'Our honor's at stake.' Sarah laughed. 'Is that what she says?'
God, you're impossible! 'Why do you care, Sarah? What's it to you?'
'Oh, I care, Frank,' Sarah said softly. 'I care because I hate to see you waste your time on something that can only bring you grief.' She paused. 'Mendoza is a tar pit. Everybody knows it. Everyone, that is… except maybe you.
Lies amp; Consequences Early on a Sunday morning in September, the day before Labor Day, Janek flew naked'-without shield or gun to Mexico City. Besides his toilet articles and a week's worth of clothing, he carried a microcassette recorder, a half dozen cassettes, a photocopy of his police ID, an ink pad, a blank fingerprint form, and a small 35-mm camera, loaded with color film, which a detective in the Forensics Division had assured him could be operated by an idiot.
On takeoff, Manhattan looked spectacular, silver towers reflecting golden light. It also looked clean and still. Staring down at the city as the plane rose in a graceful arc, Janek felt grateful to be off its torrid, squalid streets.
He had never met Howard Clury, but he believed he knew the type: a detective who could have chosen to become a criminal. In fact, in performance of his duty, a criminal was, essentially, what Clury had been.
In photographs, he even looked a little like a hood, at least a movie version of one. He had a hulking, bullish body, his neck was thick and his cheeks were heavily scarred. Most troubling to Janek were Clury's eyes. He searched them for signs of vulnerability, but could find nothing but slits in a mask.
Clury had had an exemplary record. He was a loner, specializing in undercover work, with lots of acquaintances but no real friends in the Department. He had been married to a younger and, by all accounts, pretty woman named Janet, who, he told people, had deserted him for another man. He lived alone in the one-story tract house they had shared, in a middle-class suburb on Long Island. His only extravagance was the baby-blue Cadillac he parked conspicuously in his driveway near his door.
For the first few days after he was killed, no one made a connection between the blown-up undercover cop on Long Island and the beaten-to-death society woman in Chelsea. NYPD investigators, working with Nassau County police, were convinced that Clury, engaged in a dangerous narcotics investigation, had been found out and executed by the ring he had penetrated as an agent.
There were reasons to believe this: His car was wired professionally; the people he'd been dealing with were ruthless; by blowing him up so spectacularly, they made him an example. But when these same investigators, searching Clury's house, uncovered his cache of photos of the Mendozas, a new police theory was instantly born: Clury was blackmailing the Mendozas; Jake Mendoza had paid to have him killed and at the same time arranged the murder of his wife.
On the plus side of this theory were two linking facts: Cluly, who moonlit as a private investigator, had been hired by Jake Mendoza the year before to collect compromising information about an opponent in a business deal; second, an examination of the victims' financial records showed recent cash withdrawals from an account controlled by Edith that matched perfectly with recent cash deposits by Clury.
But there were many unanswered questions: How did Clury come into possession of the compromising photographs? Why did Mendoza want his wife dead? Why, if Clury was engaged in blackmail, did he bank the money and thus provide a paper trail for the police and the IRS?
Finally, if the killings were linked, why were they so dissimilar-in Clury's case, quick and clean; in Edith's, slow and painful?
It was Timmy Sheehan's focus on these questions that caused him to regard Tania Figueras's disappearance as a relatively inconsequential tangent to the investigation.
The air over Mexico City was neither clean nor clear. On the descent, Janek craned to view the sprawl but caught only quick glimpses through a canopy of haze. On the ground, he collected his bags, passed customs, then made his way through the mob that thronged the terminal. After a chaotic scene at the Cuban Airlines counter, he boarded his plane for Havana.
After being boarded, the aircraft taxied to one side of the field and sat there, sputtering, for an hour and a half. Every once in a while the engines would rev, and then, failing to catch, would subside. There was a loud electrical hum, the air grew stifling. Passengers began to sweat and curse. A pair of stout stewardesses passed out pieces of hard brown candy. Janek noted that the bins above the seats, stuffed with baggage, were not secured by doors or even rope.
Finally, with an ear-splitting roar, the plane attacked the runway.
Shaking violently, it surged up through the smog. Janek looked down, saw nothing, closed his eyes. He wanted to rest. He wanted to be fresh when he reached Cuba. He conjured the familiar features of Tania Figueras, and then the stories about her that Timmy Sheehan's task force detectives had uncovered-the pretty Hispanic girl who lived in the Mendozas' apartment, cooked, cleaned, attended Edith Mendoza as a personal maid, and also brokered the couple's trysts.
It was the boxers who identified her. Timmy's people traced the muscular black participant in Clury's photos to Pinelli's Gymnasium, which was three blocks from Jake and Edith's Chelsea studio. Pinelli's was not a Yuppie health club; it was a serious liniment-and-leather gym catering to boxers, pro and amateur.
The black man's name was Carl Washington. He was quick to spill his story. Yes, he told the detectives, he had been hired on a number of occasions to play games with the Mendozas. Specifically, he was instructed to arrive, sweaty and bleeding from a workout, tie up the gentleman and make rough love to the lady, for which labor he was paid excellent money. He also received the expressed gratitude of both Mendozas, who, he assured his interrogators, always enjoyed their mutual encounters.
But there was more. According to Washington, he was not the only one who had performed such services. Several other regulars at Pinelli's had also played: Cash Royalton, a cruiserweight contender; Rudolfo Pefia;
Gus 'the Animal' Metaxas; and a tough, young, promising white welterweight named Tate. The meetings, Washington said, were always set up by the pretty Cuban girl named Tania. Tania would arrive at the gym, call the chosen fighter aside, outline the desired scenario, then hand him the key to the studio and the cash fee. Sometimes, when one of the guys performed particularly well, Tania would return to pay a bonus.
Why did Tania disappear only hours after Edith Mendoza was killed? What did she know? Had she been involved? Since the med examiner concluded that Edith had been severely beaten by human fists, and since Washington, Royalton, Pefia, Metaxas and Tate all named Tania as the broker of their deals, it was logical to assume that Tania had also played a role in setting up her employer's final assignation.
That had been the premise behind Janek's search nine years before-a search that had taken him, photo of Tania in hand, into bodegas and santerfa parlors throughout the city. He had checked airline manifests, immigration lists, Social Security computer printouts; had spoken to priests, taxi drivers, building superintendents, Cuban- American leaders in New Jersey, Miami and Los Angeles. Did anyone know the girl? Had anyone seen her? And the longer and more thoroughly he searched, the more worried and suspicious he became. Tania Figueras, as far as he could tell, had disappeared off the face of the earth.
Cuban airport formalities were lenient. A female immigration inspector in a tight, unironed khaki uniform asked Janek the purpose of his visit.
Tourism, he said. And what was Sen6r Janek's profession. Labor organizer, he replied.
The wait for baggage was interminable. The sky was dark by the time Janek wandered out of the terminal. In the line for transportation into the city, he and a Mexican businessman agreed to share a dollars-only tourist taxi. They didn't talk much on the way. Janek peered out the window at the dimly lit streets. He saw palms, lots of bicyclists, very few cars. In the distance he could see stark high rises, but the buildings along the road struck him as bedraggled. There was a muted smell of rot, night-blooming plants and decaying vegetation-the rich, soothing aroma of the tropics. At intersections he observed small congregations of teenage males. At several points along the route people waited with weary expressions in roadside shelters.
'Thirty years of socialism,' his Mexican companion commented, 'and they still have nothing here. Nada.'
After Janek checked into the Habana Libre, where the ragged towels still bore the old Hilton crest, he went out to walk on La Rampa. There were crowds on the wide avenue, not moving in any direction, just milling about. A light breeze was blowing off the bay. The odor of malfunctioning sewers scented the air. A grandiose movie palace with an unpainted facade was playing the Spanish language version of Gone With the Wind. Janek was able to read the title on the marquee even though half the letters were missing.
