The Devil Went Down to Austin

Page 18

The lights began to go off at the marina, Clyde Simms shutting down for the night.
"Jimmy's property," I said. "You called it a shrine to his mother. Why?"
Ruby's eyes flicked uncomfortably across mine. "How much of the story do you know?
"
"I know Clara had a fallingout with the Doebler family, lost custody of Jimmy when he was young. She reunited with Jimmy when he was an adult. I know she died about five years ago. I know she never thought much of Garrett."
"Jimmy never told you anything else?"
"We were never close."
She shook her head, fascinated. "No wonder you don't mind staying at the dome.
Jimmy's family has a history of mental illness, Tres. Clara was diagnosed with severe depression as a young woman. After Jimmy's dad died, she really went off the deep end. She started disobeying the family's wishes, keeping company with men they didn't like. Believe me, I know what Clara went through. If I'd been born thirty years earlier, I would've been Clara. The Doeblers damn near owned the county justice system around here during the 1960s. The courts found Clara legally unfit to parent. I never met her, but from what Jimmy says, she was a very sad woman when they finally reunited. A broken woman."
"At least they reunited."
She studied my face. "Not happily. The Doebler family money covered it up well, Tres, but I figured you knew how she died. Jimmy's mom committed suicide."
"Suicide," I repeated. "How?"
But as soon as I asked, I had a pretty good idea what the answer would be.
"She parked her car by the water," Ruby told me. "Down at the shore of her property, just about where you found Jimmy. And then, Tres, she shot herself in the head."
I sat there for a long time, listening to the crickets. The meteors kept streaking above us—the beginnings of a fullfledged shower.
Ruby got up. "And now it's time I apologized to your brother, I suppose. If you'll excuse me."
She looked back over her shoulder and smiled at me on her way in.
At that moment, I could believe what my brother said. I could believe Ruby McBride was pretty fucking awesome at breaking things.
CHAPTER 15
When the alarm clock went off the next morning, I slapped at the sleep button and hit only pillow.
I opened my eyes, saw the curve of a whitedomed ceiling, a blacklight Beatles poster taped to it.
My apartment didn't have a curved ceiling. I was pretty sure it didn't have an overhead blacklight Beatles poster.
I patted around. Flannel sheets, a mattress firmer and wider than my futon. In my sleep I'd gone almost spreadeagled, trying to find the edges of the bed.
The only thing familiar was Robert Johnson, curled around my head like a coonskin cap.
I sat up. Robert Johnson murred in protest as he slid off my scalp.
Sunlight sliced across the floor of Jimmy Doebler's loft. On the nightstand, the alarm clock was flashing 6:02 A.M.
Teaching class today, I remembered. UT Austin. The big time.
And on five hours' sleep, too. What more could a man want?
I got up, turned off the alarm, fumbled around for clothes. I'd unpacked my suitcase the night before, but couldn't remember where I'd stashed anything. I rummaged through the oak bureau, pulled on workout clothes before realizing they weren't mine. I looked down at Jimmy Doebler's Coral Reefer tour shirt, decided against changing.
Somehow, tai chi in a dead man's clothes seemed fitting this morning. I laid out slacks, a dress shirt, and a tie for later. Those I knew were mine. Jimmy wouldn't have owned any.
I climbed down the ladder to the ground floor. The dome was country quiet.
I made coffee, scrambled some eggs, and fried some corn tortilla strips for mi gas. I made a Friskies breakfast taco for Robert Johnson. We ate together at the counter, me standing up, reading the Austin AmericanStatesman on my laptop.
I scrolled down to tech news and there it was—the first story, posted only a few minutes before: AccuShield of Cupertino to Acquire Techsan. Ruby and Matthew Pena had wasted no time getting the sellout rolling.
The article chronicled Techsan's betatest problems, the lawsuits, the bad press—all of which would now be handled directly by AccuShield. Matthew Pena promised his client would have Techsan's software problems fixed and an industrystandard encryption program to market by the end of summer.
"It's a matter of resources," Pena said. "AccuShield has them. Techsan didn't."
The article also quoted Ruby McBride. She said the deal would be good for all parties involved. Pena would pay four million in AccuShield stock, with a lockin period of ninety days.
I copied the article, composed a quick email to Lars Elder at the First Bank of Sabinal.
I tried to sound upbeat, promised that Garrett could work out a new payment schedule for the ranch's mortgage soon. I didn't mention anything about possible murder charges.
I closed my laptop, drank some coffee, and stared at the pink cake box—the memorabilia Ruby McBride had almost pilfered the day before. Finally, either my breakfast or the photo of Clara Doebler had to go. I muttered an apology to Jimmy, then turned his dead mother facedown.
I needed to work out, then get ready for my morning class. Instead, I found myself sorting through Jimmy's Family folder—the queries he'd been making into the Doebler past. There was one letter to a local hospital, requesting inpatient records of Clara Ann Doebler's stays for clinical depression. Jimmy had written the AmericanStatesman for information about obituary archives. He'd written the Travis County clerk for Clara's death certificate, her will, the original deed to the lake property. He'd also asked if it were possible to do a birth certificate search without knowing the baby's name. He was interested in
births from 1966 to 1968—mother's name Clara DOEBLER, or possibly Clara LOWRY.
Father's name LOWRY, or UNKNOWN.
I thought about what Ruby had said—how Clara had hung out with men her family didn't like. Given the years she'd been separated from her son, Jimmy, how little he must've known about her, the queries for a lost sibling struck me as sad. I could imagine the psychology—an only child, taken from his mother and overseen by relatives who primarily wanted him out of the way, raised in boarding schools. At a younger age, Jimmy probably fantasized about "real parents" somewhere else—parents who cared for him and would someday rescue him. At an older age, when the terrible reality set in that his mother was in fact for real, he could harbour a more mature fantasy—a sibling, someone out there who at least could share his misery, maybe someone who needed rescuing by Jimmy. And maybe, deep down, Jimmy had needed a reason for Clara stopping her journal to him in 1967. A baby would've been a less painful explanation than the idea that Clara just had stopped making the time.
I set the folder aside. I tried to remember Jimmy the way I'd always thought of him before—the permanently dazed beach bum, the wellmeaning screwup, as impervious, rootless, and free from worries as a chunk of driftwood. I couldn't quite reconstruct the image.
The last thing I reviewed from yesterday was the list of phone numbers Jimmy had called in April—his cousin W.B., the Doebler Oil offices, Aunt Faye, Garrett.
I scanned it again, kept coming back to one number I almost recognized—an Austin number, a twominute call on April 16, sandwiched between two shorter calls to Garrett. On a lark, I picked up my cell phone and dialled.
The pickup was immediate. "Homicide. Lopez."
I hesitated.
"Hello?" Lopez's tone told me he was about to hang up.
"This is Navarre." Then I added, "Tres."
"Well. Aren't we the early birds?"
The only thing that didn't surprise me was that a homicide detective would be at his desk at 6:30 A.M. That was the only time they could catch up on paperwork.
I stared at Jimmy Doebler's phone bill. Two minutes, twelve seconds. April 16.
"Just got off the phone with Detective Angier in San Francisco," Lopez told me. "She sends her regards."
"The Selak drowning?"
"Angier said we're welcome to keep Pena and his attorney, the lovely Miss Lee, in Texas just as long as we want."
"She look at the inhouse files for you?"
"Nothing earthshaking. Pena and his girlfriend were bickering at dinner. Boat had a few dozen people on it, mostly computer execs. It was one of those big commercial charters—room for several hundred, so when Pena and Selak went for a walk they didn't have to go far to get out of range of witnesses. There's general agreement that Adrienne Selak had had too much to drink. She was slurring her words, stumbling, was plenty pissed at her wonderful millionaire boyfriend. Pena's account, he took her aft to cool off and to sober up. She was embarrassing him. She wasn't rational, kept calling him names, trying to hit him. Anyway, the boat was cruising the north part of the Bay, due east of Sausalito. Pena and Selak left the stern bar around 11:00 P.M. Around 11:30, Pena's employee, guy named Hayes, got worried, decided to go aft. The way Hayes told it, he heard the couple arguing, turned a corner and there they were—
Pena with his hands raised, trying to calm Selak down. She was throwing weak punches at him, crying. Then she turned like she was going to run away from him but she stumbled against the railing, hit one of those spots where it's a rubbercoated chain—where they put the stairs up for boarding, right? And she fell over the side.
Hayes swears Pena lunged for her, caught her sleeve for a second, but over she went—about a twentyfoot drop from the deck. Hayes ran for help. Pena threw a life preserver, yelled for the boat to stop. But Selak never surfaced. Straight over and she was gone. Coast Guard helped with the search, but no body was recovered. Then your friend Maia Lee got involved in the case. That's it."
"Angier think Pena pushed Selak overboard?"
"You know how it is, Navarre. We detectives are totally objective. We go simply on the facts."
"Uhhuh. You think he pushed her?"
"I wouldn't doubt it. This guy Hayes—he either saw nothing, or he saw the push, and his boss bribed or forced him into silence. But can SFPD
prove it? This happened in January. Mr. Pena is still a free man. What do you think?"
"Dwight Hayes ever treated as a suspect?"
"Not that I heard. The only thing Angier said about him, what troubled the investigators the most, is that they couldn't shake Hayes' story, no matter how they tried. They couldn't catch him in an inconsistency, and Hayes didn't strike them as the ironwilled type. He was shaking, sweating, terrified of the cops. If he'd been hiding a lie, they should've been able to get it out of him, you know? He was the best proof, the only real proof Pena was innocent."
"You filing charges on my brother?"
Half a minute of silence. "Navarre, there was something else the good folks at SFPD
told me, about your friend Maia Lee."
"Such as?"
"I hear you two used to be together. Sorry if you don't want to hear this. Your exgirlfriend apparently burned an awful lot of bridges in San Francisco defending Pena. A lot of people who used to respect her, they're in agreement that Miss Lee crossed the line on that case, sold her ethics. Happens to every defence lawyer eventually, Tres, even the decent ones."
"You sound like a homicide cop talking."