Spiral (2 page)

In his eagerness to get a shot at the land, Jerry had told the owners that he thought he could put together a deal that would net them a $5,000-per-acre profit. That meant that his own profit from anything he might put together would lie in whatever money he could get over $12,000 per acre.

As the four men sat in silence, Jerry was doing his damnedest to look contemplative. If he accepted Gamboa's offer he personally would clear $795,000 only thirty-six hours after he had located the property. But he couldn't do it. Not the first damn offer, not with what he knew about the Mexican's deep pockets.

"Is that pretty much what you see as tops?" Jerry asked. He had decided to chew on the inside of his cheek and frown a little more.

"That is our offer," Gamboa said. His smile was gone, and had been replaced by a look of sincere apology.

Jerry looked at Crisman. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to make a telephone call," he said. "You have an office I can use?"

"Sure," Crisman said. He pressed a button on a small panel near the edge of the table.

"Will you give me five minutes, Mr. Gamboa?" Jerry asked. "I'm going to have to check this out with my people in Austin."

"Of course. I understand." Gamboa smiled.

The woman who had been in earlier came to the door and took Jerry to an office down the hall. After telling him he could dial direct, she walked out of the room and closed the door behind her, leaving him alone. He stood stock still for a second, a shit-eating grin slowly covering his face. Then he slapped his left hand over his crotch, squatted, squeezed tight, and made a hook 'em horns sign with his right hand raised high in the air. He started laughing, making private wheezing sounds, as he flopped over on the leather ottoman, still gripping his crotch, raised his knobby ostrich cowboy boots, and spurred the air as if he were riding a bare-backed bull in a rodeo— which he had never, ever, even come close to doing in real life. When he had had enough of that, he got up again and tried to stop laughing. He went to a mirror and tried to compose his face, working at it, then made up his mind to go for it.

When he came back into the conference room, Gamboa and Sosa had their heads together and Crisman was just coming out of the executive bathroom. That was good. He had left them alone. Jerry went back around to his side of the desk. He wore a sober expression, as if he were going to have to deliver some bad news.

"I'm going to have to have your final offer, Mr. Gamboa," he said. "Some other players have gotten into this."

Crisman picked up his Cross pencil and screwed the lead inside. Jerry thought maybe he was going to stab it into the side of Jerry's neck if Gamboa folded.

"What will you have to have for us to get the property?" Sosa asked. Gamboa had leaned back from the table.

"I'm afraid it'll have to be seventeen thousand, Mr. Sosa. I'm sorry."

"Agreed." Sosa spoke without tension, as if he had just bought a television set.

Jerry Lowell had just made $1,325,000 in less than thirty-six hours from the sale of a piece of land that he didn't even own.

Mr. Benigo Gamboa Parra had made an even better bargain. The $4,505,000 he was investing in 265 acres of prime Texas real estate was not, strictly speaking, his money.

Chapter 1

SUMMER
came early. By March the mild coastal winter had disappeared and spring was a disregarded season: a few pacific days in early May. In the closing days of the month temperatures had climbed to record highs and the usual spring rains, seemingly confused by the brevity of the season, were few and slight. The heavy gray pillows of Gulf clouds that could pile up unexpectedly and darken the day with torrents of warm rain never paused, but drifted quickly on the southerly breezes passing over the city in bright white spumes that gave way to clear skies by midmorning. June ushered in two straight weeks of thermometer readings over a hundred, and by July Houston was locked into one of the hottest and driest summers of the city's history. It was the time of the long days, and at night, of Sirius, the dog star.

The old Belgrano home was on the southeastern edge of the city. When the mansion had been built more than a hundred years before, it had been part of a large estate that lay deep in the isolated coastal lowlands, almost in the floodplains of the bayous that wriggled their way toward the back bays of the Gulf twenty miles to the east. Built in the nineteenth-century southern tradition, it had been constructed of brick and limestone with wide wooden verandas on both floors that were meant to take advantage of the meager and torpid Gulf air that made its way across the surrounding miles of scrub-brush flats and into the east Texas woods of cypress and loblolly pine. The house was situated in the center of a cypress grove encircled by a high wall, its pediment crowned with sharp wrought-iron fleurs-de-lis.

Now all that was left of the estate lay within those same dun-colored, crumbling walls. The big cypresses and oaks remained, casting a perpetual twilight of shadow over grounds which had been unattended for so long no one remembered them otherwise. The old house itself was hidden, obscured by the wild undergrowth of dead weeds and grasses, lost within the matted tangles of coral and butterfly vines. The once wooded countryside had been scored and cross-hatched by the shaggy streets of one of the city's Latin barrios that had crowded and bullied itself right up to the pitted estate walls. The Houston Ship Channel was less than a mile away, and in the near distance toward the bays the barrios died away where miles of oil refineries, stark and sprawling, attached themselves to the channel like noisome tumors.

The entrance to the Belgrano estate faced Chicon Street in the core of the barrio, its graffiti-smeared walls abutting the sidewalk, its badly rusted gates sagging over a strip of bald caliche that went from the street to about three feet inside the gates, the span of an arm's reach through the wrought-iron bars where the smooth paving stones had been plundered over the years. The body lay in this patch of chalky dust.

It was approaching nine-thirty in the morning and the dry heat had already stirred the insects in the parched undergrowth on the other side of the high wall. The edge of the dead man's right shoulder and the tip of his splayed-out right shoe were just now being touched by the thin light of the morning sun; the rest of him was in the blue shade, suspended on the white bed of caliche dust in his own silence and in the rasping drone of the insects.

He lay on his back, his legs straight out and parallel to each other and to the gate, his left shoulder up under the bars themselves as if he had been trying to crawl under. He was dressed in a charcoal-gray suit with stripes of a lighter gray, the coat neatly closed with a single button above his waist. A soiled white shirt, open at the collar and without a tie, showed above the V of his coat lapels. His hands were placed properly inside the coat pockets, the thumbs outside as if he were posing for a quaint old-fashioned photograph. He wore a pair of scruffy black lace-up shoes, but the laces were missing, the empty eyelets giving the impression of dispossession. He appeared to be a Mexican in his early thirties, chunky, not tall.

In the very center of the man's lead-colored forehead, just above his eyebrows, a single carpenter's nail protruded from his skull. There was no mess; it was very neatly done. One end of a tiny black string was tied to the nail, and to the other end of the string was tied a large red ant. The ant was trying to walk away from the string, and in doing so was clambering back and forth in a shallow arc across the dreaming gaze of the man's opened eyes.

Chapter
2

SCENES
of homicide, Haydon thought as he stood over the reposing body, were contradictory affairs. The minimal constants, by definition, never varied: a criminal death; a Cain, an Abel. The variables were infinite: time and space and circumstance. It was not when or where or why men murdered that made homicide investigations a tedious business. It was the surety of it, the inevitability that during every single day that dawned man could be depended upon to prove again that even after thousands of years of progressing civilization, he was utterly incapable of controlling his earliest criminal impulse. In this one thing man was frighteningly consistent, and incorrigible.

The sun was steadily rising overhead, pushing the shadows farther back into the gloomy drive. The cheap suit was dusty. Whoever had put him here had wrestled him around in the caliche until they had maneuvered him into the position they wanted. Though they hadn't bothered about the ashy blotches on the dark material, they had taken the pains to straighten his coattails so that they were not tucked up under the dead man's back. Haydon noticed too the socks. See-through gray nylon with dark vertical stripes. Tropical.

It wasn't an ugly scene, but it was definitely disconcerting, because of the peculiar lead pallor of the bloodless olive flesh, and, of course, the nail and the tethered ant.

"You ever see anything like this before?" Mooney asked. He was holding between two fat fingers the last bite of a fried pie he had bought from a vending machine as they left the station.

Haydon shook his head as his dark brown eyes studied the corpse with a singularity of concentration that precluded any further response. He stood with his arms crossed, his straight lean frame seemingly at odds with the inherent disorder of a homicide scene. His thick sable hair was neatly barbered, the temples beginning to have enough gray in them now so that it was one of the first things you noticed about him. He was conscious of the broad band of sun falling across the shoulders of his suit, penetrating like a heat lamp, drawing the perspiration from the pores beneath the high collar of his shirt. Ever correct, his silk tie tightly knotted, his shoes polished, he stood over the shabbily dressed corpse and tried to place the dead man's odd mien within the framework of something sensible.

Behind him, outside the area of the crime scene roped off with Day-Glo yellow plastic tape, he could hear the four uniformed officers talking to the crowd of fifteen or twenty people that had gathered on the sidewalk and street blocked off by the patrol cars. Haydon did not like to be overheard at a crime scene. Every patrolman who knew anything about working homicides knew that.

In fact, Haydon's reputation for adhering to a personal, and sometimes eccentric, code of conduct was notorious, and reached far beyond the police department. Foremost was his obstinacy in demanding absolute privacy for his investigations, as well as for himself. He sustained a relationship of constant tension with the news media, and detested having either his cases or his name mentioned in any context. He considered having his picture reproduced the ultimate desecration. This obsession had been strained to the breaking point in the past by the fact that he had been the principal investigator in a number of sensational cases.

In addition, Haydon's personal life was guaranteed to attract media attention at the slightest opportunity. He was the only son of a respected and prosperous international lawyer whose death had left Haydon with a considerable inheritance. Aside from his work, he lived a very private life with his wife, Nina, an architect, in the family's old and spacious residence in a fashionable part of the city near Rice University. It was the natural inclination of those who did not know him well to wonder why he worked at all, much less as a homicide detective. But at age forty, and after thirteen years in homicide, Haydon had long ago dispelled those questions among his colleagues. In the police department his reputation was quite different, though perhaps no less enigmatic.

"You figure it's some kind of gang deal?" Mooney reached into his pocket and took out the waxed-paper package the pie had come in. He wrapped the piece of pie in the paper, dropped it into his pocket, and sucked the sweet off his fingers.

Haydon shrugged. "If it is, they're being uncharacteristically creative."

By now there were a few flies coming around, even though there was nothing to attract them. There was no blood. If the death had been the result of the nail, the mess it would have caused had been left somewhere else, and the man's face meticulously cleaned.

The crime-lab technicians and medical examiner's investigator arrived at the same time, and the uniformed officers moved the crowd back even farther as the vans rolled up. The police photographer was the first to step over the tape and approach Haydon.

He glanced at the body, turned to Haydon to say something as he reached into his camera case, and then jerked his head around to the body again.

"God Almighty," he said. "What is
this!”

"There's an ant tied to the string," Haydon said. He didn't know this photographer. "You'll see it when you get closer. It's up near his hairline. I want sharp close-ups."

Mooney sauntered over to speak to the coroner's investigator, an older man and a former homicide detective himself. Together they started measuring the scene as Mooney sketched the layout on the back of an envelope he had gotten off the dashboard of the car.

Haydon moved over nearer the high wall and looked at the caliche, the gates, and the driveway. The paving stones where the driveway began again inside the wall were buckled and tufts of dead grass the color of dried corn husks grew through the cracks. The drive made an immediate turn to the left about fifty feet beyond the gates, and disappeared around a corner of scorched brush and weeds. Haydon stepped to the gates, picked up a small caliche clod, and threw it into the weeds. He could hear the grasshoppers popping against the parched undergrowth. The keening insects drowned out the sounds of the city.