Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

Zuli seemed to be turning to stone. “She’s done this before, sir. With men. But not for so long. Something has happened.”

“Please, Mr. Navarre,” Mrs. Pauerstein said again. “You came highly recommended.”

“By some idiot at your day spa,” the doctor grumped. “Don’t beg this man, Beth!”

“Zuli has been with us almost twenty years,” she persisted. “We’ve known Alva since... since she was a child. We want to help.”

“This is absurd,” Dr. Pauerstein said. “I’m sorry, Zuli, but Alva’s a grown woman. We can’t go chasing after her every time she throws a tantrum.”

“A tantrum?” I asked.

No one volunteered an explanation, but I felt the history there, deep as well water.

I was thinking over the bad possibilities, the bad things that could happen to a pretty girl in a West Side bar on Halloween. I didn’t like the description of the guy she’d left with, either — a short man in a conspicuous yellow truck. Not a happy camper. Not a person who would be nice to women.

Then I looked at Dr. Pauerstein, who was silently urging me to refuse. And Zuli, who was hurting, suffering, and had only these people, whose countertops she’d been scrubbing for twenty years, cleaning carefully around Dr. Pauerstein’s pictures of cosmetically mutilated faces.

Or maybe I just thought about my rent, which was due that week.

I said, “I’ll find Alva for you.”

Later that morning I found the police’s witness — Luisa Rodriguez, a girlfriend of Alva’s who’d been with her on Halloween. Luisa couldn’t remember anything she hadn’t already told the cops, but she said it didn’t matter. Alva had been looking for trouble for years. She found it. Screw her. Who cared?

“Her mother,” I answered.

“Chingate,” Luisa spat. “Her mother gave a shit, she would have gotten Alva out of that trap a long time ago.”

“What trap?”

She gave me a hard look. “You were at the asshole’s mansion, you didn’t notice?”

“Dr. Pauerstein and Alva didn’t get along?”

She laughed. “They got along since Alva was fifteen. You think he kept Zuli around because she cleans good, mister?”

I let that sink in, and started wondering how Dr. Pauerstein might look if I gave him some of my own complimentary facial reconstruction.

“Alva was getting angry about being used,” I guessed. “There was some kind of big argument at the Pauerstein house. Had she threatened to go public?”

Luisa shrugged, but I could see an unsettling thought forming behind her eyes.

“So you’re mad at her,” I said. “Mad enough you wouldn’t care if she’s dead?”

“I don’t know anything.”

“If Pauerstein did something to her, I’ll crucify the asshole. I wish you’d help.”

I started to leave, but she called me back.

Her eyes were wet.

“We were supposed to go to college together,” she told me. “We were going to be business majors, open a restaurant someday. Instead, she stayed out of school, kept waiting for that asshole to divorce his wife. The day before she disappeared, she said she was giving up on him. She was going to tell the whole town she’d been raped as a child, throw as much shit in his face as she could. She’d told me all that before, but this time... I don’t know, maybe she was serious.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah.” She wiped a streak of mascara off her eyelid. “You doing anything Friday night?”

I spent the afternoon at Angelito’s Cantina, buying beers with Dr. Pauerstein’s money. One guy, Iago, tried to kill me with a pool cue, and then — with his face pressed against the corner pocket — admitted he might know the short guy I was looking for: Frankie somebody. A minor-league hit man.

That led me to my friend Ralph Arguello, who sat in his pawn-shop office posting merchandise on eBay. At any given time, Ralph had five to ten thousand items cooking on the Internet, but that was nothing compared to the list in his head — names, addresses, incriminating dirt on every player in San Antonio. Ralph could tell you who was buying, who was selling, and who was controlling the bids.

I said, “Hit man named Frankie. Short Latino, yellow truck.”

“Frank Tejeda,” he said. “Been on his way down, staying at the Salado Inn. You know it?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Ralph grinned, gesturing toward his wall of pawned weapons — assault rifles, bayonets, samurai swords. “Cut you a deal, vato?”

The Salado Inn bordered a dry creek bed on Highway 90, on the outskirts of Bexar County where worn-out subdivisions gave way to worn-out ranch land. Ten dilapidated red cabins formed a U around a gravel courtyard. Even the soft light of dusk couldn’t make the place look good.

Over the years, it had enjoyed an illustrious history as an Asian massage parlor, a heroin-junkie commune, and a training camp for low-budget evangelists. Now, in its old age, it had settled down as a residence motel, a sign out front promising good rates by the month, year, or decade.

There was no yellow truck parked anywhere that I could see.