Dead Men's Hearts (4 page)

“Well, then,” she said, and her own too-loud voice made her start. “Let’s just see what we have.” Firmly, she led the way into the enclosure.

Thirty seconds later, grim-faced, she told Ragheb to go back and get Haddon.

Chapter Four

They came scurrying in a line behind the director, who had commandeered Ragheb’s flashlight and made for the storage area double-time, his bearded chin well out ahead of his feet, a man who intended to set things straight, by God.

But when he reached the enclosure, he lost impetus. Standing at the entrance, swaying a little, he flashed the light from mound to mound of junk. “Well then, where is it? Don’t keep us in suspense.”

TJ used her own penlight to direct his larger beam to the sandy ground near a rough, oil-stained workbench built into one of the corners. There, next to two rusted five-gallon cans of congealed roofing tar, one of them on its side, a stained, dun-colored, unevenly globular object gleamed dully in the artificial light.

Jerry was the first to speak. “A skull. I guess there isn’t much doubt about its being human.”

“There’s more than the skull,” TJ said. She bounced her thin line of light to other objects scattered in an eight- or nine-foot radius over the junk-littered ground: a snarled, grisly clump consisting of a scapula and humerus held together by a few tattered shreds of ligament, the entire mess caught up in a twisted, filthy
galabiya;
a thigh bone with the ends gnawed away; a sacrum and an innominate bone, also held together by a few threads of fiber. A few feet from the skull was what appeared to be a turban, collapsed and filthy. Near the sacrum was a cracked, curled sandal.

“An Arab,” Jerry said. “The jackals must have been at him. There’s still some dried flesh left, but not much.”

Arlo shivered. “I wonder how long he’s… it’s been here.”‘

“Who knows?” Jerry said. He leaned over, peering at the femur, hands on his knees. “Ten years, twenty years…”

“Impossible,” Haddon said curtly. “This area was in regular use until—when was it?”

“Until the big rains five years ago, so they’ve been here less than that,” TJ said. “Five years at most. And I doubt if the jackals can get into the compound. Dogs, more likely, or those monster rats.”

Arlo’s face, pasty at the best of times, was distinctly greenish in the light from the flashlights. He looked away as Haddon shone his light directly onto the skull.

“Who is it?” the director demanded, sounding thoroughly aggrieved. “How did he get in? What the devil was he doing in here?”

No one answered. “Nobody’d better touch anything,” Jerry said.

Haddon’s lips turned down. “Perish the thought.”

“And I think we’d better notify the police.”

“The
police
?” Haddon turned on him. “Good God, Jerry, have you ever dealt with the Egyptian police? Why would we want to drag them into this? This—this person has been dead for years and no one’s missed him yet, have they? I think it’s clear enough what happened. The poor beggar got in here somehow, hoping to find something worth stealing in the collection and had the misfortune to die
in flagrante delicto.
Claimed by the Grim Reaper in the very act of plunder.”

His light darted erratically through the jumble of discarded objects. “Ha, see that piece right there? He must have come in here—”

“Why
here!”
TJ said. She waved her own smaller beam over the mounds of debris. “What would he want in here?”

“Now how would I possibly know that? Who knows what was in the heart of a dead man? Perhaps he heard someone coming and ran in here to hide. Perhaps he was hiding until nightfall, when he could make his, er, getaway more easily. Whatever it was, he simply had the bad luck to die in the interim.”

“Of what?” TJ persisted. “Old age? Gallstones? Guilt?”

“Whatever the reason,” Haddon said sweetly, “we can rest secure in the knowledge that the unfortunate gentleman is in the arms of Osiris and beyond caring what we make of him. I hardly see the need to stir things up at this late date, and particularly not
now,
with the Gustafsons here, busily putting their noses into every corner, not to mention that accursed camera crew. And don’t forget the anticipated arrival of the man known to one and all as the Skeleton Detective tomorrow evening. God in heaven! No, it seems to me it would save a great deal of commotion all around if we simply disposed of his remains without bothering anybody.”

“You’re kidding!” TJ exclaimed.

“With dignity, of course,” Haddon added.

“We could bury him right in the compound,” Arlo volunteered, earning a surprised glance from Haddon. It was not common for Arlo to address the director without having been spoken to first. “In the northeast corner, where Lambert used to bury his garbage. Nobody uses it anymore.”

“Do I understand you to be volunteering for the assignment?” Haddon asked.

“I—I only meant that I agree with you.”

“I can’t begin to tell you,” said Haddon, “what a source of comfort that is to me.”

Jerry, who had been going quietly through his pipe-lighting ritual, exhaled a lungful of fragrant smoke and shook out the match. “Dr. Haddon, we’ve got a corpse right in our backyard. We don’t know who he was, we don’t know how he died, and we don’t know what he was doing here. The police have to be called. There’s no two ways about it.”

Haddon wavered. Despite the coolness he dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. “I take your point, Jerry,” he said with surprising mildness, “but I hardly see any hurry—”

“And don’t forget, Ragheb knows all about it.”

“And if Ragheb knows, everybody knows,” TJ said.

Haddon opened his mouth to reply, closed it again, and arrived at a decision he didn’t like. “Yes, all right, you’re probably right,” he said, wearily passing a hand over his eyes. The Scotches had finally caught up with him. “We’ll call them from the house.” He made a frustrated little gesture with the flashlight, pointing the way for their return. They went back the way they’d come, with Haddon in the lead and Arlo bringing up the rear.

“But what a time for this to happen!” Haddon muttered bitterly as they entered the main building.

“All the more reason to take care of it right now,” Jerry said sensibly. “Maybe they can wrap the whole thing up by tomorrow. By the time Oliver gets here it’ll be forgotten.” He found the proper page in the tiny local telephone directory, picked up the telephone, and handed them both to Haddon.

Haddon took it without enthusiasm. His face was gray. “Wrap something up by tomorrow? The Luxor police? Don’t make me laugh. We’ll be lucky if they
get
here by tomorrow.”

He was quickly proved right. The receptionist at the police department regretted that no English-speaking official of sufficient rank to attend to this most serious matter was currently available. The morning shift would report at 8 a.m. , however, and at that time a responsible investigator would be dispatched to Horizon House at once. Personnel at Horizon House were instructed to secure the grounds.

Haddon hung up with a slurred laugh. He seemed about to fall asleep. “At once. That means… that could mean anywhere from eight a.m. to eight p.m. Well, I don’t see how it can be helped. I’m going to b-… to bed, and I suggest the rest of you do the same.” He took a deep breath and headed for the door to the patio, off which the living quarters opened. Partway there he listed, managing to right himself with the help of the wall.

At the door he turned, steadied himself against the jamb, and fixed them with a quizzical and suspicious gaze. “I don’t suppose… don’t suppose any of
you
know anything ab-… about this?”

Tiffany shook her head.

Arlo shook his head.

“Who, me?” Jerry said.

Haddon nodded gravely. “Good night to all,” he proclaimed, drawing himself up, “and to all a good night.” A moment later they heard a clatter as he stumbled against one of the wicker chairs on the patio.

“The man’s swacked again,” TJ said.

“Swozzled,” agreed Jerry. “One of these nights he’s going to fall in the fountain and kill himself on his two a.m. rounds.”

“He makes rounds?” Arlo asked. “At night? I knew he was an insomniac, but—”

“You don’t see him,” Jerry said. “Your window faces the other way. He prowls around till two or three in the morning, talking to himself and falling over stuff.”

TJ was shaking her head. “You know, it’s really not that he drinks that much. It’s the interaction with the medications he’s on that does it; that stuff for anxiety, or depression, or whatever he takes. I’m surprised he can see straight.”

“Now what in the world does
he
have to be depressed about?” Arlo asked. “We’re the ones who have to work for him.”

Jerry laughed. “If you had to be Clifford Haddon, you wouldn’t be depressed?”

“You certainly have a point there,” Arlo said, pressing his eyes with his fingertips. “Well, I guess I’d better get to bed too.”

“Not me,” Jerry said, stretching. “I left Forrest and his crew over in the annex with some six-packs and pizza, and I bet they’re still there. I know I could use a couple of beers.”

“God knows, so could I,” TJ said fervently.

“You can say that again,” said Arlo after a moment’s reflection.

Chapter Five

Whatever aura of mystery had hung over the storage enclosure the night before, it was not in evidence in the dusty, flat 9 a.m. sunlight of the next morning. The enclosure looked like what it was, a squalid, fifteen-square-foot pen crammed with the household and workplace castoffs of years. Most of it—the shabby, anonymous clothing, the moldy automobile cushions, the time-grayed newspapers—was peacefully disintegrating. Some—the broken toilet bowl, the warped plastic coat hangers—would be around for future generations of archaeologists to potter blissfully among.

Major Yussef Saleh and Sergeant Monir Gabra of the Qena Governate Police, Criminal Investigation Division, had been pottering for half an hour. They were not blissful. They had located, in addition to the bones found the night before, the other half of the pelvis, a few long bones and ribs they took to be human, and several irregular smaller pieces that they thought might be human hand or foot bones. They had found no signs of foul play and hoped they would not; sorting through the broken tools, discarded utensils, and rusty, unidentifiable pieces of metal in search of a probable blunt or pointed instrument of death was a task neither of them cared to think about.

Following proper police procedure, the bones had not been disturbed until they had been photographed and their positions sketched and described. Then, kneeling on a cracked rubber that that they had found among the junk, they delicately turned over the skull.

After a moment, the two men looked at each other with puzzled expressions.

“Yes?” Clifford Haddon glanced up, not pleased to be interrupted. When he saw that it was Major Saleh, his tone became more cordial. “Ah, yes, Major, may I help you?”

“Will you come with us, please?”

Haddon stiffened. Spots of deeper color popped out on his pink throat. “Come with you—where?”

“To the storage enclosure,” Saleh said. “I would like to ask you about something if you can spare a few minutes.”

“The—” The spots disappeared. “Oh, yes, certainly. Of course, Major.” He stood up and looked at TJ. “Will you come too, please, Dr. Baroff?”

“Certainly, Dr. Haddon,” TJ said, formality for formality. The object, she supposed, was to impress the Egyptian police with the businesslike decorum of Horizon House. Well, what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

She closed the budget file on which she had been briefing him so that he could continue to delude the visiting Gustafsons into thinking that he had his finger on the pulse of Horizon House’s operations, and rose to join them. She knew perfectly well why Haddon had asked her to come along. He was afraid the officers might ask him something he didn’t know the answer to—which covered one hell of a lot of ground—and he wanted TJ, who took her administrative role as assistant director seriously, at his side to bail him out.

Well, fine. Anything was better than sitting alone in a room with him, trying to explain item after item, none of which he knew anything about, but on all of which he was maddeningly ready to lecture her at mind-numbing length.

“You’ve found something, then?” Haddon asked the major as the four of them followed the network of flower-bordered gravel pathways to the storage enclosure.

But Major Saleh wasn’t there to answer questions. “This area, it has not been used in how long?”

“Five years,” Haddon said. “That’s correct, isn’t it, Dr. Baroff?”

“Right, everything in it was ruined in those colossal rains.”

Saleh nodded his remembrance. With Upper Egypt averaging a fraction of an inch of rain a year, no one who lived there would be likely to forget the eighteen-hour deluge that had dropped more rain in a single day than most of them would see for the rest of their lives.

“So we built a new, roofed storage area onto the garage,” TJ went on, “and haven’t used the old one since. Well, for a while it was a sort of dump for things, but not anymore.”

“You know,” Haddon said, “we really should clean the place out and knock it down. It’s disgusting. Breeding area for rats and all sorts of disagreeable things. I had no idea.”

TJ gritted her teeth and glared at him. How many times had she told that to Haddon in the last five years? Ten? Twenty?

“Dr. Haddon—” she began, but clamped her mouth shut. Not in front of strangers. Not in front of anybody. She had borne him all these years without ever once becoming really, thoroughly unglued, and she could make it through to the following September. In less than a year he would be retired, with any luck at all they would appoint her director, and it would be a bright new world.

Of course she’d be a nut case by then, but nobody but she was going to know it.

Once in the enclosure, the policemen led them to the skull, which had been turned from its upside-down position onto its right side. “Please examine it for yourself,” Saleh said. He stood aside to give them room.