Southtown tn-5 Read online

  10

  “Have to walk a piece,” the deputy told us. He swung open the gate. “Road’s out ’cause of the floods.”

  I gave him credit for understatement. The strip of yellow mud that led into the McCurdy Ranch looked like it had been used for heavy artillery practice. About a half mile back in the soaked hills, I could just make out the glint of a metal roof.

  “Gloria Paz?” Barrera asked.

  “Still there.” The deputy spat a stream of brown tobacco between the bars of the cattle guard. “Last owner set this place up as a trust. She gets to live here free the rest of her life. Damned if I know why. Then the bank gets it.”

  “You know about Will Stirman?” I asked.

  He gave me traffic cop eyes-like he could either shoot me or wish me a nice day. It was all the same to him. “We got worse problems. Evacuating this whole area. One more day of rain, that dam upriver is going to break. This whole valley’s gonna be under ten feet of water.”

  “You warn Ms. Paz?”

  “She ain’t going nowhere.”

  “How do you figure?”

  He made a dry, rasping sound that might’ve been a laugh. “You’ll see.”

  He touched the brim of his hat and ambled back toward his cruiser.

  Barrera looked wistfully at his mustard BMW, sitting useless on the side of the two-lane. We hiked into the ranch.

  After a few yards, my boots were caked in limestone frosting. I was dripping with sweat. The mosquitoes were having a picnic on the back of my neck.

  Barrera looked perfectly cool. His shirt and tie betrayed no speck of mud, not a single wrinkle. Something they taught at Quantico, I guessed. Staying Starched Under Stress, Course 2101.

  “You’ve been out here since the trial?” I asked.

  Barrera looked at me blankly. He returned his attention to the muddy slope. “No.”

  He was never what you might call a sparkling conversationalist, but during the hour trip to Castroville, he’d been even less effervescent than usual.

  That could’ve been because he had a lot on his mind, which was a guess. Or because he didn’t like me, which wasn’t.

  “Who was the last owner of this place?” I tried.

  “Businessman from San Antonio. Died a while back. Don’t remember his name.”

  “He let Gloria Paz live here for free?”

  No response.

  Okay. Thanks, Sam. That clears it up.

  I wished I was in Austin with Erainya-getting Jem settled, seeing Maia Lee, keeping the peace between the two heavily armed women in my life.

  But Barrera was the key to understanding Stirman. I was sure of that.

  He’d brought me out here to tell me something he didn’t want to say in front of Erainya. If I could get through the morning without killing him, I might find out what.

  I tried to keep my mind off the mud and insects. I appraised the McCurdy spread from a business point of view. It struck me as more scenic and a lot less useful than my own family ranch in Sabinal.

  The terrain was rocky and uneven-hills and limestone cliffs hugging the Medina River Valley, poorly suited for crops or cattle. Tourism might’ve worked. Summer cabins for tubers. Or goat ranching. Exotic game. But the McCurdy land didn’t appear to have been managed for any purpose in a long time. Cattle feeders stood rusted and empty. The barn was falling apart. A single emaciated heifer stood under a mesquite tree. Three vultures waited patiently on the branch above.

  We were almost on top of the ranch house before I realized it was abandoned-a limestone shell in a thicket of live oaks. The windows were square holes of crumbling mortar. The doorway was an empty frame. The roof had been partially stripped, leaving a patchwork of metal and cedar beam.

  Barrera hesitated in the doorway.

  He didn’t need to explain why. The place radiated a quiet malevolence.

  Inside were three empty rooms, a fireplace, a doorway in back that probably led to the kitchen. A mildewed watercolor of a fly fisherman hung crooked over the mantel. Most of the living room floor had been stripped to beams, revealing a cellar below. That was unusual in a Texas house. In most parts of the state, the winters were too mild, the soil too close to bedrock to make a cellar practical.

  Barrera stepped carefully across rotten floorboards toward a set of descending stairs. I’d never been a fan of underground, but I followed him down.

  The back half of the cellar was stacked with building materials-slabs of Sheetrock and plywood, buckets of paint and caulking, all covered in plastic tarp, tied off with bungee cords. The stuff looked like it had been there for a while. The tarp was tattered, pools of rainwater crusting in the folds. Rats, or maybe cockroaches, had been chewing the labels off the paint cans.

  Two black iron hooks protruded from the wall.

  The limestone bore stains like rust or moss, but the streaks suggested spray patterns. I’d seen walls like that before-in a Hill Country abattoir that had served generations of deer hunters.

  “The table was here,” Barrera said.

  He stood in the center of the room, holding his palms out as if warming them over a fire. “McCurdy thought the room was soundproof. But up in the cells, they could hear the screaming.”

  A raindrop hit my face. I looked up through the open squares in the roof. I reminded myself I was just ten easy steps to the surface. The floor beams above me were not prison bars.

  I thought about the businessman who had bought this place after McCurdy’s suicide. I imagined his optimism as he started tearing up the house-thinking he’d gotten an incredible deal. This load of building materials would fix up the place, make it new and clean again.

  I understood now why he’d never finished the job, why the materials were still sitting here unused and the ranch would eventually revert to the bank.

  “Stirman knew what would happen to these women?” I asked.

  Barrera picked up a small piece of metal, a broken link from a chain. “Stirman wouldn’t have cared.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  Barrera slipped the link of chain into his pocket. “Come on. Gloria will be waiting.”

  He led me back outside, down toward the river. Under the cypress trees stood half a dozen cinder block sheds and a small cabin. The smaller structures might have been kennels. Each had a metal gate. In the center of each cement floor was an iron ring, where you might attach an animal’s chain.

  Then I noticed the lidless steel toilets.

  Barrera didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask.

  After almost a decade, a cold acrid smell still hung in the air. Human misery, like old bloodstains, is hard to wash away.

  The little cabin at the end was so different from the cells that it took a moment for me to realize it was part of the same row of buildings. Two cinder block cells had been built together, expanded, treated with stucco and painted dark gold. Rust-colored curtains trimmed the windows. Statues of saints lined the roof. River rocks marked off a little garden filled with oregano and mint. It could have been any dwelling on San Antonio’s West Side-poor but cozy, proud of its eccentricity.

  Barrera knocked. The plywood door rattled in its frame.

  The woman who opened it was probably no more than fifty-five, but her frayed white hair made her look decades older. Her face was deeply etched, her eyes milky. Her determined expression, and the shotgun held loosely across her waist, made her look as if she’d just charged the throne of God and been blasted by divine light. She was obviously blind.

  She said, “ Senor Barrera.”

  How she knew without seeing him, I wasn’t sure. Perhaps Barrera’s cologne was the not-too-subtle giveaway. She turned toward me, angling the shotgun in the general direction of my chest.

  “?Quien es el gringo?”

  I hadn’t moved or spoken, but she knew I was there. She knew I was male, and Anglo.

  “We came to check on you,” Barrera said in Spanish. “This is a friend of Fred Barrow’s.”

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bsp; I wasn’t sure why he introduced me that way, but the woman took her finger off the trigger, lowered the barrel.

  “They want me to leave because of some rain,” she said. “I had to fire a warning shot at the deputy. Come in. I’ll make coffee.”

  Inside, the tiny living room was painted cornflower blue, hung with dried garlic and chili ristras. On the stereo turntable, Lydia Mendoza sang “Dos Corazones,” her heartache cutting straight through the scratch and hiss of the old vinyl.

  There was no air-conditioning. The windows let in a breeze from the river. The curtains were dappled with raindrops. With the shade of the cypresses, the room felt just warm enough for a nap.

  Barrera kept speaking to Gloria in Spanish, simple questions-was she getting enough to eat? Did the locals bother her?

  Gloria heated water in a pan on a gas stove. She knew exactly where to find her extra cups, her tin of instant coffee, her spoons.

  “Does your friend speak Spanish, Senor Barrera?” she asked.

  I said, “Si, senora.”

  She turned to face me-a moment of adjustment as she let me into her linguistic world.

  “Ya lo veo,” she said. “Then please tell Mr. Barrow I pray for him.”

  I looked at Sam, who seemed to see nothing unusual in the request.

  “ Senora Paz,” I said, “Will Stirman escaped from jail. One of the men who testified against him has been murdered.”

  She poured boiling water into each cup. “You came all this way to tell me? I am sorry to have troubled you.”

  “But, senora…”

  An electronic riff of Mozart collided with Lydia Mendoza’s song. The new music was coming from Sam Barrera’s pocket.

  Barrera frowned, fished out his phone. I was surprised he could even get a signal out here.

  He said, “Yes?”

  A moment of listening. He paled. “Alicia, I’m in Castroville… Of course I told you.”

  He took the phone away from his ear, looked at us with embarrassment. “Excuse me.”

  He took his call outside, leaving me alone with Gloria Paz.

  “Would you like milk?” she asked. “It is goat’s milk.”

  I glanced at the tin of Folgers Crystals on the stovetop. Plain, or with goat’s milk. The kind of rock-and-a-hard-place decision tough PIs must face. “Why not?”

  She brought over a tray, sat next to me on the sofa. She passed me the blue metal cup. Her hands were rough and warm.

  “ Senora Paz,” I said, “you realize you’re in danger?”

  “No, senor. I am done with fear.”

  This blind, prematurely aged woman, alone on a ranch, with the dam upriver about to burst and a killer on the loose, was telling me she had nothing to fear. The hell of it was, I believed her.

  Her tone was confident, oddly familiar, though I was sure we’d never met.

  “A warning shot won’t be enough,” I told her. “Not against Stirman.”

  Her milky eyes seemed to stare past my shoulder, as if keeping tabs on an unruly spirit. “Con permiso.”

  She reached out and touched my cheek. Her fingertips traced my jaw, my nose, my lips. “An honest face. Like Mr. Barrow’s.”

  Erainya had used many adjectives to describe her late husband. Honest was not one of them.

  “I’m not his friend, senora, ” I said. “Just a friend of the family.”

  “Tell him not to worry. We did the right thing. It was not a lie.”

  “Senora?”

  “Stirman lured many others to a similar fate. It is the same, whether he served this devil or some other.”

  It had been a long time since I’d felt unsure of my Spanish, but I wasn’t certain I’d understood her correctly. I set down my coffee.

  “ Senora, how did you come to this ranch?”

  “The Green Highway.”

  “?Mande?”

  “The power lines.”

  I knew what she meant. The power line poles that ran through the South Texas plains were kept clear of brush and cactus, making a perfect path for illegal immigrants who wanted to stay off the roads without getting lost. The Green Highway. A determined illegal could walk for hundreds of miles along those grassy corridors, straight into Uvalde or San Antonio.

  “So… you never met Will Stirman?”

  She shook her head, her expression apologetic. “McCurdy would not trust someone else to pick his women. He knew what he wanted-the kind who made him angry. He would pretend to be a border agent and search the Green Highway himself. He separated me from two friends, promised to let them go if I cooperated. I thought I knew what he wanted. I was wrong. He brought me here. He went slowly with me. My blindness excited him, I think. But it also made him careless. He did not remember the lock, the third night.”

  She related the story without faltering, without showing any emotion other than grim satisfaction. I imagined her alone in the dark, tired and beaten and bloody, escaping and stumbling down to the river, following it as she’d followed the power lines, trusting her sense of direction to lead her out of McCurdy’s property. Somehow, she had found help. She had made the sheriff believe her.

  “After all that,” I said, “you chose to come back. You made a home

  … here.”

  “You cannot move away from the dead, senor. When I spoke against Stirman, I spoke for all of the women like me. I live here now for all of them.”

  I could translate the words, but her meaning seemed alien to me. I could not imagine doing what she had done.

  “Stirman will come after you,” I said. “He will not be kind.”

  She turned her face to receive a wet breeze from the window. I realized she knew more about pain and fear than I could ever imagine. I could say nothing that would scare her.

  “This is my home,” she said. “Velo tu.”

  I looked at the garlic ristras, the sunlight on the cornflower walls, the pot of steaming water on the stovetop. I did see.

  Gloria Paz had exorcised fear from this place-from this small part of McCurdy’s ranch. I wondered if that was why the new owner had allowed her to live here. Gloria had succeeded where he had failed.

  “Tell Mr. Barrow to come visit,” Gloria Paz said. “It has been too many years. He can bring me more shotgun ammunition. Tell him not to despair.”

  Only then did I realize who she reminded me of-her small frame, her stubborn expression, the tense set of her shoulders, as if she were ready to lead a charge. She reminded me of Erainya.

  I managed to say, “I’ll tell him.”

  Sam Barrera came back inside. He muttered an apology. He slipped the cell phone into his pocket, looked around the room as if he’d misplaced something.

  “Are we done?” he asked me.

  It seemed a strange thing to say, since he hadn’t participated in any of the conversation. Perhaps he could see from my expression that I’d learned what I needed to know. Or perhaps he saw the goat’s milk and Folgers on the stovetop and decided not to risk it.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “I guess we’re done.”

  On the drive back through Castroville, we passed our friend the deputy. He was leaning against the hood of his unit, supervising a group of men placing sandbags across the entrance of Haby’s Bavarian Bakery. He tipped his hat to us. I imagined he was congratulating himself on being right-the city folk were beating a hasty retreat after a hopeless visit with the crazy woman.

  The hills retreated behind us. I waited for Barrera to speak.

  When he didn’t, I said, “You framed Will Stirman. Gloria Paz lied for you.”

  Just when I thought he wasn’t going to acknowledge my statement, he said, “So now you know.”

  “At the risk of sounding rude-were you fucking insane?”

  “Did you miss the chains?” Sam asked. “The bloodstains on the wall?”

  “That was McCurdy. Will Stirman had nothing to do with those women.”

  “Not those women, maybe. But a thousand others. He sent them to sweatshops, broth
els, slave ranches. Fred and I knew. We had both crossed paths with Stirman before. He was a monster. This was our chance.”

  “You used the public outrage about the McCurdy case. Your clients wanted a scapegoat and you knew Stirman was an easy sell.”

  “We started the investigation thinking it was him. Fred and I both. When we found out… Gloria admitted there was no supplier. McCurdy handpicked the women he wanted. Fred and I were too far along at that point. We’d gotten in Stirman’s face. We’d already convinced a couple of his men to turn on him and provide evidence. How did we know they were lying? That they just wanted an excuse to divide up the boss’s business? After we realized the truth, we decided… what the hell? Gloria was willing to cooperate. We would bring Stirman down.”

  “You. Sam Barrera. Mr. By-the-Book.”

  “Circumstances were different, eight years ago.” His voice was tinged with bitterness.

  “Erainya knew about the frame-up?” I asked.

  “Fred wouldn’t have told her.”

  “Then why is she reluctant to call the police?”

  He hesitated. “We have too much to lose.”

  “ Your reputation. She did nothing wrong.”

  He gave me a wary look.

  There was more to it. He wasn’t worried about looking bad, having his frame-up exposed eight years later. Who would believe the truth anyway, or care? No prosecutor would be anxious to file charges against Barrera and an old Mexican lady for taking a demon like Will Stirman off the streets.

  We were back in the city now. Barrera turned south on I-10-not the way to my place.

  He exited on Commerce and headed through downtown.

  I didn’t want to talk to him, but finally I said, “Where the hell are you going?”

  He drove to South Alamo and turned right, into Southtown.

  Under different circumstances, this would’ve been fine with me. Invariably, Southtown was where I ended up whenever I had free time. I loved the dilapidated houses, the palm trees and crumbling sidewalks, old cantinas next to new art studios, tattoo shops, folk magic botanicas, pan dulce bakeries.

  Back when I was still speaking with my best friend Ralph, we would kick around down here, occasionally kicking heads when business called for it. Two Northsiders, we would joke that this was the neighborhood we should have been born in. Southtown was where San Antonians came to remember why we lived in San Antonio.