Spiral (4 page)

Even the drought in this city was a source of nostalgia. They had been here four days, and every night he went outside to walk in the grounds, thinking and smoking cigarettes. When he moved against the weeds, the thistle pods clacked their shriveled seeds like the gourd rattles the Huicholes filled with cockleburs, locked in the purgatory of dry weather. At times he could smell the dust too, hanging in the night air like a moistureless fog churned up by the cars that passed on the poorly paved street beyond the wall. In all his years of traveling, he had come to realize that dust smelled the same the world over. And yet, always, in every place, it reminded him of home.

At this moment, though, he looked out the window to the white light of a clear day. He wore only a pair of khaki pants, which he had rolled almost to his knees. The old house had thick walls and deep window ledges, and on this one sat a jug of water, from which he occasionally wet his hands, and ran his fingers through his black hair until it was damp and pressed back from his forehead. He lay on his side and waited.

Ireno was overdue. He registered that fact. He would like to be able to say he wasn't worried about it. If he were Indian, like Ireno and Rubio, he would have the proper psychology for this, the blank-faced patience for which they were famous, and which the
mestizos
and
criollos
attributed to simple-minded passivity. But Bias knew different now. He had worked with Ireno long enough to know the almost Zenlike patience for what it was. Ireno could watch the lanky body of Death walking toward him across a mile of flat, shadeless desert and wait for Him with a serene and steady pulse. It was in the mind, or rather, far back in the place where the mind is not mind, but soul.

Bias listened. Old houses creaked in the hot weather. Only a few minutes earlier Rubio had passed his doorway and told him something was going on outside. He thought of the two of them,

Rubio and Teodoro, peering from the edges of the shades, straining to see, but not be seen. He could feel the intensity of their combined anxieties, like a tangible energy in the silence. Like the heat in the house. He lay on his side and waited, his back to the empty room, to the door that led to the rest of the empty house, to the incident on the street. It was a test he gave himself, to see if he could remain detached. He wondered if someone would come into the room and shoot him in the back of the head.

He heard the boards creaking under the footsteps in the corridor, and someone stopped in the doorway behind him.

"Bias!" Rubio's voice was a harsh whisper. "
Es la policia.
They are doing something at the gates."

There was a flutter in his chest, and then his heart caught its stride just as he turned over and sat on the edge of the cot.

"What do you mean, 'doing something'?" The old floor was rough under his bare feet.

"Something. I don't know."

Rubio's speech was marked by an occasional muted whistle from a notch in his lower lip where two white teeth—an incisor and a canine—were permanently exposed in the groove of dark flesh. An old knife wound from his youth, his first taste of violence, Bias thought. A bitter pun, for Rubio had indeed consumed more than his share of it since then.

"There are people. Police cars." Rubio was not easily alarmed. He had had far more experience than any of them. He was good on the streets, knew his way around in the barrios of San Antonio as well as Houston. Bias looked into his Indian eyes, and saw the coyote.

"Are they coming in?" He stood and reached back for the Heckler pistol that had been on the window ledge beside the water

jug-

He followed Rubio down the hallway and into another room, bare except for its two cots and two chairs draped with wadded clothes. There were a few wooden packing cases on top of which automatic weapons lay in various stages of disassembly. There were two windows on the street side of the room, and as Bias moved toward one of them a young man stood back to give him his place.

It was Teodoro Anica's first trip, and he was eager to do well. He never relaxed. Despite the heat, he never undressed to his underclothes like the others; he was not going to be caught off guard. As Bias squatted down to the windowsill and carefully lifted the shade, he could feel Teodoro watching him. He knew the young man was trying to read something in his face. The adoration angered him. He had no patience with Anica's zealous eagerness to do the job.

The Indians kept their thoughts to themselves. God knew why they were doing it. They were outcasts as far as the Brigade was concerned, but the Brigade used them because they were the best at what they did. Prejudice had its practical limits. Bias himself tried not to think about it at all. It had to be done and he was doing it, so to hell with it. Teodoro, however, wore his Brigade pride on his forehead. Bias and Teodoro shared a cultural history: a
criollo
heritage, family wealth, staunch conservatism, fierce Catholicism, the Byzantine experience of the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, the fervent secrecy and brotherhood of the Brigade. But he felt no kinship. The boy's enthusiasm was repugnant to him.

"Binoculars!" Bias whispered, and reached back an open hand as he kept his eyes locked to the slit held open with the thumb of his other hand.

Teodoro grabbed the Zeiss glasses from a small bag by his cot and handed them to him.

"Hold the shade," Bias said. Teodoro crouched beside him and held the slit at precisely the same level. Bias put the Heckler automatic between his knees on the floor and adjusted the binoculars.
"Poquito mas."

Teodoro raised the shade slightly, and Bias rested the front of the lenses on the paint-chipped sill. The weeds and matted vines were so thick he could see only glimpses of the street through the loops of brown vegetation. He saw the police cars and made out the crowd along the sidewalk. They were looking at something, and the way they were gathered it appeared that the gates were indeed the center of everyone's attention. Suddenly a man stood from behind a blur of weeds, and continued looking down at his feet, his big stomach forcing apart the loose sides of his sport coat as he wiped at the sweat on his face. Then a second man stood. He was taller, trim, well dressed. He wore a tie, a light summer suit; he stood straight and his hair was neatly combed.

Two other vehicles arrived, both vans, and Bias recognized the morgue wagon. The sweat under his arms turned cold.

"Damn!" He jerked away from the window. "Stay here. I've got to get a better look."

He didn't want to think. He concentrated on what his legs and feet were doing, down the stairs, turning, down again and into the entrance hall. At the bottom he doubled back, and burst out the door at the rear of the house that opened onto the long porch. Crouching, he followed the porch to the end of the house, paused, then stepped silently off and scrambled to the thickest undergrowth in the direction of the front gates. The cypress trees cut out the sunlight as he inched along on the spongy mat of desiccated leaves and twigs.

The scratchy transmissions of the police radios were audible now, but he still couldn't see anything. He crawled a few yards on his stomach and elbows until he came in line with the drive that led from the gates. The granular debris of dead cypress leaves stuck to his sweaty forearms and stomach and bit into his elbows as he raised the binoculars. He was fifty or sixty yards from the gates. At this distance the binoculars brought everything right up to his nose.

He twisted the focus adjustment, overcompensated, twisted it back, ignoring everything but the area at the bottom of the gates. The body came into focus, lying in the caliche. He recognized the suit first, and then Ireno's profile. Goddam, goddam. He stared hard, his eyes trying to crawl right through the lenses as he touched the eyepiece for even sharper magnification. Holding his breath, he saw the nail. He knew what was tied to it.
El hijo de la chingada!
Lucas Negrete had left a message, and in doing so had brought the police right to the gates. It was an arrogant maneuver. And clever. The game had begun in earnest.

Chapter 4

HAYDON
and Mooney turned off of Old Spanish Trail Road, a wide commercial thoroughfare that stretched from South Main across to Interstate 45 and resembled anything but a trail, and drove along the median-divided drive. The new building was situated at the edge of dozens of acres of asphalt which served as additional parking for the Medical Center's South Extension. Signs at both ends of the lot, one at Bares wood and one in the grassy median at Old Spanish Trail, told you where you were. There were gates and chain-link fences surrounding the lots. The medical examiner's office sat just outside the gates.

The lobby of the new office smelled of fresh masonry and caulking and paint. Haydon wondered how long those odors of optimism and new beginning would last. He and Mooney showed their identification to the receptionist and walked through to one of the four autopsy rooms.

Dr. Harl Vanstraten was standing to one side of the room slipping into his surgical gown. Even from across the room his tall, thick-chested frame seemed in clearer focus than everything else. His thinning hair was cleanly parted, his face could not have had a closer shave, and his sharp Nordic features caused one not to be surprised by the Germanic inflections in his speech.

"A real whodunit, huh, Stuart?" Vanstraten was smiling as Haydon entered, his baritone echoing slightly in the starkly furnished room.

He turned aside to a glass cabinet and removed a new pair of surgical gloves from an open box. Adding talcum to the insides, he shook them gently before inserting each massive hand, beginning with the right.

"I went with Renata last night to see a play at the Alley Theater," he said, working with the gloves. "First time in weeks."

Haydon looked at his friend's broad back. "Did you enjoy it?"Vanstraten laughed and turned around. "I don't know. There was a minute, near the end of the first act, when it didn't hold my attention, and my mind wandered to something here—a woman who died for
no
apparent reason during a rape—and except between acts when I somehow managed to talk about the play with Renata, I don't remember a thing. Excuse me. I've got to change the tapes."

Haydon watched him round the corner to his office, and tried to imagine his predicament. Vanstraten was an unrepentant day-dreamer, which infuriated his wife because he also liked to work the social circuits, where he was a popular figure. He loved being around people, but often he didn't pay any attention to them. If he saw or heard something that triggered a change of direction in his thoughts, he was gone. Sometimes he recovered in time to save himself, and sometimes he didn't. It was an embarrassment for Renata, but rarely was anyone ever offended by this eccentricity. Vanstraten's mind traveled in oblique channels, and to destinations most people never knew existed.

Two aluminum autopsy tables stood side by side in the center of the almost phosphorescent light of the room. Over each table a chrome microphone hung from the ceiling alongside a single silver-bowl surgical lamp. Above that, frosted skylights let in the clean, bright daylight. The Mexican was the only cadaver in the room. Jimbo Finn stood beside him, awkwardly stooped as if he had a catch in his back. The Mexican's head was wrapped in a plastic bag which was taped around his neck. Finn wasn't going to let the ant get away from him.

When Vanstraten came back he was kneading his surgical gloves, tightening the membranous latex around the fingers. He got straight to business.

"You have pictures, Jimbo?"

Finn nodded. "Sure do."

"Well, Richard, shall we proceed?"

Richard Hull had been at the morgue nearly ten years, and was the only diener of the several employed there whom Vanstraten would allow to assist him. He was an easygoing black man, almost as big as the medical examiner himself, who handled the cadavers in a deferential manner, as if they were still in possession of their emotions of fear and embarrassment at their situation.

As Haydon, Mooney, and Finn watched, Vanstraten and Hull began removing the dead man's clothes, carefully undressing him as if they were his valets. The process was awkward, for the rigor mortis had become even more severe than it had been when they had gone through the pockets an hour or so earlier. Vanstraten went over each piece of clothing with meticulous attention, noting especially the stains in the suit pockets. As he finished with each article of clothing, he gave it to Hull, who put it in a plastic bag, sealed it, labeled it, and set it aside.

With the removal of the last sock, the Mexican lay naked on the grates in the aluminum table that kept him above the circulating water that would carry away the blood. It was at this point that Haydon first noticed the odor of disinfectant and heard the gurgling of the lavage troughs.

Vanstraten took a pair of scissors, cut the masking tape around the man's neck, and removed the plastic bag. The ant tied to the nail looked even queerer now than it had when the man had lain on the dirty sidewalk. The ant had sought refuge from the air conditioning in the corner of one eye, where it had curled up in a ball the size of a small pea.

Vanstraten hissed through his teeth. "Very good. I've never seen this before. Not a nail with an ant tied to it. No, never." He shook his head and pulled the ant up, dangling it on the string. "A big ant," he said, stooping down and looking at it eye to eye. "Tied with thread. Black polyester thread." A huge man concentrating his inquisitive energy on the riddle of a small red dot. He shook his head again, snipped the string, and let the ant drop into a clear plastic vial that Hull was holding, and quickly capped. The plastic vial was labeled and put on the top shelf of an aluminum cart Hull had rolled over near the table. It was the first specimen of many that would crowd the cart in various bottles, jars, pans, and jugs before Vanstraten finished.