Tropic of Night (21 page)

“You’re going to use this in your book?” He was skilled at evading her frequent probes.

“Of course. I use everything. Not one of my relatives still speaks to me, and I’ve only published one novel. But you? Well, maybe just in a short story. Or a brief lyric. I don’t know you very well.”

“You don’t? We know each other … what? A year and a half?”

“Yes, and you fall by every week or so, and take me out, and treat me like a lady, and jump on my bones afterward, and God knows it’s pleasant, you’re a very nice guy, and it’s not like I need a velvet rope to keep all the others from rushing the door, but I probably know the checkout ladies at Winn-Dixie better than I know you.”

“Get out of here! We talk all the time.”

“About me and poetry and what to read, and what I think about writing, and my little-girl dreams. But we don’t talk about you. I know you’re a homicide cop and your mother owns a restaurant, and your partner is a quaint old redneck. Anecdotes, data, but the man is hidden. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“All right, what do you want to know?” said Paz, nor was he able to keep the edge of challenge from his voice.

She grinned and patted his hand. “It doesn’t matter, Jimmy. It’s not an interrogation.” She collected their trash and walked to a basket. When she returned she sat down on the grass in front of him cross-legged, exposing soft white thighs.

He said, “Well, at least it’ll give us something to talk about as the years slide by. You can pry out my shameful secrets.” He used his ordinary light bullshitting tone, but she smiled only faintly.

“I was going to call you,” she said. “My grant came through the other day.”

“What, the Iowa thing? Congratulations, babe!” He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “So, you’re leaving in the fall?”

“No, as soon as I can sublet my place. Maybe a week. Anything to avoid another whole summer here.”

Paz kept his expression neutral and friendly but began to feel that stiffening of the features that follows when we separate the face from the heart. “Well. Bye-bye, Willa. We should give you a big send-off.”

“Mm. I’d rather slink away, if you don’t mind. But if you want to take me out, I’m dying to see Race Music. It’s at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. What, you don’t like it?”

Paz was not aware that his face had registered anything at all, and he said, “I don’t know. I get enough of that oh-how-our-people-have-suffered shit on the job. Picking at the scab?I mean, what good does all that do?”

“No, the guy is funny! He’s not heavy, he’s not portentous. It’s a musical, for God’s sake. You like musicals.”

“I don’t like messages.”

“We went to My Fair Lady last month. That has a message.”

“What message?”

“People who change superficial behaviors become different people, one, and two, the old fart still can get the girl. That’s why they love it on Miami Beach.”

Paz had to laugh. “Okay, it’s a date. Friday.”

“What a guy!” she crowed, and got up and sat on his lap and kissed him on the mouth. She really did have the most excellent mouth, Paz reflected, like a teacup full of hot eels.

Paz put in a couple of hours of routine work on this morning’s shooting, which scrubbed personal musings from his surface mind. Barlow was out. He placed the folder with the completed investigation and arrest report on Barlow’s pristine desk and left for the remainder of his canvass.

Traffic was building up to the afternoon rush on 95, so he took surface streets, arriving a little after four. The courtyard under the landings was now running with children back from school. He climbed the stairs. At the third-floor landing, he came upon a boy urinating in a corner. “Don’t do that!” Paz said, and the boy said, “Shut the fuck up, motherfucker!” and continued his pee. Paz walked around the spreading puddle without further comment and rang Mrs. Meagher’s bell.

A chunky young girl with cornrowed hair and plastic-rimmed glasses opened the door and looked him up and down suspiciously. “What you want?” she demanded. She wore a pink sweatshirt with some cute animals appliquéd upon it in plastic, and blue slacks. She looked younger than fourteen.

“I want to talk with you, if you’re Tanzi Franklin,” Paz said.

“How you know my name?”

He showed her his badge. “I’m the police. I know everything.” Big smile, not returned. “Could we go inside?”

After an instant’s hesitation, the girl backed away from the door and let him in.

“Where’s your grandma?”

“She out, shopping or whatever. What you want to talk to me about?”

“Let’s go back to your bedroom and I’ll show you.”

The bedroom was a ten-foot square, walls painted powder pink, much grimed, and divided by a hanging brown plaid curtain to the right of the doorway. The girl’s side of the room contained a white-painted bed, neatly made up with a yellow chintz cover, and a low dresser in battered brown wood, with a mirror over it. A poster of Ice-T hip-hopping and one of Michael Jordan leaping were taped to the walls. Paz looked through the half-window allotted the girl by the room divider. Over the low roofs of the intervening street he could see directly into Deandra Wallace’s kitchen, now a dark rectangle.

“Nice view,” said Paz, pulling back and facing the girl, who stood nervously in the doorway. “You ever look out the window? At that apartment building?”

A dull nod. He pointed out the window at the Wallace building. “Maybe you can tell me about some of the people who live over there.”

“My friend Amy live there.” She indicated a first-floor window.

“That must be fun. You could wave to her. How about that apartment above where Amy lives and a little to the right. It’s dark now. Do you know who lives there?”

“Lady got killed.”

“That’s right. Did you ever look in there before she got killed?” Paz felt a little excited now, a tingle of detective instinct. Strictly speaking, the regs prohibited him from questioning a child without an adult guardian present, but he did not want to break this off just yet. This kid must spend a lot of time in this room looking out the window. It was like having real-life cable, with continuous soaps and no PG-13 ratings. She had a wary look, however, and so he asked if he could sit on her bed and wait for her grandmother to return. Would she mind sitting next to him so they could talk? She sat on the very corner of the bed, as far from him as she could.

“Tanzi, you could really be a big help to us and do yourself some good here. Did you know that the police pay money for people to help them?”

A spark of interest. “Yeah? Like, how much?”

“Depends on what they tell us.” He pulled a clip of currency out of his pocket. “Let’s try me asking some questions and see how much you can earn. Okay, first question. Did you ever see anyone in that apartment besides the lady who lived there?”

Nodding. “Yeah, her boyfriend.”

Paz peeled a couple of singles off the roll and dropped them on the bed. “Very good. Now let’s talk about last Saturday. Did you watch TV?”

“Uh-huh. I watched Saturday Night Live. ‘Cause my gran went to sleep before. She don’t let me watch it usually.”

“Okay, and after the show, did you look out the window, maybe wave to Amy?”

A nod, a looking-away.

“And, so, Tanzi, did you see anything that went on in that apartment?”

“He slap her.”

“Who?”

“Her boyfriend. They was running back and forth and he was throwing stuff around and out the window and she trying to stop him and he slap her in the head. And then he run out.”

Paz stripped a five from the roll and placed it on the other bills. “And after that, what happened?”

Shrug. “Nothing. I went to sleep.”

“Uh-huh,” Paz replied, and then, carefully, “You went to sleep right after the other man came in, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Her eyes were on the pile of money.

“What did the other man look like?”

The girl took a breath, as if to answer, and then without any warning she sucked in two more whooping breaths and then collapsed on the bed, her face screwed into a knot, howling.

Paz made a feeble attempt to comfort her, but she shrank from him, curled into a ball, and continued her noise, a horrible high-pitched yowl, like a cat. He heard footsteps. The bedroom door flung open and there stood Mrs. Meagher and a little boy. The woman rushed to her granddaughter, crying, “Oh, honey, what did he do to you?”

“I didn’t do anything to her,” said Paz. But she glared at him and pointed to the door. “Get out, you! I’ll tend to you later.”

He paced in the living room, wanting a smoke, a drink, baffled as to what to do next. The girl had clearly seen something, an event so terrifying that the mere mention of another man in the Wallace apartment had sent her over some psychic edge. After some minutes, the little boy came into the room and sat on a worn upholstered rocker. Paz recognized him as the landing urinator.

“How come you beat on my sister?”

“I didn’t beat on your sister. Do I look like someone who beats on little girls?”

“You the po -lice,” said the boy, as if in explanation. “How come she crying, then?”

“I don’t know. We were just talking normal, and then I asked her a question and she went bananas.”

“What you ax her?”

“The window of you guys’ room looks out on a window where a woman was murdered last weekend. I wanted to know if she saw anything.” He paused. “Did you see anything?”

“I saw a ho naked.”

“That’s nice. Tell me something … what’s your name, by the way?”

“Randolph P. Franklin. Show me your piece.”

“Later. Randolph, tell me something. How come if you live right here you were pissing on the landing?”

“‘Cause my gran, if she be there, she make me stay in after school, and I got to hang with my homes.”

“What you got to do is do your homework and mind your granma.”

The boy shook his head in disgust. “You so lame, man. Now can I see your piece?”

Paz flipped his jacket aside to reveal the .38 in its belt holster.

The boy said, “Oh, man, that a pussy gun. You should get you a nine, man.” He adopted a crouched shooting stance and made the appropriate noises. “That’s what I’m gonna get me, a nine, a Smith or a Glock. I got a friend got a two-five.”

“You don’t need friends like that,” said Paz. Mrs. Meagher came in.

“How is she?” Paz asked.

“She’s sleeping, no thanks to you. I got a good mind to call your boss and complain. And you a colored man, too.” The woman was only somewhat over five feet in height, but she was crackling with outrage, and formidable.

“Ma’am, I didn’t do anything to your grandchild. I didn’t yell at her or threaten her or touch her. In fact, all I was doing was giving her money and asking if she saw anything to do with the crime I’m investigating. And she did. I think she did see the actual killer, through that window. But as soon as I asked her to describe the man, she went into this screaming fit.”

Mrs. Meagher narrowed her eyes. “Why would she go and do that?”

“You know, ma’am, I’ve been asking myself the same thing, and the only thing I can come up with is that Tanzi saw something so awful that it somehow hurt her mind, so that whenever she has to think about it she goes off like she just did. And let me tell you something, Mrs. Meagher. I’ve been a homicide detective for six years now, and this murder we’re talking about was the worst thing I ever saw. I’m not talking about some hyped-up kid who shot a clerk in the 7-Eleven store. This guy’s a monster. And what if he does it again?”

“Sweet Jesus!”

“Yeah. And besides that, what about Tanzi? She could be messed up for life behind this, end up in an institution.”

And more of the same, until the woman was frantic and thoroughly bamboozled. She was a confirmed watcher of the kind of daytime television in which children were indeed turned into monsters by the shock of witnessing something nasty.

Smoothly, he closed with “So, if it’s okay by you, ma’am, I’d like to arrange to have her looked at by a doctor, somebody who could talk to her and figure out what the damage was and how to fix it. No charge to you, of course; the Miami PD will take care of the whole thing.”

It was okay by her. Later, driving back to the department, Paz felt only somewhat ashamed of himself. He knew that there was no way that the PD would pay for any kind of counseling for a kid like Tanzi, even if she knew who got Hoffa. At a light, therefore, he used his cellular phone to dial a familiar number, the office of Lisa Reilly, Ph.D., child psychologist. The last remaining girlfriend.

My transmission does a little hesitation and a lurch before it pops into third gear. It’s leaking fluid, too, and is the main thing that dissuades me from packing Luz and my scant trunkful of possessions in the Buick and heading out the next day toward some city picked at random. If Lou Nearing actually spotted me walking down the halls of Jackson pushing a records cart, and if he wants to come after me, say hello, talk about old times, it shouldn’t take him long to find me, and then what? No, more probably he’ll recall that I committed suicide. It was in all the papers. I wonder if Lou is still friendly with him. Maybe they call each other a couple of times a year. Hey, man, funny thing happened, I thought I saw Jane the other day in the hospital. And my husband would remind Lou that I was dead, but at the same time he would be thinking, triumphally, happily (if “happy” is still a word that applies), she’s alive. Because there wasn’t any body, which should have made him a little suspicious in the first place. On the other hand, if I were going to kill myself, for reasons he alone knew, he would have to figure I’d do it in a way that left no body for him to find?and use, in the various ways he must have learned. Immolation by fire. Drowning at sea. I chose a boat explosion and drowning, being a nautical person.

Or maybe Lou’s in with him. Maybe he’s the disciple. Maybe he killed that woman. I can’t think this way, or I’ll go mad. Madder.

Unpleasant times at the office today. Mrs. Waley tells me to push the records cart around again and I refuse to leave the Medical Records Office. Mrs. Waley is vexed. I say that it is the job of the messengers to carry records, and she points to the section of my job description where it says other duties as assigned, and I say that is only true of duties having to do with clerkship. She says in what she imagines is an intimidating voice, are you refusing a direct order, as if we were in the marines, and I put on an air of mulish obstinacy and repeat that I am not going out of the office anymore. As I do so, because I am so frightened of running into Lou Nearing again, I let Crazy Jane peek out from behind my eyes for a few seconds and I see the expression on her face change. She remembers that I am a bat and envisions a scene, maybe even violence, and she backs off, muttering about a written reprimand in my personnel jacket. I will have to bear it.