The widower’s two step tn-2 Read online

  Go two miles farther up and the bilingual billboards disappear. You drive past white middleclass housing developments and rundown shopping centres from the sixties, streets that were named after characters in I Love Lucy. The land gets flatter? the ratio of asphalt to trees gets worse.

  Finally you get to the mirrored office buildings and the singles apartment complexes clustered around Loop 410. Loopland could be in Indianapolis or Des Moines or Orange County. Lots of character.

  Erainya's office was in an old white strip mall off 410 and Blanco, between a restaurant and a leather furniture outlet. The parking lot was empty except for Erainya's rusty Lincoln Continental and a newish mustardyellow BMW.

  I pulled in next to the Lincoln and Jem helped me put up the ragtop on the VW. Then we got our respective backpacks out of the trunk and went to find his mom.

  The black stencil sign on the door said, THE ERAINYA MANOS AGENCY, YOUR FULLSERVICE GREEK DETECTIVE.

  Erainya likes being Greek. She tells me Nick Charles in The Thin Man was Greek. I tell her Nick Charles was rich and fictional? he could be anything he wanted. I tell her she starts calling me Nora I'm quitting.

  The door was locked. The miniblinds across the glass front of the office were pulled down. Erainya had stuck one of those cardboard black and white pointing hands over the mail slot, pointing right.

  We went next door to Demo's and almost collided with a stocky Latino man on his way out.

  He wore a threepiece suit, dark blue, with a gold watch chain and a wide maroon tie.

  He had four gold rings and a zircon tie stud and smelled strongly of Aramis. Except for the bulldog expression, he looked like the kind of guy who might offer you credit toward a purchase of fine diamond jewellery.

  "Barrera." I smiled. "What's new, Sam-you come by to get some pointers from the competition?"

  Samuel Barrera, senior regional director for ITech Security and Investigations, didn't smile back. I'm sure at some point in his life, Barrera must've smiled. I'm also sure he would've been careful to eliminate any witnesses to the event. The skin around his eyes was two shades lighter brown than the rest of his face and bore permanent oval rings from all those years wearing FBI standardissue sunglasses, before he'd retired into the private sector. He never wore the glasses these days. He didn't need to anymore. The glossy, inscrutable quality had sunk directly into his corneas.

  He looked at me with mild distaste, then looked at Jem the same way. Jem smiled and asked Barrera if he wanted to see a magic trick. Barrera apparently didn't. He looked back at me and said, "My conversations are with Erainya."

  "See you later, then."

  "Probably so." He said it like he was agreeing that a sick horse probably needed to be shot. Then he brushed past me and got into his mustardyellow BMW and drove away.

  I stood watching the intersection of 410 and Blanco until Jem tugged on my Tshirt and reminded me where we were. We went inside the restaurant.

  Two hours before the lunch crowd, Manoli was already behind the kitchen counter carving gyro strips off a big column of lamb meat. It seemed like every time I came in the column of lamb got skinnier and Manoli got thicker.

  The place smelled good, like grilled onions and fresh baked spanakopita. It wasn't easy to get a Mediterranean feel in a strip mall, but Manoli had done what he could- whitewashed walls, a couple of tourist posters from

  The Widower's Two it Step 15

  Athens, some Greek instruments on the wall, bottles of Uzo on each table. Nobody came here for the decor anyway.

  Erainya was sitting on a bar stool at the counter, talking to Manoli in Greek. She wore high heels and a Tshirt dress, black of course. She looked up when I came in, then lifted one bony hand and slapped the air like it was the side of my face.

  "Ah, this guy," she said to nobody in particular, disgusted.

  Manoli pointed his cleaver at me and grinned.

  Jem ran up to his mom and hugged her leg. Erainya managed to tousle his hair and tell him he was a good boy without softening the look of death she had aimed at me.

  Erainya's eyes are the only thing big about her. They're huge and blackirised, almost bugeyed except they're too damn intense to look funny. Everything else about her is small and wiry-her black hair, her bony frame under the Tshirt dress, her hands, even her mouth when she frowns. Like she's made out of coat hangers.

  Erainya slid off the bar stool, came up to me, and frowned some more. She stands about five feet tall in the heels, but I've never heard anybody describe her as short. A lot of other things, but never short.

  "You got my phone message?" I asked. "I got it."

  "What did Barrera want?"

  "Let's get a table," she told me.

  We did. Manoli sat Jem on the counter and started talking to him in Greek. Jem doesn't understand Greek, as far as I know, but it didn't seem to bother either of them.

  "All right," Erainya said. "Give me details."

  I told her about my morning. About halfway through she started shaking her head no and kept shaking it until I'd finished.

  "Ah, I don't believe this," she said. "How is it you convinced me to let you do this case?"

  "Masculine charm?"

  She scowled at me. "You look good, honey. Not that good."

  Erainya smiled. She looked out the restaurant window, checking the office. Nobody was beating down the door of the Erainya Manos Agency. No crowds were queuing up for a fullservice Greek detective.

  "Why was Barrera here?" I asked again.

  Erainya slapped the air. "Don't worry about that vlaka, honey. He just likes to check up on me, make sure I'm not stealing his business."

  It was a point of pride so I nodded like I believed it. Like Barrera needed Erainya's divorce cases and employee checks to stay afloat. Like his security contracts with half the companies in town wasn't enough.

  For the millionth time, I looked at Erainya and tried to imagine her back in the days when that competition had been real-back when her husband Fred Barrow was still alive and in charge of the agency and Erainya was Anglicized as Irene, the good little assistant to her husband the sortof famous P.I. That was before she'd shot Barrow in the chest. Then he'd been sortof dead.

  The judge had said it was selfdefence. Irene had said God rest Fred's soul. Then she'd cashed in her husband's stocks and returned to the Old Country and come back a year later as Erainya (rhymes with Transylvania) Manos, tan and very Greek, mother of an adopted Moslem Bosnian orphan whom she'd named after somebody in a novel she'd read. She'd taken over her husband's old agency and become an investigator like it had been her destiny all along. Business had been sliding ever since.

  Two years ago, when I'd just moved back to town and was thinking about going legit as a licensed investigator, one of my dad's old SAPD friends who didn't know Barrow was dead had recommended Fred as the secondbest P.I. in town to apprentice with, just after Sam Barrera.

  After Sam and I had decidedly failed to hit it off I'd gone to Fred Barrow's office address and discovered in the first thirty seconds I was there that Erainya was the trainer for me.

  Is Mr. Barrow here?

  No. He was my husband. I had to shoot him.

  "That's it on the Kearnes case, then," Erainya was saying. "You got what-twenty hours left?"

  I hesitated. "Jem says ten."

  "Ah, only ten? It's twenty. Anyway, we've got other things to do."

  "You said I could do this."

  Erainya tapped her fingers on the Formica table. They sounded hard, like pure bone.

  "I said you could try, honey. Somebody gets murdered, that's the end of it. It's a police matter now."

  I stared at the picture of Athens behind her head.

  Erainya sighed. "You don't want to have this conversation again, do you?"

  "What conversation? The one where you explain why you can't pay me anything this week, then you ask me to babysit?"

  Her eyes got very dark. "No, honey, the one where we talk about why you want to do
this job. You spend a few years in San Francisco doing armbreaking for some shady law firm, you think that makes you an investigator? You think you're too good for a regular caseload-you'll just keep churning the ones that interest you?"

  "You're right," I said. "I don't want to have this conversation again."

  Erainya muttered something in Greek. Then she leaned toward me across the table and switched to English midsentence.

  "-tell you this. You think you're a big deal, coming back to town with your Berkeley Ph. D. and whatever. Okay. You think you're too good to apprentice because you've been on the streets awhile. Okay too."

  "I did teach you the trick with the superglue."

  She used both hands this time, going out on either side of her face like she was slapping people sitting next to her.

  "Okay, so you show me one thing. It's even all right you think you want to do this because your dad was a cop. You think you want to do personal favours once in a while, do something out of charity-all right, fine. But that's not what you do to make a living, honey. The job is hard work, which you keep trying not to notice, and mostly it's not personal. You sit in a car for eight hours with intestinal problems taking pictures of some sleaze ball because another sleaze ball paid you to. You look at old deeds and talk to boring credit bureau men that aren't even goodlooking. You keep the police happy, which means you stay away from anything where people end up dead. Mostly you don't make much money so, yeah, maybe you do have to take your kid along sometimes. I'm talking about the breadandbutter work. I don't know if you can handle that part of it, honey. I still don't know that about you."

  "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 an
d 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?"