I waited for him to go on.
“You see,” he explained, “there’s always been a problem in knowing when the Maya started reckoning time. They had a very accurate calendar, but nobody knows just how it fits in with the European system, because when the Spanish arrived they destroyed as much of the old knowledge as they could get their hands on. Up until now, the best bet has been a correlation that puts the end of the Mayan Classic period at about a thousand years after Christ. But there’s always been this other correlation, that says everything ought to be pushed back two hundred sixty years. With radiocarbon dating, most people seem to think the first correlation is correct.” He raised his hands, eager to explain. “But that’s where Astrid’s work comes in. The pottery she’s analyzing comes from a sealed deposit between the last of the Classic material and the first of the post-Classic, or later, artifacts. Her analysis of the different types represented shows that it must have taken a long period, maybe two or three hundred years, to evolve the different styles. If that’s so, then all the dates for Maya civilization will have to be revised.”
“But what about the radiocarbon dates?”
“That’s one of the things the public never has understood. Take the first radiocarbon dates for the Maya area: They all had to be thrown out when it turned out they were in error. Astrid says archaeologists always tend to throw out dates that don’t fit their preconceived notions. And she says there are so many ways a date can be contaminated, you need a whole array of them to be sure about anything, and even then there’s usually a plus or minus factor that could make the whole exercise meaningless.”
“I see. You seem to have picked up a lot from her, Mr. Gladney.”
“I love her, Mr. Dunn. She’s opened a whole new world to me. Before I met Astrid, all I could think about was my business. She’s shown me a world I only glimpsed in books. And I love her. I love her and I want to protect her.”
“Admirable,” I said. “Tell me, what does Professor Thorpe think about her theories?”
“Oh. I see what you’re getting at. You mean do they threaten him? No, of course not. He’s supported her all along.”
“How fortunate.”
“Yes.” He frowned. “Oh, I see what you mean: If Thorpe didn’t agree with her ideas, they could threaten his own theories.” Gladney got up slowly. “I can’t imagine that happening. He’s always been very helpful to her. And he’s interested in something entirely different, Mayan astronomy.”
“Tell me, is she seeing a psychiatrist these days?”
“No. She hasn’t for a few years. But she does have a prescription she takes regularly.” He tried to laugh. “But it’s really unnecessary. She’s normal, as normal as you or me. Please don’t make her think it’s all going to start again.”
“Of course not,” I said.
“Can I tell her that then?”
“You can tell her I don’t intend to rake up the past for no reason.”
He grabbed my hand again and shook it feverishly. “Thank God. I tried to tell her. Thank you, Mr. Dunn.”
“But I may want to ask her some more questions.”
“Of course. I know she’ll be glad to help.” He got up and moved to the door, then half-turned. “This business has upset her so much. Do you know what will happen if Dr. Thorpe is convicted? She’ll have to find some other major professor, one that may not be as understanding. She told me a story about a student here whose professor left for another school. The next professor insisted the student completely redo his dissertation. The student finally gave up and dropped out. It happens often. There’s so much jealousy among the professors.”
“Let’s hope that doesn’t happen,” I said and watched him go out.
I looked up Cobbett’s number and called to see if he would be in, but his wife told me he had left on a business trip. She thought he would be back sometime Sunday, though if she knew his schedule, she wasn’t about to give it. I wondered what kind of business trip would take a busy director away in the middle of an important exhibit, but I didn’t wonder much, because it seemed fairly clear. I considered my options. I could watch Gordon Leeds’s apartment in the hopes that whoever he was having an affair with would show up. Or I could baby-sit Thorpe’s wife and see what the mouse did when the cat was in the pound. Or I could follow Katherine Degas. And there was a fourth option: I could stay home, have a beer, and just let the case happen. That one was very tempting. It would get me in a better frame of mind for a while, anyway. But there was the phone, menacing with its silence; the phone that could ring and tell me what I did not want to hear. And besides, there was a man out there who had given me twenty-four hours and I didn’t like ultimatums. So I went over the options again. Maybe it was because I liked her. Maybe it was because she represented an island of sanity in this whole business. Whatever the reason, I decided on Katherine Degas.
I got out the telephone directory. K. Degas, 2515 Prytania. It could be someone else, but Degas was not a common name, even in French Louisiana. And it was near the University, near Thorpe’s house, and even, I thought, reasonably close to Leeds’s apartment. So I would swing by and give it two or three hours. Odds were it would turn up nothing, but random surveillance also paid off sometimes in unexpected ways. I remembered a detective sergeant who had staked out the house of a woman he figured would hide an escaped convict. The convict never showed but he watched a truck pull up and unload twenty televisions hijacked from an interstate shipment. Katherine Degas might be the proper, hard-headed factotum she appeared, but there might be more—something that I hadn’t seen, that no one had seen, except perhaps a dead man.
8
The address was another old two-story dating from the twenties, well kept, with a lawn that was too narrow and no place to park. I wedged myself into a curbside space two houses down and rolled down my windows. It was nearly seven o’clock, not enough darkness to hide in and yet not enough light to see very well, either. The air was hot and wet, and when cars passed on Prytania they made slick sounds on the sticky tar. I adjusted my seat backward a couple of notches and waited.
Once, outside of Da Nang, we had lain on the edge of a jungle clearing through the dusk and into the night, waiting for the VC to come down the trail. It was quiet in the way only death could be, and when it got to just that moment between dark and night I began to see shapes in the gloom. They shifted and crept and ducked through the foliage like ghosts and I kept blinking to see if they would go away. I knew the point man saw them as well, because a stiffness went through him. I took out the night glasses then and focused on the shapes and, strangely, all I saw was forest. I knew then we had been out there too long, but I also knew one day was too long, so there was nothing to do but wait it out. When I came home, I found out I had developed a habit of waiting. Some people called it patience. It wasn’t. It was more fatalism, as if certain things had to be done and waiting was one of them. But the memory of the shapes in twilight was never very far away.
The shape I saw after the first hour, though, was not my imagination, because it slid into the curb, got out of the old Cutlass, and started up the walk toward the house. It was male, but there was little more I could tell about it. It seemed to belong to the house, because it stuck a key in the front door and disappeared inside.
I slipped out of my car, shutting the door softly, and walked over to the automobile the shadow-figure had just left. It was locked, and I didn’t want to take a chance unlocking it with a burglary tool to look at the registration. Far easier just to run the plates. I went back to my own car, wrote the license number on the clipboard pad I kept on the front seat, and settled in to wait some more.
A light had gone on upstairs and I saw two outlines pass before the drawn shades. They seemed to be talking and one was gesturing. Then one of the shadows disappeared and the light went out. A few seconds later the door opened and the same figure I had seen earlier ran toward the Cutlass and got in. The car’s lights flashed on and the motor coughed into l
ife. The car nosed out of the parking space and then, in a squeal of rubber, shot off down the narrow street.
I had the plate number, so there was no need to follow, but I wondered what had happened in Katherine Degas’s house. I edged my door open and then made myself get out. I crossed the street quickly and started up the sidewalk, not sure I wanted to know what I was about to find. I stopped at the big front door with its brass knocker and told myself I still had time to turn around and walk off.
But I was wrong. I had no time at all. Even as I stood there the door opened and Katherine Degas was looking at me, a tired little smile on her face. “Come in, Mr. Dunn,” she said. “It’s too muggy to be standing outside. You can watch better from inside the house.”
There was no graceful way to back off, so I followed her in. The decor was something I would have associated with a woman ten years younger. It was straight sixties, some Beatles photos, a couple of Pat O’Brien’s glasses, and a big Casablanca poster. She shut the door behind me and folded her hands in front of her.
“Can I offer you something to drink? I’m sure surveillance is a lonely business.”
She was just serious enough that I had to smile. “I’d take some coffee,” I said. “But tell me, how did you know I was watching?”
“From the upstairs window,” she said. “When Scott left I lifted a corner of the shade to watch him go. I saw you get out.”
“Elementary,” I said, shaking my head.
She went ahead of me into the kitchen. “Now ask me who Scott is.”
“I don’t have to. You’re going to tell me.”
“Yes, I guess I am.” She took a half-full coffeepot from the coffee maker and poured out two cups. “Sugar or cream?” she asked, as if this were a purely social occasion. I helped myself and thanked her. She raised her cup halfway to her lips and then reached across her body with her other arm, as if to hold herself together, and I realized she was shaking.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” she said quietly. “It always takes me a little while to get myself together after one of these go-rounds.” I watched her turn away then and realized that, with her back to me, she appeared suddenly slight and vulnerable.
“God,” she mumbled, then turned back to face me. “Scott, if you haven’t guessed, is my son, Mr. Dunn. He’s a sophomore at Tulane, in microbiology. I told him to go somewhere else, even LSU, to get out of the house, but he said Tulane was the better school. And, of course, since I’m a staff member, his tuition was waived.”
She took a sip of her coffee, and then put the cup down heavily on the table, as if the effort were too much. “He’s never liked Gregory Thorpe.”
“Is that what the argument was about?”
She nodded. “I’m afraid so. He thinks I’m—well, that Gregory and I are …”
I waited. She shrugged and picked up one of the supper dishes that were still on the table. There was only one set, I noticed, meaning she had eaten alone. She went to the sink and scraped the dish into the disposal, then washed it. “Gregory has never been comfortable around children. He used to always get Gordon to do the tours and talk to the kids.” Then she turned around to face me again. “That doesn’t mean he’s not a good man, though. He is. You have to believe that.”
I raised my coffee cup. “Good people sometimes do bad things.”
“No. Not Gregory. Not that kind of thing. Believe me. He’s a truly good man and it will get him sent to prison.”
“Will it? How?”
“Because he’s so damned dutiful, so …”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“But somehow I feel like I have to. You see, he wasn’t always like this. When Roberta was alive, he was different, energetic, with a sense of humor. When she died, it took so much out of him.”
I tried to imagine the dour Thorpe as the life of the party, but it was hard, so I veered away.
“You’ve had a few knocks, too,” I commented.
She smiled. “You mean losing Jim? Yes, it was hard, and Scotty was just a year old.”
“What branch was your husband in?”
“Air Force. He was a fighter pilot and one day he just didn’t …” Her voice choked. “Well, none of that will get Gregory loose.”
I decided to put the question: “Do you think his wife did it?”
A stricken look passed over her face. “I never said that. For God’s sake, don’t let him think I suggested that. He’d never forgive me.”
“But you don’t like her.”
“It’s hard. I remember her as a student. She was just another silly little coed, hanging on his words, popping into his office before and after every exam. Mr. Dunn, Gregory is the best Mayan archaeologist in the country, maybe in the world. He can cite every work that’s ever been written in his field and he’s published enough material to provide reading for a graduate seminar. But he doesn’t know very much about people. For years I tried to be a buffer, to shelter him, protect him, even, but there was nothing I could do when she came along. She was young, uninhibited, and she had some money of her own. Tulane, in case you didn’t know, is a rich kid’s school. What could I do? What could anyone do? I just had to stand back and watch.”
For a moment I got a glimpse into her soul, with its hurt and chagrin, and then the opening closed and she seemed to master herself again. “Shall we go into the living room?”
I followed and took a seat on the couch. She sat down at the far end, placing her cup on her knees. “Anyway, Scott was trying to lecture me on getting involved. His idea of taking care of Mama, like the old girl can’t handle herself.” She gave a hollow little laugh and unconsciously brushed a dark curl out of her eyes. “Like I haven’t done pretty damned well all these years. As I reminded him. But I guess he thinks when you reach forty you get senile. He wants me to back off, let Gregory hang. I called him an ingrate, reminded him of all Gregory had done to help us, and that was when he came out with his comment.”
“What did he say?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’d rather forget this all happened.”
She didn’t have to tell me, I could imagine: the son standing over the mother, reminding her that Thorpe had never done anything for her except to have his way, and that the first chance he got with a younger woman, he took it. Young people could be especially cruel.
I decided to change the subject. “How did Thorpe get along with his wife?”
“I don’t know for certain, but I think it was more one-way than mutual. He’s still infatuated with her, but I think she’s bored. She’s not a woman of particular depth, so far as I can see. But then, I guess I’m prejudiced.”
“Is she going out on him, do you know?”
I could see her struggling, but her natural probity won out. “I wouldn’t know the answer to that,” she said quietly.
I felt guilty then, and so I rose, placing my cup on the coffee table. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Degas.”
She frowned slightly. “Do you have to go?” she asked.
I tried to hide my surprise. “Is there some reason I should stay?”
She shook her head. “No. Unless you just want company like I do. You seem to be doing your best for Gregory. I thought maybe that gave us enough in common to share the rest of a pot of coffee.”
I smiled. “You’re an interesting woman, Katherine.”
“I wish everyone else thought so,” she said wryly. “But the truth is I’m not. I’m just single-minded in my own way, like Gregory is in his. It’s my curse that what I happen to be single-minded about is totally useless. And it is a curse. Scott wants me to leave here, go somewhere else. He’s probably right. I know there are other jobs. And yet whenever I think about it I get paralyzed. I remember talking to Gregory about it once after Roberta’s death. It was a couple of years after I went to work for him, long before he was director and before he’d ever met Cora. I had an offer from UCLA. They have a fine Latin American program. I could sense things weren’t going to work out h
ere, at least not the way I wanted, so I went to him and told him I had another possibility. Do you know what he said?”
I waited.
“He said he’d be sorry to see me go but I ought to do what was best for me and he’d write me a good recommendation.” She bit her lip. “I should have left. God, I should have left. It was my last chance.” Her tone was bleak and there was nothing for me to say, so I turned to look at the wall posters.
“I have a friend who collects these,” I said. “This Casablanca one is an original, isn’t it?”
She smiled with pleasure. “Yes. Before my marriage I went with a fraternity boy. He and his brothers broke into a movie display once and took out everything they had. I know it was a terrible thing to do.”
“I’ve heard of worse.”
“Yes.” She got up. “I almost forgot about the coffee.”
She started for the back but never made it, because before she got to the door the phone rang.
“Excuse me,” she said, lifting it. I watched as her expression turned grave. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you. I’ll see what can be done.” She hung up, shaking her head.
“It’s Artemio, the Mayan. That was the police telling me he’s been picked up drunk and disorderly down in the Quarter. They want me to come bail him out.”
“Would you like me to drive you down?”
She nodded gratefully. “Would you? I’m afraid my mind isn’t very well focused right now. I can’t even think where I put my keys.”
I walked her out to my car and headed for St. Charles. The streetlights were on now, and somewhere blocks away I heard the eerie wail of a siren, like some night thing hunting in the dark.
“It’s really getting bad with Artemio,” she said. “He’s had a lot of difficulty adjusting. There was none of this when he was here last year. This will make the third time.”
“Is he by himself? No family?”
“Yes.” She broke out a cigarette and lit it. “That’s part of it, of course. He was just a poor looter when Gregory took him under his wing.”
The Maya Stone Murders Page 8
