Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(40)

"Sure. I’ll get you a bitch for Christmas."

Then I hung up.

At least I knew Carlon didn’t have a clue about Lillian. Otherwise he would’ve barraged me with questions, and if Carlon didn’t know, it meant nobody had talked to the press at all. I grabbed my car keys, left Robert Johnson looking mournfully at his buried lunch, and headed into the afternoon heat.

I had visited Zeke Cambridge at his bank exactly twice in the years that I’d dated his daughter. The first time was when I was sixteen, just before my first formal date with Lillian. I remember sitting in Mr. Cambridge’s office in a two-ton leather chair that smelled like cigars, waiting nervously while this monstrous man with a white marble face, green eyes, and an undertaker’s suit checked my driver’s license. Then he explained, very politely, that he’d been quite a Navy marksman in his younger days and had no compulsion at all against firing at intruders in his home or young men who sat on his daughter’s bed. He patted me on the shoulder, offered me a butter toffee from his desk, and told me to have a good time. Of course that was before he knew me.

On my second visit, after Lillian and I had broached the subject of marriage, Zeke Cambridge didn’t check my driver’s license. He didn’t offer me a butter toffee. He just reminded me that he had been quite a Navy marksman in his younger days and had no compulsion at all against firing at young men who married his daughter and then failed to get a good job following college. He gave me a multiple choice test as to what my major at A & M was—petroleum engineering, prelaw, or business. He was not amused when I answered

“None of the Above."

"He really likes you, in his own way," Lillian told me afterward.

In the later months of our relationship she had tried to blame her father’s bad temper on the savings and loan crisis, which had hit Crockett S&L just as hard as any.

"He just takes out all the bad investments on the people around him, like you," Lillian explained.

"Sure," I said. "And he’s used ‘punk’ for the last three years as a term of endearment."

Whatever bad investments Mr. Cambridge might’ve made back then, he seemed to be doing pretty well these days. Crockett Savings and Loan had moved its corporate offices from a small strip mall in Alamo Heights to a four-story glass and brick office building on Loop 1604, and Grace June, the old secretary with the beehive and the horn-rims, had been replaced in the front office by a young blonde in a silk blouse and Claiborne skirt. I nodded at her, told her I was expected, and walked on through.

"Um, but—" she started to say behind me.

The two-ton leather chair was still in Mr. Cambridge’s office. His plaques from all the right clubs still hung on the wall—Rotary, Republican State Steering Committee, Texas Cavaliers. The butter toffees were still on his desk. Only Zeke Cambridge had changed. He looked smaller than I remembered, less ogreish. His black suit fit a little looser and his rectangular face had started to sag at the corners. His pointed nose, one of the only things Lillian had inherited from him, had collapsed into a network of red veins.

Mr. Cambridge looked up from a stack of legal papers as I came in and started to ask me a question. When he saw that I wasn’t the secretary, he scowled and got up from his chair, a little unsteadily.

Then he showed the other thing Lillian had inherited from him—his temper.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

Behind me, the secretary barely stuck her head in the door, as if she were afraid of having it shot off. "Mr. Cambridge? "

He glared at her over the top of his bifocals, then back at me.

"It’s all right, Cameron. This won’t take long."

Cameron closed the door. I think she made sure it was locked. Zeke Cambridge stared at me for a long time, then grudgingly gestured me toward the leather chair. He threw his bifocals onto the stack of papers.

"What right do you have coming into my office, boy? Haven’t you done enough damage?"

There was a time when those words would’ve been bellowed loud enough to shake the furniture. I would’ve apologized for bringing Lillian home late, for using my horn in the driveway, for wearing the wrong clothes in front of their friends, just for fear of being murdered by this man. Now when he spoke, the words were more like hammer strikes on a saw blade, loud but shaky, so watery they were almost absurd in their force.

"I had a feeling you would’ve refused to see me, sir."

"You’re damn right."

“It’s about Lillian."

His jawline trembled slightly. "Of course it is."

“Mrs. Cambridge told me— — "

He banged his fist on the desk. "Haven’t you done enough to my family, damn it?"

The framed pictures didn’t rattle. The bowl of toffees didn’t move. He sank down into his chair and pounded the desk again with even less force. The anger in his face dissolved into simple frustration.

“Leave my wife alone."

It was strange being able to meet his stare. His green irises had washed down to olive over the years, and his lower lids had loosened so they could barely contain the moisture in the corners of his eyes.

"Mr. Cambridge, I want to help."

"Then leave. Go the hell away."

"If you’d tell me what the police said, maybe I could—"