The Maya Stone Murders

by Malcolm Shuman

  I left him to his task and heard the door close behind me. I went next door, through the iron gate and up the steps. There was no car in the driveway and no answer to my ringing and I realized that Cora Thorpe was probably down at the prison by now. But even as I stood there I heard the squeal of tires and a blue Mazda whipped into the driveway and a straw-blond woman got out. She wore designer sunglasses, gold earrings and bracelets. Her clothes were casually elegant and I guessed Thorpe let her run wild in the boutiques. Maybe early thirties, she was slight of build and I imagined that as a coed she had awakened Thorpe’s protective instincts as well as his passion.

  “Mrs. Thorpe?” I said as she froze on seeing me.

  “Are you from the police?” she asked in a little girl’s voice.

  “No. I’m helping your husband. My name is Micah Dunn. I’m assisting his lawyer.”

  “His lawyer?” She looked surprised. “Where did he get a lawyer? Is that something Katherine did?”

  “Your husband was arrested for murder,” I said. “Don’t you think he ought to have an attorney?”

  She removed her sunglasses and I saw fear in her blue eyes. “I … Well, yes, of course. I just thought … I thought it was some mistake, that he’d take care of it, explain to them, and they’d let him go.”

  “It’s a little more serious than that,” I said. “Somebody used your husband’s car in a hit-and-run. Didn’t you notice that when you went out this morning?”

  She shook her head quickly. “No. I never drive that car, just my Mazda.”

  “Did you and your husband come straight home from the Cobbetts’ party last night?”

  “Why, yes, of course. Well, almost.” She bit her lip and I saw a fine bead of perspiration on her forehead. “That is, we stopped at a bar on Magazine for a nightcap. Alfredo’s. Sometimes we go there after parties.”

  “I know the place,” I told her.

  She nodded. “We used to go there a lot when we were dating. Gregory likes it. He’s so sentimental.”

  “When did you leave there?”

  She gave a little shrug. “Quarter to one.”

  “And you went straight home?”

  “Of course. Gregory isn’t the kind to stay up partying all night. It’s too hard on him, at his age.”

  “And when you got home you both stayed there all night?”

  She looked away. “Yes. Of course.”

  “The man next door says somebody left at about one o’clock.”

  A little flicker passed through her face. “That old … Well, if it’s important, I wasn’t feeling good and I asked Gregory to go down to the K&B at Broadway and St. Charles and get me some Alka Seltzer. Neither one of us was thinking clearly. He went about two blocks and then he remembered it was closed at that hour.”

  She came across the lawn then and up the steps, swinging her hips slightly as she walked. I could imagine the serious archaeology professor, suddenly bereft by the loss of his wife, losing his perspective and falling for her. I could even understand his still being infatuated ten years later.

  “Do you want to come in?” she asked, fitting her key in the door. “It will be a while before Gregory gets home. I could fix you some coffee. He always has me buy the specialty kind. Or I could give you something stronger?”

  “Mrs. Thorpe, I don’t think you understand: Your husband isn’t coming home today and probably not tomorrow.”

  She gave a weak little laugh. “Of course he is. Gregory will straighten things out. And you said there was a lawyer.”

  I left her, making a note to check Alfredo’s in a few hours, when the night bartender was on duty. I went home, arriving just before the rain started, and fixed a quick sandwich with bologna and some of the French bread from last night. Then I nerved myself to call Mrs. Murphy’s number, but there was still no answer. I could start with the different hospitals, of course, but I’d feel like a fool if it was a false alarm, and if it were serious they would surely have called by now.

  I took a call from a woman who wanted somebody to follow her husband, but after five minutes she stopped making sense and I knew she’d never pay because when it was over with, if he hadn’t turned out to be the reincarnation of Bluebeard himself, she’d decide I was part of the conspiracy. I referred her to a competitor who’d done me a bad turn and was grateful to put down the phone. I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes. I must have dozed because the next thing I remembered was the cold ringing of the phone. I snatched it up, afraid of what I was about to hear, but it was only O’Rourke and I relaxed.

  “He’s not the most personable client I’ve ever had,” the lawyer said. “But, for what it’s worth, I don’t think he did it.”

  “Any special reason?”

  “He couldn’t tie his shoes without help.”

  I smiled to myself. Everybody had the same opinion about Gregory Thorpe, but maybe we were shortchanging him. “He managed to secure major funding and run an archaeological project for five years,” I said. “That must tell us something.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” O’Rourke declared. “You’ve met Mrs. Degas. I took some time to talk to her afterward. She’s the one who’s been running the show. She types his grant applications, keeps his appointments, sees to his customs clearances, handles the logistics, and runs everything with an iron hand. She even went down to help him in the field last season. Not as a field hand, you understand. Just a short two weeks’ visit to bring him some equipment, get him to sign some papers, and so on. And she didn’t especially get along with young Leeds.”

  I settled back in my chair. “Are you thinking of putting her on trial instead of Thorpe?” I asked.

  “Do you have a better candidate?”

  I thought of the blond woman I had left a few hours before, the woman who was so sure her husband could fix anything, and then I thought of the fat museum curator who had so obviously told me a lie.

  “I don’t know. I think I’ll check out Thorpe’s movements when he and his wife left the party. His wife says they were at a place called Alfredo’s, on Magazine.”

  “I know the place,” O’Rourke said with distaste. “Don’t order the muffalettas. Bread’s stale and the bologna’s third-rate.”

  I smiled to myself. He had been searching for the perfect muffaletta sandwich as long as I’d known him and a few times he’d come close, but each time his ideal had eluded him. I assured him I would accept his culinary judgment and rang off. Then I forced myself up. The evening bartender would be on by now, and the sooner I talked to him the better. It was already Wednesday and by the weekend he would have forgotten, unless the Thorpes had done something unusual to catch his attention.

  I slipped down the stairs and watched Lavelle palm off a shrunken monkey’s head as the only remains of a famous Jivaro chief. When the tourist had left I cleared my throat and he jumped.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” he accused.

  “What was the chief’s name?” I asked.

  “Look, if it makes them happy, what’s it to you?”

  “David, you’re a real humanitarian.”

  “I told you about that name …”

  “I’ll stop if you’ll answer me a question.” His eyes narrowed as if he weren’t sure he wanted me to go any further but I left him no choice. “If you wanted to spend a bundle on pre-Columbian artifacts, where would you go in this town?”

  His eyes flickered as if he weren’t sure if I had a buyer or was asking from some ulterior motive. “I have a few selected items,” he said. “If you’re being on the up-and-up.”

  “No, I mean a serious buy,” I told him. “Say if I wanted to unload a cache of jade hachas.”

  He sniffed. “There are hachas and hachas. And I do not appreciate your relegating me to the status of some discount brokerage. However, if you were a man of more means, considerably more means, and of infinitely higher class and breeding, you might go to Oswaldo Ordaz. I say might. But he has a certain reputation.”

  “Mexica
n?” I asked.

  “Cuban. He’s also an immigration lawyer. He finds the two professions complementary.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  Lavelle’s brows went up. “Find him? What do you think you can do, go knock on his door? The man lives in Pass Christian, Mississippi, for Christ’s sake. Commutes over sixty miles each way. And I don’t mean he drives it himself. He has a chauffeur. Has offices on the twentieth floor of the Trade Mart. You don’t go see him. He sees you.”

  “Then how do I get him to see me?”

  “Somebody puts out the word that you have something to sell or to buy. But not me,” he hastened to explain. “I know you, and you have some hidden agenda. I don’t want to take the fall for you.”

  “Is he that heavy?”

  “I’ve never dealt with him. I don’t like his way of doing business. There’re all kinds of nasty rumors.”

  “Then how can I get in to talk to him?”

  “The same way as in all business. Word-of-mouth. Somebody that deals with him, that he trusts. He doesn’t take clients right off the street.”

  Smart man, I thought, and filed it away for future reference.

  Outside, the rain had quit and vapor rose up from the sidewalks, turning the air into a steam bath. I rolled up my car window, turned on the cool, and put a tape in the player. I inched my way through the Quarter and across Canal and reached Alfredo’s in fifteen minutes. It was a dim little hole-in-the-wall that served a neighborhood crowd and had a television going full blast in the kitchen to keep the cook from getting lonely. It was close enough to suppertime, so I ordered a Michelob and a Reuben sandwich. The bread was dry, but the bartender was talkative. He remembered the Thorpes: a young woman who made his eyes roll and his tongue hang out, and a middle-aged guy with thin hair and a tired look. In fact, it was probably the tired bit that caused the argument. Nobody threw any punches; it was just that when he served them she was mad at him and he looked like he wanted to stick his head back in his shell. The bar-keep thought she was giving him hell for wanting to go home when there were other bars they could hit, but he hadn’t listened that closely.

  I thanked him and left a big tip. Maybe things were starting to fall into place, but I couldn’t be sure. I headed back to Tulane, found a university directory in the Student Union, and called Astrid Bancroft. She answered with a tremor in her voice and it didn’t get any steadier when I told her who I was.

  “I’d like to talk to you, if I might. It may help Professor Thorpe,” I explained, taking a chance.

  “But I don’t know anything,” she protested. “I really don’t understand.”

  “I won’t take much of your time,” I promised.

  “Well …” She seemed to consider it and then capitulated. “All right.” She gave me her address and I told her to expect me in ten minutes.

  She lived on Zimpel, in one of the old homes that had been converted into four-plexes for students. The green paint was peeling and the house sagged to one side as if it had given up on life. The lawn needed mowing and I guessed the owner was a slum landlord who would run another generation of students through before the structure toppled completely, and then the plot would be bulldozed, and if he had the bribe money to get the zoning changed, he’d build a doctor’s office.

  I knocked on the weathered door because I didn’t know if the bell would work. When I was beginning to think she’d skipped out on me, the door opened and we were facing each other.

  She nodded shyly and invited me in. Her hair was bound by a blue ribbon and she had changed into a long Mexican folk dress and a white frilly blouse, and I realized she possessed a dimension beyond the one I had seen so far in the laboratory.

  I took a seat on the ratty sofa and she sat down in a stuffed chair that was probably older than she was.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “I wanted to ask you a few questions about Gordon Leeds,” I said. “You were students together. You knew each other fairly well. Was he a hard worker? Did he have boy-girl problems? Was he easy to get along with?”

  “We all worked hard,” she said. Her brown eyes darted over to mine and then away. “He was a perfectionist. But we got along. As far as any girls, I don’t think he had a girlfriend.”

  “He must have known something was wrong, or you wouldn’t have been so anxious to come talk to me after he told you Thorpe had hired a detective.”

  “Everything was at stake,” she said. “I have a promise to publish my dissertation. Do you know what would happen if it turned out the data couldn’t be relied on? All our careers would be ruined.”

  “And he thought there was something wrong with the data?”

  “He never explained. He just said some things weren’t where they should be. It scared me and when he told me Dr. Thorpe had hired an investigator, I thought I ought to talk to you. But at the last minute I didn’t have the nerve.”

  “Why didn’t you go to Dr. Thorpe?” I asked.

  “Gordon didn’t trust him. Dr. Thorpe was always putting him down.”

  “Were you present the other night at the Cobbett home, when Leeds and Thorpe got into an argument?”

  She gave a nervous little headshake. “I don’t know about any argument. We were all just talking, that’s all.”

  “I see.” I could sense her closing up, but I decided to give it one more shot: “Do you know Mrs. Thorpe very well?”

  Again the jerky headshake. “No.” She looked up at me, her hands clasped in her lap. “Is that all?”

  I nodded. “Except for Leeds’s address if you have it.”

  She seemed relieved and wrote it down for me. It was five minutes away, on Cherokee, in one of those blocks that nudge against a black section, the street forming an invisible barrier between social classes.

  The house itself was well kept, with whitewashed pillars and freshly painted mailboxes. I went into the hallway and saw one door that led upstairs, to the top apartment, and one at the end that, according to the Bancroft girl’s description, must belong to Leeds. I knocked on the door and then put my ear against the wood, but there was no movement inside. I went back to the mailbox and took out the last few days’ deliveries. There was a letter from Harvey Leeds, of Sioux City, Iowa, who by now, immersed in the horror of what had happened, had probably forgotten he had ever written it; there was a circular from a record club; and, finally, there was an ad from the University of Texas Press. I thrust the mail back into the box and as I did so I heard a metallic clink. I reached down and withdrew a key.

  There was no police seal on the door to indicate Mancuso considered this a part of his investigation, and it seemed a venial sin to invade the privacy of a dead man. I stuck the key in the door and opened it.

  The smell of incense hit me with all its pungence and I had to suppress a sneeze. I closed the door softly and tiptoed across a thick rug I knew no landlord had paid for. The room was meticulously neat and tastefully furnished. I leafed through some archaeological journals beside the sofa and then went into the kitchen. The shelves held the usual assortment of pots and pans, and there was a food processor beside the sink. One cabinet held a bottle of Cutty Sark, half gone, and a bottle of Amaretto, with the gift tag still on it, “To G. from K.” I opened the refrigerator door and peered in. It needed restocking, and when I smelled the milk it made me gag. I went over to the back door and looked out on the patio. There were a wrought-iron table shaded by a large umbrella and a barbecue pit, but they could have come with the house or been put in by the other tenant. I started for the hallway and stopped. There was creaking from above that indicated the overhead resident was at home.

  I slipped into the rear bedroom, which had been converted into a study, and examined the desk. The papers were all neatly stacked, letters separated from academic work. The letters, as I glanced over them, were mainly professional, from other scholars, but one was from an old friend whom Leeds apparently hadn’t seen since high school. I opened the drawer and removed a
packet of photographs. They showed a group of people against the background of a forest ruin and I recognized a jeans-clad Astrid Bancroft, smiling self-consciously, and the Mayan, Artemio, all gold teeth. I went through the pack, glimpsing Astrid in the laboratory, a Mayan work gang clearing the wall of a building, and one, apparently taken by Astrid, of Leeds himself, pointing to some architectural feature. The rest were shots of Mayan children, grinning at the camera, and village women in their immaculate white huipiles. I put the photos back in the desk, along with the other items I’d removed. I spent another five minutes looking around the study, then moved on to the bath. It is the bathroom that usually tells about people. The medicines they take, their personal hygiene, even their reading material.

  I was not surprised to find that the bathroom matched the rest of the house in neatness. There was a candle stump on the top of the commode, in a little ashtray, and the mat had been folded and placed across the side of the tub. The mirror had been wiped recently and the tub had been scrubbed. I went through the medicine cabinet and the shelf over the toilet, but all they revealed was that Leeds was not taking any medications stronger than Tylenol. That much of itself was odd, I thought, because he’d impressed me as a tense man, the kind who might keep a prescription for tranquilizers on hand. But there was nothing, just some Mercurochrome, a small bottle of ipecac syrup, in case of poisoning, and some Band-Aids.

  I stared down at the sink and the single tube of toothpaste, and back at the cabinet and it hit me. Of course. What was missing was his toothbrush. Which meant he hadn’t spent his last night here.

  The bed was made, but from what I’d already seen I knew he’d make his bed every morning anyway. I rummaged in the closet for letters and magazines, anything that might reveal him as a womanizer, or someone with a passion for little children, but there was nothing except an old American Heritage and some shoe polish. I went to the dresser. His socks were folded into pairs and his handkerchiefs were divided into two lots, the functional and the decorative. The other drawers were similarly neat and I could imagine the kind of dissertation he would have written, every assertion documented and every reference cited just so. So where was it, this nearly perfect document? It hadn’t been in his study, and I doubted he was the kind to leave it in an office he probably shared with two or three other graduate assistants.