The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan (13 page)

I looked from the photograph to the real-life Del
Brandon.

You couldn't miss the contrast. Del looked like his
dad after twenty years of Prozac and eclairs — a fatter, duller
version of the original, the ferocious hunger in his eyes watered
down to a kind of unfocused discontent.

Del sat down at his desk, which was absolutely empty
— no pens, no paper, nothing. The desk of an untrustworthy man.

He spread his arms. "Well?"

Erainya patted Jem's head. "Why don't you go
play with Rita, honey?" Jem ran fearlessly into the other room —
a lot more fearlessly than I would have if someone suggested I play
with Rita. Erainya shut the door behind him, then sat in the only
free chair. I leaned against the wall by the desk. Del sat back in
his chair, waiting.

"Mr. Brandon," Erainya said, "we're
private investigators."

Del had been about to prop his boot up on the desk.
He missed, dropped the foot to the floor, and sat up. "Come
again?"

"I'm a private investigator, honey. I need some
information about your brother."

Brandon's eyes got very small. "Did Arno tell
you to fuck with me like this?"

"I don't know Arno."

"You said—"

"No, I didn't. You assumed."

Del opened his mouth, looking back and forth between
me and Erainya. When the color came back into his face, it came a
little too quick. Maybe he wasn't really planning to go for his side
arm, but when his hand started slipping toward the edge of the desk
both Erainya and I had the same idea. Erainya pulled her 9mm from her
purse. I walked around the desk, lifted Del's hand, and removed his
.38 semiauto from its holster.

Del didn't object. He took the intrusion calmly, like
a man who was used to being disarmed. When he spoke again, he
addressed Erainya.

"You think this is a good idea? You think you
can treat me like this?"

"We don't want you getting stupid, honey. That's
all."

I ejected the gun's magazine into the trash can. I
checked the desk, found no other weapons, then nodded to Erainya.

She put her 9mm back in her purse.

"I yell now," Del warned, "that kid of
yours will be Ernie's lunch. What are you thinking?"

"All we want is to ask a couple of questions,
honey."

"You tricked me."

"I do what's easiest. Tell me about your
brother."

"He's dead. What's to tell?"

"You sound real broken up about it," I
noticed.

Del shrugged.

"You looked broken up this afternoon," I
added, "kicking Aaron's widow and kid out of their home."

Del's eyes got even smaller. "That's where —
on the porch, yeah. What the fuck is this about?"

"We're working for UTSA, Mr. Brandon,"
Erainya said. "The University wants to make sure their professor
didn't get shot full of holes through any fault of theirs. You heard
the police are holding a suspect in your brother's murder?"

"I didn't know that, you think I'd be out at
night conducting business? Years I've been waiting for them to catch
that fucker. He killed my father."

"You believe Zeta Sanchez had a grudge against
you?"

"Fuckin' A."

"Your brother too?"

Del's gaze slid down to his empty desktop, then back
to Erainya. "Look, lady, the police already asked me all about
that. I told them I don't know."

Erainya nodded sympathetically. "And the truth
is?"

Del licked his lips. "You just want to know so
UTSA will relax."

"That's right, honey."

"Then you'll get out of here?"

I gave him the Scout's honor.

"Just so you understand," he started, "Zeta
Sanchez— Anthony — he should've been grateful to us. Nobody else
would've given him the kind of chance we did."

He looked at Erainya for support.

She said, "Absolutely."

"Sanchez's folks worked for us for ages. His dad
was a metal welder. His mom worked in the office." Del nodded
past me, toward Rita's reception area. "I remember her pretty
well. I was about fifteen when Anthony was born. Sanchez's dad died
not too long after that but his mom worked here a few more years
before quitting. The thing about my dad, though — once your family
worked for him, he kept track of you, tried to help out any way he
could. So he kept tabs on the Sanchezes. When Anthony started getting
into trouble with gangs, Dad offered him a job here. Dad did that for
a lot of the employees' kids."

"Heartwarming," I said.

"Everybody got a chance in Dad's business. Even
Zeta Sanchez. Even my stupid fucking brother. Everybody."

From out in the office, Rita's voice exploded with
laughter. Jem was singing her something.

Erainya said, "Why would Sanchez want you and
your brother dead?"

"We shut the bastard down, that's why. Zeta was
moving drugs through RideWorks. Using our fucking company to move
heroin for his friends on the West Side. If he'd been found out, we
would've been closed down. Everything my dad built, everything Aaron
and I were going to inherit— gone. I got Dad to see what was going
on. Aaron didn't have much to do with it, but Sanchez didn't know
that. He blamed us both, told us we were just jealous he could run
the company better than we could. Dad had it out with him after that
— threw Sanchez out on his ass. You know what Sanchez did to
retaliate."

"And the rumor about your dad sleeping with
Sanchez's wife?" I asked.

"That story's bullshit."

"The girl's name was Sandra," I recalled.
"Her brother's still around — Hector Mara. You wouldn't happen
to know him?"

"I don't have to convince you two of shit,"
Del blustered. "I told you what you wanted to hear. Now you can
get the hell out."

In the reception area, Jem kept laughing along with
Rita. They both said "Whoops!" in unison.

Del nodded toward the door. "Ernie'll be coming
back about now, checking on things. My transactions don't take this
long, miss."

Erainya took a card from her purse, slid it across
the table toward Del. "You think of anything you forgot, honey,
call us."

"I got other things to do, lady. Either you got
thirty thousand dollars to spend or your time is up."

"Your wife awaits?" I asked. "Or
Rita?"

His face reddened. "I'll remember you, asshole."

"Good night, Del," Erainya said. "Thanks
a million."

We went outside to collect Jem, who was giggling at
Rita trying to balance a beer bottle on her forehead. Jem asked if we
could come back here tomorrow. He said it was fun even without the
amusement rides working.

Erainya told him probably not.

We left Rita still trying to do the beer bottle
trick, Del Brandon glaring at us while he reloaded his gun.
 

FOURTEEN

Wednesday morning came way too early and it brought
along a friend named Margarita Hangover.

I sweated through an hour of the Yang sword form,
then showered until Gary Hales banged on the wall to let me know his
bathtub was backing up. The plumbing at 90 Queen Anne is fun that
way.

I shaved carefully around the gash on my cheek. The
discoloration and  puffiness had gone down since yesterday. I
could see the shape of the new scar — a little smile, half an inch
long.

I read my morning battery of E-mail reports from
Erainya, breakfasted,  dressed in coat and tie, and got on the
road by nine. Most of Robert Johnson's hair went with me on the coat,
since he'd used it as a bed the night before, but  when you have
exactly two nice outfits and one of them smells like a bomb 
blast, you make do.

I drove northwest on I-10 until the real estate
developments and strip malls  began falling away to the natural
topography of the Balcones Escarpment — crumpled folds of land
thickly covered with live oak and prickly pear. Just inside 
Loop 1604, the UTSA campus rose from the woods in an isolated cluster
of  limestone cubes. The area around it had begun to urbanize
over the last few years, but occasionally in the early morning you
still see deer, armadillos,  roadrunners at the edges of the
parking lots.

I'd lived in the Bay Area for ten years before moving
home to San Antonio.  My California friends would not have
called this a particularly beautiful place.  Those brave enough
to visit me in Texas complain of the boring vista, the 
oppressive storm clouds that frequently rolled in, the harsh flat
prairie ugliness.  I try telling them that it's a matter of
perspective, that San Francisco is like a Monet — any idiot can
appreciate it. San Antonio, on the other hand, takes time, 
patience. It's more like a Raymond Saunders, put together with muddy
strokes  and scraps of handwriting and broken stuff. But it's
beautiful, too. You just have to be more perceptive.

Of course my Bay Area friends counter that, by my
logic, all the truly perceptive Mensa types should be living in
Allentown, Pennsylvania, appreciating the completely subliminal
beauty there. At that point in the argument I usually order more
tequila and tell my friends to screw themselves. I turned onto Loop
1604 and drove across the dusty access road to the north entrance of
campus. I parked in the faculty lot and tried not to feel strange
about it.

After twenty minutes filling out paperwork for the
provost's secretary and the dean's secretary and the campus police
lieutenant's secretary, I was back in the late Aaron Brandon's office
— my office.

The hole in the window had been covered with clear
plastic tarp. Odds and ends and half-burned essays from the floor had
been heaped onto the desk. Unfortunately, many of the essays were
still readable, thus gradable. I sat down in the black leather chair.
Outside, the spring morning looked glazed behind plastic. The picture
of Aaron Brandon with his wife and child had been replaced upside
down on the desk.

My graduate medieval seminar started in three hours.
I began sorting through my predecessors' files — syllabi, lecture
notes, grade sheets, highlighted readers, personal effects. It didn't
take long to learn what belonged to Brandon and what belonged to old
Dr. Haimer, the office's original occupant. Haimer's materials were
the tried and true and dusty — the General Prologue, Gawain, the
Wakefield plays. Brandon's syllabus, as I anticipated, tended toward
the flashy and gory — Crusade narratives, miracle plays, fabliaux.
The Middle Ages according to Stephen King.

I'd stacked about a foot of paper into two piles,
Brandon and Haimer, when I hit a thin folder labeled RIDERWORKS stuck
to the back cover of Brandon's Riverside Chaucer.

Inside was an eight-by-ten photograph of Aaron with
father Jeremiah and brother Del. All three stood on the running board
of an old-fashioned carousel. Jeremiah must've been in his sixties by
the time this shot was taken, not long before his murder. His hair
had turned greasy white, his face thinner with age, but his eyes
still glittered with the same fierce intensity. I tried to imagine
this man making advances toward a seventeen-year-old married girl
named Sandra Mara-Sanchez, and I decided with a cold certainty that
Jeremiah Brandon would've been capable of it.

The brothers Del and Aaron looked strikingly similar
to each other but hardly like Dad at all. None of the three men
looked particularly happy.

Under the photo was a Xerox copy of an article from a
Texas business journal, dated three years ago. The story announced
that a settlement had been reached between the IRS and a drill-bit
manufacturing company in the Permian Basin. An insider at the company
had tipped IRS investigators about cash transactions the company
owner was conducting with wildcatters. A sting operation had been
launched. Once caught, the owner had bargained his way out of jail
time for tax evasion by agreeing to massive fines and relinquishing
control of the company to a board of directors made up of other
family members.

I read the article again. I looked at the photo.

When knuckles rapped on the door, I closed the folder
and set it aside.

"Tres?"

Professor David Mitchell looked better than he had
the day before — his jeans and dress shirt freshly pressed, white
sideburns trimmed, face hinting at a good twelve hours of
sedative-assisted sleep. He sawed a piece of paper against his thigh.

"I've asked my secretary to delay her," he
told me. "We have about five minutes."

"Come again?"

He looked behind him nervously, then came all the way
in and closed the door. "Ines Brandon."

"Aaron's widow. She's here?"

Mitchell sighed. "Mrs. Brandon needs to collect
some of her husband's things. I wasn't sure how you'd — Perhaps we
could talk in the hall?"

"Talk about what?"

He stared over my shoulder for a few seconds, then
shook his head, coming out of his reverie. He held up the folded
paper in his hand. "I'm sorry. The first report from Ms. Manos.
You've seen it?"