Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(14)

He hung up.

I stared at the wall for a while, seeing Jay Rivas’s face. I thought about Lillian’s sudden trip to Laredo, the way our reunion wasn’t quite going as I’d planned, the way Maia Lee had sounded on the phone, and the way people kept sending me these loving phone calls. When I put my fist through the Sheetrock, I missed the stud by less than an inch. I think it surprised me more than it did Robert Johnson. Clearly unimpressed, he stared up at me from his nest of freshly unpacked clothes on the futon. I checked for broken knuckles.

“Ouch," I told him.

Robert Johnson got up and stretched. Then he showed me the kind of sympathy I was used to. He left the room.

11

Yielding to Robert Johnson’s hungry cries Tuesday morning, I walked to Leon "Pappy" Delgado’s grocery on the corner of Army and Broadway. The rest of the block had gone up for lease years ago, but it restored some of my sense of universal justice to see Pappy’s Christmas lights still blazing around the pink doorway of his dilapidated adobe storefront.

My father, always suspicious of any store larger than two thousand square feet, had been a patron of Pappy’s for years, but since I had spoken no Spanish when I left San Antonio and Pappy knew little English, we had never said a word to each other beyond "Buenos tardes".

He was amazed, maybe a little suspicious, when I started talking to him en Espanol. He rubbed his paddle-shaped nose, perplexed, then gave me a crooked grin.

“San Francisco," he said. “You talk just like my wife’s brothers now, Senor Tres."

As I searched in vain for Robert Johnson’s brand of food, Pappy told me about his seven boys and two girls. The youngest had just had her confirmation. The oldest was in the Air Force now.

I looked in my wallet after paying for my two small bags of food. It was a sobering moment.

"So what are you doing back in town, Senor Tres?" asked Pappy.

“It would seem," I said, "that I’m looking for a job."

"Always need counter help," Pappy said, grinning. I promised to keep it in mind.

Back at home, I found the list of leads Maia had given me and starred making calls. After an hour on the phone, I had talked to a dozen voice mail services, one receptionist who couldn’t spell my name but was free on Saturday night, and two personnel directors who promised not to throw my résumé in the trash if I mailed it in.

"And you say you’re a paralegal?" the last man on the list asked me. He had graduated from Berkeley with Maia.

"Not exactly."

"Then—what is it that you do?"

"Research, investigation, I’m bilingual, English Ph.D., martial artist, congenial personality."

I could hear him tapping his pencil.

"Maia employed you for what, then—discussing literature? Breaking arms?"

"You’d be surprised how few people can do both."

"Uh-huh." His enthusiasm was not overwhelming.

"Do you have a Texas P.I. license, then?"

"My work for Terrence & Goldman was more informal than that."

"I see—" His voice seemed to be getting farther and farther away from the receiver.

"Did I mention I was a bartender?"

To prove it I started giving him the recipe for a Pink Squirrel. By the time I got to the sugar on the rim he had hung up.

I was taping over the hole in my wall and pondering my limitless job opportunities when Carlon McAffrey called from the Express-News.

"Shilo’s," he said. "One hour. You’re buying."

When I got there at one o’clock the little downtown deli was still packed with businessmen gorging themselves on the pastrami and rye lunch special. The air was so thick with the smell of spiced meats you could get full just breathing it.

Carlon waved at me from the counter. He’d put on at least twenty pounds since I’d seen him last, but I could still recognize him by his tie. He never wore one with fewer than twelve colors. This one had enough pastel to repaint half the West Side.

He smiled and pushed a thick manila envelope across the counter toward me.

“When the mole people start digging they don’t mess around. I got everything, even some copy from the Light. We inherited most of their archival material when they went defunct."

The first thing I pulled out was a picture of my dad, taken the last year he had campaigned for sheriff. Those gray, mischievous eyes stared back at me from under the rim of his Stetson. He had an amused look on his face.

I always wondered how anyone could see a photo like that and willingly vote this man into public office. Dad looked like the quintessential third-grade class clown, only older and fatter. I could imagine him cutting off little girls’ ponytails with his school box scissors, or throwing spitwads at the teacher’s back.

The counter waitress came by. I decided to skip the lunch menu and go straight for Shilo’s cheesecake, three layers thick, any of which by itself would’ve been the best cheesecake in the world. I ate it while I skimmed through the rest of Carlon’s envelope.

There were lots of headlines about my dad’s last big project in office—a multi-department sting operation against drug trafficker Guy White that had eventually gone down as the most expensive failure in Bexar County law enforcement history. According to the articles, the case against White was finally thrown out of court on a ruling of entrapment, just weeks before my father’s murder. Dad won lots of friends on the federal level by telling the press that the FBI had botched the whole operation.