The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(77)

FORTY-ONE

It was six that evening before I went out again.

I'd promised Erainya I'd pick up Jem from his first formal play date, which Erainya with her usual unorthodox parenting had arranged. Jem had come away from the school visit talking about Michael Brandon, and Erainya had followed up on the dubious assumption that a play date would do both kids some good. I pulled in front of the Brandons' soon-to-be-former home on Castano. A battered blue Camry sat in the driveway. Ines' car wasn't there. The house's front door was open.

I went to the doorstep and yelled hello into the living room. The sound echoed. The brass mezuzah plaque had been pried from the door frame. The fireplace was now sandblasted to unpainted stone, the craters from the gunshots cemented over. The white carpet had been stripped, leaving the floor raw wood with carpeting tacks and glued bits of padding.

I picked my way through the rest of the house. There was a box of Arm & Hammer on the kitchen counter, a yellow sock with a red toe in the hallway closet. The rubble of Legos in the dining room was the only indication that Jem and Michael might've played here recently.

In the second bedroom, only the smell of talcum powder still lingered.

Michael's sheet cave was gone. There was one tiny, crumpled ball of paper in the middle of the floor. I unraveled it — a cutout photo of an artificial Christmas tree from an advertisement circular. I recrumpled the paper and dropped it where I'd found it.

The master bedroom was empty. Out the window, in the backyard, a young Latino guy was coming down the steps of the little apartment above the garage, carrying a moving box. Paloma stood in the doorway above, calling instructions down to him.

The guy with the box stopped as I walked into the backyard. He frowned at me, leaned backward, and balanced the box on his belly. "Mister?"

The resemblance to Paloma was striking. He had the same chunky build, the same dark squashed face. He was maybe twenty-five. Khaki shorts, red Chris Madrid's T-shirt.

I told him my name, and that I had come to pick up Jem.

"Mrs. Brandon took the boys out to get some food," he said. "410 Diner."

"That was nice of her." I looked up at the tiny balcony above the garage door. Paloma was clutching the railing, her arms straight, her face a stone scowl.

"Como esta, senora?"

She looked down at her son. "Juan, don't stand there. Dos mas cajones, eh?"

She disappeared back through the doorway.

Juan took one more uneasy look at me, then gravity decided the matter. He hefted the box farther up on his gut and lumbered down the driveway toward the Camry.

I went up the stairs and ducked through the tiny doorway of Paloma's apartment.

The room was a triangular attic — the ceiling no more than eight feet high at the apex. The window on the back wall looked out onto the alley. Windows on either side of the front doorway gave a good view of the main house, the backyard, the driveway.

Paloma was stuffing wads of newspaper into a box. Next to her on the floor was a line of assorted ceramics. To the left, a few packed boxes were piled on a stripped twin-bed frame. By the front window, a fruit crate was covered with a lace doily and decorated like an altar — framed photos, Native American fetishes, candles.

"May I come in?" I asked.

"You're here," Paloma grunted, without turning around. "I say no, you will still be here."

She wadded up another sheet of newspaper and stuffed it in her box. I knelt to look at the fruit-crate altar. The largest photo, yellowed, showed a younger Paloma with a man. Standing between them were five boys and a girl, their ages ranging from toddler to teenager.

I picked up an object next to the photo — a thin, irregular loop of bone embroidered with lace. "Deer's eye?"

She turned toward me. Her lower lip stuck out, her expression decidedly masculine. Suddenly she reminded me strongly of Winston Churchill. We shall never surrender.

"My children's," she mumbled. "They wore it during their first year. Miguel also."

"To protect the wearer from evil," I said. "That's an old custom."

Her face softened. "My grandmother made it for my mother, from a deer my grandfather shot in 1910. We are an old family."

"These are your children in the photo? Your husband?"

That question seemed to shut down any social progress we'd been making. Paloma looked away, picked up a ceramic goblet. The handle was crudely fashioned in the shape of a dragon. She stroked its wings gently, then wrapped the goblet in newspaper, placed it in the box.

"She would throw all these things away," she grumbled. "Such a waste."

I straightened up as much as I could against the slanted ceiling. Down in the driveway, Paloma's son Juan was trying to figure out how to wedge one more box into the Toyota's trunk.

"Must've been hard," I said, "seeing what you saw the night of Dr. Brandon's murder."

Down below, Juan was looping rope around the trunk lid of the Toyota. Through the shadeless windows of the main house, strips of afternoon light cut across the bare hardwood floors.

When I turned, Paloma was right behind me. She'd moved with a silence I found frightening in a woman so large. There were deep trenches under her eyes, a streak of flour along her jawline.

She took the deer's eye from my hand. "What is it you want, senor?"