The Devil Went Down to Austin (23 page)

I found no new presents on the front porch, no signs that anyone had tried to get past my newly installed lock. The minicam timer I'd placed on the door—set for motiondetection, three freezeframe shots per hit—had not been triggered.

Then I looked down toward the water.

Docked at Jimmy's pier was a white and red Supra Conbrio—a twoseater racing boat, sleek and fast, a midlife crisis killer.

Ruby McBride was sitting on the pier, her back to the shore.

I thought for a few heartbeats, then went inside the dome and pulled two beers from the fridge. Robert Johnson circled my feet, sniffing, murring. He seemed to approve of my visit to Miata the Doberman. I took my two beers outside and made my way down to the water.

Ruby didn't turn when I walked up. She was sitting crosslegged, and in her lap was one of Jimmy's unfired pots—a large eggshaped vase Ruby must've pulled from the storage shelf by the new kiln.

"We need to coordinate our plans better," I told her.

She glanced up, squinting into the sunlight. "How's that?"

"I just came from your place."

"I suppose I should've expected that."

Her tennis shoes were wet, her cotton pants rolled up midcalf. She wore a onepiece bathing suit for a top, her bare back a tan expanse of freckles.

"Well," she said. "Despite our best efforts, we seem to have found one another. You wanted to tell me something?"

"At the risk of being oldfashioned, ladies first."

I offered her one of the beers.

"I shouldn't have alcohol," she mused. "Not good with my medication."

But she took the longneck.

"I phoned Garrett an hour ago," she said. "I tried to apologize for the sellout, the way things ended. Like most of my conversations with Garrett, it didn't work out the way I planned. Left me feeling like crap."

"Why apologize?"

She shot me an angry look. "You think I don't know how he felt about the company?"

"Five days ago, I didn't know you existed. Today I found out you and Garrett go back twenty years. I don't know what to think."

The wind picked up, carrying the smells of rotting wooden planks, crayfish, and cedar.

Ruby balanced her beer bottle on the wet toe of her shoe, turned it around in a pirouette. "I was a sophomore in college, Tres. Your brother was one of those people you meet and you think, 'He's going to be important. He's going to rise above.' Believe me, when you come from a family like mine, you appreciate potential. You don't see much of it. Garrett and I dated for six months. We talked about marriage the way stupid college kids talk—like you can pick out the rest of your life delistyle from the undergrad catalogue. Then Garrett had his accident."

She was silent, watching the water.

"I know it shouldn't have mattered. I know he was still Garrett. But physically, I couldn't deal with it. The next time I saw him was five years later, a chance meeting. And Garrett was the decent one. He said he forgave me. I guess I believed what I needed to believe."

"You really thought you didn't hurt him?"

A turkey buzzard hovered above us, probably betting that two humans dumb enough to stand outside in this heat wouldn't last for long.

"When Jimmy and I got engaged," Ruby said, "Garrett pulled me aside, told me I was making a mistake. That was the first time I realized how hurt he was. When things started going bad between

Jimmy and me, Garrett just got more dismal. It became impossible for the three of us to work together. Tres, I thought I was doing something good, getting Garrett involved in the startup. I thought I was making amends."

This struck me as either the most brazen lie or the most pathetically sad truth I'd ever heard.

"You signed away the company," I told her. "If you were trying to make amends, you failed spectacularly."

She glared at me. "Yesterday we were in agreement. Now I'm a traitor? "

"Yesterday I didn't know you'd been cruising the Farallons with Matthew Pena. I didn't know about the back door in the software."

My words hit her like an Arctic front. She laced her fingers around her beer bottle, looked out at the lake long enough to count every buoy in the boating lane.

"You don't understand."

"You wanted to sell from the beginning. You said yourself—it was getting impossible for you to work with Garrett and Jimmy. When your partners wouldn't go along with the sale, you helped Pena force the situation. Maybe you didn't realize how zealous he would be."

"You're suggesting I would sabotage my own company?"

"How'd you work it, Ruby? What did Pena promise you—just extra money?"

Her eyes zigged their way down from my face to my chest. Her anger seemed to be collapsing from the inside. "Just extra money. That's good, Tres."

"Pena doesn't quit when he's won," I warned her. "He won't leave you alone. If you come clean, maybe I can help."

She shook her head. "You're cute, and all, Tres. But sorry—I don't do the damselindistress routine. There's nothing going on I can't handle."

A speedboat went by, far out in the channel. I watched its line of wake roll toward us, hundreds of yards, until it broke against the shore, lifting Ruby's red racing boat in a gentle swell.

"If everything's so great," I said, "why are you here?"

Ruby absently swatted a mosquito from in front of her eyes. "I couldn't apologize to Garrett, so I thought I would apologize to you."

"Nice try."

Her smile was fragile, covering a world of fear.

The scary thing was that despite everything I suspected about her collaborating with Pena, despite the fact that her exhusband had been murdered, despite the fact that she was quite possibly the worst thing that ever happened to my brother with the exception of the northbound train—I found myself wanting to help her.

In part, I wanted to undermine Pena, to prove to myself that his influence over people wasn't total. But my instinct to help Ruby went deeper than that.

I felt like out of the three people who'd created Techsan, I might relate to Ruby the best. The past weighed on her as heavily as it weighed on Garrett or Jimmy, and yet she'd done her best to get out from under the McBride legacy—to make her marina business pay off, to build her tower. I couldn't help admiring that, and I couldn't blame her for getting disillusioned with Jimmy and Garrett, either. I had a growing suspicion that if there were one person in the world I might be able to talk to honestly about my brother, it would be Ruby McBride.

"When you came here on Sunday," I said, "you were looking through Jimmy's things.

You picked out Clara's picture, her journal."

"I wanted to understand the Other Woman."

"You wanted to know why Jimmy was obsessed with his mother's past."

Ruby lifted the unfired pot, cradled it in her lap. "With Jimmy—there was always something going on that he didn't share, always something else taking up his thoughts, even when he was working nineteen hours a day on Techsan. That's what attracted me to him. When you have ninety percent of someone's attention—I suppose it drove me crazy, not knowing where that other ten percent was focused."

"And did you find out?"

She shook her head. Her eyes were getting teary, red. "It's the goddamn Elavil, okay?

It's not me. The alcohol . . ."

"Don't protect Matthew Pena, Ruby. He's not worth it."

She looked down at the vase—the smooth surface, muddy with unfired glaze, the ribbed interior made by Jimmy's fingers. "You still think he murdered Jimmy. You think I helped."

She waited for me to respond. I didn't.

I was thinking about leaving, heading back up to the dome for a bitter, silent supper with my cat, when Ruby said, "You really want to believe someone else killed Jimmy.

Someone besides Garrett."

"Don't you?"

She looked at me defiantly. "Then where'd they go afterward?"

"You mean to get away."

"You came rushing down from the house, right? You would've heard a boat. Coming down here, so soon after the shots, you would've run smack into the killer if he'd tried to get away up the road. The only person you saw was Garrett."

"The shoreline," I said. And then, realizing it only as I said it: "There's an access road about two hundred yards south. I passed the entrance driving up."

"Wouldn't the police have scoured that entire area?"

"Probably not."

Ruby lifted her eyebrows in challenge. "I think you owe me a walk."

She gave me her hand. I pulled her up.

There wasn't a trail to speak of, but the terrain was fairly easy. We hiked through agarita bushes, pushed past live oak saplings. Limestone outcroppings made a ridge along the water, in one place high enough to be a diving spot. The remnants of a fraying rope swing hung from the branch of a massive water cypress. Instead of evoking childhood memories, it just reminded me of a lynching tree.

I wasn't sure what we were looking for, and nothing screamed "clue."

There was only the glint of water, the ground thickly littered with cedar needles and leaves.

By the time we got within sight of the access road, we were no wiser, no cooler, and I was down several quarts of blood from the chiggers and ticks and mosquitoes.

Ruby stopped in front of me, turned. "Nothing," she decided.

I was about to agree with her when I caught myself staring at the water. The ground at my feet was littered with something besides cedar needles—a large scatter of sunflower seed shells.

I crouched down.

"What?" Ruby asked.

I looked back toward Jimmy's house. The shore curved between here and there, with a clear line of sight along the cove. You could

see the kiln, the dock, Ruby's sleek Conbrio. You could easily stand here in the woods at night, undisturbed, and munch sunflower seeds while you watched Jimmy's dock.

Perhaps you could study a murder scene you'd just left, like a painter standing back from his canvas. And if you were so inclined, you could discard a piece of evidence without much worry that it would ever be found.

I looked over the edge of the limestone ridge. The water rippled two feet below. It was shallow here, and one glint under the surface was a little brighter than the rest.

Sheer luck. It's scary how often it boils down to that. But there I was looking at it from the only right angle to see it—a .380 calibre brass casing in the water, flashing like a coin in a fountain.

I met Vic Lopez the next morning after my UT class. I had never wanted to get through a discussion of Gawain and the Green Knight with more haste.

The state crime lab was an unassuming yellow brick box wedged between two warehouses at the back of the Department of Public Safety complex. Black and white state trooper units lined the street. In the visitors' lot, Lopez sat on a loading bay between two stacks of crates, waiting for me.

He slid down from his perch. "You have any idea how many markers this cost me?

Putting my neck on the line to get evidence processed on a day's notice? It's goddamn irregular, man."

Lopez wore his normal smile, but his tone had an edge that told me joviality was not to be reciprocated.

"You drop the names I gave you?"

Lopez put his finger on my chest. "IRREGULAR. Word gets around I'm running to DPS 'cause some private dick found a piece of brass in the lake—I'm going to be laughed out of the deputies' quilting club."

"But if I'm right . . ."

He sighed, checked his watch. "Ten minutes. And these people are serious about appointment times."

He leaned back against the loading bay, fished a pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket.

"You interviewed Garrett yesterday?" I asked.

"We had a friendly conversation. Hard not to be friendly, with Miss Lee present. I heard Matthew Pena learned that lesson."

"You still haven't filed charges."

Lopez plucked out a cigarette, pointed it at me. "I only smoke when I'm pissed off. Just so you feel honoured."

"You're waiting for ballistics on the casing."

He checked his watch again. "I told my sergeant to be here at 11:15. He wants to observe the test himself."

"You told me it was at eleven o'clock."

"I got to have time to look first, don't I?"

"And I'm irregular."

"And a bad influence. Did I mention that?" He sparked a flame from his lighter. "Your friend died early Friday A.M. This is Tuesday. Five days is a hell of a long time in homicide, you know that? They started throwing me new cases yesterday—a couple of drownings. A momandpop shooting. You think my sergeant likes me churning a case from last week?"

"That piece of brass was over a hundred yards down the shore, Vic—down a rocky path."

"We've got your word for that."

"And Ruby McBride's. You're going to tell me Garrett rolled down the shoreline in his wheelchair?"

"As I remember, you were at the lake that night, too."

"If you really thought I'd planted evidence, we wouldn't be here now."

He tried his cigarette, didn't seem to like the flavour much. "What I think, Jimmy's killer met him at the water that night. The killer was able to drug him—maybe a laced beer, some kind of drink. That meant spending some time together, talking in the truck for more than a few minutes. Drugs start to kick in, Jimmy starts to fade. Killer took a .380, put the muzzle about two inches from Jimmy's head, and told him goodbye. It was intimate, Navarre. Like an old friend. You want to tell me Matthew Pena could pull that off, get that close to Jimmy Doebler?"

I looked at the lines of highway patrol cars.

The hell of it was, I agreed with Lopez. The setup of the crime was too personal.

I told Lopez about Jimmy's call to Dwight Hayes the week before he died. I told him about Ruby, the strong possibility that she'd help Matthew Pena sabotage her own company for a sellout.

Lopez slid his lighter into his pants pocket. "And she just happened to walk with you straight to the place where you just happened to find this casing."

"I wasn't implying—"

"Like hell you weren't," Lopez said. I could almost see the homicide detective gears turning in his head. "Sounds like I should pay another visit to Ms. McBride."