Castro Directive

by Mertz, Stephen

  Pierce's muscles tensed; his palms sweated against the grip of the .38. He waited, but nothing happened. Had he imagined it? Cautiously he poked his head out again.

  He's coming.

  Pierce aimed, then lowered his gun. "Jesus, cat! You scared the shit out of me!" A furry orange tiger cat sauntered out of the room and down the hall. He took a deep breath, exhaled, then moved down the hall. He stopped outside the room with the light on, turned the knob, inching the door open.

  What if the cat wasn't the only one up here? He leaned forward, glimpsed a bedroom with dresser drawers upturned. Clothing—shirts, jeans, blouses, underwear—littered the carpet. Shoeboxes and more clothes were piled on the bed. He pushed the door further open. It squeaked. And just then Elise shouted his name.

  Her voice shredded the silence and sliced through him like a hot blade. He turned and raced for the stairs, bounding down them two or three at a time. He spotted Elise backed against a wall next to an open closet door. Her mouth was moving, but nothing was coming out.

  "Christ, what happened?"

  "He was here. In the closet."

  "When? Just now?" He glanced around.

  "No. Before. Look." She nodded toward the open door. He peered into the closet and saw clothes and boxes. Then he saw the inside of the door. Scrawled in red crayon was : YOU CUNT. Below it was a crude, childlike drawing of a woman with her legs spread, and between them a kitchen knife was jammed into the crimson red, oversized lips. Pierce jerked the knife from the wall. "I'll wash it off."

  "No, we better wait for the police." Elise touched his shoulder. "They'll be here any minute."

  "All right."

  Just then, the orange cat pranced into the room. "There's your upstairs noise. He was scratching a chair or something."

  "Mouser, what are you doing in here?" She knelt down and held out her hand. "It's the neighbor's."

  The cat took a couple of tentative steps toward her, stopped, hissed at her, then scooted across the room, leaping over a pile of books. Mouser jumped onto a window ledge and disappeared through the opening in the curtains. Pierce walked over, spread the curtains. "Here's where the creep broke in. He went out the back door." An upper pane of the window was broken and the window was open.

  Elise was on her way upstairs and he followed her, thinking that she wasn't going to like it. She walked immediately to the room at the top of the stairs and turned the light on. A study, and the intruder hadn't overlooked it. A lamp lay on the floor; nearby was a coffee cup and a telephone. Books were piled in front of an empty bookcase. Stacks of files were strewn from one side of the room to the other, and the drawers of a file cabinet hung open.

  She dropped to her knees and ran her fingers over the file folders. "Let me find the R's. I've got a file on Andrews. I put it under Raymond for this very reason. Here it is." She thumbed through it. "I don't see anything missing."

  He craned his neck, trying to see what was in the file. "I didn't tell him about you." As soon as he spoke, it occurred to him that Andrews might have hired a detective to watch him.

  She snapped the folder shut. "I don't care. He knows." She stood up, looked around. "Oh, God. My bedroom."

  She rushed down the hall just as Pierce heard a pounding at the door. "I'll get it." He scrambled down the stairs and was about to open the door when he realized he was still holding his gun. He considered tucking it into the back of his pants, but decided against it. The pounding started again. He looked around, then set the .38 on the overturned television set.

  He unlocked the door, opened it. A policewoman quickly looked him over, her hand hovering inches from her holster.

  "Who're you?"

  "Nicholas Pierce."

  She was a foot shorter than he was, with blond hair tied in a ponytail. A frown knitted her brow. She was attractive, and would probably be more so if she were wearing something other than a baggy police uniform, he thought. Right now she was all business.

  "Where's Elise Simms?"

  "That's me," Elise said, hurrying down the stairs. "I was the one who called."

  The cop glanced past him, nodded to Elise, then stepped inside. Her eyes suddenly froze on Pierce's .38. "Who's gun?" she asked sharply.

  "It's mine. I'm a private investigator."

  "Is that right?" Morris Carver walked through the door. "Wrap the gun, Officer. We'll check the registration."

  "What are you doing here, Carver? I thought you were a homicide officer."

  "I'll ask the questions." He glanced over at the policewoman, who was putting the .38 in a plastic evidence bag. "Check the rest of the house."

  "Yes, sir." She handed him the bag and headed upstairs. "I've had someone tailing you all day," Carver said in a low voice that was like a rumble. "For a change, one arm knew what the other one was doing." He glanced at Elise. "The dispatcher recognized the address when you called as the one we had staked out."

  "They should've been here earlier when the place was getting tossed," Pierce said.

  Carver ignored him, moved across the living room, stepped over records, books, tapes. He crossed the dining room with Elise and Pierce behind him and walked into the kitchen. "Anything missing?"

  "I don't know," Elise said. "It's hard to tell right now." Carver walked over to the back door and opened it. "Did you leave this unlocked?" he asked.

  "I'm sure I locked it," Elise answered.

  "He came in a window and left by that door," Pierce said.

  "So you've got it all figured out," Carver muttered, and went about his business.

  The cop walked into the kitchen. "Lieutenant, there's something you should see out here." Her face was impassive, but her tone was urgent.

  She led them to the closet at the bottom of the stairs and pointed to the scrawling on the inside door.

  "So. We've got an artist of sorts," Carver said. "There's a knife on the floor," the cop said. "I think it was sticking in the wall. There's a hole."

  Carver squatted his heavy torso down on one knee. He picked up the knife from the floor, holding it by the edges of the blade, and glanced at Elise.

  "I pulled it out of the wall," Pierce said.

  Carver stood up, turned on him. "What kind of detective are you, Mr. Pierce? Don't you know enough not to tamper with evidence?"

  "I didn't think about it," he said quietly. "She was upset."

  No one said anything for a moment. Carver rubbed the nape of his bull neck. "I want to talk to each of you, separately."

  While Carver questioned Elise upstairs in her study, Pierce returned all the perishables to the refrigerator and freezer and scoured the obscenity from the closet door with cleanser and a scrub brush. When he was finished, the drawing and words were still visible. Elise would need to paint the door before the image would be completely obliterated. He'd just closed the door when Carver joined him in the living room.

  The detective walked immediately to the door and opened it. "Pierce, did I say you could wash the fucking evidence off the door?" Carver let out a long sigh and shook his head. "You do know that cases are sometimes solved by matching handwriting?"

  Pierce knew. He ran a hand through his hair. "You can still make it out."

  "Sit down."

  For the next several minutes, they went over what happened from the time he and Elise arrived at the house. Finally the burly detective put his notebook away, shook his head, and rose from the couch.

  "It's funny, Pierce. That's twice now you showed up around trouble in one week. How do you figure that?"

  "I don't know, and I don't find it funny."

  Carver picked up a broken ceramic frog that still held a surfboard in its remaining arm, examined it a moment. "What do you think this guy was after?"

  Pierce shrugged. "No idea. It might have been someone trying to scare her."

  Carver laid down the frog. He moved over closer to Pierce and his dark eyes focused on him. "We put a man in the gatehouse at Raymond Andrews's condominium the other day. We couldn't help
but notice that you stopped by for a visit. Stayed close to two hours."

  "He's an old friend. He asked me to look into the theft of the skull."

  "I got the impression from Simms that you were doing the same thing for her."

  Pierce gazed down at the floor as if he were looking for something amid the mess. "Then you got the wrong idea. I'm working for Andrews."

  Carver stared at him, shook his head. "One way or another, Pierce, you're going to get your ass kicked. I can see it coming. See you around."

  Chapter 12

  "Look, maybe you should just drop me off at "a motel, Nick. I'll be fine," Elise said as they drove through downtown. It was one-thirty, and the city looked abandoned. The only sign of life was a man shuffling along a dark sidewalk and another huddled in a doorway. Pierce glanced over at her as he turned on Biscayne. She was slumped in the seat, her arms crossed. "Whatever. But my offer still stands."

  "I don't want to put you out."

  "You're not."

  She would have to make up her mind fast, because he was nearing the turnoff for the causeway.

  "You sure?"

  "Positive."

  "Thanks, I just couldn't stay in the house tonight."

  "Understandable. So what do you think of Carver?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I don't know. What do you think of him?"

  "If you're asking me if I think he's the cop Paul Loften hired, I doubt it."

  "Why?"

  "For one thing, it would be quite a coincidence that he just happens to investigate the case that he's perpetrated."

  He considered her point for a minute. "Maybe he set that up, too. He would probably know where he had to be and what he had to be doing to get it assigned to him. I mean, he is a homicide investigator."

  "I hadn't thought of it that way." Her voice was flat. "Did he ask you about the skull?"

  "Sure he did—and he asked me about Andrews, too."

  Pierce thought it over as they crossed the causeway. If Andrews was behind the theft and murder and Carver was also involved, why would the cop be pursuing Andrews as a suspect? Unless he was trying to cover his ass. Something about it didn't feel right. He somehow couldn't imagine Carver taking orders from Andrews. Not unless Carver owed him for something.

  "This is so goddamn typical," he griped after they'd turned from the causeway and slowly cruised his neighborhood. "No place to park."

  "Let's go get a drink," Elise suggested. "I could use one. We'll find a spot when we get back."

  "It's pretty late. The hotel bars are closing up."

  "Then let's not go to a hotel. Take me someplace different. But not the Jack of Clubs, please."

  He laughed and drove over to Collins and headed north. He slowed for a red light at Twentieth Street. Even the scene along the string of porno and seedy strip joints was subdued tonight. The sidewalks were deserted, except for a red-wigged woman in a shiny silver miniskirt.

  The light changed and he glanced to his left as he passed the Beach Museum. It was dark and silent. Pierce was about to ask her if she'd visited the museum since Loften's death when she pointed at a nightclub on the next corner. "Let's go there."

  He turned onto the side street and parked across from the Place Pigalle. "You sure?"

  "They serve drinks, don't they?"

  "They sure do." He found a parking space with no problem and turned off the ignition. He looked over the nightclub. The engine ticked loudly in the silence.

  The Place Pigalle was one of those joints where private eyes were supposed to hang out and absorb the atmosphere. Here, a dick was supposed to find contacts. He'd been here once, and he'd left no wiser.

  As they walked across the street, Elise hooked her arm through his. "This a strip joint, isn't it?"

  "Sure is."

  They were met at the door by a size sixteen woman in a wraparound leopard skirt, high heels, and a blue wig. She wore thick hexagonal glasses with fish-eye lenses that made him dizzy. He nodded, blinked, and headed into the Pigalle's cool, dark womb.

  The nightclub had been around a long time. In its heyday in the fifties, there were shows here, fabulous spectacles with live bands and parades of leggy women wrapped in pink boas. Now, the glamour was tarnished with time, but the show went on.

  The stage was straight ahead and lit up. On it, a topless woman was gyrating her belly. The Human Earthquake, Pierce thought. There were about a dozen customers. All but a couple of them sat at the front tables with the best views.

  "Attentive group, aren't they?" Elise said as they sat down at a table between the bar and stage.

  She watched the dancer on stage peel off the remaining patch of cloth from her crotch as she pranced and strutted for the crowd. "No way in a million years I could do that. Could you?"

  Pierce chuckled. "Never occurred to me as an option."

  "So you come here often?"

  "I met a client here once. A guy who wanted me to find his missing teenage daughter. He was sure she was working as a stripper at one of these places along here."

  "What happened? Did you find her?"

  "Naw. She found herself. She came home on her own. Turns out she ran off to a fundamentalist Bible camp near Orlando and didn't want to tell her Jewish father about it."

  "I guess he had her all wrong."

  "Yeah, he got the pagans and Christians mixed up."

  "What'll you have to drink, friends?" a waiter in a bow tie asked.

  Elise ordered a Scotch on the rocks, and Pierce asked for a beer. As she turned her attention back to the stage, he watched her surreptitiously—the way her fingers tapped the edge of the table in time to the music, the curve of her jaw, the rich brown of her hair. This was obviously not the sort of place she frequented. She was escaping, he decided, blotting out any thoughts about what had happened this evening, delaying the worries and concern about its meaning.

  The stage went dark as the act ended. The music changed to a fast dance beat, and their drinks arrived. Pierce held up his glass and tried to think of an appropriate toast, but she beat him to it. "To better times," she said, and clicked her glass to his.

  "I bet you've never gone to a strip joint with Bill Redington."

  "Hardly," she replied, with a laugh.

  "How do you know him?"

  She sipped her drink and regarded him. "You still playing detective with me?"

  "I'm just trying to get everything straight. That's all."

  "He's an old friend of my father's. He used to visit us in Guatemala and grill my father about his knowledge of the Mayan legends. They'd go off together for days, visiting the old shamans, the keepers of the mythology."

  "After my conversation with him at his office, I can believe that."

  "Nick, what kind of person do you think I am?"

  "Jesus, what kind of question is that?"

  "Just tell me."

  "You're sort of a chameleon."

  She smiled, leaned her elbow on the table, resting her chin on her palm. "Is that your way of saying you don't trust me?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "Maybe I just don't fit in one of your little boxes." She moved her hands about, making a rectangular shape. "This person fits here. That one fits there. But when someone comes along who doesn't fit into one of them, you get confused. Like that little-blond cop tonight. I saw you trying to figure her out. But cute little women and tough cops aren't supposed to fit together, are they?"

  Pierce absently ran his fingers over the bump on his head. It was still tender, but not so noticeable now. "I guess I'll have to create a special little box for you, and one for the cop, too."

  "Maybe I'm wrong," she replied. "But I think you've already got me in a box—one for people you don't trust."

  "That would be a crowded box. In my work, it's not wise to trust too many people."

  "That's too bad. If you can't trust people, your life can't be too happy."

  "What about you? You certainly haven't got much good to sa
y about Raymond Andrews."

  She looked across the room at the stage as another dancer stepped out, dressed in high heels and a mini-skirted cowboy getup. As she undulated about the stage, the hat slipped sideways, threatening to fall. She held it in place for a few dips and turns, then flung it to the side.

  "I have nothing good to say about him, and for good reason," Elise said, turning back to him.

  "So you're holding a grudge."

  Her mouth tightened as she leaned forward. "You saw what he did to the house. He was responsible."

  "I told you before, I didn't tell him about you."

  "Doesn't matter. He knows; he has other ways." Pierce was puzzled by her insistence on Andrews's guilt.

  "Why the hell would he want to wreak havoc with your life? Tell me that."

  She stared at him as if weighing her next comment. "I guess Bill didn't tell you who owns the skull."

  "He said some Scotsman named John Mahoney."

  "He's my father."

  Wonderful. What else hasn't she told me?

  She explained that he'd lived in Scotland part-time for more than twenty years, ever since he spent a year on a fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. After he was discredited as a result of the replica scam, he'd moved there permanently.

  He sat back in his chair when she finished and gazed at the dancer whose clothes were slowly falling away. The woman seemed unreal, as if she were a celluloid image on a screen. Elise was real, and what she'd just told him made her interest in the skull the more understandable. He sipped his beer and felt her watching him.

  He leaned forward so he wouldn't have to raise his voice. "Why the hell didn't he take the three million Ray offered?"

  "The skull means more to him than money." Elise looked down at the table, lost in thought. Her eyes closed, and for a moment he thought she was about to cry. "Let's get out of here, Nick."

  It worked out as Elise had said it would; he found a parking spot near the apartment building with no difficulty. She grabbed her overnight bag and followed him upstairs. As they entered the apartment, he asked if she wanted a nightcap.