Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(60)

"Why is it orange?" Maia asked the cook behind the counter. She had stayed with her habitual favorite, huevos rancheros. The plate was overflowing with eggs and pico de gallo, beans, handmade tortillas, and grease.

The cook frowned, not understanding the question. I tried to explain the virtues of Tex Mex over Cal Mex to Maia. I was feeling contentedly native again when I turned to the confused cook and said in Spanish: "She doesn’t understand why it looks different. I told her it’s more cheese, more lard in the beans."

I tried to get fancy with the vocabulary. The cook yawned.

"Man," he said, "either you’re from California or you’re a f**king Cuban. Nobody says habichuelas for frijoles."

Shamed into silence, I made a mental note of the vocabulary problem and retreated quickly with my pile of tacos.

"What did he say?" asked Maia.

"He said you’ll be quiet and eat it if you know what’s good for you."

We sat under the ceiling fans on the patio and watched the occasional VIA bus grind down an otherwise deserted street. A vagrant stopped for a minute to admire our midnight breakfast. He was dressed in a ragged brown Cowboy Bob outfit complete with bandolera and toy pistol, his eyes unfocused and milky. I handed him my last taco. He grinned like a five-year-old and ambled on.

I was thinking about Lillian, trying to remember how she’d acted and what she’d said the day before she disappeared. But when I called up her face it was blurred with images of her at sixteen or nineteen. It scared me how fast she was dissolving into an old memory again. However much I kidded myself about knowing her, I couldn’t even guess about her last few years. I couldn’t discount the idea that she might be involved in what had happened, maybe deeply involved.

She had asked for court protection against Karnau last year, only to go back into business with him. She’d broken off her relationship with Dan Sheff last spring, then reestablished contact with me a few days later. She had brought me back to town, told me she loved me, given me something people were dying over, then vanished.

I wadded up my taco tinfoil and made a basket in the trash barrel. I tried to focus on translating the mariachi music on the kitchen radio. Maia had evidently been looking at me for a while, following the same train of thoughts. Her expression was soft and resigned.

“We need to know," she said. "You need to see her through somebody else’s eyes, Tres."

She took my hand. I stared out at San Pedro, then gave Maia directions to Lillian’s house on Acacia Street. The conjunto and beer were still flowing at the Rodriguezes’ when we drove past. The windows were lit up orange again. The yelling and the breaking glass inside told us that a spirited family discussion was under way. Maia parked the Buick around the corner, then we walked up the alley and slipped into Lillian’s backyard.

No police tape on the back door, no sign that the police had ever been here. In two minutes we’d worked open a lock on the guest bedroom window and stepped inside. Maia’s ten-pound key chain came in handy once again. Along with a Swiss Army knife, and minicanister of capsaicin, and keys to most of the Western world, she kept a pencil flashlight in her purse for just such an occasion as a friendly B & E. In the thin beam of its light, Lillian’s living room looked about the same as I had left it a week ago—trashed, but not alarmingly so. At least, not alarming to me.

"Yuck," whispered Maia. "Is this normal?"

"Yes," I said. Then reluctantly: "Maybe. I don’t know."

A screen door screeched opened at the Rodriguez place and a puppy yelped as it was shoed outside. Some woman cursed in Spanish: " You feed the damn thing."

Men laughed. The bass was turned up.

"I don’t think you need to whisper," I told Maia. "We could take clogging lessons in here and the Rodriguezes would never notice."

We checked Lillian’s computer first. There was a half-finished spreadsheet for the gallery on file, a few word-processed business letters, a few standard software applications. The only disks on her desk were blank. She had no CD-ROM drive, much less the capacity for creating such a disk. The only thing we learned was that the Hecho a Mano Gallery wasn’t even making enough money to bother recording.

In the corner of the main room was a board and cinder-block bookshelf that dated back to our college days. Maia and I pulled out books on everything from O’Keefe to Christo, unread textbooks with forgotten pressed flowers inside, five or six years worth of Sunset and Texas Monthly, all smelling like mildew and Halston. Finally Maia opened a white photo album and shone her flashlight on the first page. In the little yellow halo of light, Lillian and I stared up at us. I was wearing a tuxedo; she wore a red silk kimono over her black pantsuit, holding a peacock feather. The outfit, of course, had been a gift from my mother, an act of revenge as Lillian and I were preparing to go to my father’s sixtieth birthday party, back in my first year in college. I’d like to say that I remembered the rest of the details about that night. The truth is I didn’t. I looked at my own confident, very young smile, the way Lillian looked up at me with her head slightly tilted toward my shoulder. I couldn’t imagine myself ever having been there. Maia flipped the page quickly—pictures of Lillian’s family, several of us, all old and faded, a few of Lillian’s paintings. Maia closed the book.

"There’s nothing here," she whispered. She got up and moved on.