The Devil went down to Austin tn-4 Read online

  Crickets and owls were sounding off. The air smelled of pinon smoke from the dried cedar deadfall collected and burned daily in the Hill Country.

  Down below, I watched the small form of Clyde Simms emerge from the drystack warehouse, stand in a pool of light by the fork lift. He was smoking a cigarette, maybe looking up at the moon. Maybe watching us.

  "We can't sell Techsan," Garrett told Ruby. "You know that."

  She smiled frailly. "I know we don't have much choice."

  "We can hold out. We prove the bastard sabotaged us."

  Ruby looked much sadder now than she had at her exhusband's funeral.

  She ran a finger along Garrett's beard. Garrett stayed stone still, as if her touch was an ice pick.

  "There was a time, Tres," Ruby said, "when your brother and I actually got along.

  Before Jimmy- Well, Jimmy was a sweet man. He had a talent for GUI, graphic interfaces. But Garrett is the genius. If he'd applied himself to the job ten, fifteen years ago, he could've written industry standards. I've never seen anybody better."

  Garrett didn't look happy with the compliment. He took Ruby's finger, pushed it gently away.

  "What's your specialty, Ruby?" I asked. "Public relations?"

  "I'm the QA person."

  I looked at Garrett.

  "Quality assurance," he translated. "She breaks things. We write a program, Ruby figures out how to screw it up. That way we find the glitches and fix them before the product goes to market. And yeah, she's pretty fucking awesome at breaking things."

  Ruby nodded her thanks.

  "We were a good team," Garrett said. "We could prove Pena sabotaged us, pull things out of the hole. We could still do it."

  Ruby moved away from the railing. "With you under investigation for murder? It's only a matter of time before they charge you."

  A meteor streaked past the tail of Canis Major. Garrett kept his eyes on the sky long after the trail was gone. "You think I killed Jimmy. Don't you?"

  "Of course not," Ruby said.

  He looked at me. "You both think I killed him."

  I wanted to speak up for him, say something optimistic, but the truth was, I didn't understand why Lopez hadn't already filed charges. Garrett looked guilty as hell. Most likely, with Maia's appearance, her reputation as a defence attorney, Lopez had simply decided to take his time building an airtight case.

  "I'm sorry, Garrett," Ruby said. "With Jimmy's murder. With the betatesters suing us.

  With investors treating us like the Black Plague. I don't see it, Garrett. I don't see how we can stay in business."

  "Pena screwed us," he said, "and you still want to deal with him."

  "If we'd taken his first offer, dear heart-"

  "He killed Jimmy. Do you care about that?"

  Her expression turned brittle. "I can't believe Matthew would go that far."

  Again, the first name. The way she spoke it, I couldn't help thinking of Mrs. Hayes, sitting obliviously on her couch, extolling young Matthew's virtues.

  "He stands for everything Jimmy and I hate," Garrett told Ruby. "He's a vulture capitalist. He feeds off other people's talent."

  Ruby pursed her lips. "Unfortunately, dear heart, he's also our only hope-he's doing us a favour. Either sell Techsan or go under."

  Down at the lake, a small motorboat came toward the marina, its forward light cutting an arc across the water. The prow was shiny white, pinstriped blue. From here it looked like a bathtub toy. The night air carried up the sounds of its outboard motor, laughter, a radio playing the Dixie Chicks.

  Clyde Simms flicked his cigarette into the dark, went to meet the newcomers.

  From a nearby deck chair, Ruby picked up a sheaf of paperwork, tossed it into Garrett's lap.

  "I won't sign it," he said.

  The motorboat veered to port. The engine cut out and the boat glided silently toward home. Passengers kept laughing. Music kept playing.

  "You have to sign it," I told him. "You have no choice."

  Garrett glared at me. "Your idea of help, little bro?"

  "I don't like it. But she's right. Pena has backed you into a corner. You don't have time to find the problem in the software. Especially if you insist that the program isn't at fault, if you don't let anyone help you look."

  "The code is solid. I can do one thing well-I can program. I will not let Pena steal that from me."

  Clyde Simms was at the dock now, one foot on the prow of the boat, tying up the line.

  I wondered what the boaters thought of him as they strolled off deck for a last drink of the evening-if they even paid attention to the big Viking with the bloodied nose.

  "You need to cut your losses," I told my brother. "You're in a bad place with the police.

  You put yourself into debt. You have to take responsibility."

  "Responsibility. My little brother's lecturing me on responsibility. Despite your awesome credentials in that department, man, I am not selling."

  Ruby sat down on the edge of her hot tub, laced her arms around her knees. "Here's the thing, dear heart. You don't really have a choice."

  Garrett pivoted his chair toward her. "And why would that be?"

  "Because, as per our incorporation agreement, I'm buying out Jimmy's share in the company. Unless, of course, you are in a position to make a counteroffer. In the event one of us died, that's how it was supposed to work, remember?"

  Garrett was silent long enough to replay her words several times. "You're buying control."

  "I'm sorry, Garrett. I've already called my lawyer."

  "You coldblooded-with Jimmy not even in the ground two hours?"

  "By tomorrow, I expect to control two thirds of Techsan. You can sign the sellout agreement or not, dear, but I'm afraid you're outvoted. We are selling Techsan to Matthew Pena's client, AccuShield."

  Garrett made a fist around his beer bottle, then drained it.

  He chunked the empty Shiner off the deck. It spun in the light, a brown pinwheel, landing somewhere below with a metallic CLANKCLANK.

  "That better not have been my convertible," Ruby told him.

  "I should be so lucky."

  Garrett produced a pen from his wheelchair pouch, clicked it, signed the papers.

  I looked down at my untouched beer. Condensation had soaked a cold ring through my jeans.

  When Garrett finished the signatures, he tossed the papers at Ruby's feet.

  "Another divorce, Ruby. That's what this is. Pay me off. Then leave me the fuck alone."

  The night air between them was radioactive-glowing with grief and rage and recrimination so intimate I felt like a voyeur. I tried to convince myself two people could make each other so miserable merely through a business deal.

  Ruby turned toward me, managed a crooked smile. "Well, Tres. Your ranch is saved."

  Garrett's face was murderously calm. "You said the plumbing's working?"

  "Yes, dear heart. It is."

  "Little bro, I'll be inside. You want to leave, come get me. Something about being in Ruby's place too long-I start feeling sick."

  He wheeled himself toward the sliding glass door, spun inside.

  The night got intensely quiet.

  Ruby rubbed her face. She still had that naturally quizzical look, but the impishness had been replaced with sour dissatisfaction.

  "Your brother is impossible," she said.

  I imagined her looking like this as an older woman-in her sixties, handsome and stern, the red hair turned to steel, cut short, that eyebrow still raised in disapproval, her aged eyes like a falcon's, critically watching other people's grandchildren, thanking her stars that she didn't have any.

  She fished something out of her pocket-a medication bottle. She popped out three pink pills and swallowed them dry.

  I watched the pill bottle disappear back into Ruby's pocket.

  She crossed her legs at the ankles, looked up at the stars. "Tonight at Scholz Garten, you almost killed Clyde."

  "I wouldn't
have killed him."

  "The way you say that-like you could have killed him if you wanted to. Tres, why did you get involved?"

  "I don't like uneven fights. Too many Underdog cartoons as a kid."

  She laughed.

  "What were you popping?"

  She looked confused, then remembered the bottle. "Popping. God, that sounds so dirty. Just my attitude medicine, Tres. I'm a real nasty redheaded bitch without it, I'm afraid. I know that must be hard for you to imagine."

  "Jimmy's autopsy report," I said. "He'd been taking tricyclic antidepressants."

  She pushed her legs straight on the deck, pointed her toes toward me. "Jimmy and I were quite a compatible match. Both fuckedup rich kids. You want to know why I couldn't live with him? We were too much alike."

  "You got along with Matthew Pena."

  She stared at the sellout papers, still untouched at her feet. "Give Pena credit, Tres.

  He understands people. He understood how we'd overextended ourselves-how desperate Garrett must have been to mortgage that family ranch, for instance. He can sense immediately what's important to someone. He's the first person I ever met who really understood why I dive."

  "And why is that?"

  She came back to the railing, looked toward the water. "You have your ranch. Jimmy had that lakeside property-that damn shrine to his mother. I have this."

  "The marina."

  "Not just the marina, Tres. My family, the McBrides-we used to be big landowners out here on the Colorado River. This was in my grandfather's time, the 1930s, before that.

  When the state built Mansfield Dam, they bought out the farms, the orchards-every damn thing. Eminent domain. What you see here, this little point of land, is the one percent that wasn't flooded. That's my inheritance out there-under the lake. That's what I showed Pena, the day he wanted to take me diving. I said, 'Come see the property line.' Our orchards are still down there. Trees my greatgrandfather planted.

  Pieces of the original barbed wire fence. Eventually, I intend to map the whole estate."

  She stared out at the water as if peeling back the flood, trying to see the land that had been there seventy years ago.

  "And Pena understood that," I said.

  "He understood why I needed money to build this house, why I'd never had the courage to build before. It's hard to put down roots on land when you've spent your life hearing about a flood."

  The lights began to go off at the marina, Clyde Simms shutting down for the night.

  "Jimmy's property," I said. "You called it a shrine to his mother. Why?"

  Ruby's eyes flicked uncomfortably across mine. "How much of the story do you know?

  "

  "I know Clara had a fallingout with the Doebler family, lost custody of Jimmy when he was young. She reunited with Jimmy when he was an adult. I know she died about five years ago. I know she never thought much of Garrett."

  "Jimmy never told you anything else?"

  "We were never close."

  She shook her head, fascinated. "No wonder you don't mind staying at the dome.

  Jimmy's family has a history of mental illness, Tres. Clara was diagnosed with severe depression as a young woman. After Jimmy's dad died, she really went off the deep end. She started disobeying the family's wishes, keeping company with men they didn't like. Believe me, I know what Clara went through. If I'd been born thirty years earlier, I would've been Clara. The Doeblers damn near owned the county justice system around here during the 1960s. The courts found Clara legally unfit to parent. I never met her, but from what Jimmy says, she was a very sad woman when they finally reunited. A broken woman."

  "At least they reunited."

  She studied my face. "Not happily. The Doebler family money covered it up well, Tres, but I figured you knew how she died. Jimmy's mom committed suicide."

  "Suicide," I repeated. "How?"

  But as soon as I asked, I had a pretty good idea what the answer would be.

  "She parked her car by the water," Ruby told me. "Down at the shore of her property, just about where you found Jimmy. And then, Tres, she shot herself in the head."

  I sat there for a long time, listening to the crickets. The meteors kept streaking above us-the beginnings of a fullfledged shower.

  Ruby got up. "And now it's time I apologized to your brother, I suppose. If you'll excuse me."

  She looked back over her shoulder and smiled at me on her way in.

  At that moment, I could believe what my brother said. I could believe Ruby McBride was pretty fucking awesome at breaking things.

  CHAPTER 15

  When the alarm clock went off the next morning, I slapped at the sleep button and hit only pillow.

  I opened my eyes, saw the curve of a whitedomed ceiling, a blacklight Beatles poster taped to it.

  My apartment didn't have a curved ceiling. I was pretty sure it didn't have an overhead blacklight Beatles poster.

  I patted around. Flannel sheets, a mattress firmer and wider than my futon. In my sleep I'd gone almost spreadeagled, trying to find the edges of the bed.

  The only thing familiar was Robert Johnson, curled around my head like a coonskin cap.

  I sat up. Robert Johnson murred in protest as he slid off my scalp.

  Sunlight sliced across the floor of Jimmy Doebler's loft. On the nightstand, the alarm clock was flashing 6:02 A.M.

  Teaching class today, I remembered. UT Austin. The big time.

  And on five hours' sleep, too. What more could a man want?

  I got up, turned off the alarm, fumbled around for clothes. I'd unpacked my suitcase the night before, but couldn't remember where I'd stashed anything. I rummaged through the oak bureau, pulled on workout clothes before realizing they weren't mine. I looked down at Jimmy Doebler's Coral Reefer tour shirt, decided against changing.

  Somehow, tai chi in a dead man's clothes seemed fitting this morning. I laid out slacks, a dress shirt, and a tie for later. Those I knew were mine. Jimmy wouldn't have owned any.

  I climbed down the ladder to the ground floor. The dome was country quiet.

  I made coffee, scrambled some eggs, and fried some corn tortilla strips for mi gas. I made a Friskies breakfast taco for Robert Johnson. We ate together at the counter, me standing up, reading the Austin AmericanStatesman on my laptop.

  I scrolled down to tech news and there it was-the first story, posted only a few minutes before: AccuShield of Cupertino to Acquire Techsan. Ruby and Matthew Pena had wasted no time getting the sellout rolling.

  The article chronicled Techsan's betatest problems, the lawsuits, the bad press-all of which would now be handled directly by AccuShield. Matthew Pena promised his client would have Techsan's software problems fixed and an industrystandard encryption program to market by the end of summer.

  "It's a matter of resources," Pena said. "AccuShield has them. Techsan didn't."

  The article also quoted Ruby McBride. She said the deal would be good for all parties involved. Pena would pay four million in AccuShield stock, with a lockin period of ninety days.

  I copied the article, composed a quick email to Lars Elder at the First Bank of Sabinal.

  I tried to sound upbeat, promised that Garrett could work out a new payment schedule for the ranch's mortgage soon. I didn't mention anything about possible murder charges.

  I closed my laptop, drank some coffee, and stared at the pink cake box-the memorabilia Ruby McBride had almost pilfered the day before. Finally, either my breakfast or the photo of Clara Doebler had to go. I muttered an apology to Jimmy, then turned his dead mother facedown.

  I needed to work out, then get ready for my morning class. Instead, I found myself sorting through Jimmy's Family folder-the queries he'd been making into the Doebler past. There was one letter to a local hospital, requesting inpatient records of Clara Ann Doebler's stays for clinical depression. Jimmy had written the AmericanStatesman for information about obituary archives. He'd written the Travis County clerk for Clara's death certifica
te, her will, the original deed to the lake property. He'd also asked if it were possible to do a birth certificate search without knowing the baby's name. He was interested in births from 1966 to 1968-mother's name Clara DOEBLER, or possibly Clara LOWRY.

  Father's name LOWRY, or UNKNOWN.

  I thought about what Ruby had said-how Clara had hung out with men her family didn't like. Given the years she'd been separated from her son, Jimmy, how little he must've known about her, the queries for a lost sibling struck me as sad. I could imagine the psychology-an only child, taken from his mother and overseen by relatives who primarily wanted him out of the way, raised in boarding schools. At a younger age, Jimmy probably fantasized about "real parents" somewhere else-parents who cared for him and would someday rescue him. At an older age, when the terrible reality set in that his mother was in fact for real, he could harbour a more mature fantasy-a sibling, someone out there who at least could share his misery, maybe someone who needed rescuing by Jimmy. And maybe, deep down, Jimmy had needed a reason for Clara stopping her journal to him in 1967. A baby would've been a less painful explanation than the idea that Clara just had stopped making the time.

  I set the folder aside. I tried to remember Jimmy the way I'd always thought of him before-the permanently dazed beach bum, the wellmeaning screwup, as impervious, rootless, and free from worries as a chunk of driftwood. I couldn't quite reconstruct the image.

  The last thing I reviewed from yesterday was the list of phone numbers Jimmy had called in April-his cousin W.B., the Doebler Oil offices, Aunt Faye, Garrett.

  I scanned it again, kept coming back to one number I almost recognized-an Austin number, a twominute call on April 16, sandwiched between two shorter calls to Garrett. On a lark, I picked up my cell phone and dialled.

  The pickup was immediate. "Homicide. Lopez."

  I hesitated.

  "Hello?" Lopez's tone told me he was about to hang up.

  "This is Navarre." Then I added, "Tres."

  "Well. Aren't we the early birds?"

  The only thing that didn't surprise me was that a homicide detective would be at his desk at 6:30 A.M. That was the only time they could catch up on paperwork.

  I stared at Jimmy Doebler's phone bill. Two minutes, twelve seconds. April 16.