In Big Trouble

She was grateful for the interruption of a short, plump man with an old-fashioned flash camera, who stopped at the table and asked if the gentleman would like a photograph of the beautiful, beautiful lady, to remember this magic moment always. A. J. waved him away impatiently.

'Well?' he asked Tess.

'I never heard of Lollie Sterne before my work brought me to Texas,' she said, pleased to have the truth on her side, at least momentarily. 'It's her daughter, Emmie Sterne, I'm looking for. I have a friend who was in a band with her, and she skipped out on him, owing him some money. End of story.'

'How does that connect to the murders?' He had drained his frozen margarita and waved for another, but the drink hadn't dulled his senses as much as Tess had hoped. People who drink at lunch also tend to have a pretty high tolerance.

'It doesn't. I'm cruising for a little dirt on the Sterne family. My client really needs this money.' She was beginning to buy into her own story, always the mark of a good lie.

'And you think Gus Sterne will pay his cousin's debt, if you can dig up something on him?'

'Knowledge is power.'

'Then you should know they're on the outs.'

'Yeah, but I figure if I go to him this week, just before his big day, tell him that Emmie has ripped off this guy and I'm willing to go to the press with the story-'

'He'll make good on her debt to avoid the bad publicity.' A. J. drank from his margarita glass. He didn't use the straw, and his healthy slurp left a little pale green mustache on his upper lip. 'I like how you think. But it's still a stretch. The Eagle won't touch the story. For one thing, it's Gus Sterne. Besides, you can't expect a guy to bail out the woman who tried to burn his house down.'

Tess, who had just bitten into a tortilla chip, inhaled too sharply, and the chip lodged in her throat. Eyes watering, nose running, she gulped water, trying to wash it down. She recalled reading that people had died this way, choking to death on lethal little tortilla triangles that got stuck in the trachea.

A. J. was enjoying all her levels of discomfort. 'You really don't know what you've stepped in, do you? Yeah, Emmie Sterne tried to burn ol' Cousin Gus's house down. What was it-four years ago, five?'

'Five,' Tess said faintly. They had a falling-out, five years ago. Marianna, the Duchess of Euphemism, had struck again, backed up this time by Gus Sterne's own evasive half-truths. Clay had hinted at the rest of the story, but she had thought he was just being a petulant brat.

'So you do know. Sterne convinced the cops not to press charges, and our weak-kneed publisher really undercut us on the story. You couldn't read between the lines there, because there were no lines, except for a short on the fire itself. The insurance company wasn't so easily appeased, but they straightened it out eventually, and as long as there were no criminal charges, the paper wouldn't make it public. Gus thought he was doing the girl a favor, having her judged incompetent and packed off to some ritzy mental hospital for a few months. I hear she didn't see it that way. But she was damn lucky, I'll tell you that. If Sterne and his son hadn't gotten out of the house in time, she'd have been in prison for a double homicide.'

'Emmie tried to burn his house down? The one on Hermosa?' I grew up on Hermosa. Ugly things can happen on a handsome street. Then the new looking garage and the adjoining wing had not been an addition, but the part of house that had to be rebuilt after the fire.

'She said it was an accident, but if a Girl Scout had made that little campfire, she'd have gotten a merit badge for her use of accelerants.'

'When did this happen? What time of year?'

A. J. raked a chip through the salsa, took a bite, and made another pass. A double-dipper, that figured.

'It was hot. I remember I was heading up to New Braunfels to go tubing on a Saturday afternoon when I heard about the fire on the police scanner I keep in my car. June? July? No, late May, early June. I was covering higher ed at the time and it was one big blur of commencement speakers. I still remember the rack card the city editor wanted to run, before the story got spiked. ‘Murder Girl in Big Trouble.' Murder Girl! You gotta love it. The noun-noun construction is what makes it an instant classic. Like Sewer Boy or Glue Dog.'

In Big Trouble. Emmie's band was called Little Girl in Big Trouble. Tess was barely listening to A. J. now, but he assumed her furrowed brow meant she wanted a more in-depth explanation.

'Sewer Boy was a kid who fell into the city's sewer system when someone stole a manhole cover. Didn't surface for twenty-four hours. The headline said: ‘Sewer Boy Still Missing.' Glue Dog was this puppy some huffers got hooked on inhalants. The county took him away. ‘Glue Dog Taken from Torturers.' That was a rack card, put over the boxes to pump up street sales. Now that we're the only game in town, we're more respectable, don't have to work so hard to sell the papers, because what else are they going to buy? Truth be told, we used to be a helluva lot more fun.'

'Emmie was in a band called Little Girl in Big Trouble.'

'Really? That figures, that's the original.'

'The ‘original'?'

'Little Girl in Big Trouble. It was the headline, on one of the folios, back when the murders first happened. I wasn't at the paper then, but I've heard the story. A month after the murders, the investigation was going nowhere, and the story had dried up along with it. There were three newspapers then, and the Sun was beating the Eagle's ass. The Eagle reporter, Jimmy Ahern-'

'The one who wrote the book.'

'Yeah, right. Anyway, he was desperate for a scoop. So he sort of goosed the story a little bit.'

'What do you mean?' She wondered if it was a mistake to admit she was familiar with Jimmy Ahern's oeuvre, but the fact didn't seem to have registered with A. J.

'He had a source-at least, he said it was a source, but I think it was a voice in his head, or at the bottom of his bourbon bottle-who said Emmie was the link, the key that could unlock the murders. He got a little carried away and suggested she was a suspect-Little Girl in Big Trouble. Slapped a question mark on the end of the sucker and it led the paper. Turned out that the source really said Emmie couldn't be ruled out as a witness, despite her age. Wrong on both counts. Oh well. We ran a correction. Eventually.'

Tess had thought she knew every permutation of newspaper fuck-up possible. 'The Eagle printed a two-year-old was a suspect in a murder case?'

'She was there, she had blood on her.' A. J.'s tone was mildly defensive. 'At least, she did until the well- meaning social worker scrubbed her up at the station. Adios, el evidencio! I mean sure, they assumed the blood was from the victims, but the killer might have hurt himself, and his blood might have been on the baby. There were bloody fingerprints on her T-shirt, too-until the social worker threw that in the washing machine. It's a shame. Twenty-one years ago, you couldn't do shit with that, but if they even had a photograph of the print today, they might be able to blow it up, match it to every fingerprint on file nationwide. Yep, Espejo Verde was the most compromised murder scene of its time.'

'Is it still around?'

'What?'

'Espejo Verde.'

'The building is. Sterne Foods shuttered it, put a cyclone fence around it and it stands to this day on the river in Baja King William. The area is pretty hip now, and I'm sure a lot of people would like trying to run a restaurant there. But the Sternes won't sell.'

'Could you tell me where it is?' Tess said. 'I'd like to go see it.'

'What's the point?'

'I don't know. Just morbid curiosity, I guess.' And a hunch Emmie Sterne might be staying there. She had to be somewhere.

'C'mon, don't waste your time. Have another drink, order an entree.'

'I'm not hungry.'

'Then let me have another drink, and my chalupa, and we'll go.'

'We'll?'

A. J. leaned over the table, his eyes in a squint so narrow they might as well be closed. 'Look, stop fucking with me. There's a rumor going around town that Emmie Sterne is a big girl in big trouble these days.