Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(41)

"The police said nothing. They talk about Laredo. They talk about Lillian being an adult. I’ve been convinced . . . to wait."

"By the police?"

He glared up at me, his jaw still shaking. "By many people."

“But you don’t believe they’re right, " I said. "Neither do I."

"What I believe is that Lillian had a chance at happiness, boy. What I believe is that you took that away from her—again." He spoke like a man who had just swallowed sour milk.

The words weren’t new to me. They brought back years of Thanksgivings, Christmases, birthdays where the conversation had always eventually turned to what I wasn’t doing for Lillian. The only difference was that Mrs. Cambridge wasn’t here now to steer the conversation someplace else. And this time, maybe, I couldn’t argue with him.

Mr. Cambridge nodded, as if agreeing with my thoughts. "They said it might be because of you. The police said that. If it is, boy—"

"Detective Rivas said this?"

Cambridge waved his hand dismissively. "If it is—"

He didn’t have to tell me about his younger days in the Navy. I heard the threat just fine.

"Sir, I’d like to have your help, but I’ll find Lillian with or without it."

"So help me God, if you interfere—if you make it any harder to get my girl back—"

"It is true she had a falling out with Dan?"

His head was trembling more now. "Nothing that couldn’t be mended."

"And you knew that Lillian was leaving the gallery she shared with Beau Karnau?"

He liked hearing Karnau’s name about as much as a diminished chord. "She made the right decision--leaving that gallery. It was never right for her. But God damn it, I’ve always supported her. I never said a word. I’d do anything for my family, boy. I’ve seen them through. What have you done besides making the hard times worse for her?"

I don’t know why. Something in his tone made me uncertain which "her" he was talking about. I thought about Lillian, refusing to say a negative word about her father, hugging him when he came in the door, blaming his terminal bad temper on investments. I thought about Angela Cambridge, probably still sitting in her dark room surrounded by her parakeets, crying, hugging an old shoe box full of dead memories.

Then I thought about Zeke Cambridge coming home to that every night for forty years, his determined green eyes eventually washing out with old age, fading a lot faster than that photograph of a pilot who’d never come back. Investments, my ass.

I didn’t say anything, but when I looked him in the eye again he heard the pity as clearly as I’d heard his threats. Face trembling, he slapped his stack of legal papers and his bifocals off the desk.

"Get the hell out," he said, his voice surprisingly soft. I stared at the cracked armrest of the leather chair. I swear I could still see the impressions a sixteen-year-old’s nervous fingers had made there, waiting for his driver’s license to pass inspection. When I looked back up I almost hoped to see the marble features I remembered, the fierce disapproval. Instead, I saw an old man whose last shot at dignity was making the bowl of butter toffees rattle on his desk.

I got up to leave.

As I closed the door Zeke Cambridge kept staring straight ahead, looking more like an undertaker than ever, one who was getting old and angry and still hadn’t successfully buried his first client.

26

Just to piss off Jay Rivas, I spent the rest of the afternoon at SAPD looking through the blotters for any recent mention of the names in Drapiewski’s police files. They can’t keep you out of the blotters, but they didn’t have to like it. My charming guide, Officer Torres, kept glaring at my jugular and making little growling noises in the back of her throat. I almost asked her if I could put a bow on her neck and send her to Carlon McAffrey for Christmas.

After that I visited the mole people at Carlon McAffrey’s much-touted newspaper morgue, then the County Bureau of Records.

Never let them tell you an English Ph.D. is useless. True, I don’t get many calls to discuss the dirty jokes in The Canterbury Tales, even if that was my dissertation topic, but I can research rings around your average P.I. Terrence & Goldman always loved me for that. By five-thirty when the clone of my third-grade teacher kicked me out of Records, I’d whittled Drapiewski’s list of twelve FBI suspects in my father’s murder down to four viables, or at least questionables. Three others were in Huntsville for life without parole. Four were dead. One was awaiting trial on federal charges. None of them were going anywhere for quite a while, nor could they have been up to anything since I had come back to town. I looked at my four possibles, trying to imagine one of them behind the wheel of a ’76 Pontiac with Randall Halcomb. I waited for a volunteer to jump out at me. Nobody raised his hand.

I picked up the tail on Broadway, just as I passed the Pigstand Coffee Shop. Despite local lore, there were no pigs present.

"Never when you need one," I said to the rearview mirror.

The tail was a black Chrysler, early eighties model. I cursed the lenient Texas regulations on window tinting. I couldn’t see the car’s interior worth a damn. Problem number two with driving a VW bug: Unless your tail is driving a very old Schwinn with less than ten gears, you can pretty much forget losing them.