Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(101)

"You can’t tell me . . ." he started. He opened his mouth for the next word but it didn’t come out.

"You get it, don’t you, Dan?" I asked. "About the time your dad was making those hefty college tuition payments to SMU, Sheff Construction was so deep in debt they were on the verge of dragging their main creditor, Crockett S&L, into bankruptcy with them. Until the Cambridges assumed control of the company, that is. Then they turned their liability into a gold mine. With a little help from Fernando Asante at City Hall." I looked at Mrs. Cambridge. "How many millions did Travis Center make for your husband, Angela? How much was he figuring on making this time around, with the fine arts complex?"

She wasn’t bothering to wipe away the tears anymore. They made her face looked glazed, like a very old pastry.

"Angie Gardiner," I said. "When I saw the picture of you with the fighter pilot, your maiden name didn’t mean anything to me. Then I went out to Blanco—the ranch where Randall Halcomb was killed, right next to land owned by the Gardiner family. That’s why Lillian and Beau happened to be out there that night. Your husband and Lillian both had the unfortunate idea of using the family land that weekend, for different reasons."

Behind her, Mr. Cambridge was absolutely still. His smile had faded.

For his part, Rivas looked content. He was half standing, half sitting on the backrest of the couch, resting the butt of the 9 mm on his knee. He didn’t appear to be in any hurry to shoot me. Probably he didn’t get to hold people at gunpoint as often as he’d like.

"Danny Boy," he said pleasantly. "Be a pal and get that disk at Navarre’s feet. Leave the gun alone, you hear me?"

Dan didn’t seem to. He stayed where he was, staring in my direction with bright, completely unfocused eyes.

“You’re lying, Navarre," Dan decided. “You’ve been angry at the Cambridges for years and now you’re trying to blame them for everything that’s happened.

Thar’s it, isn’t it?"

His voice was anything but confident. He looked at the Cambridges for some confirmation—a nod, a smile, a "yes." They didn’t give him any. Dan turned to Lieutenant Rivas. “You’re going to arrest him or something, aren’t you?"

Rivas nodded. "Or something."

Dan’s face started doing its muscle tests again. He looked at me uneasily.

"My father made a big mistake, Dan," I told him. "Ten years ago he let your mother know what he’d found out about the Travis Center scam. Maybe when you’re old enough—forty-five or so—these folks will tell you how my dad stumbled across the information in your mother’s bedroom. When Cookie found out, she ran straight to your father, who was still healthy enough to recognize the danger, and he ran straight to his new bosses." I looked at Zeke Cambridge. "Whose idea was it to use Halcomb for the killing—yours or Asante’s?"

For a moment Zeke Cambridge’s eyes darkened, taking on a little of the old ferocity that had frightened me as a teenager. “You think you really knew your father, boy? He ruined people’s marriages, their careers, his own damn family. You think he’s worth defending?"

"No," I said. “He probably isn’t. Fortunately, this isn’t about knowing my father. It’s about people telling me for ten years that I couldn’t do anything about his murder, and me knowing it wasn’t true. Sooner or later I had to come back and try. Whether or not my dad was worth the effort isn’t really important. Maybe instead we should talk about how you shot Randall Halcomb while Fernando Asante looked on, how your daughter happened to be watching from the hilltop nearby, how she’s lived with that knowledge for ten years, hiding it from you and everyone else because she couldn’t turn in her own father. You think you were worth defending?"

"That’s enough." Mr. Cambridge tried to put the old tone of command back into his voice. It failed him. I looked at Dan. "I suppose you get to a point where you can’t do anything more about a problem, Sheff, and then you just have to acknowledge the brick wall in front of you and let it go. Maybe you’re at that point. You keep thinking you can set things right with your family; you keep screwing up. Maybe you just need to admit that the situation is out of the scope of things you can fix. If that’s where you are, I feel sorry for you, because either you won’t live long or you’re going to live exactly the way these people want you to."

Mrs. Cambridge looked like she wanted to hug me. Her eyes had gotten paler as she cried, like all the green was being washed out. "You don’t understand, Tres. Zeke didn’t intend—he was trying to save his own family, dear. He never thought—"

"Shut up," Mr. Cambridge said.

Rivas cleared his throat. “I’m still waiting for that disk, Danny."

Dan lifted his hands, moving them in front of him uncertainly as if he were trying to remember just how big a fish he’d caught. He looked bewildered.

"I won’t believe any of this," he told me.

"Sure you will," I said. "You believe it already. You’re remembering how violently Lillian reacted when you told her about the blackmail, and you suspect it wasn’t just the shock of finding out you had a dirty family secret. It was her secret, Dan, and you let her know it was blowing up in her face after all these years. No wonder she wasn’t happy with you—she probably thought those photos had been destroyed. Beau would’ve promised her that. He would’ve agreed to keep the secret, even to get rid of the negatives of Halcomb’s murder, only he couldn’t make himself do it."