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The Park in Houston Center was a recently completed shopping mall and the last building in the first phase of a proposed thirty-three block complex of office towers, trade centers, and inner city domiciles located on the southern edge of downtown. Houston Center was a joint venture project that had been initiated years earlier when excitable men of influence thought oil was going to skyrocket to a thou sand dollars a barrel and stay there, and the Houston power brokers dreamed of the city’s downtown streets multiplying in an unbridled reaction of metrofission that would not stop until Lamar Street ended in the briny water of the Gulf of Mexico.
A few blocks to the northwest the skyscrapers that lined Smith, Louisiana, and Milam streets provided a majestic paragon of what the Houston Center developers had envisioned for themselves in the headier days of the oil wars. But just across the street on the southeastern side, where the remaining 90 percent of the mammoth project was yet to be built, a barren urban desert of vacant lots and derelict buildings stretched across to the Highway 59 elevated freeway, which marked the beginning of the western edge of the city’s sprawling and ill-defined Chinatown. This wasteland was a reminder of another kind: that oil was a capricious mistress and sometimes she made promises she would not keep.
The Park mall was an integral part of an office building, which was itself connected by skywalks—and the ubiquitous underground tunnel system—to a ten-block complex. The mall’s glass roof emerged from the taller side of the building and made a quarter turn downward into the roof of the smaller north side, creating an arching dome of glass that spanned Caroline Street and extended a block in either direction. It housed the usual collection of shops, restaurants, and fast food eateries designed to accommodate the hectic life of the people who worked in the surrounding towers and passed through the mall as they hurried along the skywalks and tunnels in the course of a day’s work.
Haydon stood outside Abercrombie & Fitch and looked down into the open well to the 3rd level. The morning sun streamed through the glass panels overhead and the vast emptiness of the mall was peaceful and pleasant. It would be another half hour before most of the stores opened, and Haydon watched the custodians moving along the deserted central esplanade below, pushing oil mops and cleaning trash cans. One of the men dropped the wooden handle of his mop on the brick floor, and the sound echoed up to Haydon clean and sharp before it died high above him against the glass canopy. Someone laughed far down the way toward the other end of the mall.
Haydon turned around and looked for the third time at the silent empty escalators and was amused to see Lapierre’s head rising over the treads, followed by his shoulders, torso, legs, and feet as he stepped off the tracks and walked toward Haydon.
“Good morning, Pete,” Haydon said.
“You been waiting long?” Lapierre asked apologetically. “I was a little early.”
“There was a wreck on the Loop. I was going to come around on Fifty-nine, but I had to get off and come through downtown.”
“No problem.” Haydon put his hands in his pockets and started moving away. “I’m supposed to meet him outside the Houston Trunk Factory on the next level. I want to be able to see him when he comes in.”
They walked slowly along the silent mall, looking down into the next floor with casual disinterest.
“Dean Warner was helpful,” Lapierre said, getting right to the point of the meeting without further preliminaries. “Essentially everything went down about like we heard from Langer and the office staff. Warner was still hot about it. He said that it was clear from his conversation with Langer that Powell was going to be someone special, and that Warner wasn’t going to have even a little control over him. And Powell’s personality made it worse. Warner said about a week after his talk with Langer he started looking for another job, interviewing during the day under the pretext of having to go somewhere on business.
“But he began to be curious about the way Powell was hired and then Langer’s hands off directive. He didn’t much believe the business about the joint effort with a California company. He called out there just like we did, got the same information. He still didn’t believe it, and just to satisfy his personal curiosity he began snooping in Powell’s office when he was out. As a result, Warner was able to view two tapes Powell was duplicating on two separate occasions.”
“That’s what he was doing? Duplicating video tapes?” Haydon asked.
“According to Warner, video tapes often need to go through some kind of enhancing process before they can be played back with clear signals. It’s just part of processing. Powell was taking his stuff through this process. He was also converting it from tape to film.”
Haydon nodded. They came to a modern sculpture of a cluster of vertical steel pipes painted in a spectrum of warm yellows, oranges, and reds that rose from the floor below and formed a series of graduated downward loops. The sculpture was called “The Big Tree.”
“Anyway,” Lapierre said, as both men paused and looked at the pipes, “Warner said he found out that if Powell was working on one of his ‘special projects’ during the day, he’d slip the tape into an unmarked box and hide it on the shelves among all the other tapes when he went out to get a bite to eat. Within the next two weeks, before Warner left, he located two of these tapes and played them when Powell wasn’t there. One was a jungle combat thing like Patricia Beamon said she’d seen, except it wasn’t Vietnam. The men in the tapes were Latin Americans. Warner said it was pretty rough. Whoever had taken the footage was practically sitting on the gun barrels. Some gruesome close up stuff. Mutilation of bodies, some grisly humor, I believe he said.” Lapierre paused. “I don’t really see a tree in that.” He was sincere; the abstraction didn’t evoke anything in him.
Haydon shook his head, and they moved away from the steel pipes and continued along the railing that overlooked the floor below.
“Warner said the second tape was an interrogation,” Lapierre continued. “Latin American militia stuff again. It was a brutal session, and the man being questioned was eventually killed. Warner went into some detail. It really rattled him. Said it reminded him of the snuff films he’d read about.”
“Could he tell anything about the soldiers other than that they were Latin Americans? He couldn’t distinguish anything on the uniforms?”
“I asked him that,” Lapierre said. “He said he just got the impression that it was current stuff. They were well equipped and had good quality uniforms. Said it looked up to date.”
They stopped outside a women’s dress shop and looked down to the 3rd floor again. They were above a waterfall created by another series of pipes that rose straight from the mall floor and then bent horizontally at different levels. Water streamed from holes in the bottom of the horizontal arm and fell in hundreds of individual pencil thin streams down to a bed of black fibrous material that prevented the water from splashing or making any noise. It was a silent, moving, transparent veil of water dividing one side of the mall from the other.
The corner entrance of the Houston Trunk Factory was on the other side of the water veil.
“So what did he do?” Haydon asked.
“Nothing. He said he thought about saying something to the police, but then he got to thinking there wasn’t anything wrong with having combat videos, and besides, he had other things to do, like find another job. So he blew it off.”
“Had Warner gotten along with Langer up to this point?”
“He said there hadn’t been any problems.”
“What was Langer’s attitude about giving privileges to Powell?
Was he adamant, nervous talking about it?”
“Warner said he was cool. Just let Powell do what he had to do and that was it.”
Haydon propped one foot on the metal railing and looked at the curtain of water. He didn’t like the way the tiny spindles of water fell into the fibrous material without making any noise. Across from them on the same level, a record store employee was sliding back the glass front of the store. The music that had been contained behind the glass spilled out into the mall, growing louder as the opening grew larger. Finally the lurching beat and hermaphroditic voice of Michael Jackson leveled off at ten decibels higher than it should have been, and Haydon saw a couple of businessmen hurry out of the McDonald’s on the third level carrying Styrofoam cups of coffee. Behind them they felt and heard the soft rumbling of another glass wall sliding back. The mall was coming alive.
“There he is,” Lapierre said calmly.
Haydon looked through the sheet of water and saw Bill Langer just inside the Houston Trunk Factory showing something to a clerk.
“Didn’t he play football for Rice?” Lapierre asked. Haydon nodded. “Defensive cornerback.”
“Was he any good?”
“Not good enough for anyone to remember him for it.”
“Oh.”
“Do me a favor,” Haydon said, straightening up from the railing. “Check out the residence of that Ricky Toy I called you and Mooney about yesterday. I want to talk to him, but I want to catch him by surprise. He lives with two Asian girls, and I don’t want them to tip him off that I’m looking for him. See if you can establish some kind of routine around there.”
“Okay,” Lapierre said. “I’ll get right on it.”
“I appreciate it,” Haydon said. “And thanks for the update. See you later.”
He walked past a jewelry store and another dress shop to the escalators and rode them down to a large open area filled with clusters of tables and chairs where people could sit down and eat their Chick-Fil A’s, American Hero sandwiches, McDonald’s hamburgers, Potato Works potatoes, Ari’s shish kabobs, Roman Delights, Chocolate Chip Cookie Company cookies, or whatever else they chose from the menagerie of catchy food establishments surrounding this end of the mall. He circled around a bank of plants and walked past the water veil into the Houston Trunk Factory.
Langer looked up when he came in the door, smiled winningly, and extended a massive hand.
“Hey, long time, huh, Stuart.”
He looked Haydon right in the eye like you’re supposed to do in the people business and then immediately used Haydon’s first name again, with familiarity, like you’re supposed to do in the people business.
“Listen, Stuart, this’ll just take a second, and then we’ll find some place to talk.”
Another big smile before he turned away and told the clerk that the briefcase would be just the right thing, except in the lighter shade of leather, and when that came in would they please send it over to his office. The clerk yessir-ed and Mr. Langer-ed him a couple of times, and they were through.
“If it’s okay with you,” Langer said as they walked out of the store, “we’ll go across to the lounge on the 3rd floor of the Four Seasons. It’s closed. We’ll have all the privacy we need.”
They turned down a corridor that led past a men’s clothing store and entered the skywalk that crossed over Lamar Street to the hotel. The morning sunlight hit them through the tinted glass.
“This is a hell of a way to get together again after all these years,” Langer said, walking briskly and looking down the length of the street as they passed over. “It’s really too bad. You looked in on Sean Siddons recently?”
“No. I saw Frank the other day, though. He said it’s not too good.”
“It’s pitiful. Sad.”
They came into the hotel and turned left to the lounge that overlooked the street and the skywalk they had just come through. The curtains were open, and a clear morning light brightened the dove gray upholstery of the furniture. Haydon followed Langer through the empty lounge to a second level tier and a table next to the windows.
“This all right?”
Haydon nodded and they sat down.
“How’s Nina?” Langer asked, pulling his chair into a comfortable position. He threw a look around the empty lounge.
“She’s fine,” Haydon said.
“That’s great,” Langer said. “Glad to hear it.” He didn’t take it any farther, but smiled a big warm smile that said he was happy for Stuart and for Nina. Haydon didn’t say anything, so Langer let his smile fade appropriately, knitted his brow sincerely, and said, “What does it look like at this point, Stuart? Have you made any headway on this thing for me?”
The sun was coming from Langer’s direction, and Haydon had to move his head to the side to keep it out of his eyes. He shifted his chair a little.
“I’m not working for you ‘on this thing,”‘ Haydon said. Langer’s knitted brow vanished.
“As a matter of fact,” Haydon added, “I’m beginning to believe you’re the major reason we haven’t gotten any farther than we have.” There was a moment when Haydon wasn’t sure how Langer was going to arrange his face, and therefore his response. It seemed that he first wanted to register shock, then decided against it in lieu of confusion, which he ultimately (and wisely) forfeited for a hard, even stare.
He didn’t say anything.
“You’re holding out on us,” Haydon said. “You’re the one who hired the man, ignoring established personnel procedures. You’re the one who gave him special privileges that contravened company policies. You’re the one who said Powell was working for you on a project no one else knew anything about.” Haydon stopped and looked down to the street. He sighed and looked again at Langer.
“It doesn’t sound good,” Langer said.
“No.”
Langer’s hard look gave way to something else, almost a flicker of amusement. “It seems odd, doesn’t it The two of us in this situation. Back then who could have ever imagined that something like this would happened—”
“We didn’t know each other that well,” Haydon said curtly. Langer looked at Haydon soberly. “Okay, Stuart. Straight talk, head on.”
For an instant Haydon didn’t see a hard driving executive but simply a big not too clever ex-jock, headed into an already disappointing middle age, and in trouble.
“I didn’t kill him,” Langer said. “I’ll admit I wanted to. I thought about it. But, by God, I didn’t do it.”