The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(10)

Kelly's search for the name Brandon in the Express-News archives had yielded nothing about Aaron but some about his family.

A business section interview from '67 featured one Jeremiah Brandon, founder of a company called RideWorks. Kelly had highlighted the last paragraph of the story. This mentioned that Jeremiah had two sons he was raising by himself — Del and Aaron.

According to the article, Jeremiah Brandon was a former printing-press repairman who had made a small fortune repairing and building amusement rides for the many carnivals that passed through South Texas. Now with a permanent workshop and fifty employees, Jeremiah was increasing his profits yearly, and had invented such child-pleasing rides as the Super-Whirl and the Texas Tilt. I studied the 1967 photo of Jeremiah Brandon.

He looked like a turkey buzzard in a suit — thin, hardened, decidedly ugly. The fierce hunger in his eyes animated his whole frame. I could imagine him descending on a broken amusement ride like so much delicious roadkill, stripping it to its frame and wrenching out the offending gears with his bare hands and teeth.

The next article, dated April 1993, announced Jeremiah Brandon's murder. The details were sketchy. Jeremiah had been socializing with his workers at a West Side bar on a Friday night. An unknown assailant had entered the bar, walked up to Jeremiah Brandon, and fired multiple rounds from a large-caliber handgun into the old man's chest. The assailant had fled. Despite numerous eyewitnesses, the police had no positive ID to work with. Not even a sketch. The witnesses at the Poco Mas Cantina on Zarzamora had apparently been less than model citizens when it came to exercising their memories.

There were three follow-up articles, each shorter than the one before it, each pushed farther away from page Al. They all said the same thing. Police were without leads. The investigation had failed to produce a suspect, at least none that the police wanted to share with the press.

I flipped through a few other pieces of paperwork — Aaron Brandon's driving records, insurance policies. The lease for Aaron and Ines' Alamo Heights home was made out in the name of RideWorks, Inc.

I was still thinking about the murdered father and son when Deputy Ozzie Gerson knocked on my front-door frame.

"Can't believe it," he said. "You still live in this dump."

"Good to see you too. Come on in."

He inspected the living room disdainfully.

Ozzie was the kind of cop other cops would like you to believe doesn't exist. He had a fat ring the size of a manatee slung around his midsection, powdered sugar stains on his uniform. He wore silver jewelry with a gold Rolex and his greasy buzz cut covered his scalp as thinly as boar's whiskers. His face was pale, enormous, brutishly sculpted so that even in his kinder moments he looked like a man who'd just attended a very satisfactory lynching.

"You call this an apartment?"

"I tried calling it a love cave," I admitted, "but it scared the women away."

"This isn't an apartment, kid. This is a holding cell. You've got no sense of style."

By my standards the in-law looked great. On the futon, the laundry was clean and folded. Stacks of agency paperwork were tidily arranged on the coffee table. My tai chi swords were polished and in their wall rack. Stuck on the refrigerator, like a normal home and everything, was a kid's watercolor (Jem's) and a postcard (my brother Garrett's, with the endearing inscription IN KEY WEST WITH BUFFETT — GLAD YOU AIN'T HERE!!!). The only possible eyesore was Robert Johnson, who was now lying on the kitchen counter with his feet curled under his chest and his tongue sticking out.

"Track lighting," Ozzie advised. "White carpet. A big mirror on that wall. Go for open. Light and airy."

"I feel it," I said. "I really do. You want to sit down while I call the decorator?"

He pointed over his shoulder. "We can talk and ride."

I turned to Robert Johnson, who had seen Ozzie too many times to get excited by him or his designer tips. "Lock up if you leave."

Robert Johnson curled his tongue in a tremendous yawn. I took that as an assent.

My landlord, Gary Hales, was now on the front porch of the main house, cracking pecans into a large metal pail. The spring afternoon wasn't particularly hot, but Gary had one of those head-mounted mist sprayers slung across his balding skull. The thing must've been on full blast. Droplets floated around him like a swarm of gnats, dripping off his nose and chin and speckling his Guayabera shirt. Gary looked up apathetically as Ozzie Gerson and I walked by, then went back to his work. Just Tres Navarre getting picked up by the police.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

"Last week f**king parade detail," Ozzie told me. "Today I been on duty an hour and already three calls. I need a hot dog."

"Life on the edge," I sympathized.

"Balls." He unlocked the passenger's door of his patrol car, realized he had about sixty pounds of equipment on the seat, then started transferring it to the trunk with much grumbling.

Inside, the unit was about as spacious as a fighter jet cockpit. The area between the seats was filled with cellular phone and ticket pad and field radio. In front, where the drink holder and my left leg should've gone, an MDT's monitor and midget keyboard jutted out from the dashboard. The overhead visors held about a foot of paperwork, maps, and binders. The big book, the one with the whole county vectorized, was wedged between Ozzie's headrest and the Plexiglas shield that sealed off the backseat. I had just enough room to buckle my seat belt and breathe occasionally.