Mirror Maze j-4

by William Bayer

  "She told me she knew you had been looking for her after the homicide.

  She was surprised to learn you still wanted to speak with her. She said these events took place many years ago and that Mr. Mendoza has been in prison for a long time."

  "That's true."

  "Then, why are you still investigating, Frank?"

  "There are still many unanswered questions."

  "You will tell me about them?"

  "Maybe. First there's something else." The waitress returned with two cups of Cuban coffee.

  Janek waited until she slipped away. "There was a woman who interrogated me. Do you know the one I mean?" Luis nodded. "Who is she?" Luis exhaled. When he spoke it was in the manner of an efficient, well-informed cop. "Her name is Violetta Bonilla. She is well known in Havana. Actually, she is a member of our National Theater troupe."

  Janek stared at him. "An actress?"

  Luis nodded. "The Seguridad uses her because of her English. She was brought up in Miami, where her father lived in the exile community, one of our best penetration agents until they pulled him back. Violetta went to school in the States and claims to understand Americans. There is a rumor that her lover is a Minister of State. I cannot confirm that for you." "She said she was a captain."

  Luis shrugged. "The ranks of nonservice personnel are simulated, a method of flattery the segurosos learned from the KGB. But be assured that when Violetta examined you she was but a marionette dancing to Fonseca's tune. He is a colonel. What we call ' serious man." " He paused. "Perhaps you would like to see Violetta in another context?"

  "What context?"

  "She is performing now in a play. I can get us tickets. Tonight we can go together, make ourselves known." Luis smiled. "Your presence in the audience might unnerve her a little bit."

  Janek smiled. It was a tempting idea. He actually liked Luis for proposing it. But there was a side of him that wanted never to see Violetta Bonilla again.

  "No, thanks," he said. "I only want to know why they arrested me."

  "You drew their attention."

  "How?"

  Luis shrugged again. "The segurosos do what they like and explain nothing. That is one reason they are dangerous." Janek stared at him. "I don't get it. I've thought back over everything. I can't figure out where I gave myself away. I know they can't search everybody's bags. So, why'd they choose mine?"

  "This bothers you?"

  "Of course."

  "Because you are a professional."

  "Because I must have made a mistake."

  Luis stroked his chin. "I am not certain, but I believe they thought you were a bounty hunter."

  "What?

  Luis nodded. "Fonseca mentioned it. There is a rich American living here. I am sure you have heard of him an extremely crooked financier wanted by your government. Several attempts have already been made to capture this man and abduct him back to the States. I believe they thought you were another abductor, perhaps the advance man for a group."

  "That's ridiculous!"

  "Of course. But, you see, they have nothing else to do but think up plots and then find suspects to fit their fantasies. Which is why, in the end, it is impossible to penetrate their thinking. Better to forget about them, Frank. You are finished with them now. You are with me. We understand each other because we are real cops who deal with the reality of the streets." Luis smiled. "It is my pleasure to work with you, if only for a day. I know you will teach me many things and perhaps you will learn a thing or two from me as well."

  Tania Figueras's apartment was one of twelve carved out of a huge old house that had once belonged to a wealthy family. Although the building had been crudely subdivided, there were still traces of grandeur-high ceilings, delicate moldings, fine if scarred tile work in the entrance hall. As they entered, Janek noticed a faint smell of sewage, a sign that the plumbing was overworked.

  He and Luis climbed the rear stairs. Tania's apartment had been created railroad-style out of three small servant's rooms on the top floor.

  When she opened the door, she and Janek gazed at each other. Yes, it's her, Janek thought. The smooth features he knew so well from the photos he had carried around with him nine years before had grown more prominent, and the seamless skin was beginning to crinkle a little around the eyes. Her body was thicker, but her black hair was still glossy and her lips still slightly petulant. She was a good looking woman, and evidently an amused one, for she smiled as she searched Janek's eyes.

  "What took you so long? I've been waiting nine years."

  She laughed, turned, led them through her kitchen, a bedroom where clothing hung exposed, then into a pleasant sitting room with a view upon what had once been a lush tropical garden, but was now a desiccated patch of weeds dominated by the stump of a giant palm and an overgrown, browned-out banana tree.

  "You've met my little brother?" she asked casually, seating herself beside the window.

  Janek nodded.

  "How is Angel?" "He's in trouble," Janek said.

  Tania shrugged, "If he had come here with me he might be a doctor today." She turned to Luis.

  "Sometimes we think we have too many doctors," Luis explained.

  Tania snickered. "Most of them do the work of nurses, but since they have diplomas we must call them 'Doctor." Isn't that right, Ortiz?"

  Luis, embarrassed, did not respond.

  Janek glanced around the room. It was nicely furnished. There was an old stereo, a small battered TV and shelves crammed with books and long-playing records. It did not look like the room of a woman who worked as a maid.

  "What do you do, Miss. Figueras?"

  "I work for the revolution."

  "Can you be a little more specific?"

  "I am a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Finance. But not today." She smiled. "Today I assist the cops."

  "You're married?"

  She nodded. "My husband manages a citrus farm twenty miles outside the capital. I also have a son. He hopes one day to be a baseball player. He is at school now, no doubt studying revolutionary principles." She glanced at Luis again, to see whether she'd overstepped. Evidently satisfied, she turned back to Janek. "Well, shall we begin?"

  He photographed her, fingerprinted her, then set up his tape recorder.

  There then followed a brief discussion about whether she could be deposed under oath.

  Since they were outside the United States, they agreed that after the interview Janek would prepare a statement in English based on what she told him, Luis would translate the statement into Spanish, then Tania would sign both versions and swear to their truthfulness before a Cuban judge. When all that was settled and Tania assured him she was ready, Janek turned on his tape recorder. Then he hit her with his first question, designed to set a no-nonsense tone and catch her off guard.

  "Did you have anything to do with the murder of Edith Mendoza?"

  Tania laughed. "Are you serious?"

  "Please answer the question."

  "Of course not! I know what they did. I can tell you that what they said Her black eyes flashed.

  "You ran away the night of the murder. Why?"

  "I was scared! As you would have been if you'd been in my position.

  Mrs. Mendoza told me she was meeting a friend that afternoon at the studio. She asked me to come by afterwards and clean up. Nothing special about that. That was a normal part of my duties. I remember exactly what happened, almost as if it were yesterday. I got there just after seven.

  I saw her as soon as I walked in, hanging there in front of me, body battered, deep purple most of it. I screamed. I believe I screamed a lot. I had never seen anything like that before.

  Then I ran out, flagged down a said. I read all about about me was lies." cab, rushed back to Central Park West, packed my stuff and left. I hid out that night with a friend in Harlem, then, next morning, caught a bus to Montreal. I spent my second night at the YWCA, bought a plane ticket in the morning and flew down here. I've been living here ever
since."

  "The Metaxas letter-"

  "I know all about it," she snapped. "What he wrote about me was a lie."

  "Pefia backed him up."

  "Pefia lied!"

  "Everyone lied-is that what you're claiming?"

  "Sure, and why not? I wasn't there to refute them, so they said whatever came into their heads." She smiled bitterly. "You police lied, too, because I never met Metaxas, I never arranged anything with him, I never even knew what he looked like. Why are we talking about this anyway?"

  Her tone showed impatience. "I read that that letter was a forgery.

  Wasn't it? Isn't that what they said?"

  Uh-oh, here we go. Janek shook his head. Tania sat beside him, glaring, breathing in short, tight, angry gasps. She was smoldering and his only thought was that it was always this way with Mendoza-it made people crazy, everyone who touched it, every single person, including himself.

  "If what you say is true-"

  "It's true," she added scornfully.

  "Then, why didn't you come forward?"

  "Why should I? What did it have to do with me?"

  "You say you knew about the Metaxas letter. Then, you must have known it was that letter, along with Rudolfo Pefia's testimony, that got Mendoza convicted."

  "So what?"

  Oh, the lady's tough! "You didn't care if an innocent man was convicted of murder?" "Who said he was innocent?"

  "You think he-?"

  "Who cares what I think? You don't understand." Janek shook his head. "I guess not."

  "It didn't matter to me that Metaxas never wrote that letter. Or, if he did, that he lied in it. Your great American judicial system!

  You're so puffed up about it, you don't see how most of the time it doesn't work. Poor, innocent dark-skinned people are sent to prison while rich, white, guilty old men walk free." She made a vulgar gesture.

  "I shit on your judicial system! Do you understand, Lieutenant Janek? I puke upon it! And anyway"-she worked to control her breathing-"I am sure Mendoza killed her." Tania shrugged. "Not that it mattered. They were both pieces of crap. What did I care?

  And who would have believed me anyway? When I came down here I went to see a friend of my father's, a lawyer. He told me I did the right thing, that the way things work up in gringoland, I could have been convicted with Mendoza as an accessory." She laughed. "You make people's beds, pick up their dirty underwear, scrub shit crust off their toilet seats, and you're supposed to care! They were rich, foul, vulgar people. Far as I'm concerned, they got what they deserved!"

  Tirade finished, Tania sat back, then stiffly crossed her arms. The message was clear: That's how Ifeel and to hell with what you or anybody thinks.

  Janek called a break. Tania-passionate, educated and articulate-was not what he had expected. He turned off the tape recorder, Luis cracked a little joke, the three of them laughed, then Tania went into the kitchen to prepare tea. While they waited, Luis asked Janek about the Metaxas letter.

  "What is it, Frank? Why is it so important?" Janek explained that Gus Metaxas was a failed Greek- American boxer, nicknamed "the Animal," who had allegedly been one of several boxers from Pinelli's Gym who engaged in paid sexual encounters with the Mendozas.

  Three weeks into the investigation, Metaxas, who lived in a cheap hotel room near Penn Station, was found dead in his bloody bath water of self-inflicted cuts across his wrists. On his bedroom dresser was a suicide note, written in what police experts testified was his hand. In his note Metaxas wrote that he had been hired by Tania Figueras to have a sexual assignation with Edith Mendoza the day of her murder, and that the night before, at a private meeting, Jake Mendoza had paid him twenty-five hundred dollars to beat his wife to death. Twenty-five hundred more was to be paid after the deed was done. Metaxas had killed himself, he wrote, out of remorse for his awful crime.

  "Was there supporting evidence?" "Plenty," Janek said. "Metaxas's mother, who lived in Chicago, received a money order for five thousand dollars mailed the day of Gus's suicide. Since everyone knew Gus was broke, his possession of that much cash supported his story. Then there was the testimony of his best friend and sparring partner, a Cuban-American fighter named Rudolfo Peiia. Peha testified Gus had confessed the whole thing several days before he took his final bath."

  "Sounds convincing," Luis said.

  "It was, although the defense tried to laugh it off. They had their own theory-that we, the cops, forced Metaxas to write the note and kill himself, that we provided the five thousand dollars for the money order and pressured Pefia to give false testimony. The jury didn't believe that, so Mendoza got convicted."

  "And then-?"

  "Then what, Luis?" "Tania said something about a forgery."

  Janek exhaled. "That came up a couple years later. A high-ranking officer named Dakin, chief of our Department of Internal Affairs, brought in some evidence he claimed snowea that the defense theory of a police conspiracy might have been correct after all. There was a departmental hearing. In effect, my old partner, who'd headed the Mendoza investigation, went on trial. I acted as his defense counsel under a special provision whereby one officer may call upon another, rather than an attorney, to manage his defense. We successfully rebutted Dakin's so-called evidence.

  After that Dakin resigned. But from then on the case was tainted.

  Worse, it split our department. There're still people, including many cops, who think we fabricated the evidence against Mendoza because we couldn't make a legitimate case."

  "You don't believe that?"

  "I try to keep an open mind."

  "That's why you came to Cuba?"

  Janek nodded. "Trouble is, if Tania's telling the truth, then something was very wrong."

  After they drank their tea and the examination resumed, Tania dropped her second bombshell of the morning: Edith Mendoza, she said, had not been blackmailed by the murdered cop, Clury; rather, Edith had hired Clury to gather evidence against Jake.

  "She hated her husband. She told me many times. She found him disgusting and wanted a divorce. But she wanted a big financial settlement, too. So she hired this detective, Clury, who had done investigative work for Mr.

  Mendoza. She paid him to collect embarrassing material about Mendoza, so she could force Mendoza into a good settlement."

  "How did Clury get hold of the sex photos?"

  "Mrs. Mendoza gave them to him."

  "You're certain?" "She told me so."

  "You didn't note any of this down?" Tania smiled. "I didn't keep a diary, if that's what you're asking."

  "Did you know Carl Washington?"

  Her mouth tightened. "Yes."

  "Did you arrange meetings between the Mendozas and the boxers?"

  Tania looked extremely uncomfortable, but she answered. "Three of them.

  Washington, Royalton and Peiia. But not Metaxas, or that other man-what was his name?"

  "Tate."

  Tania nodded. "I never met him and never paid him.

  Not him or Metaxas. The others-well, I did what Mrs. Mendoza told me.

  She explained that the games were to Mr. Mendoza's taste, not hers, and that he forced her to join in. She told me Clury had placed a hidden camera in the studio, and that she went along with Mendoza's pleasures in order to get pictures to embarrass him."

  "So, there wasn't any blackmail?"

  Tania laughed. She looked relieved that they were done talking about her complicity.

  "That was so stupid! I kept reading that people thought Clury was blackmailing the Mendozas, when actually it was Mrs. Mendoza who was going to blackmail her husband. The money she paid Clury was for his investigation." She turned solemn, met Janek's eyes. She wanted to convince him. "I think Mendoza found out what she was up to. I think he had his wife killed and Clury, too. I can't prove it. But I can tell you I didn't have anything to do with Metaxas. Never! So, if he's the one killed Mrs. Mendoza, it wasn't the way it said in that note… Janek spent the rest of the morning trying to
tear apart her story. He asked long, complicated, sympathetically phrased questions, then short, jabbing queries designed to confuse and/or unnerve her. He pressed her on specific details, and, when she claimed she couldn't remember them, demanded to know why her memory was so selective. He forced her to separate what she knew from what she thought. He helped her to finesse her worst inconsistencies and attacked those portions of her account about which she seemed most certain. He complimented her on her composure and needled her for her disloyalty to her mistress. He was kind and cruel, subjecting her to glances of skepticism, snarls of ridicule and, when, suddenly, she dropped her head and began to weep, nods of humane compassion. In the end he thought that she had stood up well, that her story, as he forced her to refine it, was credible and that the lapses in it were justified by the passage of time. In short-he believed her.

  "I have never witnessed such an examination," Luis said as they descended the stairs of the house. "You are a master of interrogation, Frank."

  Janek shrugged. "Shucks..

  Luis looked at him, admiration clouded by confusion. "What is this 'shucks'?"

  "It means I can't handle compliments." He looked at Luis. "What do you say I buy you lunch?"

  They drove to an oceanfront restaurant a few miles east of Havana, where, at Janek's insistence, they ordered lobsters. They were the only customers. While they waited, Janek asked Luis what Tania did at the Ministry of Finance.

  "She's an economist."

  "Does she have a degree?" Luis nodded, "And she calls herself a bureaucrat."

  "She is a modest woman."

  Janek smiled. "A hard woman. A modest woman. A maid who arranged sex parties, now turned government economist. You know what I'd call her, Luis? I'd call her a very interesting woman."

  When the lobsters arrived, Janek was amazed. Their tails were so large they literally fanned out of their shells. They were delicious, too.

  "This is the sweetest, most tender lobster I ever ate," Janek said.

  Luis, who had been eating very slowly, looked up. His eyes were sad.

  "Do you know how long it's been since I ate one?"

  Janek shook his head.

  "Twelve years. I remember the occasion very well." Luis set down his fork. "I had just gotten out of the army. My father arranged a celebration at Las Americas at Veradero Beach. It was a wonderful evening. Near the end, when we were almost finished, a convoy of vehicles pulled up and a very special person walked in. It was Fidel.