The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(23)

Berton said, "You really want to know?"

Another block, then morbid curiosity got the best of me. "I heard — it was some kind of accident, right?"

George touched the tip of his cigar to his mouth. His tilted hat brim swamped his face with shadow. "We were camping up by Garner State Park, way up in the hills by the Frio River. At dawn 'Liss was still asleep in the tent, so I figured I'd go down to the Frio to do a little fly-fishing. This was our first vacation since I'd gotten out of the service, you know? A little time to get away, we figured. I came back to the tent about noon and found her."

"Found her."

"Raped," he said. "Then murdered — chopped up with my camping ax."

My hand tightened on the wheel. "George—"

"'S'okay," he said. "Really. Seven years later, you know, and it's okay. But..."

"They ever catch who did it?"

He shook his head. "They suspected me for a while — I couldn't blame them. But it still keeps me awake at night — the fact that this monster got away. That and the guilt. I'm not careful — it's like one of those balloons of coke the drug mules swallow to get across the border, you know? I'm always wondering if it's going to pass through my system eventually or maybe  upture, explode my heart."

I looked over at him, met his eyes briefly in the streetlight, looked back at the road. What do you say to a story like that — sorry?

George sat up and tried to lighten his tone. "So anyway... now you know, huh? A hundred dates later. Maybe this'll be the special one."

He smiled frailly at me, looking suddenly, as we passed under another streetlight, like a very old man, someone who'd come from 1962 the hard way. Jenny's condo building was a new high-rise behind Trinity University, designed for young professionals or students with rich daddies. It was the kind of place where the condos cost as much as the older two-story homes around them but with half the maintenance and none of the charm.

We buzzed Jenny's number in the lobby. Ninety seconds later she came down the elevator alone.

"I'll be," she exclaimed. "Two handsome men! Hey there, stranger!"

She squeezed my arm, noticed and decided not to comment on the new facial scar, then decided to get a little bolder and fold herself around my elbow.

Jenny was a nice-looking woman — maybe twenty-seven, her skin so smooth and shining with health it looked like air-mattress plastic. Her hair was floofy blond, teased to the consistency of cumulus cloud, and her dress just as light — willowy white layers of cotton. The only things of any hardness about her were her black boots and her large earrings shaped like fish skeletons.

George fiddled with his flowers. "Where's your comadre?"

"Oh." Jenny sighed, brushed her hand against my chest. "Ana's on her way down. Her pager went off right when you buzzed and she had to call the office. She's always — well, here we go."

The elevator doors opened again. The woman who stepped through was about five-nine, a dark-skinned Latina. Her red sleeveless dress was mid-thigh length and showed off well-muscled legs and arms. Her black hair was wedge-cut at the jawline and done in bangs on top — a style that might have made another woman's face look babyish, but not hers. Hers was serene, softened with amber and blue highlights but not enough to dilute the stern set of her eyes and her mouth. She came out of the elevator trying to fit something into her small black purse.

She looked up and gave us an economic, careful little smile, took two steps, then took another look at me and froze.

She continued forward, her smile a little more forced. As she got closer I could see crisscross abrasions under the makeup on her cheek.

"George," Jenny said, "Tres, let me introduce Ana."

"Ana," I repeated, greeting Detective DeLeon for the third time that day.

"Nice to meet you."

ELEVEN

The ride to the restaurant was a long one.

Not that I had to avoid conversation with Ana DeLeon. The detective and George were isolated in the backseat by the wind and the roar of the VW engine, but in front Jenny was bending my ear about her day, her week, her month. She must've been used to people tuning her out, too, because she double-checked my attentiveness with annoying frequency.

"And so I was telling George we shouldn't be using a check-writing service," she said. "There's really just four of us at the title office and that didn't justify the cost, you know?"

"Mm-hmm."

"Right?"

"Right."

"And so I started doing the bills myself and we saved so much money. I just went to this seminar on Peachtree and I mean I can't understand how I got along without it. I mean you must have to do that kind of thing with Erainya's agency, right?"

"Right."

"Yeah?"

"Uh-huh."

And so forth.

I liked Jenny. Intelligent. Good sense of humor. George was right that she and I joked around whenever I visited his title office. But the mean-spirited truth was I had nightmares about the man Jenny would marry, what he would look like after thirty years. I pictured him sitting in his easy chair with the game shows on and his nose buried in a magazine, a bright-faced geriatric Jenny standing over him chirping about her day and his responses of "uh-huh" that were once politely upbeat now reduced to inured grunts. It was not an image I wanted to have in my head on a first date.