Spiral (17 page)

"Tomorrow I go in and work on the report. I'll have to do that before anything else. A lot of people have to have copies of the details." He sipped the gin. "I'll have to talk to the various men investigating the shooting."

"They'll put you at a desk?"

"For a while. They almost have to, until I've talked to the investigating teams at least."

"Then what?"

"Then it's up to Bob, Captain Mercer, and maybe the departmental psychologist as to when I can go back to my regular schedule."

"Is that the way it's always handled?"

"Yes." He knew what she was thinking. "The psychologist is routine in officer-related shootings. And especially in something like this ... with Mooney."

"When you go back, will it be on the same case?"

"I hope so."

"You want to continue with it?"

"Of course."

"How do you feel about the investigation itself?" Nina asked. "What do you think is happening?"

Haydon drank the last of the tall glass. His low tolerance for alcohol and Nina's strong mixture were working compatibly to sedate him. He was glad for a reason to give way to dissociation, glad for an excuse not to care so intensely.

"I don't know," he said. "But it's going to be complicated, and everyone realizes that now. I suspect it'll be a long, involved investigation, and what we can dig up during the next few days will be critical. A bad time to be deskbound."

"But can't you still work on it? Isn't there always a lot of paperwork? You don't have to be on the street to contribute to this."

"No," he said. "I don't have to be."

His eyes had adjusted to the darkness by now, and Haydon could see the shapes of the furniture in the dark. He could see the black slate mantel clock sitting on a bookshelf across from them, and could hear it ticking. The clock was old and not expensive, German works and French case. He had another old one in the library; both he kept because of the measured catching of their escapements. The sound of time circumscribed, and quantified. He lay awake only briefly with Nina in the crook of his arm before he slept. But it was a fool's sleep, throughout the night. Twice he found himself completely awake, sitting up in bed sweating, his heart crazily out of rhythm with his breathing. Nina was sitting beside him. She didn't speak. She didn't have to. After the second time, he got up and went into the bathroom and drank some water. He washed his face and looked at himself in the mirror. When he came back to bed he slept, but only fitfully, running in the murky borderlands of dream and hallucination. Again and again he suddenly was staggered by the deafening, blinding bursts of point-blank gunfire coming from the paling of black bamboo; over and over he was jolted by the awful grunting bawl of Mooney's dying astonishment.

CHAPTER 18

H
AYDON
sat on a wooden bench inside the open-air shower of the bathhouse and looked at the splinters of early-morning light breaking through the lime trees. He wore only his pajama pants and sandals. A cup of coffee sat on the bench beside him as he leaned over and fed a piece of breakfast ham to Cinco, who was lying on the bricks in front of him with his front paws crossed, chewing patiently. After the collie swallowed each piece, he looked at Haydon with his old watery eyes to see if there was more. When Haydon showed him the next piece, Cinco flopped his tail twice on the bricks and Haydon handed it over. The routine was unvarying until the ham was gone.

As Cinco sighed and slowly reclined on the bricks, Haydon sat back against the bathhouse wall and sipped the last of his coffee. The stone was cool on his naked shoulders. These few minutes in the new morning air with the birds gabbling and bickering at the feeders in the trees in front of the greenhouse were far more calming than the night had been. Knowing that Haydon needed to get downtown early, Nina had gotten up before him and had breakfast ready by the time he came down. They had eaten together in the sunroom, and then Haydon had come down to check on Cinco. The morning had restored sanity. Nina, and the morning.

She knew he had to go in to the office, yet she begged him to stay home, said no one could possibly expect him to be there. And in most circumstances, she would have been right. But Mooney's death had not been an isolated incident. Somehow it had played an integral part in the scheme of a larger investigation. No one but Haydon could provide the information the department needed. Only he and Mooney had talked to certain people, gathered certain information. Only he had made certain correlations. There was no way he could change that, no way he could shut his eyes to the responsibility.

He was on his way downtown before the worst of the traffic hit the streets. He wasn't looking forward to going back into the squad room, facing the awkward, even painful way in which the other detectives would want to tell him that they were sorry, that they understood how he felt, but wouldn't be able to because in the end men didn't know how to comfort men. He had seen it before, how they subdued their own emotions in deference to the survivor, to his struggle to comprehend why Death had brushed past him, and laid its hand on the next man instead.

If Haydon could have his way, he wouldn't speak to anyone for a month. He would retreat behind stone walls, withdraw behind silence. But he could not have his way in this, and rather than seeing no one, he would see everyone.

When he walked into the homicide division, it was six-thirty, half an hour before the day shift began. The place was relatively quiet. He walked straight to his office without looking left or right and flipped on the computer terminal. He avoided looking at Mooney's carrel as he removed his coat and hung it behind the door. Out of habit he started to go out and get a cup of coffee, but he checked the impulse and sat down at the screen.

He had been typing only ten or fifteen minutes when he heard Dystal say, "You get any sleep last night, Stu?"

Haydon swiveled his chair around to face the bulky lieutenant, who was leaning against the doorframe holding a steaming mug of coffee.

"It was all right," Haydon said. "How about you?"

"Got home late, got up early." He was freshly shaved and smelled of Mennen's aftershave. Sometime within the last couple of days he had gotten a new haircut. He looked squeaky-clean, the tips of his brown boots shiny from beneath the bottom of his brown suit pants. But his fresh appearance disguised the effects of a night that probably had yielded only a couple of hours' sleep. Haydon knew without asking that before going home last night, Dystal had made a grim trip to the morgue.

"I'm gonna set a meeting for the whole bunch of us at eight," Dystal said. "We got a lot of catching up to do. Since you're not going to have a complete report till later on, I'd appreciate it if you'd just get up and tell your story." Dystal sipped at the coffee tentatively, looking at Haydon for a reaction. "A to Z. Everybody's gonna want to know, and everybody needs to know. We got nearly thirty-five detectives on this shift who'll be locked into this thing till something breaks. This way you get it over with in one dose and all the guys'll get the facts they need. You do that?"

"Okay," Haydon said. Dystal was right. "Have you got a cigarette?"

Dystal pulled the white pack of generics out of his shirt pocket and shook one up for Haydon. He lit it with his chunky Zippo, which still snapped smartly when Dystal closed it despite being so old there were only traces of the nickel plating still left on the case. The bulldozer insignia welded to one side was nearly smooth from years of rubbing against pocket change. The cigarette was terrible, as Haydon knew it would be, but he inhaled deeply anyway.

"Thanks for calling Nina last night," he said.

"I didn't think she needed to be surprised by that," Dystal said. "It's tough."

What he really meant was, he'd wanted her to be prepared for whatever state of mind Haydon might be in when he got home.

Lapierre and Nunn came in together and said good morning. Since Lapierre had been put in charge of coordinating the two investigations, Dystal told him what he thought he wanted to do about having Haydon speak to the other detectives.

"That's good," Lapierre said, looking at Haydon with his calm, smoky eyes. "We need to put everything in perspective as soon as possible. Robert and I are working on a list of players, and their relationships. Stuart, if you'll look over the list in a minute we can have it duplicated in time to hand out at the meeting. Can you think of anything else we could give them?"

Haydon shook his head. "I'll try to have the report before I leave today." He heard the division room filling with the day-shift detectives. By now everyone had heard about Mooney, from other detectives or on the news, and the usual noise that took over in the mornings was decidedly subdued.

"Okay," Dystal said, straightening up. "I'm gonna get busy. I'll make the announcement over the intercom in a few minutes. See you in a little bit."

When he turned away, he pulled the office door halfway closed behind him.Without saying anything else, Lapierre and Nunn turned to their work as Haydon swiveled around and faced the computer terminal. For the next forty-five minutes he didn't stop working on the report except to go over the list that Lapierre had mentioned.

At eight o'clock, everyone filed into the meeting room. All the desk chairs were full, and a few stood or squatted on the floor against the walls. Dystal said some words about how the investigation would be conducted, and then turned it over to Haydon, who began relating the essentials of his and Mooney's activities from the previous morning until last night. He tried to anticipate questions by relating the sequence of events in considerable detail, as if he were reciting the report he would later type. The detectives listened quietly, and Haydon knew that each of them was following his story point by point, looking for the fatal mistakes that could have prevented Mooney's death. If he had been in their place he would have been doing the same thing, not as an indictment, but as a kind of self-test. If it had been them and their partners instead of Haydon and Mooney, would it have ended the same way? If chance was the only guilty party, which of them would have been talking this morning and which would have been in the morgue?

When Haydon was through, Dystal asked if there were questions, and when there were none Haydon sat down. Lapierre got up and started handing out copies of the list.

"The first thing I ought to tell you," Lapierre said, "is that we didn't get a hit on
any
of these names from the computers in our narcotics division, or from the DEA's computers. Well, that's not quite right. The chauffeur of the limousine had a couple of marijuana busts, but that's it. Some of us were betting on leads in that area, but we're not going to get them. That covers the DEA files in Mexico too. They just don't have any records of those names. Something may come up later, under aliases maybe, but as of now, nothing.

"However, the cache of literature we found last night in the house at the Belgrano address seems to be pointing us in another direction. The next thing we need to do is to get with the FBI records, and conduct a thorough search on radical right-wing political groups to determine if there are any connections here. The neofascist type of propaganda is familiar to us by now, but the difference in this instance is that it was all printed in Spanish, the target of the assassination is a Mexican national, and it's possible the shooters are also." Haydon sat through the next hour only half listening to Lapierre's measured and methodical briefing followed by assignments to the various teams of detectives. Although he was himself presenting a controlled, even detached, appearance, he resented the cultural practice that called upon them to react to Mooney's death with a businesslike demeanor. He was as guilty as the next man regarding this, and he knew that Mooney would have done the same. Death was a complicated event for the survivors. If there was a proper way to deal with it, he did not know it. Even in the most sophisticated societies, perhaps more so in sophisticated societies, death remained the single most confusing event in the human experience. The one true disappearing act for which there could never be an explanation, or any real understanding.

He had finished the report, been debriefed by the DA's investigators, by the detectives from internal affairs, and by the shooting-team investigators. Now he had gone across the squad room and was looking through the glass wall into Bob Dystal's office. Dystal was trying to get off the telephone, and motioned for Haydon to come in.

"Allrighty," Dystal was saying. "You bet. Uh-huh. You bet. Appreciate it. Talk to you later." He hung up the telephone and leaned back in his swivel chair in a kind of controlled stretch that made the chair creak and pop as if it were about to explode. "Sit down, Stu," he said, and he rubbed his face with his thick, chunky hands.

Haydon came in, closed the door behind him, and took the chair in front of Dystal's desk. He was tired, too. The day had been interminable.

"You've talked to the DA's people, and the others?"

Dystal nodded. "I don't think there's goin' to be any problems."

"How long?"

"A few days, I guess."

"At a desk?"