Spiral

by David L Lindsey

  "All right, Stu. What do you want to do?"

  Haydon was expecting it.

  "I'll save us both a lot of time, Bob. I don't want to work under the constraints of departmental procedure. Not on this one."

  Dystal rattled his change. "Well, I guess I could see that coming. I'll tell you, Stu, I came over here with the full intention of twisting your tail. This is so far outta line it makes my conscience hurt, goes against my grain." He looked up from under his eyebrows a little apologetically. "My grain gets straighter every year, and a lot less limber. I don't much like to admit things can be done right if they're not done by the rules. The older I get, the better I like rules, Stu. By God, you can't have a decent society without decent rules, and decent people who know what the rules are there for."

  This last sentence was spoken with some heat, and Dystal stopped himself abruptly as if he had headed off a verbal stampede just before it got out of control.

  "I don't like what you're doing, Stu," he continued. "If we were in a voting situation here, I'd vote against you." He took the hand jiggling change out of his pocket and wiped it over his mouth. Haydon heard the rough rasp of his stubble against his hand. "Fact is, though, we'd be hard up if you hadn't done what you did. I know that."

  Dystal looked as if he was trying to find the right words, the right way to frame something else he wanted to say, but couldn't. Then he said, "Don't withhold information from me anymore." He was frowning, his voice hard. "Don't do that anymore. It's going too far." His eyes were searching Haydon's, frankly probing. He raised a massive, heavy hand and pointed an index finger at Haydon. "You let Nina know where you are every minute. I want to be able to get to you anytime." He lowered his hand. "By God, Stu, be careful."

  Chapter 38

  HAYDON was barefooted and shirtless, wearing only his white calzones when he walked across the terrace and went down the steps and through the cherry laurels to the bathhouse. He carried a few slices of smoked ham left over from the sandwiches he and Nina and Celia had eaten after Dystal left. And he carried half a bottle of Macon Chardonnay. He never worried anymore about what was good or bad for Cinco. At this point he only thought of what the old collie would like.

  The ceiling fan behind the trellis never stopped, day or night, always there to stir the air, hot or cool, heavy or light. Haydon paused a moment to let his eyes adjust to the darker space behind the latticework. Standing with his bare feet on the cool bricks, he could hear the faint, rhythmic swishing of the fan, and occasionally the syncopated breathing of Cinco. He finally saw the lighter outline of the old dog on the bricks and went over and knelt down beside him.

  To his surprise, Cinco's eyes were open, watching him. Haydon put down the ham, and the dog's tail swished across the bricks. With Haydon's help, he sat up and ate a few pieces of the ham while Haydon scratched him behind the ears. After a minute or two, Haydon reached over for Cinco's bowl and poured it about a quarter full of the white wine. Cinco turned from the ham and looked at the bowl, started to make a move for it, but Haydon slid it over to him. The old dog proceeded to lap it, ignoring the ham. Haydon grinned. A lifelong habit. He remembered the afternoon he had first poured some wine from his glass for the inquisitive, manic little pup playing around his chair on the terrace. The pup drank every drop of it, and Haydon had laughed and poured more. Out of curiosity Haydon had kept it up—going into the house for the bottle—until the pup had had all he could take. Then he had wobbled off and flopped down in the shade next to the house, where he immediately went to sleep with his nose in the leg of a rubber boot Pablo had left on the terrace. He had lapped up five good slugs of Sauvignon Blanc, and Haydon had named him Cinco. A lifelong habit.

  As Cinco lapped beside him now, Haydon drank from the bottle. Now that his eyes had adjusted, he could see that he and Cinco sat in a cross-hatch pattern of pale light as the late July moon, full and still rising, slipped through the lattice in powder-blue diamonds.

  "Stuart." The voice was soft, and the diamonds rippled in the moving shadow as Nina passed the trellis and came around the side.

  "Right here," he said.

  She stood at the end of the trellis, as he had done, letting her eyes adjust. The moon backlighted her gown, and he saw that she was naked, the silk a misty aura.

  "I can hear Cinco drinking," she said.

  "He preferred it to the ham."

  "Has he got water over there? That ham's going to make him awfully thirsty when he gets around to eating it."

  "Yes."

  "I see you now." She came over slowly, an arm out touching the lattice, feeling with her feet almost as if she were wading through black water, careful of sharp stones and the unbalancing force of the current. She reached out a hand and touched his shoulder, and held on as she lowered herself beside him.

  "Did you make sure the alarm system is on?"

  "It's on."

  "I'd hate for her to slip out."

  "Why would she do that?"

  "I don't know. You want a sip?"

  She took it from him and drank a little, then handed it back They sat side by side, covered in pale diamonds.

  "She seems like a nice girl," Nina said.

  Instantly Haydon's mind entertained an image of her naked on the sofa with Valverde. Doing whatever Valverde wanted.

  "She does, doesn't she."

  "It's hard to imagine her mixed up in this the way she is. In a assassination."

  "She's not mixed up in the assassination."

  "But I mean, knowing about it. She didn't seem even to realize how serious her position was."

  Haydon thought of her position on the sofa.

  "She knew what she was doing," he said.

  "But she seems so demoralized by all that's happened. Her brother being killed like that. She's been through a lot. She doesn't seem all that well prepared to handle it."

  "She probably isn't," Haydon said. "I see that kind of thing a lot. People—more people all the time—like the idea of stepping over the line. They like to think of it as living on the edge.' They think if life gets boring they're being cheated out of something. They think they owe themselves more than that. When it all finally blows up in their faces they're devastated. They can't believe it's happening to them. It wasn't supposed to ever end."

  Nina reached across, took the Macon again, drank from the bottle, and handed it back. She laced her right arm through his, and they sat together, their legs crossed and pulled up in front of them, she leaning against him now.

  "Somehow I can't think of her being motivated only by the excitement," Nina said. "Maybe at first, but I think it changed for her."

  "Maybe you're right," he said. And he was beginning to think she was. Despite his inclination to be cynical about her, he had to grant that Celia Moreno had been through an ordeal that would have badly shaken even a professional. And she was dealing with it; she hadn't completely fallen apart. She had thought she was working within the right system. It hadn't been a thoughtless lark. He didn't have any right to be pompous about her motivations.

  They were quiet, and Cinco finished his wine, pushing the bowl away from him as he licked it. Haydon pushed it back to him and poured some more. Cinco didn't began drinking immediately, but sat still, blinking drowsily. Then after a minute he began lapping again.

  "Do you find her attractive?"

  Haydon was surprised. "Very much so," he said.

  "Well, that's honest," she said, a flatness in her voice. "I apologize for having forced it out of you."

  Haydon grinned, and nudged her. "You didn't want me to lie, did you?" He looked at her, and could see her smiling silhouette.

  After a minute she said, "What about Bob? What happened there?"

  "We left it like it was." He knew she was going to be disappointed to hear that.

  "But what about her? Shouldn't she be in official custody?"

  "I suspect she is."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I don't know how Bob's going to handl
e this, but it's my guess he's done something tricky, like officially putting me back on duty without telling me. That way he can tell the people above him that he's given me a special assignment regarding this case. I don't know, I imagine he and Captain Mercer have cooked up something along those lines. Whatever it is, you can bet he's calculated the risks."

  "They seem like they would be pretty big risks, to me."

  "The pressure he's feeling from the administration and politicians to have this thing closed out carries a hell of a lot more weight than any reprimand he might receive for letting me work like this. He's taking his best shot. It isn't made any easier by having the FBI breathing down his neck, either."

  "That's the part that's bothering me," Nina said, as if she had been waiting for him to get around to it.

  "What?"

  "Her story about her reports. I don't know where the deception lies, whether someone is lying to her, or whether she's lying to you."

  "And the question in either case is, why?"

  Cinco had quit drinking again, lain down, and gone back to sleep.

  "I don't know how long he can go on like this," Haydon said, looking at the old collie. "I wonder if his days and nights run together, or if he even cares."

  "Is he asleep?"

  "I don't know. Seems like it."

  She took the wine again and lifted it to drink. Haydon looked at her and saw the pallid light coming through the lattice, striking the sloping neck of the bottle and refracting, chasing the curve of the green glass that didn't appear green in the night, but black, the light like liquid pearl scribing the body of the bottle. She gave it back.

  They sat amid the soft sounds and small movements of the summer night, not talking now, passing the bottle back and forth between them. Haydon relished this, and thought how grateful he was to her for coming out when she had, and wondered how she had sensed that it would be the right thing to do. He didn't know how long they had sat there, but it was long enough for his mind to have ranged and prowled in places he wanted, and didn't want, to be. He fought off images of Mooney that too often jumped into his thoughts now, like single discontinuous frames spliced into a film where they didn't belong. Mooney might appear at any time, or rather Mooney's corpse, bleeding, suddenly, as Haydon read the paper, or shaved, or stopped at a traffic light, or worse, at awkward times that made him wonder about his sanity.

  The angle of the moon had changed.

  Nina had the bottle, drinking, then she lowered it and handed it to him.

  "You can have the last of it," she said, dabbing a finger at the bottom of her lip where she had spilled some. "I think I can understand why you like it."

  He was drinking when she said it, and didn't understand at first, because he was tasting the wine. A drop of sweat from the bottle hit his bare chest, cold, and ran down toward his navel.

  "Or rather, I can 'reason' why you like it," she added. "I don't really understand it."

  Haydon laid the bottle on its side next to the trellis and looked at her. She was facing straight ahead, her eyes reaching out to the varieties of darkness in the cherry laurels and lime trees, her silhouette broken by the diamonds, a strand of hair at her forehead dodging in the wind currents whipped downward by the blades of the fan.

  "I've always thought of you as a private person," she continued. "Holding yourself in, finding it difficult to offer yourself to someone else. But I think I was wrong. In a sense, you do give yourself away. I mean when you're working. You leave yourself, and try to crawl into someone else's mind, try to become them, so you can know about them what they don't want you to know. The sad thing—sad to me, at least—is that you're giving yourself to the kind of people who don't want you. They're fugitive spirits, people in emotional flight. You're always trying to get close to people who are constantly pushing you away. It's the nature of the roles you play. You seem to be drawn to that kind of situation, for some reason." She paused. "But I'd never thought of it that way before."

  Haydon continued looking at her silhouette, the slope of her forehead, which was almost Indian. "What made you think about that?" he asked.

  She didn't say anything.

  "Come on," he said. He stood, then pulled her to her feet, and holding hands, they walked out of the arbor of the bathhouse, through the path of cherry laurels, and onto the grass in the moonlight. It was warmer on the lawn than sitting directly under the bathhouse fan.

  The moon was so bright it threw shadows under the trees, and so large it could not for a moment be forgotten. They skirted the orchard of lime trees, whose heavy fragrance hung in the shadows, scenting the air. Turning out of the trees, they crossed a stretch of rising lawn, to the sprawling canopy of a flamboyana. By a trick of night vision the moonlight had shattered, fallen through the filigree of tropical leaves, and lay on the lawn in pointillistic luminosity, a counterpoint pattern of the flamboyana's shadow.

  They stopped, standing on the splinters of light, and Haydon moved the silk off her shoulders and let it fall of its own liquid weight to the grass. They lay there, and he touched her, the long, dusky grace of her, and was grateful to her again for being what she was. Breathing in her smell, he kissed her, saw the pieces of the moon coming up through her from the grass so that in those places she was translucent It was a blue moon, that rare lunar occurrence of every two or three years, the second full moon in a single month, and they lay on the pieces of it, unafraid of its penetrating light.

  Chapter 39

  DANIEL FERRETIS slumped in the driver's seat of the old Volvo so that only his eyes showed above the door and looked out the lowered window to the pale-lighted parking garage. He was sweating profusely, from fear and heat, and his heavy eyeglasses kept sliding down on his small nose. It didn't do any good simply to push them up with a practiced shove of his middle finger, because the bridge was so oily they slid down immediately. He had to take them off and wipe them dry with the tail of his guayabera. The tail was the only part of it that was dry. The rest of it was soaked with perspiration and clung to his white, flabby flesh like cellophane. But he wasn't complaining. Considering the afternoon's events that had led to his being here, he was fortunate that he was still around to sweat at all.

  By a stroke of bad luck, he was having to teach one course in the second semester of summer school. It was a required sophomore course, and no one was in there because he was interested in it. Like swallowing nasty-tasting medicine, they simply wanted it over with. And so did he; he had other preoccupations. To make matters worse, it was a midafternoon class. A down time of day for him, especially in the heat of the summer. So they agreed to agree, and every day he showed up at class, handed out several sheets of information that they should memorize for the test at the end of the week, and after asking if there were any questions—there never were—he dismissed class.

  That was the way it had been until today. He had noticed the girl the first day, not for what she had, but for what she didn't have. She did not have large, round breasts. She did not have a nice round ass. She did not have blond hair, or black hair, or auburn hair, but weak, lusterless straw hair the color of old newspapers. In short, she was not a candidate for grade-point improvement in private consultation. Today when he had asked if there were any questions, she had timidly but resolutely raised her thin little arm.

  It took him twenty minutes to answer her. Not because he was verbose, but she had a follow-up question, and then another, and another. He responded with restrained patience—she could have beer an administrative spy—and gave her her money's worth, which the little bitch seemed determined to get. Whereas he usually was back in his office fifteen minutes after convening class, today he had gotten back thirty-five minutes later, and just in time to round the corner of the hallway where his office was located and see two men standing a his office door. One was bent over the lock, picking it, and the othe was keeping watch, though in the split second it took Ferretis to see and understand what was happening and to jump back, the man on guard was
looking down the hall in the opposite direction.

  Ferretis ran down the stairs, across the yard separating Erby Hall from the building north of it, and climbed to the second floor where he searched for an empty classroom on the south side. When he found one, he locked the door behind him and glued himself the windows, after closing the Venetian blinds to a sliver of visibility from where he could see both entrances to Erby Hall. His heart was throwing a fit, and his side hurt from running. He hadn't run that much in fifteen years. He probed his potbelly, wishing he had continued his long-abandoned routine of riding the stationary bicycle in the garage.

  The two men were in the building half an hour, but it seem like the rest of the afternoon. It was long enough for him to imagine that these two men might well fit into any number of scenarios that would herald the beginning of the end. He was not an excitable man but that was not to say that he was incapable of getting excited. Now he was dumbfounded. They knew about him. Really, he had never thought he would be connected to this. He had planned it so carefully . So cleverly. They? He didn't know who they were. Still, he was surprised anyone suspected. But there could be no other explanation. Why else would someone break into his office?

  When the men emerged from the east end of the building flinched. He got a good look at them, and then rushed to the door, plowing, stumbling through desks, leaving a wake of them behind. He lurched down the stairs and outside onto the mall, which was luckily, busy. He spotted them immediately, and followed them through the crowds of students from fifty yards back. When entered one of the parking lots, he took a shortcut across to the exit and was there, crouching and looking at them through the windows of the surrounding cars when they drove out. He noted the license-plate number.