The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(35)

Edie agreed. She wanted to know if there were some romances in the book, some without werewolves.

"I liked that one," complained Gregory.

Edie and Morticia started to argue with him.

Blake hollered, "Come on, man! It's this guy's first day and stuff."

The grumbling died down. Morticia and Gregory and Edie kept glaring at each other. Marfa was giving me the eye now, wiggling her eyebrows in time with her knitting needles.

"Great," I said again. We'd now ripped through twelve minutes. "I noticed the old syllabus was a little heavy on the gore. Maybe the Marie de France book would be a good place for a fresh start. How about the first three lais for Friday? We'll revisit Bisclavret and move to Lanval and Guigemar."

There was some general mumbled assent.

That gave me an opening to lecture a little bit about Marie de France, about the courtly love debate and the Anglo-Norman world. I kept stopping to ask if my students had heard all this before. They looked amazed. A few of them even bothered taking notes.

I was just wrapping things up when George Berton came in, dressed in his usual sixties leisure clothes and Panama hat. He held Jem by one hand and an enormously full brown paper bag in the other.

I kept lecturing about the difficulties of translating Anglo-Norman alliteration. George and Jem tiptoed around the back of the room and quietly took two desks next to Gregory. Jem waved at me, then pulled a new action figurine out of his OshKosh overalls and held it up for me to see.

George looked at me seriously and pantomimed straightening a tie. My hand started to go up to my collar, then I stopped myself. George grinned.

"Well," I concluded. "That's probably enough for the first day. We'll look at those first three lais on Friday. I'll keep the same office hours as Dr. Brandon. Anything else?"

Edie the housewife raised her hand. "I read in the newspaper yesterday—"

"About the bomb blast," I interrupted. "Thank you, but I'm fine."

"No..." She frowned, as if my assumption that she'd been interested in my welfare had confused her. "I just wanted to ask, is it true you're a private investigator?"

I looked back at George, who was slicing his hand horizontally across his throat, mouthing: No. No.

"It's true," I said.

The class shifted in their seats. Nobody followed up with questions. Nobody asked my trench coat size.

"Well—" I said. "Okay then. See you Friday."

At that, Jem put down his action figure and began clapping for me. The students looked back uneasily and began collecting their things. Jem kept clapping until the room was empty except for him, me, and George. George grinned. "Bravo, Professor."

"What are you guys—"

George held up his bulging paper bag. "Join us for lunch?"

SEVENTEEN

"You want the special or the beef?"

The question was a mere formality. George nudged the Rolando's Special my way, grabbed the came guisada for himself, then leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs at the ankles.

He unwrapped the end of the mega-taco and took a bite, staring thoughtfully across the UTSA patillo.

The white patio tables were abandoned this late in the afternoon, the sunken courtyard quiet except for the flutter of pigeons and the sound of the stone monolith fountain sluicing water off its slanted top into the pool below.

Overhead, reflected light from the water pulsed across limestone pillars, up the two-story roof of opaque plastic bubbles. Lines of wooden slats hung from above like weird, Mondrian stalactites.

According to UTSA folklore, the campus had been laid out following an ancient Aztec city design, which put the patillo in the center of the community and the fountain right where the altar would've been. Jem, who had already taken two bites of his kid's taco and pronounced himself full, was now tightrope-walking his Captain Chaos doll around the rim of the pool, right about where the bloody heads of the sacrificial victims would've rolled.

I looked down at my Rolando's Special — a giant flour tortilla stuffed with eggs, guacamole, potato, bacon, cheese, and salsa. Normally it would have been enough to elevate me into Taco Nirvana. Today, all I could think about were sheet caves, the desolate interior of the Brandon home, and the things George Berton wasn't saying.

He'd offered no comment on my morning's activities. Without expression, he read the short article I'd found in Aaron Brandon's desk about the IRS investigation in West Texas, then tucked it into his olive-green shirt pocket along with his cigars. He'd been animated enough talking about my classroom performance, the virtues of Rolando's, the great things Jem had been making with his Tinkertoys, but when the conversation had turned toward the Brandon case, George had closed up.

Not that George didn't sometimes close up about his cases-in-progress. Every investigator does. But after our free conversation last night, his remoteness today made me uneasy.

"The IRS article," I prompted. "Mean anything to you?"

"You mean like was Aaron Brandon interested in drill bits?"

"No, doofus. I mean like was Aaron Brandon getting ideas about turning his brother Del in to the IRS. If so, and if Del found out about it, Del might've wanted to stop him."

"I don't know."

"Okay," I said. "Hector Mara. What about him?"