The Mirror Maze Read online

  “Not now… thanks. I have to meet someone. Maybe some other time?”

  “You from around here?” the bookmaker asked. Mel nodded. “There’s a whole warehouse, in the city. We deal direct with the public. Know what I mean?” The bookmaker winked and pulled a card from his pocket. “Give us a call some day when you’re not too busy.”

  Mel looked at the card. “Thanks, er, Barney. I might do that.”

  “We take care of our customers. It’s a straight deal.” The bookmaker sipped his whiskey and savored the taste with a smacking sound from his lips. “Life’s strange, isn’t it? I used to run an importing business that employed fifty people. We all paid our taxes, it was honest and legal, but tariffs and quotas wiped me out. Today I deal in the same stuff, but I charge lower prices, I keep more people in a living, and I still make more for myself. So the customers are happier, my people are happier, and I’m happier. But it’s criminal. I could go to jail. Now, you tell me where the sense is in that.”

  “I can’t tell you, Barney, and I’m a lawyer.”

  “Oh, shit…”

  “Don’t worry about it—I can probably send you a lot of business.” Mel drained his glass and stood up. “But for now, I gotta go.”

  “So maybe we’ll be hearing from you, eh?”

  “You bet.”

  Mel left the bar and followed signs for Gates 10 to 22. According to the indicator, United Flight 86 from Denver had already landed. He continued on, and by the time he joined the gaggle of people waiting in front of Gate 14, the first arrivals from the flight were beginning to trickle through from the jetway.

  Normally he liked airports. He liked watching people hug, kiss, cry, and give vent to emotions which custom and their own uptightness made them suppress for most of their lives. The world would be so much more livable if people would let themselves be themselves for more of the time, he thought. But he had been as bad himself, once. Finding out how to think and feel differently about himself was one of the things he’d learned from Eva. Freedom’s child, if ever there had been one… He forced back the emotions rising inside him and scanned the oncoming faces.

  Then he spotted her in a blue-green raincoat and carrying a brown case, behind two men in business suits. She didn’t see him until he stepped in front of her and she almost collided with him. She stopped, recognized him, and without saying anything threw her arms around his neck and clung. He held her close, sensing her need to feel secure if only for a few seconds, and after a while when she stayed put, trembling, he slid a hand up her back to stroke her hair. Finally she released her grip and stood back, trying to muster a smile, but too wan and exhausted. Mel stared at her face for a moment or two longer than would have been normal, just to be certain. It was definitely Stephanie. But at least there were no tears. From the look of her that might well have been because she didn’t have any left. “It’s been a long time, Steph,” he said. Hardly original, but what else was there?

  Stephanie nodded and closed her eyes. She seemed to be trying to summon the strength for something she had been composing herself to say. “Mel, so much has happened… I don’t really know where to start, but…” She faltered.

  He did it for her. “I know,” he said gently. “I’m sorry.”

  Stephanie’s eyes widened in confusion. “How could—”

  “You didn’t give me any flight details, so I tried to call you back at GPD. Thornton in Personnel told me… It was Eva, wasn’t it?”

  Stephanie released a long sigh, closed her eyes for a moment again, and nodded. “But that’s not all of it. You see, there was…” She swallowed and couldn’t finish. Before she could resume, a man lugging a bulging garment bag through the crowd jostled her from behind. Mel took her bag in one hand, her elbow with the other, and steered her away from the gate. “Do you have any more bags to pick up?”

  “Just one case.”

  “Then let’s collect it and get out of here to somewhere quiet.” They began walking. “Could you eat?”

  Stephanie nodded. “We had a snack on the plane, but it was the first I’ve touched for days.” She glanced at him. “I’ve kind of assumed you can put me up for a while, Mel. Would that be any problem?”

  They came to the escalator going down to the baggage-claim level. Mel’s head was whirling with questions: How had Eva come to be there? Where did Brett figure in all this? He had wondered if Stephanie and Brett’s getting back together had turned out to be a lost cause after all, and if Brett was no longer around… but at a time like this he didn’t want to crossexamine her. Right now, he could see, she needed rest. The talking could wait until tomorrow. They came off the bottom of the elevator. Finally, to break the silence, he said, “It just… didn’t seem like Eva to go and do that, somehow.”

  Stephanie walked a few paces farther, then halted. Mel stopped with her, uncertain what he had said wrong. She drew a long breath, then turned toward him and drew him aside, out of the tide of people. Her face was different now, still showing the strain, but underneath it had acquired a firmer set of determination. “Mel, it isn’t just Eva. Brett’s dead, too. He went back to California about three weeks ago, in the middle of October. There was an accident… Except I don’t think it was an accident. And Eva didn’t kill herself, either. You’re right—she wasn’t the type, and she didn’t have any reason. But besides that, I was the only person who knew she was in Denver. You see what that means? It wasn’t suicide, Mel. She was murdered—by the same people who killed Brett. She was murdered, by somebody who thought she was me.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The “party” turned out to be at the home of Eva’s tutor, Dr. Paul Brodstein, a professor of political science at the university. His wife, Martha, also taught there, her subject being modern European history. Their house lay across the Pensacola Bay bridge on the seaward side of Santa Rosa Island, facing the Gulf. It was a sprawling, two-story affair of split-level decking and stained redwood, with a hodgepodge of cheerfully uncoordinated extensions that appeared to have evolved as afterthoughts, and stood comfortably removed from neighbors above dunes of white sand and crabgrass lining the shore.

  There were a dozen or so vehicles parked haphazardly around the house when Stephanie arrived with Mel and Brett. There had been a slight modification to the arrangement they had contemplated earlier in the day. Eva, it turned out, would be making her own way there with a boyfriend of hers who was visiting for the weekend from Washington. Mel had known Brett for too long to hope that any sense of fair play might induce him to back off and go to the beach party as he’d originally intended, and even before they arrived at the Brodsteins’, he was becoming uncomfortably conscious of an immediate attraction between Stephanie and Brett. They didn’t go out of their way to flaunt it, and Stephanie was obviously trying hard not to injure Mel’s feelings unduly, but it was there. He felt awkwardly as if it was he and not Brett who should have been finding something else to do.

  Paul Brodstein greeted them at the door. He turned out to be a lively, expressive man, with dark, bushy-browed eyes, a full head of curly black hair, and a graying beard. He was wearing jeans and a Pendleton plaid shirt, with a striped apron over the top. “Three more. My word! If this goes on, we ll have to sell the house and buy a hotel or something…” He shook hands vigorously and scanned the faces of the arrivals. “Well, at least that face isn’t exactly new. You have to be Eva’s sister. She’s here already somewhere… Anyhow, glad to see you all here. Come on in. Martha will fix you up with drinks, if you can find her. Otherwise help yourselves—they’re through there. I’m just about to get some chicken going out back.”

  The interior was as lacking in formality as the outside had suggested, with walls predominantly of bare timber, adorned with souvenirs that ranged from a South African assegai and a Japanese Space Agency astronaut’s cap, to a human skeleton and a stuffed skunk. The furniture was well seasoned and chosen for utility and comfort, not show; the housekeeping was sufficiently minimal to put guests who worried
about the adequacy of their own efforts in that direction blissfully at ease; and of course, with two university professors in residence, there were books, papers, magazines, and journals crammed on shelves in every room and in the hallways, on window ledges, mantelpieces, and stacked on any other horizontal space that could be found.

  After ushering the new arrivals into the living area, where numerous people, mainly students by the look of them, were drinking and talking in groups, Paul brought Eva in from an adjacent room and let Stephanie introduce her two companions. Then he excused himself and hurried out to the deck at the rear of the house, just as Martha appeared. She was a plump, jovial, bespectacled woman, like Paul in her forties, at that moment too busy taking care of everyone to exchange more than a few pleasantries. She asked what they wanted to drink. Mel and Brett settled for beers from an ice-filled tub in the corner, while Eva asked for another vodka tonic with a touch of lime, and Stephanie for a white wine. Martha bustled away back to the kitchen.

  Stephanie and Eva were indeed virtually images of one another. It was no wonder that they were always being mistaken. Only when they were side by side could Mel discern Eva’s face to be a shade more womanly, with less of the girlish freshness of Stephanie’s, and her body to be slightly fuller. And the similarity would in all likelihood become closer with time, as the two years that separated them became proportionately less. The difference in personalities was more apparent. Eva was wearing a pale green button-up dress, simple but smart, which contrasted with Stephanie’s beige top and blue jeans. Stephanie, bright-eyed, exuberant, eager to fit into her new role and be accepted, was all freshman student; Eva, was less talkative and impetuous, more restrained, a listener and a thinker. And while she listened, she watched people’s faces, hearing not only their words, but also the things they didn’t even know they were saying. As he stood, watching her, Mel was unable to recall anyone who had struck him in such a short space of time as so fascinatingly… deep.

  A conversation going on to one side was about environmental scares. “The whole business about DDT was a fraud,” a fat man in a gray sweatshirt was saying. “None of the claims had any basis in scientific fact, but they’ve all been so absorbed into the popular mythology that nothing will change it now.”

  “I thought there was a scientific panel on it,” a tall girl in a black dress said.

  The man in the gray sweatshirt snorted. “There was a panel all right, but it recommended unanimously not to ban it. But the EPA secretary at the time didn’t bother to read the report and hadn’t attended any of the hearings. The decision had already been made for political reasons, regardless of what the evidence said.”

  “What reasons were they?” Brett asked, moving forward to join in.

  Mel watched as Brett was drawn into the circle and Stephanie squeezed in next to him. Not that Mel was that surprised—or especially perturbed, since he had hardly known her long enough to have a claim to ownership rights… but hell, he’d found her, after all…

  “You win a few, you lose a few,” a voice said near him. He looked around to find Eva watching him, a faint smile playing on her face.

  “Do you read minds, too?”

  “When Stephanie called me earlier, she said she’d found a tall, blond date for me, with a beard. So she must have been supposed to be yours.”

  Mel shrugged and grinned resignedly. “If you really want to know the truth, you win a few, and you lose a hell of a lot.”

  “I know, but most guys wouldn’t say so.”

  “I don’t know why. If you’ve never failed, you’ve never tried.”

  “But it’s not the way to hold your own in locker-room talk.”

  “Well, that’s the problem with everything these days,” Mel said. “It isn’t knowing what you’re talking about that matters, but knowing how to sound as if you do.”

  “You mean you’re not going to try and impress me by being all man and macho? Oh, I think I like you already.”

  “If that’s the case, then I guess not.”

  Eva looked him up and down. “You keep in good shape, though. What do you do?”

  “Oh, I like to swim a lot… work out at the gym sometimes. But if you mean classwise, I’m taking computer science. So’s Brett, my roommate. He’s the guy who just walked off with my date.”

  “Real close buddies.”

  “Yeah, right…”

  “She’s going to be a physicist,” Eva said. “She wants to work on nuclear things.”

  “She told me.”

  “How do you feel about it… with all the controversy and so on that you hear?”

  “Nuclear stuff, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  Mel scratched his head. “Well, I guess if God had meant us to build nuclear plants, he’d have given us brains.”

  Eva laughed. “Good for you.”

  “Sure… I think they’re okay,” he said, relieved to find they were on the same side. “People get it all out of proportion.”

  The initial attraction that Mel had felt was already growing into something more. She was interested and interesting, which was enough in itself to make her different—the kind of person who would have thoughts of her own. He couldn’t imagine her chattering verbal styrofoam for an evening, which filled space but had no substance, leaving only the thought that the time would have been spent better with a good book. Already he found himself searching inwardly for ways to suggest getting together again, on their own somewhere. But then he remembered that she was already with a guy, the one who had come down from Washington.

  As if on cue, a man sauntered in from the door leading out to the rear deck and crossed the room toward them. He was older than Mel had expected, maybe in his early thirties, with tanned, clean-shaven features and dark hair, neatly trimmed and brushed flat, which, with his white shirt and casual tan slacks, singled him out from the generally more hirsute company of students and academic staff members. Eva smiled and slipped an arm easily and naturally through his as he joined them. The simple physical act caused Mel to experience a sinking feeling inside, even though he had no business to.

  “Having fun?” the newcomer asked. “The chicken’s cooking outside. It’s good. Be warned, though, that the conversation out there is politics.”

  “Dave, this is Mel,” Eva said. “He’s a computer expert at the university. Dave Fenner, a friend of mine from Washington.”

  “Hi.” Dave gave Mel’s hand a firm shake. His manner was frank and genial.

  “A long way to come for a party,” Mel said.

  “Not too far to see Eva, though. Are you from near here, Mel?”

  “Right here. Pensacola’s my hometown.”

  “It’s a nice place.”

  “I like it… Not sure if I want to stay here forever, though. You’re from California, is that right?” Mel said to Eva.

  “San Mateo, south of San Francisco. Wherever you’re from, it’s nice to have a change to somewhere different.”

  “I guess so.” Mel watched Eva’s long nails tracing lightly on Dave’s forearm while they spoke. Dave stood easily, his relaxed poise and confidence affirming status far more effectively than any overt male-rivalry ritual could have. It said, simply, that he didn’t need to compete. Mel had the feeling of being hopelessly outclassed. He didn’t want to make a long, drawn-out issue of proving it. It just wasn’t his day today. “Anyhow, I guess I’ll take a look outside,” he said. “Maybe try some of that chicken.”

  “Catch you later,” Eva said after him as he moved away.

  The sun was bleeding into the ocean off to the west when he came out onto the deck. A few hundred feet away across the sand below the house, lines of white-capped breakers were rolling lazily in from the Gulf. Paul Brodstein was piling breaded drumsticks and portions of breast into a tray from a grill of glowing coals, while people helped themselves and added bread, sweet corn, sauce, and potato salad from a side table. The aroma reminded Mel that he hadn’t eaten since lunchtime. Without further ado
, he picked up a plate from the stack and piled himself a generous serving.

  “The conventional wisdom about the robber-baron era is a load of bunk,” Brodstein was saying to the company in general. “Most people think of the excesses of the nineteenth century as the inevitable result of unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism, and that only when the public demanded regulation were the laws and controls implemented to force the economy to serve the many rather than the few.” He looked up challengingly. “Isn’t that the way it’s taught in the schools, acted upon in Congress, and what’s believed by the man in the streets?”

  “Well, isn’t it true?” one of the listeners asked, a heavily tanned student with blond hair, wearing shorts and a green windbreaker, perched on a corner of the rail.

  “No, it couldn’t be more wrong, Jack,” Brodstein replied. “Every one of those evils happened not because of capitalism, but because of interference in it, by the government. This nation has never had a genuine free-market economy at all.”

  “What about the big railroad scams?” another voice asked. “Wouldn’t you call those exploitive monopolies?”

  “But that was precisely because of intervention in the free market,” Brodstein replied. “You see, except for a few, very rare cases, in a genuine free market, a monopoly cannot survive. Monopoly privilege can be sustained only by force—either of the criminal kind, where you blow your competition away with bombs and bullets, or the legal kind, where the government does it for you. The only exception is when the monopoly exists through genuine excellence of the product, where it’s impossible for anyone to offer the customer a better deal—and in that case there’s nothing to complain about, anyhow.”

  Brodstein looked around to invite comment, but the listeners preferred to hear him out. He went on, “Take the great Union Pacific fraud. It was given twelve million acres of land by the feds, and twenty-seven million dollars in six-percent, thirty-year bonds. The Central Pacific, which built eastward to meet it, was given nine million acres and twenty-four million dollars. That was how they got their capital—not by private investment, which is how real free enterprise works, but by government subsidy. The men in control of policy subcontracted all the construction to themselves through an operation called the Credit Mobilier, and the costs mysteriously skyrocketed. They weren’t interested in building a railroad; they were out to milk it dry.”