| |
“Let’s go for a drive. I want to show you something and tell you something.”
They were the first words Haydon had spoken in the half hour they had been sitting on the dark terrace drinking iced Tanquerays with lime. He had been in a somber mood, looking out across the black night trees toward the greenhouse. He hadn’t gotten away from Roeg’s estate until late in the evening and then had spent much of the night downtown setting the paperwork in motion with Mooney and Lapierre. When he finally got home he was tired and preoccupied. Nina had sat with him in silence, knowing he would start talking eventually and that it was fruitless to try to draw him out before he was ready.
They drove for a long time through the flickering lights of the city, going north on Montrose, across Buffalo Bayou, and into the smaller, darker streets of the Heights. After a series of turns among the unfamiliar streets, Nina had no idea where they were. She asked no questions, and Haydon did not explain.
Eventually he pulled the Vanden Plas to the curb across the street from the small frame house. As always the doors and windows were open to the summer night. He could see, through one of the darkened bedroom windows, a dim saffron illumination coming from one of the rooms farther back in the house. The front door emitted a pale flickering aura that danced on the cement porch and died away on the steps that led to the bare yard. It was late. Probably both the boy and the pup were asleep.
“This is the house,” he said. “It was a year, I think, maybe two, before we were married. I hadn’t been out of uniform long. I had been pulled to do some decoy work for Vice, and when it was done I stayed with them. I was with them that night. I wasn’t even supposed to be there.
“I had worked the Heights in uniform for over a year just before I went to Vice and had been to this place several times. Family disturbance calls and child abuse. The woman who lived here was divorced, living with a man who drank heavily and regularly beat her and the children. He didn’t have to be drunk to do it. She worked during the day, and he stayed with the little girl and boy. They were small, six and seven. When I was working the Heights I had gone there on two occasions when it was evident he was burning the kids with hot coat hangers. He said they’d fallen on the kitchen stove grates, got against the oven when he opened it. Things like that. Once the welfare people took the girl out of the home for a while, but the mother got her back. It was a bad situation just waiting to get worse. You can see those things coming, but it’s hard to do anything about it.”
Haydon looked across the street to the house as he talked. Nina had almost stopped breathing.
“That night was slow for us. My partner and I were riding around, mostly killing time, when we heard the call about a family disturbance on Hyacinth. We were close. I told him about the address and said I’d like to make it. It was fine with him. When we got there the patrol unit hadn’t arrived yet so we got out and started up to the front door. I could already hear the children screaming and the woman next door came running out of her house saying he was killing them in there and would we please hurry.
“I ran through the front door and the mother was in the middle of the livingroom door trying to sit up. He had beaten her senseless and she was coming around. There were piercing screams coming from the back bedroom by this time. You can’t see it from here; it’s probably about where that dim light is. I ran back there, and the guy fired a shot that hit the bedroom doorframe. I fell back, pulled my gun, and heard him going out a window.”
Haydon cleared his throat and stopped a moment, his eyes glued to the house.
“There was an old sofa in the bedroom. It was the room where the children slept. All the stuffing was coming out of the sofa, and there was a hole where the springs had broken down. The little boy, he was a year older than the girl, was sitting in this hole screaming, his nose bleeding. He was purple all over. The guy was a true sadist. The little boy died later from internal injuries. But right now he was just screaming and looking down at his sister.
“She . . . she was on the floor. Naked. On her back. Her eyes were glassy. Mentally she was completely gone. The guy had been raping her. I don’t know how the roaches got on her so fast. I don’t know, maybe he’d been through a while and hadn’t touched her. But that’s not right. They had just been screaming, I heard them, so it was probably still going on when we got there. Anyway, I remember the roaches. I remember a big one. I remember the girl’s wasted little body, and I remember her eyes.”
Haydon reached down on the console and got a cigarette and punched the cigarette lighter. He lit the cigarette and lowered the window and blew the smoke out into the sticky night. The car was still idling, and the air conditioner was on.
“I yelled for my partner to get back there, I think he had stopped a second in the living room to check on the woman, and I yelled for him to call an ambulance. I don’t know how I expected him to do both of those things at the same time. I remember going out the window too, and as I hit the ground I saw a muzzle flash, but he was traveling, and it went wild again. I don’t even know where it went, high or low or what. I started after him.”
Haydon put the Vanden Plas in gear and eased down the street. “He did an odd thing. This house is not a hundred yards from Holy Cross Cemetery, back that way, and I expected him to go straight for it. But he didn’t. Instead he ran this way, toward Marigold. Just the way we’re driving now. He crossed it going through back yards and between houses; he crossed Lilac, then Jessamine. Then I thought he was going to cross over into this far end of Hollywood Cemetery and down the bayou or over into Moody Park. I just thought he would go for the woods, but he did another odd thing.”
Haydon stopped the car and looked across a narrow neck of Holly wood Cemetery, through the trees toward the bayou.
“I don’t know why he didn’t continue into the greenbelt. I wouldn’t have been able to follow him in there. I would have lost track of him. It was stupid, he should have kept going, but instead he turned back on Goldenrod, firing two more shots at me, and we backtracked, except a block farther over.”
The lights of the car panned across the houses, and they followed the same route Haydon had run on foot eleven years earlier, back past Lilac, Marigold, and Hyacinth.
“Before I knew it we were almost back where we started. He crossed Cosmos and staggered into Holy Cross Cemetery, over a low rock wall that runs out from the entrance, this one just a block from Main Street.”
Haydon drove through the massive wrought iron gates of the cemetery, which were always open. The main lanes that wound through the cemetery were paved and shaded over by enormous and beautiful oaks. At night they made a canopy of darkness blotting out the stars, lighted at their far end by patches of sky a little lighter blue than the night, and by small twinkling of city lights. Haydon walked a ways into the cemetery and then turned off onto one of the grassy tracks that cut through the ranks and files of gravesites stretching out under the trees as far as you could see. The back of Holy Cross Cemetery joined the southern end of Hollywood Cemetery and went farther north along the black water of Little White Oak Bayou.
Haydon stopped the car and got out. Nina got out too, saying nothing, but entranced by Haydon’s narration. He started walking.
“By this time both of us were exhausted, though I was in better shape and, of course, hadn’t been drinking. But once he got into the cemetery it became more dangerous for me. There were places he could take cover and still watch me. We came across over there, angling back toward the bayou. Finally he did take advantage of the tomb stones and dropped down behind one. I did the same, but as soon as I’d done it I lost sight of the one he had stopped behind. I didn’t know what to do.”
Haydon left the path and walked between the graves looking around him as he found the exact spot where it had happened eleven years ago.
“I stopped here. He was perhaps five or six graves away. I could actually hear him breathing. He sounded like he was going to explode. Suddenly I forgot all about the stalking and hiding part of it. I just wanted to get him. I stood up from behind the stone where I had crouched. Here.”
Haydon moved from behind the stone and started walking, slowly.
“He must have heard me, because he too stepped from behind his stone. There was enough light, from the city, the stars, I don’t know, from somewhere, that I could make out his face. I could probably see yours if you were over there now.”
He stopped.
“You see that reclining limestone slab? He was leaning on it. He was heaving for breath so desperately that he couldn’t hold his body up. He held the gun in his hand, but he didn’t raise it. I don’t know whether he was too tired or whether he simply had no fear. I had not yet fired a shot and was holding my own gun at my side. Maybe he didn’t see it. I don’t know. None of that was registering on me.”
Haydon moved one grave closer to the reclining limestone.
“I stopped here, two graves between us. He was looking at me, heaving for breath, reaching down into the bottoms of his lungs for it. In my mind I could still hear the little boy and girl screaming. I could still see the little girl on the floor with the roaches on her. I raised my Beretta, steadied it with my left hand, aimed between his eyes. I fired twice, hitting him in the face with both rounds. I remember the blood jumping, a great black swash of it.”
Haydon stepped over to the large stone.
“He fell on this. In the daylight you can still see the stain. For years it had a rusty tinge to it, but now it’s just a discoloration in the stone.”
He looked across the expanse of the cemetery, the massive oaks casting broad and deep shadows from which the paleness of the stones reflected the amorphous light of the city sky.
“There was, of course, an investigation. The Department’s shooting team, the Internal Affairs Division, the Harris County DA. I was no billed. I never told anyone what really happened, that I murdered the man.”
“Your partner doesn’t know?” Nina’s voice was calm and natural.
He was glad to hear it, and he was glad it betrayed no strain.
“I’ve never told another living soul. Dystal was my partner that night. When he got there I was sitting on one of these stones, my back to the body. I never told him, and he’s never said anything. But he knows.”
A polished marble bench sat beside a small arbor of grapevines a few feet away. Nina walked over to it and sat down. Both of them were quiet. The night smelled of damp grass and, from somewhere nearby, an occasional waft of gardenia. The rasping cry of a single cicada rose and then subsided.
“The boy died,” he said, turned half away from her. “The girl was eventually institutionalized. She’s seventeen now. The mother moved away about eight years ago. I don’t know where she is.”
They both listened to the cicada again. Another joined it for a while, then stopped. It continued alone.
“I’m glad you told me,” Nina said.
“I really wanted to tell you early on,” Haydon said. “But as it grew more difficult to live with, it also became more difficult to admit. The hypocrisy of it. I didn’t have to shoot him, Nina. It wasn’t even remotely necessary. I wanted to, and I did. That’s all there is to it.”
“Why have you decided to tell me now?” Nina asked. “What are you going to do?”
Haydon turned around to face her.
“I’m not going to do anything,” he said. “I’m going to keep the secret, and I’m going to live with it. Just like always, only I’ve got to do a better job of it. But I can’t do it without you, and I mustn’t go on asking, accepting, your support when you don’t know what you’re involved in. It’s just that I never knew which would be worse, to exclude you from the truth or to make you carry it around with you the way I had.”
Neither of them spoke. They were caught up in their own thoughts, each trying to understand the significance of the story for each other and for themselves. Haydon inhaled deeply of the night air, which carried the sounds and smells of a world both ancient and newborn, a world no better and no worse than the best and worst of men could make it.
––––––––
The End