Tropic of Night (11 page)

They got the girl’s name before she slammed out. Youghans shuffled into the kitchen some minutes later, dressed in greasy Bermudas and a red tank top. He grabbed and popped the tallboy can of malt liquor, drank half of it, belched, and said, “You boys picked a hell of a time to crash in here. Little bitch was polishing my pole, man, tight as a three-dollar shoe, mmm-mm! Shit, I was two minutes from getting my nut …” He rubbed his crotch mournfully. “This is about Deandra, right? Yeah, I heard she got killed. Fucking building she was in, I told her to move out of there, but she was the stubbornist bitch alive, ‘bout that and every other goddamn thing else.”

“When was the last time you saw her, sir?” asked Barlow.

Youghans scratched his head. “What is this, Monday? Must’ve been Saturday night.”

“She was okay when you left her, was she?”

“Sure, running her mouth like always. I’ll tell you, because you’re probably gonna hear it in the ‘hood, we did have us some words, shouting and all.”

“What did you fight about?” Paz asked.

“Oh, this hoodoo shit she was into. Hey, I got no problem with mother Africa dah-dah-de-dah, I got my kente cloth and all that, stuff on the walls, okay, but she had this mojo man coming round …” He finished his can in three great swallows. “Okay, first thing, right away, I don’t appreciate that, I mean him coming round. I mean, am I the man or ain’t I? Two, that nigger messing with her head, you know what I mean? Can’t eat this, can’t drink that, quit smoking, take this herb, that herb. Even told her when she could fuck. Shit! So I told her, you know, girl, get real! I told her I didn’t want her to see him no more and she threw a shit fit. She said he was this great man, dah-de-dah-dah. Because he give her a number that hit and she bought the fuckin’ store out. Like I didn’t never give her nothing. She said he was going to make her baby this big deal, used a lot of bullshit African words … I lost it, you know? Dumb-ass bitch!”

“You smack her around any?” Paz asked.

“Yeah, I popped her a couple, just before I bugged out of there. Nothing heavy, and I tossed some of her hoodoo crap out the goddamn window.”

A look between the two cops. Paz said, “Oh, yeah? Like what?”

“Some fucking statue, a little basket full of weeds and shit. Some kind of chain, with, like, big nuts strung along it. Tell the truth I was drunk. I wanted a little piece of ass and no horseshit about the great Wandingo …”

“That his name, this guy?” asked Barlow.

“Nah, it’s something else, em, something. Mepetene, something like that. Tell you the truth I didn’t pay none of that no attention.”

“You ever see him?”

“I had he would’ve needed a new face. But, no. And I tried, man. She told me he was gonna come one night, oh, couple weeks back, and I hung around outside her crib, maybe five, six hours, but the nigger didn’t show. Then, a couple days later, she tells me, oh, he was there. What, the motherfucker flew in the window? Only two stairs leading up to that crib and I was watching both of them. Telling lies like that, trying to impress me, fucker can go through walls. I tell you, man, I’m sorry the little bitch dead, but, you know, you fuck with the bull, you get the horns.”

“Sir, are you trying to tell us you think this hoodoo man killed Miss Wallace?” Barlow asked.

“Well, shit! Who the fuck else want to do something like that?”

“Like what, Mr. Youghans?” asked Paz gently.

“Oh, you know, slice her up like they done.”

“How did you know that, sir?” More gently still.

“Shit, her brother called me up and told me. Cursed me out, too, the lame little motherfucker. Blame me for it. Me? Shit!”

“So where were you between, say, eleven Saturday night and two Sunday morning?” asked Barlow.

In bed, was the answer, unusually as it turned out, alone but for the crotch magazines, and so they all went downtown, with Paz’s heart singing tra-la-la, because this was going to be a grounder after all.

When he had Youghans in the little room, with Barlow looking on silently, Paz did the usual act, kicking chairs. You piece of shit, Youghans, you were drunk. You were pissed off. You had a fight. You admitted that. And then it went too far?you stuck her, and then you got scared, and you started thinking. You cut her up. You made it look weird, like some loony did it. And you made it all up, didn’t you, the hoodoo man. And what about this?

Paz stuck it in front of Youghans’s face, the thing he had found in the apartment. A framed picture of Youghans and an unpregnant Deandra Wallace in happier days, the glass covered with little brown spatters.

“You took this out of there after you killed her. You didn’t want anyone to think about you, did you? That’s blood, Youghans. Her blood. That you put there when you cut her open. You bastard!” He leaped across the table at Youghans and grabbed a handful of shirt, shook the man and screamed into his face. Then he allowed Barlow to pull him off, as per script, and toss him out of the interview room, with appalled commentary.

Paz got a cup of coffee and strolled back to where a one-way window gave on the room, hooked a chair with his foot, and sat down to watch Barlow work. Barlow was the best good cop in the business, and seemed particularly effective with black and Hispanic suspects. They seemed grateful that a fellow who looked and sounded like the Grand Kleagle was as calm and considerate as a social worker on quaaludes. Paz watched the action, without flipping the switch to bring sound across the thick glass. It was more restful that way and he got to concentrate on the body language. He couldn’t see Barlow’s face, only the hunch of his back as he leaned over the table. He could see Youghans’s face, though, as it went through a series of transformations. Anger first, the brows knotted, the mouth gaping to shout, then confusion, the eyes wide and staring, the mouth slack, and then the collapse?tears, a rictus of sorrow, sobbing, and the hands brought up in shame, the head drooping. Paz looked at his watch. A little under forty minutes, not a bad time, even for Barlow.

Paz got a pad and pen from his desk and went to the interview room. Barlow met him at the door.

Paz said, “He looks ready to write.”

“Let’s leave him be for a while, Jimmy.”

“Don’t you want to get the confession while he’s in the mood?”

“No confession. You know he didn’t do that girl.”

“What! For Christ’s sake, Cletis … sorry. Then what the … what were you doing in there all this time?”

“I was helping a soul to Jesus. A man can’t live the way that man’s been living without its eating away at him. He really cared for that girl, you know. I just helped him to see that and see that what he was doing, the fornicating, the drinking, well, that was just a way of trying to forget what-all’d happened to her, and that maybe part of it was his fault, taking advantage of her, pulling her away from the church so she was bait for that devil.”

“Jesus Christ ! What’re you talking about? He had the damn picture with her blood on it.”

Barlow’s eyes, the color of an inch of water in a tin pail, turned sharply colder.

“Jimmy, I’ll thank you not to take our Lord’s name in vain.”

“Sorry, but … I thought … I thought we had him.”

“I know you did, and I’m sorry to disappoint you, but that’s not our man. You know that in your heart, now, don’t you?”

Paz took a quick step away, kicked the baseboard hard, and cursed to himself in Spanish. Of course he did, and he knew why he’d concocted what now seemed like an absurd case against that pathetic lowlife.

He breathed deeply for a moment, facing the wall, head drooped. Then he turned around. “Yeah, right. All right.”

Barlow strolled back to his desk and sat in his chair, Paz trailing along after him, and then resumed as if nothing had happened. “But we know a couple more things about our fella. One, he thinks he’s real clever. He went around back under Deandra’s window and picked up all his Africa things, ‘cause we sure didn’t find any when we looked. He walked into that living room with a handful of blood and sprayed it on the wall, and then he took Youghans’s picture off the wall and walked into Youghans’s place, where he knew we’d find it. A frame.”

“So to speak. What’s the other thing?”

“Oh, just something funny. He said that little thing he was with when we showed up, she came over about noon today. He says he was in his place all morning, with the doors locked and that dog in the yard. Now, he also says that picture wasn’t there when he went to bed last night and it wasn’t there when he let his honey in. And between then and when we showed up, the dog didn’t make a sound.”

“So how did the picture get there?”

Barlow gave him a long, considering look. “Uh-hn, that’s the right question. How did it?”

“Somebody the dog knew and wouldn’t bark at,” Paz suggested.

“Possible, but not likely. Man says the dog barks at leaves falling down from the trees. Barks at the man’s momma. Barked when the girlfriend came.”

Barlow grimaced, showing a mouthful of crooked, yellowing, rural-bad-dental-care-type teeth. He rubbed his face vigorously. Paz thought of a big yellow dog shaking itself.

“What, Cletis? Tell me,” Paz said when he couldn’t stand it anymore.

“When you’re in the church,” said Barlow, “when you’re a churchgoing person, a believer, you believe in things you can’t see. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. Corinthians 2:9.”

Paz resisted the impulse to shove and needle. This had happened before, between them, it was part of Cletis’s thing, and Paz had seen the older man crack cases in this way.

“I’ve seen miracles,” Barlow continued. “I know you don’t believe me, but that don’t matter. I know what my eyes have seen. It was … two times in my life it was given to me to see glory, praise Jesus. Now, the devil can’t do miracles, can he?”

Barlow was looking at him differently. It was not a rhetorical question. Paz gave it serious thought. “Why can’t he? If you believe the movies, devils can do all kinds of weird stuff. I mean, he wouldn’t be much of a devil if he couldn’t, like, give you money, or make you terrific looking.”

“You believe that, do you?”

“No, I don’t believe it,” said Paz, exasperated now. “I’m just saying, if you give me that there’s a devil, then it follows that he’s got magic powers. Logically.”

Barlow scratched behind his ear. “Logically, eh? Tell me this, then: Exodus 7:10. Aaron casts his rod upon the ground and it becomes a serpent. And Pharaoh calls in his sorcerers and magicians of Egypt and they do the same thing, their rods become serpents, too. So, do you think they were the same kind of snakes?”

“I don’t know, Cletis. It wasn’t my case.”

Barlow ignored this. “They were not the same, no sir! The Lord caused Aaron’s rod to become a real snake, but the magician’s rods stayed plain old rods. They just made everyone think they were snakes. You see the difference?”

“Uh-huh. God makes real miracles, but the devil just tricks us.” Paz said this like a bored schoolboy in a catechism class. The payoff was not too distant.

“That’s right. The devil can’t do miracles, ‘cause he’s got no power of creation. Only the Lord has power of creation. The Lord can send an angel through walls, through the roof, anywhere he likes, but the devil’s got to use the door. The only power the devil’s got is what we give him, all he’s got is power over whatsoever mind that is not turned to the Kingdom, which is you and me, son. And all the other poor sinners out there. The devil can twist your mind into a knot. That’s who we need to look for.”

“Who? The devil? Okay, I figure our perp for around eight foot six, red complexion, wears a little beard, distinguishing marks?horns, tail, little hooves. I’ll get that right out on the wires. He shouldn’t be hard to spot.”

Barlow waggled a finger. “Don’t mock, Jimmy,” he said quietly. “I know you like to, but you can’t do it around this here case. It ain’t good for your health.”

“What’re you saying? Cut to the chase, here.”

“I’m saying look at the facts. A girl killed and cut up, and not just a girl, a girl about to have a baby. The baby’s cut up too. Not just cut up in a crazy way, neither, cut up just so, in a ritual way. Two, she let whoever did it do it without fighting any, that we could see.”

“But she was drugged.”

“There was chemicals in her body, but she didn’t take them through her mouth. They just got there and we don’t know how, and right now we don’t know what they do. For all we know, they might’ve made her wide awake, and she just told him to go ahead.”

“That’s nuts.”

“Uh-huh. To us, but you been in the police long enough to know people do all kinds of awful stuff to themselves and other folks, stuff that seems just fine at the time. Something gets in ‘em, and then later, that’s just what they say. You heard it yourself about four hundred times. I don’t know what got into me.”

“That’s a figure of speech.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t always just a figure of speech. Not back in Bible times, it wasn’t. Our Lord was always casting devils out of folks. And maybe not even now, when you come to think on it. Then we got the other fact, that this fella seems to go where he wants to, and no one sees him, not even dogs. It takes some doing to get past a dog.” He fixed Paz with his eye and said, matter-of-factly, “I guess, when you put that together we’re looking for someone with demonic powers, God help us.”

Paz goggled for a moment and then felt a flash of raw anger. There wasn’t going to a be a brilliant payoff after all. With some force, he said, “Oh, for crying out loud! Look, we have exactly one informant for all this, and he might’ve been half in the bag at the time when. I’ll tell you what the real facts are. We got a perp did a killing, and he dressed it up with all kinds of African hoodoo. Is he wacko? I’ll give you that. Is he some kind of spook with weird mystic powers? No, he’s not. No offense, but that kind of stuff isn’t real, not anymore it isn’t. You want to believe it happened back in Bible times, hey, I respect your beliefs, but this is now, and we’re looking for a regular guy, a regular homicidal maniac, not the spawn of Satan. Talk about something getting into people?what’s got into you ? I mean, unless you’re pulling my leg …”