Pyramid Deception

by Austin S. Camacho

  The platform vibrated as the giant steel machine approached. The vibration increased, the rhythmic pounding of the drive wheels becoming more and more insistent until the train pulled in. Then came the orgasmic squealing as the brakes locked the wheels in place, and the final explosive huff of steam indicating that the behemoth had collapsed, exhausted until the engineer stoked it up again in thirty minutes.

  Passengers disembarked and a handful moved to board. Hannibal screened them as they passed, ignoring women, children and men over a certain age. One figure caught his attention. The man wore a suit and carried a black overnight bag. He was tall and gaunt, with light brown or blonde hair. He walked into the station. After a few seconds, Hannibal stood and followed.

  The station was almost empty, so Hannibal stayed at the door until his quarry reached the opposite entrance. Even in the well-lit station the stranger could have been mistaken for Jason Moore from across the room. His tan suit was crumpled from being slept in on the train, but it was expensive enough to belong to a lawyer.

  It could have been Jason himself, if not for the half inch of red ink poking up out of his collar.

  When the stranger stepped into the night, Hannibal moved quickly across the station. The tall stranger had already crossed the parking lot and was moving down the street as quickly as he could without running. Of course, he was dragging a suitcase. Even walking at his normal aggressive pace Hannibal was slowly closing the gap. The clack of the stranger’s oxfords on the cement became an echo of Hannibal’s own.

  The stranger crossed the street and continued down the dark sidewalk, not looking left or right. Hannibal walked as if they just happened to be going the same way, enjoying the crisp night air filling his lungs more as the walk stretched into the second block. Once they left King Street there was no one on the street but the two of them. The half-moon shed little light, but presented a lovely sight hanging over the short buildings of the part of the city still called Old Town. These three or four story structures were mostly commercial-residential hybrids, storefronts with apartments above.

  Three blocks from the train station, the stranger put the suitcase down and pulled a key out of his pocket. Hannibal kept walking while the stranger unlocked the driver’s door of an older, dark sedan. Hannibal was within ten feet of him when he looked up.

  “So what I want to know is, did they pay you enough to risk jail time for kidnapping and murder?”

  In the dim light the stranger’s eyes narrowed, then widened and his mouth dropped open. Hannibal read the entire internal monologue on his face. Who is this guy? What does he want? What is he talking about, kidnapping and murder? Did those guys set me up to be the fall guy for some crime?

  The stranger’s fingers failed him. The sound of the keys hitting the sidewalk seemed to shock him into action but by the time he turned to run Hannibal already had a hand down the back of his collar and was swinging him to the side. The stranger grunted as Hannibal smashed him into the side of the car and held him in place with an elbow thrust against his spine.

  “I figured they hired local talent for their little game. Didn’t you know you were a decoy, sent as evidence that their victim left town?” Hannibal asked while he quickly patted the man down. As expected, he was not armed. He flipped the man’s wallet open and scanned his driver’s license. “So, Walter, did you think it was some sort of practical joke or something? Did it never occur to you that you were meant as evidence that the guy they killed was still alive somewhere?”

  “I don’t know nothing,” Walter said, whining and stammering at the same time. “They just told me to get on the train with the girl and ride to the end of the line.”

  “Yeah, well you’ll have your chance to tell your story to the cops,” Hannibal said. Crouching quickly he scooped up the dropped keys. He tossed them onto the roof of the car, backed up and drew the Sig Sauer P220 from under his right arm. Holding his pistol casually at his side he said, “Get in the car, stupid. I don’t want to hurt you, but if you try to run, trust me, you’ll just die tired.”

  It took Walter a while to unlock the door because of the way his hands were shaking, but once he got it open he slid onto the seat. Hannibal slammed the door shut and walked around to get in the other side. It was a cool night, but that didn’t stop the beads from popping out on Walter’s forehead.

  “Start her up and pull a U-turn,” Hannibal said. “We’re going back to the train station. And meanwhile, you can tell me who gave you the suit and told you to get on that train.”

  “It was the girl,” Walter said, driving slowly, glancing often at the gun on Hannibal’s lap. “Lucinda. We used to hang out sometimes. She brought me the suit and said I could make two hundred dollars just for taking a ride with her. Times have been tough so I figured, why not? Nothing illegal about taking a ride, right?”

  “And where is this Lucinda now?” Hannibal asked as they pulled into the train station parking lot.

  “Who knows? She got off up in Canada. She wasn’t from around here anyway. Me, I hate the cold, so I just turned around and came home. I should have stayed in The City. I got family in Yonkers.”

  Hannibal signaled Walter to get out and walked him to the black Volvo. Hannibal’s instincts told him that the lead he had waited in the dark for was turning out to be a dead end. Walter was just a hustler. He never even met the killer or whoever set up the fake disappearance. Lucinda with no last name was the person Hannibal needed to talk to, but unlike Walter, she probably had sense enough to lay low for a while. Or maybe she was from Canada and was happy to have somebody else pay her way home. Either way, he had little hope of finding her.

  When they reached Hannibal’s car Walter stopped, his eyes moving between Hannibal’s face and the pistol held in the shadow of his suit coat. He almost looked as if he was going to cry. Hannibal shook his head. What had happened to cheap thugs in the last few decades? The guys in the Shadow paperbacks and Batman comics Hannibal read as a kid were a different breed. Those guys would have kicked this guy out of the union.

  “Relax Walter, I’m not taking you for a ride, at least not in the old movie sense. I am going to call a good cop I know who, as I think of it, won’t want to be hassled at this time of night with business. I’ll leave you in his care for the night. Now that I think of it, him you should be afraid of.”

  -11-

  SATURDAY

  Hannibal always woke up first. He had been an early riser all his life, from the days he wanted to see his dad leave in his uniform every morning. So he was startled when he opened his eyes and found himself alone.

  He didn’t have to look far. Cindy was curled up in the chair over by the window, wrapped in the spare blanket, softly backlit by the morning sun. Her hair was a matted mess. One of her tiny feet poked out from the bottom of the blanket. Her scent reached out to him, something by Hermes whose actual name he couldn’t pronounce right. It smelled of vanilla and jasmine and made his heart ache when she wore that little girl face. Her face was turned down, her lower lip poking out, and she looked up at him from under her eyebrows.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  Hannibal sat up in the bed. “What, baby? What don’t you understand?”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  Hannibal wasn’t sure if she was asking a question or making a statement, so he left enough silence for her to fill it in.

  “I’ve been up since four. I always sleep well. How can I feel so restless and drained at the same time? Am I going crazy?”

  “No, sweetheart, you’re just a little down. You’ve had a couple of pretty terrible blows. Lost a good friend.”

  “Maybe,” Cindy said, with more hope than certainty in her voice.

  “Okay,” Hannibal said, not wanting to argue the point, “But you’ve also had the rug yanked out from under you financially. I know you had some great plans and they’ve just been derailed.”

  “But that doesn’t happen to me,” she said through clenched teeth. “My
God, I grew up with no mother, learned English at the same time my father did, but still this skinny Puerto Rican girl got into law school and graduated third in her class. My plans don’t…” There was a long pause. “Don’t get derailed.”

  “Sorry to say it, baby, but it happens to everybody,” Hannibal said. He kept his voice soft but his words stayed strong. “The rest of us are used to things not going our way, but you’re not. Truth is, you’re a bit spoiled, babe.” He said it with a smile, but realized he had never had that exact thought until just then. Cindy’s eyes went down and to one side.

  “But things do go your way,” Cindy said, shaking her head. “We all knew the guy witnesses saw get on that train to Canada wasn’t Jason. But you knew it was somebody hired locally. And you knew the killer wouldn’t tell him why he was taking that trip. So he had no reason to stay away, and you knew he’d want to come home when the job was done. It all seems so obvious when you look at it after the fact.”

  “Most mysteries do,” Hannibal said. He wanted to ask why they were talking about that at all. “And I had the advantage of experience. I’ve chased a lot of runaways.”

  Cindy clenched her eyes tight, then looked up at Hannibal, on the edge of tears. “How do you do that? How can you always be so sure?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe because I’ve been right enough to count, and so far being wrong hasn’t killed me. Maybe because most of the time doing anything is better than doing nothing. Maybe just because for me, doubt is a killer. And you know what else is a killer? Hunger.”

  He grabbed the phone beside the bed and pushed a button. When he heard a response he ordered a pot of strong coffee and a three-egg omelet with ham, peppers, onions, mushrooms and Monterey jack cheese. Then he looked at Cindy with raised eyebrows. Her mouth hung open a bit and her blink rate increased. He couldn’t remember seeing indecision on her face, especially over something so simple.

  “Yeah, make it two,” he said into the phone. “And throw on some toast. Thanks.”

  When he hung up, Cindy asked, “What will you do today?”

  “Well, I’ll want to see if Rissik got anything else out of Jason’s stand-in,” Hannibal said. “He’ll be pissed about working this on a Saturday so he might shake something loose. And I’m going to see if I can get face to face with Hernandez. I need to get a sense of whether he had a motive to off Irene. While I’m doing that, you’re going to a spa and getting a massage and whatever treatment will make you relax for a while. But before any of that, I’m going sit here with my lady and have some breakfast. Now quit acting like a victim and drag that cute little ass back over here into this bed.”

  He stared at her until she moved. Her knees straightened like old rusty hinges but she finally stood and walked over to join him.

  Columbia Heights is a neighborhood still searching for itself. Situated in Northwest Washington DC it once aspired to be upscale, but somehow got stuck being a densely packed collection of condominiums and townhouses. Leaning against Howard University, it was a Black neighborhood until the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s murder. It holds both the Ecuadoran embassy and the Mexican Cultural Institute so some people think of it as a Latin neighborhood. George Washington Monroe was among them.

  “Not hard to guess why Manny decided to buy a club up here,” Monroe said from the passenger seat of Hannibal’s car. “He can get lost in the shuffle real easy. He always wanted to be invisible. I always wanted to be famous. That’s a lot of what pulled us apart business-wise.”

  “Or, maybe he just couldn’t take your pompous attitude,” Hannibal said, driving slowly down the narrow street. “Look more closely and you’ll see that half the neighborhood’s black. Maybe half of the rest are Latin.”

  “Well, okay, I haven’t been here in a while, but it looks like you might be right. Wonder where they all went.”

  “It’s a lot cheaper to live in Prince George’s County over in Maryland,” Hannibal said. Still he couldn’t deny there were plenty of Hispanic faces on the street, and every one reminded him how he had hated to leave Cindy alone that morning. He was worried about her, but knew that his best chance at making her feel better was to get to the bottom of the Jason’s murder. At least, he thought so.

  Getting into the District had been an easy half hour’s drive, a few miles down Route 7 and over to the George Washington Parkway. Once they got onto the Key Bridge they left Virginia behind for the streets of Washington. In this case, they were a bewildering collection of narrow, traffic-packed streets named for numbers, letters and states in no perceivable pattern. In the process they even drove past the restaurant from which Cindy had darted into traffic and started this case. There were lots of pedestrians on the street, which had prompted his slow pace and their conversation.

  On the way Monroe had explained the long string of phone calls that had led him to his old partner, Manny Hernandez. Apparently he had bought, and was managing, a club on M Street that alternated between soul food and Mexican food, with a hip hop DJ some nights and Salsa on others. In a multi-cultural city, in a neighborhood known for its ethnic diversity, it made a kind of sense.

  Hannibal found a parking space near the Metro station and accepted it as the closest they would get to their destination. A large construction site loomed across the street. Hannibal tried to move on, but Monroe stopped and appeared to be admiring the work being done.

  “Got a fascination with real work?” Hannibal asked.

  Wash pointed from left to right at the work area. “Jones, this is one of my favorite achievements. When we worked together, Manny and I put together much of the financing for this project. It’s called DC USA.”

  “Real catchy, Wash. A mall, I take it.”

  “A retail complex,” Monroe said. “More than 546,000 square feet of shopping pleasure. There’s going to be a Target at that end and a Best Buy down there and lots more in between. And the most important thing is what this area needs most, lots and lots of underground parking. This, my friend, is a guaranteed money maker that will benefit the neighborhood.”

  “I’m not one of your marks, Wash,” Hannibal said, tugging Monroe by the arm, “and I’m also not your friend. Let’s go find Hernandez.”

  Taberna Pacifico didn’t open until five but the staff was already setting up for a busy night. The door was unlocked so Hannibal walked in with Monroe close behind. Heavy drapes gave the wide dining area a cavernous gloom and even hours before dinner the air was cluttered with a chaos of spices that assaulted Hannibal’s nose. They walked toward the back of the house until a grim-faced man stepped into their path. His slicked-back black hair was thinning but not his waist. He looked to Hannibal like a retired Mexican wrestler, one of those guys who wears a fancy mask when he’s doing his work. Hannibal stopped at a polite distance but Monroe surged ahead.

  “We’re here to see Manny,” Monroe said, offering a broad, persuasive smile. “We’ll only be a minute.”

  The bouncer was right in Monroe’s face but, to his credit, Monroe didn’t even blink. He met the bouncer’s hard look with the same disarming smile he had shown Hannibal the day before. Then he took another step toward the back.

  The clatter of dishes in the kitchen almost cloaked the low rumble coming from the bouncer’s chest but Hannibal heard it. The bouncer presented a palm, which Monroe tried to step around. The bouncer’s right fist cocked back, but Hannibal’s gloved right hand stopped it mid-swing. The two men locked eyes.

  “You don’t want none of this,” Hannibal said in a low, hard voice. “Walk away.”

  Hannibal’s arm began to shake as he kept the bouncer’s fist from moving forward. He knew what happened next and every scenario he imagined ended with the other man’s knee dislocated or his own nose broken or both. But then a strident voice came from the back room.

  “What the hell? Is that Wash?”

  Monroe rushed past the bouncer toward a man who could have been his mirror image except for his obvious Latin background.
Same height, weight and build. Same disarming smile, but Hernandez had not aged as well as Monroe. If his life was made into a movie, Ricardo Montalban would have been cast to play Hernandez.

  “Manny, you crafty old bastard,” Monroe said, moving with all the speed he could muster while hampered by his limp. He was grinning like the unpopular kid at his high school reunion, not wanting to remind the others how they treated him back then.

  “Wash, you son of a bitch,” Hernandez said, but he wasn’t smiling. His right cross caught Monroe on the side of his jaw, tossing him backward to land flat on his back on a dinner table.

  That was all the guidance the bouncer needed. His huge left fist whipped around toward Hannibal’s face. Luckily for him, Hannibal had already formed an alternative mental picture that did not involve dislocation. He ducked under the sweeping left hook and reached down to grab the cuffs of the man’s pants. When he snapped upright the bigger man’s feet were yanked out from under him. The average man might have cracked his skull open on the floor, but this man was a wrestler. He knew how to fall, absorbing the impact with his arms, and rolled to his feet. Now Hannibal had some distance and could figure to use his kick boxing skills to put the man down without permanent damage to either of them. If he had to.

  “We don’t want this, Mr. Hernandez,” Hannibal said while keeping his eyes on the bouncer. “Just want to talk. If not me, it will be the police because you’ll be a suspect in the murder investigation.”

  “Murder? What murder?” His accent was cultivated and Hannibal imagined he was unbeatable in his day at charming the ladies.

  Monroe sat up on the table, all the fight knocked out of him. “Manny, someone’s gone and killed Irene. I’m not accusing you, but your name is going to come up, old buddy, so we need to talk.”

  Hernandez considered for a few seconds, then gestured to his bouncer to relax and waved Monroe inside.