia and I left Blue Star.
Seeing as how neither of us had eaten in six hours and most of the
town was closed down, I had to swallow my pride along with three
chorizo
and egg
taquitos
at Taco
Cabana. At least I didn’t compromise myself enough to try the neon
pink chain locations. I drove Maia to the original
cocimz
on San Pedro and Hildebrand, still a sleepy wooden shack that gave no
indication of the million—dollar franchise it had spawned.

"Why is it orange?" Maia asked the cook
behind the counter. She had stayed with her habitual favorite, h
uevos
rancheros
. The plate was overflowing with
eggs and
pico de gallo
,
beans, handmade tortillas, and grease.

The cook frowned, not understanding the question. I
tried to explain the virtues of Tex Mex over Cal Mex to Maia. I was
feeling contentedly native again when I turned to the confused cook
and said in Spanish: "She doesn’t understand why it looks
different. I told her it’s more cheese, more lard in the beans."

I tried to get fancy with the vocabulary. The cook
yawned.

"Man," he said, "either you’re from
California or you’re a fucking Cuban. Nobody says
habichuelas
for
frijoles
."

Shamed into silence, I made a mental note of the
vocabulary problem and retreated quickly with my pile of tacos.

"What did he say?" asked Maia.

"He said you’ll be quiet and eat it if you
know what’s good for you."

We sat under the ceiling fans on the patio and
watched the occasional VIA bus grind down an otherwise deserted
street. A vagrant stopped for a minute to admire our midnight
breakfast. He was dressed in a ragged brown Cowboy Bob outfit
complete with
bandolera
and toy pistol, his eyes unfocused and milky. I handed him my last
taco. He grinned like a five-year-old and ambled on.

I was thinking about Lillian, trying to remember how
she’d acted and what she’d said the day before she disappeared.
But when I called up her face it was blurred with images of her at
sixteen or nineteen. It scared me how fast she was dissolving into an
old memory again. However much I kidded myself about knowing her, I
couldn’t even guess about her last few years. I couldn’t discount
the idea that she might be involved in what had happened, maybe
deeply involved.

She had asked for court protection against Karnau
last year, only to go back into business with him. She’d broken off
her relationship with Dan Sheff last spring, then reestablished
contact with me a few days later. She had brought me back to town,
told me she loved me, given me something people were dying over, then
vanished.

I wadded up my taco tinfoil and made a basket in the
trash barrel. I tried to focus on translating the mariachi music on
the kitchen radio. Maia had evidently been looking at me for a while,
following the same train of thoughts. Her expression was soft and
resigned.

“
We need to know," she said. "You need to
see her through somebody else’s eyes, Tres."

She took my hand. I stared out at San Pedro, then
gave Maia directions to Lillian’s house on Acacia Street. The
conjunto
and beer were
still flowing at the Rodriguezes’ when we drove past. The windows
were lit up orange again. The yelling and the breaking glass inside
told us that a spirited family discussion was under way. Maia parked
the Buick around the corner, then we walked up the alley and slipped
into Lillian’s backyard.

No police tape on the back door, no sign that the
police had ever been here. In two minutes we’d worked open a lock
on the guest bedroom window and stepped inside. Maia’s ten-pound
key chain came in handy once again. Along with a Swiss Army knife,
and minicanister of capsaicin, and keys to most of the Western world,
she kept a pencil flashlight in her purse for just such an occasion
as a friendly B & E. In the thin beam of its light, Lillian’s
living room looked about the same as I had left it a week
ago—trashed, but not alarmingly so. At least, not alarming to me.

"Yuck," whispered Maia. "Is this
normal?"

"Yes," I said. Then reluctantly: "Maybe.
I don’t know."
 
A screen
door screeched opened at the Rodriguez place and a puppy yelped as it
was shoed outside. Some woman cursed in Spanish: " You feed the
damn thing."

Men laughed. The bass was turned up.

"I don’t think you need to whisper," I
told Maia. "We could take clogging lessons in here and the
Rodriguezes would never notice."

We checked Lillian’s computer first. There was a
half-finished spreadsheet for the gallery on file, a few
word-processed business letters, a few standard software
applications. The only disks on her desk were blank. She had no
CD-ROM drive, much less the capacity for creating such a disk. The
only thing we learned was that the Hecho a Mano Gallery wasn’t even
making enough money to bother recording.

In the corner of the main room was a board and
cinder-block bookshelf that dated back to our college days. Maia and
I pulled out books on everything from O’Keefe to Christo, unread
textbooks with forgotten pressed flowers inside, five or six years
worth of Sunset and Texas Monthly, all smelling like mildew and
Halston. Finally Maia opened a white photo album and shone her
flashlight on the first page. In the little yellow halo of light,
Lillian and I stared up at us. I was wearing a tuxedo; she wore a red
silk kimono over her black pantsuit, holding a peacock feather. The
outfit, of course, had been a gift from my mother, an act of revenge
as Lillian and I were preparing to go to my father’s sixtieth
birthday party, back in my first year in college. I’d like to say
that I remembered the rest of the details about that night. The truth
is I didn’t. I looked at my own confident, very young smile, the
way Lillian looked up at me with her head slightly tilted toward my
shoulder. I couldn’t imagine myself ever having been there. Maia
flipped the page quickly—pictures of Lillian’s family, several of
us, all old and faded, a few of Lillian’s paintings. Maia closed
the book.

"There’s nothing here," she whispered.
She got up and moved on.

When I followed Maia into the bedroom she was shining
her flashlight on Lillian’s white wicker baby carriage. It was
lined with red gingham and filled with rows of antique porcelain
dolls. Ever since junior high, that carriage had been in Lillian’s
bedroom wherever she lived. I remember feeling nervous the first time
I’d kissed her on her bed, looking over her shoulder at all those
little porcelain eyes.

“
It’s my mother’s." Lillian had laughed,
biting my ear. "Family heirloom, Tres. I can’t get rid of it."

I touched the gingham blanket. There was a small
bundle tucked underneath. I brought it out. Ten letters postmarked
from San Francisco, each carefully refolded and placed back in its
envelope. Before I could put them away, Maia took the stack, noticed
the address, then dropped them lightly back into the doll collection.

"So that’s what happened to all my stamps,"
she said.

She shone the flashlight right in my eyes as she
turned away. I tried to believe it was an accident.

After a few minutes in the bathroom, Maia found a
cigar box full of assorted junk—door handles, rubber bands, costume
jewelry, and a rather large diamond engagement ring.

Maia held up the ring and examined it. Finally she
said: "Can I assume you didn’t mail this too?"

I stared at it, wondering how many years I would have
to work for something like that, assuming I ever got a job. Maia’s
expression was tightly controlled, but from the cold fierceness in
her eyes I guessed she was pondering where on my face she might most
effectively embed the engagement ring.

It was a strange feeling, sitting on Lillian’s
bathroom floor, having a stare-down with my former lover by the light
of her pencil flashlight. Then the police siren sounded. It was a few
blocks away and probably had nothing to do with us, but it reminded
us where we were. Ten minutes later we were back in Maia’s Buick,
heading out of Monte Vista.

I said nothing except to direct Maia through town
until we were crossing the Olmos Dam. Then I said:

"Wait. Pull over."

Maia frowned. She looked at the narrow road that
sloped off a hundred feet into the Basin on either side.