Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  “Gabriela called while you were out this afternoon,” Nina said. “She’s going to stay another week.”

  Haydon nodded, still looking past the French doors. The ageing Mexican housekeeper, who had been with Haydon’s family since before he was born, was visiting her family in Mexico City. It was an annual trip that usually lasted several weeks.

  “I’m going to go ahead and ask Lydia if she’d like to stay on full time,” Nina added, musing to herself as much as to Haydon. “Ramona can’t be expected to do much around here this semester. Not while she’s taking eighteen hours.”

  As Gabriela had grown older, the large home, which she once had run with the discipline of a family doyenne, gradually had gotten to be too much for her. Nina and Ramona had taken up the slack when they could, and what they couldn’t do was taken care of by another Mexican woman, Lydia Quiroa, who came in part time. Lydia, who was in her late forties and always wore her jet hair in a single long braid hanging down her back, had the disposition of an angel and had made herself indispensable. All of them, even the increasingly eccentric Gabriela, who had a critical eye for human foibles, had grown fond of her and considered her a member of the family.

  “And I’ve got to start putting in more time at the studio, too,” Nina continued. “The new commission in Careyes is getting increasingly demanding…”

  One of the things that made a man like Fossler so valuable was his experience. Though he had taken an early retirement from the police department four years before, he had seen eight or nine years more mayhem than Haydon himself. A man who had seen that much didn’t get too excited when he encountered something out of the ordinary. He had been through so much, seen so many things he had never seen before only to learn that he eventually would see them again, or see variations of them, that it was hard to get worked up about anything. Yet here was Fossler, calling from Guatemala City, acting against the grain of his own character, Fossler putting the pressure on Haydon to make a decision. And then, in the retrospect of the last few minutes, there was one thing that Fossler had done that bothered Haydon. He had not explained why he had given him the names and addresses. Surely it had not been necessary for Fossler to have taken the time to give them to Haydon if he was going to be seeing him the very next night.

  “Hey,” he heard Nina say. “I think your coffee’s fine.”

  Haydon stopped, realizing he was still stirring his coffee. He looked around at Nina, who was studying him, and shrugged.

  “Okay, what’s on your mind?” she asked.

  “Nothing, really,” he said, and sat back on the small sofa, crossing his legs and holding the cup and saucer in his lap. He was only a few inches from Nina’s legs, close enough to smell the sachet on her clothes.

  “You’ve never had ‘nothing’ on your mind in your life,” she said. “You can’t do it.”

  He looked across the library to the cold landscape outside where the watery afternoon light was losing strength, giving way to the blue winter hours before evening.

  “Bloody weather,” he said.

  “Who was that who called you after lunch?” Nina asked, leaning over and putting her coffee cup on the service tray. “Is that who you went to see?”

  “Yeah,” Haydon nodded. “I did.”

  “And then someone called you a while ago. I saw the light on the telephone in the kitchen.” She ran one hand through the front of her hair to get it back away from her face. It was graying quite noticeably now, strands of pearl that streaked the rich chestnut and added a sphingine air to her beauty that he found unmistakeably sexy, which was fortunate, because the gray was there to stay. It would never occur to Nina to color her hair. It just wasn’t in the realm of consideration.

  “The call after lunch,” Haydon said, “was Germaine Muller. Jim Fossler has found her daughter, living in Guatemala City.”

  “Oh, my God,” Nina said. “She’s all right?”

  “Apparently she’s fine. Then the call a few minutes ago was from Fossler. He thinks the girl’s in some kind of trouble. Wants me to come down there, stay a couple of days. Help him look into it.”

  “You’re going to do it?”

  Haydon nodded, sipping his coffee. “I’ll have to.” He told her about both conversations, leaving out most of Fossler’s puzzling behavior, making it sound as if he would only be going down to wrap up the formalities of closing Lena’s case.

  “But that’s not necessary, is it?” Nina asked. “You could get the embassy down there to confirm she’s alive, or whatever it takes, couldn’t you?”

  “I could, yes. But I’d rather do it myself. I’d like to meet the girl. It’s something I’d want to do with or without it being an official trip.”

  “I didn’t know you were that intrigued with the case.”

  “I am now. Fossler has come up with some interesting…information.” He leaned forward and set his cup on a neat stack of art magazines on the floor beside him. He moved closer to Nina and put his left arm around her legs, leaning against the front of them, feeling them warm against his side. They sat that way a while as the blue winter light darkened and the logs burned to a slower, quieter flame.

  Nina said nothing, but Haydon could feel her moving her feet under the cushion. He carefully turned his eyes to her, hoping to observe her unnoticed. She stared at the fire, her brow wrinkled, and her hair, its wiry gray strands now made even more apparent by being highlighted in the glow from the fireplace, falling down to frame her face again. It was a study in chiaroscuro, Italian baroque again. Now that night had closed around the house, the library’s high walls of books were lighted only by the green-globe lamp by which Haydon had been reading at the refectory table and by a small Chinese lamp with a parchment shade that sat on the long mahogany table against the back of the sofa. These two pools of soft light and the gentle, wavering glow from the fireplace were all that held off the darkness and allowed an occasional glint to escape from the gilded spines of the books.

  Haydon was acutely aware that with the discussion of Jim Fossler’s situation in Guatemala an air of uneasiness had seeped into the warm library like a cold draft. It didn’t have to be unsubtle for Nina to sense it, for her to know the smell of risk. Nor did she have to be told that, despite what Haydon had said, this was not in fact something he had to do. He did not know how she had decided to deal with this kind of situation anymore, only that she must have decided never again to make it a point of contention when he had made up his mind to do something she considered needlessly jeopardous. By the same token, he had never articulated that he would not give up, not even for her, a job that regularly placed him in the path of uncertainty. In a way, that she had chosen the course of keeping her own counsel—a tactic he could hardly object to since he himself always had favored it to deflect conflict—saddened him. In the past, the fact that she could be depended upon to speak her mind on this point was something of a comfort to him, her objection being invariably unswerving, straightforward. And it was not that she was now disingenuous about her feelings. She simply had resolved to be more reserved in this one thing only, and Haydon knew that any regret on his part reflected directly on his own implacable nature.

  They stayed there, watching the fire together, until only the embers remained.

  CHAPTER 5

  Haydon’s alarm rang at five-thirty. He took his arm from around Nina and reached back to the bedside table and turned the alarm off, then tucked his arms under the covers again. Nina had not stirred and wouldn’t for two more hours. Since she didn’t go to the studio until nine o’clock, and Haydon’s shift started at seven, he had always let her sleep. It had been that way for years. He snuggled up to her for a few more minutes, grateful that she was warm blooded and slept in nothing but her panties. But he didn’t close his eyes. Christ, it was black as midnight, another reason winter was a lousy season.

  After a few moments, his thoughts drifted to Jim Fossler, a sure sign that he ought to go ahead and get up. Resignedly he slipped his ar
ms from around Nina again and got out of bed. He thought he could hear the wind blowing, which made him cringe, but when he went to the window and looked out, he could see the bare trees against the dull glow of the overcast sky, and the black silhouettes of their bony branches were motionless. He turned and walked into the bathroom.

  He took a hot shower, standing under the steaming water for a long time, until he felt warm all over. Nina told him his hot showers were extracting the natural oils from his skin, but he thought it was worth it if he could start the day warm. He got out of the shower and quickly dried off, combed his wet hair, wrapped the towel around his waist, and shaved, careful to work around his moustache. He dried his hair and combed it again, splashed a dash of cologne on his face, and walked into his closet to dress.

  By five fifty-five he was descending the stone stairs and crossing the wide entry hall to the kitchen. He surveyed the jars of coffee beans, decided on a Sumatra roast, and then ground enough beans for four cups. Normally Gabriela would be in the kitchen in her dressing gown by the time the coffee had finished dripping, her thick, brindled hair combed out and hanging down her back in lengthy ripples. They would cook breakfast together, comfortable with each other’s company and in a routine that had been established over many years, and then they would eat together, sitting at the enormous butcher’s block in the center of the kitchen. When the weather wasn’t cold, which was all but a couple of months out of the year, they ate in the adjacent sun-room.

  But since Gabriela was in Mexico City, he was alone, thinking of Germaine Muller while the coffee dripped and he cut thick slices of bacon and put them on the grill. While that was simmering, he went down a short hallway to the side porte cochere, braced himself against the anticipated cold, and stepped outside. Holding his breath, he hurried down the curving drive to the front gate where the paperboy tossed the newspapers through the wrought-iron bars. He slipped the plastic bags off the papers as he fast-walked back up the drive, then put the bags into a paper sack by the side entry as he came in. By the time he got back to the kitchen, the bacon was sizzling. He tossed the papers on the butcher’s block and quickly grabbed a fork and moved the pieces of bacon around on the grill. He picked up the two eggs he already had gotten out of the refrigerator, broke them into a bowl, beat them rapidly with a whisk, and chopped two green onions into the bowl with them. He cut two thick slices of bread from the loaf on the counter and put them in the toaster, turned the bacon, and poured the eggs into a saute pan. In a few minutes everything was ready, coming together at once like a piece of chamber music. He put everything on the butcher’s block, reached for the newspapers, and sat down to eat and read. In the winter, the warm room and the mingling aromas of coffee and bacon and cooking onions made breakfast his favorite meal of the day.

  At twenty to seven he was putting on his overcoat in the entrance hall, pulling the trilby firmly onto his head, pulling on his gloves, and stepping out to the cold, dark morning under the front porte cochere. He started the Jaguar and let it idle a few minutes, and then drove out into the open air, around the last half of the circular drive, pushing the remote control on the front gates and driving out between them to the street. It was a routine that didn’t vary by five minutes the year around. And usually it was the last time for the remainder of the day that he could predict with any reasonable knowledge what was going to happen from one minute to the next.

  As soon as Haydon stepped through the door of the homicide division, he went straight to Bob Dystal’s office without even stopping to get a cup of homicide’s notoriously bad coffee, a pot of which was always brewing. Dystal was already there, hunched over paperwork on his desk like an anthropomorphic buffalo in a white Western shirt with plastic mother-of-pearl snaps.

  “Morning, Stu,” Dystal said, looking up as Haydon walked through the door. He was sipping his own homemade coffee, black as crude oil, from the tin cap of his slightly rusty and dented Thermos, which sat on the corner of his desk. A well-worn chocolate brown suit coat sagged on a wire hanger off the side of the filing cabinet behind him, and above it, near the front edge, a little red plastic radio was softly playing country music, something with a lilting fiddle.

  “Got a minute?” Haydon took off his trilby and hung it on a coat stand beside Dystal’s door. He stuffed his gloves into his coat pocket and started unbuttoning the coat.

  “You bet. Any damn excuse,” Dystal groaned, dropping his ballpoint pen on the scattered papers. He straightened up, pulled back his beefy shoulders and twisted them this way and that as if he had been there all night. “I came in an hour early just to do this crap, and it feels like I been here all weekend.” He reached out for his Thermos, uncorked it—Dystal was the only man Haydon knew who still owned a Thermos so old that it closed with a cork—and added a quick dollop of crude to the pewter-colored Thermos top that he used as a cup. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Lena Muller,” Haydon said, slipping off his coat and hanging it beside his hat on the rack.

  Dystal stopped his cup halfway to his mouth, “Uh-oh.”

  Haydon told Dystal everything that had happened the day before, the conversation with Germaine Muller and the later telephone conversation with Jim Fossler. As he talked, Dystal’s broad, good-humored face clouded over and he stood slowly, holding his cup of coffee, and came around the desk. He stopped at the side of the empty chair beside Haydon, listening, staring out to the squad room, which was beginning to fill with the oncoming day shift. Listening, thinking as Haydon talked, he casually stepped over and closed his office door against the growing clamor outside and then came over and sat down in the chair beside Haydon as Haydon continued. He scooted the chair around a little so he was facing Haydon but still had a good view of the squad room through the plate-glass window. The enormous bulk of his body filled the much-abused wooden office chair, which creaked occasionally as Dystal shifted his weight. His stomach, always hefty, but formerly more firm than it was now, was easing a little more than it used to over his belt buckle, which was made from the rowel of an old Mexican spur backed in silver.

  Haydon had known Dystal since they had been in the academy. At the beginning, they had been patrol officers together and, later, had gotten their first break in plainclothes on the same vice-squad special assignment. They had worked the same shift in homicide for years, though not always as partners. One of the first promotion opportunities that Haydon had passed up had gone to Dystal. They were as close as brothers, which meant they knew things about each other that nobody else knew, and they respected each other enough to keep it that way.

  When Haydon finished, Dystal sat a moment without saying anything, his log-sized legs stretched out in front of him, his 14E cowboy boots, polished but well worn, crossed at the ankles. He twisted his shoulders and neck from side to side again. The bulk and thick muscles that had won him college football glory and garnered a flood of offers from the pros were giving him hell in his late forties. Something masculine and mournful and barely audible was oozing from the radio on the filing cabinet.

  “Guatemala,” he said finally, shaking his head with a soft snort, still looking out to the squad room. He held the tin cup in the thick fingers of both hands, turning it slowly, idly. “Guate-goddamn-mala.” He shifted in his chair, and the leather of his boots creaked. “Ol’ Jim-bo tracked ‘em down.” He was thoughtful. “He doesn’t even speak that good of Spanish.” He raised his tin cup to his mouth, his eyes still on the squad room, and blew across the surface of the coffee. “Can’t believe that son of a bitch Muller paid him for a three-week goose chase like that. Fossler, he would’ve gone to Bangkok for what Muller was paying him. But he shouldn’t have. Man doesn’t speak Spanish any better than ol’ Jim-bo, he shouldn’t go down into that damned country.”

  Dystal’s broad, slick-shaven face showed a concerned irritation. To him. Central America was as alien and exotic as Bhutan, and therefore highly suspect and presumably dangerous. Besides that, he had absolutely no respect for George
Muller or George Muller’s way of doing things. Raising a thick finger, he scratched a well-trimmed sideburn. Dystal liked a close shave and a clean haircut, and now that he was nearer, Haydon could smell his Mennen’s Skin Bracer. Haydon guessed Dystal hadn’t changed shaving lotion brands since high school, certainly he hadn’t as long as Haydon had known him.

  “Shit,” Dystal said. “The damn State Department sure can work with some squirrels, and they don’t get any squirrelier than Cage, I guess. That’s scary, dammit. Jee-sus.” Dystal shook his head, thinking. “Fossler didn’t believe the kids were trafficking, didn’t think it was the police they were worried about?”

  “He never referred to the police at all. Which, I suppose, you could figure is consistent with his hunch that it wasn’t drugs. And he was definitely a little rattled.”

  “Not like him.”

  “No.”

  “Well, hell. I’d be rattled too, the second I stepped off the plane down there. He’s got a right to be rattled. You don’t go snooping around in a country that sends a death squad after you when they don’t like the way you pick your nose. He found the kid, and that’s what he went down there for. Fossler ought to come on home while he can still draw breath.”

  “I think he feels an obligation to find out a little more about the mess the girl may be involved in.”

  “Well, I guess I can see that,” Dystal said, rolling his head toward Haydon. “What I don’t see is why you think you need to help him.”

  “Come on, Bob, what was I going to do? Tell him I wasn’t going to help him? Tell him he was on his own?”

  “He’s a grown man.”

  “He’s in a bind.”

  “He shouldn’t have jumped off in that kind of business. You cut yourself loose from the organization that goes along with law enforcement, you get out there on your own, you gotta expect to get into a bind.”