Spiral

by David L Lindsey

  "How did you know I hadn't told them I was a detective?" he asked.

  "I relied on it," she said coldly. "This is a hell of a time to try to talk to me."

  "I'm sorry," he said. "But I felt it couldn't wait." She was smaller than he remembered, but no less pretty. The black linen looked even better on her than the pink silk. The pale gray pearls were perfect.

  "Why weren't you with the detectives who came by this morning? That's what I expected."

  Haydon was relieved. "It just didn't work out that way," he said. "I'm sorry about your brother."

  She looked at him as if she couldn't believe he had had the bad manners to say it. "Jesus!" She shook her head, looked toward the backyard, and then back at him. "What the hell do you want?"

  He was surprised to see tears in her eyes, and decided on the spot that he wouldn't try to finesse her. He didn't have the time or the patience right now, and besides, she was too savvy for it.

  "First," he said, "let's agree that we'll play straight with each other from the start, and get it over with. Okay?"

  She looked at him, waiting. Haydon would have to take his chances.

  "I'm going to assume you told them you didn't know what they were talking about when they asked you about the tecos." He paused, looking at her, trying to see something. "I'm also going to assume you are far more intelligent than you were pretending to be the other afternoon in Valverde's office, and that you will recognize an opportunity when you see it."

  Her expression didn't change.

  "I'm willing to stick my neck out," Haydon said. "But I want you to know ahead of time that if you take advantage of this, I will be in a position to respond and will not hesitate to do so. All I want is honest answers, and in exchange I'll agree to help you in any way I can, if you want it."

  She still wasn't saying anything, but the stubborn stance was gone, and she was listening. He could see she was trying to think ahead.

  "You've seen the papers about Valverde?" he asked.

  "Yes, I saw it." Her expression softened a little, but there was more on her mind than compassion, or even grief, for that matter.

  "I'm on temporary suspension. It's almost mandatory in an officer-involved shooting," he said, bending the truth. "But I'm continuing the investigation independently." He let her sort out the implications in that. "There are three reasons I think you should tell me what you know," he continued. "One, because I'm going to find out later anyway. Two, because helping me now will buy you leverage later, when you're going to need it. Three, because I believe you did not know your brother was going to be killed along with the rest of them and you are now beginning to have second thoughts about your involvement."

  "You're a confident prick, aren't you?" she said.

  "I told you I didn't want to waste a lot of time, and I've got a long way to go. Those are my hunches. You tell me where I'm wrong."

  "One question. If you're on 'temporary suspension' working 'independently' on this thing, explain to me why your word will be good back in the real world. If you're not legitimate, neither are your promises."

  "I didn't say I wasn't legitimate," Haydon answered. "I've been given off-the-record liberties. You can't expect me to explain the details."

  "Why not? That's what you want from me, isn't it?"

  "You're failing to recognize a small distinction between us. I wasn't involved in an assassination. I'm not going to need any help trying to avoid spending the rest of my life in a federal prison because I've been involved in a political assassination."

  She looked at him without expression, and then a slow, cynical smile changed her face.

  "Christ, if you only knew," she said. She gave a humorless little laugh and looked away.

  Haydon studied her as she started fighting back tears again. He tried to remember the face of the girl who had brazenly smiled at him behind the back of her lecherous boss as she walked out of the room leaving behind her pink panty hose. She had known quite well her tryst with Valverde was apparent to him, but she had shown absolutely no embarrassment. Either she had been truly unaffected by being caught, or she had covered admirably, playing the part to the hilt. In either case she was going to be interesting to deal with.

  Haydon glanced toward the gate and saw the two vatos sipping beer and looking at them. She saw them too, and turned back to him.

  "You'd better go," she said, wiping the corners of her eyes. "Come on. I'll walk you to your car."

  As he turned, she played the part again, putting her left arm casually around his back at his waist. He felt her hand pause a fraction of a second on the Beretta in the small of his back, and they both stiffened. In an instant Haydon's mind flashed back to the two vatos, and just as quickly her hand was off the gun, but stayed on his back as they approached the Vanden Plas.

  He unlocked the car and opened the door, letting out the pent-up hot air as he reached into his pocket and took out another card. Using Celia as a blind from her two cousins, he wrote his telephone number on the back of the card and handed it to her.

  "This is my home number," he said. "If you want to talk."

  She slipped the card between the buttons in the linen dress. She didn't say anything.

  Haydon looked at her. "I'm not going to be sitting still," he said. "The offer's not open-ended."

  Celia Moreno said nothing, but backed away from the car. Haydon got inside and slammed the door. He started the motor and pulled away from the rows of cars. He didn't look back at her in the rearview mirror, and wondered later if she had stood in the street watching him leave, or if she had immediately turned and walked back to the mourning family behind the honeysuckle fence.

  Chapter 29

  DRIVING home, Haydon thought about the John Doe and the tethered ant. The investigation had gone so far so quickly that he was no longer important. And it was not likely that he would become important again. When it was all over he probably would be buried as John Doe and the enigma of the ant would be buried with him. Haydon wondered what would have happened if another team of detectives had caught the case. What if he and Mooney had not been first out? He would never have seen the motorcycle tracks in the dust, would never have forgotten them and then remembered them, would never have gone back with Mooney to double-check, would never have had to sit on the dark sidewalk with Mooney's head in his lap, watching the black rivulet of Mooney going over the curb and into the dusty gutter. Jesus Christ. It was such an incredible thing that it kept forcing its way back into his thoughts. The finality of it; Mooney's complete and irrevocable absence.

  He drove through the gates onto the brick drive, and into a spray of water that covered the windshield, melting the world beyond the glass. He turned on the wipers and let them pump a couple of times as he drove out of the reach of the sprinklers and pulled up to the front of the house. As he got out of the car he looked back at the curve of the drive and saw steam rising from the dampened bricks. The sprinklers on either side of the gates had obscured the wrought-iron grilles in a heavy mist that billowed and fell in the still heat.

  Haydon consciously relaxed as he walked through the entrance hall and into the library. He tossed the copies he had gotten from Cordero's office onto the refectory table and took off his coat. Through the French doors he caught sight of Pablo down on the bright emerald swatch of lawn, crossing toward the lime trees with a pair of clippers.

  At that moment Nina stepped out of a thin slice of shade on the west side of the terrace and into the sunlight. She was holding a garden hose, watering the terra-cotta urns of bougainvilleas that lined the limestone balustrade. She wore a shirtwaist dress of white summer linen and was barefoot. As she moved from one urn to the other, she ran the water on the slate floor to cool it off, then stepped into the dark puddle, wriggling her toes and frowning in the unrefracted light as she put the hose into the urn and watched the water bubble in the soil around the bougainvillea. She was intent, and Haydon knew what she was thinking about. Nina did not have a wandering mind.
When she watered the bougainvilleas, she thought about watering the bougainvilleas.

  He moved around his desk to the French doors, stood there a moment watching her, then tapped on one of the small panes. She turned at her waist, the hose still in the neck of an urn, and shaded her eyes with her free hand. She saw him, smiled, and indicated she had two more urns.

  He nodded and waved, and she turned back to the flowers as he continued watching her, the white dress, the sunlight, the remembered smile. He didn't want to take his eyes off her, and thought how remarkably she contrasted with the depressing events that had preoccupied him during the last two days. She represented all that was positive in life, unencumbered by the solemnity of death, free of fear and the dread of fear. She was his counterpoise, sustainer of his often dubious equilibrium. They had been so long together that he had come to accept her presence and the rhythm of their life together almost as he accepted the rhythm of his own breathing. Almost. Looking at her, he thought what a rare thing she was, and he hoped he would never be guilty of taking her for granted. He turned away from the windows.

  Sitting down at the refectory table, he picked up the stack of pages copied from Cordero's address book. Some pages had only one entry, and a few of the others were blank. The entries were as varied as anyone's address book, though there were a lot of entries with Mexican addresses and telephone numbers. Haydon flipped through the pages one at a time, reading all the names, putting check marks by those that he wanted to come back to, sometimes for no specific reason.

  On the bottom of the last page, and written at an angle across the lines of the address book, were four rows of a series of letters. Two of the series were darker than the other two, indicating that perhaps they had been erased and written over, the pencil markings showing darker on the abraded surface.

  Codes, in Haydon's experience, were usually simple from the perspective of the designer, though he knew this was not so in those instances where cryptography was an integral part of the profession, as in the military or in intelligence work. But in the cases he came across, where an ordinary citizen was simply trying to make an un-obvious record for future reference, and did not want the record to be immediately understood by a casual observer, the codes were not complex. And in many cases, they were based on some system involving the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, and/or the numerals 0 through 9.

  Haydon began by making a few assumptions: that Cordero had written the four lines; that the four lines were a list; and that the list was composed of names, or telephone numbers, or a combination of both. If the letters represented telephone numbers, and there were only four, it said something about Cordero that he simply didn't memorize them and avoid this kind of evidence.

  Taking a legal pad off his desk, Haydon began jotting notes about the combination of letters in front of him.

  If each letter represented a single-digit number, only the second and fourth series had the proper amount of numerals—ten—to represent an area code and telephone number. The first and the third series had eleven.

  All the letters in each of the four series were from the first ten letters in the alphabet, except for the initial letters in the first, third, and fourth series, which were V, W, and L respectively.

  Where doubled letters occurred, they were vowels, except in the second series, where the initial letter F was doubled.

  When coded to the alphabet so that A represented 1, B represented 2, and so on, none of the combinations of numbers that resulted were legitimate area codes or prefixes in the Houston area. If the coding was reversed so that A represented 26, B represented 25, and so on, the results were equally unsuccessful.

  He was studying the list, searching for patterns and dissimilarities, when he heard the terrace door to the hallway open and close. Turning in his chair, he waited for Nina to come around the corner.

  "Any luck?" she asked, appearing in the doorway with the backs of her wrists resting on her hips. Her hair was a little wild, wiry with humidity, and trying to break out of the clasp at the back of her neck. The heat on the terrace had enriched her complexion, brought a brighter color to her cheeks. She blew at the hair curling around her forehead and wiped at it with the back of her hand. "Let me rinse my hands," she said. "And we'll talk." Then she was gone from the doorway.

  When she returned, she brought a tall glass of iced water with mint leaves crushed in the ice.

  "You want some of this?" she asked, pausing at the door.

  "No, thanks," Haydon said.

  She came in and sat down, and put the glass on a cork coaster she had brought with her.

  He showed her the copies of the bank statements he had copied in Cordero's office, along with the pages from the address book. Then he explained what he was trying to do with the series of letters.

  Nina shook her head, looking at the pile of papers, and his legal pad covered with his trial-and-error efforts to unscramble the code.

  "I don't know how you manage to straighten out evidence like this," she said. "None of it seems to go together."

  "Sometimes you don't straighten it out," he said, loosening his tie. "And about half the time most of it doesn't go together. That's what makes it so frustrating, spending a lot of time trying to make sense out of things that aren't supposed to make sense. But you never know that when you begin."

  Haydon leaned back in his chair, looking at the groups of papers, at his own scribblings about the series of letters, which might not even be what he thought they were. Suddenly he felt Nina's eyes on him. He turned to her.

  "Bob called just before you got here," she said. "They're having the memorial service tomorrow morning. Ten o'clock. Church of the Good Shepherd."

  Haydon turned away from her to look outside. "Memorial service," he said.

  "He's not going to be buried here. Bob said his brother is taking the body back to Arlington. There's a family plot up there."

  Who the hell thought he ought to go to Arlington? Nobody had checked with him about it. They hadn't checked with him. It was presumptuous to think that Mooney would want to go to Arlington. What the hell made them think Mooney wanted that? Mooney would have told them that he didn't, if he could have. It was the farthest thing from Haydon's mind that they would have taken him to Virginia. Christ, Mooney hadn't been to Virginia in fifteen years as far as Haydon knew.

  It happened in less than a few seconds. Fleetingly. He pulled back so fast he saw how stupid he was, could see himself being stupid. It was not for him to consider where Mooney would finally come to a stop. It certainly wasn't up to Ed Mooney anymore. Like everyone else surprised by death, he had lost that privilege the instant it happened. But more than that, when Haydon thought about it he was sure that Mooney really wouldn't have cared anyway. You could have asked him about it every day for a year and he would have continued to say he didn't care. After he was dead, he would have said, it wouldn't matter to him if they burned him up, or pickled him, or froze him, or dropped him into the Gulf of Mexico, or tossed him over into the Grand Canyon. What the hell would he care? And he probably wouldn't.

  Haydon wondered where the body was now. In the morgue, or a funeral home, or on the way to Arlington, Virginia. He didn't ask, because it seemed he shouldn't want to know. But he did.

  "Ten o'clock?" he asked. He hadn't forgotten, but he had been quiet too long.

  "Yes." Nina paused a second, then said, "And Bob also wanted to know if you wanted to say something, at the service."

  Yes, by God, he did. He wanted to say a lot of things, a book full of words, a dozen books of words, a hundred books. He wanted to say... a lot of things.

  "No," he said.

  Chapter 30

  HAYDON worked on the code another two and a half hours, guessing, making more trial runs, backing up and repeating approaches with only a minor twist in the technique, running it all in reverse, guessing again, using a small calculator he kept in his desk to double-check his formulas.

  One of the major difficulties in dec
iphering codes was not discovering the patterns of the characters, but discovering what was not a part of a pattern, identifying characters thrown in arbitrarily with no meaning other than the intent to create the illusion of a pattern where none existed. It was this arbitrary character that Haydon began to look for first. He had a hunch that the best candidates were the double letters that occurred at various places within each series. With the calculator, he began computing the letter-to-number equivalents for each series, making the doubled letters represent, in turn, their own valuations independent of the others in the series.

  He filled several pages with combinations of numbers in his peculiar handwriting, a stylized, spare scratch that Nina claimed, with some justification, resembled Assyrian cuneiform more than Arabic numerals. Nothing worked. Next he decided to treat the only occurrence of a pair of consonants—the two F's in the primary position in the second series—as being the only arbitrary descriptors, while the doubled vowels were treated as representing a single-digit numeral, since they fell within the first nine letters of the alphabet. After nearly an hour, he had still made no headway. None of the systems he derived from manipulating the second series produced any success when applied to the other three. He retraced his steps and reexamined his initial assumptions.

  Gradually he realized that the first letter in each of the four series of letters had nothing to do with the combinations of numerical equivalents that followed. It was indeed a letter, not a letter representing a number. In fact, it represented itself. All other letters did represent numbers. But the key to the cryptogram was the doubling of vowels. The second vowel was the true arbitrary descriptor. When EE appeared in the series it did not represent 55, but simply 5. The second letter in each pair was the red herring.

  Working quickly now, Haydon deciphered each series using this method, and discovered that he had four local telephone numbers, each preceded by a single letter: V, F, W, and L. He guessed the letters represented names, and he guessed the first was Valverde. Using a crisscross directory, one of numerous kinds of directories he kept in the library, he checked each of the four numbers. He was not surprised to find they were unlisted.