Carolyn G. Hart_Henrie O_05 Read online

  One siren. Two. Another. A dissonant chorus rising and falling, warning, wailing.

  I flung away the light cover. I didn’t turn on the light, but groped my way to the balcony door. I unlocked it and stepped out. The gentle breeze was mild, rustling the glossy magnolia leaves of branches that spread not too far from me. Moonlight spangled the dark water.

  More sirens. Shouts. Calls. I strained to see. Although lamps illuminated patches below, most of the River Walk was in darkness. The cafés were closed. I knew it must be very late. The sounds came from around the bend, then I saw spotlights playing on the sides of an apartment building.

  A stentorian voice, amplified by a megaphone, intoned: “Stay calm. If your door is hot, go to your balcony and await instruction. If your door is cool, proceed to your nearest fire stairs and exit the building. Firemen are presently extinguishing a blaze which appears to be confined to the basement. Stay calm. If…”

  I covered my first fire for the Houston Post. I was a young reporter, not long out of J School, no seniority, so I was working the Christmas shift and that’s when a five-alarm fire broke out. I got my first Page One byline. I remembered jumping over snarled hoses and watching glass explode from the force of flames within and scribbling frantic notes and ignoring the burn of tears and rush of nausea as a wall collapsed on a crew. The memories ran like a subterranean river as I looked toward the lights flickering on shiny glass. But tonight there were no billows of gray smoke against the starry sky, no acrid smell biting into my throat and lungs and the breeze was coming my way, ruffling my hair, stirring the begonias in the pot—

  I gripped the iron railing, leaned forward. This balcony afforded a good view of the stone stairs that led down to the River Walk from La Mariposa. A lamppost shed a golden pool of radiance just past the steps. Movement caught my eye even though I was watching the lights around the bend. I jerked my eyes back to the scene just below me and recognized Rick’s tall, familiar figure, running hard. Then he was gone, pounding around the curve of the River Walk, heading for the site of the fire. Where had he come from? Tesoros or La Mariposa? And what was he doing at either at this time of night?

  I was pulling off my T-shirt and shorts, discarding it as I whirled into my room. I found a blouse and slacks, slipped into tennis shoes, and was on my way downstairs, my key in my pocket, my travel flash in my hand.

  I took the exit to the River Walk stairs and hurried down. I walked fast past Tesoros and a café and an empty stretch beneath a bridge. When I came around the bend, I saw across the river a milling crowd of tousled people scantily dressed in whatever they’d found to pull on hurriedly. A cordon of police kept the crowd back from the building. Firemen lugged hoses, mounted ladders, moved in orderly haste. The calm voice over the megaphone continued its exhortations. People streamed from a stairway, pouring out onto the sidewalk. I hurried up the wide stone steps to a footbridge. I stopped midway across the river and looked down, scanning the surging, nervous crowd.

  From my overlook, I saw them at the same time, Rick pushing his way toward the apartment house, struggling against the crowd, and Iris stumbling out from beneath the bridge, trying to shrug free of a tangled mass of cloth.

  “Help, help, please, help me.” Iris’s frantic voice cut above the melee of sounds. Or perhaps I heard because I was listening and Rick heard because it was the voice which mattered above all others to him.

  By the time I clattered down the stone steps to the River Walk, she was in his arms, clinging to him and sobbing. Her words were choked, her tone stricken. “They’re gone. Oh, God, Rick, I’m so sorry, they’re gone. I tried my best, but he got—”

  Rick saw me and clapped his hand firmly over her mouth. “Hush, Iris, hush. Mrs. Collins is here.” His tone was sharp. Then his fingers slipped up to smooth a tangle of hair away from her flushed face. “Are you all right? What happened?”

  She pulled away from him, stared at me. Tears streaked her face, her soft young lips trembled, then tears flooded her eyes and she turned again to cling to him. “I’m so sorry, Rick.”

  He bent his head, his lips against her ear. I couldn’t hear his whisper, but I didn’t need to. Whatever it was that had been taken, Iris wasn’t to reveal it to me.

  I did hear him say quietly, “Let’s walk this way,” and he led her away from the continuing bustle on the River Walk. He didn’t say anything to me, but I followed. When Rick and Iris reached the bridge, they climbed the stone steps. I was right behind them. Once on the other side of the river and around the bend, it was quiet, no sirens now, just an occasional rumble of sound and murmur of faraway voices. The River Walk was deserted here. In front of a closed café, Rick pulled out a chair from a wire table.

  Iris sat down gingerly.

  Rick and I saw her scraped and bloodied knees at the same time.

  “Oh, God.” He knelt beside her. “Are you hurt?”

  I found a handkerchief in my pocket, held it out to Iris.

  She waved it away. “It doesn’t matter. My knees sting, but I’m all right.”

  I glanced back toward the building, no longer spotted with light from the searchlights. Lights in apartments flickered on, off. “Looks like the residents are going back inside. What happened, Iris? Did the fire alarm go off?”

  She pressed fingertips against her temples. “God, it was so scary. The alarm jangled and buzzed and it was like waking up in a hornet’s nest. Then I heard the sirens. I grabbed”—she glanced toward me—“my backpack. I ran down the stairs and came out on the River Walk. People were yelling and shouting. I smelled something burning.” She looked at Rick, her face forlorn. “I thought the best thing to do was to come to you.”

  I, too, looked at Rick, but my gaze was puzzled. “Were you at Tesoros?”

  “No. I bunked in an extra room at La Mariposa.” He looked uncomfortable. “I thought I’d better stay close to Iris.”

  I wondered if my concern for Iris after our River Walk adventure accounted for his presence.

  Iris confirmed my guess. “Rick called this evening and told me he’d be at the inn. He said he’d keep his cell phone on. But I didn’t bring mine downstairs with me.”

  No, she’d concentrated on saving the backpack.

  Iris shivered. “When I got downstairs, I thought I’d hurry to La Mariposa and find him. When I went under the bridge, I heard someone coming up behind me, running. I thought someone else wanted to get away from the fire and the noise. It was dark under the bridge and all of a sudden I was covered up, a blanket or something like that. I struggled, but somebody pinned my arms against my sides and yanked at the backpack and then it came loose. I tried to scream but the blanket was in my face, against my mouth. By the time I pulled it off, no one was there.” Her hands dropped to the table. She clasped them tightly together to try and stop their trembling.

  “You never saw anyone?” I asked, but I knew the answer before she shook her head.

  Rick reached out, took her shaking hands in his. “I’m sorry, Iris. I thought you were safe.”

  And she hadn’t been. I had an idea why. “Whose apartment were you in, Iris?”

  Iris spoke in a small voice, “Rick’s mom.”

  “Is that where you were when you called Rick at Tesoros to tell him what happened when we met?” She’d skated away to safety and the first thing she did was call Rick. She’d already talked to him before I got back to the store.

  Rick looked at me sharply.

  But Iris answered like a lamb. “Yes. I mean, I know he told me not to call him, but I thought I could just hang up if anyone else answered. In fact,” she said proudly, “Celestina answered once. I waited awhile and tried again. That time Tony answered. I hung up. But the third time Rick answered.”

  “So she was safe as could be. Right, Rick?” I tapped on the wire tabletop and remembered the untidy desk in the main office of Tesoros—the computer, the printer, the speaker phone and the caller ID, all the appurtenances of a successful business. “And your mom’s
number came up three times on the caller ID in the back office.”

  He looked stunned.

  “Don’t you see?” I sounded tired. I was tired. “The Caller ID was a dead giveaway. You told everyone at Tesoros that Iris left town with somebody new and that you and she were all washed up.”

  A soft gasp from Iris indicated she’d not known of this. She looked at Rick in dismay.

  But I didn’t have time to worry about her feelings. “Somebody never did believe that story, Rick. Then you get three calls from your mother’s apartment and everyone knows your mother is out of town. You gave a pretty good performance, but you were way too nervous. I didn’t believe you and neither did someone else at Tesoros. And today, when your mother’s telephone number surfaced, the answer was pretty clear. So who’s calling the store from that number? Somebody who wanted desperately to find Iris saw those numbers and figured it out. Then the objective was to get the package.”

  “A fire in the basement,” Rick said hoarsely. “But that’s awful. All those people in the apartment house! What if the firemen couldn’t put out the fire, what if it spread too quickly and people were trapped?”

  I had some respect for our adversary. “The point was to get the package. I’m willing to bet the fire was contained in a barrel, oily rags giving off smoke, then the alarm pulled. Lots of smoke, little danger. Wait and watch for Iris. When she came out, she headed for help. That’s what the watcher expected. As soon as she was away from the congestion, he ran up behind her, flung a blanket over her head, grabbed the backpack, and by the time she picked herself up and pulled off the cover, he was gone.”

  “Gone.” Rick said it crisply. “Gone. By God, it’s gone.” His head lifted. Tension eased out of his face. “So, it’s not our problem any longer.”

  I looked at him in surprise.

  He looked back defiantly. “None of it happened. I mean, what do we care? All I wanted was to protect Maria Elena. If that guy—”

  I frowned. “What guy?”

  Now it was his turn to look surprised. “The blond guy. The guy who tried to grab Iris, who threatened me. The guy who searched your room.”

  I was shaking my head.

  But Rick ignored me, talked faster. “Sure it was him. He—”

  “What about the calls Iris made from your mother’s apartment?” I wasn’t going to budge on this one.

  Rick waved his hand in dismissal. “That’s all your idea. Maybe it’s a lot simpler. Like you said, anybody could figure out Iris was hiding downtown. And this guy has to know a lot about all of us—”

  “And why is that?” I demanded.

  Rick shrugged. “So we don’t know why he’s picked us. Maybe the whole thing doesn’t have anything to do with the store. Maybe he’s some guy who delivered stuff. Maybe he delivered that wardrobe and he’d hidden something in it—”

  “Susana cleaned out the wardrobe,” I objected. “Vacuumed it. After she found a mummified mouse.”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t matter any longer,” he said happily. “I can take Iris home. She’s okay because she doesn’t have it any longer. Nobody’s after her.” He pushed back his chair, reached out a hand to pull Iris to her feet.

  I was on my feet, too, and standing in front of him, feeling a little like an irritable old cat facing a bumptious mastiff puppy. “Rick, listen to me, please.”

  Iris clutched his arm. “We don’t know who got the”—a quick look at me—“got my backpack.”

  “Think about this, Rick.” I looked straight into reluctant eyes, held his gaze. “You want to believe it was the blond guy. That puts some distance between you and Iris and the backpack snatcher. So let’s agree maybe it was, though I don’t know how he could be privy to the caller ID in the office, but we’ll let that go for now. Let’s assume it’s the blond man. What if he’s hotfooting it right back to Tesoros? And if it wasn’t the blond man, if it was someone from Tesoros, your problems aren’t over. You want to protect Maria Elena, don’t you? Shouldn’t we make damn sure the backpack and whatever it contains aren’t right back where they started from, hidden somewhere in Tesoros?”

  He rested back on his heels, his forward motion stayed for the moment.

  I took advantage of his silence to ask Iris, “What did you smell when the man grabbed you?”

  She looked at me blankly. “Smell?”

  “Close your eyes. Try to remember.” At noon, when the blond man gripped my arm, he came so near that I could see his sweat and smell his breath, and there was the distinct, unmistakable sour odor of alcohol, present and past. He’d been drinking for more than a day, I was sure of it.

  Iris obediently closed her eyes.

  I smiled a little. She looked so young, almost like a child in her shorty pajamas with a pink ribbon bow at the neck.

  “The blanket was dusty,” she said uncertainly. “It made my nose itch. And I was hot. It hurt the way he held me, one arm circled around me.” She shuddered. “I hated the feel of his arm, rigid and hard, crushing me. I didn’t smell anything except dust.”

  The blond man smelled like hell at noon. That smell—and I’d bet he’d had a few more drinks in the interim—wouldn’t be gone by night. If he’d flung the blanket over Iris, he was close enough for that rank odor to reach her. It didn’t prove my idea that her attacker was someone else, but it convinced me. I glanced at Rick, but he hadn’t paid any attention to my questions of Iris.

  He glared down at the flagstones, unhappy at my suggestions, but well aware that I could be right.

  “Okay.” His voice was resigned. “We’ll go to Tesoros. And we won’t stop looking until we’ve checked out every inch. If there’s anything there that shouldn’t be, we’ll find it.”

  He and Iris moved ahead of me. I was close behind, but I didn’t try to talk. I was still working out probabilities in my mind. I didn’t think the engineer of the fire and theft—if retrieving contraband can be termed theft—was the blond man who’d scared me on the River Walk and later searched my room. If he’d known where Iris was, there would have been no need to search my room. No, I felt we were looking for someone else and that someone could be picked from a short list—Tony, Susana, Celestina, Frank, or Isabel—all of whom had access to the Tesoros receiving room. And that list should include Tom Garza. Although he and Frank and Isabel worked at La Mariposa, they were part of the family. To me, that was the key determinant. That list, of course, included Rick Reyes, but I had seen him sprinting on the River Walk in answer to the cry of the sirens and witnessed his search for Iris. Although I’m fond of young lovers, that status does not guarantee innocence. I was glad I knew from my own observation that he could not have taken Iris’s backpack.

  But he could be in league with someone else.

  The bleak thought chilled me. I added him back to my list of suspects in the crime at large. If he was involved in hiding contraband at Tesoros, he certainly wouldn’t admit it to Iris if she came clutching that material, appalled at her discovery. He could, in fact, have mounted a complicated charade, culminating tonight in the apparent disappearance of the stolen goods, whatever they were, enabling him to announce with great relief that, after all, the problem was solved, the goods were gone, and all was well in the world.

  I sighed and walked faster, noting how protectively Rick held Iris’s arm, how solicitous he was. Iris leaned against him. Obviously, she adored him.

  I wasn’t happy at the possibility of his involvement. I wasn’t sure I thought it feasible. I liked him. But I couldn’t be positive of his innocence. That uncertainty was one more reason I was unwilling to pretend the receiving-room mystery could be dismissed. I wanted to be sure not only that I could like Rick, I wanted to be able to tell Gina she could trust him with her granddaughter’s heart.

  We were passing another café front, perhaps twenty-five feet from Tesoros, when Rick stopped. Iris stumbled to a halt, looked up at him nervously.

  I came up beside them. In the moonlight, Rick’s face was blank with shoc
k. He leaned forward. “My God. Stay here. Both of you.” He plunged forward, running toward Tesoros. A bright sheath of light spilled out from the open door and a dark shape huddled on the River Walk.

  We didn’t wait, of course. Iris’s rubber-soled house slippers slapped on the flagstones as she ran. I broke into a slow lope. I was about ten feet behind them when they careened to a stop just past one of the pair of park benches that flanked that open door. I hurried to join them.

  The golden wedge of light spilling out of Tesoros illuminated the flagstones and the trickle of blood from the battered head of a man lying face down, absolutely inert, halfway between the open door of Tesoros and the dark, silent water of the river. Blood matted the man’s hair, but there was no mistaking the soaring eagle on his limp arm. The blond man had not changed clothes since our noon encounter. He still wore the light blue T-shirt and the navy slacks. He looked smaller in death. He’d given Rick and Iris twenty-four hours, not knowing he had less than twelve left for himself.

  “Oh my God.” Rick shuddered, then took a deep breath. “Wait here. I’d better see.” He edged reluctantly toward that still form.

  I could have told him we were too late, but Rick forced himself closer, sank to one knee, and lifted a flaccid hand. When he stood and came back to us, his face was greenish. “He’s dead.”

  Iris gave a small moan. She reached out, clung to my arm. Her tear-streaked face was pale and frightened. “Aunt Henrie, it’s that man. It’s that man!”

  Rick stiffened. “Oh, Christ. Iris, are you sure?”

  She nodded wordlessly.

  “Yes, Rick,” I said grimly.

  Rick’s head swung back toward the murdered man. “But—” Then he broke off, shook his head, said briskly, “Iris, go up to Mrs. Collins’s room. I’ll call the police and—”

  The sudden, startling sound was incongruously ordinary, the clank of a galvanized metal pail against the cement. The three of us turned in unison to stare at the open door of Tesoros. In the vivid stream of light, Manuel Garza slowly straightened. One hand clutched a mop. Sudsy liquid sloshed around the rim of the pail placed neatly to one side of the door. Oblivious alike to the sprawled body and to us, Manuel stepped back to the entrance and moved the mop back and forth, back and forth. He was neatly dressed, a short-sleeved blue work shirt, faded jeans, high-topped black sports shoes.