Mirror Maze j-4 Page 4

  "Frank… " Her smile was warm, her voice throaty and full of feeling.

  "It's been so long. I hope you don't mind meeting here." "Not at all,"

  Janek said. "It's good to see you, Sarah." Suddenly he felt gallant toward her. The bitterness he had harbored for so long faded rapidly in her presence, leaving him with a mellow, protective concern he had not felt toward her in years.

  When Josef came over to greet them, he kissed Sarah's hand. After he took their order and moved away, she giggled slightly. "I'm still a sucker for old-world manners," she said.

  She asked a lot of questions about people in the Department, detectives with whom they'd once socialized. Most of them were people Janek didn't see anymore and a few of them were dead. But Sarah chattered on about them as if the years had never passed.

  When she asked about his current cases, he responded cautiously. When she asked if he still attended pro-hockey games, he sensed she had something on her mind and was trying to warm him up before exposing it.

  He knew how to deal with that: keep shifting the topic to throw her timing off. So he sparred with her until halfway through the main course, when he suddenly realized he was treating her like an interrogee. Then he was annoyed with himself. He hadn't wanted the dinner to turn out this way. Lighten up, he told himself. Try and make it pleasant. But then it was too late; Sarah looked uncomfortable.

  "All right," she said, breaking in on him in the middle of a story,

  "there's something I want to discuss."

  He lowered his silverware. "Sure, there is. That's why you asked to meet." "I thought it would be nice to see you, Frank."

  "But it hasn't been all that nice, has it?"

  "I didn't say that. You make me a little nervous, that's all."

  "Sorry. I wanted this to go well.

  Anyway"-he looked at her-"what's on your mind?"

  She lowered her eyes. "I need more money."

  He stared at her blandly. "So do I."

  "I mean it, Frank. I can't keep up, not on what you send me.", "I don't follow that." He spoke carefully. "You have a full-time job. Plus I send you a monthly check. The amount was agreed to long ago. You can't come around now, years later, and expect to renegotiate."

  "Times change. Things are more expensive these days."

  "For everyone. Not just YOU."

  "Look, Frank-" "No, you look," he said. "You still going out with what's-his-name?"

  "That has nothing to do with-"

  "It has everything to do with it. You're going out with a professional man who earns a hell of a lot more than me. And he sleeps with you in a house I spent twenty years paying off so you'd always have a roof over your head."

  She bristled. "Guess what, Frank? The damn roof on that damn house leaks."

  "So, get it fixed."

  "They say it has to be replaced." "I'm sorry," he said. "It's your house now. Fix it up or sell it and move someplace else."

  She gazed at him. She made no attempt to conceal her disgust. "I had a feeling you'd say something like that. I was hoping you wouldn't."

  He laughed, fighting off the old bitterness. "Shameless as ever. You haven't changed."

  She stared at him, outraged. "What've I got to be ashamed about?"

  The transparency of your manipulations, he thought, but he didn't say it. Instead he shook his head. Then, in a tone as kind as he could manage: "Why don't you ask your rich boyfriend to help you out?"

  "I can't, that's all." Tears filled her eyes. "Oh, Frank don't you understand?"

  "Sure, I understand. You're in a relationship with another guy. I don't know why you two haven't gotten married-that's none of my business. But my responsibility to you ended long ago. The fact that I'm still paying alimony galls me no end."

  She lowered her voice, then mumbled as if to herself, ' suppose I could go to court, ask for a bigger allotment.

  "I wouldn't do that if I were you. Believe me, that would be a mistake."

  "I'm not threatening. It was just an idea."

  "When you talk about court I take it as a threat."

  "I'm only asking, Frank. If you can't do it, you can't." She smiled.

  "I don't want to be one of those wives we used to talk about. Remember?

  The ones who took their exes ' the cleaners'?"

  "You'll only be counted among them when you act like one of them." He signaled to the waiter. "How about some dessert?"

  "Please do one thing?" He stared at her, waiting to hear. "Think about it, that's all. Just think about it. Will you do that, Frank?"

  He swallowed. He could feel his resistance melting, but he couldn't help himself-he'd always been a sucker for a well-turned ankle. "Tell you what. I'll consider helping with the roof Get an estimate and let me know."

  She brightened. "That would be wonderful!"

  "I'm not promising anything."

  "I understand."

  "First let's see what kind of money we're talking about."

  "I'll call the contractor tomorrow."

  The waiter came over. They ordered pastries. Then their conversation mellowed. Again, he felt the similarity to an interrogation-how, after manipulating a source into giving him what he wanted, he always felt the need to smooth things over, descend from a summit of intensity and conflict to a plateau of amiable banter. But this time he hadn't gotten anything. Sarah had. So, what about himself, what role had he played in their little joust? Sucker? Dupe? He knew he'd been the one to lose control.

  After dinner they strolled through the Village, down quiet residential streets. It was a warm summer night, people were out, sitting on portable lawn chairs or lingering before their doors. On the stoop of one building a girl was playing a guitar; her friends, assembled on the steps, sat around her, listening.

  "How's Kit?" Sarah asked in a tone intended to sound nonchalant. Sarah had never been able to bring up Kit's name without pretending she was doing so casually.

  "Kit's fine," he said.

  "I hear she's sending you on a little trip." Janek stopped walking. "Who told you that?"

  "A little bird," Sarah said gaily.

  He was angered that word on his Cuba venture had gotten out. "Whoever told you broke security."

  "It was a cop's wife, someone you don't know. You don't know her husband, either."

  So, despite Kit's precautions, the Department was still a sieve. Janek wondered if Baldwin had leaked the story. He would certainly have passed the news to Dakin, then Dakin's crowd would have spread it fast.

  "It's that damn Mendoza thing, isn't it?" she asked. "I hate that case.

  I always did."

  He started walking. "I'm not all that crazy about it myself." "It ruined our marriage. I never told you that before, but that's really what I think."

  He looked at her. Was she serious? Didn't she understand that her selfishness had ruined it-her refusal to have children, her insistence on having abortions the two times she'd gotten pregnant, as if the presence of a child in the house would somehow demenish her, cause him to pamper her less, make her feel less like a princess? The greatest regret of his life, he knew, was that he had spent a dozen years with a woman who had insisted on a barren marriage, while all the time he had yearned for a son or daughter whom he could lavish with his love.

  "Mendoza is an unpleasant fact of life," he said. "My only interest in it is to put it to rest."

  "And Kit-is that her only interest?"

  He stopped again. "What are you getting at?"

  She turned to him. "Just raising a point. Everyone in the cops has his own agenda. I learned that from you long ago. I was just wondering if maybe Kit had one. Like why, now that everyone's forgotten about Mendoza, does she want you to go back and beat on it again?"

  "Our honor's at stake." Sarah laughed. "Is that what she says?"

  God, you're impossible! "Why do you care, Sarah? What's it to you?"

  "Oh, I care, Frank," Sarah said softly. "I care because I hate to see you waste your time on som
ething that can only bring you grief." She paused. "Mendoza is a tar pit. Everybody knows it. Everyone, that is… except maybe you.

  Lies amp; Consequences Early on a Sunday morning in September, the day before Labor Day, Janek flew naked"-without shield or gun to Mexico City. Besides his toilet articles and a week's worth of clothing, he carried a microcassette recorder, a half dozen cassettes, a photocopy of his police ID, an ink pad, a blank fingerprint form, and a small 35-mm camera, loaded with color film, which a detective in the Forensics Division had assured him could be operated by an idiot.

  On takeoff, Manhattan looked spectacular, silver towers reflecting golden light. It also looked clean and still. Staring down at the city as the plane rose in a graceful arc, Janek felt grateful to be off its torrid, squalid streets.

  He had never met Howard Clury, but he believed he knew the type: a detective who could have chosen to become a criminal. In fact, in performance of his duty, a criminal was, essentially, what Clury had been.

  In photographs, he even looked a little like a hood, at least a movie version of one. He had a hulking, bullish body, his neck was thick and his cheeks were heavily scarred. Most troubling to Janek were Clury's eyes. He searched them for signs of vulnerability, but could find nothing but slits in a mask.

  Clury had had an exemplary record. He was a loner, specializing in undercover work, with lots of acquaintances but no real friends in the Department. He had been married to a younger and, by all accounts, pretty woman named Janet, who, he told people, had deserted him for another man. He lived alone in the one-story tract house they had shared, in a middle-class suburb on Long Island. His only extravagance was the baby-blue Cadillac he parked conspicuously in his driveway near his door.

  For the first few days after he was killed, no one made a connection between the blown-up undercover cop on Long Island and the beaten-to-death society woman in Chelsea. NYPD investigators, working with Nassau County police, were convinced that Clury, engaged in a dangerous narcotics investigation, had been found out and executed by the ring he had penetrated as an agent.

  There were reasons to believe this: His car was wired professionally; the people he'd been dealing with were ruthless; by blowing him up so spectacularly, they made him an example. But when these same investigators, searching Clury's house, uncovered his cache of photos of the Mendozas, a new police theory was instantly born: Clury was blackmailing the Mendozas; Jake Mendoza had paid to have him killed and at the same time arranged the murder of his wife.

  On the plus side of this theory were two linking facts: Cluly, who moonlit as a private investigator, had been hired by Jake Mendoza the year before to collect compromising information about an opponent in a business deal; second, an examination of the victims' financial records showed recent cash withdrawals from an account controlled by Edith that matched perfectly with recent cash deposits by Clury.

  But there were many unanswered questions: How did Clury come into possession of the compromising photographs? Why did Mendoza want his wife dead? Why, if Clury was engaged in blackmail, did he bank the money and thus provide a paper trail for the police and the IRS?

  Finally, if the killings were linked, why were they so dissimilar-in Clury's case, quick and clean; in Edith's, slow and painful?

  It was Timmy Sheehan's focus on these questions that caused him to regard Tania Figueras's disappearance as a relatively inconsequential tangent to the investigation.

  The air over Mexico City was neither clean nor clear. On the descent, Janek craned to view the sprawl but caught only quick glimpses through a canopy of haze. On the ground, he collected his bags, passed customs, then made his way through the mob that thronged the terminal. After a chaotic scene at the Cuban Airlines counter, he boarded his plane for Havana.

  After being boarded, the aircraft taxied to one side of the field and sat there, sputtering, for an hour and a half. Every once in a while the engines would rev, and then, failing to catch, would subside. There was a loud electrical hum, the air grew stifling. Passengers began to sweat and curse. A pair of stout stewardesses passed out pieces of hard brown candy. Janek noted that the bins above the seats, stuffed with baggage, were not secured by doors or even rope.

  Finally, with an ear-splitting roar, the plane attacked the runway.

  Shaking violently, it surged up through the smog. Janek looked down, saw nothing, closed his eyes. He wanted to rest. He wanted to be fresh when he reached Cuba. He conjured the familiar features of Tania Figueras, and then the stories about her that Timmy Sheehan's task force detectives had uncovered-the pretty Hispanic girl who lived in the Mendozas' apartment, cooked, cleaned, attended Edith Mendoza as a personal maid, and also brokered the couple's trysts.

  It was the boxers who identified her. Timmy's people traced the muscular black participant in Clury's photos to Pinelli's Gymnasium, which was three blocks from Jake and Edith's Chelsea studio. Pinelli's was not a Yuppie health club; it was a serious liniment-and-leather gym catering to boxers, pro and amateur.

  The black man's name was Carl Washington. He was quick to spill his story. Yes, he told the detectives, he had been hired on a number of occasions to play games with the Mendozas. Specifically, he was instructed to arrive, sweaty and bleeding from a workout, tie up the gentleman and make rough love to the lady, for which labor he was paid excellent money. He also received the expressed gratitude of both Mendozas, who, he assured his interrogators, always enjoyed their mutual encounters.

  But there was more. According to Washington, he was not the only one who had performed such services. Several other regulars at Pinelli's had also played: Cash Royalton, a cruiserweight contender; Rudolfo Pefia;

  Gus "the Animal" Metaxas; and a tough, young, promising white welterweight named Tate. The meetings, Washington said, were always set up by the pretty Cuban girl named Tania. Tania would arrive at the gym, call the chosen fighter aside, outline the desired scenario, then hand him the key to the studio and the cash fee. Sometimes, when one of the guys performed particularly well, Tania would return to pay a bonus.

  Why did Tania disappear only hours after Edith Mendoza was killed? What did she know? Had she been involved? Since the med examiner concluded that Edith had been severely beaten by human fists, and since Washington, Royalton, Pefia, Metaxas and Tate all named Tania as the broker of their deals, it was logical to assume that Tania had also played a role in setting up her employer's final assignation.

  That had been the premise behind Janek's search nine years before-a search that had taken him, photo of Tania in hand, into bodegas and santerfa parlors throughout the city. He had checked airline manifests, immigration lists, Social Security computer printouts; had spoken to priests, taxi drivers, building superintendents, Cuban-American leaders in New Jersey, Miami and Los Angeles. Did anyone know the girl? Had anyone seen her? And the longer and more thoroughly he searched, the more worried and suspicious he became. Tania Figueras, as far as he could tell, had disappeared off the face of the earth.

  Cuban airport formalities were lenient. A female immigration inspector in a tight, unironed khaki uniform asked Janek the purpose of his visit.

  Tourism, he said. And what was Sen6r Janek's profession. Labor organizer, he replied.

  The wait for baggage was interminable. The sky was dark by the time Janek wandered out of the terminal. In the line for transportation into the city, he and a Mexican businessman agreed to share a dollars-only tourist taxi. They didn't talk much on the way. Janek peered out the window at the dimly lit streets. He saw palms, lots of bicyclists, very few cars. In the distance he could see stark high rises, but the buildings along the road struck him as bedraggled. There was a muted smell of rot, night-blooming plants and decaying vegetation-the rich, soothing aroma of the tropics. At intersections he observed small congregations of teenage males. At several points along the route people waited with weary expressions in roadside shelters.

  "Thirty years of socialism," his Mexican companion commented, "and they still have no
thing here. Nada."

  After Janek checked into the Habana Libre, where the ragged towels still bore the old Hilton crest, he went out to walk on La Rampa. There were crowds on the wide avenue, not moving in any direction, just milling about. A light breeze was blowing off the bay. The odor of malfunctioning sewers scented the air. A grandiose movie palace with an unpainted facade was playing the Spanish language version of Gone With the Wind. Janek was able to read the title on the marquee even though half the letters were missing.

  Following the flow of people, he found himself drawn into a small park.

  Here he discovered an impromptu rumba band entertaining people waiting for service at the under staffed counters of an enormous ice cream parlor named Coppelia.

  Occasionally people stared at him. His clothes, he realized, gave him away. He was a Yankee, a gringo, citizen of the country that had blockaded Cuba for three decades. But the people who stared did not regard him with anger. They seemed more curious than hostile, he thought.

  He was approached several times by men offering to exchange pesos for dollars and twice by sultry young women, wearing tight tanktops and sporting flashy watches, who asked if he needed an escort. After he shook his head, a male youth approached, offering discounted Monte Cristo cigars. Janek shook his head again, then walked back to his hotel. The lobby was swarming with young people, expressions blank, milling or sitting, waiting for something to happen. The dollars-only shops were deserted. He thought: This is not a happy place.

  He had bought a package tour through a Mexican travel agency. For six hundred dollars he got round-trip air transportation from Mexico City, five nights at the Habana Libre, breakfast and a second meal of his choice for four days, a bus tour of old Havana, an optional visit to the Hemingway Museum, and one admission to the floor show plus a prepaid champagne cocktail at the "world famous" Tropicana Nightclub.