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Haydon walked out the screen door of Alice Parnas’ little house with the sounds of her sobbing still pulling at him and blending with the screeching of the grackles until it was all mixed up in his mind. A mess. And he was convinced it was more of a mess than she had told him. He got into the car and drove away from Bayland Street, not paying any attention to where he was going. Just driving and thinking of the mess of it all.
He wasn’t surprised when he found himself getting deeper into the Latin neighborhoods, going under the North Freeway and into the streets between Little White Oak Bayou and Hollywood Cemetery, Holy Cross Cemetery. He drove like the people drove, slow, almost idling. It was nearly noon, the heat had burned away the morning shadows, and the small houses stood defenseless, letting the sun scorch them one more day, make tiny bubbles in the worn asphalt shingles on the roofs, dry out another piece of paint to flake away and expose the wood, heat the dark insides of the cramped rooms to suffocating temperatures so that the ammoniac odor of urine burned your eyes and the roaches thrived and bred like the time-surviving creatures they were.
He wasn’t surprised, either, when he found himself in front of the house, motor off, looking at it. It hadn’t changed. He had been to it many times since then and it never changed, just as the events never changed no matter how many times he relived them. The people were gone, those people, and there were children again. There had been a lot of children since then. Always children. There or next door or in the next house or down the street or across the street.
He watched a potbellied little boy, a toddler, come around the side of the house wearing only dirty underwear drooping below the sway of his belly. He absently grabbed at the low leafy limb of a honey locust as he came around, dragging a stick in the dirt as a mongrel pup tried to bite it. The boy stripped the branch of leaves as he chugged along, letting it pop back, bare, a few of the tree’s feathery amber flowers falling from the vibration.
Spotting something interesting in the dirt of the bare yard, the boy abruptly squatted, dropping the stick, which the pup promptly grabbed and shook fiercely like a terrier shakes a rat. The boy’s distended stomach hung down between his fat little knees as he doodled with whatever it was he saw. His straight black Mexican hair fell down over his forehead, a sprig of it going wild at the crown at the back of his head.
Haydon could see the sticky dirt on the tight bow of the boy’s stomach. It was like the stomach of the small boy that night who huddled on the lumpy sofa looking at his sister on the floor. His little sister. So little. Haydon remembered the dirt on her, too, and the other stuff. The flies. The one big crusty roach sitting where it shouldn’t have been. Ever.
The boy kicked at whatever it was he had found in the dirt, kicked with one chubby foot from the squatting position, which would have been an acrobatic accomplishment for an adult, but not a little boy. He heard something behind him and quickly turned around. A young Mexican woman in a dark shirtwaist dress stretched shapeless and missing several buttons came around the edge of the house, her face angry, her hand stretched out at him. She quickly reached up and grabbed the same branch he had just stripped of its leaves and broke it off. The boy didn’t wait. He jumped up and headed for the opposite corner of the house that would take him around to the back again, already beginning to cry in anticipation, one fat hand back behind him covering his filthy buttocks. The woman marched after him.
Haydon felt panicky. He wanted to throw open the door of the car and go after them. Slowly he closed his eyes and lowered his head to the top of the steering wheel. Images, stark and dark, made a ratcheting procession across his mind, a painful jittering of scenes from a night in that house so long ago and only yesterday. It seemed both. One would think it couldn’t seem both, but it did. The movies had it all wrong about things like that. They didn’t happen in slow motion. They happened fast. Like an explosion. And then afterward when you thought about it, or your mind wouldn’t let it alone, it still wasn’t in slow motion but fast again, an endless looping of the same scenes so that you did them over and over and over again.
He looked up. With the air conditioner off, the car was getting hot. He looked through the windshield at the desperate little street. Nobody here could afford the noisy window units that kept some of the other houses almost cool. Here they used the houses to create a shade, a place to crawl into out of the sun, not out of the heat. You couldn’t get away from the heat.
Reflexively Haydon looked around again just in time to see the boy come around the corner of the house, crying, rubbing his eyes as he walked with the rolling gait of a fat man. He wiped his nose with a long sweep of his forearm as he walked straight to the pup chewing on the stick. He bent down and jerked the stick out of the pup’s mouth and began hitting him with it, getting down close as the mongrel rolled over on its back in defenseless supplication, exposing its spotted pink belly.
Finally the little boy quit and threw down the stick. He picked up the pup and hugged it and then dropped him. Looking around, he walked over to the spot in the dirt he had been looking at before the woman came and squatted once again, punching something in the powdery dust. Haydon looked at him and imagined that from his navel he could see a thick globule of dark blood emerge and form a fat bubble. The bubble burst and made a thick scribe on the downward curve of the boy’s stomach until it reached a point where it stopped and began dripping quickly into the sand.
Haydon started the Vanden Plas and drove away.
~
NINA’S CAR WAS NOT there, so he parked in the drive and went into the front entryway. Gabriela heard him come in and met him in the kitchen, where he had taken a bottle of white Bordeaux out of the racks and was pulling the cork.
“You had lunsh?” she asked, resting one hand on the tile cabinet and the other on a well-padded hip.
He popped the cork. “No. Could I get a sandwich?”
“Chure, of course. Ham and Swiss? Smoked ham. A good one. And good fresh bread from Regina’s. Dark bread.”
“That would be great. Could you bring it into the library? And olives?”
“Of course. And the little green onions.”
She watched him get out one of the ribbed bistro glasses and walk across the dining room to the hallway and the French doors. She came after him.
“You gonna give that stuff to ol’ Cinco?” Hayden went out the door.
She stood in the door as he got Cinco’s bowl and moved it out of the sun into the shade. The old dog was pulling himself up from where he had been sleeping next to the balustrades at the other end of the terrace.
“You gonna cut his yeers in half givin’ him that stuff,” she said from the door, her hands perched on her hips. ‘Tha’s for pipple, not dogs.”
Haydon knelt down and poured a third of the bottle into Cinco’s bowl as the old collie walked up, swinging his tail, and looked over Haydon’s shoulder, touching a cold nose to his neck. Haydon turned, scratched him behind his ears, and stood. Cinco moved around next to the shady wall and leaned against it as he eased himself down on the flagstones. He blinked at the bowl and began lapping the wine.
Gabriela shook her head and went back into the house to start the sandwich.
Haydon walked into the library from the terrace through the French doors and set the wine bottle and the glass on the refectory table. He sat down at his desk and pulled the typewriter table over to him and threaded a sheet of paper under the platen. He watched Cinco a few minutes and then began working up the reports from the morning’s interviews.
After a while Gabriela brought his sandwich and left it beside the glass and bottle on the refectory table along with a linen napkin. Haydon finished his notes and turned to the food. The combination of smoked ham and bakery bread was delicious, with just the right touch of Dijon mustard to make it taste musky with the salty olives. The green onions were fresh and light. Haydon ate in silence, sipping the Bordeaux and looking out at Cinco, who had gone to sleep beside the empty bowl with his long nose resting on his paws.
In between bites Haydon pulled a piece of paper and a pencil over to him and wrote down Powell’s name in the center of the clean sheet. To one side of the name he wrote Parnas and drew a line between them with arrows at each end. There was an interaction between the two, a mutually beneficial relationship. He moved up and wrote Langer. This time the arrow went from Powell to Langer: a relationship initiated by Powell. Farther around Powell he wrote Quinn, the arrow pointing from Powell to Quinn: another one-way relationship. She reciprocated nothing. Farther around he wrote Toy. The arrow pointed both ways, another mutually beneficial relationship. From Toy another went out to a question mark.
As far as Haydon knew at this point, Langer was the only one who had an apparent reason to kill Powell. But according to Langer there should be at least one or more arrows going out from Powell’s name with question marks at the end of them too. The subjects of Powell’s blackmailing. According to Langer. But if that were the case, where were the tapes Powell was using for leverage? Or, for that matter, where were the tapes he was supposed to be using against Langer?
Haydon didn’t believe there were any video tapes. In fact, he didn’t believe Powell was blackmailing anyone. For some reason, that idea simply didn’t fit in with the profile Alice Parnas had drawn of Powell. And regarding Wayne Powell, Haydon tended to believe Parnas rather than Langer. He looked at the diagram, at the arrow going from Powell to Langer. He erased the tip of the arrow next to Langer and put it at the other end, pointing to Powell. That, he felt, reflected something closer to the truth.
If Powell wasn’t blackmailing Langer, then why had Langer contrived that elaborate story about his illicit activities in Los Angeles? As a diversion. From what? From whatever it was Powell was actually doing in the lab at night. But if Parnas was to be believed, what Powell was doing, though certainly odd, wasn’t the kind of thing to get him killed. Unless something unexpected had come across on the tapes, something that shouldn’t have been filmed and that Powell shouldn’t have seen. But would Langer have known about it, and would he have killed because of it?
Perhaps not, but if Langer fell into a secondary position as a suspect, then Toy took his place. Whatever the machinations of the individuals involved, it seemed a very strong probability that Wayne Powell had been killed because of something he had seen and processed on video tapes. And where were the tapes? Two possibilities: Whoever killed Powell had them, or Powell had hidden them.
He needed to talk with Mooney and Lapierre and see what they had come up with. It was time to compare notes.