Mirror Maze j-4 Read online

"Mendoza. It's haunted us the way the Dreyfus Affair haunted the French army. It's made us question our honor. That's why we've got to get to the bottom of it, Frank."

  She seemed to sigh then, a sound he couldn't remember hearing her make before. He looked at her. She was huddled, eyes closed, against the passenger door, head crooked between the window and the seat. Turning back to the parkway, his brain flashing with memories of the labyrinth everyone now called, simply, "Mendoza," Janek was inclined to give out a sigh himself.

  The crime-scene photos had been horrific, even to cops who thought they'd seen it all: shots taken from various angles of the body of Edith Mendoza, naked, gagged, wrists cuffed, feet tied together with rope, then suspended upside down from a hook implanted in the ceiling of the doubleheight mirror-lined studio apartment in Chelsea that she and her husband had kept for fun and games.

  There was one shot in particular that Janek remembered. The photographer would have had to have taken it on his belly. Janek could still recall the way Edith's finely sculpted features filled the frame, the way her thick dark hair hung loosely, barely scraping the polished floor. What was memorable was the tranquillity of her features, the lack of any expression of anguish, the repose. Her face had been the only part of her that had not been bruised. Her torso, beaten mercilessly by her killer, had home terrifying- marks.

  C, The moment they reached Hunts Point, Kit came awake. They passed men tossing food crates off the backs of trucks, Korean shopkeepers bargaining with Italian wholesalers, piles of eggplants and tomatoes, carrots and onions, multiplying wildly in the huge main selling hall.

  Kit guided Janek to a diner just behind. Teamsters, who'd driven produce in from Long Island and New Jersey, crowded the counter demanding coffee.

  "My cousin's place," Kit explained as she nudged him toward a booth.

  Janek smiled. He knew that Kit, who always seemed to enjoy telling him how lonely she was and how she spent most holidays at home watching sports events and sipping ouzo, was actually a member of a vast extended Greek-American family that owned coffee shops all over the city.

  "I didn't like Baldwin's coffee," she said when they were seated. "And I didn't think much of his spread."

  "He'll take it home and feed it to his kids for breakfast," Janek said.

  "It'll give them bad breath. Later at school they won't understand when the other kids turn away."

  Kit laughed. "You've got everyone figured out, don't you, Frank?" "Not everyone," he said. "Not you."

  She stared at him, blinked.

  "Hi, Chief!" A handsome young waiter with a Greek accent took their breakfast orders, then moved away.

  "My nephew," Kit explained.

  "I know what you're thinking," Janek said. Kit looked at him curiously.

  "You want me to interview Tania. I'm wondering how you think I'm going to do it."

  "Only one way I can think of," Kit said. "Fly down to Cuba and knock on her door."

  "You're kidding!"

  "Uh-uh, not kidding, Frank. There's no extradition, no cooperation, but there's nothing to stop you going down there as a tourist."

  "Sure. Without my badge, without my gun."

  "What do you need them for? You're just going to talk to the woman.

  It's perfectly legal to go. There're charters out of Miami-though I wouldn't advise taking one. Your best bet's Mexico. You don't want to attract attention by going as a cop, so you work up a cover identity under your own name, something they'd appreciate, something slightly socialist, like… labor organizer? Yeah, that sounds right. Then go to a tour operator and arrange a week's vacation. The Cubans are hungry for dollars. They'll show you a good time."

  "Then one afternoon I just slip out to the address." Janek pulled out his notebook, laid it on the table. "Ring the buzzer. Ask for Tania Figueras. Ask her if she'd like to fill me in on a few little matters that happened one night nine years ago."

  "Sounds good to me."

  "I don't believe this!"

  "Why not?" She eyed him sternly. "You know you're going to go. You knew it, same as me, soon as you heard where she was."

  Kit was right. But somehow he hadn't been able to picture himself playing detective in a country where he would have no authority, where, at best, he would be tolerate only because he carried hard currency.

  "We thought Tania was dead. Now it turns out she's been living this close for years. She has to know what's been going on. But she never came forward, never even wrote a letter. Why should she talk to me now?

  What's to stop her, soon as I identify myself, from slamming her door in my face?"

  "She may do that. She may even call the cops and have them heave you out. But can you think of any other way to handle it? Be honest, Frank.

  Can you really imagine yourself, now that you know where she is, shrugging the information off?"

  The waiter brought their food. Kit dug into her scrambled eggs. Janek sipped his coffee and watched her eat. How can she feel so ravenous?

  "No. I I "No-what?" she asked, not looking up.

  "No, I can't imagine that."

  "So-?"

  "So, I'll go." He paused. "Want to know why?" She nodded. "I'll go there for you-because you want me to."

  She looked up at him then, her tired face breaking into a grin.

  "You'll not only go, Frank. You'll bring back the goods." Her smiled turned truly beauteous. "I know you will."

  He spent the next several days in a small bare room off Central Files reviewing the Mendoza folders, scanning the documents, rereading the notes, trying to fill in the well remembered outlines of the case with its texture, smell what he thought of as its "buzz." Halfway through the material he was moved to pity. Mendoza was a cop's nightmare, and, for New York City cops, it was a great nightmare shared.

  The photographs told the initial story well. There was one, clipped out of an issue of New York magazine, that had appeared a year before the killings. It showed the Mendozas in happier days: short, chubby, balding Jake, the corporate-takeover genius, standing proudly beside Edith, his younger, taller, slimmer wife. Both Mendozas gazed at the camera. Jake wore his shy, dimpled, baby-face grin; Edith's smile was more restrained. What came through strongest was their confidence-"Look at us, we've made it big. Now we're reaping the harvest."

  The setting for this shot, the vast living room of their Central Park West apartment, was as interesting to Janek as the portraits. Polished floors, priceless antiques, radiant old-master paintings mounted on glazed and glowing walls-the artifacts spoke of wealth and striving, props in a room conceived of as a theater in which the elites of Manhattan mingled, and by so doing imbued their hosts with glamour.

  Jake and Edith had been involved with the great cultural institutions of the city-Metropolitan Museum of Art, Metropolitan Opera, New York Public Library, New York City Ballet. But there was a dark side unseen by their attractive society friends, bizarre scripted encounters enacted in another, smaller, less-glittering theater: the covertly rented, mirror-lined studio in Chelsea in which Edith Mendoza had been found hanging from a hook.

  There were photographs in the file of that apartment, too, showing the Mendozas at play with partners recruited from the lower depths. The pictures had been discovered in the suburban home of an undercover narcotics detective named Howard Clury a week after Clury, while starting up his Cadillac, had been blown to bits by a plastic explosive expertly wired to his accelerator. It was the discovery of Clury's cache, and -the coincidental timing of his execution (one day after Edith's), that pushed the case out of the category of "brutal society sex murder" into another, more esoteric realm of criminal phenomena.

  Janek inspected the Clury pictures closely. They had been taken with an extreme wide-angle lens so that everything in the Chelsea studio could be seen. The mirrors that lined the walls tripled the impact of the images. They showed Edith, bound naked to the bed with rope, being ravaged by a muscular black man (later identified as an aspirant boxer named Carl Washington),
while Jake, bound tightly to a chair, looked on with anguished eyes.

  But was Edith truly being violated? Or could her expression be characterized as ecstatic? Was Jake helpless and humiliated? Or was he simply fascinated? Janek compared one of the pictures from this series with the portrait in New York magazine. Except for their nakedness, the Mendozas looked the same. Jake's grin was just as broad. Edith's smile was similarly enigmatic. Their expressions projected the same smug sense of entitlement, perhaps tinged in the sex photos by an additional blush of almost otherworldly delight.

  After three days of studying the file, Janek arranged to meet his former partner, Timmy Sheehan, at a pub called O'Malley's on Second Avenue near Ninety-third. O'Malley's was a typical neighborhood Paddy bar, catering to a mix of bluecollar people, brassy local women and apartment-house doormen of Irish descent. It was not a cop hangout, which, Timmy said, was why he found it tolerable.

  When Janek arrived a little after six P. m., Timmy was waiting at the bar. Janek didn't spot him at first; the afternoon sunlight was so bright he was temporarily blinded when he walked in. But then, as his eyes adjusted, he made out Timmy's face-pink cheeks, squared-off chin, thick gray hair rising straight back from the forehead. Timmy was staring at him, waiting to be recognized. A TV, set above the bar, was carrying the local news.

  "Have I gotten that fat, Frank?" he asked as Janek approached.

  "Yeah, I think so. In the jowls," Janek said.

  They cuffed at one another, ordered beers, then moved to a booth in the dark back half of the room. There they chatted briefly about a former supervisor named Mcgavin who had shot himself the week before, after seven years' retirement, in Arizona.

  "Way I heard it," Timmy said, "he ate his Popsicle in a service-station rest room."

  "Leave a note?"

  Timmy shook his head. "He just sat down on the toilet. Then… ping!"

  Timmy formed his right hand into a pistol, pulled an imaginary trigger.

  "His wife, Jo-remember her, Frank?-she was out by the pump filling up the tank. When she heard the shot she knew what had happened. People at the station started going crazy, but Jo just stood there pumping gas till it ran down the side of the car."

  "Jesus!" No matter how many such stories Janek heard, he never became inured to them.

  "Mcgavin was always an inconsiderate bastard." Timmy squinted.

  "Anyway, Frank, what's on your mind?"

  Janek met Timmy's eyes. They were smart and quick. There had always been something cool about him, swift and cold behind the banter.

  "Heard the latest on Mendoza?"

  Timmy laughed. "Like what? He still hates my guts?"

  "We located the maid."

  Timmy nodded slowly. "That is news. What does she have to say?"

  "Haven't talked to her yet."

  "Then, I guess there is no ',' is there?"

  Janek had noticed Timmy tighten up at his mention of the maid. The tightening was barely perceptible and quickly covered by a smile.

  Mendoza was like that. It made everyone connected to it tense. The waves keep coming, he thought, the way they do when you throw a stone into a lake-concentric waves that keep widening until they disturb lives far removed from the original crime.

  "Tell me your version."

  "Oh, shit, Frank. Just read the file, why don't you?"

  "Been reading it. It's thick. And my part, looking for Tania, was a sideshow. What I remember, I guess like everyone, are the things that happened later on-the stuff with Dakin, the forged-evidence charges, the aftermath."

  "The important stuff."

  "Yeah, but I'm not going to talk to Tania Figueras about that. I'm going to talk to her about the Mendozas. I want to get a feel of what the case was like at the beginning, before you connected it to Clury, before anything."

  Timmy sat silent. He gazed at Janek, then suddenly stood up, walked into the men's room, emerged a couple of minutes later, walked over to the bar, brought back a second set of beers, sat down, groaned, looked at Janek with great forbearance and began to talk.

  "There was a call to nine-one-one. It came a little after seven P.m. A woman in Chelsea reported shrill screaming in a neighboring apartment.

  Couple of hours later a pair of patrolmen showed up. The dispatcher had billed it as a possible domestic disturbance. You know what they found Edith Mendoza, hanging upside down. I can have the squeal. 9 You were down in Dallas, working on… I can't remember now. "

  "Drug case. I was testifying."

  "Right. So anyway, I went over there with Jim Rankin, the only other guy in the squad room at the time. Neither of us ever saw a crime scene like it. It was a good-sized studio, about twenty-by-twenty, with lots of mirrors around and a double-story ceiling. There was this beautiful lady hanging from there, bruises all over her, track lights aimed down, floor lights aimed up, spotlighting her like she's in some kind of show. And she's even twirling a little, too, like the rope had been wound up, you know, like when they'll twirl someone in a circus.

  But there was one big difference. The lady was dead."

  "Wouldn't the rope have unwound by then-after so many hours?"

  "I guess. So maybe it just seemed that way. Maybe it was the air that moved her when we opened the door. I remember she was moving in a kind of circle. Counterclockwise, I think."

  "That's interesting," Janek said. "That's not in the file."

  "It wasn't really relevant."

  Janek nodded. "So then-?"

  Timmy shrugged. "I did what I was supposed to do."

  He described how he had contacted the med examiner, called in a Crime Scene squad, IDed the victim-standard procedure, everything by the book.

  A little before eleven, he and Rankin drove uptown to Mendoza's building, a block-wide Art Deco tower on Central Park West. Timmy called Jake Mendoza from the lobby. Mendoza, sounding groggy, complained that Timmy had woken him up. When Timmy asked if he could come upstairs, Jake demanded an explanation. When Timmy told him he couldn't go into it on the phone, Mendoza said fine, in that case it could wait till morning.

  Then he hung up.

  "Think about it, Frank-two cops call you middle of the night, tell you they got something important… and you hang up on them?" Timmy rolled his eyes. "We had to see him, so we went to work on the elevator man. We finally persuaded him to take us to the penthouse. We rang the buzzer and waited a long time. Finally Mendoza opened the door. He was wearing pajamas.

  "I didn't like him, not from the first. I thought he was a phony. His hair was mussed like he'd been sleeping, but the pajamas looked fresh to me. Anyway, when we told him about his wife, he gaped at us. Then, I swear, he grinned. Like we were putting him on, like it was, you know-hardy-har-har. But when Rankin showed him one of the Polaroids, he got serious real quick. He went into another room and called his lawyer.

  When he came out he said he'd been advised not to talk to us.

  Then he said he wanted to see the body.

  "We waited while he dressed, then took him downtown. And we were very careful, Frank. We didn't say a word to him in the car. I watched him.

  There was something about him. He sat very still and there was this smell coming off him, like bad fumes, you know, something like that.

  Actually, it was some fancy men's fragrance he'd splashed on himself, but it was going bad… like something was eating him up inside and turning that fragrance to shit. That's when I knew he was behind it.

  "His lawyer was waiting for us at the morgue, a tweedy, WASPY type named Andrews. They huddled, then Andrews motioned us aside. Mendoza had been at his office until nine o'clock, he told us, working on a deal since noon with lunch and dinner delivered in. Andrews gave us names of people on Mendoza's staff who would verify Mendoza hadn't left the entire time.

  When he came home and Mrs. Mendoza wasn't there, he'd assumed she was out seeing friends. He didn't know anything about the Chelsea studio. He had no idea what his wife was doing there. Finally Andrews said Mend
oza was too upset to talk, but in a couple of days, after the shock wore off, he'd probably be willing to sit down. Now, did we have any problems with that?" Timmy laughed. "Oh, sure we did.

  But we didn't say anything. That was it. End of discussion."

  "What about the maid?" Janek looked at Timmy. No sign of tightening this time. Two men, who'd been arguing about baseball at the bar, inexplicably burst into song. Timmy glanced at them, then back at Janek.

  "We found out about her the following day. The night doorman filled us in. Around nine o'clock, about the time the patrolmen got to the studio, Tania Figueras came down to the lobby of the Central Park West building with a suitcase, told the doorman she was leaving the Mendozas' employ, got into a taxi and drove off. The doorman said she looked terrified. We were too busy to look for her, but when you came back from Dallas I put you on her."

  "And I never came up with anything. She disappeared."

  "Right. But by that time she didn't matter all that much." Timmy sat back in the booth and smiled. "By that time the case was getting complicated. Because once we got Clury factored in, we knew we had a double… Two nights before Janek was due to fly to Mexico City, he met his ex-wife, Sarah, for dinner. Their meeting, arranged at Sarah's request, took place in a small family-run Czech restaurant called Praha on West Thirteenth in Greenwich Village.

  Praha had been a favorite dining place during the years when they'd been married. Personal attention by the staff and the friendly gemdtlichkeit atmosphere made it an ideal spot to celebrate promotions and anniversaries. Janek still went there; the owner, Josef Jellef, had been a friend of his father's. At first he was surprised when Sarah had suggested it, but as the evening approached, he became concerned.

  Suppose she wants to meet there to stir up nostalgia for years I'd just as soon forget?

  She was seated when he arrived. Josef had put her at his best table, visible through the front window. Pausing out on the sidewalk to observe her through the glass, Janek tried to imagine how she would appear to a stranger glancing in: a svelte, well-groomed woman in her forties with intelligent eyes and a well-modeled face. But would it occur to this stranger that the handsome woman he was looking at had once been the wife of a cop? Janek didn't think so. Sarah looked more like an attorney's wife, privileged, perhaps even spoiled. There could be, he knew, something attractive, even sexy, about such a woman-a woman, like Sarah, who knew exactly what she wanted.