'We located the maid.'
Timmy nodded slowly. 'That is news. What does she have to say?'
'Haven't talked to her yet.'
'Then, I guess there is no ',' is there?'
Janek had noticed Timmy tighten up at his mention of the maid. The tightening was barely perceptible and quickly covered by a smile.
Mendoza was like that. It made everyone connected to it tense. The waves keep coming, he thought, the way they do when you throw a stone into a lake-concentric waves that keep widening until they disturb lives far removed from the original crime.
'Tell me your version.'
'Oh, shit, Frank. Just read the file, why don't you?'
'Been reading it. It's thick. And my part, looking for Tania, was a sideshow. What I remember, I guess like everyone, are the things that happened later on-the stuff with Dakin, the forged-evidence charges, the aftermath.'
'The important stuff.'
'Yeah, but I'm not going to talk to Tania Figueras about that. I'm going to talk to her about the Mendozas. I want to get a feel of what the case was like at the beginning, before you connected it to Clury, before anything.'
Timmy sat silent. He gazed at Janek, then suddenly stood up, walked into the men's room, emerged a couple of minutes later, walked over to the bar, brought back a second set of beers, sat down, groaned, looked at Janek with great forbearance and began to talk.
'There was a call to nine-one-one. It came a little after seven P.m. A woman in Chelsea reported shrill screaming in a neighboring apartment.
Couple of hours later a pair of patrolmen showed up. The dispatcher had billed it as a possible domestic disturbance. You know what they found Edith Mendoza, hanging upside down. I can have the squeal. 9 You were down in Dallas, working on… I can't remember now. '
'Drug case. I was testifying.'
'Right. So anyway, I went over there with Jim Rankin, the only other guy in the squad room at the time. Neither of us ever saw a crime scene like it. It was a good-sized studio, about twenty-by-twenty, with lots of mirrors around and a double-story ceiling. There was this beautiful lady hanging from there, bruises all over her, track lights aimed down, floor lights aimed up, spotlighting her like she's in some kind of show. And she's even twirling a little, too, like the rope had been wound up, you know, like when they'll twirl someone in a circus.
But there was one big difference. The lady was dead.'
'Wouldn't the rope have unwound by then-after so many hours?'
'I guess. So maybe it just seemed that way. Maybe it was the air that moved her when we opened the door. I remember she was moving in a kind of circle. Counterclockwise, I think.'
'That's interesting,' Janek said. 'That's not in the file.'
'It wasn't really relevant.'
Janek nodded. 'So then-?'
Timmy shrugged. 'I did what I was supposed to do.'
He described how he had contacted the med examiner, called in a Crime Scene squad, IDed the victim- standard procedure, everything by the book.
A little before eleven, he and Rankin drove uptown to Mendoza's building, a block-wide Art Deco tower on Central Park West. Timmy called Jake Mendoza from the lobby. Mendoza, sounding groggy, complained that Timmy had woken him up. When Timmy asked if he could come upstairs, Jake demanded an explanation. When Timmy told him he couldn't go into it on the phone, Mendoza said fine, in that case it could wait till morning.
Then he hung up.
'Think about it, Frank-two cops call you middle of the night, tell you they got something important… and you hang up on them?' Timmy rolled his eyes. 'We had to see him, so we went to work on the elevator man. We finally persuaded him to take us to the penthouse. We rang the buzzer and waited a long time. Finally Mendoza opened the door. He was wearing pajamas.
'I didn't like him, not from the first. I thought he was a phony. His hair was mussed like he'd been sleeping, but the pajamas looked fresh to me. Anyway, when we told him about his wife, he gaped at us. Then, I swear, he grinned. Like we were putting him on, like it was, you know-hardy-har-har. But when Rankin showed him one of the Polaroids, he got serious real quick. He went into another room and called his lawyer.
When he came out he said he'd been advised not to talk to us.
Then he said he wanted to see the body.
'We waited while he dressed, then took him downtown. And we were very careful, Frank. We didn't say a word to him in the car. I watched him.
There was something about him. He sat very still and there was this smell coming off him, like bad fumes, you know, something like that.
Actually, it was some fancy men's fragrance he'd splashed on himself, but it was going bad… like something was eating him up inside and turning that fragrance to shit. That's when I knew he was behind it.
'His lawyer was waiting for us at the morgue, a tweedy, WASPY type named Andrews. They huddled, then Andrews motioned us aside. Mendoza had been at his office until nine o'clock, he told us, working on a deal since noon with lunch and dinner delivered in. Andrews gave us names of people on Mendoza's staff who would verify Mendoza hadn't left the entire time.
When he came home and Mrs. Mendoza wasn't there, he'd assumed she was out seeing friends. He didn't know anything about the Chelsea studio. He had no idea what his wife was doing there. Finally Andrews said Mendoza was too upset to talk, but in a couple of days, after the shock wore off, he'd probably be willing to sit down. Now, did we have any problems with that?' Timmy laughed. 'Oh, sure we did.
But we didn't say anything. That was it. End of discussion.'
'What about the maid?' Janek looked at Timmy. No sign of tightening this time. Two men, who'd been arguing about baseball at the bar, inexplicably burst into song. Timmy glanced at them, then back at Janek.
'We found out about her the following day. The night doorman filled us in. Around nine o'clock, about the time the patrolmen got to the studio, Tania Figueras came down to the lobby of the Central Park West building with a suitcase, told the doorman she was leaving the Mendozas' employ, got into a taxi and drove off. The doorman said she looked terrified. We were too busy to look for her, but when you came back from Dallas I put you on her.'
'And I never came up with anything. She disappeared.'
'Right. But by that time she didn't matter all that much.' Timmy sat back in the booth and smiled. 'By that time the case was getting complicated. Because once we got Clury factored in, we knew we had a double… Two nights before Janek was due to fly to Mexico City, he met his ex-wife, Sarah, for dinner. Their meeting, arranged at Sarah's request, took place in a small family-run Czech restaurant called Praha on West Thirteenth in Greenwich Village.
Praha had been a favorite dining place during the years when they'd been married. Personal attention by the staff and the friendly gemdtlichkeit atmosphere made it an ideal spot to celebrate promotions and anniversaries. Janek still went there; the owner, Josef Jellef, had been a friend of his father's. At first he was surprised when Sarah had suggested it, but as the evening approached, he became concerned.
Suppose she wants to meet there to stir up nostalgia for years I'd just as soon forget?
She was seated when he arrived. Josef had put her at his best table, visible through the front window. Pausing out on the sidewalk to observe her through the glass, Janek tried to imagine how she would appear to a stranger glancing in: a svelte, well-groomed woman in her forties with intelligent eyes and a well-modeled face. But would it occur to this stranger that the handsome woman he was looking at had once been the wife of a cop? Janek didn't think so. Sarah looked more like an attorney's wife, privileged, perhaps even spoiled. There could be, he knew, something attractive, even sexy, about such a woman-a woman, like Sarah, who knew exactly what she wanted.
'Frank… ' Her smile was warm, her voice throaty and full of feeling.
'It's been so long. I hope you don't mind meeting here.' 'Not at all,'
