"Is it still around?"
"What?"
"Espejo Verde."
"The building is. Sterne Foods shuttered it, put a cyclone fence around it and it stands to this day on the river in Baja King William. The area is pretty hip now, and I'm sure a lot of people would like trying to run a restaurant there. But the Sternes won't sell."
"Could you tell me where it is?" Tess said. "I'd like to go see it."
"What's the point?"
"I don't know. Just morbid curiosity, I guess." And a hunch Emmie Sterne might be staying there. She had to be somewhere.
"C'mon, don't waste your time. Have another drink, order an entree."
"I'm not hungry."
"Then let me have another drink, and my chalupa, and we'll go."
"We'll?"
A. J. leaned over the table, his eyes in a squint so narrow they might as well be closed. "Look, stop fucking with me. There's a rumor going around town that Emmie Sterne is a big girl in big trouble these days. Unfortunately, the cops aren't talking. The DA's office also has a black-out on information. But something happened over the weekend. I know, because a cop got disciplined for making a bad mistake, and the union rep is just busting to tell me about it, how unfair it was, and what an asshole Al Guzman is, how he's going for this guy's balls to cover his own ass. Only he says he can't, until next week."
That time frame again. "I told you, it's no big deal, a bad debt, nothing more. After hearing all this, I'll probably tell my client to forget it."
"Then there's no problem if I want to accompany you on your little sight-seeing trip."
Tess was saved from answering by a brief commotion on one of the bridges spanning the narrow river. A man and a woman-tourist types, even Tess's inexperienced eyes had learned to pick them out here-were arguing heatedly. Drunkenly, too, judging by their liquid posture. The words were inaudible from this distance, but the body language spoke volumes. Arms windmilled, middle fingers saluted. Tess tensed up, ready to act if the man shoved or hit the woman. Her peculiar brand of sexism also dictated that she would never sit idly by when a man struck a woman.
The woman grabbed a fistful of the man's hair. He pushed her away, clambered onto the railing.
"I'd die for you, that's how much I love you," he screamed at the woman. "I'd fucking die for you."
And he jumped. The woman screamed, but everyone else seemed surprisingly blasé. It turned out the water was not even chest deep and the man bounced to the surface, stunned and sputtering. "Neeeeeeeeeeeil!" the woman screamed, and jumped in after him. They embraced in the water until a passing tourist boat fished them out. Just another beautiful love story.
"He's lucky we had some rain this fall," A. J. observed, helping himself to another chip, double-dipping yet again. "Otherwise, they'd both have broken their legs. Want another drink?"
"We already have a second round coming."
"I believe in planning ahead."
Espejo Verde. The Green Mirror. Tess had expected something fancier than this plain, dull green cinderblock building next to a muddy-brown river. Especially after seeing the other side of the King William neighborhood, which was full of restored Victorian mansions that almost lived up to A. J.'s rhapsodic descriptions. This area below Alamo Street-Baja King William, A. J. kept calling it-had some nice houses, too. In particular, she liked the purple one with the pink porch, which A. J. said had the local historical society up in arms. But Espejo Verde, even in its glory days, had been plain at best.
"What was the big attraction?" she asked.
"I always heard it was the food. Authentic Mexican, Mayan dishes like cochinita pibil. And Lollie Sterne. She was one of those people who made a party wherever she went. People liked to be around her."
Tess got out of A. J.'s car, an old Datsun that, in the tradition of reporters' cars everywhere, was a rolling garbage can. The restaurant's windows were literally shuttered, the patio ceiling had been culled of its fans-by scavengers who left behind ragged wires, little snakes hanging overhead. But there was no graffiti, and few other signs that anyone had dared to tamper here. It wasn't a place where one would trespass lightly. She imagined the neighborhood children, the stories they must tell each other about the ghosts that roam the grounds at Espejo Verde. Did they hold their breaths when they ran past, or was there some other delightful, shivery ritual to keep its evil spirits at bay?
The fence was padlocked, but Tess twisted the Master Lock and it came open in her hands. Someone had been here and closed the lock without pressing it down, so it only looked as if the chain was fastened.
"That's trespassing," A. J. said uneasily, as she opened the gate, which creaked in appropriate horror-movie fashion. But the sky was bright, the street was busy. What harm could really come to them here?
"I'm not a reporter, I don't have to follow the rules. Look-the door lock's rusted off."
After a moment of hesitation, A. J. pushed ahead of her into the old restaurant. The first things they saw were their own wavy images, reflected in a huge funhouse mirror, its surface cracked and speckled, its verdigris frame caked in dust. The Green Mirror, the restaurant's namesake. Beyond it, the room was musty and dark, with a strong smell of decay to it, but surely that was just her overactive imagination. Tess studied the empty space, trying to envision a two-year-old girl playing among three corpses until she was smeared with blood. She saw Guzman, a young patrolman when he had walked in here twenty-one years ago, and she almost felt some empathy for him. His face had probably been clean-shaven then, his stomach not so soft, his mouth not so sad. No one was ever tough enough to see something like that.
But the baby had been in her playpen, off the kitchen. How had she gotten there? Who would kill three people, only to hold a little girl in their bloodied arms, and put her to bed? What had Emmie seen, what might Emmie know? Was she on the run because she had killed someone, or because her tangled mind held the secrets to what had happened here? Recovered memory therapy was a fragile science, if a science at all. But Tess remembered things from when she was two. Okay, she remembered telling a dog to get out of their yard, but it was there, it had happened.
"She's not here," Tess said out loud. "The is the last place she would come."
"What are you talking about?" A. J. asked.
"Nothing."
He hadn't waited for answer, pushing through the old swinging door into the kitchen. He came back so fast that it was like watching a cartoon character getting caught in a revolving door, then spat out again.
"Don't," he said, holding up one hand to wave her away, while he held the other to his mouth, trying to swallow whatever had risen in his throat. Tess ignored him and tiptoed to the door, although she wasn't sure why she was worried about being overheard. She cracked it just enough to see the cowboy boots at the end of a long wooden table, the dark stain all around the body, an orange T-shirt with what appeared to be brownish splotches draped over a chair. There was something about the head, something odd-no, she wouldn't go any closer. She backed out of the room and went to sit on the floor next to A. J., who had lit a cigarette with fumbling hands, then appeared to have forgotten about it. It hung from his gaping mouth, his lips white, his face the same color as the margaritas he had been drinking.