Laura Lippman (24 page)

“Look, he’s some old fart on a policeman’s pension whose only hobby is killing weeds and trying to get lung cancer. My car probably costs more than he paid for his house. I win.”

“As in, the one with the most toys, etc., etc.”

“Most toys, most power. A person who really has power over you doesn’t have to pull the kind of pennyante shit he was trying. We had to be polite to him because we thought he might have something for us. That’s the up side to getting nothing. We don’t owe him, and we don’t have to go back.”

Tess thought back to Diamond, how he had slobbered over Danny Boyd’s mother, with her big blue eyes and blond hair. Danny had taken after his mother. A cute little boy, a rich man’s son. Blond hair, blue eyes.

“I’m not so sure we came away empty-handed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Danny Boyd. He doesn’t fit. He never fit. It’s like trying to hammer the wrong jigsaw puzzle piece into place. Why do two convenience store robbers suddenly upgrade to a high-stakes kidnapping?”

“Because they had just killed three people in a botched robbery and they needed the money to get far away,” Rick shot back.

“I thought of that. But they didn’t ask for any money. They took a kid, then tried to give him back, and they were so broke they walked their check at the Pig Stand, whatever that is. You think we could get the original police report on the kidnapping? I want to check something out.”

“Legally, we’re entitled, but I bet the cops won’t make it easy for us,” Rick said. “As it happens, I now realize I know the ‘do-gooding little Mex’ who represented Darden and Weeks. She’s an attorney with a nonprofit, does environmental law now. And, no, she wasn’t well-suited to criminal law, but she’s the kind of analretentive Harvard grad who keeps her records forever. Chances are, she picked up a copy of the complaint, preparing to depose the nanny if it came to that. I know her pretty well.”

“She still a friend, or did it end badly?”

“Darlin’, she’s ages too old for me.” Rick smiled. “She’s more of a mentor-mama figure to me than anything else. Besides, all my ex-girlfriends love me. It’s the current one I can’t keep happy.”

It was dusk before the bell rang on the fax machine in Rick’s office, a small but posh suite of rooms on the twentieth floor of a downtown office building. Tess stared out at San Antonio, watching the way the city began to glow at sundown. The sky almost seemed to part, the east going black while the west was still full of rosy clouds, the McAllister Freeway running between them like a dividing line. It was really a very pretty place in its own right, a lovely place of hills and old trees and gracious homes. There was nothing here to dislike, and much to admire. It was not, in the end, that different from Baltimore. A small big city, provincial and anxious, eager to please. Its only flaw was that it wasn’t home, and she was so homesick.

She held Jimmy Ahern’s
The Green Glass
in her hand, her thumb marking the page. In the end, the proof had been in the padding. All those little details that he had thrown in so frenetically, trying to puff the book up to full-length. How had the cops missed the motive buried there? Not that it would matter, unless she was right about this, too. She needed A plus B before she could get to C.

At the high trill of the fax line, she turned and watched two pages peel off the machine, falling to the floor where they rolled and shimmered like shiny snakes. When she didn’t move Rick leaned over and picked them up, handing them to her facedown so she could have the first look.

“Well?” he asked as she scanned the old report.

“The Boyds lived on Shook Avenue.”

“So your hunch was wrong.”

“My hunch was dead-on,” she said, looking up with a victorious grin. “The Boyds lived on Shook, but the kidnappers grabbed Danny on Contour Drive, less than a block from Gus Sterne’s house on Hermosa. A little blond boy, out with his nanny, the same age and description as Clay Sterne, just outside the Sterne house. Sure, the Boyds never got a ransom demand. Because Gus Sterne did. And never told anyone.”

Rick rubbed his eyes. “I’m totally lost,” he confessed. “Why did Darden and Weeks have it in for this one family?”

“They didn’t. They took Clay because Gus Sterne said he would pay them to kill Lollie and then reneged on the deal. They were just trying to get him to pay up. And if they had taken the right kid, things might have worked out differently all around.”

T
hey left a message for Al Guzman to meet them at the Liberty Bar, where Rick and Kris were to have dinner.

“If she shows,” he said glumly, parking next to a lopsided old house that made the Tower of Pisa look stable. But once inside, Tess felt like Brigham Young regarding Utah. The long old-fashioned bar, the worn wooden floors, the smell of fresh-baked bread, the decadent chocolate cake beckoning to her from a sideboard—it was at once homey yet untamed, a place to seek comfort or adventure, depending on one’s mood.

“Do you come here a lot?”

“All the time.” He looked wistful. “Kris and I have had some of our best fights here.”

They took a seat in one of the neon outlined windows overlooking the street. Older ghosts and goblins roamed the sidewalks here, and many of them had spilled into the bar. A devil brandished his pitchfork at a curvy vampire, while a doleful-looking man with an accordion was walking around in huge rubber chicken feet.

“Strange costume,” Tess said.

“Old story,” Rick said. “Suffice to say, a woman who dances with the man with chicken feet will live to regret it.”

The waiter, dressed as a safari-bound Groucho Marx, greeted Rick with a familiar smile and a curious look for the woman who was not Kristina. He left them with fresh bread as they studied the specials on the menu. Pork chops, meat loaf, pasta, eggplant puree on parmesan toast, and—she couldn’t help laughing at this—a “Maryland-style” crabcake that was billed as one of the house specialties. No crab for her, Maryland-style or otherwise. But everything else looked wonderful. Everything. Tess, whose Irish roots often had to fight to be heard over the domineering Weinstein genes, had found her inner Molly Bloom. Yes, her taste buds sang out. Yes, yes, yes.

She was not so far gone in her own appetites that she didn’t notice how glum Rick still looked.

“Not to pry—” she began.

“You?” But she had gotten a smile out of him. “You’re a professional pryer.”

“It’s just that you and Kristina bicker all the time, and you both seem to enjoy it immensely. So how did you end up having a
fight
-fight?” She was feeling very warm and wise. Now that she had all but solved the triple murders, she was ready to tackle anything. She could see herself on the radio, dispensing brisk, no-nonsense advice about love and marriage, or telling people how to manage their stock portfolios, repair their cars, build small nuclear weapons with household items.

“Honestly, I don’t have a clue. It started out about there being no two percent in my fridge, and the next thing I know, she’s slamming doors and saying I’m not serious about our relationship.”

“You’re the one who wants to marry her.”

“She says the marriage talk is a joke to me, that I’d never mention it if I thought there was a risk of her saying yes. At least, I think that’s what she said. I kind of zoned out in the middle part, somewhere between the two percent and ‘you son-of-a-bitch.’ I was reading the sports pages when she started in on me. That columnist Robert Buchanan, man, he pisses me off. I mean, I’m not saying he should be a homer for the Spurs, but he could cut them a little slack now and then, you know?”

“When Crow and I were together,
I
was the one who buried my nose in the paper while he prattled.” She remembered Charlottesville, the discovery of all the things she hadn’t heard—assuming they had ever been said. “Just more proof that I’m not very feminine.”

“Wouldn’t say that. Wouldn’t say that at all.”

The compliment was automatic, mindless. Rick was still in his funk, while Tess’s mind was racing, making connections someone should have made long ago. The fire at the Sterne house, the fire that was never started at Espejo Verde, despite the gas cans found there. Did Emmie’s act prove that she knew the man who raised her was responsible for her mother’s death, or was it just a coincidence? And all those psychiatrists, how scared Gus Sterne must have been when one had tried to recover Emmie’s memories from the night of the triple murder. You could see how everything fit together if you took a step back. Guzman had been too close, for too long.

The paunchy homicide cop came into the restaurant as she was thinking about him. There was a split second before he spotted them, and Tess used this opportunity to study him. His eyes were so active, like a camera on a motor drive clicking away. She saw skepticism on his face, a hint of amusement at his surroundings. But the primary impression was of someone who made a constant inventory of wherever he happened to be, whether it was a restaurant or a murder scene.

Then he saw them, and his face was instantly more guarded.

“This the kind of place you hang out in?” he asked Rick, sitting down and helping himself to a piece of bread, reaching for the butter, then pushing it away. “Kind of girly, isn’t it?”

“The food is good and they’ve got Shiner Bock on draft. Besides, Tommy Lee Jones always brings the out-of-town press here for all those profiles they’re forever doing on him. If it’s good enough for Tommy Lee Jones—”

“Then it’s good enough for Tommy Lee Jones,” Guzman finished. “Now what have you and this particular out-of-towner cooked up for me tonight? You going to tell me where to find your client?”

“I’m going to tell you why you don’t need to find him.” Tess had intended to be cool, to make Guzman work harder for what she knew, but she couldn’t hold back. “Crow didn’t kill anyone. Neither did Emmie.”

“Yeah?” He was intent on his bread, which he had decided to butter after all.

“Seriously, you’ve got to listen to me. I know one of the first things police do in any homicide is look to see if anyone benefits from the murder, financially or otherwise—”

“Oh, you mean like that whole motive thing? You know, I knew there was something I forgot.” He slapped his forehead with the palm of his free hand. “Twenty-one years on a case, off and on, and I forgot to check if there was a motive.”

“No need to be sarcastic, guy,” Rick put in. “She’s assuming you did your job. So tell us, were there life insurance policies on the victims?”

“Okay, yeah, we checked that. Lollie Sterne’s daughter was her beneficiary, while Frank Conyers left Marianna about five hundred thousand dollars. She’s probably got more change rattling around in her sofa than that. The cook, Pilar Rodriguez, was the kind of old woman who kept her money in her mattress, so she didn’t need an executor for her estate.”

“There was a corporate policy, too, one that Lollie took out as a publicity stunt. It paid one million dollars if her hands were damaged. I’m assuming death counts as damage. That policy paid off, and Sterne Foods, which was about to be forced into seeking outside investors, was suddenly in very good financial shape.”

Nothing registered on Guzman’s face. Not surprise, not even mild interest. He just helped himself to another slice of bread. When he did speak, his voice was so mild that he might have been inquiring about the weather. “Why not just torch the restaurant, if you need insurance money? Why kill your cousin, and two other people?”

“Arson might have been the original plan,” Tess said. “It was a Monday night, the one night the restaurant was supposed to be dark. Darden and Weeks came with gasoline. But the building probably wasn’t worth nearly as much—”

“Fifty thousand, as a matter of fact. Yeah, I checked that, too.”

“So I think the intent was just to cover their tracks after they killed Lollie. But they couldn’t go through with it, because of Emmie. They couldn’t kill a little girl.”

“They could shoot two women in the head, and torture a guy, but they couldn’t let a baby burn up? I guess everyone has their limits.”

“It’s consistent, though. They didn’t hurt Danny Boyd, either, when they realized they had the wrong little boy. They could have killed him, or left him by the roadside. Instead, they tried to abandon him someplace relatively safe and got caught for their trouble.”

“Wrong little boy?”

“Darden and Weeks meant to kidnap Clay Sterne. Check the arrest report. He was grabbed a half-block from the Sterne house.”

Finally, she had Guzman’s attention. She could almost see his mind opening beyond his intense dark eyes, taking in the new information and examining it from every angle.

He spoke slowly, deliberately, thinking out loud. “When Darden and Weeks were picked up for the kidnapping, they hadn’t yet been linked to the triple murders. That was a lead we developed while they were in Huntsville. So at the time—”

“No one made a connection between the Boyd kidnapping and the murders. And even when they became suspects, the reason for the kidnapping seemed obvious—they took Danny Boyd to generate quick cash for their getaway. It all made perfect sense.” She tried to find a smile that was conciliatory, without being smug or cocky. “Unless you know they intended to kidnap Clay Sterne. Two boys, both blond, about the same age.”

She hadn’t expected Guzman to start high-fiving her, but she had thought he would be more gracious. Instead, he chewed his bread, staring over her shoulder at the Halloween night crowds.

“So you’re saying Gus Sterne hires these guys—to kill his cousin, a woman who was like a sister to him—because he needed money to keep Sterne Foods going, and then was crazy enough to think he could get away with not paying them?”

“I’m saying Gus Sterne was naive enough to think that he could pay these guys for their work, and they would go away. Once the job was done, I’m sure they blew it all, then demanded more money. There’s about a two-week lag between the two crimes. They blackmailed Sterne, he balked, and they decided to take his son, to show how serious they were. Instead, they ended up with Danny Boyd and they went to prison, hoarding their secret because they still planned to cash it in. You said they obviously had money when they got out. That could have been hush money from Sterne.”

“Okay, I’m with you so far. I don’t believe a word of it, but I’m with you. So who killed Darden and Weeks?”

“Gus Sterne,” Tess said, trying not to sound too triumphant. “He learned the hard way that you have to do these things yourself. He killed Darden and Weeks, and tried to frame Emmie for it. So the gun shows up under the bed, Crow’s T-shirt ends up at the murder scene. But it’s all credible, because everyone knows she’s crazy enough to do anything. Whereas no one would believe Gus Sterne, San Antonio’s great benefactor, could be responsible for his own cousin’s death.”

Guzman smiled. Worse, it was a fatherly smile, sweet and sorrowful and kind. The smile of someone who knows he has no choice but to disappoint you.

“It’s not a bad theory,” he began, and Tess knew then how bad it must be, that she had missed something crucial, that the devil, as always, lurked in the details. “But there are a couple things you couldn’t have known, either of you. You, because you’re not from here, and Rick because he was just a kid when some of this happened.”

“Fourth grade,” Rick confirmed. “I remember the cops coming to school after the kidnapping, reminding us not to get into strangers’ cars.”

“So you can’t know that Gus Sterne was almost destroyed by his cousin’s murder,” Guzman said. “His business got much worse before it got better, and he neglected his wife, which probably set him up for the divorce that came a decade later. I saw this guy at the funeral—I did the motorcade. He was a zombie, a wreck. He sobbed, and he didn’t care who saw him. Finally, he pulled himself together for the kids, for Clay and Emmie, and he turned Sterne Foods around by sheer will.”

“You can grieve for someone whose death you caused,” Tess said stubbornly.

“Yeah, but not for someone whose death you ordered,” Guzman said. “A person who contracts a hit is a strange combination—a cold-blooded wimp. But, okay, let’s say Gus Sterne’s the greatest actor since Barrymore, that he faked out everyone. You still lose your motive, because he didn’t use the insurance money to bail out the company. Yeah, we knew about the Lloyd’s policy. It paid off to the corporation, sure—and Sterne used every cent of it to set up a foundation. A foundation in Lollie’s name, not his. Neither he nor the business got a penny of it. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think anyone has three people killed because he’s itching to set up a scholarship fund.”

“Remorse?” Tess offered, but it sounded weak even to her. Guzman shook his head impatiently.

“Now let’s talk about that other crime-solving favorite, opportunity, as it applies to the deaths of Darden and Weeks. As you know, the coroner can only come up with a range of time they’ve been dead. It’s pretty interesting, actually, they use the maggots to date the corpse—”

“I’ve read about this, I don’t need all the details,” Tess said firmly. She was still planning to eat something after Guzman left.

“So, anyway, all we’ve got is a range. But the range says one thing: Gus Sterne couldn’t have killed either guy. Because, as those who read the
Eagle
’s business section know, Gus Sterne returned Sunday from an international restaurant expo in Tokyo, where he had been for the last two weeks.”

“Have you seen his passport?” But it was Rick who jumped in, and he was too quick, too glib, a lawyer falling back on his instinct to match the other side point for point. “For all you know, the paper ran something from a press release. An article doesn’t prove he was in Japan.”

Rick was given the kind smile, too. “Well, if it comes to that, I’ll check the airlines. In the meantime, if your client shows up, please remember I’ve got dibs.” He stood, leaving behind a five-dollar bill for the half-loaf of bread he had consumed, waving Rick’s hand away when he tried to push the bill back to him. “Ethics policy, Mr. Trejo. Can’t have it get out that I let a criminal attorney stand me to even a slice of bread. I’m sure you understand. Drive safely.”

The plunge from cocky conviction to abject humiliation is a fast, sickening one, and it doesn’t mix well with alcohol. Tess drank anyway. She drank and she got maudlin, although she tried to disguise it at first.

Rick saw through her and hitched his chair closer, and his attempts to comfort her hurt almost as much as Guzman’s fatherly smile. She must have looked very foolish indeed if Rick was trying to be genuinely sweet to her, with none of his usual smart-alecky comments or taunts. She drank bourbon, her appetite forgotten.