Mirror Maze j-4

by William Bayer

  "She found the body. She's the one screamed so loud the neighbor called nine-one-one."

  "Oh, gracious me!" Timmy's voice went mock falsetto. "Such a ghastly sight it must have been!" "She was scared," Janek said. "She saw her employer hanging from a hook. She was sure Mendoza had done it. So she did the normal thing.

  She ran."

  Timmy bit into his lower lip. "And now she wants to clear the air.

  What a good girl she must be, so straight and honest-the little bitch!"

  "I cornered her, Timmy. That's why she talked."

  "Yeah." Timmy stared at him a moment, then got up from the table and walked over to the bar. Janek watched as he ordered an Irish whiskey, threw it back, ordered another, drank that one off, too, then lumbered back to the booth. Timmy stared at him again and this time Janek saw that his eyes were red and crazy.

  "How can you be so fuckin' stupid, Frank?"

  "Is that what I am?"

  "About this. Forget Mendoza. It's a tar baby. The more you punch it, the more stuck you're gonna get. Let the others rant if they want.

  Dakin, Kit, the whole dumb crew downtown. Mendoza's in a cell where he belongs. It's over.

  End of story."

  "If there's been a miscarriage, it's gotta be set right. You know that."

  "Jesus! Listen to yourself! You sound like a scumbag attorney! The man's a piece of shit. He killed a cop. He deserves a living death."

  "What're you saying?"

  "What do you think?"

  "I think you're saying there was something wrong with that note," Janek said, feeling a terrible ache beginning to rise out of his stomach.

  "What the fuck difference does it make?"

  "Oh, Timmy! Timmy!" The ache was curling around his chest. "I defended you, remember? I broke Dakin for you. Christ!"

  Timmy sneered. "Oh, yeah, I forgot!" He coughed, then smacked the table with his fist. "Do I remember? What the hell do you think?" He glared at Janek, eyelashes flickering, his eyes watery and bloodshot.

  "We both know Mendoza had his wife beaten to death. We know he ordered Clury killed. How he did it, who he hired, how much he paid, the fuckin' details-who cares?"

  "Christ!"

  "You keep saying that! Don't '!" me, partner! You think law enforcement's a kid's game where winning's less important than playing by the rules? No cop worth his salt thinks like that."

  Janek wanted to hit him then. Instead he just stared.

  Timmy didn't look away. "You're telling me you faked the evidence."

  Timmy laughed. "Am I? Would you believe me now whatever I said?

  Think it through. If you really believe I faked that note, you also have to think I had that old bat, what's-her-name, Komfeld, knocked off, too.

  Like maybe I personally raped the cunt and stole her ratty silverware.

  Sound like me, Frank? Hub?"

  Timmy took a draft of beer. The foam clung to his lips.

  "You'd also have to believe Dakin isn't a psycho, Mendoza's pure as snow, and I'd risk everything, my pension, my whole fuckin' life, to close out a case because… why.? I couldn't handle it? You have to believe the five grand I supposedly used to pay for the money order to Metaxas's mom came out of-what did Dakin say? Dough I took off of some coke dealer he couldn't name? I can't remember all the crap he tried to sling at me." Timmy paused to wipe his mouth.

  "Wanna know something, Frank? At this point I don't care. Hear what I'm sayin'? I'm sick of it! The whole fuckin' mess. You wanna try and get to the bottom of it, go ahead. Spend the next ten years on it if you want to. You won't get anywhere. Kit won't either. But be careful. Because if by some fluke you happen to stumble into the real heart of the thing, something bad might befall you' Personally speaking, I'd feel real sorrowful if such an event should come to pass,"

  "The real heart of the thing "-what the hell does he mean by that?

  Janek stared into Timmy's eyes. "Is that a threat, Timmy?"

  Timmy's hands were trembling. "Me threaten you? You gotta be kidding."

  "Then, what're you saying?"

  Timmy's eyes focused down to rivet points as he met Janek's stare.

  Suddenly he laughed. "Oh, hell! Do what you want. Nothing I say's going to stop you, is it, partner?"

  With that, he set his palms on the table and slowly pushed himself to his feet. He towered over Janek for a moment, then turned his back and stumbled toward the door. Just as he reached it, he turned again, squinted and peered back at Janek through the gloom. Then he laughed a final time, a loud, high-pitched cackle Janek had never heard from him before. Then he stumbled out into the street.

  Janek was still shaking when he met up with Sue in front of the Seventeenth Precinct on East Fifty-first. It was eight o'clock, the sky was dark, and he was exhausted from a day that had begun at dawn with one maniac and finished in the afternoon with another. Dakin, Timmy-they're both crazy. Fuck '! Forget about '! Get on with your lovely, lonely life!

  However, the sight of Sue's glistening eyes and ardent, youthful face revived his faith in his fellow cops. He thought: At least there're a few not tainted by that stinking case.

  "Stiegel's in a bar on First Avenue," Sue told him. "He was getting annoyed sticking around, so I told him to go get a drink." She paused.

  "I don't think you're going to like him much, Frank."

  They walked three blocks to the bar. It wasn't what Janek expected. He knew some of the places in the neighborhood, overpriced Yuppie hangouts, but the one Stiegel had chosen was the crummiest of all-smoky, noisy, with a special aroma that told Janek it was a haunt for alcoholics.

  Sue pointed out the detective from the door. Stiegel had the kind of sloping body that always reminded Janek of a big piece of fruit. His hair was crew cut and his eyes were tired. He sat alone at a small table nursing a bourbon, inhaling deeply from a cigarette and staring vacantly at the wall. As Janek approached he felt like an intruder, catching another man in an unguarded moment. While Sue introduced them, he studied Stiegel carefully. There's no bottom to this guy, he thought.

  "I heard of you," Stiegel said. Janek nodded. He noted that Stiegel spoke in a hoarse whisper, a cigarettes-and whiskey voice. "I heard you were down in Jamaica working on that Medina thing."

  "Mendoza," Sue corrected him.

  Stiegel nodded. "Yeah… right." Then he brightened. "Either you guys wanna drink?" Janek and Sue shook their heads. Stiegel shrugged. "I'm off-duty, so what the hell." He swallowed a mouthful from his glass, set it down carefully, pushed his cigarette into an ashtray, then sat back ready to talk. "Sue tells me you want a rundown on the bad girls. I don't know much-just they pick up guys in hotel bars, drug ', roll I em and write on '." Stiegel grinned.

  "Carlson wasn't picked up in a hotel. But his complaint got slotted to you."

  Stiegel shook his head. A curl of smoke from the half extinguished cigarette wrapped his face like a veil.

  "You know how it is, Lieutenant-you luck into something couple of times, all of a sudden you're the Department expert.', "Sure, I know how that goes."

  "Thing is, I got maybe seventy, eighty open cases, of which less than a dozen are bad-girl deals. A caseload like that, I can't worry too much about guys let themselves get rolled." Stiegel leaned forward. His eyes turned canny. "Still, I put it together. The victims give different descriptions but the MO's always the same. I figure there's a ring of '.

  ' girls,' I call '." He laughed. "Not bad, huh?"

  Janek glanced over at Sue; she rolled her eyes. Stiegel, Janek knew, was just the sort of third-rate detective she most despised.

  "So, who are these bad girls?" Janek asked.

  "Beats me, Lieutenant."

  Sue tightened her lips to show disgust. "Just let the cases pile up, that it, Detective?"

  Stiegel shrugged. "What else can I do? I send the victims over to the artists unit. Makes ' feel better. Helps ' get it off their chests. Not the writing, but the shame."

  "You must have found out something,
" Janek said. "What about the body writing? What'd you make of it?"

  "That's the best part, isn't it?" The canny eyes again. "See, most of the marks are married and from out of town. I think the girls're only interested in out-of-town married guys. Then, after they take them down, they write on ' like you said. I've seen some weird stuff since I started taking these complaints. There's this one Oriental girl, she writes on the guys in Chinese. The others write in English, but they end up saying the same stuff."

  "Which is?"

  "Insults-'Asshole,' ' face,' ',' like that. There was this one mark, the girl wrote on him, ' cock's so small I couldn't find the worthless thing."

  " Stiegel laughed. "Surprised the guy had the guts to file a complaint, but he was so mad he was willing to take the ridicule.

  Anyway, that's when I figured out why they write on them the way they do." "Which is-?" Sue asked.

  "To make the mark think twice about reporting it. Way I figure, he's got enough to do getting the writing off. The girls use indelible ink.

  You got to scrub yourself raw to get it out. And then I asked myself, how does a guy explain something like that? Does he say to the wife:

  "Gee, honey, I was up in my hotel room having a little drinky-poo with this whore when she dosed me out and wrote this awful thing around my nipples'?" Stiegel shook his head. "I don't think so. Do you, Lieutenant?"

  "Seems unlikely," Janek agreed.

  "That's why they do it. Keeps the guys quiet. I figure they maybe do a hundred, two hundred jobs for every one gets reported.

  Stiegel, Janek felt, had propounded a perfectly reasonable theory. It explained the skin writing, though not the use of mirror-reverse.

  "Any other cases where the girl used mirror writing?"

  "Just Carlson. Except for the blonde who took him, and the Oriental girl, the rest of them write their insults straight."

  "And you never got close to anything?"

  Stiegel shook his head.

  "A dozen cases-there must have been something," Sue said.

  Stiegel finished off his drink, signaled the waiter for another, then stared into Sue's eyes.

  "There was this girl, a year ago… maybe two." His voice turned vague.

  "What about her?"

  "It was at Roosevelt Hospital. She stumbled into the ER, her face cut up real bad. What brought me into it was what she told the triage nurse.

  She said she'd been sliced up by some guy in a hotel room when she tried to dope his drink."

  "You interviewed her?"

  "Tried to. But she wouldn't talk. Maybe I could have pushed it, but the way her face was messed up, I just let it go. I got my own way of doing this job that you people probably wouldn't approve. If someone doesn't want to talk to me, I forget about '."

  Sue gaped, as if she couldn't believe what Stiegel had just said. Janek brought out Capiello's sketch of the redhead. Stiegel squinted at it.

  "No, that's not her." He looked up. "Looks a little like the one took down Carlson, doesn't she? But, I don't know, different somehow."

  "This girl at Roosevelt-did you take notes?"

  Stiegel shook his head. "I'm not too big on notes."

  "Try and remember. What time of year was it?"

  "Let's see." He scratched his head. "I remember it was cold."

  "Last winter?"

  "Maybe the winter before. February, March, something like that."

  Janek nodded at Sue and she nodded back, their shared acknowledgment that they'd gotten about all Stiegel had to offer. As they stood to leave, Sue turned back. Stiegel was staring at the wall.

  "Keep up the good work, Detective," she said. Her sarcasm was unmistakable, but Stiegel didn't notice.

  Outside the bar, Sue vented her anger: "Couple more bozos like him and we can turn the city over to the felons."

  "I've seen worse," Janek said. "His theory about the writing wasn't bad." They began to walk back toward the One-seven.

  Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that one out." she paused.

  "When I meet a guy like that, I'm ashamed to be in the same outfit."

  "Worn-out detectives come and go. Don't hate him, pity him. Remember:

  "There but for the grace of God… ' "

  Sue looked at Janek curiously. "If I thought I was going to end up like Stiegel I think I'd eat my gun."

  Janek winced.

  They walked a block in silence. Then Janek turned to her: "What I want you to do is find that girl, the one who got sliced in the hotel."

  "There ought to be something in the hospital records."

  Janek nodded. "Find her, handle her right and she may put you on to the rest of them."

  "And once we're on to the bad girls, maybe we can find the girl did Dietz."

  "That's the idea."

  When they reached the precinct, Janek started to look for a cab. "I'm due at the Savoy for a stand-up with Channel Six." "I'll drop you," Sue said, "then head over to Roosevelt. I want to get started on this right away."

  Janek could have kissed her. "You like the work, don't you?" he asked as he slipped into her car.

  "Want the truth?" Janek nodded. "I love it-every friggin' minute. I love it so much my lover's jealous. She says I'm more committed to it than her. And you know what, Frank? She's friggin' right!"

  The interview went fairly well, he thought. There was the usual obligatory camaraderie with the reporter, or "wax job" as Aaron called it-which ended the moment the cameras began to roll. Then Meg Chang transformed herself into the shrewd, street-smart TV journalist she was, all canny questions and meaningful squints:

  "We understand Mr. Dietz was shot in the head."

  "That's correct."

  "We also hear his room was ransacked. Was there a robbery, Lieutenant?"

  "There are things missing. But we're not sure robbery was the only motive."

  She examined him skeptically. "Does this mean that visitors aren't safe from crime even in a luxury hotel?"

  "It doesn't mean that at all. We're still investigating. My preliminary opinion is that Mr. Dietz was targeted."

  "There're rumors around the hotel that shortly before he was killed he was seen with a redheaded woman in the downstairs lounge. "

  "Sorry, Meg-you know I can't discuss an ongoing investigation."

  She nodded curtly, then turned directly to the camera:

  "There you have it. Lieutenant Janek will not confirm the presence of a mystery redhead seen with Philip Dietz just before he was killed.

  Meantime, the question hangs in the air, are visitors to Manhattan safe, even inside two-hundred fifty-dollar-a-night hotel rooms? This is Meg Chang, Channel Six News, in front of the Savoy."

  Although he was exhausted, he couldn't get to sleep. The encounters of the day kept ricocheting inside his brain. Dakin, Capiello, Kane, Carlson, Timmy, Stiegel-as soon as he finished reviewing his meeting with one, memories of his meeting with another would intrude.

  The confrontations had been too intense, the aroused emotions too inflamed, for him simply to push the skirmishes out of mind. These men haunted him-their sad, canny or glaring eyes; their ravished, hard or angry faces. There was a common element, he realized: Each, in his way, was a victim of the city and each had found his own way of coping with its violence. Even Kane, from out of town, seemed, with his threats and games, like a New Yorker.

  Close the album, let their faces fade. Plenty of time to think about them tomorrow.

  He shut his eyes tightly, then slowly relaxed until his eyelids gently met. The image of the redhead came into his mind, the two artists' sketches superimposed. Yeah, he thought, something about her, something about her eyes… He took a half dozen deep breaths, rolled over onto his side, exhaled, then felt himself finally falling-falling into sleep.

  A quarter hour later his telephone rang. Although it took him only a couple of seconds to come awake, the process seemed interminable, as if he were rising slowly from a deep, dark well. Grasping for the receiver, he knocke
d the phone to the floor.

  "Frank? Are you there?" When he picked up the handset he heard Sarah's voice.

  "Yeah, I'm here," he said. "I was asleep."

  "Sorry. I didn't know. It's just eleven."

  "I had a tough day. Maybe you could call back-"

  "I want to talk about the roof. I left a couple of messages."

  "I got them. Why don't we-?"

  She interrupted. "That last estimate's pretty good. I told the contractor you wouldn't pay five figures." He thought a moment, then made up his mind. "Yeah. well, I'm not going to pay anything."

  Silence. Her voice went terse. "What do you mean, Frank?" "Just what I said. Don't count on me. I'm out."

  "This is pretty strange. I thought we had an understanding."

  "I told you I'd consider it. I have. It's your problem now. So, please, let's not talk about it anymore."

  A long silence. "May I ask why this change of heart?"

  Sure, that's fair. "I don't feel like paying for it, okay'?"

  Another silence, then she hissed, "You are a bastard!"

  "Don't start on me, Sarah."

  "You broke your word!"

  "I never gave you my word."

  "Of course you did!" "No," he said. "You heard it that way because you wanted to."

  "Not true, Frank!"

  "It's true."

  "I can't believe you'd break your word just like that. Without telling me. Without even-"

  Suddenly there was an explosion, so close it pained his ears. Then he heard pieces of metal cascading down upon the street. His first thought was that a gas main had exploded and ripped open the pavement.

  "Hold on. Something happened."

  He got out of bed. Carrying his phone, he went into the living room to look out ' the window. People in the building across the way were standing in nightclothes in lit windows staring down.

  He moved closer to the glass to see what they were staring at. It was the wreckage of a car. There wasn't much left of it, just the frame, a hulk of smoldering steel. The hood, doors and other parts were strewn about.

  Then it hit him. It was his car. The smoke was rising from the remains of his Saab, parked where he'd left it after returning from seeing Dakin.