"This related?"
"No. I'm on a missing person case of sorts."
"Something in it for me? Remember, the newspaper is your friend. A story might flush out some leads."
"No." Perhaps she was a little too quick. But one of the few honorable things Guzman had done was not go to the media. Well, maybe not honorable-he had his own agenda, as evidenced by Steve Villanueve's botched surveillance and interrogation-but the bottom line was there had been no leaks. She wanted to keep it that way.
"I mean, I'm more interested in poking around in your archives. I thought you could help me."
"Sorry, our library is closed to the public. But if you tell me what you need, maybe I can get it for you."
He was persistent, she had to give him that. "Aren't your archives searchable on the Web?"
"Only for the last two years, and it will cost you two bucks an article to pull up more than the headline. Before then, most of the paper is stored in shoeboxes."
Tess laughed. Every newspaper reporter she had ever known took a perverse pride in denigrating their employer's resources.
"No, literally," A. J. said. "That was the old system. Shoeboxes. The old publisher cut a deal with Joske's department store, and he got these shoeboxes really cheap, which they stacked on top of each other. One day a whole wall of 'em fell over on one of the librarians, and the workers' comp claim convinced the company to modernize. Even if you could get in there, you'd never be able to find what you want."
"Probably doesn't matter, anyway. The good stuff never gets in the paper."
"Amen."
"I mean, this guy I'm looking for…Tyner Gray-he's a lawyer, disappeared with his partner's money." The lie was fun to tell, even if Tyner wasn't there to hear his name taken in vain. "I don't think it's the first time he disappeared down here, he might have even been living a double life. But as you said, the juicy stuff never sees print anyway."
He nodded, having forgotten that she was the one who had expressed this sentiment, not him. He had only seconded it. "Tyner Gray. Doesn't ring a bell."
"Oh, he's a small-timer. Probably never crossed your screen." She paused, trying to decide if she could make the transition she needed without sounding too forced. "I got excited for a moment when I saw the item about this guy, Tom Darden, whose body was found in the Hill Country. Because Gray had used the name Darden once. But I don't think there's a connection."
"Can't see that there would be, given that Darden was locked up for the last twenty years."
"Yeah. The paper called it the ‘infamous Danny Boyd case,' but I've never heard of Danny Boyd. Should I have?"
"Not unless you were around here two decades ago. Even then, there are plenty of folks who don't know what happened. ‘Infamous'-that's a kind of a code."
"Code for what?"
A. J. glanced at the tables around them, as if he were planning to break a confidence. "It was before my time, but everyone knows that Danny Boyd's kidnappers molested him. But we couldn't print that detail, because he had been identified when he was snatched, and, of course, we don't identify victims of sexual assault. Especially when he's a rich man's little boy. So it became the ‘infamous' Danny Boyd case. It's a wink at the reader, you see, a tip that there's something salacious we can't tell." He sighed. "Of course, given recent events, it's hard to remember those innocent days when there were things that newspapers didn't deem fit to print."
"I knew there was something," she said happily, as if this were a game they were playing. Read Between the Lines, Win Cash Prizes. Much better than Wingo any day. "Maybe it's the ex-reporter in me, but I always can tell if the reporter is holding something back when I read the paper. This may make me sound cynical, but I figure this Sterne guy, who's getting so much press for this All Soul Festival, can't be as saintly as he's made out to be."
"Gus Sterne? Actually, what you see is what you get, in my experience. A little arrogant, maybe, but basically a good guy for someone with that much money and that much clout."
"Still, everyone has skeletons in their closets." She was pushing too hard, A. J. was wary again. "Hey, I've been in some San Antonio homes. People here have skeletons on their bookshelves."
He smiled, but the good ol' boy veneer was gone, revealing a much shrewder man than she wanted to deal with.
"You got a lead on the murders? Because if you do, all bets are off."
The murders. Thousands of people had been killed in this city over the last twenty years, and many of those cases must have gone unsolved as well. But there was no doubt what "the murders" were.
She was grateful for the interruption of a short, plump man with an old-fashioned flash camera, who stopped at the table and asked if the gentleman would like a photograph of the beautiful, beautiful lady, to remember this magic moment always. A. J. waved him away impatiently.
"Well?" he asked Tess.
"I never heard of Lollie Sterne before my work brought me to Texas," she said, pleased to have the truth on her side, at least momentarily. "It's her daughter, Emmie Sterne, I'm looking for. I have a friend who was in a band with her, and she skipped out on him, owing him some money. End of story."
"How does that connect to the murders?" He had drained his frozen margarita and waved for another, but the drink hadn't dulled his senses as much as Tess had hoped. People who drink at lunch also tend to have a pretty high tolerance.
"It doesn't. I'm cruising for a little dirt on the Sterne family. My client really needs this money." She was beginning to buy into her own story, always the mark of a good lie.
"And you think Gus Sterne will pay his cousin's debt, if you can dig up something on him?"
"Knowledge is power."
"Then you should know they're on the outs."
"Yeah, but I figure if I go to him this week, just before his big day, tell him that Emmie has ripped off this guy and I'm willing to go to the press with the story-"
"He'll make good on her debt to avoid the bad publicity." A. J. drank from his margarita glass. He didn't use the straw, and his healthy slurp left a little pale green mustache on his upper lip. "I like how you think. But it's still a stretch. The Eagle won't touch the story. For one thing, it's Gus Sterne. Besides, you can't expect a guy to bail out the woman who tried to burn his house down."
Tess, who had just bitten into a tortilla chip, inhaled too sharply, and the chip lodged in her throat. Eyes watering, nose running, she gulped water, trying to wash it down. She recalled reading that people had died this way, choking to death on lethal little tortilla triangles that got stuck in the trachea.
A. J. was enjoying all her levels of discomfort. "You really don't know what you've stepped in, do you? Yeah, Emmie Sterne tried to burn ol' Cousin Gus's house down. What was it-four years ago, five?"
"Five," Tess said faintly. They had a falling-out, five years ago. Marianna, the Duchess of Euphemism, had struck again, backed up this time by Gus Sterne's own evasive half-truths. Clay had hinted at the rest of the story, but she had thought he was just being a petulant brat.
"So you do know. Sterne convinced the cops not to press charges, and our weak-kneed publisher really undercut us on the story. You couldn't read between the lines there, because there were no lines, except for a short on the fire itself. The insurance company wasn't so easily appeased, but they straightened it out eventually, and as long as there were no criminal charges, the paper wouldn't make it public. Gus thought he was doing the girl a favor, having her judged incompetent and packed off to some ritzy mental hospital for a few months. I hear she didn't see it that way. But she was damn lucky, I'll tell you that. If Sterne and his son hadn't gotten out of the house in time, she'd have been in prison for a double homicide."