Mirror Maze j-4 Read online

  She removed his wallet from his fallen pants and emptied out all his pockets. She took the cash (more than four hundred dollars.

  Surprise!), but left the credit cards and IDs arranged neatly on the cocktail table. The point, as Diana had always taught, was to rob the mark, not enrage him. She also removed his watch. It wasn't anything special, but it was part of the game that he be deprived of his way of marking time. Then, when she had finished searching his person, she began a methodical search of the apartment.

  It took her five minutes to discover that everything of interest was concentrated in the bedroom. The front closets and drawers were virtually empty. The bedroom, however, offered all sorts of treasures: a pair of gold Cartier cuff links, a Krugerrand, a gold pocket watch (probably his grandfather's) and, in the bottom of a drawer filled with hand-ironed shirts, a worn air-mail envelope containing various denominations of foreign currency and five one-hundred-dollar bills.

  All of this she took. She discovered and rapidly rearranged a good deal more. There was a trove of personal letters which she laid out, like cards dealt for solitaire, neatly on the living-room floor. And a collection of photographs which she separated and then propped up in various places around the apartment-on top of the bureau, on the bedside tables and along the windowsills.

  She uncovered a small cache of ho-hum sex toys-a pack of condoms, a vibrator with attachments and a pair of domino masks. She partially superimposed the masks in the middle of the bed, to suggest classic symbols of comedy and tragedy, then unraveled the condoms and arranged them symmetrically so that they radiated from the masks like rays of the sun. Finally, she completed the work by circling the masks and condoms with the vibrator cord. Then she stepped back and squinted at her design.

  It was fine as far as it went, she thought, but not, she decided, sufficiently bizarre. Feeling it could use a little more embellishment, she looked around the room and then, recalling a tangle of jockstraps she'd seen in one of the drawers, thought of a way to have some fun. She withdrew a pair of surgical scissors from her purse, retrieved the jocks, snipped off the fronts of the pouches, then added them to the bed display.

  Pausing, she thought of inflicting similar damage on all his trousers and undershorts. But that, she decided, would take too much time and demonstrate too much hostility. She felt that in Roger's case she would make a deeper impression if she showed a certain elegant restraint.

  But there was one final assault upon his dignity that she would not resist. The "inscribing," Diana called it. All of Diana's girls were instructed to do it and were tutored in its importance. Yet Gelsey's particular manner of inscription was unique. She employed it always.

  It sent a message to the mark, and, at the same time, doubled as her signature.

  She hurried back to the living room. Roger was still snoring. She knew from her experience with various dosages that he would remain unconscious for at least ten hours. Now it was necessary to place him on his back. She lifted his legs, still bound by his dropped pants, pulled them around ninety degrees, then laid him out full-length on the couch.

  Then she bent down, unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it open so that his upper chest was exposed.

  Indelible black marker in hand, she straddled him like an equestrienne and began to write in script upon his flesh. When she was finished she smiled at her handiwork. To an ordinary viewer it would appear an incoherent scrawl. But she could read it easily. And so would Roger, when, awakening, he stumbled into his bathroom and examined his groggy features in the mirror. Then the message she had written on his chest would leap out at him with diabolic force. And the fact that she had inscribed it as one long word in mirror-reverse would haunt him far longer than her robbery:

  Down in the apartment-house lobby, she paused before the mirror between the elevators. Pretending to smooth her hair, she willed herself egress from the glass. Her dream sister stared back at her, and then, in an instant, disappeared. Now she was once again herself.

  Smiling sweetly at the doorman, she strode out into the open air. It was two A.m. The rain had stopped. The sidewalk was still wet. The air smelled faintly of iron.

  She walked the four blocks to her car, got in, then drove leisurely along the empty avenue. At an intersection, when she stopped for a red light, a homeless man approached with a squeegee. She nodded encouragement when he began to wash her windshield; before the light changed, she handed him a twenty-dollar bill.

  As she entered the tunnel she did not think about what she had done.

  Rather, she reveled in feelings of purification and release. The events of the evening seemed like a dream, not surprising since it was her dream-sister who had engaged in them. Still, the gratification engendered by the acts of violation now belonged to her.

  Forty minutes later, approaching Richmond Park, she pulled off her blond wig and glanced at herself in her rearview mirror. This time it was her true image that stared back.

  A Small House in Queens Not much of a place, Janek thought as he pulled in front of the house and parked. It was just an ordinary little house on a modest residential street that ran parallel to the Van Wyck Expressway, one of a thousand "starter houses" he'd passed countless times on his way out to Kennedy Airport from Manhattan.

  It was two A. M., a humid August night, with a scorching wind blowing in from the south. Street lamps burned sulfurous in the gray-black haze.

  Janek, sweating, sat in his car in front of the house, listening for the sound of shots. He didn't hear any, but wouldn't have been surprised if he had. It was summer, the season of random gunfire, bullets discharged in rancor, piercing windows, killing babies in their cribs and grandmothers waiting to cross dusty, savage streets. All that summer, it seemed to Janek, the city had teetered on the edge of a breakdown.

  He glanced at himself in his rearview mirror. There were bags under his eyes, but his features, he was pleased to see, were still intact.

  Forty-four years old and I can maybe pass for forty-eight. But what about ten years from now? Will I end up with a turkey gobbler neck and one of those old cop faces that remind me of a shattered piece of safety glass?

  He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, stuffed it back into his pocket, then stepped out of his car. The house, he saw, was covered with some sort of synthetic siding made to look like roughly finished stone.

  The tiny front yard was enclosed by a chain-link fence, high enough to imprison a dog.

  Janek unlatched the gate, entered and carefully closed it behind him.

  Three narrow brick steps led to a front stoop defined by a surprisingly delicate iron railing. From there he looked back at the street. There was a small wooden structure set out by the curb to hold garbage cans.

  Except, Janek knew, there'd never be any garbage in front of this house; if someone were in residence, the garbage would be hauled off in a van with blacked-out windows.

  He wiped his forehead again and pressed the buzzer. A moment later the door opened and he was staring into Baldwin's chilly little eyes. The balding borough commander, wearing baggy shorts and a gray police T-shirt, looked different than in uniform-smaller and much more ordinary.

  "Frank-" "Harry," Janek said.

  "Kit's here. She's waiting for you."

  Baldwin, who was standing too close, stared at him for a moment, then stepped aside. As Janek crossed into the narrow front hall, he smelled deli food on Baldwin's breath.

  "That you, Frank?"

  Janek followed Kit's. voice into a small living room where a bare bulb illuminated functional secondhand furniture. There he found her, reclining in a maroon lounge chair, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup.

  A short, dark, intense woman with sharp Greek features and burning eyes, Kit Kopta was chief of detectives of the city of New York.

  Janek crossed to her, bent and kissed her cheek.

  "Just you, me and Baldwin?" he asked.

  "The others are with the prisoner." Kit raised her eyes to the ceiling.

 
; A prisoner upstairs. Made sense. This was a police safe house. But the presence of the C of D and the borough commander suggested a prisoner of more than ordinary stature.

  "Get yourself some coffee, Frank." She gestured toward the kitchenette.

  When Janek walked in he found Baldwin hunched over the counter, making himself a corned beef sandwich. There was a sweat line on the back of his T-shirt. Janek noticed the flab on his biceps.

  "Been a while, Frank," Baldwin said.

  "Yeah, about a year, I guess." Janek filled his cup. Beside the pot on the stove, there was a spread of deli meats, sliced bread and Danish laid out on the counter, an open jar of mustard and a neat pile of napkins and paper plates.

  "Big one, huh?"

  Janek nodded knowledgeably and returned to the living room. Kit was dozing. When she heard him, she opened her eyes.

  "Baldwin says this is a big one," Janek said.

  "Could be."

  "Am I supposed to guess?" Kit smiled, a warm, dazzling smile that took him back nearly twenty years-to the time when they'd been young detectives, heady on each other and the job. Their affair had lasted three months. They'd been close friends ever since.

  "We got a guy upstairs says his sister was Mendoza's maid."

  Mendoza. Of course. The case had haunted him for the better part of a decade. Mendoza's maid had been the missing witness. Janek had been assigned to find her. He never had. :'Jesus," he said. "Does this thing never stop?"

  "Maybe now it will. You see why we called you, Frank?"

  Sure, I see. Who the hell else would she call?

  There wasn't much of a story, at least not so far. The prisoner, one Angel Figueras, had been apprehended by an alert patrolman the previous evening, emerging through the back door of a mom-and-pop jewelry store on Queens Boulevard, pockets stuffed with watches and engagement rings.

  Figueras was arrested, booked and awaiting arraignment when he asked to see a criminal defense attorney named Netti Rampersad. "She's upstairs with him now," Kit said.

  "Rampersad. Never heard of her. Is the name for real?" Kit smiled. "It's real and she's a powerhouse. Anyway, they had a little conference, Rampersad went to see the D. A., and now here we are, about to make a deal.

  "He locates his sister-we let him off."

  "That's about it," Kit confirmed. "He especially requested you, Frank.

  You're the one he wants to tell it to."

  "He knows me?" Janek was surprised.

  "Seems that way. Meantime his story checks out. He's Tania's brother and he swears he can give you her address. All we gotta do is give up a small-time safe cracker for a shot at a woman we've been wanting to talk to for nine years. Not a bad deal, seems to me."

  "No guarantee she'll talk to us."

  "No. But we know you'll give it your best shot." Kit smiled at him again, her gorgeous smile. "Don't we, Frank?"

  They went upstairs. Baldwin didn't join them, just grinned at them, jaws masticating meat.

  "What's he doing here?" Janek whispered when they reached the upstairs hall.

  "Harry? Well, it's his safe house." Kit lowered her voice. "Also… he's Dakin's friend."

  "Looking out for Dakin's interests?"

  Netti shrugged. "A case like Mendoza-who knows?"

  Four of them were sitting on plastic chairs around a card table in what Janek took to be the master bedroom. There was a stained rust-colored shag rug on the floor. Figueras, a short, lean, hard-bodied, mustachioed Hispanic in a soiled tanktop, looked fairly relaxed considering he was handcuffed. There was a slicked-down young A. D.A. named Gabelli, who wore his sleeves rolled up Manhattan district attorney-style; Detective Sergeant Tommy Shandy, who guarded the portals to Kit's office; and Netti Rampersad, clearly the dominant personality in the room.

  Janek studied her. She looked to be in her early thirties, a tall attractive woman in tight jeans, with a lush mane of red-blond hair and a galaxy of freckles on her upper chest, exposed by a scoop-neck blouse that looked like it had cost a lot of money. There was a glow on the lady, too, a glow Janek had observed on certain female attorneys when they thought they had a group of men by the balls. Evidently Ms.

  Rampersad thought she had the assembled males exactly that way tonight.

  "Tony and I've worked it out," Rampersad said to Kit. "No typewriter, so we wrote it up by hand."

  She handed Kit a handwritten document. Gabelli turned to Kit at the same time.

  "Sure you want to do this, Chief?"

  "Why shouldn't I?"

  "I'd prefer to see him plead, do a deal on the sentencing. "

  "We've gone over that, Tony." Rampersad stared at Gabelli, not bothering to conceal her annoyance. "No plea, no felony on the books.

  That's the only way he's going to talk." She turned to Kit. "Take it or leave it, Chief." "We'll take it," Kit said.

  "I thought so. Now all you've gotta do is sign… Later, alone with Figueras in the smaller bedroom, Janek asked him if they'd ever met.

  "No, sir. But I know your name. My sister said, ', Angel, the cops pick you up, I'm your ticket out of trouble. Ask for Lieutenant Janek. Tell him where I am." That was her good-bye present, see."

  "She went away?"

  Figueras nodded. "She went back to Cuba, Lieutenant. Now I give you her address."

  When Gabelli heard, he turned on Rampersad. "Cuba! Fuck! You're trying to screw us, Netti!"

  "What?"

  "The deal's invalid."

  "Fuck you, Tony!"

  Janek glanced at Kit. She didn't look angry at all.

  "I didn't know where his sister was," Netti Rampersad said. "But it doesn't matter if she's in Timbuktu. The information's good, the deal's good." She turned to Kit. "Are you satisfied, Chief?"

  "Sure I am, Counselor."

  "Good. Now can we all go home?"

  Kit nodded to Tommy Shandy, who unlocked Angel's cuffs. The little Cuban shook his wrists and grinned.

  "I'll drive you," Netti Rampersad told him.

  "Drop me at the subway's okay," Angel said.

  While Angel retired to the bathroom to clean up, Janek followed Rampersad downstairs. She went into the kitchen, poured herself a cup of coffee. Janek joined her. She was still glowing.

  "Feeling victorious?"

  She raised her eyebrows. "Interesting situation, you have to admit."

  "I'd like to ask you something."

  "Sure." "Angel asked for you. Does he know you? You don't exactly strike me as a legal-aid type."

  "Oh?" She arched her eyebrows higher. "Fill me in, will you, Lieutenant?

  Exactly what type's that?"

  Janek shrugged. "14ollow eyes. Bitter mouth. Lots of yak about prosecutorial misconduct and infringed constitutional rights. " She smiled. "Go on."

  "Well, let's see." Janek scratched his head. "Polyester blouse.

  Ten-buck hairdo. Hmmm… way too many cigarettes. "

  She laughed. "Tell you the truth, Angel and I didn't meet until this morning."

  "Then, why-?" "His sister told him to request me. Just like she told him to ask for you." She paused. "I'm thinking I should go to work now on Mendoza's appeal." She met his eyes carefully, as if she wanted him to understand how strong and confident she felt. "How many lawyers do you think he's had?"

  Janek shrugged. "Three or four. They keep getting grungier." He looked at her. "Think the tide's turned?"

  "You never know, do you? But Angel's not lying. Everything he told you's true."

  "I have your word on that, Ms. Rampersad?"

  "Oh, sure," she said. "You have my word."

  Suddenly she was bored. She glanced at her watch. "Gotta go." She yelled roughly out to the hall: "Angel! Let's haul ass!" She turned back to Janek, stuck out her hand and then, to his amazement, addressed him in a mock Chinese accent: "Velly nice to meet yoo, I'm shoo."

  It was three-thirty by the time he left with Kit. She'd dismissed Tommy Shandy, who'd driven her in from Manhattan. Baldwin stayed behind to straighten u
p the safe house.

  Janek and Kit sat together in Janek's car, trying to decide where to go.

  It was the deadest hour of the morning, the favored time for shootouts between drugged-out thieves and trigger-happy clerks and therefore the most dangerous time to enter a twenty-four-hour convenience store. It was also the hour when desperate battered wives put bullets into their sleeping husbands' heads. Most of the bars had closed and most of the coffee shops hadn't yet opened. Kit suggested they drive to Hunts Point Market. She knew a place where they could get themselves a good breakfast there, she said.

  On the way to the Bronx they passed Shea Stadium, silent, looming, and for a moment Janek saw grandeur in it. Then, for no particular reason, he recalled a vacation he'd taken two years before, a late-summer camping trip to the Macneil River in Alaska.

  He and the woman he'd been in love with, a Germ@ n psychiatrist named Monika whom he'd met on vacation n Venice, had gone there to hike, fish and observe the wild brown bears. It was a glorious time. The wildflowers were in bloom, the sun had blazed, and at night the northern lights had glowed like jewels in the sky. In the mornings he'd gathered birch twigs to make a fire, mixed batter, flipped flapjacks, then served them to Monika from an old black skillet.

  She had told him she loved him. He had told her the same. But when they got back to civilization, the romance started going sour. Her life was in Europe-, his was in New York. Her friends were academics; his were cops. She had patients; he had snitches. She wanted to relieve people of torment; he strove for an ideal that he laughingly called justice. In the end, being adults, they acknowledged their incompatibility and agreed to part. They vowed to stay friends, and genuinely tried, but it had been nine months since either had written or called the other.

  "It's like the Dreyfus case," Kit said.

  Janek, reverie broken, turned to her. "What?"