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