Dead of Night (8 page)

Months later, when he knew her better, the two of them naked in the tobacco barn, Solaris said what he felt the first time he’d heard about it. “The man’s afraid of germs, but he buys the kind of nasty shit he does? Sewage? Water with invisible bugs? He’s crazy. He looks like what the Santeria people call ‘the Walking Dead’”

The Cuban was imagining the man in zombie-white makeup, with pointed teeth and ears, like a bat. Not so different from the way he actually looked.

Dasha replied, “He’s afraid of anything unhealthy. An uneducated boy like you has never seen diseases under a microscope. He has. If he knew I’d touched your
yieldak,
had your sweat on my skin and didn’t wash? He’d never let me in the car.”

The Chinaman had already told Solaris why the man ordered such strange things. Research.

Maybe true; maybe the Chinaman was making it up.

He’d also told him the doctor had invented vitamin pills and become rich. Made good investments, owned many businesses even though he was
socialista
at heart. Loved the old Cuba during the days of the Bearded One, which had something to do with him buying sugarcane acreage in the Everglades, west of Miami, a city Solaris dreamed of visiting.

“Probably because of the trouble he had in Florida, he hates the U.S. government,” the Chinaman said. “That’s why I pretend to give him a discount.”

Why did the Yankees bother growing cane? Cuba had once produced enough to sweeten the world, yet the arrogant imperialists had nearly strangled the island to death.

The Chinaman didn’t say that. One of the old villagers had told him. Gave him a speech. Solaris wasn’t interested.

So it was “Señorita Bruja Naver,” and “Dr. Dulce,” until the woman asked to see his body in the dim light of a tobacco barn that smelled of sour pepper, like a whiskey keg. Now she was “Señorita Serpiente.”

On her next visit, Dasha allowed him to touch her breasts. Part of the reward system. The third trip, she behaved as if he were invisible until she stepped into the building and bolted the door. Then, step-by-step, she instructed him on how he could please her.

Her body was different than the prostitute he’d been with. Different than women described by older men in the village—all they talked about was sex and baseball. Solaris felt very strange when he did what she asked him to do, yet it was impossible to refuse her.

As their helicopter lifted over the mountains, he’d gargled with rum, hacked, and spit into the sand. But he still loved the thought of her body, the way her pale skin burned beneath his hands.

 

 

During a recent visit, she’d held up a rubber balloon shaped like a plantain.

“If he learns how to control himself,” she told him, “waits until I’m ready, I’ll let him use this one day. But don’t expect it every time.”

Solaris had tried to hold back. God he’d tried. He’d thought about baseball, then about old women stirring beans, even imagined dogs farting. Nothing could dull the voltage of her fingers on his skin.

She was livid. Went looking for a towel and didn’t come back.

His last performance, a month ago, was worse. When he bragged to his friends in the village about what the blond Russian did to him in the tobacco barn, they’d spit and whistled in scorn. Called him a crazy liar. To prove himself, he’d borrowed a camera from an old man who’d once been the village Party captain. Solaris had wedged the camera into the barn rafters, lens pointed downward, a long piece of fishing line tied to the shutter release.

Just being in the barn, the way it smelled, imagining being with her, made it difficult to breathe.

Their small helicopter landed five days later.

When Solaris was naked, and she had her bra off, he tried to position her in a way so that her face and body would be visible to the camera, all the while feeling blindly for the fishing line that his stupid fingers could not locate.

“What are you doing?”

“Doing?”

“Yes, doing?”

“Trying to find a more comfortable position against this wall.”

“No, I meant him. What’s wrong with
him
?”

“Wrong?”

“Are you blind? Idiot!”

Solaris looked.
“Oh.”
The pressure of making a photograph had affected him in a way that imagining old women stirring beans, and farting dogs, could not. “I think ... he’s learning control.”

The woman slapped his flaccid member, then slapped it again. “If this is what he calls control, I have no use for him. Or you.”

There was something vicious in her voice, a deeper pitch as if there were an angry man hidden inside.

Solaris had called after her, “Maybe he wants to listen to your lips, not your hands—”

Too late. She was dressing, already on her way.

 

 

The last time Solaris looked into Snake Woman’s face was in the final minutes of his life, hearing the man-voice inside her, seeing the revulsion that she felt for him—for
men
—as his eyesight and his hearing faded, recognizing both and wondering why those frightening qualities hadn’t alerted him before.

It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, dry season, when coffee bushes were blooming white as snow on hillsides above the village baseball diamond, near the vegetable fields where he’d once plowed behind oxen.

The streets of Vinales were decorated with ribbons and candles that were lit each night. They hadn’t celebrated the holiday while the Bearded One lived, so the decorations seemed more colorful because they were unfamiliar.

This trip, three of them arrived in the helicopter. Dasha, dressed in black blouse and slacks; Mr. Sweet; plus the lardish-looking Russian man who sometimes accompanied them, black hair growing on the backs of his hands, and out of his ears like a wolf.

Mr. Sweet slid into the back of the waiting Volvo, never said a word, as usual, adjusting the paper mask on his face, not touching the door handles even though he wore gloves, his eyes sweeping the area but nothing registering.

He’d speak with the Chinaman, no one else.

The big Russian gave Solaris the familiar stare—contemptuous, aggressive. Solaris returned it:
If you had the chance, cabrón, you wouldn’t risk it.

Didn’t matter. When Dasha wagged her finger at Solaris, inviting him to follow her into the barn, he was so grateful that his voice broke when he said to her, “After the last time, I thought you were so disappointed in me that you would never—”

“Shut your mouth, fool. If your body wasn’t attached to a brain, we’d get along much better.”

Even with her bad Spanish, the woman could joke with him. That’s the way Solaris took it:
This is how close we’ve become.

There was something different in her manner. She was rushed, a critical woman more critical than usual. And the hairy Russian shadowed her movements, but from a distance, his attention swiveling from Dasha to the Chinaman who was now sitting in the backseat of the limo with Mr. Sweet.

There was an energy in the air, volatile.

More than once, he heard the name Applebee mentioned—the disgusting little man who’d cried like a baby because he had to ride in the helicopter.

“I would spit on such a man!” Solaris had once bragged to Dasha. “Why bring such a person to Cuba? What use could he be?”

He was testing. Wanted to see how she reacted. He could picture the blond woman and Applebee off by themselves, whispering. The Chinaman had told him Applebee was there to confirm there were tiny creatures in the South African crates the doctor was buying, and also to test the local water supply.

The woman didn’t discuss business with Solaris, so she surprised him, replying, “He’s going to make me rich; that’s his use. He’s finding a cure for a parasite. A sort of worm.”

“What kind of worm?”

“The kind of worm people will pay anything to get rid of.”

That peculiar little guy with a microscope. It was impossible for Solaris to compete. “A man who cries isn’t a man. He’s worthless!”

“Worthless?” The woman’s tone was cutting—yes, her way of joking, he decided. “You’d be an expert on that”

Later, as he died, Solaris realized he’d misread more than just her sense of humor.

Never saw it coming.

By 11:30, I’d finished giving my edited statement to detectives. During the interview I told them that, because I’d left my cell phone with Applebee, I’d checked the log. The last two numbers dialed were unfamiliar. They’d been made while I was chasing the bad guys.

“It was either Applebee or whoever killed him.”

The cops were not pleased that I’d retrieved the phone. They said I’d maybe screwed up any chance of fingerprints. They copied the numbers, letting me see they were pissed off.

So maybe that’s the reason they told me I couldn’t leave: a mild punishment.

At twenty minutes before midnight, and with nothing else to do, I took aside an investigator from the Bartram County Medical Examiner’s Office to ask if she’d come to any conclusions about Jobe’s death. I’d assumed murder, but realized there was another possibility.

The investigator, whose ironic name was Rona Graves, replied, “Are you a relative? A close friend?”

“No. His sister’s a friend. I’d never met him.”

“Are you wondering suicide or murder? It’s really impossible to say right now. Too soon. Too much to sort out.”

We were standing outside, Applebee’s porch light casting tree shadows on sand, stars beyond the tree canopy, the two of us separated from a handful of curious neighbors by yellow crime scene tape. Ms. Graves, in jeans and a blue blouse with rolled-up sleeves, was an interesting-looking woman, with her Appalachian face, Latina cocoa skin, wild black surfer-boy hair cropped short. She had all the professional mannerisms, didn’t have to think about it: the voice, the wording, body language that served as a barrier. She’d been in the business for a while. But she could also wrinkle her nose to show you how hard she was thinking, or brush an elbow. Ways of letting you know there was a human in there.

She was wrinkling her nose now, tapping thoughtfully on a clipboard. “I probably shouldn’t discuss this any more than that. We’re all going to have to wait for the autopsy.”

I nodded and looked toward the house—silhouettes of busy cops—then down a sand trail that led to more dilapidated houses. This island was prime for one of the big developers to move in, get the title problems resolved, then start all over demanding really big bucks.

It would happen.

“This could be a really nice place.”

I said, “Lots of waterfront, good trees. Yeah.” Startled we’d shifted to a similar pattern of thought.

“When the nightshade blooms here, it’s like snowdrifts. All those white blooms. But you’ve got to be careful, especially with kids. The berries are poisonous. We’ve done several of those cases.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Two died.”

She was still tapping on the clipboard. I got the impression she was marking time, just like me. Her preliminary examination was done. Now she was waiting for detectives to finish so she could bag the body and be on her way.

“Do you have any nonrelated questions, Dr. Ford?”

“Just Ford. Or Marion.”

“Okay. Ford. Anything else I can do for you?”

There was something else on my mind. I was concerned about the young constable.

I said, “The teenage girl who was here, the one the EMTs treated for shock? Her name’s Melinda Voigt. Local girl. She’s never been through anything like this. I think she’s going to need some help.”

“I haven’t met Melinda, but I know who she is. What kind of help?”

“Maybe a couple of visits with your shrink buddy. Better yet, the kind of help where someone with some authority—like you—tells the girl a small lie. A lie of kindness. I think someone needs to get the girl off alone and tell her that Applebee was dead before she arrived here.”

“She feels responsible?”

“The girl was on his porch when I arrived. She hadn’t gone in. She refused to let me in. After we found the body, she started wondering if maybe she could have saved him. If she hadn’t waited. Behaved a little more human and a little less hard-ass.”

“She played the role, huh? The big boss in charge.”

“That’s right.”

“I’m not surprised. The cops tell me she’s a pompous ass. Even before she got elected constable, they say she was a pompous ass. Do you know what the vote was? Four to three. Only seven island voters. She’d cooked up the constable idea herself. A title, some power. I hear she comes from big money.”

“Acting like a pompous ass is one of the stages most of us go through, isn’t it, Ms. Graves?”

“I’m not so sure. Are you including yourself?”

“Sure. I’ve got lots of experience. Not just the pompous ass stage, either. On a regular basis, I invent all kinds of ways to behave like an ass. Thoughtless ass. Clumsy ass. Dumb ass. Myopic ass. Name one.”

She was grinning as I added, “The kind of guilt Melinda’s starting to feel could become permanent. The kind too heavy even for us experienced asses to deal with. She told me she’s only twenty. A small lie of kindness might help.”

Graves thought about it for a moment, letting me see that her professional side was uneasy with the idea, before she said, “From what I was told, Applebee was still alive at a little after nine when you telephoned 911. Slightly more than an hour later, you called to say that he was dead. What time did the girl arrive on scene?”

“Nine-forty. That’s what Melinda told me. I showed up about twenty minutes later.”

The woman was shaking her head. “The window’s too small. We can’t pinpoint the time of death that closely.”

“I’ve read there’s a way by measuring the body’s core temperature—”

“Yes, I’ve already done that, but not with any . . .” She paused to organize her explanation. “Let me put it this way. After somatic death—that’s when the body as a whole stops functioning—a corpse’s core temperature can remain normal for one, even two, hours afterward, depending on conditions. Then it drops by one to one and a half degrees per hour. That’s what you’re talking about. I did my preliminary examination at eleven-thirty. Applebee’s temp was thirty-five Celsius, which is only two degrees below norm. See what I mean?”