"So do you do security for the money or the access?" she asked Rick, trying to give him a chance to breathe.
"Both, I guess. I like the money. I like the music."
"Especially Emmie's."
She glanced at his face. The deep color in his cheeks wasn't purely from exertion. "Emmie's good."
A short silence, as they hit bottom. "Want to knock off early?" he asked. "We could grab breakfast on Broadway, near where you're staying."
Tess stopped abruptly. "I didn't tell you where I was staying."
"Sure you did-" He had stopped, too, and was bent over, his hands on his knees as he sucked in air greedily.
"No, Steve, I'm very careful about such things. My father's training. I've never listed my home address in the phone book, and I wouldn't casually broadcast my whereabouts in a strange city. I suppose you could have gotten it off the police report from this weekend-"
"Oh, were you down at the station?" he asked. His acting was on a par with his running.
"-but that still doesn't explain why you're here today, chatting me up, trying to get me to go to breakfast. Guzman's idea? Or is this a little ad hoc plan concocted by a patrolman who wants to move up to detective?"
"I don't want to write tickets forever," Steve said, straightening up. "Besides, Guzman has his ambitions, too. If I could help him solve the triple murders, everyone would get what he wanted, and that would be a good thing." The last sounded like a child repeating something an adult had told him. "Guzman was so close, until Darden turned up dead. Now the other one, Laylan Weeks, has vanished without a trace, and Emmie is missing, too. He thought…I thought…"
"He thought he could send you to spy on me, the way you've been spying on Emmie at the Morgue and Hector's. Did you work at Primo's, too? Didn't Emmie ever get suspicious, seeing you at every gig? But I guess that's what the whole lovesick-puppy thing was about. You pretended to have a crush on her because it made it plausible that you'd be hanging around, watching her every move. She thought you were a groupie. You're really a spy."
"Doing my job," he pleaded. "Just doing my job."
"Consider it done," Tess said. "I'll make you a deal-you stay away from me from now on, and I won't let Guzman know how badly you botched this particular assignment."
"You'd go to Guzman?" He was scared. The sweat on his brow was fresh, his round cheeks were flushed anew. She couldn't blame him. She wouldn't want to be on Guzman's shit list either.
"If I see you anywhere near me, I'm on the phone to him. But if you stay away from me, this will be our little secret. Now scoot. I still have a real workout to do."
He backed away from her, then turned and began sprinting toward the path that wound along the zoo. His bright white, perfectly plain T-shirt became smaller and smaller, until it was little more than a tiny flag of surrender, waving at her from a great distance. Tess felt like a bully. It wasn't the worst feeling in the world.
Chapter 20
A. J. Sheppard had agreed to meet her for lunch, once he determined she was paying. Apparently San Antonio Eagle reporters didn't have the kind of expense accounts taken for granted by those reporters at Baltimore's Beacon-Light. He named a place on San Antonio's River Walk, and when Tess demurred-she wasn't a tourist, after all-he had been insistent. "When you get home, it's all anyone will ask you, anyway. Did you see the Alamo? Did you go to the River Walk?" He was strangely emphatic on this point, in the manner of a person who is strangely emphatic about the smallest matters. In the end, it was easier to concede.
The little district of restaurants and shops, a flight of stone steps below the real city, was pretty and picturesque. A cleaner Venice, decided Tess, who had never seen the real thing. The Riverwalk had begun life as a one-time WPA project, according to an old travel guide she had found in the nightstand at La Casita, then been pulled back from the edge of ruin in the early sixties. Not unlike Baltimore and its Inner Harbor project. American cities seemed in a constant state of such rediscoveries, waking up again and again to the reality that the old downtowns were aesthetic marvels, well worth preserving. The only thing Tess couldn't understand was why such developments seemed predicated on having bodies of water nearby. Not that you could really call the San Antonio River a body of water. More like a small limb.
From a patio table at Siempre Sabado, she studied the passersby, trying to pick A. J. out of the crowd. The only thing she could be sure of is that he would not be wearing a conventioneer's badge, like so many of the others she spotted here. Come to think of it, she had no idea what he looked like nor how old he was. Their fleeting acquaintance was based on exactly one telephone call seven months ago, a call he had promised to disavow. On the phone, he was loud and braying, like a deaf old man who thought he had to shout to be heard. His accent was comically broad; he would not have been out of place on Hee Haw. Try as she might, she couldn't get any visual image to adhere to that voice, except for a straw hat and a corncob pipe. This morning, when she had asked what he had looked like, even he seemed stumped. "I'll find you," he said at last.
He did, swooping down on the table like a sudden change in the weather.
"Monaghan!" He pumped her hand with a vigorous up-and-down motion, as if her arm were the lever on an old-fashioned water pump. He was a tall, lanky man with something on his face that was either an early 5 o'clock shadow, a weak beard, or crumbs from his breakfast cereal. He wore a jacket over his blue jeans, and a reporter's notebook was sticking out of his back pocket, tenting the jacket. He pulled out the notebook and threw it down on the table with a loud smack, yelling for a waitress. The staff regarded him tolerantly, if not fondly.
He squinted at her. "I thought you'd be a tough old gal, with a fedora and a trench coat, and here you are, looking like some damn cheerleader. How old are you, twenty-one?"
"I'm thirty," she said, a bit sharply. He looked about thirty-five or forty and she wanted him to know he shouldn't patronize her.
"Excuse me. Never knew you could insult a lady by underestimating her age." He picked up the menu but didn't bother to open it. "You drink at lunch?"
Tess figured no one would ask that question unless he drank at lunch. Why not? she thought. She'd sip, he'd slurp, she'd have an edge. This was not, after all, her buddy Feeney, who owed her so many favors, and who would sit on a story at her request. She'd have to tread carefully here.
"Do they have good margaritas?"
"They're the only reason to come here. That and the view. Food's pretty mediocre, compared to what else is out there. If there was any truth in advertising, they'd call it Casa So-So." He waved frantically at the waitress, his long arm slashing the air. "Two frozen margaritas."
"On the rocks for me." Frozen margaritas went down too easily.
The waitress brought the drinks and a basket of chips, with a thin, brown sauce new to Tess's taste buds. She poked the edge of a chip into it, like a shy swimmer dipping her toe in the ocean. It might be mediocre to Sheppard, but it was still awfully good by her standards.
"Tess Monaghan," A. J. said, drumming his hands on the table. "Tess Monaghan, private eye. How'd you get into this private investigator gig, anyway? I thought you worked at a newspaper up in Baltimore."
"I was working for the paper as an investigator when we spoke. But I was a reporter at the Baltimore Star, before it folded."
"That thing we didn't talk about last winter-boy, that ended pretty badly, didn't it?"
"Yes." The image of the body in the ditch was always there, waiting for moments like this to clutch at her. The white T-shirt had been so bright against the winter-brown land, the blue plastic grocery bags had looked like a bier of roses.