Spiral

by David L Lindsey

  Bias signaled for the waitress to bring him a refill, and watched her as she finished writing up the check for the one other customer in the shop. Then she went behind the counter to get the coffeepot off the hotplate. She was a Mexican girl, and when Bias and Rubio had first come in, her friendly, quick smile had not been wasted on him, though he had been unresponsive, and otherwise ignored her. He had his map to study. By the time she had served them their third cup without so much as a glance from either of them, she had gotten the message and didn't even bother to smile anymore.

  But now, as she came up to the table and started to refill Rubio's cup, he stopped her with a quick gesture.

  "No, he's not coming back."

  She shrugged, poured his coffee, put down a plastic container of cream, and started to turn away.

  "What is your name?" he asked.

  She looked at him, surprised. A tentative smile.

  "Yolanda." A savvy city girl. No last names to strangers. She wore her waitress uniform well, and held her long, girlish hair in an upward sweep at her temples with simple white barrettes. Her mouth was large, and pretty. She had one dimple.

  He said something to her in Spanish. She grinned, a little embarrassed.

  "I don't speak Spanish," she said, cocking one hip as she stood in front of him.

  He wasn't surprised, but he was disappointed.

  "You were born in Houston?"She nodded. "Right." She was still smiling, pleased at hi; attention.

  "Have you ever been to Mexico?"

  "Just to Matamoros." She seemed to wish she could have tol< him Acapulco, or Cancun, or Mexico City.

  "You have family there?"

  "In Brownsville. My grandmother lives there."

  He nodded, and smiled back at her, but was already decidin that it wasn't any good. He shouldn't have started it. She was sti standing there with the coffeepot, but she could see it slipping too, little puzzled by it.

  "If you need anything else..." she said.

  "No," he said, opening the plastic container of cream. "Just coffee right now. Thanks, Yolanda."

  "Sure," she said with a slight shrug again. His use of her fii name seemed to soften a little of the disappointment. Her smilm flickered again, faintly sad this time.

  Bias was angry with himself, but he didn't dwell on it. He dumped the cream in his cup and stirred, then sipped carefully. The coffee was hot, but strong. When the temperature was in the 90's, hot coffee was not in great demand in sandwich shops. He put down the cup and looked back at the map. He felt tired, very tired. Or again, he traced his pen back and forth along San Felipe. From River Oaks Boulevard to the West Loop there were exactly a dozen points at which side streets intersected San Felipe. Some of them did not cross, but came to a dead end there. He was sure Negrete's men would pay particular attention to these.

  Then his pen froze, and he stared hard at something on the map as if he were seeing it for the first time, though it must have been hundredth. He was amazed he had not recognized its potential long before. It was the perfect site, so perfect that he had a tremendous sense of relief. He had no doubts now that they would be able pull it off.

  CHAPTER 33

  AFTER hanging up the telephone, Haydon opened the door so the light would go off and leaned against the glass of the booth. He thought about Mooney. It was so damned unreal. He would have been inside the store now, buying a couple of sweet rolls for a snack, buying something for the little girl with gold earings as naturally as if she had gone in there with him, and watching out of the corner of his eye to see if the two boys who had left their bikes outside were going to lift a package of gum over in the candy aisle. Instead, he simply didn't exist, didn't play any part at all. Except that he was a part of the puzzzle, or rather, his death was. He was a number in a larger equation, an unknown factor. A candidate for an interview with the extraordinary Detective Voyant. Christ. How had he thought of that? It was freakish.

  Mooney used to do a little routine in which he satirized the "if-only-the-dead-could-talk" wish of frustrated homicide detectives. He became the famous female Detective Claire Voyant. Detective Voyant tried to solve her cases by interviewing the dead, taking statements from the victims, the only people in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred who knew who had killed them. This would have seemed the answer to a homicide detective's prayers, but as it turned out, the bewildered Detective Voyant invariably discovered that the ghosts of the victims—in Mooney's words—"didn't know Jack shit" about who had killed them. Claire was the supremely frustrated investigator, and in all the years Mooney had been relating her stories, which were drawn larger than life with Mooney's special brand of irreverent humor, she never cleared a single homicide case through her unique ability to interview the victims.

  It occurred to Haydon, standing in the telephone booth and staring out through the lemon light, that he had heard the last of

  Detective Voyant. However, it seemed to him that had she tried her technique in one last case, that of her creator and fellow detective, she would have appreciated the irony in the fact that even Ed Mooney, really, didn't know Jack shit about who had shot him that dark night from the impenetrable wall of black bamboo.

  Haydon was burning up in the booth, but stood there, sweating, thinking. He remembered the swell of Mooney's stomach as he lay on his back. He remembered the sound of the gunfire, and his own mental image of what it meant, Mooney's appalling death grunt, the heat and brilliance and roar of the blasts lifting him off his feet and hurling him backward in darkness to the dirty sidewalk where he died staring up to the night sky until one darkness overcame another and he, the profane and contentious and likable and terrified Ed Mooney, stepped across that awesome border into eternity.

  Haydon heard his heart in his ears, hammering. He felt perspiration on every inch of his body. He saw himself standing in the dark booth as if he were outside himself looking back from a slightly higher angle. Then he moved back, and saw the booth in front of the convenience store bathed in the hazy nimbus of yellow light, then from higher and farther away he saw the barrio, then the breadth of the encompassing city, itself continuing to recede, becoming smaller and smaller until it hung like a sparkling pendant in the vast expanse of a starless sky, shrinking, diminishing, ultimately lost.

  He stepped out of the booth, and went home. He sat in the library, his coat off, his tie loosened, his sleeves turned back, sipping a gin lime he had made for himself the minute he came home. He had made one for Nina too, and she was sitting across from him in the same white linen dress she had been wearing in the afternoon. She also wore a sober expression, almost strained, as they looked at each other. He had just told her what he had found at La Concha Courts and Stang Street, and what he had conveyed to Dystal. Then he had fallen silent. "Celia Moreno never called back?" he asked after a moment. Nina only shook her head. Haydon looked at her. She had put her drink on the small table beside her chair and was sitting with her arms crossed, almost hugging herself, an attitude she had assumed as she listened to him recount the afternoon's events. Maybe he shouldn't have told her everything. He really hadn't thought about it, about the effect it might have on her, before he started talking. With all the excitement and the tension, he simply had told her everything. It hadn't been prudent. She was already scared for him, and telling her what he had seen at the Stang address didn't help matters. She wasn't used to it. His talking to her about his cases, in this sort of detail at least, was still new to both of them. If it hadn't been for Mooney, it might not have happened at all.

  He knew too that she still was wishing he would turn it all over to Dystal, that he would back out of it altogether and let the others take it to the end. But it was something she wasn't going to bring up again.

  He sipped his drink, and his mind went back through the day's events. He sifted through the debris of the case, trying to pick out the one item that would point him in the right direction, trying to spot the anomaly.

  "Somewhere in all this," he said, "t
here's got to be a direct connection to Rubio Arizpe. We've yet to come across that one crucial contact. Cordero. He knew something, but it's too late to get anything out of him now."

  He leaned forward in his chair, holding his glass in both hands, forearms resting on his knees. "Negrete's played hell with this," he said. "He's caused a lot of confusion." He paused. "It doesn't make sense that the tecos would be killing their own people, I mean, Lopez outside that old Belgrano house, and now Waite. It's got to be Negrete. Dystal's going to have to do something about him. I don't know how they'll tie him to it. It's not going to be easy."

  "Who's left?" Nina asked. "Of the tecos?"

  "The only one we know about is Ferretis."

  "What did Lopez and Waite do for the tecos? What was their role?" She was frowning, intent.

  "I don't have any idea," he said.

  "Well, who were the other two people in the house with this man Waite? Do you think they were tecos?"

  Haydon shook his head again.

  "It seems to me that if Rubio Arizpe was the other man on the motorcycle, he's certainly cruel enough to have killed those people," Nina said. "It doesn't necessarily have to have been Negrete." "I thought about that too," Haydon said, pushing his lime down into the ice. "But then I can't think of any reason for the torture. Not only that, but if he's a professional, and I'm betting he is, he wouldn't want to attract that kind of attention. That kind of scene is a red flag to police. It really stirs up things. Arizpe's going to want to be the next thing to invisible ... until he makes his move for Gamboa."Nina picked up her drink and sipped it. She ran her fingers through her hair, a gesture that recalled Renata Islas. There was an intercourse with women, Haydon thought, that had nothing to do with sex. At least, not explicitly. It was a communication of gesture and movement that he did not always understand, but observed with invariable appreciation. It was a dialect of gender.

  "What makes you so sure this other person is Rubio Arizpe?" Nina asked suddenly. "Maybe you haven't come across a connection to him because there isn't any. Don't you get leads in cases all the time that never develop into anything? Renata Islas only gave you a name and a description. That's all."

  "That, and the knowledge that he's operated here before."

  "She has no proof of that."

  "No. Not the kind of confirmation we'd like to have. Still, I guess it's more of a hope than anything," Haydon said. "Because if it's not him, then there's someone else out there we don't even know about yet. And that's a considerable setback. I'd hate to think we're still at that point."

  "Have you told Bob about Arizpe?"

  "There really hasn't been time. I'm going to give him everything when he gets over here tonight."

  "Maybe your assassin is Cordero or Ferretis."

  Haydon smiled at her. "If you'd met Cordero you'd mark him off your list. I don't have any doubt that he was instrumental in putting it together, but he's a hell of a long way from being an assassin."

  "And Ferretis?"

  "I don't have any idea, but it seems highly unlikely to me that an organization of militant right-wing Mexicans with involvement in death-squad activities throughout Mexico and Central America would use a man who lives in upper middle class Meyerland as an assassin. It's just too improbable."

  "I guess that's right," Nina said. She stared at her glass, running her thumb from top to bottom all around it, erasing the beads of sweat. "Do you really think Negrete has any better idea about where he's going with this than you do?" Well, he's had some serious 'interviews' with Lopez and Waite." Haydon nodded to himself. "He knows something. I just hope Dystal gets to Ferretis before Negrete does. And I hope Celia Moreno..." Haydon stopped, and looked at Nina. Without saying anything, he stood and walked across the library to his desk. He flipped through a stack of papers until he found the stapled pages of the copies of Cordero's address book. He had been an idiot. Surely he had seen it when he was going through the names before. He turned to the M's. It was there. After Bernardo Montez, C. Moreno. He dialed the number, and it rang four times before someone picked it up. It was a woman's voice, but it wasn't Celia.

  "This is Stuart Haydon," he said. "Is Celia there? I'm returning her call of an hour ago." "No," the girl said. "She's not here. This is her roommate. She left about half an hour ago." "Do you know where I can get in touch with her?" "Uh . . ." The girl hesitated. "She told me that if you called, I should ask you who you talked to at her mother's house today." Haydon understood. "Besides her, I talked to two young men, I think they were cousins. They didn't think I belonged there." The girl repeated what he said, as if she were writing it down, and then Celia Moreno came on the telephone.

  "Hello?" Her voice was soft, a kind of hesitant half-commitment, as if that provided her with some kind of protection.

  "This is Stuart Haydon." "Oh, God." She recognized his voice. "Listen, I've got to talk to you, but not on the telephone."

  "You know you could be in danger, don't you?" he said.

  "I think so," she said, her voice cracking.

  "I'll come by and get you."

  "No, I'm not staying here. I'm leaving, Nikki and I both are leaving."

  Good. "Where, then?"

  There was a pause, and Haydon could tell she was trying to figure out how to give Him directions to a meeting place without also revealing the information to whoever might have tapped her telephone.

  He helped her. "Do you know where I saw the girl exercising today..."

  "What?"

  "Do you know the place where I saw the girl exercising today? Cover the mouthpiece and ask Nikki about it."

  There was a moment of muffled conversation, and then she came back on. "Yeah, okay. I understand."

  "There's a service station near there that stays open all night." "The closest one?"

  "Yes. I'll pick you up there. Just wait inside with the attendants. It's well lighted." "I'll be there."

  "It's going to take me ten or fifteen minutes to get there," he said. "Any problem with that?" He didn't want her to panic, leave before he got there.

  "No, no problem. I'll be there."

  "I'm on my way," Haydon said, and hung up.

  Chapter 34

  MEMORIAL DRIVE split into two main thoroughfares on the western side of Memorial Park. Its southern trunk became Woodway, a sinuous and heavily wooded drive that cut through the affluent section of Tanglewood west of the Loop. Haydon made good progress in the traffic, and by the time he rounded the curve of looming pine trees and saw the blue-white neon lights of the service station, it was closing in on the fifteen minutes he had predicted.

  The station driveway was glistening with water as he turned off Woodway and rolled to a stop under the canopy near the front door. Two attendants in rubber boots were working outside, one rolling up the water hoses while the other used a wide rubber squeegee to push the last ripples of foam down the sloping drive toward the street. A third attendant was inside the bright office, but Celia wasn't with him.

  Haydon left the Vanden Plas idling, and got out as the attendant inside looked up. He was sitting behind his desk staring at a color television perched on top of a display stack of oil cans. When he saw Haydon, he looked out to the other two men, saw they were busy, and reluctantly got up and walked to the door.

  "Yes, sir," he said.

  "A woman was supposed to be waiting here for me," Haydon said. "Dark hair, attractive."

  "Nope," the man said, shaking his head and rubbing his elbow as he stood in the doorway. "No woman like that been in here tonight, that's for sure."

  Haydon hadn't expected this; her condominium was only five blocks from the station. He had started to say something to the man when the attendant's eyes shifted past Haydon's shoulder. He looked around to see Celia riding a bicycle into the station's light, the gears clicking as she approached, gliding on her own shimmering reflection over the wet drive.

  She pulled up beside the Vanden Plas and got off the bike.

  "I'm sorry," she
said, her face a mask of restrained self-possession. "I helped Nikki get some things into her car."

  "Fine," Haydon said. This was a different Celia. She wore a long, diaphanous lavender skirt, which she had gathered up from around her ankles by running a purple cord under the hem of the skirt, front to back, and pulling both ends up between her legs to gather the long material into a pair of chic billowing pants. Her blouse was a black satin camisole with lace over the tops of her breasts. She had pulled her dark hair up off her neck because of the evening heat; a few strands were coming loose at the back.

  Haydon looked at the attendant, who was looking at Celia.

  "Could she leave her bicycle in your office for a while? She'll be going with me."

  The man shifted his attention back to Haydon.

  "Yeah, I guess so," he said. He politely came around the rear of the car and took the bicycle from Celia. He smiled at her as she thanked him, and told him she appreciated it, and then he gave a different sort of smile to Haydon as Celia untied the cord from her waist and let the skirt hem fall.

  "I get off at six o'clock, sport," the attendant said to Haydon. "I don't guarantee anything after that."

  "We'll just be a little while," Haydon said. Celia was already walking around to the passenger side, dabbing at the perspiration on her forehead with a tissue she took from the waist of the skirt.

  As the attendant walked the bike into the office, Celia and Haydon got into the Vanden Plas. Haydon put the car in gear and drove out of the glare of the neon and into the scattered shadows of the street.

  "You're going to find this unbelievable," she said, starting to talk before Haydon had a chance to say anything. She turned the vents on the air conditioner to blow on her face and dabbed the tissue around her neck. She lifted the front of the camisole and fluttered it. "I find it unbelievable."

  Haydon waited.

  She glanced at him, then said, "Where are we going?"

  "Nowhere. I'm just going to drive while you talk."