The Widower's Two-Step (10 page)

A smaller corkboard to the left was more downto earth. It displayed $250 check stubs from Paintbrush Enterprises, also Julie's schedule and hourly pay scale for several jobs she'd taken through Cellis Temps in the last few months to make ends meet—basic word processing and data entry for an assortment of big corporations in town. Whether or not Miranda Daniels was going to take Nashville by storm, it didn't look like Julie Kearnes had been in any immediate danger of becoming affluent.

I looked through Julie's floppy disks. I opened the horizontal cabinet and took out a thin stack of mildewed blue folders. I was just starting to look through one labelled

"personal" when the front door opened and a man's voice said, "Anybody home?"

Jose tiptoed into the study, smiling apologetically, like he needed to pee real bad.

He looked around at the decor and said, "I had to see."

"You're lucky I didn't shoot you."

"Oh—" He started to laugh. Then he saw my face. "You don't really have a gun, do you?"

I shrugged and turned back to the files. I never carry, but I didn't have to tell him that.

Jose unfroze and began looking around the room, picking up knickknacks and checking titles on the bookshelf. The parrot cracked pistachios and watched him.

"Dickhead," the parrot said.

I gave the bird some more nuts. I believe in positive reinforcement.

On a quick look, Julie's "personal" file seemed to deal mostly with her debts. There were plenty of them. There was also some paperwork from Statewide Credit Counselling that suggested Julie had entered into debt negotiation about two months ago. The house, the parrot, and the '68 Cougar she was murdered in seemed to be her only assets. It looked like she had two mortgages on the house and was about one of Sheckly's pay checks away from becoming homeless.

I started Julie's IBM, figuring I'd do a quick check, take the hard disk with me and look at it more leisurely later on if anything seemed of worth.

There was nothing of worth. In fact, there was nothing at all. I sat there and stared at an empty green screen, a DOS prompt asking me where its brain had gone.

I thought for a second, then turned off the machine and pried off the casing. The hard drive was still in its slot. Erased, but not removed. That was good. I wrestled it out, wrapped it in newspaper, and stuck it in my backpack. A project for Brother Garrett.

"What is it?" Jose asked.

He'd come up behind me now and was peering over my shoulder, fascinated by the open computer. The cologne was intense. The parrot sneezed.

"Nothing," I said. "A lot of it. Somebody has tried to make sure there's nothing to be found on Julie Kearnes' computer."

Jose said, "It must've been that man who came over."

I stared at him. "What man?"

Jose looked exasperated. "That's what I was talking about outside—the man who came over Saturday night. You said you knew about him."

"Wait a minute."

I did a mental checklist. Saturday night, the night before I'd confronted Julie myself.

There hadn't been any man. I'd pulled standard surveillance, methods even Erainya couldn't have found fault with. I'd watched the house until elevenohfive, which had been lights out plus thirty minutes. At that point you can figure the subject is down for the count. I'd chalked Julie's tires, on the off chance she'd go somewhere during the night. Then I'd driven home for a few hours sleep before heading back to Austin at fourthirty the next morning.

"When did this guy come over?" I demanded.

Jose looked proud. "He banged on Julie's door at elevenfifteen. I remembered to check my clock."

The parrot ruffled his feathers and squawked, "Shit, shit, shit."

"Yeah," I agreed.

13

When it came to snooping Jose was a pro. He remembered that the visitor had woken up Julie Kearnes at exactly elevenfifteen on Saturday night. He remembered the man going inside and arguing with Julie in her living room for eight minutes twenty seconds.

Jose had seen them through the window. He could describe the guy well—Latino, stocky, well dressed, in his late fifties. Around five feet eight, maybe 230 pounds. His car had been a BMW, goldish colour. Jose gave me the license, though after hearing the description of the visitor I was pretty sure I didn't need it.

Jose apologized that he'd only heard a few lines of their argument when the visitor came storming out of Julie's house. Something about money.

Jose said Julie Kearnes had been holding her .22 Lady smith when she came onto the porch the second time, like she was chasing the guy out.

"She didn't fire it." He sounded disappointed.

I told Jose he'd done a great service for his country and hustled him out the door. He vowed to call the number on his hand if he remembered anything else.

I went back inside Julie's house and stared at the disassembled computer. I looked at Dickhead the parrot, who'd just finished his last pistachio and was now eyeing my nose. Hungry, thirsty, alone.

"Robert Johnson wouldn't like you," I told him.

The parrot turned his head upside down and tried to look pathetic.

"Great," I said, and held out my arm.

Dickhead flew over and landed on my shoulder.

"Noisy bastard," he said in my ear.

"Sucker," I corrected.

When I got to Guadalupe Avenue, otherwise known as the Drag, the sidewalks and crosswalks were clogged with students just getting out of their afternoon classes. The fiveblock stretch of shops and cafes bordering the west side of campus boasted an impressive selection of human flotsam—greying hippies, homeless people and street merchants, musicians and soapbox preachers, sorority girls. Across the street from the chaos, the big peaceful live oaks and white limestone buildings and red tiled roofs of UT stretched out forever, like Rome or Oklahoma City, someplace that had absolutely no concept of limited space.

The Drag probably wasn't the best place in Austin to get some serious thinking done.

On the other hand, nobody was going to bother me sitting on the sidewalk outside the Student Coop with a parrot on my shoulder.

Maybe Dickhead would volunteer a few choice expressions for the passersby. Maybe if I put out a hat somebody would drop coins in it. Meanwhile I could watch time pass on the UT tower clock and think about my favourite dead woman.

Julie Kearnes' finances didn't look good. Reading through them a little closer I could see how much pressure she'd been under. She'd been getting harassing reminders from the bank that held her mortgages, from all the major credit card companies, from a local Musicians' Credit Union.

The debt negotiation she'd started might have helped, eventually, but not if she lost her biweekly pay checks from Sheck because she'd been getting too close to Saint

Pierre. Not if she lost her only paying gig with Miranda because of the Century Records deal. The temp jobs she'd been doing to fill in the cracks wouldn't have been enough to sustain her and pay the debts.

So maybe she'd decided to do some dirty work. Maybe she'd found herself getting crushed to death between Les SaintPierre and Tilden Sheckly and had to play both ends against the middle. Steal a demo tape for Sheckly or go bankrupt. Find some dirt on Sheckly for Les SaintPierre or lose your gigs.

She'd known Sheckly for years, worked in his office for most of that time, took trips to Europe with his business manager. She'd been in a position to find dirt.

Maybe what she'd dug up had been a little too good. Les had disappeared before he could play his hand. Julie had gotten nervous. She'd been pressured by some unwanted visitors over the weekend, including me. Then finally she decided to set up some kind of emergency meeting Monday morning with someone she needed help from but didn't trust. She'd taken her .22, driven to San Antonio, and walked into her own murder.

People get desperate, play in a league over their head, they often get killed. Certainly not the fault of the dashing investigator who'd only come in at the end of Act V.

Maybe. The scenario didn't comfort me any. It also didn't explain the suitcase full of Les SaintPierre's intimate apparel sitting in Julie's closet two weeks after he'd disappeared. Or the man in the gold BMW who knew enough about surveillance to spot me and outwait me at Julie Kearnes' on Saturday night.

On the street, three guys in studded leather coats and green porcupine hairdos walked by smoking clove cigarettes. A group of girls in matching wrinkled flannel, with long tangled hair and bleached white skin, stopped for a minute to ask me if I knew a guy named Eagle.

Flannel in Texas requires a real commitment. Until the cold fronts start coming in, anything except shorts and flipflops requires real commitment. I told them I was impressed. Dickhead even whistled. The girls just rolled their eyes and kept walking.

By seven o'clock the sky was turning purple. The grackles started coming in from the south again and a curve of black clouds slid in from the north, smelling like rain. The last wave of college kids flooded across Guadalupe, dispersing to seek coffee shops or frat parties.

I checked my brain for new revelations on Les Saint Pierre and Julie Kearnes, found I had none, then got up and dusted the street grime off my jeans. I went back to my VW

and locked Dickhead inside with some pistachios and a cup of water.

I walked across Guadalupe Avenue to the pay phone.

When I called my own machine, the Chico Marx voice said, "Oh, broda, you gotta plenny messages."

Carolaine Smith had called, cancelling our weekend plans because she had an outoftown special assignment. She didn't sound particularly shaken up about it.

Professor Mitchell had called from UTSA, asking me to bring a curriculum vitae and a dossier when I came to my interview on Saturday.

Erainya had called, reminding me she needed to hear by next week whether I was coming back to work and by the way could I take Jem for a few hours tomorrow night.

It would mean a lot to him. I could hear Jem in the background singing the Barney the Dinosaur song at the top of his lungs.

My next call was collect, persontoperson to Gene Schaeffer at the SAPD homicide office. Persontoperson was the most expensive calling rate I could think of. As usual Schaeffer accepted the charges graciously.

"What a privilege," he said. "I get to pay money to talk to you."

"We should form a calling circle. You, me, Ralph Arguello."

"Screw yourself, Navarre."

Ralph Arguello is one of my less reputable friends. I made the mistake of introducing Arguello to Schaeffer once, thinking they could help each other on a West Side murder case. The problems started when Ralph offered Schaeffer a finder's fee for any unclaimed goods the detective could send to Ralph's pawnshops from the SAPD

evidence locker. Schaeffer and Ralph did not come away from the encounter with a warm fuzzy feeling.

"I assume you have an excellent reason for calling," Schaeffer said.

"Julie Kearnes."

The walk light on Guadalupe changed. Students drifted across, their faces now featureless in the dusk.

"Schaeffer?"

"I remember. The fiddler. I assumed you had enough sense to get off that case."

"Just curious what you'd found."

He hesitated, probably wondering if hanging up would be enough to dissuade me.

Apparently he decided not. "We found nothing. The job was clean and professional;

only a few custodians in the SAC building that time of morning and nobody saw anything. Weapon was a highpowered rifle. Hasn't been found yet and I doubt it will be. Your client's going to have to look elsewhere for her missing demo tape."

"It's a little more than that, now."

I told Schaeffer about Les SaintPierre's disappearance. I told him about Miranda Daniels' problems getting out from under Tilden Sheckly's thumb and Milo's theory that Les might have used information from Kearnes in some kind of botched blackmail attempt. I told him about the man who had been arguing with Julie Kearnes Saturday night.

Quiet on the other end of the line. Too much of it.

"I figured you'd want to know about SaintPierre," I said. "I figured you'd want to find him, clear up some of those pesky questions, like is he still alive? Did he get Kearnes killed?"

"Sure, kid. Thanks."

"The guy in the BMW. Who does that sound like to you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Don't let's obfuscate, Schaeffer. You know damn well it's Samuel Barrera. He was at Erainya's not two hours after Kearnes got gunned down. Alex Blanceagle at the Paintbrush hinted that another investigator besides me had been poking around.

Barrera's in this somehow—not one of his twenty operatives but Barrera himself.

When was the last time Sam had a contract so juicy he handled it personally?"

"I think you're jumping to some large conclusions."

"But you'll talk to Sam."

Schaeffer hesitated. "As I remember, Barrera turned you down for a job. A couple of years ago when you were shopping around."

"What's that got to do with it?"

"What was it he told you—you weren't stable enough?"

"Disciplined. The word was disciplined."

"Really stuck in your craw, didn't it?"

"I got a trainer. I stayed with the program."

"Yeah. To prove what to who? All I'm saying, kid, you would be illadvised to go forward on this Sheckly case, to see it as some personal competition between you and Barrera. I'm advising you, as a friend, to drop it. I know for a fact Erainya isn't going to cover your butt."

I stared up at the phone lines above me. I counted rows of grackles. I said, "You called it the Sheckly case. Why?"

"Call it whatever you want."

"He's already talked to you, hasn't he? Barrera did, or some of his friends in the Bureau. What the hell is going on, Schaeffer?"

"Now you're sounding paranoid. You think I can get pressured off a case that easy?"

I thought about his choice of words. "Not easy at all. That's what scares me."

"Let it go, Tres."

I watched the lines of grackles. Every few seconds another little rag of darkness would flit in from the evening sky and join the congregation. You couldn't identify the screeching as coming from individual birds, or even from the group of birds. The sonar static was disembodied, floating noise. It echoed up and down the malls between the limestone campus buildings behind me.