"Are you normally a spectator at your son's fist-fights?" I asked. "Somehow I would've thought you'd fight them for him."

For a woman of good breeding, Cookie Sheff did an excellent job of slamming the door in my face.

24.

I waited almost two hours on the shoulder of I-10 South with no company but my AM radio before Dan's BMW sped by at a leisurely eighty-five miles per hour. By a combination of good luck and bad traffic, my talk-show host and I managed to keep up with Mr. Sheff as he headed toward downtown.

It had been a sobering moment when I had tuned into WOAI and hadn't turned it off immediately. Here it was two hours later, still on. I kept telling myself it was nostalgia for those torturous trips to Rockport with my parents. Surely I couldn't be interested in this stuff. Surely I wasn't approaching thirty.

"The problem with this country," Carl Wiglesworth was saying, "is the socialists who are running our schools."

Ah, Texas. For a moment I wished Maia were there. She would've gone into the cutest little apoplexy over Carl.

On the way downtown I watched Dan's taillights from a hundred yards back and thought about my quality time with the Sheffs. First there was the problem of somebody-the cops, the Sheffs, maybe even the Cambridges-trying to downplay things. For some reason, Lillian's disappearance hadn't yet gone down as a potential kidnapping.

Don't worry, she might just be out of town.

No way would Rivas pull that shit on a big-name family without a seriously good reason and a seriously greased palm. If he had pulled back the reins on the investigation, somebody with heavy clout had made it happen.

Then there was Dan. He was lying about Beau. And he wasn't exactly stable. Maybe it was just Lillian's disappearance that had gotten to him, but I had the feeling there was more wrong with Dan Sheff's life than one lady could cause, unless that lady was his mother.

I still needed Dan alone, away from Kellin and a thirty-second Dominion Security response time, to ask him why he was pursuing a relationship that Lillian's datebook had pronounced dead months ago.

But first, we did our day at the office.

It started at a huge construction site where Basse Road met McAlister Highway-a half-finished strip mall on the grounds of the defunct Alamo Cement Company, right down the street from my mother's house. Dan pulled in next to a trailer with Sheff Construction's black and white logo on its side.

I looked around at the changed terrain and said: "God damn."

Of course my mother had told me about the real estate changes in the old neighborhood, even sent me some news clippings from time to time, but still I wasn't prepared for what I saw.

The Alamo Cement Company had been the largest single piece of private property in Alamo Heights for as long as I could remember. Its front borders along Tuxedo and Nacodoches had been carefully sculpted with acres of trees, trails that nobody ever hiked, and shady groves that were strictly for show behind a square mile of storm fencing. Only if you went around back, next to the Basse Road train tracks, did you see the uglier side of the cement business-four beige smokestacks and a massive wedge of factory, dusty trucks, and freight cars that never seemed to move, floodlights that stayed on twenty-four hours and made the place look like a rocket launch site on a particularly desolate part of the moon. In the center of the quarry the Latino workers lived in an area dubbed Cementville, a collection of shacks so squalid that they could have been directly transplanted from Laredo or Piedras Negras.

Of course hardly any of the wealthy Anglos in the neighborhood ever saw that part. We'd just seen the Cementville kids at school-dirt-poor worker children, dark and hungry-looking, dropped with the greatest irony into the richest public school district in town. They would sit on the steps of the high school, clustered together for protection, surrounded by Izod shirts and new Cutlass Supremes. Ralph Arguello was one of the few who had broken out of the pack by playing football. Most of them had simply disappeared back into the quarries after graduation.

Now, four years after the land had been sold off, only the factory itself had yet to be developed, and it looked like the Sheffs were about to remedy that. The shell of the building and the smokestacks were still there, as were a few broken-down freight cars and trucks, and about twenty odd acres of weeds surrounded by barbed wire. Everything else had already changed. The road to McAlister Highway went right through the old plant grounds past a huge man-made canyon, once the quarry, now lined with million-dollar homes. The shacks of Cementville had been swept away in favor of a golf course, a church, several restaurants. The strip mall Dan's company was constructing was right in the shadow of the old factory.

Dan got out of the BMW and spent about five minutes talking to the foreman. The foreman talked slowly, going over a blueprint, and Dan frowned and nodded a lot, like he was pretending he understood. Then, to the foreman's visible relief, Dan got back into the Beamer and left.

"A day's work well done," I said, figuring we'd be on our way back to the Dominion now.

Only we drove the wrong way-onto I-35 and then south, almost to the city limits, then exited into a war zone of apartment projects. The last time I'd passed them, fluorescent seventies' daisies had adorned the sides of the buildings. Now it was scrawling neon spray paint advertising the Alacranes and the Diablitos.

"The youth of America is the key," Carl told me. "When will we stop accepting these deviant lifestyles that are destroying our kids?"

"Go deviance," I told the radio.

Not looking like a tail was getting difficult now. It hadn't been easy to begin with in an orange monstrosity like mine. But when you've covered thirty miles from one side of town to the other, it's almost impossible. Fortunately for me, Dan seemed about as aware of his surroundings as a dug-in armadillo. Otherwise I might as well have flashed my high beams and waved a lot.

We drove through the projects, past a mixture of condemned industrial lots and sickly pastures grazing sickly cattle, toward a glass and prefab office complex that looked about thirty seconds old. It squatted defensively in the wastelands of the far South Side, surrounded first by thick, ridiculously out-of-place rows of salvias and petunias, then on the outside by a more honest ten-foot fence topped in barbed wire. A huge white stylized "S" in a black circle was emblazoned on the front gates.

Dan parked in the handicap space and walked through the front doors like he owned the place. He did. I pulled off the road next to a pasture and tried to look inconspicuous.

Think cow, I told the VW.

Carl and I had a nice long chat about local politics while we waited. He told me the socialist environmental types at the Edwards Aquifer District would probably bring about the end of Western Civilization. Then he mentioned the new bond initiative for a fine arts complex that Councilman Fernando Asante had recently pushed through in special election. Carl was skeptical.

"The last thing the taxpayers need," he said, "is another city-funded Travis Center pork barrel."

Then he read the figures on how many double-digit points Asante's popularity had gone up since that first brainchild of his-Travis Center-had opened on the edge of town. Proof positive, Carl said, that the voters have been deluded. Another pork project like that, combined with Asante's new push to be the "law and order" candidate, and old Fernando might actually attain his dream of mayorhood. Carl was even more terrified by that thought than I was.

Dan came out after about an hour and stood at the door with an older Hispanic man. White hair, white mustache, dark blue suit.

Dan's body posture told me he wasn't thrilled with his employee. He stood back as they talked, arms crossed, shifting his weight impatiently from foot to foot. The white-haired man spread his hands in a placating gesture. He did most of the talking. Finally Dan nodded. Gold rings flashed as they shook hands.

We drove north again until Dan's BMW turned onto I-10, heading toward home. I exited at Crossroads Mall, then drove back to Alamo Heights.

"Money," said Carl. "It all boils down to money, my friends."

I drove through Terrell Hills, past the Country Club, then into the forested shade of Elizabeth Street. Tall white houses and old old money. I had a flashback to Senior Party (Alamo Heights had been too cool for a prom back then) when I'd driven down this street bringing Lillian a dozen roses and a dozen balloons for her mother.

"She likes balloons," Lillian had said.

"You're not just setting me up, are you?"

She laughed, then kissed me for a long time. So I brought balloons.

Sure enough, Lillian's mother and I became fast friends after that, bonded by balloons, much to the chagrin of Mr. Cambridge. Until June fifth in 1985. That night at 8 P.M. I was supposed to meet the Cambridges for dinner at the Argyle with an engagement ring for Lillian. That night at 8 P.M. I was on a Greyhound somewhere outside El Paso, heading west. I hadn't seen Lillian's parents since.

The beige Spanish villa hadn't changed, just sunk a little deeper into the forest of pyracantha. The rough-hewn oak door barely registered my knocks.

"Oh, my," said Mrs. Cambridge.

She tried to frown at me but it wasn't in her nature. The ice melted between us in a matter of seconds, then my neck was wet with her tears, my cheeks well kissed, and my hands filled with ice tea and banana bread. She made the best banana bread. We sat down in her small shadowy den, surrounded by photos of Lillian and a dozen bird cages filled with parakeets, while Mrs. Cambridge began patting ten years of stories into my kneecap.

"Then after college," she was saying, "it was so difficult for her. Oh, Tres, I know it's not your fault, but-well."

Mrs. Cambridge had always been a thin woman, but now she was almost skeletal. Age had left her eyes milky and her skin spotted with chocolate. She held on to my knee like I might disappear any minute. She gave me a genuine smile.

If scum had knees, I was scum. She could've called me any name she wanted, just not that smile again. Her love for me closed up my throat like alum powder.

"Mr. Karnau took such an interest in Lillian's work, you know. They used to go on trips in the country, photographing everything under the sun." She pointed proudly to Lillian's hand-tinted photos on the wall. When she mentioned Karnau she tried to keep her tone lighthearted. I think it was an effort for her. "I didn't know-a young lady and such an older man together alone in the woods, but well-they had such high hopes for the gallery. They needed to have that chance, I suppose. Still, she wasn't really happy."

Mrs. Cambridge had begun crying silently again, wiping away tears with the back of her hand as if it were an old-established habit to cry while you entertained. The parakeets chattered around us.

"Lillian was discouraged, you know, because her own work wasn't selling. More and more it became a business to her, not something she enjoyed. Then she and Daniel had their falling out ..."

When she mentioned Sheff's name she glanced at me guiltily, as if she might've hurt my feelings.

I tried to smile. "Go on, please."

More knee patting.

"I don't know, Tres. When she said she was talking to you again, after all this time, I didn't know. Ezekiel, of course, well-"

She let that go unsaid. I remembered Mr. Cambridge's booming voice quite clearly.

I looked at Mrs. Cambridge. Her smile was as watery as her eyes.

"I'm sorry," I said, "but what have the police said?"

"I have to let Ezekiel handle that, Tres. I just can't-" I nodded, accepting her hand in mine.

"And the Sheffs?"

Even Mrs. Cambridge had trouble making it sound genuine. "They've been very sweet."

For several minutes we were quiet, holding each other's hands. Her birds chattered. Then she closed her eyes and began to rock, humming a song I couldn't discern.

When she looked at me again, she seemed to have a secret thought. Smiling weakly, she rose from the couch and went over to the grandfather clock in the corner. From the bottom of the pendulum closet she extracted a Joske's shoe box tied with an ancient ribbon. She brought the box back, setting it on my lap. She removed the lid, then held up a yellowed photograph printed on the thick paper they used in the 1940s. It was black and white but had been lovingly hand-tinted, like the kind of photos Lillian did.

A rakish-looking pilot stared out at me, young and confident. On the back of the photo, in faded blue ink, it said Angie Gardiner + Billy Terrel. Vaguely, I remembered Lillian telling me about this man. It had always seemed to me, though, that Lillian considered Terrel almost a myth, someone her mother had made up.

"My first husband," Mrs. Cambridge said. When she looked at me then, I could see the multiple colors in her irises, like Lillian's, and in her smile that vaguest hint of mischief that Lillian mixed so well with love. It was hard to look at.

"Lillian's father doesn't like me to keep these things around. He discourages me from talking about it." Then she added, like a well-worn litany: "Ezekiel's a good man."

"Mrs. Cambridge," I said, "Lillian may be in a lot of trouble. I'm not sure how much the police can help."

She looked at the picture of Billy Terrel. "Lillian couldn't understand when you left. She'd never lost someone like that before. Then so many years later, to have a second chance, like it was all a mistake ..."

I didn't know what else to do. I bent over and kissed her cheek, very lightly. Then I knew it was time to go.

"I'll find her, Mrs. Cambridge," I said at the door.

I don't think she heard me. Before I could turn away, I saw her hugging that old shoe box, trying to smile and humming along with the bright and senseless chatter of a dozen parakeets.

Then I went out to the car to tell Carl Wiglesworth what was really wrong with the world.

25.

I was just making Robert Johnson's usual Friskies taco lunch when Larry Drapiewski called from the Sheriff's Department.

"I'm pretty sure I don't want to tell you this," he said. "Beau Karnau had a restraining order issued against him last year-to stay away from Lillian Cambridge."

I put down the heated flour tortilla and spooned the chicken Friskies over it. Normally I would've sprinkled cheese on top, but we were out. Then I did my best to convince Robert Johnson that his food dish really was full. I shook it. He stared at me. I pretended to sprinkle cheese. He stared at me.

"You get that, son?" Larry said.

"Unfortunately, I got it."

"The way one of the reporting officers remembers it, Karnau kept showing up at Miss Cambridge's house drunk, yelling at her, threatening her. He would go on about how she owed him big and couldn't leave the business. Broke a window once. Never actually struck her."

I stared out the unhinged kitchen window. "What about since last year?"

"The order was rescinded at Miss Cambridge's request in December. No further complaints. Could be old history. There was never any-"

"Okay, Larry. Thanks."

I could hear him tapping his pencil. "Damn it, son-"

"You're going to tell me not to jump to conclusions. Not to fly off the handle."

"Something like that."

"Thanks, Larry."

I hung up.

Robert Johnson was chewing on my ankle. I shook my fist at him. Clearly unimpressed, he started to bury his Friskies taco under the kitchen rug.

When I called Carlon McAffrey at the Express-News he sounded like he was in the middle of an especially noisy sandwich. I asked if he'd heard anything interesting lately.

Carlon belched. "Like what kind of 'anything'?"

"You tell me."

"Jesus, Tres, I'll show you mine if you show me yours. What the fuck are you talking about?"

I took that as a no. "Okay. How about the name Beau Karnau?"

Carlon covered the phone and shouted to somebody behind him. After a minute, without reducing the volume, he shouted back into the phone. "Yeah. Karnau's got a photography opening Saturday, Blue Star, some cowboy shit. Why, should I be there?"