The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan (33 page)

Neither of the bartenders looked thrilled to see me.
The older man reminded me about the new management, then told me the
bar was closed.

"I'm looking for Mami," I told him.

His right eye developed a tic. He glanced nervously
over at his assistant, then back at me. "Closed. Eh?"

"No Mami?"

"Closed all day."

I slid one of my Erainya Manos Agency cards across
the bar. "When you see Mami, tell her I'm a friend of the man
she talked to earlier in the week — the man with the Panama hat.
Tell her I need to talk."

The old man gave no sign of comprehension. He scooped
his hand toward the door, like he was bailing water, then told me a
few more times how new the management was and how closed the bar was.

I stepped outside into the graveled lot. Across the
street, two women in sack dresses trudged down the sidewalk, lugging
plastic La Feria bags. A man in a filthy butcher's apron smoked a
cigarette in front of a little meat market. Down on the end of the
block, the yellow-capped towers of Our Lady of the Mount rose up
against the gray sky. The clouds moved just fast enough so that the
iron Jesus seemed to be pushing through the gray like the masthead of
a ship. I crossed the street and walked toward the church.

At the steps of the main sanctuary, I looked back.
The old bartender was a tiny figure in the cantina doorway. He was
looking in my direction.

I walked inside the church entry hall, past marble
columns, oil portraits of archbishops, and polished oak tables neatly
stacked with bilingual Catholic newsletters.

Beyond the lacquered interior doors, the sanctuary
opened up into a cavern of gilt and air. Angels laced the domed
ceiling. Candlelight glittered in every recess, and far up ahead the
altar was bedecked for Sunday service.

I walked up several pews and sat down, my eyes fixed
on the distant central crucifix.

I didn't know why I wanted to be in a Catholic church
after an absence of over fifteen years. Maybe it was my visit to
George Berton's bedside the night before. Maybe it was just something
Kelly Arguello had said.

In the pew rack was a Bible, a folded program adorned
with doodles by some bored child. A broken pencil. A single rosary
bead.

I closed my eyes and the sanctuary doors sighed open
behind me. Steps clicked down the aisle — two sets. The pew across
from mine creaked.

I looked over and saw the old bartender, kneeling
stiffly. He crossed himself with a bony hand. Five rows back, the
woman from the bar was settling into a pew. Her face was blotchy from
new crying. She frowned straight ahead, then forced her eyes shut and
started mumbling a silent prayer.

I looked at the bartender.

His smudges of hair glowed like candle glass. He had
leathery skin, deeply wrinkled. He looked frail — probably no more
than a hundred pounds. His green slacks and black-striped shirt
reminded me of something George Berton would wear.

"You are Catholic?" he asked me.

The broken English was gone, replaced by beautiful
Castilian Spanish, the kind you rarely hear in Texas.

"I used to be," I answered, also in
Spanish. "I suppose I still am."

He slid back from his knees onto the pew cushion. The
effort made his leathery face tighten. He laced his hands over his
belly as if holding in an appendix pain. "That red car on the
street. The man you mentioned... he was driving it Wednesday night."

"You've got a good memory."

"It's a nice car. His name was Berton, si?"

"Did you speak to him?"

The old bartender gestured toward the woman behind
us. "I didn't say anything. He spoke with Mami."

I looked back at the middle-aged woman in red. She
was still praying in a long, continuous whisper, her eyes and hands
squeezed tight. The way the old bartender had spoken her name...

"You two are married?" I asked.

The bartender gave me a slight smile, like he was
used to hearing that question, spoken with the same amount of
disbelief. "Ten years."

"What did Mami tell my friend George?"

The bartender winced. "Mami is foolish enough to
sit on the porch most afternoons — at the house, there behind the
bar. She was an easy victim for conversation."

He probed his belly gently with his fingers, trying
to relocate the source of the pain. "She wants to know if your
friend is all right, you see. She heard he was shot, and she had told
him things that might get him into that kind of trouble. She has a
big heart, and is foolish about talking."

Mami's plum-meat-colored lips kept moving to the Ave
Maria.

"What things did she tell Mr. Berton?" I
asked again.

"About the man Hector Mara met in the bar —
two weeks ago. Rey Feo."

Rey Feo, the "ugly king," was a title for
one of the rulers of San Antonio's fiesta week, but I had a feeling
that wasn't what the old man meant.

"A nickname," he explained. "I don't
know the man's real name. He only came to the bar that once. I asked
Mr. Mara about him — Rey Feo is what he said."

"A heavyset Anglo," I guessed.
"Dark-haired."

The old man shrugged. "I only tell you all this
because Mami already made the mistake of talking. Mami's got a big
heart. There isn't much lying in her."

"Did she tell my friend anything else?"

The bartender stared at the crucifix over the altar.
The gilded-wood Christ looked centuries old, his face as stoic and
emaciated as the Mission Indian who had probably carved him.

"Do you understand how this could be bad, me
talking to you?"

"But here you are."

He massaged his belly, sighed. "I love her, you
see. I can't give her much — not my body, most nights not even my
time. I want to at least give her some peace. She wants to know she
didn't get your friend killed with what she said. She gets like this
over things."

"What did she say?"

"That she recognized a woman. A woman in the
photograph your friend had."

My blood slowed to syrup. "Who?"

"There is a man called Zeta Sanchez. This was a
picture of his wife. It was a bad photo, but Mami said yes, it was
the right woman. Is your friend healing, mister? I want to tell
Mami."

I got up, didn't answer him, then walked down to
Mami's pew. I knelt next to her. I could hear a faint tremble in the
prayer she was whispering.

"It's okay," I said. "The man you
spoke to will be fine. He told me to say thank you. To you and your
husband, he said to say, 'God bless you.'"

She shuddered, but kept her eyes closed, still
praying.

When I looked back from the doorway, the old man was
kneeling where I'd left him, facing the altar now, still five rows
ahead of his young wife. They both looked at peace, completely
unaware of each other or any purpose other than communion with God.
 

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?"

"I want to understand what you really saw that
night, Paloma — it doesn't make sense to me."

"I do not want to talk to you."

"Someone else fired those shots into Aaron
Brandon. Zeta Sanchez was merely set up for the kill."

Her face flattened. "You call me a liar?"

"Nobody else saw Sanchez that night. Nobody else
heard the shots. Only you. A man's life rests on what you say."