The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(30)

"And the rumor about your dad sleeping with Sanchez's wife?" I asked.

"That story's bullshit."

"The girl's name was Sandra," I recalled. "Her brother's still around — Hector Mara. You wouldn't happen to know him?"

"I don't have to convince you two of shit," Del blustered. "I told you what you wanted to hear. Now you can get the hell out."

In the reception area, Jem kept laughing along with Rita. They both said "Whoops!" in unison.

Del nodded toward the door. "Ernie'll be coming back about now, checking on things. My transactions don't take this long, miss."

Erainya took a card from her purse, slid it across the table toward Del. "You think of anything you forgot, honey, call us."

"I got other things to do, lady. Either you got thirty thousand dollars to spend or your time is up."

"Your wife awaits?" I asked. "Or Rita?"

His face reddened. "I'll remember you, ass**le."

"Good night, Del," Erainya said. "Thanks a million."

We went outside to collect Jem, who was giggling at Rita trying to balance a beer bottle on her forehead. Jem asked if we could come back here tomorrow. He said it was fun even without the amusement rides working.

Erainya told him probably not.

We left Rita still trying to do the beer bottle trick, Del Brandon glaring at us while he reloaded his gun.

FOURTEEN

Wednesday morning came way too early and it brought along a friend named Margarita Hangover.

I sweated through an hour of the Yang sword form, then showered until Gary Hales banged on the wall to let me know his bathtub was backing up. The plumbing at 90 Queen Anne is fun that way.

I shaved carefully around the gash on my cheek. The discoloration and  puffiness had gone down since yesterday. I could see the shape of the new scar — a little smile, half an inch long.

I read my morning battery of E-mail reports from Erainya, breakfasted,  dressed in coat and tie, and got on the road by nine. Most of Robert Johnson's hair went with me on the coat, since he'd used it as a bed the night before, but  when you have exactly two nice outfits and one of them smells like a bomb  blast, you make do.

I drove northwest on I-10 until the real estate developments and strip malls  began falling away to the natural topography of the Balcones Escarpment — crumpled folds of land thickly covered with live oak and prickly pear. Just inside  Loop 1604, the UTSA campus rose from the woods in an isolated cluster of  limestone cubes. The area around it had begun to urbanize over the last few years, but occasionally in the early morning you still see deer, armadillos,  roadrunners at the edges of the parking lots.

I'd lived in the Bay Area for ten years before moving home to San Antonio.  My California friends would not have called this a particularly beautiful place.  Those brave enough to visit me in Texas complain of the boring vista, the  oppressive storm clouds that frequently rolled in, the harsh flat prairie ugliness.  I try telling them that it's a matter of perspective, that San Francisco is like a Monet — any idiot can appreciate it. San Antonio, on the other hand, takes time,  patience. It's more like a Raymond Saunders, put together with muddy strokes  and scraps of handwriting and broken stuff. But it's beautiful, too. You just have to be more perceptive.

Of course my Bay Area friends counter that, by my logic, all the truly perceptive Mensa types should be living in Allentown, Pennsylvania, appreciating the completely subliminal beauty there. At that point in the argument I usually order more tequila and tell my friends to screw themselves. I turned onto Loop 1604 and drove across the dusty access road to the north entrance of campus. I parked in the faculty lot and tried not to feel strange about it.

After twenty minutes filling out paperwork for the provost's secretary and the dean's secretary and the campus police lieutenant's secretary, I was back in the late Aaron Brandon's office — my office.

The hole in the window had been covered with clear plastic tarp. Odds and ends and half-burned essays from the floor had been heaped onto the desk. Unfortunately, many of the essays were still readable, thus gradable. I sat down in the black leather chair. Outside, the spring morning looked glazed behind plastic. The picture of Aaron Brandon with his wife and child had been replaced upside down on the desk.

My graduate medieval seminar started in three hours. I began sorting through my predecessors' files — syllabi, lecture notes, grade sheets, highlighted readers, personal effects. It didn't take long to learn what belonged to Brandon and what belonged to old Dr. Haimer, the office's original occupant. Haimer's materials were the tried and true and dusty — the General Prologue, Gawain, the Wakefield plays. Brandon's syllabus, as I anticipated, tended toward the flashy and gory — Crusade narratives, miracle plays, fabliaux. The Middle Ages according to Stephen King.

I'd stacked about a foot of paper into two piles, Brandon and Haimer, when I hit a thin folder labeled RIDERWORKS stuck to the back cover of Brandon's Riverside Chaucer.

Inside was an eight-by-ten photograph of Aaron with father Jeremiah and brother Del. All three stood on the running board of an old-fashioned carousel. Jeremiah must've been in his sixties by the time this shot was taken, not long before his murder. His hair had turned greasy white, his face thinner with age, but his eyes still glittered with the same fierce intensity. I tried to imagine this man making advances toward a seventeen-year-old married girl named Sandra Mara-Sanchez, and I decided with a cold certainty that Jeremiah Brandon would've been capable of it.