Spiral

comu-nistas coming after him. Always he say to me, ‘Pepe, I am gone with no reason, this is what you do.’”
    ”I don’t see how Cuba could be—”
    ”Mr. Vega say, ‘Pepe, you take my wife and my children, and you go to this place, soon as you can.’”
    ”Where, Pepe?”
    ”I no can tell you, man.”
    ”Pepe—”
    ”No!” The tightness in his voice again. ”Mr. Vega, he say I don’t tell nobody.”
    ”Pepe, listen to me, okay? I don’t know what’s happened to Justo, but another person involved in this case has also disappeared, and so I—”
    ”Man, you hear what I saying to you? Mr. Vega tell me to do something, I do it.”
    I remembered both Justo and Pepe making a point of that. ”I’m not trying to—”
    ”And you hear something else, too. You got to find Mr. Vega, man.”
    ”Pepe—”
    ”I do what Mr. Vega say, you do what I say.”
    That last was spoken with the resonance of a blood oath. ”Is there anything...” But then I stopped, realizing that Pepe had broken the connection.
    ”Lieutenant?”
    Hanging up, I looked over to the Skipper. ”Pepe doesn’t know where Justo is.”
    Tranh said, ”What about the rest of your conversation with him?”
    ”Instructions that Justo gave him for security.”
    Helides shook his head. ”And no help to us.”
    ”I’m afraid not.”
    Now the Skipper glanced up at Tranh, who was looking only at me. ”Duy?”
    No reaction.
    ”Duy.”
    Tranh looked down now.
    Helides said, ”Do you have any ideas?”
    ”Just one, Colonel.”
    ”What is it?”
    Duy Tranh now looked back over at me. ”That Mr. Cuddy seems to have made a bad situation worse.”
    * * *#

    ”In a way,” I said, ”he’s right.”
    Tranh had left us in the den, the Skipper asking me to pour him a scotch, straight up. As I extended the glass toward his chair, he said, ”In what way, Lieutenant?”
    I sat down across from Helides. ”When I got here Tuesday afternoon, only two people were dead, your granddaughter and Sundy Moran. Since then, Ford Walton’s joined them. And now probably Malinda Dujong, and possibly even Justo as well.”
    The Skipper stopped the scotch before it reached his chin. ”You’re not certain Malinda is dead?”
    ”No,” and I told him why I’d run the bluff on his son and the others.
    A suckling sound as Helides tipped the glass toward the good side of his mouth. ”So, you thought spreading the word that you’d discovered what Malinda had found out might spook our killer.”
    ”Into going where he’s holding her.”
    ”Or making him come after you.”
    I nodded, and the Skipper nodded back.
    ”Colonel, anything at all that you haven’t told me?”
    His eyes showed over the rim of the glass. ”About Malinda?”
    ”About anything at all.”
    Helides rested the drink on the arm of his chair. As I was about to ask him if he was all right, the Skipper said, ”After I lost Nina—my first wife—I didn’t go to any kind of psychotherapist. Or ‘head-shrinker,’ as I thought of them in those days. Then, when David’s condition was... obvious, I couldn’t see that the doctors he saw helped him much. Even Henry Forbes, who’s top-notch in his profession. But after Veronica a... was killed, I asked Malinda if she’d speak to me.”
    ”Malinda?”
    ”Yes. Through my... grief, I could see that she was helping Jeanette. Had helped her, even before... that day, in coping with Spiro and his lifestyle.”
    ”So you thought Ms. Dujong might be able to help you as well?”
    A slow exhalation. ”At that point, Lieutenant, I couldn’t see what harm it could do.”
    When the Skipper didn’t continue, I said, ”What did you two talk about?”
    ”My dreams.”
    He spoke the phrase so quickly, I almost missed it. ”Your dreams?”
    ”Oh, not what happens when I sleep at night.” A pause. ”If I sleep. No, more what I had hoped for in my life. The grand strategy—my words, not hers.”
    ”Sir, I don’t mean to pry, but—”
    ”Prying is what I’ve asked you to do.”
    Almost a smile from him.
    ”Essentially,” I said.
    Helides suckled some more scotch. ”My dreams, Lieutenant, were to grow old with Nina and have a son in Spiro that we could be proud of. Well, I think now my personality was more suited to being a commander than a father. It never really registered with me that you couldn’t give orders—even good ones—to your son and still expect him to respect you. So I began to focus on the new baby God was about to