Castro Directive

by Mertz, Stephen

  "Not if she was close to the cop. Besides, she is an extremist. I've had one of my lawyers make inquiries about her. He's come up with some interesting bits of information. Some of her colleagues say that in the last few years, she's gone off the deep end."

  The deep end . . . Hell, that could mean virtually anything. "Did these colleagues give any specifics about what they meant?"

  "Simply that she's lost her scientific perspective in favor of some way-out ideas. She's done things like using a dowser on digs to try to locate buried artifacts."

  "You mean a dowsing rod?"

  "That's right."

  "I thought that was for finding water."

  The phone line crackled with Andrews's chuckle. "You'll have to ask her about that. Mahoney, her father, is the same way, but worse. From what I understand, getting involved in the practices of a culture you're studying is not necessarily an unacceptable method of study, but he apparently lost his perspective. Probably drank some concoction the shamans made and never fully recovered."

  "I see."

  "That's not all. Have you had a chance to look into her financial status?"

  "A bit. Not much."

  "Did you know she withdrew twenty-five thousand dollars from a money market account last week?"

  "Looks to me like the cop's fee for services."

  Maybe Andrews was right. It was hard to imagine Elise spending twenty-five thousand dollars on a shopping spree.

  When Pierce didn't say anything, Andrews went on. "So where do we stand? Does she still trust you?"

  "I'm not sure she's ever trusted me, but she's still interested in working with me."

  "Good. Have you seen Redington?"

  "Yesterday, but just briefly."

  "He's basically a good fellow," Andrews said, "but he's somehow gotten all caught up in Simms's web. I wouldn't doubt that he actually believes she had nothing to do with Loften's death. That's why I was a little worried by what Carver said. The woman must have a talent for gaining sympathy."

  "She hasn't fooled me." He sounded more confident than he felt.

  "Well, enough said. I trust your judgment. I know that for you to make any inroads you have to act like you're working with her. Go ahead. Tell her you're on her side."

  "But what's the point?"

  Pierce listened to the slight buzzing on the line. "I thought I made that clear." A sternness had entered Andrews's voice, as though he were a teacher addressing a troublesome student. "The point is finding the skulls. Getting back the stolen one, and finding out what she knows about the other one."

  "Okay. I'll see what happens and let you know."

  Pierce hung up. For the first time in weeks, he felt like taking a walk on the beach. He needed to sort things out. He kept a swimming suit, T-shirt, and sneakers in a locker in the corner of his office for just such occasions.

  He stood up and took two steps toward the locker, when the phone rang again. The recorder was still on, and he waited.

  "Nicky, pick up the phone. . . . Pick up the phone. I know you are there. Your line was just busy."

  "Fuck you," Pierce barked, without making an effort to answer the phone.

  "Nicky, talk to me. . . . Please.. . . Suit yourself. I will call Gibby and see if he can tell me why you will not answer your phone."

  "For Christ's sake." He snapped the receiver out of its cradle and turned off the recorder. "What the fuck do you want?"

  "That is no way to talk to me. I do not deserve that. Not after the way you acted in the restaurant."

  "The way I acted? You're the one who stormed out."

  Softer now: "Nicky. I do not want to fight with you."

  "Tina. We're history, and I'm tired of history repeating itself."

  "Oh, that is so cute. You are so clever, and so damn stubborn."

  "Is that all you wanted to say?"

  "Look, I am sorry if I embarrassed you at the restaurant. I still have the envelope with the articles and copies from the books."

  "Send it to me. I knew your library's not a mail house, but you could've given it to me at the restaurant."

  "No, I want you to come and get it."

  "I'm busy." He started to hang up.

  "Either you come over here, or I will call Raymond Andrews and have a talk with him about you."

  "Leave him out of this, Tina," he said, gritting his teeth.

  "I am sure he will be interested in knowing that I have information for his case and you do not have time to pick it up because you have another girlfriend."

  Oh my God. He took a deep breath, exhaled, then spoke slowly and calmly. "I'll be there in half an hour."

  He slammed down the phone. "Bitch." His anger and frustration propelled him out his chair, out of the office.

  He knew she would follow through on her threat if he ignored her, and he didn't need that complication. He would pick up the envelope and tell her . . . . He didn't know what he would tell her, but he would figure out something that would shut her up, something that would get his message through to her.

  As he drove across the causeway to downtown, his anger became a crescive ache at the back of his eyes. He kept hearing Tina's voice on the recorder. "Pick up the phone Nicky. I know you are there." Her precise, accented English, which he'd once thought cute, now was a burr rubbing his skin.

  As he veered around a slow-moving car, his Smith & Wesson rattled in the glove compartment. He glanced into his rearview mirror and noticed a dark blue Mercedes with tinted windows shift lanes. Was it the same one he'd seen at the Coral Castle? And the same one he'd seen parked in front of his apartment the day of the break-in? He remembered a car honking; now it came together. The driver of the Mercedes had been trying to signal Scarjaw that one Nicholas Pierce was coming home.

  He pressed on the accelerator and glanced in the mirror to test his notion. But the Mercedes made no effort to catch up. Maybe it was all his imagination. Hell, Miami was full of blue Mercedes with tinted windows. As he came off the causeway and headed down Biscayne Boulevard, he decided to see if the Mercedes would pass him so he could get its license number. But he lost it in traffic. After a mile or so of stop-and-go driving, he turned into the library parking lot and the .38 rattled again as he moved across the bumpy pavement. He considered waiting to see if the Mercedes showed up, but his thoughts turned to Tina, and his anger crested again.

  He literally raced up the five flights to her floor. He was breathing hard as he threaded his way between carrels and shelves. He passed tables, a row of microfiche machines, a copier, and finally reached Tina's office. She was talking with two other librarians. He pounded once against the office window. It shuddered under his fist. All three looked up, startled by his sudden appearance and his grim demeanor.

  "Okay, here I am. Where the hell is it?"

  "Nicky. Calm down."

  "Stop fucking with me."

  Tina's eyes flicked nervously toward the other librarians, who were backing away and moving toward the door. "Get out of here before I call security!" she shrieked, reaching for the phone.

  Pierce saw the manila envelope on the corner of her desk and snatched it. "You're not calling security. You're not calling anyone."

  He yanked the phone from her hand, jerked the cord out of the wall. "No more calls. Got that?"

  By the time he reached his car, he imagined that the librarians had sent a team of security guards after him and they were now sealing off the exits. He was about to be arrested for destroying public property, for threatening a library employee, maybe even for assault.

  Yeah, he was acting like an asshole. A premeditated one at that. The other librarians in the room were a bonus. My crazy ex, Tina would say. You need to stay away from him, her colleagues would chime in.

  He reached his car and quickly pulled away. He was in such a hurry to escape that he didn't notice that his car door was unlocked, or that his Smith & Wesson no longer rattled in the glove compartment.

  Chapter 21

  No one sa
w Pierce for the rest of the day and half of the next. He spent most of the time alternately cleaning up his trashed apartment and reading a novel he'd started. The novel gave him a chance to forget about Tina and Elise and Andrews and the crystal skull. After reacting as he had to Tina's threat to call Andrews, he needed a reprieve,—time out—space from Tina, space from all of them.

  Now and then he went over to his desk, where he'd left the stuff he'd grabbed from Tina, and ran his fingers over the manila envelope, debating with himself. If he didn't open it, his life might improve. If he opened it, the damned thing might prove to be a Pandora's box of unimaginable complications. Repeatedly, he turned from the desk without opening the envelope. But his resolve not to open it grew progressively weaker.

  Late in the morning, when he'd finished the book, he picked up the envelope. It occurred to him that Tina had used a carrot-and-stick approach to get his attention. The envelope had been the carrot; the threat to call Andrews the stick. But none of that mattered now; it was over, done.

  In the envelope he found copies of the pages from the two books Tina had brought to the restaurant and two articles by Redington. The names of both were a mouthful. One was A Jungian Interpretation of the Mayan Myth of the Twin Crystal Skulls as Related to the Fountain of Youth Myth. The other was called The Study of Anomalous Behavior Related to Obsessions with Mythology.

  He read the title of the second article again, and didn't put the article down until he was finished. Redington claimed that in rare cases a myth could actually possess an individual and lead to bizarre and possibly dangerous behavior. He saw the implications, the parallels to the skull case, and suddenly wanted to talk to Redington face-to-face.

  He stuffed the article back in the envelope, slipped it under his arm, and was about to leave when the phone rang. He hoped it was his credit bureau contact, whom he'd belatedly asked to run a check on Elise Simms. He'd specifically asked her to find out about any large withdrawals.

  "Hello, Nick. It's Elise."

  "Hi," he said coolly.

  "I haven't heard from you in a couple of days, and I was wondering what was going on."

  He thought for a moment about how he should respond. He knew Andrews wanted him to play along with her, but he just couldn't do it. He told her he knew about the large withdrawal she'd made from her money market account and asked what it was about.

  There was a pause, and he wondered if she was making up a story. "Nick, have you seen any documentation of this money market withdrawal?"

  "No. It was from an informant."

  "An informant. Who? Your friend Fuego? He's working for you, isn't he?"

  "Why do you say that?"

  "I just got that feeling when I saw you two guys talking at jai alai. I'm right, aren't I? You don't trust me. You never have."

  "Just doing my job."

  "Well, Fuego must have the wrong account. I haven't taken anything out of my money market for months."

  "That's not what I hear."

  "Nick, even if I did take out twenty-five grand from an account, that wouldn't mean a damn thing."

  The line fairly crackled with tension. "I guess not." Christ, it is her, he thought as he hung up and leaned against the kitchen wall. He hadn't said anything about twenty-five grand; she'd blurted the figure.

  The phone rang again as he left the apartment, and he hadn't turned on the recorder. Probably Janet at the credit bureau. Hell, he'd talk to her later.

  As he drove to Florida International University, he thought more about Redington's article on obsessions with myths. If his guess was right, Elise was seeing Redington as a patient. She was obsessed by the myth of the crystal skulls—no, possessed by it—and Redington, like a priest who protected the confession of a murderer, was inadvertently involved. Redington could deny it, but Pierce was taking the article with him and was ready to put him on the spot.

  Possessed by a myth.

  Hell, it wouldn't even be the first time he'd dealt with a case involving possession. He'd once been hired by a man who claimed his wife's bizarre behavior was related to possession by a mythological god. Sarah was an heiress, a WASP aristocrat with an opulent life-style, but from time to time and under the most embarrassing circumstances, she would slip into a trancelike state and proclaim herself a goddess called Oshun.

  When Pierce was hired, Sarah was under treatment at a mental health center, but the doctors were baffled. Most of the time she appeared perfectly normal, and the battery of tests she'd been given revealed no psychotic delusions.

  Pierce was surprised that neither the husband nor the doctors had taken the hint in the god's name. He made a couple of inquiries, and it was as he suspected. Oshun was an orisha, a god of Santerla. So he'd gone to Tina's Tia Juana, the only practitioner he knew personally, for elucidation.

  She was a plump, spry woman in her mid-fifties who lived alone in a small cement-block house in Little Havana. She always wore the same perfume (at the request of the spirits, she said, so they could find her through the scent), and ten or twelve beaded necklaces of various colors, and when she worked, she was usually dressed in white—the color for her trabajos or spells.

  She'd listened to the details of Pierce's case and suggested he bring the woman to her. He'd returned the next day accompanied by Sarah, her doctor, and her husband. They'd followed Juana into a small room devoid of furnishings except for an altar. It was covered with candles and statues of saints, some black, others white, and with figurines of black peasants and American Indians in feathered bonnets.

  At first Sarah was reserved as Juana performed a cleansing. She sprinkled Florida water on her and rubbed a bouquet of white flowers up and down her body. Finally she lit a cigar and blew clouds of smoke over her. An odd idea of cleansing, Pierce thought. But by then Sarah seemed captivated by Juana, who started reciting a spiritist mass. Within a couple of minutes, Sarah began drooling, then convulsing. The doctor moved toward her, but Juana's assistant, a black woman, motioned him back again. At that point, amid the confusion, Sarah stepped to the center of the room and Oshun began speaking in a deep, strong voice.

  She addressed each person in the room, saying something personal. She'd stepped close to Pierce, looked in his eyes, then whispered: "You travel in the astral planes." Then she spoke to the group as a whole and said that she meant no harm to her "horse," as she called Sarah, and that in making the unwanted appearances, she was giving her a message. Sarah needed to stop living, two lives and join her separate identities together.

  When it was over, Sarah confessed that she was keeping an apartment in Little Havana and had become fascinated with Santerla. At first, she had wanted only to obtain readings about her future. But gradually she became fascinated with the gods themselves and had started going into trance.

  Once she had opened up to her husband, Pierce's involvement was over. He later heard that her consuming interest with Santerla had faded, and as far as he knew, the goddess Oshun never mounted that particular horse again.

  Pierce parked his car, crossed the campus, and climbed the back stairs to the psychology department. The secretary had told him that she was expecting Redington to be in all afternoon, so he hadn't made an appointment. Pierce preferred it that way. Lost in his thoughts, he nearly bumped into a man descending the stairs. He looked up in surprise and veered to the side. But the man's briefcase still caught him on the hip. Both men excused themselves at the same time and moved on.

  As Pierce entered the department offices, the quiet seemed overwhelming. Classes were over for the quarter, and the place looked vacant. But when he reached Reding-ton's office, he saw the professor seated at his desk behind a stack of papers. He was frowning and shaking his head as he wrote a note on a typed page and didn't notice Pierce in the doorway for several seconds.

  "Afternoon."

  Redington scrutinized him over his half-moon glasses. "You again. What is it now?"

  "Sorry to bother you."

  "Don't stand there saying you're
sorry. Come in and close the door. Look at this," he said, pointing to the stack in front of him. "Term papers. All afternoon I've had a low-grade headache—and have been giving consistently low grades. They can't complete a thought; they can't write a comprehensive paragraph." He shrugged and sighed. "Of course, there are exceptions, and those are the ones who have always kept me going."

  Pierce eased himself down into the chair opposite Redington and nodded sympathetically.

  "You came up those back stairs again?" Redington asked, then muttered that he was fortunate his students hadn't discovered that direct route to his office. "They'd probably sneak in here and change their grades." He made a halfhearted attempt to straighten the stack of papers on his desk. "So what is it today?"

  "I read your journal article on myths and obsessions. Do you really think it's possible to be possessed by a myth?"

  "For Christ's sake. I wrote that in 1965. But it's just as true today, I suppose."

  "So you can be possessed by a story?"

  Redington removed his glasses and let them hang over his chest from their elastic band. "First of all, myths are more than mere stories; they're archetypal experiences. They are part of all of us, of our collective unconscious. Do you understand?"

  He nodded. "I wrote a paper back in college on Jung's ideas about mandalas."

  Redington smiled, tapped the stack of papers in front of him. "Good. I certainly hope it was better than what I've been reading here. Now as to possession, let me make it clear that myths are not independent entities that creep up on you in your sleep. However, in certain circumstances mythological images can cause numinous experiences, which can result in changes in a person's psychological makeup."

  "It sounds dangerous." Pierce smiled, only half joking.

  "Only if the archetypal image assaults the conscious mind to the point that the individual is unable to integrate it. Then the consequences can be destructive."