Tropic of Night (31 page)

“Where?”

“Don’t look. Middle-aged white guy in a turtleneck. Arty type. Now he’s telling his date. She’s staring, too. Are you more famous than you’ve let on?”

“No, probably someone I arrested,” said Paz, turning to look the arty gent in the eye. The man nodded at him familiarly. Paz had no idea who he was.

“What’s that buzzing noise?” Willa asked.

“Shit! It’s my damn beeper.” Paz pulled it out of his pocket and studied its tiny screen, his brows twisted. “Some asshole probably misplaced a time sheet or something. Wait here, I’ll go call.”

But when Paz called on his cell phone, the operator patched him through to a radio car, and after a minute or so he found himself talking to Cletis Barlow.

“Jimmy, you got a pen? You need to get out here right now.”

“What? I’m in the middle of a date. I’m at the theater. What the heck is so important?”

“He done it again. Cuban woman. In Cocoplum.”

“Oh … fuck !” cried Paz, with his thumb over the phone mike. Cocoplum was a wealthy bayside development south of the Grove, favored by the Cuban upper crust. If the bastard wanted the absolute maximum in police attention he had made a good choice of victim.

“You still there, Jimmy?”

“Yeah. Look, are we sure it’s the same guy?”

“It’s a carbon copy of Deandra Wallace,” said Barlow. “No breakin. No struggle. The same cuts, the baby done the same. Bet you a bag of silver dollars they find the same drugs in her. Man came home and found his wife and baby like that? Jesus wept! Take down the address.”

Paz did. When he got back to Willa, they were flashing the lights and the lobby was draining of people.

“What?” she asked, seeing his face.

“That guy killed another pregnant woman. I got to go. You can watch the rest of this, if you want, or I can drive you home, but I’ll probably be tied up all night. If you want to stay, I can give you cab fare …”

“No, I want to come with you.”

Paz looked up at the ceiling, registering extreme disbelief. “Come on, babes, it’s police business. I can’t take a date to a murder scene.”

“I won’t be at a murder scene. I’ll stay on the good side of the yellow tape like the rest of the gawkers. Please, Jimmy?it’s our last night and I’ll never see you again until I’m a famous writer and I come to the Miami Book Fair and you come up to the table to get an autograph …”

Paz sighed dramatically. “It’ll be hours and hours. What in hell will you do ?”

“I’ll absorb atmosphere. I’ll have conversations. I’m a writer. Puh-leeeeze … ? “

So they drove down together, Paz having made her swear on the ghost of William Butler Yeats that she would keep out of trouble. In a little while they were at the crime scene, a more impressive showing than the one that had attended the death of Deandra Wallace. There were more than a dozen official cars in the cul-de-sac, radio cars and the big Ford sedans used by the brass, besides an ambulance, a crime-scene-unit van, a generator truck supplying power to the floodlights that illuminated what was clearly the victim’s home. This was a large, two-story, Spanish-style affair, with a tile roof and two wings, one of which enclosed a four-car garage, all set amid lavish plantings and irrigated lawns backing on Biscayne Bay. It looked like a stage set under the lights.

Paz parked a good distance away, reminded Willa to stay put, and walked toward the house, shoving his badge wallet onto his breast pocket to display the shield. There were little knots of neighbors at the head of the cul-de-sac, as well as three TV vans setting up to broadcast live, all under the supervision of a couple of uniforms. The neighbors looked stunned and worried. Good, thought Paz, unkindly, as he went by. He stopped by the crime-scene truck and picked up a steno pad, a set of plastic booties, and a pair of rubber gloves.

The suits were out in numbers in front of the house, among whom Paz spotted his homicide shift lieutenant, Romeo Posada, and the homicide unit commander, Captain Arnie Mendés. He did not care for either of them, but Mendés at least had a set of brains. He nodded to both of them as he stepped into the house and took in the scene. An oval entrance hall, high-ceilinged with a gilt chandelier hanging on chains, a tile floor, white, gold-flecked, underfoot, straight ahead a formal stairway, doors to the left and right. A crime-scene tech was dusting the French windows in the huge living room to the right. Paz asked him where the scene was. The guy pointed upward. “The master bedroom, hang a left at the head of the stairs. You want to bring a vomit bag, Jimmy. Fucker did a number on the poor bitch. You figure it’s the same guy from Overtown?”

“We’ll have to see,” said Paz, and headed up the staircase. The master bedroom was the size of a helipad, and done in shades of yellow?drapes, shag rug, the trim on the king-size four-poster. A cheerful color, which made the prevailing color of the bed and its occupant a particularly obscene contrast. Barlow was staring at the dead woman, motionless, his head down. A couple of CSU cops wandered around taking strobe photos and vacuuming every surface.

Paz stood next to his partner and studied the woman’s face. The eyes were slightly open, but otherwise she looked like she was sleeping. Early twenties, Paz estimated, tanned body, thick blond hair in a shag cut, a little plump in the cheeks, but nice even features.

“Where’s the baby?” Paz asked after several heavy swallows that tasted unpleasantly of semidigested grilled pompano with mango confit.

“Bathroom,” said Barlow.

Paz took a look in the adjoining bathroom, which was huge also, and brightly lit, yellow like the bedroom, and equipped with a shower stall, a Jacuzzi bath, two sinks, and a vanity table of the type used by movie stars, with the lightbulbs all around the mirror. The little gray corpse was lying half on this table and half in the sink, with its severed umbilicus hanging down like an appliance cord. There was a CSU man in the shower stall, clanking tools.

Paz pulled his eyes away from the never-born baby. “Anything good?”

“I’ll know when I get the trap up,” the CSU guy said. “He used the shower after, we know that. There’s blood marks behind the grab bar. Maybe we’ll get some hairs.” More clanking, a muffled curse. “We found one thing, near the baby. I gave it to Cletis already.”

“What?”

“Probably nothing. Looks like a sliver of black plastic or glass. Doesn’t match anything I could see in the room.”

Paz went back to the bedroom. Barlow had not moved.

“So what do you think, Cletis?”

“Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils.”

“Besides that, Cletis. Do we have anything?”

“Well, she’s fresher than Deandra. Look, the blood’s just about done setting up. He couldn’t have finished more than half an hour before Vargas got home. He says he was at a Marlins game with some clients, which I guess we’ll check out just to dot the i’s. This here’s his wife, Teresa, age twenty-four. There’s a housekeeper, too, who you need to talk to. Her English ain’t that hot. Amelia Ferrer, we’re keeping her in her room downstairs. You also need to talk to the people in the other two houses on this strip, maybe they saw or heard something.”

“Obviously Amelia didn’t or she would’ve called the cops.”

“You’ll find out. Let me handle the scene and you go talk the language to these people.”

“What about this piece of glass CSU found?”

Barlow took an evidence bag from his pocket and held it up to the light. In it was a fragment a little larger than a fingernail clipping, and with nearly the same crescent shape.

“That’s not as good as a rare nut, is it?”

Barlow said nothing and put the bag back in his pocket. Paz said, “Well, I got to admit you called it right. We’re deep in it now. The bosses are all over this already. Did Posada or Mendés have anything to say?”

“Oh, yeah. The department called the Feebs already. Guy’s flying down from Quantico, the expert on serial killers. It’s butt-covering time. Meeting Monday morning in the chief’s office.”

“Mendés’s?”

“No, the chief. Of police. Horton. This is going to be high-level right down the line. The big boys’ll be looking over our shoulders from inside of our suit jackets from now on. You better go talk to them people now.”

Barlow returned to his silent contemplation of the eviscerated Teresa, or maybe he was praying for guidance. Paz went out of the death-stinking room, down the stairs to the maid’s room near the kitchen, and found the housekeeper, a stocky, thirtyish woman a shade or two darker than Paz, wearing a tan uniform and apron. A policewoman was keeping an eye on her. Amelia Ferrer had been crying and dabbed at her reddened eyes with a wad of paper towel while he conducted the interview. She had last seen her employer alive at just before eight that evening. Mrs. Vargas had been watching television in her bedroom and Mrs. Ferrer had gone up as she usually did to see if anything was wanted before she herself settled down to watch her favorite program ( Wheel of Fortune) in her own room. She had not left her room until she heard Mr. Vargas’s horrified shriek at shortly after ten, while E.R . was playing. Yes, her door had been slightly ajar, as always. Yes, she had heard Mr. Vargas enter the house. No, she had not heard anyone else come in, but she recalled dozing off for a few minutes. No, the elaborate alarm system had not been turned on; they did not turn it on, usually, until the family was ready for bed.

Mr. Vargas was in his living room, with a stiff drink. He wanted someone to blame, and it was Paz. After some shouting and raving, which Paz did not allow to affect him, he took Vargas through his day, in English. He’d worked the morning (he was in real estate, office in Coral Gables) and then gone out for a spin in the boat (a big Bayliner, docked behind the house). Then he’d had supper with his wife (here he broke down briefly) and picked up a trio of heavy investors at the Biltmore in the Gables and driven them up to Joe Robbie Stadium for the game, using his firm’s skybox. He wouldn’t have gone off with his wife just about to have a baby had it not been a major deal. He had called her on his cell phone during the seventh-inning stretch, about eight-fifty. She had been fine. The game was over at nine-twenty, he had dropped his clients at their hotel, making excuses when they invited him for drinks. He had hurried home, arriving just past ten, and found … Another breakdown.

Now there was a bustle outside the living room, voices raised. It was the family, the famous Cuban family?Vargas’s father, mother, two sisters, their husbands, the victim’s father. By the book, Paz should have isolated all these people and interviewed them separately, but it was so hideously clear that this thing wasn’t a domestic that he let them come in for a shrieking-and-comfort-fest with Alex Vargas. He did not, however, avoid a dirty look from the victim’s father, and an angry spurt of Spanish to his son-in-law?”That’s the detective? What, we don’t pay enough taxes, they stick you with a nigger?”

Paz went out through the rear of the house, through the French doors that led to a broad terrace, which included a long lit-up pool and a little palm-thatched bar. He stood and breathed salt-scented air until his gut stopped roiling. He didn’t really blame the gusanos, who were hopeless; he blamed himself for still, still, after all these years, letting it get to him.

He walked off the terrace out onto the dock, and determined that no one was lurking in the Bayliner, nor had the murderer left any obvious clues on it. Beyond the boat there was nothing but the dark bay and beyond that the lights of Key Biscayne. There were cops all around the place kneeling, squatting, looking for evidence. Paz did not think they would find much.

He checked out the other two houses on the cul-de-sac. One was closed up for the summer. The other was occupied by a frightened family who had seen and heard nothing. No cars, no boats. They would have heard. They asked Paz what had happened, and Paz told them they were investigating a homicide. Paz agreed with them that it was awful for something like this to happen in a neighborhood as nice as this one.

As Paz arrived back at the Vargas house, he was buttonholed by Arnie Mendés. The homicide chief was a burly man, of the size and shape characteristic of football tackles, with a broad, humorous, fleshy face decorated by a brush mustache and sideburns. Mendés was not a Cuban at all, but a third-generation Spaniard, who barely spoke the language. His people had come over from Segovia in 1894 to roll cigars. His name, however, had clinched him the job.

“Solve it yet, Jimmy?”

“Yes, sir. We’re pretty sure it was a mentally retarded itinerant Negro person. I’m just about to drive along under the expressway and pick him up out of his refrigerator carton. I’m sure he’ll confess.”

“It may come to that,” said Mendés, laughing. “Do you have any idea who these people are?” He gestured broadly to the house and grounds.

“Rich Cubans?”

“You could say that. The husband’s daddy is Ignacio Vargas. Owns the Southeast Company. You’ve seen their ads?”

“Developers.”

“Gigantic fucking developers, hence dear friends of every politician in the state. The dead girl’s father is Hector Guzman, the founder and president of Hemisphere Bank, which is that great big black glass thing on Brickell. What they call a dynastic marriage, and the little heir to it all is lying in that fucking yellow bathroom with his head sliced open. As of this moment, the total detective resources of the Miami PD are on this case and will remain on it until it goes down, or we give up hope of putting it down, in which case all of us will be looking for employment. So what do you have for me?”

“Boss, we just got here. We haven’t got an autopsy yet, we haven’t looked at the crime-scene stuff …”

“I mean is it what it looks like?”

Paz paused. Of course the man would’ve already spoken with Cletis. So Paz said, “What it looks like, subject to revision, is a ritual murder similar in all obvious respects to the murder of Deandra Wallace and her unborn baby. That means a ritual serial killer, and this guy is very smart, very sneaky, and he seems to move around without anyone seeing him.”

“A black, I understand. I mean seriously.”