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Haydon walked back around to the breezeway where Mooney and the two patrolmen were waiting.
“Okay,” he said. “They’re in 132, on the left side a little over halfway down. The manager doesn’t know if they’re in there or not.” He looked across the quadrangle at the pool where a man and a woman were swimming, hanging on to the edge of the pool near the diving board. “Ed, I guess you’d better have them go inside. I’d feel better about it.”
Mooney turned and looked at the sequence of numbers on the apartment doors.
“That’s almost straight across from the pool. You think they’ll get suspicious if they see me out there?”
“I don’t know, but we can’t let those people stay where they are.” He looked at Sublette. “Why don’t you two go around and cover the front. We’ll give you enough time to get in place before Ed goes out to the pool, just in case they spot him and try to ease out. Be careful. Give the door plenty of berth. Once we get inside and everything’s okay, I’ll open up. Call us when you’re in place.”
The two patrolmen left and Mooney muffled the radio with his hand as they waited for the call. The couple in the pool were laughing. The girl’s throaty voice came to them clearly across the surface of the water. In a few minutes the radio crackled. The two patrolmen were ready.
Haydon held the radio as Mooney started across the spotty grass of the quadrangle toward the pool. Haydon watched as he approached them, squatted down at the water’s edge, and surreptitiously showed his shield as he began talking. They became still in the water, two dark heads in the liquid turquoise. Haydon tried to imagine the sequence and range of their emotions as they realized what was happening. In a few moments they got out of the pool, and the girl stood in her dripping bikini talking to Mooney while the man walked around to the broken lawn chairs and got their towels. All three of them left the pool together, Mooney putting his arm on the guy’s shoulder in a chit-chatty manner, as they disappeared behind a clump of honeysuckle on the other side of the quad.
Haydon started down the side under the stairways toward 132, stepping around a Burger Boy grill and a stack of fishing poles. He saw Mooney coming to meet him from the other direction. They approached the door from opposite sides, holding their guns. Mooney nodded that he was ready, and Haydon stretched out his left arm to knock, then stopped.
Mooney looked at him and Haydon pointed to the doorknob. A brass key protruded from the lock. Both men leaned back while Haydon slowly reached up and knocked on the door. He knocked twice. When there was no answer, he turned the door handle and pushed open the door. Mooney reached inside the doorjamb and flipped on the light. When nothing happened, Haydon slowly leaned into the opening. The light carried from the breakfast nook adjacent to the kitchen, into the dining area, and across one end of the living room. It was enough.
“Damn,” he said, and charged inside as he flipped on another light in the dining room, bathing the lower half of the woman’s naked body in a harsh light, her upper torso still in the darkness on the living room floor. “Damn! Watch the hallway, Ed.”
Haydon stepped across into darkness. “Jesus, Stuart,” Mooney snapped.
The ceiling light flashed on in the living room and Haydon was unlocking the front door as the two patrolmen burst in.
“Help him check out the bedrooms,” Haydon said, jerking his head toward Mooney, who was still crouched at the entrance of the hallway. The two patrolmen stopped in midstride and stared at Haydon kneeling over the woman lying face down, her long black hair matted in the pool of dark syrup that had spilled out of her head, one arm tucked under her, the other flung out on the carpet. In the bright light of the almost bare room, the trail of blood that tracked up the wall and ended in a fuchsia starburst caught their attention like the brilliant flash of an explosion.
“Help him, dammit,” Haydon yelled, and they ran past him as he put his hand down into the girl’s hair around her neck. Her carotid artery was flat. With half his mind he was alert to Mooney and the patrolmen making their way down the hall, opening, and closing doors, and with the other half he worked up the courage to turn her over. He could tell there was an exit wound in the scramble of hair at the back of her head.
“It’s clear,” Mooney yelled, and Haydon heard them returning along the hall. Gently, as if she were asleep, he put his hand on her left shoulder and began turning her over. She was almost all the way over before her face pulled away from the soaked carpet and fell back. He laid her out Hat, and with the tips of his fingers picked the hair away from her face. There was a single small bullet hole above her left eyebrow, belying the massive intracranial blast that had bulged and blackened her eye and caused her face to balloon in a grotesquely lopsided fashion. She had deep purple bruises around her breasts and rib cage, and a large one covered most of the right side of her lower abdomen. He looked at her hands. The backs of them and the undersides of her wrists were covered with narrow abrasions.
Haydon stood up. Mooney and the two patrolmen were looking down at the girl.
“Sublette, get on the radio and call it in,” Haydon said. “Have them bring the wagon to the front door. I don’t want them carrying the body through the quad. We’re going to attract a crowd, so get the other two units in here.” He looked at the name tag on the other patrolman’s shirt. “Moreno, get a sheet out of the bedroom.”
“Looks like they questioned her before they shot her,” Mooney said.
Haydon nodded. “I wonder if she told them anything. Any signs of a struggle back there?”
“It’s hard to tell. The place has been ransacked.” They looked around the living room.
“She put up a fight,” Mooney said, pointing to the video equipment scattered around the otherwise empty room, and to the blood splattered along the base of the walls. “Blood’s scattered around too much for it all to have come from the gunshot wound. They must’ve shot her against the wall.”
He looked at the red starburst and walked over to it.
“Yeah, here’s the hole. We’ll have the lab guys get it out.”
“She had handcuff marks on her wrists,” Haydon said.
Mooney came back and looked toward the kitchen.
“She’d been getting supper,” he said. “Vegetables on the countertop in there. A wok with oil in it, too.”
“You see her clothes?” Haydon asked.
“No, but then you can’t really tell. The place is a mess back in there.”
“They should be somewhere around here,” Haydon said. Moreno came in with the sheet and put it over the girl.
“Thanks,” Haydon said. “Why don’t you wait outside the back door. Keep people away. And leave the door open, will you? We need some circulation in here.”
They were standing by the girl’s body. Haydon felt his heart pounding. The muscles in his neck and shoulders were drawing up, pulling at their roots deep in his back. He had been inhaling the musky odor of blood since he had seen the girl from the back door. Now he could taste it as well.
Mooney looked around the room, waiting, as Haydon stared at the sheet, which now had several crimson patches forming in it where the blood was soaking through. She was so still. He almost expected to see a gentle rising and falling of the sheet, a sign that she was not dead. He wondered what quirk of fate had dictated that she be the one. Why her instead of the other one? If she had walked across to the convenience store to get a bunch of celery . . . if she had been ten minutes earlier or ten minutes later from wherever she had been . . . if the patrolmen had spotted the cars half an hour earlier . . . if . . . if . . . What would it have taken to have saved her from the motionless silence of the sheet?
“So what do you think,” Mooney finally said.
Haydon flinched. Listened a moment, relaxed.
“It’s Roeg,” he said. “The rest of the tape must be extraordinary.” He looked down. “This. I don’t know. I’d like to think Langer couldn’t do it. He might have had it done.”
He heard the first steady whine of the sirens on the Loop, several of them beginning to waver.
“We might have had a chance to find Toy before.” He shook his head. “But not now.”
“I guess the other gal’s with him,” Mooney said.
“Probably. I wonder how he’s going to react to this? He may not be satisfied with blackmail now.”
The sirens were in the neighborhood. He looked out the front door, which had been left open, and saw the blue and cherry flashes growing brighter against the front of the apartments across the street.
“You think he knows about it yet?”
Haydon shrugged. He looked at the figure under the sheet again, heard the car doors slamming outside, men’s voices, equipment being unloaded. Stan Gibbs, one of the coroner’s investigators, came in the door with the two men from the crime lab. They looked at the sheet, at the wall, then at the two detectives.
“Haydon? Didn’t know you were back,” Gibbs said. He walked over, squatted down, and peeked under the sheet. When he saw it was a naked woman, he lifted it a little higher, looked some more, then pulled it off. He stood, looking at her. “Little Oriental,” he said. “Dang, she’s really put together.”
Haydon turned and walked out of the room, through the kitchen, and out the back door into the quadrangle. Several people had already come out on their balconies and around the lighted pool, staring at the opened doorway of 132.
Pulling his cigarettes out of his coat pocket, Haydon offered one to Moreno. The young man hesitated, then went ahead and took it. He mumbled “thanks” and Haydon lit them both. Without speaking, he moved out into the grass and stood alone.
When Haydon was halfway through his second cigarette Mooney came out of the apartment, looked for him, and came across the grass.
“Gibbs thinks maybe a couple of hours. Sublette and Moreno couldn’t have missed them by much.”
Haydon smoked. A girl in a swimsuit broke away from a group at the pool and made her way over to Moreno, sent to see what it was all about. Moreno bent slightly, listened to her, and then shrugged, nodded his head toward the opened door. She continued talking to him.
“I went ahead and sketched the scene, got the measurements and everything,” Mooney said. “The lab boys are checking the key for prints.” He was looking at Haydon.
“How the hell did they know where to find them?” Haydon asked. “Either someone told them, or they followed them here. If someone informed them, who would it have been? Who other than the two girls knew where Toy was? Who would he have shared that information with? If they followed them, how did they miss Toy, and how did they pick them up in the first place?”
“Maybe they just followed the girl,” Mooney said.
“From where? How would they have picked up her trail?”
A couple of other people from the pool area came up and joined Moreno and the girl in the swimsuit, a few more drifted across the quadrangle, two women came along the sidewalks under the stairs. Finally a small crowd had gathered. A woman came around behind Moreno and tried to look in the opened door. When he turned around and saw her he made all of them move back off the sidewalk onto the grass.
Haydon began absently to field strip his cigarette, his eyes looking at what he was doing but not really seeing anything. He looked up suddenly, fiddling with the filter.
“I’ll bet Toy made his bid, tried to collect, probably using the girls, and they followed her here. Maybe she was supposed to make the pickup, and they grabbed her.”
“I don’t think so. Remember, she was cooking supper in there.”
“How do you know it was her? Maybe it was the other girl, or Toy. When Roeg’s people come in with her, Toy and the other girl get away.
When Toy gets away they try to get more out of her and end up killing her.”
“What makes you think Toy got away?” Mooney asked. “Maybe they hauled him off somewhere. Somebody’ll find what’s left of him in a trash dumpster tomorrow.”
“Okay.” Haydon sighed. “Why don’t you start with the crowd over there. Let’s see if anyone saw or heard anything.”
He turned and walked across the quadrangle to the manager’s office. She was one of the very few people who were not outside their apartments or peeking through their curtains. He knocked and she came to the door, opening it cautiously.
“I need to ask you a few questions,” Haydon said. She nodded.
“May I come in?”
She unlatched the screen door and pushed it open. When he got inside he didn’t sit down but stood in the tiny breakfast nook. He laid the key with the paper tag on the dinette table. She looked at it, her thin arms folded across the bare space between her halter top and the jean shorts.
“You want to tell me who you gave the other key to?” he said.
She looked at him, her eyes slightly too big for the bone structure of her face. She had added a little mascara since he talked to her earlier.
“My husband works night shift,” she said. “With the telephone company.”
Haydon waited.
She sat down on the green plastic seat of one of the dinette chairs, slumping as if she wouldn’t have been able to stand another minute. She massaged a thin hand against her right temple.
“Coupla hours ago guys came to the door looking for that Chinese and his two girls. Said they needed to talk to ‘em about repossessing one of the cars. Asked what apartment they was in and then asked for the key. I asked what they needed the key for, and they said that was their business. I said well just a damn minute and one of the guys came over and put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed real hard and said they’d like to have the key.”
She looked up at Haydon, her eyes wet now, messing up the mascara.
“I mean, they were threatenin’ me, you know. Goddamn.” She shuddered. “Told me I didn’t have to say anything about them to anybody, you know. I gave ‘em the key and they left and that’s all I know.”
“You didn’t see them leave?”
“I sure didn’t. People like those Chinese have problems, it’s none of my business, just like the man said. You can’t go around sticking your nose in ever’body’s business, and I don’t want any trouble. This is just a job, bein’ manager, not a damn babysittin’ service. It’s like running a damn convenience store. Robber comes in, I’m not going to get myself shot over the boss’s till. My life’s worth more’n a damn minimum wage job, I’ll tell you that. No, I didn’t see ‘em leave, and I don’t know when they left.”
“There were two, three of them?”
“Two came in here.”
“What did they look like?”
“Just businessmen. Wearing suits like yours.”
“You’d know them if you saw them again?”
“I imagine.”
“Was one of them a big fellow, sandy hair? In his forties? Could have been a college football player?”
“I don’t think so. They were just ordinary guys. Just common guys. Nothing noticeable about ‘em.”
Haydon thought a minute. “Okay, I appreciate your help. Our people will be through down there in a couple of hours. We don’t want anyone in the apartment until we give you official permission to clean it up. We’ll put our own locks on the doors.”
“Clean it up?”
“One of the women was shot in the head. I’m going to leave you one of my cards.”
“Dead?” The woman’s mouth quivered. Haydon nodded.
“Well, what’ll I do?” She looked at him, her eyebrows contorted in knots of anxiety.
“Ask your husband when he gets home,” Haydon said. “He’ll know.”
Outside, Mooney was standing by the edge of the pool talking to a man in a cowboy hat. Mooney waved to Haydon, and they started to ward him.
“Haydon, this is Sandy Buckner. He saw one of the girls earlier this afternoon.”
Haydon shook his hand. Buckner was in his early thirties, wore a cowboy shirt, Levi’s, and boots. The round imprint of a Skol can showed from his shirt pocket, and his bottom lip was pooched out with an oversized lump of the grainy tobacco. He flipped his head toward Mooney.
“He wonted to know if anybody saw sumthin’ unusual aroun’ this place”—he flipped his head toward apartment 132—”or with the people that lives there. I seen those little ol’ Jap gals all the time”—he flipped his head toward the pool—”out here swimmin’. I never saw ‘em do anythang but lay aroun’ the water or go out with their boyfriend.”
He leaned a little to one side and spat.
“This evenin’ I was comin’ home from work. I drive a truck, and I’d been out in Odessa a coupla days. When I pulled aroun’ to the side over here I saw one of those little gals gettin’ out of a yella taxi car. I mean she was gettin’ out from under the wheel. I didn’t know she drove one. She was wearin’ a man’s britches and shirt and had her hair all tucked up under a taxi cap. Maybe she just started the job, I don’t know, but I never seen her drive it before.”
He looked at Haydon. No one said anything.
Buckner looked at Mooney and lifted his shoulders. “Well, that’s the unusual thang I seen.”
“Is the cab still around there?” Haydon asked.
“Hell, yeah,” Buckner drawled. “I seen it while ago.”
“Thanks,” Haydon said. He started back toward the apartment.
“We’ll probably get back to you,” Mooney said, moving toward Haydon.
“Lissen, I seen those little gals quite a bit,” Buckner said. “I talked to ‘em. One of ‘em’s named Lai and one of ‘em’s Yue. Wont me to look at her, see if I can tell which one it is? It won’t bother me none. I was in Nam. I’ve seen lots of that kind of shit.”
“Maybe later,” Mooney said. He wanted to catch up with Haydon. “We didn’t know their names though,” Mooney said, pulling out his notebook. “Thanks. We’ll call you.”
Haydon was already inside the apartment door.