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.
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 wo
rk, 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.
Spiral Page 2