Sandy guffawed. “And that’s why you took a vacation all of a sudden?”
“I’d had that planned for three months,” he protested, his dignity offended.
Sandy and I exchanged looks. It was clear we weren’t going to get anything more from him.
“Okay, Cobbett,” I said, trying to make my voice hard. “We’re going to take you at your word. But by God, if you’ve held anything back, we’ll …”
“I swear to God,” he declared, tears in his eyes.
I knew what Sandy was thinking: As soon as he could get to a phone, we’d have every cop in the city on us. She gave me an exaggerated movement of her eyes that meant, “Let’s leave him here and hope somebody rolls him for his watch.” I had a feeling she’d even be willing to blow the horn real loud.
“Listen, Cobbett,” I said. “The lady would like to dump you but I don’t think we have to do that. So far the cops don’t know you’re implicated. But if you go to them, you’re going to have to explain about the appraisals and about your deals with Ordaz.” I shushed him before he could protest: ‘I know. It’s all on the up-and-up. But it won’t look like it when it hits the papers. Your directors will take one look and bounce you higher than a basketball. And nobody else will ever hire you. If you talk.”
He gulped. “I won’t say anything,” he said.
Sandy shot me a look that said she thought my softness would be my death, and sighed. She turned out of the parking space, rolled past what looked like a minor dope deal going down between a man with a brown bag and the driver of a Caddie, and took us away. Ten minutes later we were back on the expressway and I unlocked the cuffs. “Out,” I commanded, as we slid down an exit ramp and came to a stop at a street corner. The chastened curator scurried away like a frightened gopher.
I turned back to Sandy. “Somehow this isn’t what I planned to be doing on my Sunday afternoon.”
She fixed me a drink and we sat down before the picture window. “So where from here?” she asked, sipping her piña colada.
“The jade,” I said. “Time to give it back.”
“Oh, hell, and just when I was getting used to having it to look at.”
She went into the bathroom and came back out with the little piece of polished stone.
“Where did you have it?” I asked.
“Secret,” she said. “Where only a narc would look.”
I took the object and ran my hand over the design cut in its smooth surface.
“We have to find who peddled the artifacts to Ordaz,” I said. “It can only have been one of four people: Thorpe, Leeds, the girl, Astrid, or the Mayan, Artemio.”
“If it was Thorpe, Ordaz wouldn’t need to go to no appraiser to find out the value,” Sandy commented.
I nodded. “Ditto the next two. And that only leaves Artemio.”
“But I thought you said he was Thorpe’s ace boon coon.”
“He was also about to be sent back to Yucatán, and he hasn’t been very happy about it.”
“Hmmm.” She raised her glass thoughtfully, eyeing me over the rim. “Why do I get the feeling the Green Hornet’s going to ride tonight?”
It was well after dark when we left again. A breeze was coming in across the lake, but it was hot, like a sirocco, and I was glad for the air-conditioning. I had begged Sandy to let me take the car, so that I could claim I’d stolen it if I were caught, but she refused. We drove down Pontchartrain Boulevard, the bright lights of the other cars like eyes, probing us, and I kept imagining I heard sirens. Once a red flasher sped past, in the other direction, and Sandy laughed quietly as she saw me tense and then relax.
“Take it easy, Micah. You know the cops in this town. You old news. They on to the next big story by now.”
I thought of Mancuso and wondered. He was no fool. He’d have my description in every public rest room in the state by now. No, he wouldn’t forget.
We came to Carrollton and went right, toward the river, and twenty minutes later melted into the checkerboard of streets that made the Carrollton quarter. The houses were old and brooding, the trees stately. And the streets were quiet. We stopped at an intersection and I opened the door.
“I’ll go on foot,” I said. “I’ll meet you in half an hour at Burdette and Plum. If I’m not there, get the hell out of here.”
She reached down, handed me the tiny automatic. “Here.”
I smiled and shook my head. “I could never shoot those things,” I said. “It would just get me killed.”
I left her at the stop sign and walked away down the sidewalk.
It was only nine, so there was a chance he wouldn’t be there. In that case, the trip would have been wasted. But I had to make the effort, because he was the only one who could have been stealing the artifacts.
I turned a corner and stopped. There was a car double-parked just up the street, across from the house where he stayed. I ducked my head, hoping it wasn’t the police. The lights hit me in the face and then I was past and I heard somebody laugh. A college kid and his date. I kept walking.
His place was just ahead now, on the left. There was a car in the drive, which meant someone was home, probably the owner or one of the other boarders. I halted, listening. Somebody was playing rock music and I thought it was coming from inside. I went along the side of the house, toward the outbuilding. At first I thought there was a dim light in one of the windows, but then I saw that it was just a reflection from the street. I put my hand on the knob.
The door was unlocked and I pushed the door forward, gently, standing out of the way. It was dark inside and there was no sound, but I sensed someone in the blackness. Sweat was prickling my forehead and I resisted the urge to turn around and walk away. Instead, I felt inside for the light switch, found it, and flipped it on.
There was no gunshot, no blast of dynamite, only light. I waited an extra ten seconds and then stepped through, closing the door behind me.
One look at the body on the bed told me I had found Artemio at home.
16
I turned him over and flinched as a fog of alcohol hit me. I shook him and he mumbled something in Mayan. I let him fall back onto the bed and glanced around the room. What remained of a bottle of K&B rum was on the table, and I kicked a glass that lay overturned on the floor.
Beside the bed was a little stand that looked like something from a secondhand store. I examined the thin stack of papers atop it. They were mostly comic books and advertising circulars addressed to “Resident.” I replaced them and went to the bureau. Judging from the laundry bag in the corner, there wouldn’t be much in the drawers, and I was right. A few pairs of socks, some underwear, and a shirt. In the top drawer was a checkbook. The last entry, scrawled in a shaky hand, had been an eight-hundred-dollar paycheck, entered three months before, leaving a nominal balance of three hundred dollars, but from the number of checks used since, I could tell he had lost interest in record keeping. There was also a week-old letter from the bank, advising of a two-hundred-dollar overdraft. What I did not find were a passport and alien resident card, but it hardly seemed strange; they were probably in safekeeping with Thorpe or Katherine.
I replaced the items in the drawers, then went to the tiny closet and looked inside. Some sandals, a raincoat, and, on the shelf, a couple of wadded towels, and a Penthouse. The bathroom held a razor, some antiseptic, and a tube of diarrhea pills. There was also a large bottle of very cheap cologne. I shut the door and went back to the sleeping man. I patted down his pockets, but all he had was some change. A battered wallet held three dollars and an ID card in Spanish, plus some receipt tapes from K&B, which I judged from the amounts were liquor purchases.
I felt under the mattress, wondering if he might have hidden something between it and the springs. I had no idea what I was looking for, but anything might help. The mattress heaved like a raft in a sea and the Indian coughed. I eased the mattress back down. I stooped and felt under the bed.
The only things I touched were a single rubber
-soled sandal, three of its straps broken at the heel, and a library book in Spanish. I brought the book out into the light and opened it, choking at the dust that rose up from the pages.
It was called the Relaciones de Yucatán and was part of a larger, multi-volumed work. I remembered with chagrin the hours I had spent in German class at the Academy when I could have taken Spanish. Well, no sense regretting it now. I flipped through the pages to see if anything might be concealed inside, but there was nothing but a flattened soda straw, which Artemio had evidently been using as a bookmark.
I glanced down at the text he had been reading. The words were all foreign, and I was about to shut it when two words I knew suddenly jumped out of the page at me.
Ek Balam.
I stared down at the page, willing myself to understand, but it was useless. I closed the book, stuck it under my arm, turned out the light, and stepped back into the night.
It was natural for a man to want to read about his land’s history, of course, especially when he was employed in the recovery of that history. The book had been checked out of the Tulane library three months before and was now overdue. But that hardly meant more than that Artemio was a slow reader, which, judging by the stack of comic books, he probably was.
I went back to Artemio and shook him until his eyes opened.
“Mashi?” he asked in what I took to be Mayan.
“The artifacts,” I demanded. “The ones you stole from Ek Balam. I want you to tell me why.”
But his eyes looked past me. He gave me a silly smile.
“Artefactos? Los artefactos? Se los vendí. You want to buy them?”
“I want to know who put you up to it,” I demanded. “Who told you where to go to sell them?”
“Sell? Sí, vendí los artefactos.”
“The jade,” I cried in frustration. “The jade piece with the face.” I indicated my own face with my hand. “The hacha.”
His face lit and he nodded, a thin trickle of saliva running down his unshaven chin.
“Ah, sí. La hacha. En el templo Ah. In the temple. That’s where …” He made a digging motion with his hands. “I escavé the hacha. Ek Balam.”
“You dug it up in the temple? Which temple?” I grabbed his shoulders, shaking him.
“Templo Ah. The temple …” His head fell back limply and he emitted a loud snore. I dropped him onto the bed and left.
Suddenly I felt tired and helpless. All along I had asked myself what the Captain would do. When he would have attacked, I had forged ahead. But I was no closer to a solution than before. Now an irrational feeling surged up: All I had to do was go home, somehow make it to the house on the beach. The Captain would take care of everything. And I would take care of him. I fought the urge back and kept walking.
I came to the end of the block. The double-parked car was gone, but there was another one waiting at the stop sign, lights out.
It was too far away to see if it was Sandy. Had I been in the room half an hour? I had lost track of time. I made myself keep walking and as I approached, the headlights of the car flashed on. I froze as the car started forward. The door opened and then, to my relief, I heard Sandy’s voice:
“Micah, over here.”
I trotted over to the passenger’s side and got in. It was not until I had closed the door that I noticed the man in the backseat.
“Micah, I ought to brain you,” O’Rourke said.
The tension drained out of me. I turned around and shook my friend’s hand. “Damn it, John, how did you get here?”
“Lady came by and picked me up. It’s only a few blocks, you know.”
“But this could mean your license.”
“Nah. I was trying to convince my client to give himself up. A primary duty of an officer of the court.”
“But you’re representing Gregory Thorpe. You told me there was a conflict …”
“There was. That’s why I dropped him.”
“You quit Thorpe?”
“Sure.” He shrugged. “Why not? They’ve hit on a better theory of the murders. Why bother a Tulane professor when they can pin it all on a PI? They’re going to let Thorpe post bail, because the cops hate like hell to drop charges on anybody, but the focus is definitely on you.”
“Stands to reason,” I said.
“But I do have to tell you,” O’Rourke went on, “that what you did was a damned fool thing. Even a lawyer as good as I am is going to have trouble getting you out of this one. Unless you came up with something from your friend’s room.”
I held up the book. “Nothing but some ancient history. Do you read Spanish?”
He shook his head. “So what’s next?”
“You tried to convince me to turn myself in and I told you to go to hell. Now get lost, Counselor.”
O’Rourke nodded regretfully. We came to Henry Clay and I got out to let him leave the car.
“Now where?” Sandy asked.
We didn’t have that many options. I gave her Katherine Degas’s address.
We stopped in front and I opened the door. “When I signal, leave,” I said. “Mancuso’s no fool and he’s overdue to pay you a visit. I’d rather not be there. I don’t think they’ll be looking for me here.”
She eyed me knowingly. “You sure that’s the reason?”
“I’m sure,” I said, but I could see she wasn’t buying it. I sighed, walked up to the door and rang. I heard movement and then the door swung open. When Katherine saw me her expression went from surprise to happiness.
“Micah. My God, I’ve been so worried. I was afraid something had happened to you.”
I turned around and nodded to Sandy. The door closed behind me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought it was best not to call. I was with a friend.”
She stared at me, our faces very close, and I smelled the delicate scent she was wearing. “I thought the police had found you.”
“Not yet,” I said. “But I can’t hide forever.”
Her lips opened slightly and she started toward me, then stopped herself. “No.” She turned around quickly. “They’re going to release Gregory.”
“So I hear. I’m sure he’s happy.”
“I suppose.” She looked away. “I didn’t want it to be at your expense.”
“Things work that way sometimes,” I said. “It isn’t his fault.”
She bit her lip. “You don’t know Gregory. When he’s under pressure he can say things he doesn’t mean.”
A warning signal shot through me. “Are you saying he’s laying the blame on me?”
“I don’t know. I just mean he isn’t used to being in this kind of position. It’s normal to want somebody else to be the scapegoat.”
“It’s normal,” I said, “as long as you don’t throw them an anchor when you see them going down.”
I went over to the sideboard, laid down the book, and poured myself a bourbon. The cops never liked to turn anybody loose if there was the ghost of a chance he was guilty. But Captain Lafaux and I had once had a run-in over an arson case and he’d come out looking bad. He hadn’t said anything but I knew he’d jump at the chance to get me in the future and now he had his opportunity.
I went over to where she sat and handed her the book. “Does this mean anything to you?”
She took it from me and then opened it. “It’s a standard source for Yucatecan ethnohistory,” she said. “Gregory’s used it on several occasions. Where did you get it?”
I told her about Artemio and she smiled faintly.
“I wouldn’t have expected anything else.”
Then I brought out the jade and I saw fires of excitement in her gray eyes as she took it in both hands, like the last droplets of water in the desert. She ran her fingers over the dark surface and examined both sides.
“What did Artemio tell you?” she asked.
I explained and she listened, face intent. “What did he say about where he dug it up? Exactly.”
“Temple. No, Templo Ah. Does that make any s
ense?”
She nodded emphatically. “A lot. Templo Ah is Temple A, at Ek Balam. He’s saying that’s where he found the jade.”
“But where in the temple?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but my guess is that it would be in the center, between the two doorways. That’s where Andrews found the clay figures in the Seven Dolls Temple at Dzibilchaltún.”
“So far, so good,” I said. “But it still doesn’t explain why the jade is so valuable.”
She looked down at the little face and ran her hands over it caressingly. “The key has to be the meaning of these glyphs,” she said.
I told her about Cobbett and she listened with a combination of amusement and horror. “Cobbett said they weren’t calendar glyphs.”
“He’s right. Gregory could tell you, of course, though I don’t know that he could read it. The glyphs are very complex. It was only in the last thirty years, since the work of Knorosov, that it’s been realized that many of them stand for phonetic elements. But we still don’t have the meanings for a lot of them. It’s sort of as if we used several different symbols for each letter of the alphabet.”
I turned to the book. “What about this?” I asked. “I found the words ‘Ek Balam’ in it.”
She nodded. “Yes. The Relaciones de Yucatán are part of a questionnaire the King of Spain sent to the Spanish landholders in the sixteenth century. Every Spaniard was required to send back a general description of his lands and their history. You can imagine it was a nuisance to most of the Spanish landowners, and they ran out to find the first Indian who was willing to tell them a story. The Spaniards living near Valladolid, in the center of the peninsula, got a story about a great lord named Ek Balam who once reigned in that area. The archaeological site is probably named after him.” She broke out a cigarette. “It wasn’t more than a few sentences in the book, and nobody knows whether he ever really existed. The old accounts are garbled. A lot of times the Indians said whatever they thought their Spanish masters wanted to hear.”
I picked up the little jade artifact. “Ek Balam.” I set it down on the coffee table. “Any idea what that means in Mayan?”
The Maya Stone Murders Page 15
