Spiral (3 page)

Backing against the wall in the narrow border of what was left of the morning shadow, Haydon faced the sunlight as he took a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses out of his jacket pocket and put them on. While the photographer and then the coroner's investigator did their work, he looked across at the crowd.

There were three or four high school kids in the tribal dress of their particular barrio. One, a girl with a single yellow dangling earring, kept her hand over her mouth and her head turned half away from the ugly scene as though she could not bear to watch it, though her eyes never left the body as Finn did what he had to do to take the corpse's temperature. A few middle-aged women hugged themselves and talked quietly in a little wad off to one side. A redheaded delivery man whose uniform name patch said "Red" and whose bread van was parked down the block in front of Montoya's grocery popped his gum and alternated his attention between the dead Mexican and the perky nipples under the thin tank top of the girl with the yellow earring. There were a couple of older men who appeared to be regulars from La Perla bar across the street, and a barber wearing a white short-sleeved nylon smock and a cigarette tucked behind his ear.

There were four or five others, but none of them caught Hay-don's attention as individuals. They were merely "crowd," the back of a head, a blank face, a quarter profile.

When they were through, Mooney and the coroner's investigator started toward Haydon. Finn, whom everyone but Haydon called Jimbo, was probably fifteen years older than Mooney, and was his physical opposite. Tall and thin, he seemed prematurely bent with age. His octagonal rimless glasses had sunk deep into the sides of his nose, and he always had one or two white patches on his face where he had had skin cancers burned off.

"You got a nice one here, Stuart," Finn said.

"It looks like it," Haydon said. He guessed from the fidgety way Finn was pulling back his lips and repeatedly clenching his even white teeth that he was breaking in a new set of dentures. "Are you through with him?" he asked.

"All I'm gonna do."

"Then let's take a look."

The three men stepped over to the body and squatted down. Haydon leaned over and sniffed at the dead man's mouth, then turned his attention to the feet. The guy hadn't been particular about how he treated his patent-leather shoes. They were scuffed and scratched, the heels worn considerably on the outsides, and the toes turned up slightly, indicating the shoes were too large for his feet. Haydon shoved a yellow pencil into the instep of one shoe and pushed it off the foot. He turned it over in the dust with the pencil and read the brand name on the inside. They could make out only one word in the sweat-stained leather: Canada.

"Canada!" Mooney snorted. "A Mex'can from goddam Canada. Beautiful. "Ed Mooney had none of Haydon's reserve. He was overweight, and gaining. He was Irish, impatient, garrulous, prejudiced, and profane. They had been partners for four years, ever since Haydon had stuck his neck out to get Mooney transferred from vice to homicide. It was a move Mooney had coveted for years, but was always denied because his own irascible personality had created bad blood for him in the upper echelons of the department, where such decisions were made. The two men had been friends since the academy, and their opposite personalities, instead of clashing, meshed like cogged wheels.

They looked at the hole in the big toe of the thin sock through which a dirty, horny toenail protruded, and another hole, larger, worn at the heel. Haydon wondered about the missing shoelaces.

Carefully, he probed the suit pockets. Nothing in the inside coat or lapel pockets, nothing in the trousers pockets. Leaning against the gate, Mooney and Finn gripped the body by the right shoulder and lifted it while Haydon quickly checked the hip pockets. Nothing.

Haydon felt the stickiness under the cuffs of his shirt, the briny sweat soaking into the lizard band of his wristwatch. Feeling his own clothes becoming a blotter for perspiration, his attention was drawn to the damp spots on the dead man's coat pockets which concealed his hands. He reached down and pulled at the right coat sleeve, pinching the cloth just below the elbow. There was some resistance, from the beginnings of rigor mortis, Haydon thought, and he held the coattail with his other hand as he jerked firmly at the sleeve. When the hand finally came out, it pulled the lining with it.

"She-it," Mooney said.

The hand lay palm up in the dust, and in the stiffening cramp of death the fingers had contracted into a claw with five bloody stubs where the fingernails had been. Three of the fingers had been wrenched into impossible angles, one bent completely back over itself. The pocket lining was crusty with the coagulating blood serum that had seeped from the wounds.

"He pissed off somebody." Finn turned his head and spat in the

dust.

Haydon rose to a crouch and pulled on the dead man's arm until he had dragged his left shoulder out from under the gate. He straddled the body and, stooping, pulled the other arm from the other pocket. Again the pocket lining came out with the hand. Again the disfigured stubs.

Squatting down again, Haydon examined the fingers. At first he thought the fingernals were missing, then he realized they simply had been mashed beyond recognition. The ends of the fingers had been flattened by something, and then they had swollen, making it difficult to tell exactly what had been done to them.

"Goddam. Somebody really did a job on this tamale," Mooney

said.

Haydon glanced at his partner. Ed Mooney didn't enjoy these as he used to. His face was flushed, and it wasn't completely attributable to the heat and his increasing obesity.

Turning his attention once again to the dead man's face, Haydon saw that his features were predominantly Indian. It was impossible to determine if he was Mexican, Salvadoran, Colombian, Cuban, Guatemalan, or what. Houston was a refuge for people from all over Latin America. A refuge, and sometimes a staging ground. The corpse had started a mustache, which had only a few days' growth, and there was a relatively recent scar about half an inch long in the shape of a shallow crescent at the lower corner of his right eye.

"Gases building up in there," Finn said, pointing at the pink emerging between the corpse's slightly parted lips. "It's pushing his tongue out. We'd better get him into the cooler."

Haydon didn't say anything. He was looking at the nail in the forehead. It was a large galvanized finishing nail and extruded at a slight angle about an inch out of the pewter-colored skin. Though the wound at the nail's entrance was clean and bloodless, it seemed to Haydon a particularly sinister form of mutilation, more chilling even than the condition of the tortured hands.

The ant was still alive, but motionless except for a single wavering antenna at the edge of the man's oily hairline. Haydon took the pencil and prodded it. The ant moved about an inch before it stopped again, its head down next to the ridge of thick hair. The string was tied just in front of the insect's bulbous abdomen.

Haydon put the pencil in his pocket, and the three men stood.

"Nail didn't kill him," Finn said flatly.

"I don't think so either." Haydon was looking at the ant. "I guess you can take him," he said. "If Vanstraten's there would you tell him we're coming over, and ask him if he would wait around for this one?"

"Sure thing," Finn said, and he motioned for his assistants to bring the gurney.

Haydon and Mooney moved away as the coroner's assistants collapsed the aluminum gurney, wrestled the corpse onto the sheets, covered it, raised the gurney, and wheeled it to the back doors of the van.

"You want to give this to the Chicano squad?" Mooney asked. "This guy definitely ain't Irish."

Haydon shook his head slightly and looked away. He looked down the street, squinting into the morning sunlight. He wondered how many homicides he had investigated in morning sunlight. He would like to know. In fact, he wondered how many kinds of morning sunlight he had stood in and looked at dead people. A few came readily to mind. The deep gold light in which the old man had lain. His name was Petersen, and he had replaced every window in his odd little house with amber glass. He had been dead three days when they got there, and his cat was sitting on his chest, having eaten one side of the old man's fat lower lip. Mr. Petersen and his cat, levitating in the thick gold light. There was the cool blue light of a January dawn in which he had viewed the body of one Jamie Frank Carlisle, whose assailant had shot him point-blank in the navel, and had left him sitting in the backseat of his car with his bare feet in a Styrofoam ice chest full of cold water. He remembered the eerie apple-green light on the teenaged girl he had seen only minutes after a spring hailstorm. She lay nude and face down in a vacant lot, raped and strangled, white hailstones in her black hair, and a solitary one, tinted aqua by the light, melting in the small depression above her hips. The pearl light on the waterlogged breasts of the prostitute Sally Steen, who surfaced in the steamy water of Buffalo Bayou, like the Lady in the Lake. He remembered...

"You'd think it'd rain," Mooney said.

It took Haydon a moment to come back. "It will," he said.

"Yeah," Mooney snorted. "And then everything along that goddam Braeswood will flood again. I'll tell ya, the city oughta issue scuba gear over there. Hell, I wouldn't care if it didn't rain for a year. A little drought would do that damn swamp some good."

"Let's keep it," Haydon said, referring to the case. He had taken a handkerchief out of his pocket and was wiping his forehead, lifting his sunglasses and going over the straight bridge of his nose.

"Hell, I don't care. I'll bet it's gonna be a queer mess. They're vindictive little shits. They'd do something like this."

"Maybe so," Haydon said, but he didn't believe it. The contrivance of the nail and the ant was not an act of spite or venomous retaliation for spurned or unfaithful love. It was a calculated performance, too specific to have been done in a moment of hot, unreasoning passion. And the tortured fingers. There had been method in their mutilation; it was not a random viciousness. This would be worth investigating. He would like to meet the man who had tied the string.

"I got the name of the old
mamacita
who stumbled onto the guy. You didn't want to talk to her, did ya?"

"We can interview her later if we need to," Haydon said, neatly refolding the handkerchief and putting it back in his pocket.

Mooney looked at the wall and the gate as if registering their existence for the first time. "This place deserted, or what?"

"It looks deserted, doesn't it?" Haydon said, not answering the question. He moved to the gates and looked through the wrought-iron grillwork again. "No one saw anything, I suppose," he said, turning around and facing the street.

"Nothin'. First two officers on the scene talked to the people who came up. Nobody knew
nada
about
nada.
The barber—there was a barber here—was the one who found them. He came along across the street to open his shop and saw her over here layin' right beside this dead guy. He didn't know what the hell. Thought there was some kind of slaughter, bodies everywhere. He's the one put in the call. Then he comes over here, sees Mama squirming, figures out that she'd just fainted, and helps her up."

Haydon thought a minute. He looked both ways along the sidewalk, and then out to the dusty street. Traffic was occasional, but picking up. The morning light was already turning harsh.

Chapter 3

B
L
AS
MEDRANO
BANDA
rolled over on his side and looked out the open window at the late-morning sunlight. It was impossible to relax; the bed was really little more than a cot. The best thing he could do was to shift positions regularly on the limp sheets and let the blue plastic blades of the fan that sat in an empty chair push hot damp air over his body. Despite the drought, the humidity remained high, especially here near the bayou. Sticky was as close to dry as anyone ever could hope to be in this city.

He had learned long ago that patience was the great art in these affairs. How many hours had he spent letting his mind range along the continuum that was his memory, a boundless entertainment that could evoke an equally boundless spectrum of emotion? Now, it was patience that was required. To achieve true patience you had to play games with time, to select a discrete point in Plato's moving image of eternity and hold it in your mind, even against its will. Boyhood. Father Donato. And the subject of patience. The priest stood in front of the classroom of boys, at his wit's end.
Quo usque, Catilina, abutere patientia nostra?
"How long, Catiline, will you abuse our patience?" Cicero always had served Father Donato well, even in his frustrations. And in that school in Guadalajara there had been many frustrations.

A tug horn bellowed in the late-morning heat. It sounded foreign to him. From an oak tree beyond the dry weeds, the deep fluting of a mourning dove drifted through the window, sad and comforting, as if calling him home. He imagined that it had flown all the way from Jalisco, over the hundreds of miles of desert and brown mountains, just to sit nearby and call to him, beguiling his memory.

Why else had the priest come to mind just now? That had been so long ago, before Bias had lost his faith, not in God—he never thought of God anymore—but in men. What is it when an exile begins to think of home again? Not a real exile, but a man like himself, a kind of disobedient Jonah in search of Tarshish. Or, more accurately, hiding from God. Hiding from God. That was an oxymoronic proposition, Father Donato had said. And later, when Bias had turned his back on the hopes the priest had held for him, and embraced instead a politic and philosophy so radically different, the old man had something very much the same to say. But by that time he was approaching the end of a long and cruel illness. He was frail and dying, everything made him cry. It didn't matter.