“I hear that pays pretty good,” he said. “So if you’re hiring out, I’m your man.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Mr. Browning said, then focused on me. “So, I understand you are quite the journalist.”
“Trying to be.”
“I see.” From a drawer behind the bar, he pulled a stack of papers and spread them out between us. They were copies of my articles about Ashton, not the actual school-paper versions but computer copies.
“Where did you get those?” I asked.
“Your articles seem to be popular among some of my daughter’s friends.”
Nash, I thought. He probably showed the articles I sent him to Tres, and Tres handed them over to the old man.
Just then my phone rang, and Mr. Browning looked at me like I’d farted or something. I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed, especially since my ring tone was the theme song to Walker, Texas Ranger. I didn’t take the time to see who was calling, but I figured it was Audrey.
After I turned off the ringer and put the phone away, Mr. Browning continued. “For someone who never met Ashton, you seem to have a lot of interest in her.”
“It’s a big story.”
“Is that all?”
“What else would there be?” I glanced at Randy, hoping he wouldn’t bring up anything about the reward money. No worries, though. His attention had turned to the thin gold stripe around the lip of his glass. He chipped at it with his thumbnail, probably trying to see if the gold was real.
“I can think of a pretty good reason,” Smiley said from his chair in the corner, but Mr. Browning cut him off before he could go into what that reason was.
“Actually, these articles are impressive. I was especially struck by the one about my daughter’s charity work. I appreciate you shedding light on that so people can get an understanding of what a caring girl she is.” He paused for a moment, looked down, and pinched the bridge of his nose, apparently trying to put a check on his emotions before he started bawling or something.
“Yeah, she seemed pretty caring,” I said.
He looked up, his focus returned, though his eyes were a touch watery. “One person in the article, I believe, even mentioned how much the children in the neighborhood adored her.”
“That’s right. She was sure popular with the kids.”
He asked if I remembered the neighborhood where she knew these kids from. I told him about the Ockle ladies, but I couldn’t remember the street name.
Smiley spoke up from the corner. “These Ockle ladies—did they say anything about any older kids, like about the same age as Ashton?”
This line of questioning I didn’t like. Sure, I thought the cops should know about Hector, but Mr. Browning was still a suspect. Maybe he was fishing for how much I knew that might incriminate him. If he’d hired Beto or Tattoo Head Oscar to put a hit on Hector, he wouldn’t think twice about getting rid of anyone who knew about the connection—namely me.
So I’m like, “No, I don’t remember any older kids. All I know is she delivered meals and everyone liked her.”
At that point, Mr. Browning glanced at Smiley. He seemed surprised about something. Or maybe he suspected I wasn’t telling everything. Then it hit me—he knew about my trip to police headquarters and my Hector Maldonado theory. He probably knew everything that’d happened in that police station since Ashton disappeared. The actual cops didn’t care about what I had to say, but my theory, coupled with my articles about Ashton, were enough to get me dragged down to the Brownings’ guesthouse.
“Well, there was this one guy,” I said, figuring I might as well come clean. “Hector Maldonado.” I went on to tell pretty much the same thing I told the cops, this time going light on how much Mrs. Ockle liked Ashton’s sandwiches. Still, I didn’t mention Beto and Oscar. If Mr. Browning wanted to know about those two, he’d have ask about them by name, which would prove he was involved with them somehow.
He didn’t, though. All he said was, “So you never saw this Hector person with my daughter. And these Ockle women never said they actually saw him with her. In fact, it might have been her brother they saw.”
I had to admit that was true.
He leaned his elbows on the bar top and shot me the stern authority-guy stare. “Then I suggest you refrain from spreading rumors that Ashton was involved romantically with someone of that nature.”
I wanted to ask what he meant by someone of that nature, but Smiley cut in with a question.
“What about the rec hall? We know you were there, but you didn’t write anything about it in your articles.”
I’m like, “The rec hall?”
And Mr. Browning’s like, “I believe the kids call it Gangland.”
Just to convince them I wasn’t holding back information, I told them pretty much all I remembered about Gangland. I figured they already knew most of it, and there didn’t seem to be anything that could get me into trouble—with these two, at least. I especially played up the Rowan Adams angle, but they weren’t as interested in him as they were in the likes of the Rat Finks and Colonoscopy—as if only non-Hollister kids were worthy of suspicion. Smiley even wanted to know more about the two Vietnamese dudes—Tommy and Huy—I saw walking into Gangland after we had to leave. I told him he was wasting his time thinking about them, but he jotted their names down in his notebook anyway.
“I’ll tell you something about that place,” Randy chimed in. “The girls there are stuck-up. They don’t know what they’re missing. If one of them called me right now, I wouldn’t give her the time of day. Except maybe that blonde in the tuxedo. If you know her, I wouldn’t mind getting her phone number.”