In Big Trouble

'A man murdered somewhere else, according to the sheriff,' Marianna pointed out. 'Just another coincidence, Miss Monaghan, another situation requiring context. You think the two things are related because they're connected in your mind. You're like the old fable about the seven blind men, each trying to describe an elephant from feeling one part of it.'

Tess took the newspaper from Marianna's hands.

'Is Little Girl in Big Trouble playing somewhere tonight?'

'I wouldn't know. I kept that because of Emmie's photo, but the paper is a month old, as you can see. I don't recall seeing a listing for them in today's paper, though.' She frowned, gave a convulsive little shudder. 'I hate that name. I hope she has changed it by now.'

'What's wrong with Little Girl in Big Trouble?'

'She took it from a headline in the paper, an old one from when the local press was more, well, colorful. She thought it was funny. I think it's bad luck to make fun of people's pain.'

A strange superstition for someone who sat in a room full of skeletons. 'About Dutch-Emmie-and Crow. They're in this band together, but are they, well, together-together?'

'Are you asking me if they're romantically linked? I don't know. I'm not Emmie's confidante in these matters. No one is. She's always been very private.'

'But what do you think?'

'What do I think about what?' Marianna's smile was borderline cruel and Tess felt like a mouse being batted back and forth between a cat's paws. It was as if the woman was forcing her to say the words, to face the reality she was just beginning to realize she so dreaded.

'Are they in love?'

'I hope so,' Marianna said, her voice strangely fervent. 'I truly hope so.'

Chapter 8

Primo's, the bar where Crow's band had last played, was a local place, but it was so cheesy and soulless that it might as well have been part of a national chain. Tess's own neighborhood back in Baltimore had more than its share of these desperately zany places, where fun had to be planned and delineated with great care, and where the anti-bacterial cleansers overwhelmed the yeasty beer smell that a bar should have. They even had the same 'theme' nights: Ladies' nights, mambo nights, Jamaica nights, Super Bowl night, cigar nights, two-for-one shooters, bottomless maragaritas.

Yet every night was the same. These bars were the cruise ships for Generation Whatever, the sullen young things for whom Tess had babysat when she was in her teens. Now that they had attained their majority-or, in the case of Primo's, attained the fake IDs that claimed they had attained their majority-they didn't know how to do anything but watch, complain, and repeat punch-lines from the sitcom of the moment. Kids today, she thought contemptuously, eyeing the morose happy-hour crowd.

'The manager here?' she asked the bartender, who was whistling as he worked. At least he seemed to be enjoying himself. He winked and gave her a raffish smile as he jerked his head toward a nearby door.

'In there,' he said. 'And if you want to be his friend, I hope you're packing some raw meat in your bag.'

The man wedged behind the desk in the tiny office was startlingly huge, three hundred pounds plus. He didn't get up when Tess entered, a lack of politesse for which she was grateful. She couldn't help thinking the desk functioned as a retaining wall for his girth and that if he stood, his huge stomach would come rolling toward her like a tidal wave.

'Yeah, they played here,' he said, barely glancing at the page from Marianna Barrett Conyers's newspaper. A nameplate, a dusty pink lei looped over one end, provided the name he had neglected to give, Don Kleinschmidt. 'Now they don't.'

'Weren't they any good?'

'They're great, if you want some chick up there singing stuff nobody's ever heard of and nobody can dance to. All the little girls want to be Fiona fucking Apple these days. Which is okay, if you want your own goddamn Lilith Fair every night. But chick music doesn't bring the guys in, and the guys are the ones who drink. If I wanna sell cranberry juice, I'll get me a Snapple franchise.'

Kleinschmidt lit a cigarette and looked around for an ashtray. A bright orange oval one sat on some bracketed shelves on the wall to his right. He could have reached it if he stretched. Apparently, Kleinschmidt had decided that a man's reach shouldn't exceed his grasp, for he flicked the ashes into a half-empty glass of Coke instead, then dropped the hand holding the cigarette behind the desk, as if fearful that Tess might demand a puff. Such stinginess seemed instinctive to him, Darwinian even. He hadn't gotten to his current size by sharing.

'I need a band that plays covers, dance tunes,' he continued. 'Oldies like ‘Wooly-Bully,' ‘Louie, Louie,' and whatever crap is on the radio right now. If the band has a girl singer, she can make like Alannis every now and then, but it's gotta be familiar. People come here to hear music they already know and eat food they already like. The only strange they want is on their pillow, after they leave. Get me? Get me?'

She got him. 'And this band, Little Girl in Big Trouble, couldn't do that.'

'Wouldn't do it. They said if they were going to play crap, there were people in town who would pay them more money to do it. So they walked. Prima fucking donnas.'

'The girl was difficult?'

'No, it was him, mostly.' He tapped a ridged, nicotine yellow fingernail on Crow's face. 'Fast Eddie here. He didn't like me talking to the girl. He didn't like anyone talking to her. Jealous little schmuck. Almost started something with a customer one night. That was the end of it, you wanna know the truth. We might have worked out our artistic differences, but I draw the line at trying to beat up customers.'

Pacifist Crow must be on on a real Sir Galahad trip with his new girlfriend, trying to impress her. 'Do you know if they're playing anywhere else in town?'

Kleinschmidt smirked, sucking on his cigarette, then dropping it behind his desk again. His mouth was tiny but full, a child's pink rosebud, incongruously pretty. It made him look as if he had just eaten a small boy, who was now trapped in those mounds of fat. Don't be a fatist, Tess scolded herself. Kleinschmidt would be disgusting at any weight.

'What's the information worth to you?' he asked.

It would have been easy enough to slide a twenty his way, even a fifty. Tess's per diem was based on the understanding that the occasional bribe was one of her operating costs. But she hated the idea of giving this man anything.

'How about if I don't come back here tonight and help the cops pick out all the underage kids at the bar? How much is that worth to you?'

Kleinschmidt shrugged and stole another puff from his cigarette. 'I can't be checking IDs too closely. Trinity University is our bread and butter here on St. Mary's Street. I'm flexible with the chronologically challenged. That's why I'm still here after fifteen years, while almost every other place along here has bit the dust.'

'I'm waiting,' Tess said.

He sucked on his cigarette as if it were a straw in a glass with just a few drops of soda left. 'Last I heard, they were playing at the Morgue.'

'The Morgue?' First Marianna's house of horrors, now this. Tess was beginning to think San Antonio was one death-obsessed burg.

'Not morgue-morgue. Newspaper morgue. The developer picked up the old San Antonio Sun building cheap, thinking he'd make it into a mini-mall. You know, shops on the bottom, professional offices up above. But he couldn't get the right mix of tenants. So now it's like five music clubs in one. There's a big room downstairs for headliners, then lots of little rooms that can change their personalities to fit whatever nostalgia craze is under way.'

'How do you change a room's personality?'

'That's the beauty of it-the decor is totally minimal. All he needs to do is frame a few front pages to change the era. Like, a disco room, with front pages from the seventies-Watergate, Nixon resigns, blah, blah, blah. Eighties? Stock market crash of '87. He's making money hand over fist, the lucky bastard. I heard he based it on