The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(97)

A last strange twist on the case — Aaron Brandon's widow Ines had come forward and admitted to having a prior relationship with Aaron's supposed killer, Zeta Sanchez. She had, at one time, gone by the name of Sandra Mara-Sanchez. The local news was still chewing on that piece of information, not sure what to do with it, but they reported that Ines Brandon was not at present charged with any crime. After questioning, she had been released to be with her son. In the short clip they showed of Ines, I saw Erainya in the background, along with several high-powered defense lawyers.

I turned off the TV.

Harold Diliberto had failed to make the news, unless you count the early morning coffee crowd at the Sabinal General Store. Harold would live, and as Dr. Janice Farn succinctly put it, "He'll only be a little uglier than he was before."

The hospital room hadn't been quiet for two minutes when my mother appeared in the doorway with a wicker picnic basket. George was snoring, his Panama hat pulled down over his trach tube. Mother was dressed in a beaded denim dress, her neckline dripping with trouble dolls and Zuni fetishes. Her black hair was pulled back, also beaded. She looked like a Shopping Channel advertisement for the Bead-O-Matic appliqué kit.

"You look fine, dear." She sat down, hoisting the basket onto her lap. "You have a little color back."

"I feel colorful. And you don't have to whisper. When George sleeps, he sleeps."

She patted my wrist, then helped me raise the bed to a forty-five-degree angle. "You'll be ready for release this evening, I hear."

I tried to sit up and immediately regretted it. My bandaged shoulder screamed like it was being repierced with a hot glue gun. My not-very-funny doctor had asked me, after some successful minor surgery,  whether I'd be wanting a stud or a dangle for the hole.

"Don't worry," my mother said. "This will cheer you up."

Out of a little lap table she brought a ceramic plate and soup bowl, a spoon and napkin, a vase filled with baby's breath and dried roses and incense — the whole Bohemian breakfast-in-bed kit. Then with a flourish she extracted a foam cup the size of a Bill Miller extra-large iced tea (which is to say, awfully big).

The white top was scotch-taped in place, dripping with steam.

"Caldo res from El Mirador," she announced proudly.

I stared at her blankly. "But it's not Saturday."

One of the many absurd rules Texans learn to live with — El Mirador's famous soup cannot be had for love or money except on Saturday.

"I had a premonition," Mother told me. "I just knew I had to get an order to go this week. It reheated beautifully."

"Thank you."

Mother smiled, gratified. She spooned the concoction into my bowl, and watched, pleased, as I slurped it mouthful by greedy mouthful, spilling a good deal of it on my napkin.

Afterward I sat back, enjoying the warmth, even enjoying my mother's quiet company.

It seemed like hours before she said, "Jess isn't coming back."

Her jaw was set, her lips were pressed together in resolution. Her eyes were ever so slightly rimmed with red — from sleeplessness or anger or maybe crying — but she sounded confident, even upbeat.

"Apparently he came by and got the last of his things while I was doing my installation at the Crocker Gallery," she continued. "It's amazing — three years together, and amazing just how little he really made a mark on that house."

"That house," I assured her, "could never be anything but yours."

She nodded tentatively.

"And nobody makes a mark on my mama," I added.

She cracked a smile.

She gathered her things, replaced the items in her purse, and sat up in a glittery readjustment of denim and black hair and beads.

"I don't suppose I need to tell you," she said, "you scared me to death again."

"No, you don't."

We agreed on dinner next Monday.

Then Mother left me alone with the afternoon light growing long on the walls of the hospital room. I lay there for a long time, listening to George Berton contentedly mumbling his dead wife's name.

FIFTY

To my knowledge, Ralph Arguello had never lived in any one location for longer than six months. He began life moving from shack to shack in the slums of Cementville, a factory-run shanty town where his father worked. After his father's death and his mother's success as a maid, they moved into a small cottage off Basse, behind the Alamo Gun Club, but Ralph, as much as he loved his mother, was constantly shifting from friend's house to cousin's house to God knows where, lying low when the cops were around, making money any way he could.

The habit proved hard to break once Ralph became a successful pawnshop king. Today, he would still move into the offices of acquired shops for a few weeks, to get a feel for the land, he claimed, and then move to another apartment or rental house. He had several homes in his name, several more in other names, but none of them were his home. He traded in and out of living quarters with the same kind of rootlessness the items in his pawnshops experienced.

Ralph's inseparable possessions were few.

This week he was living in the old Broadway Apartments in Alamo Heights. The units were dingy blocks, with narrow, perpetually shaded courtyards smelling of chinaberries and Freon and damp earth. The metal window frames had not been replaced since the Johnson administration. It was a place you could drive past a thousand times and never notice, which is exactly what appealed to Ralph, I was sure.