Mirror Maze j-4

by William Bayer

  Ever do karate?"

  Janek shook his head. "Too much chop-chop."

  She smiled. "Now that you've met everybody and checked out the joint, let's see what you got."

  He handed her copies of Tania's affidavits, had her sign a receipt for them, then watched her as she read. She might, indeed, have strange mannerisms, but now, in defense attorney mode, she was all business.

  "My client's going to be pleased," she said when she finished. "You've just handed me his passport out of hell."

  "Think you can get him bail?"

  "If I get him a new trial, bet your ass he'll be on the street."

  "I don't know." Janek shook his head. "He's a rich guy.

  He might make a run for it."

  "He's served hard time. He's no threat to society.. Anyway, what's it to you?"

  "He killed a cop." "Oh, sure," she said, turning sarcastic. "Howard Clury.

  How could I forget?"

  At that she launched into a little tirade, working herself up as she went along like an actress delivering a curtain speech. Janek didn't much like her tone, but he was impressed by her passion. Toward the end she was spitting out her words:

  "No one ever brought charges against Mendoza for that, did they? Maybe because there was no evidence. But still he had to be a cop-killer, didn't he? So, what did you guys do-excuse me, some of you guys?

  Cooked up as phony a chain-of-evidence story as this town has ever seen, probably even talked some lame-brained boxer into slicing his wrists while taking a bath. But that didn't matter because it brought the Great Cop-killer down. That was the only thing that mattered… except maybe to a few of us who happen to believe in the rule of law."

  Janek stood back from her. Then he clapped. "Nice summation, Counselor."

  "Never hurts to rehearse."

  "I'm curious-do you see yourself becoming a legal heroine out of this?"

  She shrugged. "Major victory in a high-visibility case could do wonders for my practice."

  "And if some good cops get hurt, Ms. Rampersad, that won't bother you a bit?"

  She studied him. "Please call me Netti."

  "That's short for-?"

  "Henrietta. And don't worry about good cops. They won't get hurt. As for the bad ones -'You do the crime, you do the time." Isn't that what they say these days?"

  Aaron was seated when Janek arrived at Peloponnesus. He was nibbling olives and there was a chilled open bottle of Boutari Retsina on the table. The Greek fish restaurant on White Street catered at lunch to people in the criminal- justice field-court clerks, bondsmen, lawyers, judges. It was barely a quarter full that warm September night.

  It was Janek's first chance to unwind since his return but still he felt tense. He told Aaron about Kit ordering him to pay a courtesy call on Dakin, and then about Sarah and the ninety-eight-hundred-dollar estimate on the roof.

  "There she is, two years into a relationship with her accountant friend, Gilette. Half the time he's sleeping over in my old house. I'm sure the only reason they haven't gotten married is she doesn't want to lose the income she gets from me."

  "Ever confront her with that?" Aaron asked.

  "No. Because I can't prove it. If I bring it up it'll just start an argument, and, for me, one of the great benefits of the divorce is I no longer have to fight with the woman." He shook his head. "Thing is, I feel like I'm being taken."

  "I got news for you, Frank-you are."

  "Yeah… I I "I used to like Sarah fine. But what she's doing to you isn't right.

  Why don't you get yourself a good lawyer, go in tough and cut off the alimony? At the least get it reduced. " "I've thought of that. But the idea of fighting again after all these years… " He shook his head.

  "If we'd had children I think things would have been different. It was her decision, her fear. She was adamant. Whenever I'd bring it up she'd get irrational. After a while I stopped trying to convince her. Then it just seemed to hang between us, this unspoken thing that turned everything mean. We didn't talk about it but it was always there.

  Instead we talked about crap like the goddamn roof."

  They ordered a selection of mezes and two plates of broiled shrimp. Then they discussed the Dietz case.

  "Try this, Frank," Aaron said. "Dietz goes down to the bar, picks up the redhead, charms her into coming up to his room. But it's all a setup.

  She's after the chip. She works for the people he's contacted about buying it. She's sitting down there, available, ready to be picked up.

  Once upstairs she drugs Dietz, robs him, then shoots him so he can't identify her later." Janek smiled. It was a game they often played-Aaron tossing out theories which he then tore apart. They both enjoyed the exercise and it often helped them clarify their views. Also, on this particular evening, it made a good escape from bitter thoughts about Sarah and the prospect of having to face Dakin in the morning.

  "Nice theory," Janek said, "except for two little points. The first one bothered me soon as we walked in last night. I felt something was wrong.

  I couldn't put my finger on what it was. Now I think I know."

  "What?"

  "The way the room was tossed tells us the person who searched it didn't find what he or she was looking for. Once you find the object of your search, you've got no motivation to keep ripping stuff up. But that room was torn from top to bottom. It would be an incredible coincidence if our redhead happened to find the chip at the very end."

  Aaron nodded. "Okay, that's pretty good. Now, what's the second thing?"

  "The writing on Dietz's chest. Think about it. If the redhead wanted us to know Dietz couldn't get it up, why write on him in mirror-reverse?

  Only reason to do that would be if the insult were addressed to Dietz himself which it was. She wrote it so Dietz would read it when he woke up and looked at himself in the mirror. But if she shot him, then she'd know he wouldn't be waking up. So why bother to write him a message?"

  "Maybe she decided to kill him after she wrote it. Maybe she wanted to make it look like she was a psycho hooker instead of a paid assassin. Or maybe she just used the mirror writing to sidetrack us, the way it's doing now."

  Janek laughed. "You're talking like a mystery-story detective."

  " You gotta admit that message is bizarre."

  I ' just bizarre. Very difficult to write. Here." Janek brought out his notebook, tore out a page and handed it to Aaron with a pen.

  "Try it. Try writing ' couldn't get it up' in mirror-reverse."

  Aaron stared at the pen and paper, laid down his silverware, took up the challenge. Janek watched, amused, as Aaron struggled to perform the feat.

  "You're right," Aaron said after several attempts. "It would take a lot of practice."

  "Some people write that way naturally. People with dyslexia, for instance."

  "Well, there you are!" Aaron said. "Now we know something about her."

  "If she wrote it."

  "I think we can assume that. Bare skin. Getting it up. It adds up to some kind of sexual confrontation."

  "I agree. But I still don't see why she'd kill him."

  "She's crazy. A man-hater. Seduces, then kills. Or maybe they had one of those-what do they call '? Sexual misunderstandings."

  "Like he tried to force himself on her, she said no, he wouldn't take no for an answer, so she shot him dead?"

  "Could be." Aaron drained his glass. "What do you think?"

  "No sign of a struggle."

  "So, maybe she likes a steady target. Put him to sleep, then put a ' bullet in his brain. No movement, no back talk, no chance he'll cry out or try and take away her gun."

  This, to Janek, was the best part of the game-the part where Aaron pressed him, forcing him to come up with a countertheory to fit his own objections.

  "What if we're looking at… two separate layers of crime," he said.

  "Two?"

  Janek nodded. "Layer one: Redhead gets picked up in bar of businessman's hotel, goes up to guy's ro
om, spikes his drink, waits till he falls asleep, then robs him of various valuables. Reducing it to schematic form: Two strangers meet, they don't know anything about each other, each has his/her agenda. The meeting ends badly for the man.

  The girl leaves. End of first crime."

  "So then-"

  "Second person enters room, someone who does know something about the victim. He knows Dietz has a valuable computer chip. Maybe he's the prospective purchaser, maybe someone else. All that matters is he's after that chip. Okay, he finds Dietz asleep, uses the opportunity to make a thorough search but doesn't come up with it… because the redhead, who was there first, already found it and took it away."

  Aaron's eyes were glowing. "Go on. This is pretty interesting."

  Janek sat back. "Unfortunately this brings me to the part that doesn't figure. The second intruder places a pillow on top of Dietz and shoots him in the head."

  "I like the idea of two separate crimes. But you're right-killing Dietz doesn't add."

  "It might, if we knew more. We've got a way to go on this. I keep asking myself what the intruder or intruders were trying to do-really trying to do. On this deal, everything makes sense up to the shooting.

  Then it falls apart. I can't think of any reason why either person, assuming there were two, would bother to kill a man already asleep."

  Aaron thought about that awhile. "Gotta find the girl if only to eliminate her. Maybe in the end it'll turn out she's just a psycho."

  "Maybe," Janek said without much conviction.

  "Imagine," said Aaron, "a pure psycho killer. After all these brilliant ideas, wouldn't that be a gas?"

  There was an aura of darkness around Dakin, always had been, as far back as Janek could remember. Even from his first days as a police cadet, he had heard rumors about the chief of Internal Affairs, the man other cops called "The Dark One."

  Shortly before graduation from the academy, Janek attended Dakin's famous lecture, affectionately called T amp;C by the students. Its long title was "Temptation amp; Corruption: The Dilemma of Police Work."

  Attendance was compulsory.

  Every seat, Janek remembered, was filled that hot summer afternoon. The lecture hall, cooled only by fans, was stifling. Two hundred cadets, dressed in crisply ironed blue shirts, black ties, sharply creased dark blue trousers and gleaming black shoes, sat attentively as The Dark One alternately scolded and exhorted, admonished and implored, like a preacher conjuring up the eternal fires of hell.

  Janek would never forget his first impressions-Dakin's tine red hair, fiery yellow eyes, angular body, reed-thin voice, tortured gestures and pale waxen skin. There was nothing dark about The Dark One's complexion, but there was something very dark about his soul. He never smiled. He discoursed about concepts (right and wrong, good and evil) as though they had no connection to living human beings. Dakin's passion burned like a pure blue flame exuding chilly, forbidding fumes.

  He was humorless, pitiless, steely, intimidating, respected and friendless. He was a cop's cop" and a legend. Janek feared and disliked him.

  Years later, he and Timmy Sheehan would confront Dakin at a special departmental hearing, and although Dakin held the rank of chief and Janek was only a lieutenant, Janek would manage to defeat and discredit him, driving him into a bitter, involuntary retirement.

  Now, at 5:45 A. M., Janek sat in his car, parked in Cort City Plaza, across from the stark gray apartment tower where Dakin lived, waiting for the dawn to break.

  Dakin's morning routine never varied. A lifetime bachelor, he would emerge from his building at six, stride briskly to the newsstand by the Baychester Avenue station a mile away, buy the Daily News, then walk briskly home. It was common knowledge that the best time to approach him was during this daybreak outing. But even then, depending upon the substance of one's mission and the quality of one's entreaties, one always risked dismissal.

  Unfastening his eyes from Dakin's door, Janek glanced around. Perhaps, he thought, he might learn something about his quarry from a brief study of his neighborhood.

  Cort City Plaza had been built on a forgotten strip of the Bronx separated by a narrow inlet from Pelham Bay Park. Until the day that someone envisioned it, it had been a swamp. Now it possessed the dismal aura of a hundred similar high-rise satellite communities constructed on the outskirts of major cities. In such places it didn't matter which part of the country one was in, because the satellite town always looked the same: bleak, gray, uniform, built on the edge of a great metropolis yet cut off from its rich offerings by high-speed roads on which cars hurtled day and night.

  There was nothing in Cort City Plaza, it seemed to Janek, to become attached to; no corner of beauty to inspire a painter or a poet. The only texture was the lack of texture. The landscape was rubble and weeds, the spirit cheerless and forlorn. Yet such a place might well suit The Dark One, Janek thought; here he could brood in anonymity over the loss of his terrifying power and the awful spectacle of his fall.

  Promptly at six, Dakin emerged. Janek locked his car and hurried over.

  "Morning, Chief"

  Dakin's yellow eyes sliced him like razors. "It's you, he snickered.

  "Been expecting you."

  "Can I-"

  "Walk on my right. Hearing's better that side."

  Janek positioned himself to Dakin's right, then glanced at his profile.

  The thin red hair had mostly bleached to white, but the skin was pale as ever, the body was still ramrod straight and the voice was as reedy as the day Janek had heard it deliver T amp;C at the Police Academy twenty-two years before.

  "You got something for me. Spill it."

  The imperial manner, too, was still intact. It was as if the heroic days of Dakin's reign had never passed, days when the only thing that mattered was the merciless rooting out of corrupt cops. As they walked together toward the subway station, and Janek began to summarize his interview with Tania, another part of his brain thought back upon the Dakin legend.

  There were the stories, told and retold countless times, of how, arresting a cop for corruption or malfeasance, Dakin would call the man aside, place his arm fraternally across his shoulder, then gently recommend that the poor slob blow his brains out. "It's the only honorable way. Spare your family and colleagues the disgrace," Dakin would counsel in a whisper. More than a dozen men, according to the legend, had followed that withering advice.

  At the height of his power he had been master of the sting, dangling enticing goodies in front of desperate cops to tempt them down crooked paths. The better the man, so the stories went, the more elaborately Dakin would contrive to sting him. It was as if he had to prove that there was no such thing, as an incorruptible cop… except, of course, for himself. He, Dakin, was untouchable, inviolate, perfect in his virtue. Unable to face the darkness in himself, he hid behind a facade of rectitude, and from there searched out the weaknesses in others.

  Looking at him now, Janek understood the role he'd played: He was our Robespierre.

  "So, that it?" Dakin said when Janek finished summarizing. They were less than a hundred yards from the subway station. The towers of Cort City Plaza, blocking the rising sun, cast lengthy shadows on the stony terrain.

  "That's it."

  "When're you going to arrest him?"

  "Who?"

  "Sheehan, of course." "I'm not going to," Janek said.

  Dakin gave him a sharp glance. His amber eyes flickered wildly. "I expect someone sure as hell is!"

  Janek shook his head. "No one's going to arrest Timmy. Mendoza's got a new attorney, a brainy young woman with lots of brass. The information's been passed to her. It's up to her to decide what to do with it."

  "You're kidding me!"

  "I'm not."

  "Who cares about Mendoza?"

  "I would guess Mendoza does," Janek ventured.

  "He's crap. It's us. We're what the case is about. NYPD. Who we are and what we stand for. Nothing less."

  Janek exhaled. "I know yo
u feel that way. But to me, that's just a part of it."

  Dakin shook his head. Under his left eye a little muscle began to twitch; like an insect it jumped beneath the pale, sallow skin.

  "I-" Dakin started to say something, then, unaccountably, he stopped. He stared at Janek, spat at the ground, then plunged forward toward the newsstand.

  As Janek watched him buy his paper, he thought back seven years to the last time they'd met.

  It was across an oval table in a nondescript conference room in the Headquarters building. A special departmental hearing was in progress.

  The judges, three high-ranking officers impaneled by the commissioner to hear Timmy Sheehan's charges, sat at one end, Timmy and Janek sat facing Dakin, and a female police stenographer sat at a little portable table by the door.

  The events that led up to that hearing were recounted:

  A year and a half after Jake Mendoza's conviction, Mendoza's first appeals lawyer went into court with a statement sworn out by a middle-aged, frizzy-haired Brooklynite, a graphologist named Phyllis Komfeld. Komfeld claimed that an NYPD detective, whose name she didn't know, had. her a thousand dollars to forget Gus Metaxas's suicide paid note.

  The judge convened the parties. Komfeld gave her testimony and was then cross-examined by the prosecutors. She could produce no evidence to support her allegation, and under harsh questioning admitted she had spent several years in mental institutions. Police handwriting experts reaffirmed that the note had been written in Metaxas's hand. The judge ruled that there were no grounds for a retrial. Mendoza hired a new lawyer. The Mendoza case ground on.

  But then a strange thing happened. Six months after the hearing, Phyllis Komfeld was found tied to her bed, raped and strangled by an intruder.

  Her apartment had been ransacked. Some valuables, mainly family silver, were taken.

  At first the case was treated as a routine robbery-homicide, unconnected to Mendoza, perhaps one of a hundred similar crimes committed in Brooklyn that particular year. But then Dakin's office asked to take it over. The case was reassigned to Internal Affairs. For a while nothing more was heard about it, until one night a panicked Timmy Sheehan knocked on Janek's door.