Spiral

by David L Lindsey

  He ate without enthusiasm, his thoughts returning once again to the day's events as he chewed the steak and gazed at the tablecloth, which had a ragged thread in the weave of its herringbone pattern.

  Suddenly he stopped chewing. He remembered what had been buried at the back of his mind, or he thought he remembered. He reached out and touched the ragged thread, and stared at the herringbone pattern. He would have to check it out. Definitely, he would have to check it out.

  He got up from his chair and went out to the pay phone in the lobby to call Mooney.

  "Steak, shit!" Mooney said. "You know what I'm eating? A submarine sandwich stuffed with mayonnaise and shredded lettuce. Watts went out and got them for us. His idea of a great meal. I don't even believe I'm eatin' this for dinner, for Christ's sake."

  "I'll bring you the bacon they wrap around the filet," Haydon said. "I've got some interesting information about Gamboa. Anything there?"

  "Naw," Mooney sounded bored. "Everything's outgoing right now."

  "Will you be at a stopping place in about forty-five minutes?"

  "I'm always at a stopping place."

  "I've got an idea I think we ought to check out."

  "I'm ready. Maybe we could drop by a quickie seafood place."

  Haydon hurriedly finished the filet. It would sit like a stone in his stomach, and if by some odd chance he actually got home by twelve as he had agreed with Nina, he would not be able to sleep for hours. The waitress had disappeared, so Haydon decided to forgo the second cup of coffee. He quickly sipped the last of the original cup, put two dollars on the table—a generous tip, considering—and walked to the register near the front door. The waitress was there, talking with the young man behind the register, who had showy white teeth and heavy black eyebrows that had grown together.

  "Oh, God, I'm sorry," she said when she saw Haydon, and began fishing in her apron pockets for the check.

  "It's all right," he said. "I should have told you I was in a hurry."

  She quickly calculated the total with her ballpoint pen, and took the time to turn the ticket over and write: "Have a nice day! Candi," in a rounded script that went all the way across the back.

  Outside, Haydon unlocked the car and ran the air conditioner a minute before he pulled onto Kirby. He drove to Shepherd, where he jogged over to Memorial Drive and followed it all the way to the police station.

  The homicide division looked as if it were working two full shifts at the same time. Haydon and Mooney were back on the street in fifteen minutes. By the time they got to the edge of Chinatown on Preston, they saw a ghostly jet of vapor pouring out of the air-conditioner vents. There was now no cool air, only a kind of heatless exhalation. It was leaking Freon.

  "Well I'll be goddamned," Mooney said, his voice rising. "This is the shits." He angrily slapped off the air conditioner and rolled down his window, as Haydon did the same. Mooney took off his tie, which hadn't been tightened around his neck since five minutes after he had gotten to the office early that morning, and stared through the streaked windshield, sulking. No steak, and now no air conditioning.

  "You know," he said, after stewing a few minutes, "there are few enough goddam amenities on this chicken-shit job without having the air conditioner crap out. I mean, an air conditioner. In this goddam sump of a city it's an absolute necessity! Like public utilities, for Christ's sake." He reached down between his legs and pushed the seat lever. His side of the seat slammed back as far as it would go. "And I'm surprised they don't have us running around in some kind of little Chink-shit cars, too," he said, apropos of nothing. "That's when I'd tell 'em to kiss my ass, and take early retirement."

  Haydon had been hearing a lot about early retirement from Mooney lately. Quite a few of the detectives were discouraged by the new, stringent policies imposed on the department, and Mooney was no exception. Haydon agreed with their reasons for discontent and was a little embarrassed that the new austerity measures obviously posed no hardships for him.

  But aside from that, Haydon had been concerned for a good while that Mooney didn't seem particularly happy. In a fast-paced city that placed a premium on youth and health-spa physiques, a paunchy, red-nosed cop pushing forty-five was not exactly in the mainstream of the A crowd. Mooney was facing the lonely middle age of a lifelong bachelor, and his social life was quickly loosing altitude. He was watching a lot of television at night, alone.

  "See if there's a flashlight in here anywhere," Haydon said. Mooney reached under his seat and felt around. He turned with a groan and looked in the backseat.

  "There's a little one back here," he said. "I doubt if it's got batteries. If it does, the bulb'll be broken."

  They followed Harrisburg into the East End, past a monstrous coffee packaging and distribution plant that produced odors that always reminded Haydon of the smoldering fires of a jungle village in the Yucatan, past Eastwood Park, a used-furniture store darkened and ripe for burglary, a meat-processing plant, the railroad tracks, a thrift store, a dance hall called Latin World with palm trees along its sidewalk and a painting on its wall of a pair of dancers in thirties-style tuxedo and slinky dress leaning into a sweeping tango.

  Turning into the darker streets, they entered Chicon two blocks from the Belgrano estate. The neighborhood cantinas offered them bouncing Mexican music with wheezy accordion rhythms and the simple chords of amateur guitarists. They crept past Los Cuates and La Perla, seeing the men and women lounging in the night shadows outside, cigarettes glowing in parked cars. The sweet smoke of marijuana drifted to them from the hot, murky evening like the heavy perfume of a sad and indifferent woman.

  Haydon continued past the cantinas and stopped across the street from the empty barber shop of Ernesto Herrera. From where they were sitting they could see a faint glow of amber light in the second floor of the old house.

  "Somebody's there," Haydon said, his voice low.

  "You don't want to go up and knock on any doors, do you?" Mooney asked.

  Haydon smiled. "No. There's a gate at the back, like a door in the wall. I want to double-check it. That's all." He turned, stretched over the back of the seat, and grabbed the flashlight. He held it under the dash and flipped it on. A yellow beam lit Mooney's shoes in the floor of the car.

  "Well, whattaya know," Mooney said sourly. "Not exactly high-performance, though."

  "It's good enough," Haydon said. "This will take only a minute."

  He put the car in gear and eased away from the curb, around the corner and down the street on the east side of the house. The top of the high wall was darkened with cloudy branches of trees growing on the other side. Haydon went to the end of the block and crossed the intersection into the next block. He cut the lights and parked in front of a little shotgun house with its windows thrown open. There were no lights on inside, but they heard a radio.

  "Okay," Haydon said. "Let's walk back and cross the street to the rear wall. The gate's right in the middle. All I want to do is check the ground just inside."

  They locked the car and took the hand radio with them, the volume turned down. Haydon carried the flashlight and Mooney followed with the radio. They rounded the corner on the opposite side of the street, staying in the shadows of the banana trees growing next to the fences inside the yards. When they were opposite the gate they paused, then crossed.

  The streetlight that should have been at the corner of the block was out, so they were in a prolonged half-light when they stepped up on the sidewalk next to the wall. Mooney turned his attention to the street as Haydon cupped his hands over the lens of the battered flashlight and guided a dull beam along the edge of the wrought-iron gate. When he found the latch where the lock was supposed to be, he was surprised.

  He straightened up and put his mouth close to Mooney's ear. "It's not locked," he said. "I'm going to ease it open."

  Mooney turned to the gate and put his hands on the hinges to help deaden the squeak they anticipated. Haydon inched it open. It squeaked sharply once, and Hay
don crouched to the ground, directing the flashlight beam on the few feet of open ground between the gate and the dense stand of bamboo. He saw the powdery dust he had remembered, and then he saw the other thing, the narrow herringbone pattern of tread marks, clear and precise in the fine dust. Instinctively, he followed them with the beam to the bamboo. The rear end of a motorcycle glimmered through the stalks.

  Haydon heard a dog on another street, a high-pitched quivering wail that dropped to a deep chesty baying a split second before the point-blank barrage of automatic-weapon fire opened over his head with an explosion like the end of the world. Though he could not possibly have seen it, he was aware of Mooney being blown off his feet, being hurled out the gate with an awesome grunting bawl that had no comparison in Haydon's experience. Unreasonably he screamed too, heard his own voice syncopated between the spitting solar brilliance of each rapid explosion. He came up with the Beretta in both hands to meet the stunning muzzle fire with his own deafening blasts into the bamboo.

  Then silence.

  For an instant the hush was disorienting. His body was as rigid as bone, his arms holding the Beretta straight out in front of him.

  Suddenly every dog in the barrio raised an incredible yowling. Haydon staggered from his crouch, caught himself with his left hand, his ears ringing, the Beretta still pointing at the stand of bamboo. He was trembling, crabbing backward to the gate, suddenly realizing he might have emptied the fifteen-round clip, wondering if he could fire again if he had to. He stumbled backward over Mooney, the dogs filling his head and scrambling his thoughts, remembered, felt the numb coolness of shock coming as he lunged out of the line of sight of the opened gate, remembered again, jumped back into the open, and began dragging Mooney sideways to the protection of the wall. He knew Mooney was dead. He felt dead, and in Haydon's mind the black spillage that was still spreading incredibly quickly over the pale sidewalk and in which Mooney seemed to float so lightly under the dim, distant source of illumination proved he was dead.

  The straining whine of a car engine on the other side of the block. Louder as it approached the front of the old mansion, shouting coming from beyond the wall, yelling, only a few voices, the deep-toned jangling of iron gates, and the car screaming away into the city night.

  He sat on the gritty sidewalk, leaning against the Belgrano wall with Mooney's head in his lap. He was thinking about Mooney's ulcers when he remembered the radio, and saw it winking at him from the gutter.

  Chapter 14

  HE listened to the dispatcher call for the nearest units—officer down, which would bring everyone on the East Side—and then she asked if he was all right. He said he was. Homicide picked it up and Dystal was on, his west Texas drawl tightened by what he had heard. Dystal asked if it was bad, and Haydon said Mooney was dead. Dystal asked if he was all right, and he said he was. They were on the way, the lieutenant said, and kept talking, and Haydon knew why and didn't care and turned off the radio.

  The empty sidewalk stretched on either side of them like a luminous chalky border against the wall. No one was coming out of the houses, which was good, because he didn't want them to, and after a minute there were fewer and fewer dogs barking until the last one stopped. He watched the black pool spread to the edge of the curb, where two or three rivulets broke loose and went over the side. He knew there would be a lot of it, so it didn't bother him. He wanted a cigarette. Dystal would have one when he got there, or maybe one of the patrolmen who would be there first. His clothes were plastered to him with sweat, enough of it to soak through his suit, enough to make his face slick, to form a drop on the end of his nose and make the corners of his mouth taste salty.

  In his mind he stood back and looked at himself. It was an unreasonable thing for him to keep Mooney's head propped up with his thigh, but it didn't seem right that he should let it on the sidewalk. Not now, while there were just the two of them and they still shared whatever it was that tied them together. After the others arrived the situation would become official and it wouldn't matter anymore and he could put Mooney's head on the sidewalk. When the others entered into it—he almost thought "intruded"—the strange intimacy of a closely exchanged death would vanish. Mooney's departure would become a "case."

  Mooney's head was surprisingly heavy. Haydon looked at the enormous swell of Mooney's stomach and remembered the corpse that had lain next to this same wall, but on the other side of the block. That was only this morning. He remembered the shoes without laces, and he looked at Mooney's shoes to check. He looked at Mooney's hands. And, realizing now that he had been avoiding it, he looked at Mooney's face. Even though he was only a foot or so away, he could not see his features distinctly. He could not get a clear picture of what Death looked like, having come to make its roost in Mooney's body.

  He looked up and let his eyes settle on a nothing part of the night. He thought that it was a good thing he didn't have cigarettes with him because if he had he would have smoked one and it might have seemed a callous gesture to the first officers to arrive—him sitting there with Mooney's head in his lap, smoking a cigarette. Mooney wouldn't have given a damn, but it wouldn't have looked right all the same.

  He was not, initially, aware of the sirens, rather it was as if he thought of them first, and then heard them. They were distant, frail and distant.

  Mooney had been still for so long Haydon half expected him to heave a big, fat man's sigh as he often did on stakeouts when he had to sit cramped up in a car for long periods of time. But there would be no such sigh from him now, because Mooney wasn't there. Mooney was lost. Roosting Death had performed its magic, and shunted him into oblivion, to a place that even Death forgot. That was part of the magic, the heart of its hopelessness. He remembered the words of Catullus, "Lost is the lost, thou knowest it, and the past is past." Haydon saw the infinite black vacuum of never again. He simply waited, cradling what Death had done on a hot night, dreading the approaching end of their tranquility

  Chapter 15

  THE streets on all four sides of the block occupied by the Belgrano estate were closed off by police cars, and teams of officers were going door to door to each of the houses that faced the mansion walls. Fractured beams of flashlights crisscrossed in the darkness through the brushy undergrowth of the grounds, and every window in the old house was lighted, its bare rooms exposed to the surrounding night.

  Dystal had been in the fifth car to arrive at the scene, though he was the first man from homicide. Before the others arrived, he took Haydon aside and listened to his story. He was easygoing, but not lax in wanting details. Haydon was aware that Dystal was watching him closely. He had expected it. Haydon had not acted responsibly in deliberately cutting off the radio, leaving Dystal to wonder what was happening, and with no idea of what he would find when he got there. He had every reason to expect the worst.

  After Dystal had made Haydon go through it a second time, and then began backtracking with questions, Haydon realized there was more at play than the lieutenant's need to know. Haydon had to have his facts straight. He would have to repeat his story to each of the three teams that investigated officer shootings: the department's shooting team, the representative from the internal affairs division, and the Harris County district attorney's investigators. Dystal was testing him, coaching him. He wanted to know for himself if Haydon would be able to handle it, and he wanted to help him do it if he could.It was the beginning of a long night. The parts were played by the same actors who always played them, but the cast had been expanded with additional characters. Besides Dystal, there were several teams of detectives, as there had been that afternoon, and the shooting team investigators. There were two other homicide lieutenants, the captain, and one of the assistant chiefs. The afternoon's terrorist-style assassination had already put the upper echelons of the department on alert. When they arrived at the scene at the Belgrano estate and learned that Haydon and Mooney had been investigating Hay-don's suspicion of the presence of a motorcycle at the scene of another La
tin killing earlier that morning, their worst fears broke into the open.

  Standing in the street, thirty yards away from the empty white outline of Mooney's body on the stained sidewalk, Haydon did his best to review the events of that morning to the small crowd of detectives circled around him. There was as yet no written report about the morning's incident, since it had quickly taken second place to the investigation of the assassination that had occurred a few hours later. Nor had he yet had the time to write up the results of his interviews with Valverde and Gamboa. A great deal of the information he had gathered during the day and relayed back to Mooney still had not been recorded, since Mooney had been busy initiating his own inquiries up until the time he had accompanied Haydon to the Belgrano address. It was obvious that before either investigation could progress much farther, Haydon would have to sit down and produce a detailed report.

  After he had recapped the new developments and answered a few questions, there was little left to say. The administrators gradually moved aside to discuss cosmetics, their immediate concern being the news cameras and reporters held at bay behind the barriers across the street. The officers huddled together to compare notes, to work out the strategies they would have to answer for the next day. Haydon and Dystal were alone again.

  "Have another one of these things 'fore we go in there," Dystal said, tilting his head toward the house and shaking out a cigarette.

  They leaned against the fender of Dystal's car and smoked, and as Haydon raised the cigarette to his lips a spasm of ungovernable twitching seized his upper arm. He almost lost the cigarette, then dropped his hand to his side, hoping that Dystal hadn't noticed.

  "I don't guess you gotta go through with this part of it," Dystal

  said.