Spiral (14 page)

Haydon heard a dog on another street, a high-pitched quivering wail that dropped to a deep chesty baying a split second before the point-blank barrage of automatic-weapon fire opened over his head with an explosion like the end of the world. Though he could not possibly have seen it, he was aware of Mooney being blown off his feet, being hurled out the gate with an awesome grunting bawl that had no comparison in Haydon's experience. Unreasonably he screamed too, heard his own voice syncopated between the spitting solar brilliance of each rapid explosion. He came up with the Beretta in both hands to meet the stunning muzzle fire with his own deafening blasts into the bamboo.

Then silence.

For an instant the hush was disorienting. His body was as rigid as bone, his arms holding the Beretta straight out in front of him.

Suddenly every dog in the barrio raised an incredible yowling. Haydon staggered from his crouch, caught himself with his left hand, his ears ringing, the Beretta still pointing at the stand of bamboo. He was trembling, crabbing backward to the gate, suddenly realizing he might have emptied the fifteen-round clip, wondering if he could fire again if he had to. He stumbled backward over Mooney, the dogs filling his head and scrambling his thoughts, remembered, felt the numb coolness of shock coming as he lunged out of the line of sight of the opened gate, remembered again, jumped back into the open, and began dragging Mooney sideways to the protection of the wall. He knew Mooney was dead. He felt dead, and in Haydon's mind the black spillage that was still spreading incredibly quickly over the pale sidewalk and in which Mooney seemed to float so lightly under the dim, distant source of illumination proved he was dead.

The straining whine of a car engine on the other side of the block. Louder as it approached the front of the old mansion, shouting coming from beyond the wall, yelling, only a few voices, the deep-toned jangling of iron gates, and the car screaming away into the city night.

He sat on the gritty sidewalk, leaning against the Belgrano wall with Mooney's head in his lap. He was thinking about Mooney's ulcers when he remembered the radio, and saw it winking at him from the gutter.

Chapter 14

H
E
listened to the dispatcher call for the nearest units—officer down, which would bring everyone on the East Side—and then she asked if he was all right. He said he was. Homicide picked it up and Dystal was on, his west Texas drawl tightened by what he had heard. Dystal asked if it was bad, and Haydon said Mooney was dead. Dystal asked if he was all right, and he said he was. They were on the way, the lieutenant said, and kept talking, and Haydon knew why and didn't care and turned off the radio.

The empty sidewalk stretched on either side of them like a luminous chalky border against the wall. No one was coming out of the houses, which was good, because he didn't want them to, and after a minute there were fewer and fewer dogs barking until the last one stopped. He watched the black pool spread to the edge of the curb, where two or three rivulets broke loose and went over the side. He knew there would be a lot of it, so it didn't bother him. He wanted a cigarette. Dystal would have one when he got there, or maybe one of the patrolmen who would be there first. His clothes were plastered to him with sweat, enough of it to soak through his suit, enough to make his face slick, to form a drop on the end of his nose and make the corners of his mouth taste salty.

In his mind he stood back and looked at himself. It was an unreasonable thing for him to keep Mooney's head propped up with his thigh, but it didn't seem right that he should let it on the sidewalk. Not now, while there were just the two of them and they still shared whatever it was that tied them together. After the others arrived the situation would become official and it wouldn't matter anymore and he could put Mooney's head on the sidewalk. When the others entered into it—he almost thought "intruded"—the strange intimacy of a closely exchanged death would vanish. Mooney's departure would become a "case."

Mooney's head was surprisingly heavy. Haydon looked at the enormous swell of Mooney's stomach and remembered the corpse that had lain next to this same wall, but on the other side of the block. That was only this morning. He remembered the shoes without laces, and he looked at Mooney's shoes to check. He looked at Mooney's hands. And, realizing now that he had been avoiding it, he looked at Mooney's face. Even though he was only a foot or so away, he could not see his features distinctly. He could not get a clear picture of what Death looked like, having come to make its roost in Mooney's body.

He looked up and let his eyes settle on a nothing part of the night. He thought that it was a good thing he didn't have cigarettes with him because if he had he would have smoked one and it might have seemed a callous gesture to the first officers to arrive—him sitting there with Mooney's head in his lap, smoking a cigarette. Mooney wouldn't have given a damn, but it wouldn't have looked right all the same.

He was not, initially, aware of the sirens, rather it was as if he thought of them first, and then heard them. They were distant, frail and distant.

Mooney had been still for so long Haydon half expected him to heave a big, fat man's sigh as he often did on stakeouts when he had to sit cramped up in a car for long periods of time. But there would be no such sigh from him now, because Mooney wasn't there. Mooney was lost. Roosting Death had performed its magic, and shunted him into oblivion, to a place that even Death forgot. That was part of the magic, the heart of its hopelessness. He remembered the words of Catullus, "Lost is the lost, thou knowest it, and the past is past." Haydon saw the infinite black vacuum of never again. He simply waited, cradling what Death had done on a hot night, dreading the approaching end of their tranquility

Chapter 15

T
HE
streets on all four sides of the block occupied by the Belgrano estate were closed off by police cars, and teams of officers were going door to door to each of the houses that faced the mansion walls. Fractured beams of flashlights crisscrossed in the darkness through the brushy undergrowth of the grounds, and every window in the old house was lighted, its bare rooms exposed to the surrounding night.

Dystal had been in the fifth car to arrive at the scene, though he was the first man from homicide. Before the others arrived, he took Haydon aside and listened to his story. He was easygoing, but not lax in wanting details. Haydon was aware that Dystal was watching him closely. He had expected it. Haydon had not acted responsibly in deliberately cutting off the radio, leaving Dystal to wonder what was happening, and with no idea of what he would find when he got there. He had every reason to expect the worst.

After Dystal had made Haydon go through it a second time, and then began backtracking with questions, Haydon realized there was more at play than the lieutenant's need to know. Haydon had to have his facts straight. He would have to repeat his story to each of the three teams that investigated officer shootings: the department's shooting team, the representative from the internal affairs division, and the Harris County district attorney's investigators. Dystal was testing him, coaching him. He wanted to know for himself if Haydon would be able to handle it, and he wanted to help him do it if he could.It was the beginning of a long night. The parts were played by the same actors who always played them, but the cast had been expanded with additional characters. Besides Dystal, there were several teams of detectives, as there had been that afternoon, and the shooting team investigators. There were two other homicide lieutenants, the captain, and one of the assistant chiefs. The afternoon's terrorist-style assassination had already put the upper echelons of the department on alert. When they arrived at the scene at the Belgrano estate and learned that Haydon and Mooney had been investigating Hay-don's suspicion of the presence of a motorcycle at the scene of another Latin killing earlier that morning, their worst fears broke into the open.

Standing in the street, thirty yards away from the empty white outline of Mooney's body on the stained sidewalk, Haydon did his best to review the events of that morning to the small crowd of detectives circled around him. There was as yet no written report about the morning's incident, since it had quickly taken second place to the investigation of the assassination that had occurred a few hours later. Nor had he yet had the time to write up the results of his interviews with Valverde and Gamboa. A great deal of the information he had gathered during the day and relayed back to Mooney still had not been recorded, since Mooney had been busy initiating his own inquiries up until the time he had accompanied Haydon to the Belgrano address. It was obvious that before either investigation could progress much farther, Haydon would have to sit down and produce a detailed report.

After he had recapped the new developments and answered a few questions, there was little left to say. The administrators gradually moved aside to discuss cosmetics, their immediate concern being the news cameras and reporters held at bay behind the barriers across the street. The officers huddled together to compare notes, to work out the strategies they would have to answer for the next day. Haydon and Dystal were alone again.

"Have another one of these things 'fore we go in there," Dystal said, tilting his head toward the house and shaking out a cigarette.

They leaned against the fender of Dystal's car and smoked, and as Haydon raised the cigarette to his lips a spasm of ungovernable twitching seized his upper arm. He almost lost the cigarette, then dropped his hand to his side, hoping that Dystal hadn't noticed.

"I don't guess you gotta go through with this part of it," Dystal

said.

Haydon knew that as they had stood in the street talking with the officers and other detectives, Dystal had caught him glancing toward the flashlight beams raking the bamboo.

"I ought to," Haydon answered. It seemed he should have said more, but he didn't.

Dystal nodded, and let it go. "Pete'll be out here in a second. He's about got 'em all squared away in there." He pulled on his cigarette. "Ol' Pete," he said.

Haydon could smell the hot oil from the engine of the car they were leaning against, and he listened to the periodic popping and cracking of the metal in the hood and firewalls as the engine cooled. He heard someone cough and spit on the other side of the wall, and the faint conversational voices of men in the dark.

Suddenly these minutiae were essential to him. As long as he could make sense of them, as long as they fit together in the increasingly unreal fabric of the night, he would be able to maintain his emotional equilibrium. He strained to pull in even more sensations: the subtle colors still discernible in the night; the soft chinking of a nervous hand worrying pocket change coming from the group of administrators plotting strategy off to one side; the distinctive cadence of a woman's voice coming from the news vans behind the barricades.

Lapierre appeared in the opened gate of the wall and motioned to them. Together Haydon and Dystal stood up from the car and tossed their cigarettes aside. They approached the sidewalk and stood on either side of the bloody sheet that someone had thrown over the place where Mooney had lain.

"Okay," Lapierre said, in an oddly preparatory tone. "The shooter is seven feet from where you were standing, Stuart." He shined the bright beam of his flashlight into the dense bamboo directly in front of them and illuminated a ragged path torn through the stalks. "That was your line of fire," he said. "First him, then you, from a slightly different angle."

They stood there, looking at the narrow path of shredded poles at shoulder height. Closer, the bamboo was torn lower and climbed on a rising trajectory where Haydon had fired from a crouching position.

"I guess he didn't see," Haydon said. It wasn't clear what he meant.

"We've cut a path around here," Lapierre said.

They followed him through a narrow opening the investigators had cut to the body. It did not go in a direct line, but approached the site in detour to avoid contaminating the evidence of the pattern of fire. The bamboo was so dense they didn't see the flashlight of the waiting patrolman until they were several steps away. He stood to one side of the body, which was draped with a sheet. Though Haydon had been sweating profusely all evening, he had forgotten about it until Lapierre bent down to uncover the body. Then he was conscious of it again, seeping from every pore, a maddening, strangling dampness.

The shooter lay on his side in a small opening hacked out of the impenetrable bamboo, his legs scissored as if he were running. His blood was splashed like black sludge across the rigid stalks that had been at his back. Haydon's stomach clenched, his hearing filled with the constricted surging of his own blood driven through his arteries. His eyes focused on the entry wounds. They were not clean. The slugs, having been deflected from a true course by the bamboo, had wobbled and tumbled into their mark. Two slugs had hit his face: one took his left eye into his head, the other blew out his right cheek. A neck wound. One, he thought, in his chest.

Haydon stared until he heard Dystal say, "Ever seen him?"

Haydon nodded. "It's Jimmy Valverde ... the limousine service."

"Goddam." Dystal almost jumped. He spoke to Lapierre. "Better get somebody over there, seal the place off." Then to Haydon, "You sure?"

"It's Valverde," Haydon said, staring at the man who had liked to take cash, and had played with the body of Celia Moreno.