Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(83)

He looked even worse close up. In the shadows his face looked half-dead, unshaven, the skin loose around his eyes and his short-cropped hair sickly white instead of blond. He’d been continually twisting his gold ring around on his finger until there were red grooves worried into the skin. He looked at me and tried to maintain some anger, or at least some suspicion, but it was too much effort. His expression fractured into simple grief.

"I didn’t," he said.

"Beau?"

He closed his eyes tightly, opened them, then nodded. He looked around for a beer and realized he’d left it at the bar. He almost got up. To keep him there, I started telling him what had happened after he’d run from the Hilton, what I’d told Schaeffer. I didn’t mention the decade-old letter from his mother that was still in my pocket. When I was finished he just stared forward like a sleepwalker.

"It’s only a matter of time before they ID you, Dan. There were cameras rolling, for God’s sake."

He kept turning the gold ring like it was a screw that just wouldn’t tighten.

"How much do you want?" he said.

I shook my head. “I’m not Karnau, Dan."

He accepted the rejection with a listless shrug. He looked down at the checkered tablecloth.

“He was lying there, you know? I came in angry, saying I was going to kill him." He laughed weakly, wiping the water off his lower eyelids. “And then all I could think of was to hold the wound, but it was his head, and I couldn’t—"

The waitress came up. She was about fifty, with a beer gut and a golf hat that had been through the wash too many times. She got out her order pad. Then she noticed Dan’s expression.

I held up my Shiner Bock bottle and two fingers. The waitress disappeared.

“I’m supposed to be at a damn party tonight." Dan laughed again, almost inaudibly. “Mother’s invited the mayor, everyone important. I’m supposed to drink champagne and dance with their wives and all I can think about is—I mean—"

He shrugged, unable to finish the thought.

“I know about the photographs, Dan. Three times I’ve seen you with Karnau. The second time you hit him. The third time he ended up dead. You want to avoid taking the fall, you’ve got to level with me."

The waitress came with our beers. When she left, Dan was staring nowhere again, getting lost in the memory of that hotel room. He got teary and drooped his head like he was going into shock. I reached across the table and pressed my thumb on the meridian point in the base of his palm. The jolt registered in his face like a cup of strong coffee.

"Tell me about the photographs, Dan."

His eyes refocused on me, a little irritated. He pulled his hand away.

“Last spring I was looking through the finances. Garza had said something that made me angry, something about me and my mother taking up space."

"He said this to his employers?"

Dan’s focus drifted down to the tabletop and stuck there, like he was trying to drill a hole through the wood with his eyes.

"Garza worked for my dad for years. He gets "—Dan squeezed his eyes shut—“he got a lot of leeway. Mother insisted on that. But I looked at the accounts and saw--I mean it wasn’t hard to find—"

“You saw the ten thousand dollars a month that was going to Karnau."

The jukebox cranked out a Merle Haggard song.

“I couldn’t believe it. All my mother would tell me is that Karnau had been threatening to publish some old photos of my father. I don’t know where he got them. She said the photos could ruin us. She told me not to get involved; she wanted to protect me."-

When he talked about his mother he started mumbling, head down. It was as if he were five years old, recounting to a playmate how he’d gotten in trouble. I took out the photo from Garza’s trailer and put it on the table. Dan’s forehead turned scarlet.

"You’ve seen this before?"

"One like it. In Garza’s files."

"But you don’t know what it’s a picture of."

Dan looked down at his beer. "No. She wouldn’t tell me. She wanted—"

“She wanted to protect you."

Dan looked miserable.

“You found out right before the River Parade," I guessed. “And you told Lillian. She didn’t take it well."

He swallowed. “I thought she had a right to know. She was working with this guy, for God’s sake. And we were practically engaged. I’d just given her a diamond ring. I showed her the photo, explained what I knew to her. I told her I’d deal with it, but—" He shook his head, blushing. “I guess I can’t blame her. She didn’t want to see me anymore."

"Dan, did it occur to you Lillian might’ve been shocked because she already knew about those photos? Karnau was her partner for ten years. Maybe she just didn’t realize he was using them for blackmail. Maybe she thought they were destroyed; maybe Karnau had agreed to destroy them, then when she found out he hadn’t—she didn’t know what to do. Maybe—"

I stopped. I had been thinking aloud, trying to sculpt an answer I could live with. Dan was looking at me like I’d just spoken in Arabic.

"Why would she have known?" he said.

I stared at him. I probably looked as dazed as he did. “All right," I said. “You said your mother told you to stay out of it. You obviously didn’t."