Mother went to stir the soup. She added a bowl of boiled chicken and stewed tomatoes to the broth. I came over to the counter and started chopping cilantro for her.
'And work?' Mother looked sideways at me, intently.
'Maybe not so great. I've got one job to finish. After that…'
She nodded, satisfied, then pushed a strand of black hair back over her ear.
Out of habit I tried to spot any sign of gray. There wasn't any. God knows I'd snuck plenty of looks into her medicine cabinet for Miss Clairol and never found anything more incriminating than vitamin E, rosemary essence, and a few healing crystals.
Mother looked at me again and smiled, like she knew what I was thinking and enjoyed it. It was a game she'd been winning for a good fifteen years.
'Well,' she said, 'I happened to talk with Professor Mitchell at UTSA.'
I chopped the cilantro a little harder. 'Mother-'
'Please, dear, we were just touching base.'
'Touching base.'
'Of course. It must've been ten years since I did that art show with his wife.'
In the other room one of the young rednecks broke a setup and the other one whistled appreciatively. Jess tossed his beer can toward the trash and made it. The Oilers were winning.
'So you just happened to run across Mitchell's phone number in your book.'
'That's right.'
I slid the cilantro off the knife blade and into the pot. The cebollas were already grilled and the sour cream was ready. Strips of fried corn tortilla were in a bowl to the side, ready to be stirred in.
I wiped off my hands.
'And while you were on the phone-' I prompted.
Mother shrugged. 'All right. I did ask if there were any openings in the English department.'
I looked down longingly at the big knife I'd been using.
'Well, really, Jackson. He was very helpful.'
Only my mother calls me by my first name and lives. She likes to put me in my place next to the first two Jackson Navarres-my father and my grandfather. The third in a long line of hopeless males.
The phone rang. My mother tried to look surprised and failed miserably.
'Good Lord, who could that be?'
I bowed to the inevitable and said I'd get it. Mother smiled.
I took the phone out onto the deck next to the hot tub, picked up the receiver, and said,
'Professor Mitchell?'
A moment of surprised silence on the other end, then a fatherly voice said, 'Now this isn't Tres, is it?'
I told him it was. He laughed and gave me the standard kneehightoagrasshopper reminiscences about how long it had been and how glad he was I'd gotten out of puberty. I said I was too.
'Your mother told me you were job hunting,' he said.
The Widower's Two it Step 31
'Yeah, about that-'
I wanted to apologize for my mother thinking that college teaching jobs grew on trees and fell when ripe as soon as one's parents made phone calls to old friends.
Before I could, Professor Mitchell said, 'I made your appointment for eleven o'clock Saturday. It's the only day we're all available to interview.'
I hesitated, then closed the glass door to the kitchen to shut out the pool game and the TV.
'Pardon?'
'Your mother's timing was perfect as usual,' Mitchell said. 'Big stirup in the department, the hiring committee just forming. So happens I'm on it. Eleven o'clock.
Will that time work for you?'
A polite no would've done just fine. Sorry, my mother's just meddling in my life again and I have a very bright future in private investigations. I kept waiting to hear myself say no. I watched through the glass door as Carolaine came on the television again, this time for a newsbreak.
Maybe what made me weaken was Carolaine's face. Maybe it was a week with almost no sleep, doing surveillance, minding a fouryearold. Or the fact that whenever I closed my eyes now I saw Julie Kearnes in her '68 blue Cougar, people with white rubber gloves picking fragments out of her hair with tweezers. When I finally responded to Professor Mitchell I didn't say no. I said, 'Eleven o'clock Saturday. What the hell.'
My mother's voice came on the upstairs phone line. She sighed and said, 'I've died and gone to heaven.'
Professor Mitchell started laughing.
6
The good news Tuesday morning was that Gladys the secretary was able to negotiate a lunch meeting for me with Milo Chavez. Actually, Milo was meeting with somebody else, but Gladys figured it might be okay if I dropped in for a few minutes-seeing as there was a homicide to talk about and all.
The bad news was that lunch would require money.
I tried the ATM on Broadway and Elizabeth but it played stubborn with me. It told me my checking balance was insufficient for the minimum twentydollar withdrawal. I tried for a cash advance from credit. Somewhere in New Jersey, the people at VISA laughed long and hard.
Plan C. I called my old friends at Manny Forester amp; Associates. By ninethirty I had three subpoenas Manny's normal errand boys had been unable to serve. By eleven o'clock I'd found two of the invisible men, dropped the papers at their feet, and gotten away with no more than a few cuss words and a steak knife waved in my face. Not my idea of fun steady work, but at fifty dollars a subpoena it wasn't bad emergency income.
The third delivery was for a repeat customer-William Burnett, a.k.a. Sarge. I served process on him at least once a month thanks to Manny Forester's zealous efforts on behalf of Sarge's wife and creditors. Sarge just kept on smiling and lighting his cigars with the subpoenas, moving from downtown bar to downtown bar. He and I were to the point now where we took turns buying each other beers every time I tracked him down.
He'd tell me all about his days in the coast guard down in Corpus Christi.
Thanks to Sarge's stories and the hospitality of the Cantina Azteca I was thirty minutes late for lunch.
When I finally got to Tycoon Flats on North St. Mary's, the tables in the burger joint's courtyard were filling up with college kids from Trinity and lunchhour businessmen. It was overcast and humid. Heavy kitchen smoke drifted through the mesquite trees into the laundry lines of the unpainted houses behind the restaurant. The whole neighbourhood smelled like welldone bacon cheeseburgers.
Milo Chavez wasn't hard to spot. At a green picnic table halfway across the courtyard sat 350 pounds of human boulder, neatly packaged in fiftytwoinch pleated gray trousers and a white dress shirt that had probably been customtailored from most of a hot air balloon. He wore gold accents from his stud earring to his Gucci loafer buckles.
His hair was newly razorcut to a thin black stubble, which made his coppery face seem even more huge. The Latino Buddha, with fashion sense.
Sitting across from Milo was an older Anglo man who was trying to impersonate a navy pilot. I might've fallen for the pressed khakis and aviator's glasses, but the leather flight jacket was overkill. His mouth was too soft, his grayblond eyebrows a little too twitchy and nervous for a navy man.
He was frowning and holding out his fingers in Cat's Cradle position and speaking to Milo in low but insistent tones. I caught 'I will not' several times.
I tried to read Milo's face, but there was nothing there except Milo's standard sleepy, almost bovine calm.
Of course that didn't mean anything. Milo had looked calm when he'd run into me at Mi Tierra the week before and told me about the demo tape problem that might lose his agency a milliondollar contract. He'd looked calm at our high school senior party when he'd shoved Kyle Mavery's face into the sour cream dip for making snide
