The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan

THE LAST KING OF TEXAS

RICK RIORDAN
The
third book in the Tres Navarre series

Copyright © 2000 by Rick Riordan.

ISBN 0-553-57991-6

To Lyn Belisle, first editor and fan,
Renaissance woman, damned good sport,
and
Rick Riordan,
Sr., who knows all the rides

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to
the people who helped with the research for this book — Dr. 
Jeanne Reesman, head of the English division at the University of
Texas at San  Antonio; Lieutenant Pefia, supervisor of criminal
investigations for the UTSA  campus police; Officer Sandy Peres
and Sergeant Cunaya of the San Antonio  Police Department media
relations office; Lieutenant Quintanilla, commander of  the SAPD
homicide division; Corporal Mac McCully and Sergeant Marin of the 
Bexar County Sheriff's Department; Ben and Jim Glusing for the
continued use  of a fine ranch in Sabinal; Rick Riordan, Sr.,
for the family history; Dr. John  Klahn and Dr. Roderick Haff
for medical information. Special thanks to Bexar  County
Sheriff's Deputy Don Falcon and Sergeants Eddie and Andrea Klauer of 
the SAPD, who helped shape this book more than a little. On-going
thanks to  Gina Maccoby and Kate Miciak for their support and
invaluable guidance, and to  Becky, Haley, and Patrick.

ONE

Dr. David Mitchell waved me toward the dead
professor's chair. "Try it out, son."

Mitchell and Detective DeLeon sat down on the
students' side of the desk, the safe side. I took the professor's
chair. It was padded in cushy black leather and smelled faintly of
sports cologne. Walnut armrests. Great back support.

Mitchell smiled. "Comfortable?"

"I'd be more so," I told him, "if the
last two people who sat here hadn't died."

Mitchell's smile thinned. He glanced at Detective
DeLeon, got no help there, then looked wearily around the office —
the cluttered bookshelves, file cabinets topped with dreadlocks of
dying pothos plants, the tattered Bayeux tapestry posters on the
walls. "Son, Dr. Haimer's death was a heart attack."

"After receiving death threats and being driven
out of the job," I recalled.

"And Haimer's successor?"

Detective DeLeon sat forward. "That was a .45,
Mr. Navarre."

When DeLeon moved, her blazer and skirt and silk
blouse shimmered in frosty shades of gray, all sharp creases and
angles. Her hair was cut in the same severe pattern, only black. Her
eyes glittered. The whole effect reminded me of one of those sleek,
fashionable Sub-Zero freezer units, petite size.

She tugged an incident report out of the folder in
her lap, passed me a color Polaroid of Dr. Aaron Brandon — the
University of Texas at San Antonio's new medievalist for one-half of
one glorious spring semester.

The photo showed a middle-aged Anglo man crumpled
like a marionette in front of a fireplace. Behind him, the limestone
mantel was smeared with red clawlike marks where the body had slid
into sitting position against the grate. The man's hands were
palms-up in his lap, supplicating. His blue eyes were open. He wore
khaki pants and his bare, chunky upper body was matted with blood and
curly black hair. Bored into his chest just above his nipples were
two tattered holes the size of flashlight handles.

I pushed the photo back toward DeLeon. "You
homicide investigators. Always so reassuring."

She smiled without warmth.

I looked at Mitchell. "You really expect me to
take the job?"

Mitchell shifted in his seat, looking everywhere
except at the photo of his former faculty member. He scratched one
triangular white sideburn. The poor guy had obviously gotten no sleep
in the last week. His suit jacket was rumpled. His rodentlike
features had lost their quickness. He looked infinitely older and
more grizzled than he had just six months ago, when he'd offered me
this same position for the first time.

It had been mid-October then. Dr. Theodore Haimer had
just been forced into retirement after his comments about "the
damn coddled Mexicans at UTSA" made the Express-News and
triggered an avalanche of student protests and hate mail the likes of
which the normally placid campus had never seen. Shortly afterward,
while the English division was still boxing up Haimer's books and
interviewing candidates for his job, the old man had been found at
home, his heart frozen like a chunk of quartz, his face buried in a
bowl of dry Apple Jacks. I'd decided against teaching at the time
because I'd been finishing my apprenticeship with Erainya Manos for a
private investigator's license. My mother, who'd arranged the first
interview with Mitchell, had not been thrilled. A nice safe job for
once, she'd pleaded. A chance to get back into academia.

Looking now at the photo of Aaron Brandon, who'd
taken the nice safe job instead of me, I thought maybe the whole
"Mother Knows Best" thing was overrated.

"We offered you this position last fall, Tres."
Mitchell tried to keep the petulance out of his voice, the
implication that I could've saved him a lot of trouble back in
October, maybe gotten myself killed right off the bat. "I think
you should reconsider."

I said, "A second chance."

"Absolutely."

"And you couldn't pay any reputable professor
enough money now." Mitchell's left eye twitched. "It's true
we need a person with very special qualifications. The fact that you,
ah, have another set of skills—"

"You can watch your ass," Detective DeLeon
translated. "Maybe avoid making yourself corpse number three
until we make an arrest." I was loving this woman.

I swiveled in Aaron Brandon's chair and gazed out the
window. A couple of pigeons roosted on the ledge outside the glass.
Beyond, the view of the UTSA quadrangle was obscured by the upper
branches of a mesquite, shining with new margarita-green foliage.
Through the leaves I could see the walls of the Behavioral Sciences
Building next door, the small red and blue shapes of students making
their way up and down steps in the central courtyard, across wide
grassy spaces and concrete walkways.

Icicle-blue sky, temperature in the low eighties.
Your basic perfect Texas spring day outside your basic perfect campus
office. It was a view Dr. Haimer had earned through twenty years of
tenure. A view Aaron Brandon had enjoyed for less than ninety days.

I turned back to the dead man's office.

Yellow loops of leftover crime-scene tape were
stuffed into the waist-high metal trash can between Brandon's desk
and the window. On the corner of the desk sat a pile of ungraded
essays from the undergraduate Chaucer seminar. Next to that was a
silver-framed photo of the professor with a very pretty Latina woman
and a child, maybe three years old. They were all standing in front
of an old-fashioned merry-go-round. The little boy had Brandon's blue
eyes and the woman's smile and reddish-brown hair.

Next to the photo were the death threats — a neat
stack of seven white business envelopes computer-printed in Chicago
12-point, each containing one page of well-written, grammatically
correct venom. Each threat was unsigned. The first was addressed to
Theodore Haimer, the following six to Aaron Brandon. One dated two
weeks ago promised a pipe bomb. One dated a week before that promised
a knife in Brandon's back as a symbol of how the Latino community
felt about the Establishment replacing one white racist with another.
The campus had been swept and no bombs had been found; no knives had
been forthcoming. None of the letters said anything about shooting
Brandon at home in the chest with a .45.

"You have leads?" I asked DeLeon.

She gave me the Sub-Zero smile. "You know
Sergeant Schaeffer, Mr. Navarre?"

I said, "Whoops."

Gene Schaeffer had been a detective in homicide until
recently, when he'd accepted a transfer promotion to vice. Sometimes
Schaeffer and I were friends. More often, like whenever I needed
something from him, Schaeffer wanted to kill me.

"The sergeant warned me about you," DeLeon
confirmed. "Something about your father being a retired captain
— you feeling you had special privileges."

"Bexar County Sheriff," I corrected. "Dead,
not retired."

"You've got no special privileges with me, Mr.
Navarre. Whatever else you do, you're going to stay out of my
investigation."

"And if the person or persons who killed Brandon
decides I'm Anglo racist oppressor number three?"

DeLeon smiled a little more genuinely. I think the
idea appealed to her. "You cover your ass until we get it
straightened out. You can do that, right?"

How to say no to a job offer. Let me count the ways.

"I'd have to talk with my employer—"

"Erainya Manos," Dr. Mitchell interrupted.
"We've already done that."

I stared at him.

"The provost is more than agreeable to retaining
Ms. Manos' services," Mitchell said wearily, like he'd already
spent too much time haggling that point. "While you're teaching
for us, Ms. Manos will be finding out what she can about the hate
mail, assessing potential continued threats to the faculty."

"You're wasting your money," DeLeon told
him.

Mitchell continued as if she hadn't spoken. "The
campus attorney's office has employed private investigation firms
before. Confidence-building measure. Ms. Manos considered the
contract a more-than-fair trade for sharing your time with us, son."

"I bet."

I looked at DeLeon.

She shrugged. "Say no if you want, Mr. Navarre.
I've got no interest in your P.I. business. I'm simply not opposed to
the campus hiring somebody who can stay alive for longer than three
months."

I gave her a 'GeeThanks' smile.

I sat back in the late Aaron Brandon's chair,
understanding now why Erainya Manos had cheerily let me take the
morning off. You have to cherish those open employer-employee
relationships.

Mitchell was about to say something more when there
was a knock on the office door.

A large young man leaned into the room, checked us
all out, focused in on me, then wedged a plastic bin of mail through
the doorway.

"You're the replacement," he said to me.
"Thought so."

I'm of the opinion that you can categorize just about
anybody by the type of vegetable their clone would've grown from in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The guy in the doorway was definitely
a radish. His skin was composed of alternate white and ruddy
splotches and gnarled with old acne scars. On top of his head was a
small sprig of bleached hair that matched the white rooty whiskers on
his chin. His upper body sagged over his belt in generous slabs of
red polo-shirted flesh. His face had upwardly smeared features —
lips, nose, eyebrows. They did not beckon with intelligence.

"Gregory," Professor Mitchell sighed. "Not
now."

Gregory pushed his way farther into the office. He
balanced his mail bin on his belly and stared at me expectantly. "You
have my essay?"

"Gregory, this isn't the time," Mitchell
insisted.

Gregory grunted. "I told Brandon, I said, 'Man,
some people are really late with the grading but you take the cake.
You ever want your mail again you get me my essay back.' That's what
I told him. You got it graded yet?"

I smiled.

Gregory didn't smile back. His eyes seemed out of
focus. Maybe he wasn't talking to me at all. Maybe he was talking to
the pothos plants.

"I don't have your essay," I said.

"Its the one on the werewolf," he insisted.
The mail bin sagged against his side. I'd disappointed him. "The
Marie de France
dit
."

"Bisclavret," I guessed.

"Yeah." Unfocused light twinkled in his
eyes. Had I read the essay after all? Had the pothos read it?

"Bisclavret's a
lai
,"
I said. "A long narrative poem.
Dits
are shorter, like fables. The essay's not graded and I may not be the
one grading it, Gregory."