Spiral

by David L Lindsey

  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.

  The thin, unsteady beams of the flashlights made the sprawl of the dead man quaver before Haydon's eyes, and when they played across the rails of bamboo, the bamboo jittered like the jerky images in a shadow play. Haydon felt as if he were slipping into hallucination. He could hear flies, but couldn't see them. Light-headed, he reached out and grasped a thick-jointed pole to steady himself. The night had sucked the air out of the bamboo brake and was trying to suck it out of him too.

  He felt Dystal's massive hand take his arm.

  "Come on, Pete." Dystal's voice was tense. "Let's get on with it, for Christ's sake."

  They turned and followed Lapierre through another narrow trail, Haydon's eyes trying to focus on the wandering beam that scanned the walls of towering bamboo and made it seem as if they were in an ever narrowing tunnel. They emerged suddenly into the open, into a larger theater where Haydon was aware of the canopy of ancient trees high up in the dark. To their left was the old house, and to their right a group of detectives and uniformed officers standing around a lighted shed.

  "It's an old carriage house," Lapierre said as they approached. "They used it as the garage where they worked on the motorcycles."

  They spoke to the men who were there. Two large sheets of plywood lay side by side on the dirt floor, covered with grease and oil stains. Cans of lightweight oil and gasoline were stored in a jumble along one wall with a red metal toolbox filled with a junky assemblage of tools.

  "There are parts from two different motorcycles on the workbench over there," Nunn said. Haydon hadn't even seen him until he spoke. "We've got someone on his way over here who's supposed to be able to sort this out for us, see if any of it matches the bike used in the shooting."

  Numbly Haydon followed Lapierre again, along a gravel pathway to the back of the old mansion, onto the back porch and into the kitchen. Though it was not furnished as it might have been in normal circumstances, it was easy to see that it had been used regularly. The large pantry that once had supplied the larder for an active household was empty, but a small cache of canned goods, looking stark and temporary, sat on one of the cabinets. A few pots and pans were stacked upside down on a drainboard next to the sinks. There was a plastic bottle of Joy dish soap, a can of Comet cleanser. The pilot lights were burning in an old gas range, which needed cleaning.

  They walked out of the kitchen and through a hallway into the front foyer of the house.

  "Most of the downstairs is empty," Lapierre said. "A few of the rooms have a couple of metal cots and mattresses in them, but they don't seem to have been used recently. It looks like this was a kind of safe house, people passing through from time to time and using it as temporary shelter. But it's fairly clean. It's been maintained."

  Haydon was only going through the motions, putting no analytical consideration into what he was seeing. He was aware that they passed a formal living room, a marble fireplace at one end. He saw crime-lab technicians dusting prints, gathering Coke and 7-Up cans. A scattering of kitchen chairs. A woman wearing surgical gloves was bent over a kitchen table strewn with playing cards, using tweezers to hold each card as she patiently dusted them.

  Again he followed Lapierre, to the foot of the stairs, the three of them avoiding putting their hands on the long banister. Haydon was aware of trying to appear alert, and he was aware of how he must be overcompensating, trying to seem in control, to appear normal. He was resolutely ignoring the huge damp stain of Mooney's blood that had soaked through his pants leg and was slowly growing stiff like a detached scab slapping against his leg as he climbed the stairs.

  As they reached the top, they spoke to several patrolmen stationed on the mezzanine, and could see the brilliant flash of strobe lights jumping out of one of the bedrooms.

  "There are five bedrooms up here," Lapierre explained methodically, indicating the doorways facing the opened balcony. "Two are empty, a third has two more unused cots. The fourth and fifth ones have been occupied. The bedroom by the front window over there seems to present the most immediate information."

  The police photographer was coming out of the bedroom as they approached. Inside, several detectives had begun going through the room's contents. In addition to two cots with sheets on them and soiled clothes tossed underneath, there were
several wooden crates turned upside down and used as tables. There were a number of empty ammunition boxes for Geco-BAT 9mm parabellum cartridges, a plastic soft-drink case filled with empty Dos Equis beer bottles, yellowing copies of several Spanish-language newspapers published in Houston. A copy of Penthouse lay on the windowsill that faced the street.

  "Not much here," one of the detectives said. "Just this stuff." He handed Lapierre a Guadalajara newspaper—"Published last week," he said—and a small paperback book. The paperback was a copy from one of dozens of serial novellas published in Mexico each week, popular soap operas printed in sepia ink in a comic-book format and relating tales of passion, betrayal, romance, and tragedy.

  "And these," the detective said, looking at Lapierre as he handed him three of four copies of a cheapily printed magazine called Replica. These, too, were printed on comic-book paper, their covers variously decorated with lurid illustrations of what the headlines said were threats to democracy: leering bespectacled Jews casting glances over their shoulders hunched in cabalistic conspiracy; effeminate homosexuals in mincing postures corrupting children with offerings of candy and pornography; a political cartoon caricature of a giant-sized guerrilla in camouflage clothing with long hair and a hammer and sickle on his beret swallowing one by one the countries of Central America as he reached a grasping claw toward Mexico; a conspiratorial black-robed Jesuit whose fanged teeth echoed the traitorous symbols of the sons of the church in the murals of Siqueiros.

  "Let me see," Haydon said. Lapierre gave a copy to Haydon and Dystal, and the three of them looked through the magazines.

  "What the hell is this?" Dystal said.

  Haydon fought to stay on his feet. With deep breaths, he sucked in the stale air of the old house, the dead, dusty air of the barrio.

  Chapter 16

  La COLOMBE D'OR was an anomaly in a city of contemporary glass hotels eager to attract large numbers of guests to their atriums, escalators, coffee shops, and theme restaurants. With only five suites, it was probably the smallest luxury hotel in the world. It occupied an old mansion on Montrose Boulevard that once had been the twenty-one-room residence of Walter J. Fondren, one of the founders of Exxon Oil. As a hotel, it was operated in the manner of an elegant and refined auberge intended to make its guests feel as though they were visiting in the home of a warm and wealthy friend. Each of the five suites was furnished in different antique period pieces and original artwork, and was daily supplied with fresh flowers, fruit, a box of chocolates, French toiletries, mineral water, and a complimentary decanter of brandy. A staff member was assigned to each suite, twenty-four hours a day, and the guests were indulged with quiet discretion. Each suite had a private telephone line. There was no switchboard.

  He arrived a little after ten in the evening without reservations, hoping he would be lucky. He was. While he registered, the concierge arranged for his three oxblood leather suitcases to be taken to the only remaining available rooms. He then selected his dinner from the evening's menu and asked that it be served in the dining room of his suite. Across the small lobby, diners visited quietly in the softly lighted dining room that presented its large windows to Montrose. The glittering pillars of downtown rose beyond the dark trees of the old neighborhood that was Houston's equivalent to Paris's bohemian Left Bank.

  Glancing first into the small bar and then into the library that served as a sitting room, he turned and walked up the dark walnut stairway to his rooms on the second floor.The valet had left all three bags sitting at the foot of his bed, as he had requested. The drapes had been pulled back from the windows that looked toward downtown and only two lamps had been left on. The suite was large and comfortable, and smelled vaguely of furniture oils and the French Provencal dinners that were being served downstairs. He stepped over to a small pedestal table and poured two fingers of brandy into a glass. He tasted it, felt it heat his throat all the way to his stomach. The aftertaste was excellent, but he was starving. It would go to his head. He took another sip, and looked around the room, walked into the sitting area, then into the dining room, and back into the bedroom, feeling the slight movement of the wooden floors, hearing their subdued groan beneath the Persian carpets.

  He stood in the middle of the room, holding the brandy and thinking. The knock on the door startled him. It was too soon for dinner. But it was dinner, and he watched the valet and maid move the flowers from the center of the table and set the china and silverware in place, and then the serving dishes with the carre d'agneau. Watching them, he was shocked at how long he must have stood there, so unaware of time, so comfortable in limbo. They finished and stepped back, waiting. He thanked them and asked them not to stay.

  He sat alone at the head of the table and ate in the dim light, which he preferred. The lamb was better than he had expected—in fact, it was superb—and he made a deliberate effort to eat slowly, to savor the sauteed vegetables and the mint jelly. He had chosen a heavy Guatemalan coffee from the list, and asked that they serve it strong. It had been perfectly brewed.

  Turning to his right, he glanced out the windows, saw lights of every kind beyond the panes, and staring back at him through the glinting sparks a pair of eyes with a freakish hollowness that stopped his breath. It was not the strangeness that startled him; it was the recognition. How had he come so far, gone so far? He was beyond himself, beyond the man he once thought he saw and understood through the lens of his youth. The man of these eyes was somewhere else. This man who held the piece of skewered lamb on the end of a silver fork, this man whose face he examined in the reflection, whose cheekbones ... whose cheek bones ...

  Once Father Donato had struck him. Donato had heard every kind of provocation from the young men he taught. All of them understood things they believed no one had ever understood before, certain they saw more clearly than the plodding priests who taught them. They offered heretical theories, they flirted with damnation, and yet Donato maintained his emotional equilibrium through it all. He did not denigrate their expositions, but sought always to guide their curiosity, to use the momentum of their own interrogations to lead them to more refined truths. Only on one occasion did Bias ever see him loose control. Just once, and Bias was all the more shocked because he had not known he was approaching perilous ground.

  It was after he had entered the Autonomous University and had long given up his early thoughts of entering the Jesuit order. Donato had forgiven him that, too, and though he said he had seen it coming, the disappointment was something he could not so easily hide. Bias had known for a long time that he had become more than just another student to the priest. He was a son. This they both understood.

  Inevitably his involvement in the university's politics became more important to him than everything else. He was a teco, the unblinking eye of justice, condemner of corruption, exposer of fraud, one of the select guardians of democracy. Enlightened by the conservative political philosophies predominant at the university, he became an ardent proponent of a new kind of revolution in which Jeffersonian ideals played a greater part than did the grand-sounding concepts that had risen out of the Revolution of 1910, and which were dragged out of the mothballs by Mexican politicians whenever there was an election and then promptly returned to the mothballs the day after they were sworn into office. Between elections, they ruled by corruption and deceit.

  He was in his fourth year at the university, and was trying to explain to Father Donato the importance of the teco philosophy. The priest, whose wavy black hair had grayed dramatically in the past year, listened to him with steady, dark eyes. There had been no amusement there, no pleasure in the young man's excitement at discovering a new truth, no enthusiasm for the grand convictions of this new philosophy. When Bias finally paused in his audacious dialectic of the pious right, Father Donato's hand came from nowhere and struck him across his jaw. Bias distinctly remembered the force of it, and the single motion of his own reflexive action as he came to his feet swinging a doubled fist he somehow stopped inches away fr
om the priest's unflinching glare.

  "You-do-not-create-by-destruction," Donato hissed. "Not with people." The tears in the Jesuit's eyes were instant, coming as if to spite the fire that was also there. "Did I teach you nothing? Bias! Did I delude us both?"

  Bias had stormed out of the room without saying a word, but the remembrance of Donato's eyes followed him. Those eyes, set deep in the hollow wells of his skull, reflected the same anguish as the eyes he now saw staring back at him from the night beyond the glass.

  He turned away from the windows and laid down his fork. He looked at the few pieces of lamb on his plate. Had that highly charged conversation been one of politics or theology? Both disciplines had to be lived as they were learned or they did not possess the value of conviction, and were meaningless. Father Donato had seen an abyss between them, yet Bias had not been aware of having crossed one. The distance separating them had been spanned unnoticed, and the priest's blow had spun him around and revealed it. Father Donato could not have been more surprised than Bias himself. His had been a radical departure, but somehow he had failed to recognize it until his confrontation with the priest.

  After that, Bias had spoken with his rejected mentor only one other time. It was two years later, and Bias had already begun the career that would eventually suck from him everything the priest had given. But he had heard the priest was quite ill, and in an awkward effort to rekindle a lost friendship, he went to visit. It was an unsatisfactory reunion. After a few false starts at conversation, Bias related a recent dream in an effort to amuse the older man. It had been a strange dream, a kind of fable of confusion, of loss, and of being lost. The frail priest began to cry. Perplexed and embarrassed, Bias turned around and walked out. They had not even really talked. Six weeks later, he heard that Father Carlos Donato had been found dead in his rooms.

  Lord God of the Armies, General in Chief of the Brigade, let me be first in holy combat, do not refuse me the vanguard. Give courage to my burning heart that I might obey without question.