Laura Lippman (21 page)

In Big Trouble
. Emmie’s band was called Little Girl in Big Trouble. Tess was barely listening to A. J. now, but he assumed her furrowed brow meant she wanted a more in-depth explanation.

“Sewer Boy was a kid who fell into the city’s sewer system when someone stole a manhole cover. Didn’t surface for twenty-four hours. The headline said: ‘Sewer Boy Still Missing.’ Glue Dog was this puppy some huffers got hooked on inhalants. The county took him away. ‘Glue Dog Taken from Torturers.’ That was a rack card, put over the boxes to pump up street sales. Now that we’re the only game in town, we’re more respectable, don’t have to work so hard to sell the papers, because what else are they going to buy? Truth be told, we used to be a helluva lot more fun.”

“Emmie was in a band called
Little
Girl in Big Trouble.”

“Really? That figures, that’s the original.”

“The ‘original’?”

“Little Girl in Big Trouble. It was the headline, on one of the folios, back when the murders first happened. I wasn’t at the paper then, but I’ve heard the story. A month after the murders, the investigation was going nowhere, and the story had dried up along with it. There were three newspapers then, and the
Sun
was beating the
Eagle’s
ass. The
Eagle
reporter, Jimmy Ahern—”

“The one who wrote the book.”

“Yeah, right. Anyway, he was desperate for a scoop. So he sort of goosed the story a little bit.”

“What do you mean?” She wondered if it was a mistake to admit she was familiar with Jimmy Ahern’s oeuvre, but the fact didn’t seem to have registered with A. J.

“He had a source—at least, he said it was a source, but I think it was a voice in his head, or at the bottom of his bourbon bottle—who said Emmie was the link, the key that could unlock the murders. He got a little carried away and suggested she was a
suspect
—Little Girl in Big Trouble. Slapped a question mark on the end of the sucker and it led the paper. Turned out that the source really said Emmie couldn’t be ruled out as a
witness
, despite her age. Wrong on both counts. Oh well. We ran a correction. Eventually.”

Tess had thought she knew every permutation of newspaper fuck-up possible. “The
Eagle
printed a two-year-old was a suspect in a murder case?”

“She was there, she had blood on her.” A. J.’s tone was mildly defensive. “At least, she did until the well-meaning social worker scrubbed her up at the station.
Adios, el evidencio!
I mean sure, they assumed the blood was from the victims, but the killer might have hurt himself, and his blood might have been on the baby. There were bloody fingerprints on her T-shirt, too—until the social worker threw that in the washing machine. It’s a shame. Twenty-one years ago, you couldn’t do shit with that, but if they even had a photograph of the print today, they might be able to blow it up, match it to every fingerprint on file nationwide. Yep, Espejo Verde was the most compromised murder scene of its time.”

“Is it still around?”

“What?”

“Espejo Verde.”

“The building is. Sterne Foods shuttered it, put a cyclone fence around it and it stands to this day on the river in Baja King William. The area is pretty hip now, and I’m sure a lot of people would like trying to run a restaurant there. But the Sternes won’t sell.”

“Could you tell me where it is?” Tess said. “I’d like to go see it.”

“What’s the point?”

“I don’t know. Just morbid curiosity, I guess.” And a hunch Emmie Sterne might be staying there. She had to be somewhere.

“C’mon, don’t waste your time. Have another drink, order an entree.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Then let me have another drink, and my chalupa, and we’ll go.”

“
We’ll
?”

A. J. leaned over the table, his eyes in a squint so narrow they might as well be closed. “Look, stop fucking with me. There’s a rumor going around town that Emmie Sterne is a big girl in big trouble these days. Unfortunately, the cops aren’t talking. The DA’s office also has a black-out on information. But something happened over the weekend. I know, because a cop got disciplined for making a bad mistake, and the union rep is just busting to tell me about it, how unfair it was, and what an asshole Al Guzman is, how he’s going for this guy’s balls to cover his own ass. Only he says he can’t, until next week.”

That time frame again. “I told you, it’s no big deal, a bad debt, nothing more. After hearing all this, I’ll probably tell my client to forget it.”

“Then there’s no problem if I want to accompany you on your little sight-seeing trip.”

Tess was saved from answering by a brief commotion on one of the bridges spanning the narrow river. A man and a woman—tourist types, even Tess’s inexperienced eyes had learned to pick them out here—were arguing heatedly. Drunkenly, too, judging by their liquid posture. The words were inaudible from this distance, but the body language spoke volumes. Arms windmilled, middle fingers saluted. Tess tensed up, ready to act if the man shoved or hit the woman. Her peculiar brand of sexism also dictated that she would never sit idly by when a man struck a woman.

The woman grabbed a fistful of the man’s hair. He pushed her away, clambered onto the railing.

“I’d die for you, that’s how much I love you,” he screamed at the woman. “I’d fucking die for you.”

And he jumped. The woman screamed, but everyone else seemed surprisingly blasé. It turned out the water was not even chest deep and the man bounced to the surface, stunned and sputtering. “Neeeeeeeeeeeil!” the woman screamed, and jumped in after him. They embraced in the water until a passing tourist boat fished them out. Just another beautiful love story.

“He’s lucky we had some rain this fall,” A. J. observed, helping himself to another chip, double-dipping yet again. “Otherwise, they’d both have broken their legs. Want another drink?”

“We already have a second round coming.”

“I believe in planning ahead.”

Espejo Verde. The Green Mirror. Tess had expected something fancier than this plain, dull green cinderblock building next to a muddy-brown river. Especially after seeing the other side of the King William neighborhood, which was full of restored Victorian mansions that almost lived up to A. J.’s rhapsodic descriptions. This area below Alamo Street—Baja King William, A. J. kept calling it—had some nice houses, too. In particular, she liked the purple one with the pink porch, which A. J. said had the local historical society up in arms. But Espejo Verde, even in its glory days, had been plain at best.

“What was the big attraction?” she asked.

“I always heard it was the food. Authentic Mexican, Mayan dishes like cochinita pibil. And Lollie Sterne. She was one of those people who made a party wherever she went. People liked to be around her.”

Tess got out of A. J.’s car, an old Datsun that, in the tradition of reporters’ cars everywhere, was a rolling garbage can. The restaurant’s windows were literally shuttered, the patio ceiling had been culled of its fans—by scavengers who left behind ragged wires, little snakes hanging overhead. But there was no graffiti, and few other signs that anyone had dared to tamper here. It wasn’t a place where one would trespass lightly. She imagined the neighborhood children, the stories they must tell each other about the ghosts that roam the grounds at Espejo Verde. Did they hold their breaths when they ran past, or was there some other delightful, shivery ritual to keep its evil spirits at bay?

The fence was padlocked, but Tess twisted the Master Lock and it came open in her hands. Someone had been here and closed the lock without pressing it down, so it only looked as if the chain was fastened.

“That’s trespassing,” A. J. said uneasily, as she opened the gate, which creaked in appropriate horror-movie fashion. But the sky was bright, the street was busy. What harm could really come to them here?

“I’m not a reporter, I don’t have to follow the rules. Look—the door lock’s rusted off.”

After a moment of hesitation, A. J. pushed ahead of her into the old restaurant. The first things they saw were their own wavy images, reflected in a huge funhouse mirror, its surface cracked and speckled, its verdigris frame caked in dust. The Green Mirror, the restaurant’s namesake. Beyond it, the room was musty and dark, with a strong smell of decay to it, but surely that was just her overactive imagination. Tess studied the empty space, trying to envision a two-year-old girl playing among three corpses until she was smeared with blood. She saw Guzman, a young patrolman when he had walked in here twenty-one years ago, and she almost felt some empathy for him. His face had probably been clean-shaven then, his stomach not so soft, his mouth not so sad. No one was ever tough enough to see something like that.

But the baby had been in her playpen, off the kitchen. How had she gotten there? Who would kill three people, only to hold a little girl in their bloodied arms, and put her to bed? What had Emmie seen, what might Emmie know? Was she on the run because she had killed someone, or because her tangled mind held the secrets to what had happened here? Recovered memory therapy was a fragile science, if a science at all. But Tess remembered things from when she was two. Okay, she remembered telling a dog to get out of their yard, but it was there, it had happened.

“She’s not here,” Tess said out loud. “The is the last place she would come.”

“What are you talking about?” A. J. asked.

“Nothing.”

He hadn’t waited for answer, pushing through the old swinging door into the kitchen. He came back so fast that it was like watching a cartoon character getting caught in a revolving door, then spat out again.

“Don’t,” he said, holding up one hand to wave her away, while he held the other to his mouth, trying to swallow whatever had risen in his throat. Tess ignored him and tiptoed to the door, although she wasn’t sure why she was worried about being overheard. She cracked it just enough to see the cowboy boots at the end of a long wooden table, the dark stain all around the body, an orange T-shirt with what appeared to be brownish splotches draped over a chair. There was something about the head, something odd—no, she wouldn’t go any closer. She backed out of the room and went to sit on the floor next to A. J., who had lit a cigarette with fumbling hands, then appeared to have forgotten about it. It hung from his gaping mouth, his lips white, his face the same color as the margaritas he had been drinking.

“You never get used to seeing dead bodies,” Tess said.

“I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies,” he retorted, as if this were a point of pride. “I’ve seen guys on the table, in mid-autopsy. I saw a guy in a trash compactor once. But I’ve never seen a guy crawling with maggots, his head all but sawed off. And I’ve never stepped on a guy’s fingers.”

“His fingers?”

“All ten of them, arranged by the door so they were pointing toward the guy. As if you might not notice him otherwise.”

M
inutes went by, six-hundred-second minutes in which A. J. and Tess just couldn’t find the will to get up off the floor and walk out into the bright sunshine, where they would have to face the consequences of their discovery. The smell seemed to worsen as they lingered, taking on a life of its own and wrapping around them, jeering at them. Still they sat, their legs too rubbery to use just yet.

“According to the laws of osmosis, you’re supposed to get used to it,” Tess remarked.

“I don’t think the laws of osmosis apply here,” A. J. said, taking short, shallow breaths and trying to pull the neck of his shirt over his nose, so he looked like a kid playing bandit, or that weird guy with the sweater from the old Bazooka bubblegum cartoons. “The question is, who should we call first? The cops, or my photographer? You got a cell phone?”

“No,” Tess lied. “You?”

“At the office. I didn’t count on writing today. Guess I’ll be filing after all.”

“You can’t write a story. You’re a witness.”

“Who are you, the ombudsman? I’m a reporter with a first-person story on a murder at one of the most notorious murder scenes in the city. Wonder who that is in there. But even if it’s nobody, it’s a story.”

Nobody indeed. He might be a dead, decaying stranger, but Tess had no doubt they had found Laylan Weeks, Tom Darden’s pal. Which meant he was no longer a viable suspect in Darden’s death. Which meant Crow and Emmie were.

A. J. stood up, his legs shaking hard enough to make the change in his pocket jingle. “Guess I’ll walk up to that ice house on Alamo and make the call.”

“Do that, and the cops will be here and have it roped off before you get back,” Tess said quickly. “I’d hold my ground, if I were you. Let me walk to the gas station. I’ll call the paper, they can get another reporter and a photographer out here. Then I’ll wait fifteen minutes and call the cops, like a good citizen. Your guys will already be in, and you’ll have told them what you saw. So if you get held up at the cop shop, giving a statement, your paper still gets the story.”

A. J. thought about her proposition. Tess knew he wasn’t bothered about waiting to call the police, he was just trying to figure out the best way to keep control of the story. He wanted to keep his exclusive, and maybe prevent the local television stations from getting it for the early news. Once the call went out on the police radio, his advantage was lost.

“How about if I give you the beeper number for a photog? The city desk might send one of those hungry youngsters who—well, let’s just say there’s not always a healthy respect for territory. We’ll get the photog in and out, with a statement from me, before the cops get here. Then I’ll have the photog call the cops, report it as a break-in.”

“Sure,” Tess said, suppressing a smile. “Write the number on the back of your business card.”

“Do you think—I mean, can’t I wait just outside the door, but inside the fence? I don’t want to stay in here—” Tess knew he was about to say “alone,” then felt sheepish. “I mean, I think it’s better if I’m outside when the cops come.”

“I do, too,” she assured him. “I’m off.”

She shouldered her knapsack and felt her phone pressing into her back, beneath the bag’s false bottom. Too bad she had to double-cross A. J. He was a nice enough guy, but he put his interests first, which forced her to do the same. She walked briskly down the block until she was out of sight, then broke into a jog. She had to run almost a mile up Alamo Street before she found a cab to take her back to her car.

She called Rick Trejo from the cab’s backseat, then the
Eagle
city desk. The person who answered the phone was either very young or very old—the voice was cracked and quavery, which could be from tentativeness or overuse. At any rate, the woman on the other end was blessedly dull and asked no questions when Tess left word that A. J. Sheppard was having car trouble, and probably wouldn’t be in for the rest of the afternoon.

“You didn’t call the cops? Jesus, Tess, what were you thinking?”

“That we could use a head start.”

“Why?” Crow asked. He was sprawled in the only chair in the duplex’s living room, his guitar in his lap. “I’ve been here all day, I obviously didn’t sneak down to this restaurant and murder some guy I’ve never even met.”

“Trust me, it’s not today you need an alibi for,” Tess said, remembering the smell and A. J.’s description of the maggots.

Rick paced the small living room. Tess realized she had finally made it inside Crow’s house. The shotgun duplex was charming in a funky, retro way, or could have been. It had old-fashioned built-in bookcases and a huge fireplace, which had been converted to gas. The wood floors needed refinishing, but were basically sound, the windows large and numerous. But there were no domestic touches, no indication that Crow and Emmie had considered this anything but a way station to wherever they were headed.

“If Tess is right, and that’s Laylan Weeks in Espejo Verde, the police will want to question you again,” Rick told Crow. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they find a way to charge you this time, if only to coerce you into finally telling them what you know.”

Crow ran his fingers lightly over his guitar strings, humming softly to himself. He was like a little kid who puts his hands over his ears and chants to avoid hearing what he didn’t want to hear.

Tess leaned toward him. “You do know something, don’t you, Crow?”

“I know Emmie’s not going to surface until she’s good and ready. All we can do is wait.”

“You’ll be waiting downtown,” Rick said.

Crow looked unconcerned. “Big deal, so I spend the afternoon down there. They’ll take me in, they’ll try to get me to tell them something, they’ll let me go because I don’t have anything to tell.”

“You better be prepared for the reality that you could be charged and held without bail,” Rick said. “It’s a homicide rap, you’re from out of state. They’ll argue you’re at risk for flight. You could be in jail until your trial comes around.”

“They can’t do that.”

“If there’s one shred of physical evidence to tie you to that scene, they can. Someone’s already tried to frame you once, and only police incompetence kept it from working. Why wouldn’t they do it again?”

Tess saw a flash of orange in the gloom of the Espejo Verde kitchen, and then remembered Crow happily dying his Cafe Hon T-shirt in her sink, until his hands were bright yellow and the sink had a permanent ring. It had been that same mango-y color, almost exactly, as the stained cloth she had seen. “I used to have a Cafe Hon T-shirt,” he had told her Saturday night.

“I can’t be in jail this weekend—”

“Why, Crow?” Tess asked. “What’s going to happen? What’s Emmie going to do?”

“Nothing,” he said, and his eyes went dark and flat. “But we’ve got all these gigs. The Morgue paid us in advance, and we’ll have to give it back if at least three-quarters of the band doesn’t play Friday and Saturday. And I don’t have it, okay? It’s already gone, blown on frivolous things like food and gas for my car.”

“You won’t have to worry about those things if you’re in jail,” Rick said. “If you do get charged, and I can get bail, will your parents be able to cough up the money?”

“Call my parents and I fire you,” Crow said firmly. “I don’t want them bailing me out of anything, literally or figuratively. Besides, if you’re right, there’s not going to be any bail.”

Rick glanced at his watch. “I have to call the cops. Better I call them before they call on us.”

Crow smiled, a bitter, downturned smile. “I’ll brush my teeth so my breath will be kissing-fresh for the interrogation.”

Rick picked up the phone, which sat in a curved niche in the wall. “Detective Guzman,” he said into the receiver. Then, to Tess, as he waited to be put through. “You should have called me from there. It looks bad, the way you handled it. As if you assumed he was guilty.”

He made her feel like a child, and she answered in a child’s whiney tone. “I’m tired of talking to cops. I’m tired of finding dead bodies. Let A. J. give them the blow-by-blow. He saw everything. Besides, as long as Crow surrenders, what’s the big deal? There’s no reason we should assume he’s involved in this.”

“I just hope Guzman sees things your way,” he said. “If he ever picks up. I hate to think of how many minutes of my life I’ve spent on goddamn hold. I want those minutes back. When death comes for me, I want back every minute I was on hold, in traffic jams, and behind people with eleven items in the ten-items-or-less line.”

For all its windows, the living room was fairly dark, perhaps because it faced north. Crow’s neighborhood was quiet in the late afternoon, and Tess became aware of the sounds around her—Rick’s tuneless humming, the wind moving through the trees, a car moving slowly down the block, bushes rustling, a burst of barking from what sounded like an entire kennel of dogs a block or two away. The steady, muffled sounds of traffic from the nearby highway.

Then she became aware of the sounds she wasn’t hearing—running water from the bathroom, Crow’s footsteps as he moved about the rear of the house, gathering his things.

“Rick—”

But he was hearing, or not-hearing, the same thing. He dropped the phone, even as Guzman’s voice came on the line. They ran down the narrow hall to the bathroom, a large old-fashioned room with a vanity flanked by high built-in cabinets and small square windows bracketing the vanity’s mirror. The window closest to the door was up, and the screen had been pushed out on the ground below.

“The car’s still there,” Tess said, pointing to the Volvo with Maryland tags.

“Only because his key ring is in the front door. And with the park nearby, he can get a good head start on foot,” Rick said. “I just wish I’d known he was going to do ‘Norwegian Wood’ for his encore.”

“Norwegian Wood?”

“Sure. This Crow had flown.” And he laughed mirthlessly at his own bad joke, while Tess just stared at the empty space where a screen had once been, where Crow’s body had been only minutes ago. It was such a small space, even for someone as slender as Crow. It couldn’t have been easy to slide through it without making too much noise, to drop to the ground without a thump that would draw their attention.

Such a small space, yet it reminded her just how big trouble can be.