Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (7 page)

"Shilo’s," he said. "One hour.
You’re buying."

When I got there at one o’clock the little downtown
deli was still packed with businessmen gorging themselves on the
pastrami and rye lunch special. The air was so thick with the smell
of spiced meats you could get full just breathing it.

Carlon waved at me from the counter. He’d put on at
least twenty pounds since I’d seen him last, but I could still
recognize him by his tie. He never wore one with fewer than twelve
colors. This one had enough pastel to repaint half the West Side.

He smiled and pushed a thick manila envelope across
the counter toward me.

“
When the mole people start digging they don’t
mess around. I got everything, even some copy from the Light. We
inherited most of their archival material when they went defunct."

The first thing I pulled out was a picture of my dad,
taken the last year he had campaigned for sheriff. Those gray,
mischievous eyes stared back at me from under the rim of his Stetson.
He had an amused look on his face.

I always wondered how anyone could see a photo like
that and willingly vote this man into public office. Dad looked like
the quintessential third-grade class clown, only older and fatter. I
could imagine him cutting off little girls’ ponytails with his
school box scissors, or throwing spitwads at the teacher’s back.

The counter waitress came by. I decided to skip the
lunch menu and go straight for Shilo’s cheesecake, three layers
thick, any of which by itself would’ve been the best cheesecake in
the world. I ate it while I skimmed through the rest of Carlon’s
envelope.

There were lots of headlines about my dad’s last
big project in office—a multi-department sting operation against
drug trafficker Guy White that had eventually gone down as the most
expensive failure in Bexar County law enforcement history. According
to the articles, the case against White was finally thrown out of
court on a ruling of entrapment, just weeks before my father’s
murder. Dad won lots of friends on the federal level by telling the
press that the FBI had botched the whole operation.

There was an ongoing series of "guest
editorials" from the Light written by another of my father’s
great admirers, Councilman Fernando Asante. He blasted my father for
everything from abuse of police power to poor taste in clothes, but
mostly Asante focused on the Sheriff’s opposition to Travis Center,
a proposed hotel-tourist complex for the southeast side of town. Back
in ’85 Asante was making Travis Center the centerpiece of his first
campaign for mayor—pushing the idea that the complex would generate
tourist dollars in the poor, largely Hispanic section of the city. My
father opposed the project because it would require the annexation of
county lands, and more importantly because it was Asante’s idea.

Then there was a report on the fall ’85 election
results, which Dad didn’t live long enough to see. The voters
showed a healthy sense of humor by voting against Asante for mayor
five to one but approving his Travis Center bond initiative by a
landslide. Now, ten years and umpteen million dollars later, Asante
was still just a councilman and Travis Center was finally complete.
I’d seen it from above on my plane’s final approach-a huge
bulbous structure, hideously painted pink and red, cutting a gash in
the hills on the edge of town like a giant flesh wound.

Finally there were stories about the assassination.
There in black and white were all the front page headlines I had
nightmares about, plus pages of follow-ups I’d never had the
stomach to read. The murder scene, the investigation, the memorial
services—all reported on in microscopic detail. Several articles
talked about Randall Halcomb, the closest thing to a real suspect the
FBI ever discussed in public. An ex-deputy, Halcomb had been fired by
my dad for insubordination in the late seventies, then arrested in
1980 for manslaughter. Halcomb was paroled from Huntsville a week
before my dad’s murder.

Convenient. Only by the time the FBI found him, two
months after Dad`s death, the ex-deputy was curled up in a deer blind
in Blanco, shot between the eyes. Inconvenient.

The last thing in Carlon’s files was a photo of my
father’s body covered with a blanket, his hand sticking out the
side like it was reaching for a beer, while a grimfaced deputy held
up his hand to block the camera, a little too slow.

I resealed the envelope. Then I stared at the neon
beer signs over the bar until I realized Carlon was talking
to me.

"—
this personal vengeance theory," he was
saying, “just some ex-con with a score to settle. That’s
bullshit. Christ, if Halcomb was acting alone, how come he turned up
with a bullet between his eyes once the Feds start looking for him?"

I ate a piece of cheesecake. Suddenly it tasted like
lead.

"You’ve been doing your homework, McAffrey.
You stay up last night reading these?"

Carlon shrugged. “I’m just saying. There had to
be a cover-up here."

“
Maybe that’s the journalist in you talking."

“
My ass. Your dad was murdered and nobody ever did
time for it. Not even a fucking trial. I’m just trying to help."

Years of good living had softened Carlon’s face a
little, but you could still see the hard edge in his smile. His eyes
were cold and blue. There was energy there, self-confidence, a harsh
kind of humor. Nothing that might pass for compassion. He was still
the same college kid who pushed cows down hills for fun and laughed
shamelessly at racial jokes and broken limbs. He came through for his
friends. He probably meant what he said about helping. But if you
couldn’t use it for fun or profit it meant very little to Carlon
McAffrey.

“
Halcomb had his own motive," I reminded him.

“
Assuming he’s the one who did the shooting, he
wouldn’t have needed anyone pulling his strings."

Carlon shook his head. "My money’s on the mob.
My sources at the SAPD tell me I’m right."

"I heard that from the SAPD too. Doesn’t
exactly inspire my confidence?

"Your dad died right after he brought Guy White
in for trafficking, Tres. Don’t tell me that was coincidence."

"Why should the mob target a retiring sheriff?
That would be pointless. The charges against White had already been
thrown out."

Carlon wiped a piece of sauerkraut off his cheek. He
was looking over my shoulder now, toward the booths on the east wall
of the restaurant.

"Good question," he said. “Go ask him."

“
Who?"

Carlon pointed with the bottom of his beer bottle.

“
Guy White, man."

The booth Carlon was pointing at had two men in it.
The one with his back toward me was a skinny, middle-aged Anglo whose
mother dressed him funny. His slacks rode up at the ankles, his beige
suit coat was too big around the shoulders, and his thinning brown
hair was uncombed. He had finished his meal and was now tapping a
quarter slice of pickle absently on his plate.

The man sitting across from him was much older, much
more carefully dressed. I’d never seen Guy White in person, but if
this was him the only thing white about him was the name. His skin
was carefully bronzed, his suit light blue, his hair and eyes as rich
and dark as mole sauce. He had to be the best—looking man over
sixty I’d ever seen. Mr. White was about halfway through with a
club sandwich and appeared to be in no hurry to finish the rest. He
was chatting with the waitress, smiling a Colgate smile at her,
gesturing every so often toward his associate across the table. The
waitress laughed politely.

Mr. White’s poorly dressed friend did not.

"He comes in here twice a week to be seen,"
Carlon told me. "Clean-nosed celebrity these days--bailed the
symphony out of bankruptcy, goes to the Alamodome for all the games,
supports the arts, gets his picture taken with Manuel Flores at
charity garden shows. Gone downright respectable. If something new
came up in your dad’s case, something that screwed White’s public
image to hell, that’d make a nice story."

I shook my head. "You expect me to walk over
there right now and confront him?"

"Where’s that old college try? The Tres
Navarre I knew would go up to an ROTC captain during live ammunition
practice and tell him his girlfriend—"

“
This is a little different, Carlon."

“
You want me to do it?"

He started to get up. I pushed on his shoulder just
enough to sit him back down on his stool.

“
What then?" Carlon said. “You asked me for
the files. You must have some kind of theory."

I took one more bite of cheesecake. Then I stood, put
the manila envelope under my arm, and left my last twenty on the
counter.

"Thanks for the info, Carlon," I said.

"Suit yourself," he said. “But you want
this thing covered in a friendly way, you know where to come."

I looked back at him one more time as I left. He had
pocketed my twenty and was ordering another beer on the Express’s
expense account. For a minute I wondered why he had never gone into
straight news reporting. He seemed disturbingly well suited for it.

Then it occurred to me that he was probably thriving
right where he was, catering to the interests and appetites of the
city in the entertainment section. That thought was even more
unsettling.
 

12

Twenty minutes later I’d reparked my VW at the top
of the Commerce Street Garage, one row down from the dark green
Infiniti in Guy White’s reserved monthly space.

I knew White parked in the garage because it was the
only logical place to park if you’re going to Shilo’s. I knew he
had a regular space because ten minutes earlier a nice parking
attendant had shown me the list of monthly parkers. In fact he’d
shoved it in my face, exasperated, trying to convince me that my
name, Ed Beavis, was not registered. Normally I would’ve bribed him
for the information I needed, but poverty makes for creative
alternatives.

A few more minutes of waiting and the elevator door
shuddered open. Mr. White’s skinny associate in the ill-fitting
beige suit walked out first, bouncing car keys in his right palm. He
wasn’t any handsomer from the front. His face had that sandblasted
look farmers tend to get—dark pitted skin, permanently squinting
eyes, features worn down to nothing but right angles. Mr. White
strolled a few steps behind, reading a folded newspaper in one hand
and smiling contentedly like there was nothing in there but good
words.

We started our cars. Making no effort to hang back, I
followed the Infiniti out of the garage, then onto Commerce and east
for a mile to the highway. I couldn’t see anything through the
silvered rear window of Guy White’s car, but once in a while my
friend the driver would glance back at me in his sideview mirror.

Tailing someone well is extremely hard. It’s rare
that you can strike the right balance between being far enough away
to look inconspicuous and being close enough not to lose the subject.
A full ninety percent of the time you’ll lose the person you’re
tailing because of traffic or stoplights, nothing you can do about
it.

Then you have to try, try again, sometimes for seven
or eight days.

That, of course, is assuming you don’t want to be
seen. Tailing someone badly is very easy.

When I got about fifteen feet behind the Infiniti in
the center lane of McAlister, the driver looked in his side mirror
and frowned. I smiled at him. He said something to his boss in the
backseat.

If they’d sped up they could’ve easily left me in
the dust, but they didn’t. I guess one guy in an orange Volkswagen
wasn’t their idea of terrifying. The Infiniti kept cruising at an
easy fifty mph, finally taking the Hildebrand Exit and turning left
onto the overpass. I followed it into Olmos Park.

Mansions started rising out of the woods and hills.
Bankers’ wives jogged by in warm-up suits that cost more than my
car. The natives seemed to smell my VW as it went by. It looked like
their noses weren’t pleased.

We passed my father’s old house. We passed the
police station. Then we turned off Olmos Drive onto Crescent and the
Infiniti pulled into the red brick driveway of a residence I knew
only by reputation: the White House.

It wasn’t just called that because of the man who
lived there. The facade was an exact replica—wraparound porches,
Grecian columns, even the U.S. flag. It was an egomaniac’s dream,
except the whole building was scaled down to about half the size of
the original. Still impressive, but after you looked at it for a
while, it somehow seemed pathetic. It was a Volvo trying to look like
a Mercedes, a Herradura bottle filled with Happy Amigo tequila.

I pulled over on the opposite side of the road, where
the cactus and wild mountain laurels sloped down toward an old creek
bed. The driver of the Infiniti got out and started walking toward
me. Mr. White got out next. He brushed some invisible speck off his
powder-blue suit, then folded his newspaper under his arm and began
walking leisurely toward his front door, not looking back.