“Sometimes. And I do salvage work on a contingency basis, a percentage of recovery.”
After a few more casual questions, he pushed my stack back and I stowed it away.
“Now let’s get a couple of things straight that bother me some,” he said. “You are coming down here into my back yard looking for somebody that killed three people.”
“I guess you could put it that way,” Meyer said.
“What other way is there, Professor? And so that makes you some kind of amateur detectives, don’t it?”
“I guess we are doing what a detective would do.”
“Why don’t you leave it up to the people who know what the hell they’re doing? You may be messing up a professional investigation. Ever think of that?”
“There isn’t any investigation. At least, not in the way…” Meyer paused and shrugged and dug into his portfolio and took out the Xerox sheets of the clippings from the paper.
Sigiera read the account. “So this Pittler is some kind of terrorist?”
“We believe Pittler could be the Evan Lawrence that was reported killed in the explosion, along with his wife, who was my niece, and Captain Jenkins, my friend.”
“No terrorists?”
“No terrorists,” I said. “And three hundred thousand missing from the woman’s estate, cleaned out before they went to Florida.”
“It says here they were newlyweds.”
“And so they were.”
“How’d you people come up with that name?” Meyer explained about the yearbooks, and the days of studying the pictures. He showed Sigiera the color print of Evan Lawrence.
“Good-looking man. Doesn’t mean much, though, does it? I caught me a guide last year, pretty as a movie actor. He’d led three groups of braceros across the river up near Quemado and killed them, every one, for the poor pitiful pesos they had left after paying him. Eleven bodies we found in a ditch with stones piled on them. And that killer had eyelashes you wouldn’t believe, and if you looked right at him, he blushed.” He pulled his wet shirt away from his chest, and said, “Question. What do you do if you find him?”
“Hold him for the authorities,” I said.
“A salvage consultant doesn’t have to do all that paperwork with licenses and all that, and he doesn’t have to report to the law every time he enters a new territory. McGee, are you hired out to this professor?”
“We’ve been close friends for many years,” Meyer said with enough indignation to be convincing. Sigiera picked up the card with the name and address Meyer had gotten from the university records. “Set still,” he said, and headed out of the room, leaving the door open.
He was gone almost forty minutes. Time dragged. The fan made a clicking sound. An insane mockingbird played its endless variations in a live oak outside the window. It was too hot for conversation.
When he did come back, it was obvious that something had sobered him. He had a file folder in his hand, a buff folder of the type where the sheets are fastened at the top with metal tabs that come up through two holes in the sheets and are bent over. The metal fasteners were rusty.
“Had to go over to the courthouse annex to get this,” he explained. “There was a card on it here because it’s still an open file. It’s still an open file because I think we’re looking for the same fella.” He checked the name again. “Cody Tom Walker Pittler, who, if he’s living, was forty-two years old the twenty-fourth of this month. And what we want him for, it happened twenty-two years ago last month. I was a little kid then, but I can remember hearing about it because it was something dirty. You know how little kids are. Everybody whispered about it that summer. First, let’s double-check on him being the same one.”
He slipped a photograph out of the file. A boy of about seventeen stood grinning at the camera. He was in football togs, helmet under his arm, hair tousled. The young Evan Lawrence, we agreed.
“High school,” Sigiera said, “before he went away. Before he had the trouble.”
He seemed thoughtful and in no hurry, and we made no attempt to push him. He flipped pages, read for long minutes.
He slapped the folder shut. “It’s all in our damn cop language,” he said. “The decedent, the angle of entry, the alleged this and that. Too many words. That’s the trouble with the law lately. Too many words. Too many writs. Too many pleas. We can live with it. We have to live with it. But sometimes it gets a little scratchy.
“Here’s what happened. Cody was apparently a normal kid. No juvenile record. No problems. His father, name of Bryce Pittler, owned a small contracting business that did foundations, put in septic tanks, and so on. Had a yard and a little warehouse and three transit-mix trucks. Worked hard at it and did okay. When Cody was about thirteen and his sister, Helen June, was eighteen, their mother died sudden. She caught the flu and it went into pneumonia and she tried to keep right on going no matter what, and they got her into the hospital too late. Bryce Pittler waited two years and then he married a twenty-five-year-old woman that worked in the office for him. Her name was Coralita Cardamone, half Mexican, half Italian, and she was supposed to be one very hot number around town at that time. If he hadn’t up and married her so fast, his friends would maybe have had a chance to warn him off her. A year after they were married, that would be when Cody was sixteen or thereabouts, one of the big building supply outfits from Houston came down to all these little places along the river, buying up small contracting firms. They gave Bryce Pittler an offer he couldn’t refuse, because it gave him a good piece of money, and they kept him on to run it the way he had before. They did that with the other outfits they bought, and some of the ex-owners turned out to be good managers and a lot didn’t.
“Bryce Pittler turned out to be one of the good ones, so what they did after not too long was to make him a regional manager, covering all the way from Brownsville to El Paso. The daughter, Helen aune, got married and moved out. Bryce Pittler had to be away three and four nights a week. That left Coralita and the kid alone in the house. I don’t know how they got started, but bet your ass it wasn’t the kid’s idea. He thought his old man was absolute tops. They were close. But it was going on. They interrogated Coralita’s best friend, a woman named”-he flipped the folder open, turned a few pages-“Leona Puckett, who said Coralita had told her about the whole affair. Leona said she had begged Coralita to stop with the kid because it was a mortal sin. Apparently when the kid got back after his first year in college, they picked right up again, just like they probably did whenever he came home for vacation. She was a very ripe woman, and they say she never got as much as she needed, and from what Leona reported, the kid was so well hung she just couldn’t bring herself to give it up. So it was the old old story, except it was the traveling man that came home to find his wife in bed with his son. He heard them and went and got his target pistol, the one he’d taught the boy to shoot. From the coroner’s report, the woman was on top, and the headboard of the bed was against the wall opposite the kid’s bedroom door. Maybe he didn’t even know it was his son under there when he nailed her with one shot right to the base of the skull. She was instantly dead in mid-stroke. There were signs of a struggle. A chair tipped over. Bryce Pittler was on the floor, still alive, with a bullet that had gone through his lower right chest at an upward angle, nicked a big artery, and lodged against his spine. The pistol was near his right hand. The wound was consistent with what could have happened if they struggled for the gun. Pittler never came out of it. A neighbor walking his dog in the yard next door heard two shots, and then as he was wondering whether to phone it in, a car came roaring out of the drive and turned north. He phoned it in. Pittler died on the table. Never said a word. They had a double service. There was an all-points bulletin out. The law looked, but not very hard. I don’t think the kid was running from us as much as he was running from what happened. I mean, that’s about as rough as it can get for a kid. It’s like in those old Greek plays. The neighbor recognized the profile of the kid driving the car as it passed the streetlight. And he hasn’t been seen since. Here’s a picture of the woman.”