Mirror Maze j-4

by William Bayer

  Geez! I never saw anything like that!" "Well, wake her up," Janek said.

  "Bring her into the city. We're going to set a trap, but not in Jersey.

  I don't want any jurisdictional disputes."

  He stopped by Deforest's office, filled him in, requested arrest war-rants for Diana Cassiday and Stephen Kane. Then he told Deforest that he and his people were leaving the division. When Deforest heard what he intended to do, he soberly wished Janek good luck.

  Back at Special Squad, he briefed Aaron and Ray, instructing them to find a good location for a trap. He also told them to sign out field videotape equipment and the best body-wire unit Special Services could provide. Then he called Netti Rampersad.

  "Frank… " She savored his name with the warmth of a casual lover.

  "Sorry, I don't have very good news. Sarah's attorney called to say she'll fight the alimony rollback. What I need now is that dossier you mentioned that shows how Sarah and Gilette are living high off the hog."

  "I'll bring it right down."

  This time when she greeted him, she was not wearing workout clothes but was dressed in an expensive, smartly cut pin-striped gray linen suit.

  "Excuse the battle dress," she said. "I'm due in court."

  Doe Landestoy turned away and giggled.

  Janek handed her Aaron's Sarah-Gilette file. He had never read it. She put it in her desk.

  "Can we go someplace and talk?"

  "You can walk me over to the courthouse," Netti said.

  "Where's Rudnick?" he asked on the stairs.

  "In the law library. He haunts the place."

  "The other night-" "Please, Frank," she said gently, "don't tell me you've ad regrets."

  "Absolutely not."

  "Neither have I."

  "Well, now that that's settled..

  They emerged laughing onto Canal Street, made their way through the throng, crossed, then entered Chinatown. "I need a favor," Janek said.

  "What's up?"

  "A young woman I know is in pretty bad trouble. She needs a good lawyer."

  Netti opened her purse, handed him her business card. "Tell her to call me anytime."

  They walked past a pagoda-shaped telephone booth. The sidewalks were slippery. Chinese men in sleeveless shirts were unloading fish off the backs of trucks.

  "I wonder if you'd-?"

  "-finish telling you what I started to tell you the other night?"

  He gazed at her. "Are you telepathic?"

  "Depends on who I'm talking to."

  "You amaze me." I She smiled. "Let's hope I always do."

  The air on Mott Street was aromatic: roasting barbecued ducks and ribs, scented breads.

  "So, what do you want to know?" she asked.

  "You mentioned the Clury angle, how it was connected, as opposed to the way everyone thinks. You said something about another agenda, someone wanting Clury blown up for his own reasons."

  "You've got a good memory."

  "It was a night to remember.

  She smiled again. "Forget Mendoza for a while, follow up on Clury. You might discover something that'll give you a whole new slant on the thing."

  "I can see why you'd want me to forget Mendoza."

  "Nothing to do with my representing him. Just take a look at the case from another point of view-the Clury point of view."

  "You're being cryptic."

  "I have to be."

  They passed a greens market. Two elderly Chinese women, with Mao-era haircuts, were picking over the vegetables.

  Mendoza's pretty rich, isn't he?" "Like Croesus," she said. "But you're changing the subject."

  "A guy like that-life sentence, no possibility of parole-can he still control his money?"

  "Some convicts appoint a trustee. Jake writes most of his own checks.

  But he also uses his old lawyer, Andrews, as fiduciary. By the way, the only reason Andrews didn't represent him on the murder charge was because he didn't know bat-shit about criminal defense. He still doesn't." Is o, if Jake wanted, say, to bid on a Van Gogh at auction, he could do it even though he's locked up."

  "Right. So, what're you driving at?"

  "Something else I'm going to be looking into."

  Netti glanced at him. "Who's being cryptic now?"

  "Then there's the El Paso thing… " he remarked casually.

  "What about it?" She was annoyed. "You seem to have a lot on your mind."

  "Department figures it was a copycat job."

  "Naturally." She spoke with disdain.

  "You don't really think it proves anything?"

  "Let's put it this way-in a case like this I'll use every little thing I've got."

  "So, you think I ought to look into Clury?"

  "I'd say that's the smart move."

  "You wouldn't be trying to mislead me, would you, Netti?" "Anyone else, Frank, and I'd never give it a thought.

  But not you. I've gotten to know you too well. And besides, you're a client."

  She glanced at her watch. "Gotta run. Late for court." She kissed him quickly on the cheek, then strode off.

  He stood at the edge of Chinatown, watching her take long, loping strides toward the courthouse, her mane of red hair flowing behind her.

  She looked awfully good, he thought.

  Back at the Property building, walking down the corridor, he heard laughter issuing from Special Squad. When he entered he found Gelsey, stripped to her bra, sitting on Aaron's desk while Sue Burke taped a battery pack to her back. Ray was closely observing the procedure, while Aaron, wearing a flamboyant orchid-covered shirt, was delivering the punch line to an old police war story. Gelsey looked at ease.

  "Hi!" she said. Her voice was gay. "I like your people." "We like her, too, Frank," Aaron said.

  "But does he like me?" Gelsey asked. "He was so tough yesterday I couldn't tell."

  Everyone laughed.

  "I found you a lawyer." Janek handed her Netti's card. "Call her.

  She'll help you settle with Carlson. Sue and I'll take care of Stiegel."

  "Who's Stiegel?"

  "The cop who took Carlson's complaint," Sue explained.

  Suddenly Gelsey didn't look so happy. "I really am in trouble, aren't I?" No one said anything, but Janek could see that the others hoped she'd get out of it.

  Sue patted Gelsey on the shoulder. "You're wired. Put on your shirt so we can see how you look."

  She looked fine.

  "Helping us, you'll be helping yourself," Sue reminded her.

  "What about Cavanaugh?" Aaron asked. "He's not going to be happy when he hears she smashed his Omega." "Cavanaugh's compromised, " Janek said.

  "Kane's his boy. Kane may even try to implicate him. I think Cavanaugh'll stay quiet, no matter how pissed off."

  Ray proposed a payoff site downtown, the plaza behind the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center. There were few people there at night, and although it appeared open, it could easily be bottled up.

  Since both Kane and Diana had met Janek, and Kane had also met Sue, Ray felt they would need to borrow a half-dozen men from other units. One would circulate, one would pretend to be homeless, four would impersonate a night cleaning crew. Janek would control the operation and monitor Gelsey's wire from a parked unmarked police communications panel truck.

  Janek wanted to check the place out. The five of them piled into a cab.

  On site he looked around: The river bound one side of the plaza, new sleek buildings of reflective glass -the other. The spectacular Winter Garden was far enough away that people sitting inside would be out of danger. He approved the plan, assigned Aaron and Ray the job of lining up the van and the extra men. Then he returned to Special Squad with Gelsey and Sue to throw the bait, Sue set up the recording equipment in Janek's office, then returned to the outer room to listen. When everything was ready, Janek signaled Gelsey. She nodded, they picked up their phones, Janek dialed and settled back.

  "Hello. May I help you?"

  He
recognized Kim's crisp tone, remembered the way she'd glared at him in the limousine mirror.

  "It's Gelsey."

  "One moment, please."

  There was a pause, then Diana came on:

  "Well… this is a surprise." "Yeah, sure," Gelsey said.

  "What's on your mind, pet?"

  "Still interested in that whatchamacallit?"

  "The Dietz item?"

  "Uh-huh..

  "I might be. How much do you want?" Diana, Janek thought, was doing a bad job concealing her excitement.

  "You mentioned a fifty-fifty split."

  "Did I?"

  "If you've changed your mind, Diana, forget it."

  A brief silence. "The offer stands."

  "How much can we get for it?"

  "Hard to say. Maybe ten… fifteen K."

  Gelsey looked at Janek. He shook his head.

  "Not enough," Gelsey said. "if that's all it's worth, you wouldn't have been so fierce about it."

  "I didn't mean to be fierce, dear. I really don't know what it's worth.

  I won't till I show it to the buyer. "

  "Surely you don't expect me to hand it over?"

  "I can give you something on account, if that's what you're hinting at."

  Again Janek shook his head.

  "You must think I'm stupid. The only way this deat's going down is if we all three meet together."

  "Impossible!"

  "It's that or nothing."

  Another pause. "You strike a hard bargain, dear."

  "Not nearly as hard as you. Look, I've got the item. You've got the buyer. Neither of us can do anything without the other. That's why we all three have to meet. In a public place where I won't get ambushed."

  Oh, she's good! Janek thought.

  "I'll have to talk to the buyer, see how he feels."

  "Do that. But remember, Diana-there is no other way Be ready to roll at ten tonight. I'll call you with instructions. Till then… kiss-kiss … "

  Two seconds after Gelsey put down the phone, Sue burst in from the other room.

  "Fabulous!" Sue embraced her. "Wasn't she great, Frank?"

  He looked into Gelsey's eyes. "I told you you were an actress."

  He wanted to spend the afternoon with her, build her confidence, keep her from thinking about the danger. Also, he admitted to himself, he liked her company.

  He took her to lunch at a Cajun dive on Eighth Avenue in the Twenties.

  While they ate jambalaya and sipped beer from jelly jars, he asked about her parents.

  She described her father in detail-handsome, a charmer, a silver-throated smoothy. But Janek received no clear impression of her mother. She came across, from Gelsey's description, as a shadowy presence in the house-secretive, withdrawn, ineffectual and plain.

  "I don't think she had much influence on me," Gelsey said. "I'm strictly my father's girl. He was a scam artist and so am I. He built the maze; I paint pictures. So, we're both visual artists, too."

  "Did he think of himself as an artist?"

  "God, no! He'd laugh at the idea." She told Janek about other works created by other maze artist-craftsmen: the Watts Towers in Los Angeles; an elaborate tile complex in Washington; a wall constructed out of empty beer cans in Key West, Florida.

  "There're hundreds of these huge lifelong projects around the country.

  The men who create them, like my father, usually start out without a clear idea of what they're doing. But something drives them. They see something vaguely in a dream, then set out to construct it… out of masonry, metal, wood, tile, glass, whatever material they know how to use. These projects speak to people because they're obsessive. You look at them, sense the design and know they're the product of a single person's mind. You marvel at the work put in, the scale, the ambition.

  Few people have the will to devote a lifetime to something so grand…

  Instead of borrowing Aaron's car, Janek signed out a police Ford from the Sixth Precinct. Driving out to Newark, he and Gelsey didn't talk much. He liked being with her, sitting beside her in the car. She aroused his affection in a way few young women ever had. Perhaps, he thought, she reminded him of his mother-there was something about the set of her eyes.

  "What's it like to live above a maze?" he asked as he took the turn that led to Richmond.

  "Most of the time I forget it's there."

  "But there're times when you don't forget."

  She nodded. "Then it feels strange. Like living on top of a bomb."

  He wondered if her forays into the city, spurred on by rain, had been attempts to add excitement to an otherwise quiet life. It occurred to him that for her to live above the maze was akin to an orphan living in the house in which his parents had been killed. People normally flee the scenes of injurious family crimes. But Gelsey had stayed on. He wondered why.

  As they passed the entrance to the park, he asked her if there was a way they could get inside.

  "This summer some kids cut a hole in the fence." She pointed ahead.

  "About a hundred yards up the street." He stopped where she showed him.

  "Want to go in?"

  "If you like," she said. "It'll bring back memories."

  They got out, she crawled through the hole, he followed, then, at her suggestion, picked up a stick in case they ran into dogs.

  He was less impressed with the decay than he had been the previous morning. He guessed this was because the high afternoon sun made the ruins of Richmond appear flat, while the rising sun had endowed them with a sorrowful, romantic glow. But there was still something fascinating about an amusement park in an abandoned state. They didn't make them like Richmond anymore. The new ones were glossy and plastic.

  Richmond, with its patina of ruined, rusted rides, and broken, weathered sheds, would make a fine setting, he thought, for a post-nuclear holocaust film, As they strolled through the weeds, he told Gelsey about Walter Meles and how he had hated touching Walter's monkey's paw. Gelsey didn't remember Meles-when Janek and his father had come out to Richmond, she hadn't even been born. Still, she listened with attention, and, when he finished his story, shook her head.

  "Most everyone who worked here was injured somehow," she said.

  The fun house was shutted. The alcoves, on either side of the door, which had contained the mechanical Laughing Man and Laughing Woman, looked forlorn without their cackling patrons of joy.

  "Remember how they sounded?" Gelsey smiled. "Scratchy. Very scratchy."

  The huge painted smile that adorned the front had faded but still was visible. One of the walls, however, had fallen down. When Janek looked in he saw no mirrors, rolling floors, bats on wires, giant spiders' webs. There was no spooky lighting or scary sound effects.

  The fun house was but a shell.

  Gelsey said, "When Dad was here this place looked great."

  As they strolled, he tried subtly to guide her toward the tunnel of love. Finally, she seemed to catch on.

  "Want to see where my mother worked?"

  "If you'd like to show me… "

  He remembered the attraction well. Most customers were young hand-holding couples. One boarded a boat. He had shared his with his balding father. The boat was then pulled by a mechanical system into a pitch-black tunnel. Here the air was close, the humidity intense, the environment a jungle at night: glossy plants, mechanical alligators, chained up live monkeys and parrots screeching out of the gloom. As one's boat passed through, along a meandering circular path, the darkness overwhelmed. But he remembered the high-pitched giggles and deep throaty laughter of lovers urging each other to greater intimacies.

  He also remembered wondering what it would be like to thrust his tongue inside a girl's mouth.

  The tunnel, like the fun house, was seriously decayed, but they found the cement bed that had been the river, and the remains of the chains that had hauled the boats. The tunnel entrance was still defined, although most of its ceiling had collapsed. Gelsey led him into the ruins, then pointed
at a shed in the center.

  "That's where Mom sat. The control booth. She could see everything from there. If things got out of hand, she'd turn on the lights."

  "It was so dark in here, how could she see?"

  "She was used to it. The way the place was set up, if you were in the booth, the lamps in the foliage silhouetted people in the boats against the walls." Gelsey paused. "I think she lived in a state of darkness anyway." Back in her loft, he asked if he could stand on the catwalks again. She was pleased that he was interested.

  "I think last night Sue got a little freaked out," she said, opening the trapdoor. "Especially when we went down to the floor."

  "It's really tough to look at nothing but yourself."

  "If you're not pleased with yourself, very tough," she agreed.

  Standing in the dark on the catwalks with the blazing lights on below, he was dazzled again by the rigorous symmetry of the maze. But there were places, he observed, where the ceilings were not transparent.

  Gelsey explained that, for structural reasons, her father hadn't been able to roof all the mirrored corridors with one-way glass. Also, there were backstage and service areas between the sections.

  "Is there a map?"

  She smiled, pointed to her head.

  He couldn't believe there was nothing on paper.

  "Didn't your dad work from a plan?"

  "He made it up as he went along."

  To Janek that seemed impossible; the maze was too well designed. Gelsey explained that her father had built and rebuilt portions many times, constantly correcting his work.

  "I do the same thing-get an idea, sketch it on canvas, then, when it doesn't work, adjust a little here, a little there, erase this, add that, until I find my way to something I like. "

  "But without a plan, how do you know which mirrors are doors? To me they all look the same."

  "They are the same. Otherwise you wouldn't get lost. But I've been through it so many times, I know which ones open and which ones don't."

  She paused. "Sometimes when I'm down here I try to lose myself by closing my eyes and whirling around. But after a few minutes I'll recognize a mirror combination or a turn in a corridor, and then I'll know exactly where I am." She explained that the door mirrors, identical to the stationary ones, were disengaged by touching them at a point exactly five feet off the floor. Once sprung, they were easily pushed open. When pushed back, they relocked.