Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (45 page)

It was another hour before I could stand up steady
enough to take that shower. There was an overnight duffel in the
bathroom that I’d apparently packed for myself the night before,
though I remembered nothing about going by Queen Anne Street. Inside
I found some reasonably clean blue jeans, my City Lights T-shirt, my
toothbrush, and my father’s old notebook. Some letters spilled out
when I picked the duffel up. I put them carefully back inside.

Once I was dressed, Garrett and Larry gave me the
courtesy of some time to myself. I rummaged around the kitchen for
some potential breakfast. The candidates were two bottles of whiskey,
one egg that had crystallized into a geode, a tangerine of unknown
age, a jar of Sanka, and a variety pack of lunch-bag-sized snack
chips. I wondered if whiskey poured over Fritos would make an
acceptable breakfast cereal. I decided to opt for the tangerine
instead.

While I ate the tangerine and drank instant coffee,
Larry and Garrett sat in the living room with Harold Diliberto, our
trusty overseer, and discussed the pros and cons of legalizing
marijuana. Garrett was predictably in favor, Larry was predictably
against. Harold seemed to think the whole issue was those damn
Californians’ fault and both Garrett and Larry seemed comfortable
with that.

I must’ve been washing my hands in the
stainless-steel sink for a good three minutes before I realized what
I was doing. I kept separating my fingers in the water, watching it
flow through, thinking about the sticky consistency of Dan Sheff’s
blood.

Finally Larry called from the living room: “You
okay, Tres?"

I told him I was. Then I shut off the faucet and
looked for dish towels. There were none.

When I joined Larry on the leather couch, he was
pouring whiskey into four glass tumblers that all said JACK. Garrett
was smoking a joint and looking out the screen door at the fading
afternoon. I asked Harold if he’d get some wood for the fireplace.

Larry and Garrett looked at me strangely, but they
didn’t say anything. Harold went out to the wood pile. By the time
Harold had stacked the wood and started the fire with one of our Bics
from the bucket-o-lighters, I was on my second glass of Jim Beam and
the shivery feeling in my gut had just about faded. The fire burned
it away completely. The mesquite wood, left over from last winter,
was so dry after three months of summer that it ignited instantly and
burned like a forge. The room got uncomfortably warm, until my
fingertips felt almost alive again. I didn’t even mind the smoke
rolling out the front of the mantle from the poorly working flue.
Harold excused himself to go work on the water pump outside. Sweat
started beading on Larry’s fore-head, but he didn’t complain.
Garrett wheeled himself a little further away and sat watching the
flames.

After finishing my second drink, I got up, went to
the bathroom for my duffel bag, and came back out with my father’s
notebook. I removed the letters and set them aside. Then I squatted
down and propped Dad’s notebook against one of the burning logs.

Nobody protested. The smoke rolled through the pages
of the binder, sucked inside by the cooler air. One canvas corner
caught fire. Then the outside cover fell open, letting one page burn
at a time, each blackening at the edges and curling inward to reveal
the next.

Dad’s handwriting looked lively in the red light.
The pictures he’d drawn of Korean planes and tanks for my bedtime
stories seemed to jump right off the page. After a while the binder
was reduced to a mass of black cotton candy at the edge of the fire.

When I turned, Garrett saw my eyes watering.

“
Smoky?"

I nodded.

Garrett squinted, then blew pot smoke toward the
ceiling. He kept looking up at the cedar rafters.

"Yeah. Me too."

Larry poured us all some more whiskey. "I
suppose that notebook might’ve been potential evidence."

"I doubt it," I said. "But maybe."

Larry grunted. "I suppose after what I helped
you do last night, I shouldn’t complain."

I had to think for a moment. Then fuzzy snapshots
started coming into my head—Drapiewski getting me away from the
investigation early, the two of us taking a long drive into Olmos
Park, me having a conversation with someone on Crescent Drive, making
a deal. I reached for my wallet, opened it, and found the
hand-written piece of paper still inside. I put it back. Larry
propped his boots up on the coffee table. He stared at the fire, then
started laughing easily, as if he were remembering all the clean
jokes he’d heard that week.

“
Last time I was out here with your daddy, boys,
Good Lord it must’ve been ’82 . . ." He proceeded to tell us
about the big tornado that had ripped through Sabinal that year and
how Dad had invited Larry out to help inspect the damage. The ranch
house had been spared, but my father and Larry had spent the
afternoon trying to extract a dead cow from the top of a mesquite
tree with a chain saw. Larry thought it was so funny I couldn’t
help but laugh along, although last time I’d heard the story it’d
been a horse in the tree, and a hurricane instead of a tornado that
had done the damage.
 

64

For once, Garrett seemed in no mood to speed. We
started following Larry’s red jeep back toward town, but quickly
lost sight of the deputy’s taillights when he turned onto Highway
90. The Carmen Miranda drove on leisurely while a brilliant Texas
sunset flared up over the edge of the plains. When Garrett dropped me
back at Queen Anne Street, I found a courtesy copy of today’s
Express-News
on the
doorstep. I took it inside and tried to read the front page while
Robert Johnson, after one unenthusiastic "roww" of
greeting, began practicing his "slide-into-home-plate"
routine with the other sections, seeing how many square feet of the
living-room carpet he could effectively cover with paper.

"Don’t you have anything better to do?" I
asked.

He looked up, wide-eyed, like he was shocked by the
very idea.

The
Express-News
said that Dan Sheff, Jr., heir to Sheff Construction, had apparently
uncovered a scheme by his own family and their associates to defraud
the city of millions in bond monies for the proposed fine arts
complex. Dan Jr. had, in the process of heroically confronting the
alleged conspirators, been shot once. A policeman was involved in the
incident, name not yet released, and there was some indication that
the construction scam might extend back as far as ten years. The
mayor was already being hounded for an extensive investigation to
ferret out any wrongdoing on the part of local officials. I was
mentioned briefly as being at the scene of the shooting. The article
said Dan was presently in critical but stable condition at the Brooke
Army Medical Center, where he was receiving flowers and praise from a
number of well-wishers. The location of Lillian Cambridge, who had
been missing for several days and whose parents were implicated in
the scheme to defraud the city, was still unknown.

I threw section A to Robert Johnson. He used it for a
triple play.

When I pulled down the ironing board and checked my
answering machine I found about half an hour of messages. Bob
Langston, Number 90’s former tenant, claimed he now had enough
pinhead friends together to effectively kick my ass. Carlon McAffrey
warned me I’d better get him that exclusive interview with Dan
Sheff soon in case Dan decided to die. Carolaine Smith, the TV news
lady I’d knocked into the river, said KSAT was willing to forgive
the whole incident in exchange for an interview with Dan Sheff, if I
could arrange it. Detective Schaeffer from the SAPD had left several
messages—wondering where the hell I’d disappeared to last night,
letting me know that the Cambridges had signed a testimony about some
disks that had turned up missing at the scene. Schaeffer wanted to
know if I had any ideas about the disks or if he just needed to
arrest me. One message from my mother, pleading for me to come over
to dinner and please bring Jess’s truck back with me. One from
Ralph that simply said: "She’s fine. Que padre,
vato
."

The only person I called was Maia Lee.

It was six o’clock San Francisco time. Maia was
just about to go to dinner. At least that’s what the man who
answered her home phone said.

"You want me to get her?" he said.

"Just tell her Tex called. She asked me to let
her know when it was over."

The guy made a small grunt, like he was leaning over
to tie his shoe, or maybe finish straightening his tie.

“
What’s over?" he asked.

I hung up.

The sunset was almost gone when I drove into Monte
Vista, to an address I knew only by reputation.

It was a gray adobe house, three stories high, with
two Cadillacs in the drive and a huge live oak in the front yard
sporting a homemade plywood treehouse. A little Hispanic boy was
grinning down at me from the top, pretending to hide. He had his
father’s smile. I pretended to shoot him as I walked by underneath.
He giggled hysterically. When I got to the door I could smell
homemade tamales cooking inside.

When Fernando Asante came to the door, dressed in his
jeans and a Cowboys jersey, I said: “Is there a place We can talk?"

His other child, a little girl, came up and hugged
his thigh. Asante glanced at me, then motioned me inside.

"What is it, Jack?" he said after we were
seated in his office.

Asante was a football fan—even the light on his
desk was a Cowboys helmet, the kind of thing a kid might keep in his
room. The room was cozy, a little messy. It wasn’t what I’d
expected.

Asante looked almost sleepy now, no trace of the
politician’s smile.

“
I don’t like loose ends," I told him.

He laughed, shook his head. "After the last two
weeks, after the last ten years, you say this, son."

I took out a piece of paper I’d received last night
when I’d conducted some business in Olmos Park. I held it up.

Asante looked unimpressed. "What is it now? More
old notes from your father’s grave?"

He tossed me the front page of the morning paper.

"Already seen it," I said.

Asante smiled. Asante could afford to smile—there
was as yet no mention of him.

“
Here’s what I think, Councilman. I think you’re
going to weather the storm."

Asante’s eyes were like black marbles. He might’ve
been blind for all I could read in them.

“
I think you can pull in enough favors and
manipulate the investigation enough to get yourself off the hook. I
helped out by tampering with most of the evidence myself—your
lawyers will have a great time with that. Unless those CDs show up,
and you know they haven’t yet, there isn’t enough legally
obtained direct evidence to implicate you in anything. The Sheffs and
the Cambridges may or may not go down for defrauding the city,
they’ll try to take you with them, but I’m betting you’ll
survive. Unless those CDs show up."

“
Let it rest," Asante told me. "You’re
going nowhere with this, son. If you had any such evidence, you’d’ve
brought it to your own friends in the police department by now. Then
we’d just have to let justice prevail in the courts, wouldn’t we,
Jack?"

I shrugged. “Maybe."

Asante looked at the piece of paper I was tapping on
the table. His smugness wavered, just for a moment.

"And what have you got there, son?"

There was a knock on the door. Asante’s son
scampered into the room, around the desk, and into his daddy’s lap.
Suddenly shy, the boy hid his head in his hands. Then he whispered
something in his daddy’s ear, got a kiss, and ran off.

Asante’s face softened as he watched the boy leave.
Then he looked at me again, his eyes hard.

"My dinner is ready, " he said.

I nodded. "Then I’ll be brief. I couldn’t
sit around waiting for you to come claim the disks from me, Mr.
Asante. Eventually you would try. Even if I destroyed them—you’d
never be sure. For your own peace of mind, you’d come looking. I
could’ve turned them over to the police, but I somehow don’t
trust the police or the courts with this one. They never did much
good with my father’s murder the first time around, did they?
That’s why I decided to make a deal."

I unfolded the piece of paper. I slid it across the
desktop to him.

Asante looked at the signature, frowned, then tossed
it back on the desk. He didn’t get it.

"And this is?" he asked.

“
A receipt for my disks. Guy Wliite always writes
receipts. It’s one of the few ways he’s decent."

Asante stared at me for a minute, still not
comprehending.

"White’s been pretty mad at you for ten
years," I explained. "Sending all that heat his way about
my father’s murder, then trying to do it again with Garza and
Moraga. So we made a deal. Mr. White and I have just bought
controlling interest in Fernando Asante."

As it started to sink in, Asante’s face went pale.
That was all I wanted to see. I stood up to leave.