Sprayed Stiff (14 page)

Tessa turned to me and whispered, “If you need any representation during this fiasco with the Barristers, let me know. We’ll work out a babysitting trade.”

Ugh. From the way the kids had acted tonight, I thought I’d rather go to jail. Still, I smiled and thanked her. “I almost needed you yesterday about dawn, but they let me go without arraigning me.”

“Yes, Rick tells me you have a cop on your side. He says he reminds him of Toby Keith. Lucky you.”

“Why don’t I feel lucky?” I asked.

“Forget feeling lucky. How about getting lucky?” Trudy threw into the backseat without missing a beat in her own conversation. Elephant ears. Jon slipped me an embarrassed look. What did
he
have to be embarrassed about? Humph.

Tessa smiled indulgently but, ever serious about business, returned to her subject. “Well, it’s good to have friends in the local cops, but before this Barrister affair is done, you may need more than just the guys in blue.”

“Why is that?”

“Rumors. The legal community is a big hotbed of gossip, and the hottest bed lately is our boy Percy’s.”

I waved off her intensity. “Oh, I know all about the girlfriend.”

“Which one?” Tessa asked.

“Is there more than one current one?”

“I don’t know about that, just that he’s never at a loss for young female companionship, thanks to the liberal use of his credit card on their behalf. That’s not the gossip, though.”

“What is, then?”

“That Percy has been laundering money for some wealthy Mexican ‘businessmen,’ and that the feds just started breathing down Percy’s neck about the funny money.”

“What kind of businessmen?”

Tessa took off her glasses and pinned me with her most serious look, the one she reserved for making a point with jurors. “Drug kingpins.”

Gulp.

“W
HICH FEDS ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?”

Tessa shrugged. “There are as many stories as there are lawyers in San Antonio. Some say the IRS got suspicious and is leaning on Percy for unorthodox income. I’ve heard the DEA is setting up some kind of sting to catch the kingpins. Then there’s the one about the FBI putting undercover people in Percy’s office building. All or none may be true.”

That reminded me about Annette’s mention of Percy using the IRS to get rid of his old girlfriends. At the time I’d thought it a rather callous joke, but maybe the IRS was protecting him in exchange for something he was doing for them. I wondered again about Annette’s motivation in coming to me with all her information. Was she an undercover federal agent? Was she using me to feed the cops false tidbits to send them on wild-goose chases, or to get me to nose around the investigation more for some hidden purpose? Or did she want to tell someone what she knew in case something happened to her—and why would she think something would? Or maybe she was on the take from the drug kingpins and…

Okay, this speculation was getting way too complicated for me. After all, I couldn’t even keep up with an innocent white lie or two.

I asked Tessa if she minded if I shared her gossip with the local authorities.

“Go ahead, I’ll even talk to them, but what I know is twentieth-hand at best and may be completely spurious. Percy is not the favorite of the bar.”

I extracted my cell phone and dialed Scythe. Amazingly, he picked up on the first ring. He never does that.

“Hey, Bozo. You know, I’ve been thinking that that makeup and wig paired with just the right bra and panties might be kind of a turn-on.”

“Charmer, with that kind of comment, you’ll be dead before you ever see your deal.”

Trudy, talking a mile a minute about drapery fabric, still managed to hear that. She spun around and wiggled her eyebrows at me. Jon’s forehead wrinkled in concern. Geez, love affair by committee. I guess I should invite them on our next date.

“Reyn, threatening cops is a felony,” Tessa whispered.

Ack, I was surrounded by a pack of well-intentioned busybodies.

Scythe’s baritone dropped and smoothed around the edges. “Gosh, and here I thought that telephoto lens had piqued your curiosity….”

I squirmed in my seat. I hated that he could do that long-distance. Trudy grinned. Jon looked like he might start taking notes. Rick increased the volume of his song right at the part about midnight visits from the police.

I cleared my throat and raised my voice. “I’m calling about some important business.”

“I thought what we were talking about was important.”

Hmm. “I just heard some gossip about Percy Barrister I thought you should be privy to.”

“Shoot.”

I recounted what Tessa had told me. He asked to speak to her. From her side of the conversation, it sounded like this gossip was news to Scythe. After a few moments, she passed the phone back to me, covering the mouthpiece as she did so. “He told me to try to talk you into taking a trip to the Bahamas for a few weeks.”

Getting me out of the way, no doubt, so he and Zena could live happily ever after. I bet she’d wear the clown getup with a push-up and a thong. Humph. “I’m not going to the Bahamas or anywhere,” I informed him as I took the phone back.

“That’s too bad. I’d hate to lock you up in jail again.”

“Why would you do that?”

There was a long stretch of silence in which I thought I’d lost his signal. Finally, he blew out what sounded like a sigh. “Never mind, you’re hopelessly hardheaded.”

“I prefer to think of it as persistent and committed.”

“You need to
be
committed.”

“Well, I’m so glad I took the time out of my busy evening to help with the investigation.”

“Look, Reyn, all gossip holds a grain of truth. Where the grain is here, we don’t know. Is it federal involvement? Is it drug kingpins? It could be that Percy is doing the taxes for a pharmaceutical salesman who is being audited by the IRS, and it got blown into these other stories by the fact that his wife was unrelatedly murdered. You see what I’m getting at? I am concerned that I hadn’t heard this before. But, frankly, if the feds are already investigating, they might not tell us. They’d let us turn over the rocks for them and see what crawled out. They are not famous for their cooperation with us locals.”

“So, thanks for nothing, is what you are saying.”

There was another long pause during which I felt him grappling to control his temper. I got another sigh in my ear. “I like having the heads-up, but it may come to nothing, is what I am saying. And if drugs, Mexican ‘businessmen,’ and the feds are involved, I like it even less that
you
are involved. All three are dangerous. So get uninvolved.”

“Control freak,” I muttered. Trudy shot me a glare. Tessa shook her head. Jon got a cat-that-got-the-canary look. What was that about?

“By the way, where are you going?” Scythe asked.

“How do you know I’m going somewhere?” I responded suspiciously.

“You’re calling me from your cell phone, and you said you were in the middle of a busy evening. What are you so busy with tonight, Reyn?”

“I have a date.” I punched the connection into oblivion. Take that, bossy britches.

I hadn’t been to Sixth Street in nearly ten years and things had changed. Back when the drinking age was still eighteen in Texas, students from the relatively liberal University of Texas filled not only the sidewalks but the street itself, drifting from club to club, serenaded by street musicians, sidewalk circus acts, and palm readers. Live bands played next door to each other, sending their music out into the crowded streets. Rock mixed with country, jazz, and reggae floated together on the humid night air that was laced with beer and tequila fumes. You could elbow your way into a club, but half the party took place on the asphalt outside. It was a Lone Star Mardi Gras every night. When the state legislature upped the legal age to twenty-one, more than half the nightly crowd had to go underground with their partying, so Sixth Street grew up. Downtown Austin was still a music mecca, just not such a wildly drunken one. Cars could actually get down Sixth Street on a Saturday night now, and even though the sidewalks were crowded, it was nowhere near the chaos of the eighties and early nineties.

We parked the eggplant and walked three blocks to Bangers. I kept looking behind us. For some reason, I was on edge. It was Scythe’s fault. He’d made me paranoid about bogeymen. I brushed it off in irritation. I refused to be manipulated. I focused ahead of me instead and smiled. Tessa and Rick held hands and shared a tender look. They were an odd pair, he tall and gawky, she short and curvy. But they weren’t nearly as odd as Trudy and Mario—beauty and the beast—who were nuzzling each other, as usual unable to keep their hands off each other. If you wanted proof that love was blind, you needed to look no further than my best friend and her husband. They had convinced me the whole love thing was purely chemically controlled—we were at the mercy of our pheromones. That made me think of Scythe again, an arrogant asshole if there ever was one and still he could make me wriggle just by his tone on the phone.

I was an adult, lots older than either of these pairs of friends when they married. I could overcome some silly hormonal attraction. I needed to find a mate who would be a good life partner, not some package of testosterone who made me hot every now and then and made me mad more often than not.

I smiled at Jon, who walked next to me. With his dark soulful eyes, black wavy hair, and chiseled features, he was handsome and good-hearted, a young man who would make some woman a wonderful, attentive husband. I reviewed the list of my available friends and clients. I thought of a couple of possibilities, including Jessica (if she ever got over her Bizkit obsession), and chastised myself for not inviting one of them to join us. I made a mental note to give him their phone numbers before the night was over.

A pack of giants in letter jackets stumbled out of the club to our right, and Jon grabbed my waist to save me from being trampled. Rick turned around up ahead and motioned us to hurry. He’d found Bangers. We gathered out front. The pounding music was deafening, even outside the door. I winced and wondered if whatever we found out was going to be worth permanent damage to my eardrums.

Rick leaned toward us and shouted, “The manager was supposed to save us a table. We’ll get settled, then I’ll go looking for him.”

We all acquiesced and followed him into the throng of thong-wearing, gyrating bodies. Jon put his arm proprietarily around me as he forged a path behind Rick. A band was onstage, and I scanned the members for a dark-haired, pale, skinny bassist. Bingo. It was hard to tell about the old-world manners thing right now, however, as he was throwing his head around like he was having convulsions, his chin-length, sweaty locks slapping across his face. The throbbing, unintelligible music gave me a headache, but everyone around us seemed to like it. Mario and Trudy detoured to the dance floor while Tessa and I sat down at a table that said
RESERVED
. Rick waved at us and wandered off toward the bar. Jon went with him, but returned after a few moments with a vodka gimlet for Tessa and a glass of white wine for me.

“It’s pinot grigio. I remembered you liked it.” There was something stray-puppyish about Jon that was alternately endearing and irritating. I swear, was I never satisfied—criticizing one guy for being too macho, another for being too cloying? Jon could be forgiven, as he was just acting with respect for his elders. Even though I was only seven years older than he was, he was like my nephew.

“Thank you.” I nodded at his glass of clear liquid. “What are you having?”

“Club soda. I told Rick I’d drive home.”

“Good Boy Scout,” Tessa said in the dry way she sometimes had. I gave her a double take, still not sure from her poker face whether that was slightly facetious or not. Jon grinned winsomely, apparently taking it as a compliment.

“Wretched Roadkill!” the man Rick had been talking to shouted with a sweep of his arm as he jumped onstage and grabbed the microphone from the lead screecher. “Let’s hear it for our Austin boys made good!!! They opened for Limp Bizkit just a few weeks ago, and now they’re back at their home bar. Do you know how lucky you are?”

The earsplitting answer was almost more than I could take. I put my hands over my ears. Wretched Roadkill? What the hell kind of name was that? I began to rethink my dismissal of a Wilma suicide. If Lexa was involved with the bassist for a band with that horrid a name, Wilma might very well have ended it all before he became part of the hallowed Barrister family.

Nah. I looked at the sweaty, scraggly half-dozen waving at the crowd. She’d be more likely to blow away this whole Black Bart bunch than herself. I thought they wore the color of night to match the circles under their eyes. What would cause those? Living like vampires and singing like dying dogs?

These were all burning questions I wanted to ask Tessa, Trudy, or Mario but it was too damned loud. The screeches had turned into a chant for the name of a song that sounded like “Drag Me Bloody, Love Me Dead.” Ack. I thought we’d found a whole new group of murder suspects. What was Lexa thinking? Maybe Jessica was wrong. Maybe that wasn’t Lexa she’d talked to backstage. Maybe the party animal had nipped into the mushrooms and had been hallucinating.

I hoped so.

Wretched Roadkill started the bloody, dead song. Mario dragged Trude back on the dance floor. Rick finished up with the manager and returned to our table. “Aaron wanted to make clear that there are a lot of music groupies in Austin, the girls come and go, so he can’t be sure. But he did admit that the bassist of Wretched Roadkill has kept one girl in particular around since they started playing here a year ago. The girl matches Lexa’s description.”

My heart fell. “Is she here tonight?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“Can I talk to Aaron?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Reyn,” Jon piped up at my left shoulder. Who asked him?

Rick shook his head anyway. “He doesn’t want to get involved. He said after the band goes offstage, I can slip back there and check things out.”

“Was the band playing two nights ago?”

“Saturday night? You bet. They started at ten o’clock. And, I asked, all members of the band played all night.”

I relaxed a little in relief. It didn’t eliminate Lexa’s boyfriend. After all, a haul-ass drive from Austin to San Antonio could be done in an hour, but it sure would have cut it close. “What’s the bassist’s name?”

The left side of Rick’s mouth quirked in a half grin. “He goes by Asphalt.”

“No way.” I laughed.

“It’s better than Corpse,” Tessa offered straight-faced as she sipped her vodka gimlet.

Jon just shook his head as if he was saddened by the creeps of the world in general. Or maybe he was in shock—after all, the boy had spent his entire life in private schools, raised as the son of a U.S. senator. Maybe this dark side was too much to take. If he stuck with me, he’d see more than he knew inside a week.

My throat was beginning to feel raw from having to shout over the music. “How ’bout I go with you to check things out?”