Spiral

by David L Lindsey

  He looked at his watch. It was two hours before Jack Crowell's shift ended at the telephone company. Crowell answered almost before the first ring stopped. As soon as he heard Haydon's voice, he said how sorry he had been to read about Mooney in the papers. Haydon got away from that as soon as he could without being rude, and told Crowell he had four unlisteds. Crowell jumped at the chance to help and said he would call back as soon as he had them.

  Haydon stood, placed his hands in the small of his back, and leaned backward. He had not left his chair for the two and a half hours he was working on the code. Now he faced the possibility of having some real leads, though he had nothing to go on but the fact that they were coded telephone numbers. If it turned out that the V was Valverde, then he felt he could be sure of the rest of them.

  Then he had an idea. He picked up the telephone and dialed Cordero's number. It rang twice before it was answered by a man. He recognized Ryan Coates's voice, and hung up. He wished he had called earlier, and wondered how long Lapierre's men had been there. He wondered if Cordero had gotten back in time to dispose of the telephone book.

  When his own telephone rang, he picked up a pencil immediately.

  "Here they are, Stuart," Crowell said. "Ready?" He gave him Valverde's name first; the address was the limousine service, though it was not the company's number. Ferretis, Daniel B., was next. Then Waite, Tucker. And, finally, Lopez, Ireno, H. Haydon thanked Crowell and hung up.

  He stared at the list, then he leaned over to his desk and got the Key Map directory of Harris County. The Ferretis address was in

  Meyerland, an upper-middle-class neighborhood along Braes Bayou just south of Bellaire. He found the street and marked the page with a paperclip. Tucker Waite lived on the other side of the city, in a subdivision called Port Houston, a neighborhood with few amenities across Clinton Drive from the Turning Basin. The ship channel was just across the freeway. Apparently Ireno Lopez lived in some kind of apartment on Lacona just off Sixty-ninth Street, which was also honorarily named Staff Sgt. M. Garcia Drive.

  He looked at the list again. There was one big disappointment: no number for a man named Rubio Arizpe. His only hope was that one of these names would be Arizpe's contact. At this point, he still had only the name, the possibility, that Arizpe was indeed involved.

  Haydon closed the directory and wrote the three addresses on a clean sheet of paper. He quickly jotted a note to Nina, who had taken Gabriela grocery shopping, telling her where he was going and that he would call her in a couple of hours. He signed it, and made a notation of the time: five-twenty.

  It was the hottest part of the day, and at the height of rush hour. Avoiding the expressways, he traveled the oblique streets—there was no direct route—around the southern side of the University of Houston, through MacGregor Park to Old Spanish Trail, where he turned north. At the Gulf Freeway, Old Spanish Trail became Wayside and he was once again in the neighborhoods with the highest Latin population in the city. Just as he crossed Country Club Bayou, he angled to the right onto Sixty-ninth Street, which then ran parallel to Wayside all the way to Buffalo Bayou above the Turning Basin.

  He found Lacona, a bleak little street with its pavement almost completely covered with the chalky powder of its caliche shoulders. There was a welding shop on the right near the corner of Lacona and Sixty-ninth. It took up two lots. One lot was given over to a weedy scrap-metal yard with an abandoned welding truck and rusty heaps of twisted steel, the other was occupied by a barnlike corrugated-tin workshop with its greasy wooden doors thrown open to the stagnant afternoon. The rusty tin had collected heat all day, making the inside of the shop a shadowy furnace.

  To Haydon's left, directly across the street from the welding shop, was La Concha Courts, a collection of unpainted clapboard cabins on either side of a caliche drive that went through to the next block. They were destitute dwellings occupied mostly by destitute men, merchant-ship sailors from foreign ports who needed a bed and a room for a week or two or three, a place to sleep on whores and sleep off drunks.

  Each cabin had an attached carport, and as Haydon turned into the driveway and eased along between the cabins, he noticed the carport of number eight was empty. Not wanting to run the risk of being reported to the police by a suspicious owner, he backed up the Vanden Plas to a cabin near the entrance where a sign leaning against its tattered screen door said "Manager." He got out, went up to the door, and knocked.

  "Que quiere?" The voice sounded like years of whiskey and cigarettes, and came from the impenetrable charcoal darkness behind the screen.

  Haydon tensed, and held his shield up to the unseen respondent. "Detective Haydon, Houston Police Department. Will you come to the door, please?"

  He heard a deep grunting, followed by the unmistakable uncoiling of old sofa springs. There was the ominous moaning of labored breathing, and a fat man appeared on the other side of the screen, his stomach touching the door. He wore a stained undershirt and a pair of gray dress pants that had never been cleaned in their history. He looked at Haydon, chewing something with toothless gums, his lips flibbering obscenely, folding in on themselves to keep whatever it was he was chewing inside his mouth.

  "What," he said.

  "I want to talk to Ireno Lopez," Haydon said. "Is he in his rooms?"

  The manager shoved at the screen door and rolled out onto the little wooden stoop, squinting down the caliche drive toward cabin number eight. He held a bottle of Lone Star beer by wedging its long amber neck in the crotch of his first two fingers and letting it dangle at his side.

  "Noestdr

  "When will he be back?"

  The fat man shrugged and looked at Haydon with mindless eyes, masticating.

  "How long has he been gone?"

  "Two, t'ree day."

  "When did you see him last?"The fat man looked at Haydon blankly, his lips sucked in to form a wrinkled socket, breathing heavily through his nose with a kind of moaning grunt every time he exhaled. He seemed not to have heard the question, to be waiting for Haydon to say something. Haydon started to repeat the question, but the man said, "Mown-day. Estuvo ahi, Mown-day." Some of whatever he was chewing escaped from his mouth.

  "Morning or afternoon?"

  "He lef' in the mornin'."

  "Where did he work?"

  The fat man shrugged with a grunt.

  "How long has he been living here?"

  The man shifted on the boards of the porch, still holding the screen door open with his left shoulder, and took a drink from his beer, washing down what he had been chewing. A power drill revved in the welding shop, and somebody banged on steel with a hammer. Hordes of cicadas buzzed in overlapping waves in the still-leafed hackberries that loomed above the squatty units of La Concha Courts.

  "He been livin' here, fie, six weeks." The fat man's stomach jumped with an inward belch.

  "You need to let me in," Haydon said.

  "Momentito." The fat man turned and heaved himself back into the charcoal darkness. When he returned, he did not come out, but stuck his arm around the screen door and handed Haydon a key.

  Haydon thanked him, got into the Vanden Plas, and eased along the caliche to number eight.

  The door was poorly fitted into its frame, and was only a token of security. The cabin was stifling, and stale from the pent-up heat of several days. It consisted of one room with a double bed, a sofa, an armchair, a clothes chest, and a dinette table with three chrome chairs. One side of the room was recessed for a "kitchen" which contained a single enameled sink, a two-burner gas stove, and a tiny refrigerator. The other half of the setback was the bathroom, with a corner porcelain sink, a commode with a badly warped lid, and a metal shower stall with peeling white paint.

  Haydon took a pair of latex surgical gloves out of his suit pocket and slipped them on. The medicine cabinet was almost empty, a flat metal container of aspirin, a disposable plastic razor, a can of Band-Aids, a toothbrush, and some cheap aftershave lotion. He turned, took the lid off t
he commode tank, looked inside, and replaced the lid. There was one dirty towel on a metal rod. In the shower stall, a

  well-used bar of Ivory soap—Haydon smelled it—leaned against the rusty shower wall on the floor. The bathroom stank of gypsum-laden water.

  It seemed that Lopez rarely used the kitchen. There were no cooking utensils except a coffeepot, which was clean. A small can of coffee sat on the counter beside the sink, along with a box of Fig Newtons. When Haydon tilted the box of cookies to look inside, fou or five roaches darted out of the waxed paper. Little beads of roac droppings were scattered along the counter next to the wall. In th refrigerator he found half a quart of milk, two overripe peaches, shriveled red bell pepper, and three bottles of Dos Equis beer.

  Haydon bent down and looked in a small plastic trash basket. Three peach stones, three Dos Equis bottles, a Band-Aid wrapper, ALL covered with ashes and cigarette butts that had been dumped in on top of them.

  The clothes chest was metal, a filthy hospital green, and mostly empty. Except for more roaches. In the top drawer there were a few pairs of dingy jockey shorts, several pairs of dark nylon socks, a sin holey undershirt. The other drawers were empty.

  A few Spanish-language newspapers and magazines were scattered on the old stained sofa. Haydon lifted the cushion of the armchair and saw a foil condom packet, a quarter, and two pennies, put the cushion back and kneeled down on the gritty linoleun look under the bed. A shoe box sat next to the foot of the bed. Haydon dragged it out and found it covered with a gray rag stained with grease smudges. It smelled of light machine oil. He lifted the rag found three full boxes of Geco-B AT 9mm parabellum cartridges, extra clips for a .45 caliber Mac-10, and a silencer for a handgun. There was a well-used map of Houston, folded to a size that placed River Oaks at its center. A small square had been drawn with a point pen on Inverness where Gamboa's address would have been. Charley T's in Greenway Plaza had been circled, and the route ( Richmond to the West Loop) intersection had been marked. Other routes were traced out from Inverness to other locations where, Haydon assumed, Gamboa often traveled.

  There was little else in the box. A few small screwdrivers pair of needle-nosed pliers used for cleaning firearms, a few screws, a can of oil, and a tube of grease.

  Haydon stood quickly, went outside to the car, where he folding city map from the glove compartment, and came back inside. Squatting next to the box, he copied onto his map the markings from the other, unfolding it all the way and looking on both sides so as not to miss anything. There were scattered notations which he didn't take the time to reason out.

  When he was through, he put the map back into the box and covered it with the rag again. As he bent to shove it back under the bed, he saw a yellowed label, almost unreadable, on the end of the box: "Zapatos Canada, Calle Hidalgo No. 1262, Guadalejara, Jalisco." Mooney had had it all wrong. He would have been disappointed. The idea of a Canadian Mexican had appealed to his sense of vagary.

  He had one more task before he left: the bed. He lifted the mattress, holding it up on the sides as he walked around the edges, but found nothing. Next he began going through the folds of the sheet; there was no bedspread. On the bottom sheet he found several dark pubic hairs, one, he thought, lighter than the others. He was tempted to take them and fold them inside the latex gloves, but thought better of it. He would have to ask Vanstraten to run the tests on the sly, and he would taint the scene in the process, as if he hadn't done that already. Still, the hairs were here, and Haydon had a hunch they were going to tie in to something they already had.

  Moving to the head of the bed, he looked closely at the flat pillow, under it, and along the edge of the bed. There were several long hairs.

  Haydon straightened up and looked around the room one more time. There was a tiny altar set up in one corner on the edge of a nightstand. He looked among the plastic flowers, and behind the picture of an effeminate Jesus sitting on the ground in the garden of Gethsemane, gazing up at an ominous, lowering sky.

  He walked over to the telephone, dialed the police station, and asked for Bob Dystal. When Dystal came on, Haydon said, "This is Stuart."

  "What's goin' on?" There was an edge of caution in Dystal's voice.

  "This is an anonymous tip, Bob."

  There was a slight pause. "What is it?"

  "You need to send the crime-lab people to La Concha Courts, 802 Lacona Street. That's off of Sixty-ninth. See the manager. He told me the occupant, Ireno Lopez, hadn't been in his place since Monday morning. There are some good hairs on the bed, head and pubic. A cardboard box under the bed contains an interesting map. The shoe box has a Zapatos Canada label. Our John Doe from the Belgrano house was wearing Canada shoes."

  "I don't like this," Dystal said.

  "Lopez had an unlisted telephone number." Haydon gave him the number and stopped. "Did you pick up Cordero?"

  "No. We screwed it up. He's gone," Dystal snapped. From the sound of his voice, Haydon decided Dystal had chewed ass about that. It was a major mistake.

  "I found Lopez's number in his office."

  "Goddammit."

  Haydon wanted to ask if they had found Cordero's little address book, but didn't want to reveal its existence if they hadn't.

  "One other thing. You need to watch Lucas Negrete. He was a rogue police officer in Mexico City five or six years ago, and was responsible for a lot of violence. There are six men working for him, and I think they're doing a lot more than standing guard around Gamboa."

  "You gonna be at the place when we get there?"

  "No. I'll get back to you," Haydon said, and hung up before Dystal had time to ask any more questions.

  By the time he backed out the door and locked it, he was sweating through his suit. He returned the key to the fat man, who told him from the darkness just to open the screen door and toss it inside. He thanked the fat man's voice, and got a porcine grunt in response.

  CHAPTER 31

  WHEN Haydon got back to Wayside, he headed northeast. He wriggled out of his suit coat while he waited at the Navigation stoplight, then picked up the Key Map notebook from the seat and flipped to the next paperclipped page. Tucker Waite. Stang Street.

  It was approaching seven o'clock when he turned past the Athens Bar and Grill at the corner of Clinton and McCarty. For a split second he thought about stopping for a cool drink, but he didn't even hesitate as he turned onto McCarty. The sun was low on the horizon behind the city, though it was still nearly two hours before dark. The Port Houston and Pleasantville subdivisions were a collection of scattered streets within a rhomboid formed by the sparsely populated Market Street on the north, Clinton Drive and the Turning Basin on the south, East Loop North Freeway on the east, and the Port Authority North Railyards on the west.

  Within these geometric borders were bare stretches of sandy coastal pasturage, brown with tall, dead grass and scrubby bushes. Some of the streets had only a few houses, isolated by vacant lots that had never held anything more useful than scavenger weeds tangled with trash. Abandoned rail spurs sometimes ran out into the weeds, forgotten.

  Stang Street was one of the thinly populated ones that ran into a desolate little field with brittle coastal grass, and an occasional chinaberry or mesquite tree. Haydon slowed and checked the numbering system. Waite's house stood off by itself where the pavement stopped and the street continued as a crushed-shell road around a sandy hump of dune grass. As Haydon approached, he was unsure of how to present himself. Then he remembered he had forgotten to call Nina.

  The far side of the house was protected from an open expanse that reached toward the freeway loop by a thick house-high hedge of junipers planted so close together they formed a solid green wall. On the near side, a clapboard garage was offset thirty yards from the house, one of its double doors folded open to reveal the rear end of an old pickup sitting on cement blocks. A fishing skiff sat on a rusty boat trailer in the drive. A battered Evinrude outboard mounted on the skiff's stern looked as if it hadn't run in years.
One of the trailer's tires was flat.

  The yard had no curbing, and the Bermuda grass, looking pale from too much sun and too little water, simply grew in uneven margins out into the crushed shell. A sidewalk ran straight out from the front porch. There was a beaten rut in the grass at the end of the sidewalk where someone habitually parked a truck or car. The house was covered with white asbestos siding, and the green aluminum awnings on its front windows had been bleached pale by years of the southerly angle of the summer sun.

  Seeing no vehicles that seemed currently in use, Haydon pulled up to the side near the boat trailer so his car wouldn't be visible from the intersection at the end of Stang. He turned off the motor, opened the glove compartment, and took out a thin leather pouch, which he slipped into his jacket pocket.

  The heat had not yet begun to recede, and the traffic coming off the long fall of Sherman Bridge on the Loop glittered like a string of sequins reflecting the last sharp rays of the July sun. Haydon lowered the driver's window on the Vanden Plas and got out. A hot breath moved over the mounds of sand and clumpy dead grass, bringing with it the shuddering rasp of grasshoppers in the fields.

  He walked around to the front of the house, stepped up on the prefabricated cement stoop, and knocked on the door. To the right of the porch a spray of oleanders defended the front windows, and the rear end of a sleeping German shepherd peeked out of its shade.

  Suddenly Haydon was bathed in the cool, rippling wave of premonition, his eyes locked on the motionless flanks of the reclining dog. He slowly back down the steps, and saw the chain locked to a steel stake at the side of the porch. It snaked around the back of the oleander to the dog. Haydon crouched and pulled the chain, taking up its slack until it stopped. He tugged firmly, and kept it taut as he concentrated on the oleander. The blood was almost perfectly camouflaged until he saw a single splash of it, and then all of it became instantly visible as if he had finally identified the telltale pattern of the leopard's spots in the dappled shadows.