rakes and whole Latino families in the back cruised for unkempt front yards. A good number of seventies Hondas and VW bugs puttered down the street with peeling bumper stickers like UNREAGANABLE and HONOR THE GODDESS.
Austin, the only city in Texas where my car is inconspicuous.
Nobody paid me any attention. Nobody stopped at the Kearnes residence. If the police had been here they hadn't left any obvious sign.
I was about to cross the street and let myself in when a guy stuck his head in my passenger's side window and said, 'I thought that was you.'
Julie's acrossthestreet neighbour had horse like features. He smiled and you expected him to bray or nuzzle you for a sugar cube. His saltandpepper hair was clipped close around the ears, gelled, spiky on top. He wore a blue buttondown shirt tucked into khaki walking shorts, tied with a multicoloured Guatemalan belt, and when he leaned into the car I didn't so much smell him as experience one of those surrealistic fifteen second designer cologne ads.
He grinned. 'I knew you'd be back. I was sitting on my love seat having an espresso and I thought: I bet that police detective will be back today. Then I looked out the window and here you are.'
'Here I am,' I agreed. 'Listen-was it Jose-?'
'Jarras. Jose Jarras.' He started to spell it.
'That's great, Mr. Jarras, but-'
Jose held up one finger like he'd just remembered something vitally important and leaned farther into my car.
'Didn't I tell you?' he said, lowering his voice. 'I told you something funny was going on.'
'Yeah,' I admitted. 'You called it.'
I wondered what the hell he was talking about. Maybe Julie's murder had made the Austin AmericanStatesman. Or maybe Jose was just percolating some of the great theories he'd offered me Saturday morning-how Miss Kearnes needed his help because the Mafia was after her, or the Feds, or the Daughters of the Republic of Texas.
Jose narrowed his eyes conspiratorially. 'I started thinking about it after I talked to you.
I said to myself, why would the police be so interested in her? Why are they staking out her house? She's got one of those drug dealer boyfriends, doesn't she? She'll have to go into the witness protection program.'
I told Jose he had a hell of a deductive mind.
'Poor dear's been super agitated,' he confided. 'She's stopped making those sugar cookies for me. Stopped saying hello. She's been looking like-well.'
He waved his hand like I could easily imagine the crimes against fashion the poor dear had been perpetrating. I nodded sympathetically.
'She had that visitor Saturday night…'
'I know,' I assured him. 'We were watching the house.'
The visitor had been one of Julie's girlfriends, an amateur aroma therapist named Vina whose innocuous life story I'd already delved into. Vina had come over to Julie's with her essential oil kit around eight and left around nine. I didn't want to tell Jose that the chances of Vina being a mafia hit man were pretty slim.
Jose leaned farther into my car. Another inch and he'd be in my lap.
'Are you going to break in?' he asked. 'Check for traps?'
I assured him that it was standard procedure. Nothing to get alarmed about.
'Oh-' He nodded vigorously. 'I'll let you get to work. Aren't you supposed to give me your card, in case I remember something later?'
'Give me your hand,' I told him.
He looked uncertain, then thrust it at me. I took my permanent black marker off the dashboard and inscribed Jose's palm with Erainya's alternate voicemail number, the one that says: 'You have reached the Criminal Investigations Division.'
He frowned at it for a minute.
'Budget cutbacks,' I explained.
When I got to Julie's front door it took me about two minutes to find the right dupe for the dead bolt. I leaned leisurely against the door frame, trying different keys and whistling while I worked. I smiled at an elderly couple walking by. Nobody yelled at me.
Nobody set off any alarms.
A licensed P.I. will tell you that committing crimes in the line of work is a myth. P.I. s gather evidence that might be used in court, and any evidence gathered illegally automatically ruins the case. So P.I. s are good boys and girls. They do surveillance from public property. They keep their noses clean.
It's ninety percent true. The other ten percent of the time you need to find out something or retrieve something that's never going to see its way into court, and the client-usually a lawyer-doesn't care how illegally you do it as long as you don't get caught and traced back to them. They'd just assume use somebody unprincipled and unlicensed who can play a discreet game of hardball. That's how I'd worked for five years in San Francisco- unprincipled and unlicensed. Then I'd moved back to Texas, where my dad's old friends on the force had put increasing pressure on me to get licensed and work right.
None of them wanted the embarrassment of busting Jack Navarre's kid.
I jimmied the side bolt. Then I took the two days' worth of mail from Julie's box and went inside.
The kitchen smelled like lemon and ammonia. The hardwood floors had been swept.
Copies of Fiddle Player and Nashville Today were neatly stacked on the glass topped fruit crate that served as a coffee table. There were fresh cut flowers on the dining table. She'd left an orderly home for someone who was never coming back to it.
I sat on the sofa and went through the mail. Bills. A letter from Tom and Sally Kearnes in Oregon and a pix of their new baby girl. The note said Can't wait for you to see Andrea! Love, T amp; S. I stared at the pink wrinkly face. Then I placed the photo and letter upside down on the coffee table.
I did a quick sweep of the back rooms. No messages on the answering machine.
Nothing to look at in the garbage can except moulding coffee grounds. The only thing interesting was on the top shelf of Julie's bedroom closet. Buried under a down comforter was a twotone brown suitcase like you'd see in a vaudeville act.
Inside on top were photos of Les SaintPierre. There was Les drinking beer with Merle Haggard, Les accepting an award from Tanya Tucker, young Les in a wide collared pink shirt, big curly hairdo, lots of polyester, standing next to a similarly dressed disco cowboy who was probably famous once but whom I didn't recognize.
Underneath the photos were lots of men's clothes, packed more like someone had been emptying drawers than picking things for a trip. It was all socks and jockey shorts. Or maybe that's what Les SaintPierre wore when he travelled. Maybe I'd been going to the wrong vacation spots.
I put the suitcase back.
In the den a green, hungrylooking parrot was sitting on its polished madrone branch.
He told me I was a noisy bastard and then went back to scratching ravenously at his cuttlebone.
I found some pistachios for him in the kitchen. Then I sat down at Julie's IBM PS/2 and stared at a dark screen.
'Dickhead,' the parrot croaked. He cracked a pistachio.
'Pleased to meet you,' I said.
The corkboard behind the computer was cluttered with paper. There was a dogeared picture of Julie Kearnes as a young fiddle player, her auburn hair longer, her body slimmer. She was standing next to George Jones. There was a more recent picture of the Miranda Daniels Band with Julie in the forefront. The photo was surrounded by concert reviews clipped from local papers, a few sentences about Julie Kearnes' fiddle playing highlighted in pink. One frontpage feature from the Statesman entertainment section showed just Miranda Daniels, standing between a standup bass and a wagon wheel with a fake sunset backdrop behind her. The title boldly announced: 'The Rebirth of Western Swing: Why a new breed of Texas talent will take Nashville by storm.'
A smaller corkboard to the left was more downto earth. It displayed $250 check stubs from Paintbrush Enterprises, also Julie's schedule and hourly pay scale for several jobs she'd taken through Cellis Temps in the last few months to make ends meet-basic word processing and data entry for an assortment of big corporations in
