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Haydon was halfway home before he remembered that he had not asked Mooney if he had found anything in Toy’s condo. It could wait until morning. He was going to call Dystal when he got home and suggest a breakfast meeting. They needed to go over what they had, get the benefit of each other’s perspectives on the evidence.
It was just a little after nine o’clock when he pulled through the gates and drove along the crunching cinder drive to the porte cochere. Again Nina’s car was not there. He went in the front door and got the mail off the small table in the hall and scanned the envelopes as he went into the kitchen. Laying the mail on the cabinet, he started to open a bottle of wine, decided he had already had enough, and reached for the Melitta coffeepot. He put enough water in the kettle for two cups and heated it while he put two spoons of Arabian mocha in the clay filter holder. When the water was ready he poured it into the filter, watching the rich mocha drip its dark syrupy brew into the small white pot.
When it was through dripping, he put the pot, a cup and saucer, and the cream pitcher on a tray with the mail, carried them into the library, and set them on the refectory table. There were only two lamps lit, one on his desk and one on the old table. He poured a cup of coffee and stirred in a spoon of cream. While he was tasting the first sip of coffee he saw the package on his desk.
He had totally forgotten about it. Gabriela had said a woman had left a package and a letter. Without taking his eyes off the package, he took his coffee over to his desk, pulled out the walnut captain’s chair, and sat down. He took one more sip of coffee, eyes still on the package, hoping.
The package was the right size, wrapped in brown paper that had been a shopping bag. Part of the red letters of the word Safeway showed on the front of the package. A plain white envelope was attached to the package with a green rubber band of the kind newspapers are wrapped with.
Haydon set down the coffee cup and pulled the envelope from under the rubber band. He tore it open and unfolded the single sheet of paper. It was a typewritten page with the type going out to wide margins and close to the top and bottom of the page. It was signed by Alice Parnas.
Dear Mr. Haydon,
After your visit this morning, I began thinking about what I was doing. I have no right to keep anything away from you for I know that you are doing your best to find poor Wayne’s killer. I can not cry forever and I know deep down that crying doesn’t help find Wayne’s killer but it is just a selfish indulgence for me.
I can not go back to work at that place for the things they say in their gossiping hurt so much and the wonderful secret Wayne and me had is now a nightmare that just gets worse and worse for they do not know, of course, and I can not listen to the things they say anymore since he is not here to make it not matter. I have an aunt who lives in New Mexico, and I will go out there and live with her a while until I decide what to do. But this is of no interest to you. I will tell you what I know about what happened the night poor Wayne was killed.
The night Wayne was killed was the night Ricky Toy was supposed to come back from a trip to El Salvador. Wayne got a call from Ricky Toy a little after 12 that night and Ricky Toy wanted Wayne to meet him at a bank drive-in over by the Shamrock Hilton Hotel. I have told you that I usually go up to the office with Wayne when he processes these video tapes but Ricky Toy does not know that, so Wayne dropped me off at a drugstore while he went over to get the tapes from Ricky Toy. When he came back to get me he told me that something was going on because he did not think Ricky Toy went to El Salvador but had some tapes of something else that he wanted Wayne to process but he did not want Wayne to pass them on to Mr. Langer like he always does because this was something Ricky Toy did not want Mr. Langer to see. Wayne thought Ricky Toy was doing something to blackmail Mr. Langer. Ricky Toy told Wayne to process the tapes and then to call him and he would tell him what to do then.
We went back to the lab at the office and Wayne started processing the tapes. He said that he didn’t want any part of whatever it was Ricky Toy was doing and that just to prove he didn’t have anything to do with it if Mr. Langer should ever think he was part of whatever was going on he was going to make a copy of the tapes for himself and give it to Mr. Langer to show where he stood. Wayne did not want to lose his job there because it was a good one and he was wanting to settle down and someday we would get married.
While he was working on Ricky Toys tape we heard somebody come into the offices. Wayne was afraid it was Ricky Toy coming for the tapes (Wayne had given Ricky Toy a key to the offices a long time ago) so he gave me the copy he had made for himself and told me to go on and he would call me later. I couldn’t drive his sports car, so I took a city bus. That was about 2:30. That was the last time I saw poor Wayne and I do not know who it was we heard coming into the offices but whoever it was they must have killed Wayne.
I hope this tape will tell you something. We looked at it and it didn’t make any sense to us, but you are more experienced at such things and I am sure you will be able to see something here that we did not see.
I hope this helps you get Wayne’s killer. I do not want to talk about it anymore but I know that you may want to ask me some more questions so I will send you my aunt’s address when I get out there. I won’t give it to you now because I may go somewhere else I don’t know.
Alice Parnas
Haydon laid down the typewritten page and sat quietly in the soft glow of his desk lamp. He remembered the way Alice Parnas had looked lying on her dingy bed, the faded yellow robe thrown open to them all, her eyes still swollen with crying, the ragged hole at the elastic waistband of her panties. He looked at the typewritten page again, at the last part of the last line: “I may go somewhere else I don’t know.”
He reached for the package and slipped off the rubber band. He unwrapped the brown paper until a video cassette lay exposed on his desk. It was three-quarter inch. He picked it up and looked at it. There were no identification markings. He thought suddenly of fingerprints and opened one of the bottom drawers on his desk. He removed a pair of white thin cotton gloves and slipped them on, decided there was no use, and took them off again and put them back into the drawer. He picked up the cassette and walked into the television room.
Turning on the television, he slipped the cassette into the VTR and pressed PLAY. There was static on the screen. Then the tape began. The opening shot was of a door in a large room. The lighting was bad, and the only illumination seemed to come from a bare light bulb that hung just inside the door. The door opened a little way, then closed and opened again. Three black men came in and stopped just inside the door, closing it behind them.
They stood together a few minutes while one of them talked to the other two, looking as if he was giving instructions. His voice was faint and garbled. Haydon thought the cameraman was too far away from his subjects. Occasionally the other two nodded as if they understood. They seemed ill at ease, looking around into the darker edges of the picture. All three men had sweat rings under the arms of their shirts. The man doing the talking was tall and thin, not old. One of the others was younger, husky, wearing a net shirt bulging with muscles. The third man wore gaudy pimp clothes and seemed the most relaxed of the three, almost sullen.
As the three men moved away from the door the camera followed them, but not far before they disappeared into the muddy darkness. It was far enough, however, for Haydon to see that they were in some kind of warehouse.
In the next shot the door of the warehouse opened again and two men came through. The first was a large black man in a suit. He was handsome, with a mustache and an athletic build. He seemed vaguely familiar to Haydon. He held the door open for another man, also dressed in a business suit, who seemed a little nervous. The camera also followed them along the aisles made by stacks of wooden packing crates until the darkness swallowed them.
Again a shot of the door. This time when it opened William Langer was the first through, followed by a second man. They visited casually as they strolled out of the camera’s view. The black man in the business suit passed them and went out the door and returned shortly with yet another man, dressed casually in a knit shirt. Langer’s back came into view, and he went out the door also. When he returned he was accompanied by a slightly built individual who hurried into the darkness more quickly than the others.
It was difficult to determine how long this had taken, because in actual time several minutes had probably passed between each entry and exit from the warehouse door. Haydon checked the counter on his VCR It registered nearly eight minutes.
There was a jump in the tape here, and the quality of the taped image changed dramatically. The first shot was in darkness, and it was a moment before Haydon realized that he was seeing movement in the darkness. Gradually he was able to make out the gray, smoky images of the men he had seen come in through the door. They seemed to be standing or sitting together, all facing one direction. They were talking among themselves. The camera zoomed in on their faces and though the lighting was hazy you could clearly make out each individual. The camera lingered a long moment on each of them, including Langer and the black man.
Then, slowly, the camera panned from the area where the men were sitting across the aisle to an open area. Here the tape almost went white, flaring, washing out everything. Haydon assumed a fast lens had been used to get a shot of the men in the darkened portion of the warehouse and then it let in too much light when panned toward the lighted area. He saw someone moving in the lighted area but could not make out what they were doing. He thought it might be the black man who had been giving instructions at the beginning. The lighted area seemed to be ringed with more wooden packing crates, and just as Haydon was relatively sure of this the camera came slowly around again to dwell on the men in the shadows, once again zooming in on each individual face. Then it went blank.
Haydon looked at the VTR counter. The tape had lasted sixteen minutes.
He did not run the tape again but pushed the rewind button and sat back to wait. What had he just seen? There was nothing there on which to build a blackmail scam. Even if the men Langer had been seen with were known criminals, he could explain his way out of that a dozen different ways. Why were they there? They had come to see something. They were seated facing the lighted area, waiting. The question was, what was it they were going to see and why hadn’t Toy filmed it?
The VTR rewind clicked off and Haydon punched the ejector and retrieved the cassette. He turned off the television and walked back into the library. He got his coffee cup, poured the cold coffee into one of the potted plants by the French doors that looked out onto the terrace, and poured the second cup from the Melitta pot. After he mixed cream with it, it was only lukewarm. He sat down at his desk.
Maybe what he had here was only part of everything Toy had recorded in the warehouse. That would make sense. He would give only a portion of it to Powell in case something happened to it while it was in Powell’s possession. Whoever had killed Powell had gotten the original and might or might not know if additional tapes existed. But surely there was more, and Toy probably had them. Haydon had only the prelude sitting in front of him. Ricky Toy had the rest of the narrative.
Langer had been shrewd. He was indeed being blackmailed, but he had laid the blame at the wrong doorstep. Half-truths. It happened so often. People who tried to lie their way out of trouble often took little bits of truth and mixed them with little bits of lie and tried to pass it all off as a whole reality. It worked against them in the long run because they were likely to forget the exact proportion of the ingredients. Seldom could they re-create the recipe with total accuracy. They would be much better off to fabricate the entire thing, but they rarely did. It was odd how they clung to the little fragments of truth, as if they were good-luck pieces.
Haydon’s eyes fell on the cardboard boxes of books across the room and then went back to Alice Parnas’ letter.
“I may go somewhere else I don’t know.”
He suddenly put down the cup and saucer. Alice Parnas was not a woman who toyed with innuendos, and she was not likely to begin doing so at death. It was not suicide she had had in mind when she wrote that last line.
He grabbed a piece of paper from his desk and quickly scribbled a note to Nina that he would be late coming in. He taped the note to the shade of the lamp on his desk and left.