“Alva was getting angry about being used,” I guessed. “There was some kind of big argument at the Pauerstein house. Had she threatened to go public?”
Luisa shrugged, but I could see an unsettling thought forming behind her eyes.
“So you’re mad at her,” I said. “Mad enough you wouldn’t care if she’s dead?”
“I don’t know anything.”
“If Pauerstein did something to her, I’ll crucify the asshole. I wish you’d help.”
I started to leave, but she called me back.
Her eyes were wet.
“We were supposed to go to college together,” she told me. “We were going to be business majors, open a restaurant someday. Instead, she stayed out of school, kept waiting for that asshole to divorce his wife. The day before she disappeared, she said she was giving up on him. She was going to tell the whole town she’d been raped as a child, throw as much shit in his face as she could. She’d told me all that before, but this time... I don’t know, maybe she was serious.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah.” She wiped a streak of mascara off her eyelid. “You doing anything Friday night?”
I spent the afternoon at Angelito’s Cantina, buying beers with Dr. Pauerstein’s money. One guy, Iago, tried to kill me with a pool cue, and then — with his face pressed against the corner pocket — admitted he might know the short guy I was looking for: Frankie somebody. A minor-league hit man.
That led me to my friend Ralph Arguello, who sat in his pawn-shop office posting merchandise on eBay. At any given time, Ralph had five to ten thousand items cooking on the Internet, but that was nothing compared to the list in his head — names, addresses, incriminating dirt on every player in San Antonio. Ralph could tell you who was buying, who was selling, and who was controlling the bids.
I said, “Hit man named Frankie. Short Latino, yellow truck.”
“Frank Tejeda,” he said. “Been on his way down, staying at the Salado Inn. You know it?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Ralph grinned, gesturing toward his wall of pawned weapons — assault rifles, bayonets, samurai swords. “Cut you a deal, vato?”
The Salado Inn bordered a dry creek bed on Highway 90, on the outskirts of Bexar County where worn-out subdivisions gave way to worn-out ranch land. Ten dilapidated red cabins formed a U around a gravel courtyard. Even the soft light of dusk couldn’t make the place look good.
Over the years, it had enjoyed an illustrious history as an Asian massage parlor, a heroin-junkie commune, and a training camp for low-budget evangelists. Now, in its old age, it had settled down as a residence motel, a sign out front promising good rates by the month, year, or decade.
There was no yellow truck parked anywhere that I could see.
Behind Cabin One, I found an old guy with a chain saw sculpting four-foot-tall armadillos out of juniper logs. After some compliments on his artwork, and a twenty-dollar bill, he was willing to tell me that Frank Tejeda — “oh yeah, the short spic” — stayed in Cabin Four.
“Hasn’t been around in a couple weeks,” the old man added. “Since that woman, awhile back. That was the last time.”
“What woman?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Ask him.”
Then he revved up the chain saw and went back to expressing himself.
Frank Tejeda’s cabin was unlocked, the inside depressing even by slum standards — one gray room with a tiny bathroom and kitchenette in back, a card table, a chair, and a stripped bed that sagged like a relief map of the California Central Valley. The sink was full of dishes. The back door was a sheet of plywood postered with pages from an old Chinese restaurant calendar. Strewn around the floor were men’s clothes, ammo boxes, beer bottles, and Taco Cabana bags.
It was hard to know, in the disaster area, whether anything was out of place, but I found no suitcase, no gun locker, no valuables. Nothing I would expect to find if Tejeda planned on coming back. Gone about two weeks — about when Alva Cruz disappeared.
I stood in the center of his room, listening to the sounds of the chain saw and the highway, trying to imagine Alva Cruz coming here of her own will. A good-looking young woman with plans to go to college, with a mom who cared about her — surely she wouldn’t hate herself so much that she’d spend the night with someone who lived here.
Then I saw a glint on the floor by the back door.
I knelt to look. A silver earring — an angel — was snagged in the grimy crack between doorjamb and threshold. A long strand of black hair trailed from the hook.
I had to jostle the back door’s makeshift lock to get it open.
When I finally did, I realized the neighbor’s chain saw had been loud enough to cover the sound of a car pulling up — a yellow truck, in fact, parked right behind the cabin, between the back door and the woods of the creek bed.
A short Mexican man stood on the back step, pointing a shotgun at my heart.
He said, “You need to die.”
“Ralph Arguello sent me.”
I wondered what level of hell I’d go to if I died violently with a lie on my lips, but it was a good lie. Ralph’s name had been known to cause hesitation even among psychopaths.
Frank Tejeda furrowed his brow, his finger tense on the trigger.
I could see why nobody had given a good description of him — there just wasn’t much special about him, except that he was short and about to kill me. He had the typical weathered face, the sour demeanor, the dusty flannel-and-jeans look of a hundred thousand guys on the West Side.
Of course, having somebody point a shotgun at you does sharpen your focus. I spent the next eternal second studying Frank Tejeda’s St. Christopher medal, the bloodshot vein like a river delta in his left eye.
“Inside,” he said at last. “Back up slow.”
When we were standing in the bedroom, Frank apparently satisfied I hadn’t brought a date with me, he said, “What’s Ralph want?”
“Alva Cruz.”
The barrel of the gun dipped, but not long enough for me to act. “Who?”
“You picked her up at Angelito’s,” I said. “Halloween night.”
“Hell I did.”
“You didn’t clean up, Frank. You killed her, dragged her out the back — her earring is snagged over there on the doorframe.”
When he looked, I grabbed the shotgun barrel and kicked him in the face.
The gun fired into the wall behind me. Completely deaf, I wrestled Frank to the ground and got my knee between his shoulder blades.
I frisked him, came up with some brass knuckles, a switchblade, and a pack of Chiclets.
“I didn’t do it,” he said. “¡Lo juro!”
“Uh-huh.”
“Take me to Ralph. I’ll tell him—”
“Ralph doesn’t have a damn thing to do with this, Frankie. This is about you and me and a dead young girl you dragged out your back door. Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
A little more knee-pressure on his spine and he started yelling that maybe he did know, after all.
I hauled him off the floor and together we took a walk out back.
Alva Cruz was heartbreakingly close.
Fifty yards down in the creek bed, inexpertly wrapped in black Hefty bags, the maid’s daughter was slowly being shrouded with yellow acacia leaves. One pale hand had escaped the plastic. Her fingers curled delicately toward the sky, the nails painted orange in honor of her last holiday.
Cold temperatures had reduced the stench of death, but it was still there — a little stronger than your average roadkill, which the Salado Inn residents had probably mistaken it for.
“You son of a bitch,” I said.
“I swear,” Frank said. “I wouldn’t—”