"If you're not going to recommend me to the Board," I said, "now would be a good time to say so."
The coat hangers that made up Erainya's body seemed to loosen a little bit, and she sat back in her chair. She looked out the window again, checking for clients. Still no lines outside the office.
"I don't know," she said. "Maybe not. Not if you can't take a case when it's good and drop a case when it's bad. As long as you're operating under my license I can't risk you getting it revoked."
I examined her face, trying to determine why the warning she'd thrown out so many times before had a harder edge this time.
"Barrera said something to you," I guessed. "He's got pull with the Board. Was he pressuring you about me?"
"Don't be dumb, honey."
"I just watched a woman get murdered, Erainya. I'd like to know why. I could at least—"
"That's right," she said, sitting forward again. "You shake up that Kearnes woman one day and she runs out and gets herself killed the next. What does that tell you about your methods, honey? It tells me you should listen sometimes. You don't blow a surveillance because you're getting impatient. You don't ring the subject's doorbell and ask them to confess to you."
The rims of my ears felt hot. I nodded. "Okay."
Fingers on the Formica. "Okay what?"
"Okay maybe I'll quit. Withdraw. Unapprentice. Whatever you call it."
She waved her hand dismissively. "Ah, what, after this many months?"
I got up.
She stared at me for a few seconds, then looked back out the window like it didn't matter one way or the other to her. "Whatever you want to do, honey."
I started to leave.
When I was at the door she called me. She said, "Think about it, honey. We could treat it as time off. Tell me next week."
I looked over at Manoli, who was telling Jem something in Greek. It must've been a fairy tale, by the tone and the gestures he was using.
"I told you today, Erainya."
"Next week," she insisted.
I said sure. Before I could leave, Jem looked over and asked me what kind of party we would have when my hours got to zero. He wanted to know what kind of cake.
I told him I'd have to think about it.
4
When I got back to 90 Queen Anne my landlord Gary Hales was out front watering the sidewalk. It looked like he was doing a good job. A few new cracks had sprouted. A couple of slabs that had started to buckle up last week were buckling up a little more.
Gary's got a gray thumb.
"Howdy," I told him.
He looked at me like he was trying to figure out who I was.
Gary's a pale guy, kind of quivery, his skin washed out blue and his face all liquid.
Looking at him with a garden hose is kind of disconcerting because you're never really sure where the stream of water stops and Gary starts.
"Yeuh," he said. "Your lady friend's come by."
I sighed. "You let her in?"
A ripple went across his mouth. Maybe it was a smile. Gary's a sucker for the sweettalking ladies.
"You old dog," I said. "What'd she promise you this time?"
Another ripple. "Yeuh. Should make her a key, I reckon."
I walked around to the right side of the house. The yard was crunchy with pecans and mesquite bean pods and red bougainvillea petals, the closest we get to fall colours in South Texas.
Ninety Queen Anne was a decaying twostory craftsman in a state of major denial. It had a dignified facade, intricate woodwork around the windows, a huge bougainvilleadraped front porch where you could sit out of an evening and sip your margarita. But the white paint had started to peel a long time ago, and the green shingled roof sagged in the middle. Sometime in the 1950s the whole house had shifted on its foundations so the right half drooped slightly backward. My mother said it looked paralyzed. I preferred to think of it as extremely relaxed.
When I got to the porch of my inlaw apartment Carolaine Smith was standing in the doorway, letting the air conditioning escape. She was holding the telephone toward me.
Carolaine had on her anchorperson costume—a white silk blouse and conservative blue skirt and blazer, her dark blond hair done up big, brushed away from her face, her makeup heavy for the cameras. Only her prescription glasses were out of costume.
They were large black mousy jobs left over from her days as a smalltime reporter, back when she still called herself Carolyn. She only wore the glasses now when she wanted to see.
"So who's Annie at First Texan?" she asked. "She sounds cute."
"No comment."
"Asshole."
Carolaine handed me the receiver.
Annie at First Texan had pretty much the same question about Carolaine, but she finally agreed to give me the information I'd asked her for last Friday about Julie Kearnes.
Carolaine went into the kitchen, where it smelled like something was burning. I stood in the middle of the living room and looked around. My laundry had been put away for me. The futon was put back into couch position. The swords were off the coffee table and back in the wall rack. Robert Johnson had climbed to the top of the closet and was hiding between two shoe boxes.
He peered out at me hopefully.
I shook my head to tell him that Carolaine was still here.
He made a low growl and disappeared back into the shadows.
Annie started telling me about Julie Kearnes' checking account. Biweekly direct deposits from something called Paintbrush Enterprises—$250 each, steady for the last two months, which was as far back as Annie had pulled the files. A few sporadic pay checks from a temp employment firm in Austin. All other deposits in cash, probably gig money, none of them large amounts. Three overdrafts at H.E.B. Central Market. The usual monthly bills. Julie's balance at the moment was $42.33. About forty dollars more than mine.
Annie told me I owed her bigtime for risking her job.
"Like Garth Brooks," she suggested. "And dinner at La Margarita."
I said it would be fine with me if she had dinner with Garth at La Margarita. I wouldn't stand in the way. Annie called me some unflattering names and hung up.
Carolaine pulled a cookie sheet out of the oven and said, "Damn."
I think the things on the sheet had been chilaquiles in a former life. Strips of corn tortilla and bacon were curled up and smoking. The cheese was brown and the jalapenos were gray. It smelled pretty bad.
The Widower's Two it Step 23
"Tinfoil on the top," I suggested. "And turn it down to three hundred degrees next time.
That old Wedge wood's like a nuclear reactor in there."
"Damn it," Carolaine said, pushing up her glasses. "I've got to be back at the studio for the noon broadcast."
"Rowww," Robert Johnson complained from the closet.
I looked down at the burned food, then at my clean living room. "You shouldn't have done all this."
"No big deal."
"No," I said. "I mean you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't keep getting Gary to let you in and setting up house. You don't clean your own apartment this much. It makes me nervous."
She leaned back against the sink and raised her eyebrows. "You're welcome."
I stared out the kitchen window at the crepe myrtle.
Carolaine dropped her hands on her thighs. "Jesus, Tres, what am I supposed to do?
I've hardly seen you this month. You cancel dinner dates on me three times in a row, you leave me waiting outside the Majestic for an hour with two goddamn concert tickets, then I try to do something nice for you—"
"I'm sorry. It's been a hard morning, Carolaine."
Sarcastic smile. "I bet. Still following some woman around Austin. Peeping through her windows with binoculars at night. Poor guy."
"She was murdered."
The smile flickered around the edges, then disappeared.
She listened while I told her the story. She kept her expression soft and sympathetic, but her eyes weren't totally focused on me. They were moving slightly back and forth like they were reading math equations, maybe calculating what the murder meant for my job prospects.
When I was done Carolaine folded her arms. "What did Erainya say?"
"That I was handling it wrong anyway. End of case."
"What did you say?"
"I quit."
After a moment of stunned silence Carolaine looked at her watch. Then she took her purse off the counter and rummaged for something inside. She was trying not to let it show, but I could see the relief loosening up her shoulder muscles.
"So what now?" she asked.
"I don't know. It depends on what Milo Chavez wants."
"You mean you might keep working for him, unlicensed—like the work you did before?"
She said before like it was a euphemism for something one didn't talk about in polite company.
"Maybe," I admitted.
"The last time you did this man a favour it almost got you killed, yes?"
"Yes."
"I don't understand—I don't see why you can't just..."
She stopped herself. The corners of her mouth tightened.
"Say it," I told her. "Why can't I just use my degree and get a real job teaching English somewhere."
She shook her head. "It's not my business, is it?"
"Carolaine—"
"I have to leave, Tres." Then she added without much optimism, "You could come back to the studio with me. We could get takeout, spend the afternoon in my dressing room like old times. It might do us some good."
"I have to call Milo."
The frost set in. "All right."
Carolaine closed her purse, then came up and kissed me very lightly without ever really looking at me. She smelled like baby powder. There were a few freckles on her nose that the makeup hadn't quite covered.
"Sorry I bothered you," she said.
The front door slammed behind her.
Robert Johnson came out of the closet as soon as he heard Carolaine's car start. He looked out the window suspiciously, then gave me a look of death he must've learned from Erainya Manos.
"You want to play Anne Frank when people come over," I said, "don't blame me."
He came over and bit me on the ankle, lazily, then headed for the food dish.
Some days everybody wants to be your friend.
5
At sunset the sky turned the colour of cooked eggplant. Seven million grackles descended for a convention in the trees and phone wires above the city. They sat there making a scratchy highpitched sound that was probably screwing up the sonar of every submarine in the Gulf of Mexico.
I stood in the kitchen reading the ExpressNews late edition. I had just started on my third Shiner Bock and was starting to get mercifully numb in the extremities.
Julie Kearnes had had the good sense to get murdered on a slow news day. She merited a small story on A12. I received honourable mention for making the 911 call.
The staff writer had done some homework. He wrote that readers might remember Kearnes for her song "Three More Lonely Nights," recorded by Emmylou Harris in 1978, or for Julie's more recent work as fiddle player and backup singer to rising local star Miranda Daniels. The police had no leads in the killing, no murder weapon, no useful witnesses.
The writer mentioned nothing else about Julie Kearnes—none of the immaterial stuff I had learned from following her around town, talking to her neighbours, going through her garbage. For instance that Julie's favourite food was Thai. That she shopped at the same New Age stores my mother liked. That Julie had played fiddle in country bands since she was six but secretly, at night, preferred to listen to Itzhak Perlman. That she drank cheap white wine and owned a parrot.
None of that made it into the ExpressNews—just the fact that Julie Kearnes now had a hole in her head.
The last part of the article talked about what a pain it was having the SAC parking lot cordoned off all morning for the investigation. It quoted some grumpy students who'd had to park several blocks away from class.
I thought about Julie Kearnes all dressed up nice, fiddle beside her in the '68 Cougar.
I thought about the real downside of surveillance—not the boredom, like most P.I.s will tell you, but the times when the subject starts to become a real person to you.
I drank more beer.
I'd had no luck with the telephone. I'd paged and left messages for Milo Chavez but his secretary Gladys insisted that he couldn't be reached. Milo was somewhere in Boerne, working on a major event. Gladys acknowledged that a major event in Boerne was an oxymoron, but she still said there was nothing she could do for me. Yes, she had heard the news about Julie Kearnes. Yes, the police had been by. Yes, she had left messages for Milo about it. No, she still couldn't reach him. No, reaching Les SaintPierre himself, God of Talent Agents, was out of the question. Why not try back tomorrow?
I thanked her and hung up the phone.
I was ready to turn in for the day. Unfortunately, time and tide and my weekly dinner at Mother's house would wait for no man.
I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror.
"You can do this," I said.
Robert Johnson looked up at me sideways from the leaky faucet that doubled as his watering hole. He offered no words of encouragement.
I showered and dressed fancy—jeans with no holes, my Bay to Breakers Tshirt, my deck shoes, the newer ones that didn't yet resemble baked potatoes.
Then I put the top down on the VW and headed north on Broadway toward Vandiver Street, blasting tinny con junto music from my AM radio all the way through downtown Alamo Heights. When I stopped at the light on the corner of Austin Highway a couple of guys in tuxedoes and Stetsons in the Mercedes next to me looked over and stared.
Once you get to Vandiver it's easy to find my mother's house, even in the dark. You just go down the row of white postWW II houses until you find the pink adobe bungalow with the green porch light. Understated.
Nobody met me at the door so I let myself in.
Mother was burning frankincense tonight. The Christmas lights were blinking in the pencil cactus, and the hot tub out on the deck was bubbling happily to itself, ready for a party. The general theme of the house was Ethnic Eclectic—Mexican curios next to Japanese kimonos next to African burial masks.