Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  CHAPTER 3

  The telephone in the library had been altered so that its ring was little more than a soft mutter. Haydon, stirred from his thoughts in front of the fireplace, walked over to his desk and picked up the receiver.

  “Hello.”

  “Stuart?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Jim Fossler.”

  Haydon could have bet money on Fossler and not been afraid of losing a dime. He was dependable and methodical. Common sense was high on his personal list of virtues, a list he took seriously. Fossler was a lanky man of fifty-four with a quiet disposition, thinning black hair, a permanent five o’clock shadow, and slightly bulging eyes that didn’t miss anything they weren’t supposed to miss. Low key, but often impatient with the frequent wrongheaded thinking of a municipal bureaucracy, he took an early retirement when the second of his two sons graduated from college, and started his own investigation agency. His wife, Mari, a talkative and bright Filipino whom Fossler had married after the death of his first wife, while the boys were still in high school, quit her position with an accounting firm and used her keen eye for business to help Fossler build his agency. After five years, Fossler’s work was distinguished by his high success rate and his preference for keeping a low profile. As Fossler saw it, he was basically in the information business and you didn’t get information by attracting attention to yourself. He was very good.

  “I was hoping you’d call tonight,” Haydon said. “I hear you’ve had some luck down there.”

  “Then you’ve talked to Germaine Muller?”

  “This afternoon. A few hours ago.”

  “Good. I’ll tell you, I’m not at all sure what the hell’s going on down here,” Fossler said, his voice calm. He must have been calling from a pay telephone, because he seemed to be speaking close to the mouthpiece, and Haydon thought he heard traffic. “Long story about how I finally got to the girl, which we can get into some other time, but I can tell you this, nothing in this country is simple. I went from coast to coast and border to border before I found her right here where I’d started out. Which was a surprise.”

  But Fossler didn’t sound surprised. Not only did he have a personality that some would consider unexciting, he was also unexcitable. Day in and day out he could make you want to climb the walls, but in a fast-breaking situation, in a squeeze, he was steady on, the kind of man you prayed for.

  “Listen,” Fossler said, “before I even get started here I want you to take down a couple of names and addresses. I’ll get to why in a minute. You got something to write with?”

  “Yeah, I do. Go ahead.”

  “Okay. John Baine.” Haydon wrote down the address.

  “Janet Pittner.” He gave her address and telephone number. “She’s the woman Lena’s living with, been living with her almost the whole time she’s been gone. This woman’s older than the girl by ten or fifteen years, I’d guess. Wealthy American, socially connected. Everybody in the American community here—which is pretty big—knows her, and she knows everybody. Good looking, but kind of crazy, I think. High strung.

  “Dr. Aris Grajeda. He works in the slums here, no telephone, and no street address except somewhere in a shantytown called…I’ll spell it: M-e-z-q-u-i-t-a-l. I haven’t met this guy yet, but I’m going to try to see him tomorrow. I understand he worked with Lena, with some Indian tribe up in the western highlands. He’s maybe in his mid thirties. A Guatemalan. Got his medical degree from Johns Hopkins, for Christ’s sake. He’s been back in Guatemala three years now. I hear his personal life is pretty interesting, very dedicated to his work. Not popular with the police here, because he calls a spade a spade. Considered a leftist, probably going to get himself killed.

  “And before I forget…” Fossler gave Haydon his own address. “It’s an old boarding house kind of thing, an old hotel.”

  “What about a telephone number?”

  Fossler didn’t respond immediately, and Haydon could hear the roar of trucks. It sounded like Fossler was in some kind of depot, maybe a bus station.

  “No. You can’t get me that way,” Fossler said. “I mean there’s a telephone there, but it’s not good.” He paused. “None of the telephones are good down here, understand? I’m calling you from a pay telephone, but…, I’m still not sure it’s good.”

  Haydon sat down slowly at his desk. “What’s going on, Jim?”

  “I’ve talked with the Muller girl twice,” Fossler said. “The first time was Thursday afternoon. After I found out where she was living I just went there and asked for her.”

  “That was at Janet Pittner’s?”

  “Right. There was a kind of an awkward moment when Lena realized who I was. It seemed to me Janet Pittner didn’t know about the trouble back in Houston. So Lena asks the woman to leave us alone for a few minutes. We had a pretty good talk, as a matter of fact. I told her that after she’d first disappeared it was thought she had been murdered and Baine was the suspect. She couldn’t believe it, claimed she didn’t have any idea. She asked a lot about her mother, how she was, seemed to regret having put her through all the worry, but she didn’t give a shit about her dad. Didn’t even care to talk about him. I told her about her mother’s concern, that she wasn’t going to tell her dad, that she wanted to work it out with the girl, just between the two of them. She started crying. I didn’t know what to think, whether she was afraid or relieved or depressed or what. Finally I got her calmed down. I told her to think it over, and that we ought to get together again the next morning—Friday—and talk it over. But she didn’t want me to come back to Pittner’s again, so we agreed to meet at a pastry shop.

  “I didn’t call Germaine Muller right away. I thought I’d meet with the girl one more time, get a better feel for how it was going to go. To tell you the truth, Stuart, I kind of liked the girl right off the bat. She seemed like a good kid. I didn’t want to just leave it cold. Then the next morning I’m sitting in the shop by a window so I can see the street. She’s twenty minutes late. I was about to give her up when she comes running into the shop, tells me to come with her, throws down some money, and we hurry out to the street where we jump into a car. Me in the front, her in the back. There’s John Baine, driving. We ride around, and Baine begins grilling me, like he’s checking me out, maybe I’m not who I say I am, and he’s grilling me to get to the bottom of it. Lena keeps turning around and looking behind us, and Baine is always flicking his eyes at the rearview mirror.

  “Anyway, after a while they unwind a little. I tell them they’re obviously in some kind of trouble and they ought to go to the American embassy. Baine starts swearing, and Lena says, no, no, that wouldn’t be good at all. The embassy would be a mistake. Whatever I do, don’t go there and mention them. Do not do this, she says. I said I didn’t have any intention of doing that. I was suggesting they should do that. They’re the ones with a problem, not me. No, they say. That wouldn’t be good. We kept driving.”

  Though Fossler was talking in his usual deliberate manner, rather slowly, steadily, he was betraying himself. Jim Fossler was never loquacious. If anything, he tended toward the other extreme. More often than not you had to pull information out of him, a trait that was maddening if you were trying to work with him in a high-pressure case that needed to move quickly and relied on a rapid, free-flow of information among several cooperating teams. On the other hand, you never had to worry about him gossiping away more than you wanted other people to know. A loose-tongued detective was one of Haydon’s pet peeves.

  But Fossler always addressed the business at hand, if a little too slowly, and yet here he was saying more than he needed to, failing to edit himself. He could have summarized what he had said so far in four or five sentences, but he was dragging it out inefficiently—slowly, to be sure—but dragging it out nonetheless. He was displaying an agitation Haydon had never witnessed in him before, and it made Haydon’s stomach tighten.

  “We drive around. More questioning,” Fossler continued, “until the
y seemed to be satisfied I wasn’t whoever the hell else they thought I might have been. But they didn’t seem to want to turn loose of me. Baine asked me if I knew anybody at the embassy. I told him no, which was true. I didn’t check in with the embassy when I got here because I didn’t want to worry if maybe somebody was watching me. Baine said that was a good call, because the embassy sucked. Baine, he’s maybe twenty-seven, twenty-eight, has been wandering around down here, all over Central America, six or seven years, so he’s no kid. I didn’t feel too bad about him.

  “So after a while they dropped me off three or four blocks from where they’d picked me up. Lena said they’d get back in touch and let me know what to tell her mother, what she was going to do.”

  “So she knows where you’re staying?” Haydon asked.

  “Yeah, they know.”

  Fossler waited again for another surge of traffic to subside. Haydon still didn’t know why Fossler had called him, except to inform him that the Muller girl was indeed alive. But there was more to it than that, Fossler just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. He was about to.

  “Something else,” Fossler said. “There’s a guy down here says he knows you. Taylor Cage.”

  Haydon sat forward in his chair. His memory of Taylor Cage was as sharp as if only a minute had passed instead of a decade. Haydon would never forget the hot, humid night he last had sight of him, his barrel chest thrust forward as he swaggered toward the rank hold of a cargo ship berthed in the Houston ship channel. Cage was alone, and even the jaundiced glow from the dock lights deserted him as he approached the pitch-black margin that marked the belly of the tanker and into which he disappeared without hesitation. Haydon had been sure he was watching a man stroll to his execution. He had never met another man who would have done it. But Cage had done it, and because of the nature of the operation, Haydon had had to live with the silence of the unknown denouement that followed. Then five weeks later, late at night, Haydon received a collect telephone call at home from a Father Guillen in Barranquilla, Colombia. Haydon didn’t know anyone named Guillen, but when you dealt with the variety of people he dealt with, you never rejected a collect call simply because you didn’t recognize a name. He accepted the call and immediately recognized Cage’s voice: “It was a hell of an ugly trip, but I made it. I’ll be in touch.” That was it. Haydon never heard from him again, except as an item of gossip among the right kind of people, once every two or three years.

  “You do know him, then?” Fossler asked.

  “Yeah, barely. You spoke to him?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “What’s he got to do with any of this?” Haydon asked.

  “Damned if I’m sure,” Fossler said. “But he knows everybody I’ve mentioned. I only had a short meeting with him. Unexpectedly.”

  “Where did you find him?”

  “He found me. Came to the place where I was staying. A different place. I’ve moved. Several times.”

  “What did he want?”

  “This was before I found Lena, about five days ago,” Fossler said. “I was sitting in my room, by an open window, trying to get some air—it’s the dry season down here, summer, for Christ’s sake—and there’s a knock on the door. I get up and open it, and this guy just shoves his way in, you know, like a bulldozer, barrel chest first, and we’re in the middle of the room before I know what’s happening. Scared the shit out of me. This country, Stuart, it’s full of things that’ll scare the shit out of you. No rules down here. Everything’s negotiable—or not. Anyway, I see right off he’s American, and he starts shooting the questions. Some of them didn’t make any sense to me, and I guess he saw this. So I explain myself, straight on—the truth. He looked at me. Do I know anybody at HPD? I tell him I used to be in homicide. No shit, he says. Do I know Stuart Haydon? Of course. So I tell him about you and this case.”

  A car, its horn blaring, faded in and out of the background sounds. Fossler continued.

  “He asks a few questions about it, and I answer them. He seems satisfied. He gives me a couple of names and leaves, telling me to watch my ass and telling me to be sure and say hello to you. And that’s how I came onto Lena. The names take me right to Janet Pittner.”

  “And you haven’t seen him since.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You said he was ‘involved.’”

  “My gut tells me he’s got something to do with the reason the kids are scared. It’s just my gut, okay? And since he stumbled in on me I’ve picked up a tail. Maybe coincidence, but I don’t think so. It’s a woman, a girl. Guatemalan girl. She’s good. In fact she may have been on me a long time. I wouldn’t be surprised. I can’t always spot her even now, but if I work at it I can find her. She’s very good.”

  “You think Muller and Baine are trafficking?”

  “No. I really don’t. I don’t think it’s like that at all.”

  “Then, what?”

  “I don’t know. Look, I’m getting off this phone in twenty seconds. This conversation is not private, Stuart, remember that. Look, if you can’t justify coming down here on this case, you know, coming down to verify the girl’s alive so you can close the book on it, then take a day off. I’m asking for a favor here, Stuart. I’ll owe you one. Come down here, give me twenty-four hours of your time. You’ve traveled around down here. You know how it is. I can’t go into it anymore over the telephone, believe me.”

  This was extraordinary. Jim Fossler did not operate like this. The cloak-and-dagger business was alien to his nature. His investigative procedures were as down to earth as his steady diet of meat and potatoes, nothing fancy. He didn’t see ghosts; he didn’t let his imagination run away with him. And he didn’t ask for favors.

  “What do you say?”

  “I’ll talk to Dystal tomorrow.”

  “Look,” Fossler said, “I’ve got to know before we get off this phone. Can you do it or not? There’s one flight out of Houston every day. Continental. It’ll get you here just after dark. I need to know now. It’s important that I know now.”

  Listening to a man like Fossler, a self-controlled, unflappable veteran, forced by events to betray his nervousness, was an odd experience. It was like communicating in code. On the surface of things, Fossler never broke character, but his urgency was telegraphed in nuance and subtleties. He wasn’t going to hit you over the head with it. When you communicated with Fossler, more than half the burden fell on the listener.

  “Okay,” Haydon said. “I’ll be on tomorrow night’s flight. You want me to get in touch with Mari, see if she has anything to send down?”

  “No, no need for that. I talked to her just before I called you. I’ll pick you up at the airport.” He hesitated. “I appreciate this, Stuart, I’ve got to go.”

  In an instant, Haydon was listening to a dead line.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Get a little chilly?” Nina was walking into the library with the coffee service on a tray. Haydon was back in front of the fireplace, holding one foot up to the fire and then the other. Nina’s feet were never cold. In fact, she was so warm natured that she seemed never to feel the effects of winter at all. She wore only cotton sweaters, and her big concessions to winter dress around the house were long pants—she rarely wore them otherwise—and socks without shoes. Usually she wore sandals or was barefooted.

  After setting the service on a low rosewood table in front of the sofa, she poured each of them a cup. Taking hers, she settled back where she had been before, turning sideways and tucking her feet under the cushion again.

  “Better get it while it’s hot,” she said.

  Nina drank her coffee black and scalding, nothing complicated about it. Haydon, on the other hand, added one spoon of cream—not milk—and, when he could get it, a few shavings of bitter chocolate. As for the temperature, he liked it hot to very warm, not scalding.

  He bent down and turned off the gas jet in the fireplace. The logs were burning on their own now, giving off a soft crackling sound and a swe
et, spicy scent.

  “Ramona’s having a good semester,” Nina said, watching him as he came over and sat on the edge of the sofa and pulled his coffee over in front of him. “I was afraid for a while that all the madness at home was going to distract her. She was getting a lot of letters from the family after her cousin was killed in Medellin. I don’t know how she kept her mind on school with all that going on.”

  “She’s lucky,” Haydon said, taking the paring knife and the wedge of Lindt bitter chocolate off the tray and shaving fine curls of it into his coffee. “She could be trying to get through school in Bogota.”

  “I guess,” Nina said. “What a mess all of it is.”

  Haydon added cream to his cup and stirred the coffee, staring out the French doors to the deepening gray afternoon. He thought about Modesto Solis, who had made it possible for his niece to get out of Colombia. It was a mistake to believe the entire country was paralyzed by the narco wars. There were millions of people it seemed never to touch directly, though it was a growing menace and probably affected them in ways they never knew. But for the men and women like Modesto who were in law enforcement, it had been a nightmarish decade. It had changed their lives, changed the way they viewed the world, and even themselves. The good-natured Modesto that Haydon had known in the past had, in recent years, become a serious man, suspicious and distrusting. Modesto’s own brother, Ramona’s father, Rene, had been dead almost eight years. He also had been a Bogota detective, one of the early casualties of the narco wars. It had been a long run, and there was no end in sight.