Tropic of Night (32 page)

“There are some indications, Chief.”

“Perfect. The icing on the cake. Cletis tell you we’re bringing the Bureau in?”

“Yes, sir.” In a perfectly flat tone.

“Yeah, you’re as enthusiastic as I am, but the boss and the mayor want them in on it. As far as I’m concerned, they can advise, but you and Cletis are the point guys on this business. I want you to understand you have my total support. You can absolutely count on me.”

“I appreciate that, sir.”

“Right. Up to the point where you fuck up or it becomes politically inconvenient to support you, in which case you’re both shit-canned.”

Paz couldn’t help smiling. “Please, sir, I don’t need a pep talk. Give it to me straight.”

Mendés smiled, too, but Paz knew he was serious. A bright man, and honest according to his lights, but ambitious as Lucifer. He leaned forward a little, placing his head a little closer to Paz’s face. “Okay, you said ritual killings. Did you mean something like a psychotic ritual or a ritual from some actual cult?”

“Unclear, at the moment. There’s some kind of African connection, with African fortune-telling, in the Wallace case. And I’ve got people checking to see whether the situation, the pregnant woman, the cuts, the parts taken from the corpses, the drugs involved, are connected to anything in the anthropological record. I was just going to get with the family and ask them if the vic had any interest in that stuff.”

“Yeah, well, why don’t you let Cletis handle that end of things,” said the homicide chief.

“Any particular reason for that?” asked Paz, an edge in his voice. “My interview technique not quite polished enough?”

“Oh, fuck it, man!” the chief snapped. “The whole fucking department knows you have a beef with upper-class Cubanos. You just let the preacher talk with the family, and you find something else useful to do. Supervise the goddamn canvass. This guy must’ve got here somehow, and every one of these fucking piles has a guard dog and a proximity alarm. People must have heard something. Oh, and Jimmy? You’re both off all other unrelated cases, off the chart entirely. And you’ll both report directly to me on this one, from now on, until further notice.”

“What about Lieutenant Posada?”

“You let me worry about Posada. We’ll need a high-level liaison with the Bureau, and that ought to be right up Romeo’s alley.”

“Yes, sir,” said Paz, and walked off to find the patrol sergeant in charge of the local canvass.

So the hours passed. Paz kept busy, interviewing cops, interviewing neighbors who had told the cops he interviewed that they might have seen something, talking to the crime-scene guys, in hopes of picking up something obvious, some lead besides a tiny piece of fractured black glass. The results were thin. Two people walking dogs on Cocoplum Boulevard had seen a man go by on a bike at about the right time, but the guy was white, with blond hair. Nobody closer to the murder scene had seen this person. The crime-scene techs had picked up some grains of soil off the rug near the French windows leading to the terrace and there was an indentation from a bike tire in the dirt under one of the big palms that lined the driveway. Hooray, a clue. The CSU people took a plaster impression.

At about midnight, Paz decided to pass on some of the misery and called Manny Echiverra at home, told him what had happened, and suggested that it would be a smart career move for him to get down to the morgue and autopsy Mrs. Vargas, forgetting about normal procedure and schedules or any other bureaucrap, because he was the pathologist who had done the work on Deandra and did he want someone to maybe miss a significant similarity? And blame it on him?

He had just folded away the cell phone when a familiar voice said, “I hope you’re not avoiding me.” He turned to see Doris Taylor standing there in her famous grass-green pantsuit.

“Can’t talk to you now,” he said, covertly looking around to see if anyone was observing them together. “Also, you need to get behind the barrier with the other press.”

“Oh, I’m moving along, like the cops are always telling us to do. I just wanted to let you know there’s a young woman sitting in your car. A real interesting young woman. I didn’t realize you had such good taste. Me and Willa, why, we just talked and talked. In fact, I might even do a piece on the after-hours life of Miami’s hardworking dicks, how they bring their girlfriends to crime scenes so as not to lose a minute …”

Paz grabbed the woman’s arm and backed into the dense shadow of a ficus tree. “What do you want, Doris?”

“Everything. This is the biggest murder in a decade. I hear it’s bloody. Is it the same guy?”

“Looks like it.”

“Any clues about who it is?”

“Not as yet. It’s early days.”

“It’s a black man, though. The same as with Wallace?”

“We don’t know that. We have no ID, no witnesses …”

“Oh, please! White boys don’t kill black girls in Overtown in the middle of the night and then just stroll away. It’s the same guy here, so he’s black. What did the murder scene look like?”

He told her, and answered all her avid questions, omitting and changing some small details, as always. He left her full of sucked blood, a happy woman.

They buttoned the place up at about one, the crime-scene lights packed away, the cop cars gone, and the press vans, the corpse now down at the morgue, the rest of the extended family still in the house, unbuttoned and wailing loudly enough for the noise to reach Paz where he stood with his partner on the street.

“He come on a bike, huh?” Cletis ventured.

“He could’ve,” said Paz. “He sure didn’t come by car. If he came by bike, then according to our witnesses he turned himself white, which should be right up this guy’s alley. Or maybe he walked on water. And someone let him in there, like before. Any luck with the family?”

“Some. The sister-in-laws say the victim was talking to someone about a lucky charm thing for her baby, but they didn’t know much more than that. I got a bunch of stuff I took out of the victim’s room, address books, handbags. I’ll study it some and see if there’s any good for us there.” He pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket. “Whyn’t y’all take this glass splinter, seeing as how you’re in with the boys at the U. See what it is, what it come off of.”

Paz put it away. They spoke briefly about arrangements for the morrow. Barlow was heading for the morgue, where he would observe the autopsy and generate zeal among the toxicologists. Paz walked back to his car, where he found Willa dozing. He got in and drove off. She awoke, stretched.

“Well, was it as exciting as you dreamed?” he asked sourly.

“Yes,” she replied, “it was like watching an anthill poked with a stick. And I had a real interesting conversation with Doris Taylor. She told me all about your exploits.”

“I bet she did. But because she spotted my car and you, and you spilled your guts, instead of, for example, saying you were a witness, she now has me by the balls. She’ll pump me dry on this goddamn case.”

Willa looked genuinely remorseful. “Gosh, Jimmy, I’m sorry. She seemed so friendly, and like she really liked you.” She paused and slid closer. “Would it make it up a little if I got you by the balls and pumped you dry?”

“To an extent,” said Paz.

An hour later, upon her hard futon, this had been accomplished, and they were back at it again, she on top, he solidly engulfed, she not moving very much, her little breasts occasionally brushing his face, and chatting away as she generally did during the second act. This feature of Willa Shaftel’s sex life was not actually one he would have ordered off a menu, but he had grown used to it. Every so often, she would pause and utter a pleasant small cry, and shudder, her face and chest would flush, her eyes would roll back in her head, and there would be a delightful spasm in the moist flesh that gripped him, and then she would take up where she left off.

“Gosh, that was a lovely one,” she said huskily after one of these caesuras, “and I can hardly bear it that this is our penultimate fuck.”

“Penultimate?”

“Unless you’re not staying over. I was planning on a lazy one tomorrow morn, plus the usual shower encounter.”

“I have a gigantic day tomorrow. A serial killer who whacked someone important is about the worst thing that can happen to a police force, and I’m in the bull’s-eye. Sorry.”

“The ultimate, then. This will have to last you all the lonely nights, or all the lonely twenty minutes before you find someone superior to me in every way, with even more gigantic tits, if your imagination can encompass that. Unless you contrive to visit Iowa City. Do you think you ever might?”

“Every weekend.”

A chortle. “Yeah, we could meet in the airport Marriott. Ah, Jimmy, you know even though I’ve realized these many months that you were fucking everything above room temperature, I guess in my little girl’s heart I still wished that you’d say, ‘Willa, love of my life, you’re the best pony in the stable, so stay, stay, stay and be my tender bride, and spawn delightful Judeo-Afro-Cubano babies, each with your blazing intelligence and my preternatural beauty.’ Like in the movies.”

Paz said, “Would you, if I did?”

She stopped her slow grinding and looked him in the face. “Oh, wait a minute, I have to consider this. Here’s a good-looking man, a body from heaven, luscious skin, smart, good steady job, sensitive but not a wuss, a penis of adequate size and function …”

“Adequate?”

“A great kisser, at both ends, too, a lover who, while slowing down a bit with approaching middle age, can still fuck one’s brains out, a great dresser, polite, decent, generous to a point, not anything of a pig. A catch, you would say, and so I ask myself, why is there hanging over his head a forty-foot state highway sign with yellow flashers that reads ‘Heartbreak Ahead! Do Not Get Serious!’? Why is that, Jimmy? No quick answers? I’ll leave you to consider it while I work up another one, and I believe I’ll ask you to join me here.”

And that was Willa gone, he thought, as he strode with shaky steps to his car. After they finished she had been almost businesslike, not willing to chat at length, not cold exactly, but anxious to close out a chapter. She’d kissed him quickly after he was dressed and very nearly hustled him out the door. He thought about her forty-foot highway sign. His sign. Yes, he knew about that. It was part of what he considered his honesty, almost his honor. He knew that guys lied to get laid, cops joked about it in cop bars after work, but Paz had a horror of false pretenses.

As he got in his car he experienced a pang of remorse so powerful that his breath choked for an instant. He thought for a moment of going back. This was it, something he needed, a grenade to blast him out of that pleasant long, slow slide. But Paz had a good imagination and brought it into play to rescue him, as it had so many times before, from living real life in the moment. Okay, sure, Willa was cute, smart, a terrific piece of ass, but she was a little plump, even at twenty-six, and in a decade or so she might look like a fireplug. And she had a mouth on her, too, that might get boring after a few years. He thought of Willa getting together with his mother. His mother would hate anyone he got close to, that was a given, and he considered this as a revenge fantasy for a moment. It would be amusing, at least. But maybe Willa would love his mother. Willa claimed to be able to talk to anyone. She might get in good with Margarita and then he’d have the two of them running his life. And it would pinch the money, too, he’d have to get his own place and support her, poets didn’t bring in the cash, that was for sure, and they’d fight about money, and then the sex would fade, and who the hell needed it? So the ogga slyly chatted, and soothed, and stifled all real feelings, and Jimmy Paz drove off into the night, himself again.

Iwork like an animal all Sunday, or as my husband was fond of saying when I used to ask him how the writing went that day, like a nigger . It was okay for him to use this vile expression, he explained to me at length, and many times, because for his race the N-word was communal, warm, palsy. I never believed this, and I always felt a slight repugnance on the many occasions when he used it. Jews don’t warmly call one another kikes, I believe.

He and his ways are ever in my thoughts now, since this last murder. Two down, he has two to go for the okunikua . In Olo, an ikua is a song, a bird song, or a lullaby, and the same word is used, as in our language, for a sorcerous work, an enchantment. Okun means four. Owo, aga, iko, okun, olai … as I was taught to count by poor Tourma in Uluné’s compound. But in the low tone ikua means a gift. Or a sacrifice. Okunikua is thus the four song or the fourfold sacrifice.

Four is an important number in Olo affairs, and he must murder four women within sixteen days to complete the ritual. What he will be able to do when he has finished is something no one knows, not even Uluné. No Olo has done okunikua since some time before the turn of the last century. I recall the first time I actually read about it, in Tour de Montaille’s work, in Lagos. He regarded it as a relic of the bad old days before French civilization arrived. The Olo witch who did it, whose name the Olo never mention, was annoyed by French civilization, and wished to make it go away, which in time, of course, it did. Uluné and his fellow tribal patriarchs considered that the two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the consequent reduction of the proud colonial powers to quaint little postcard nations were a direct result of this guy’s okunikua . They approved the result but, as moral people, thought the means excessive. Western historiography does not agree, since it is much more logical and scientific to assume that millions of fairly rational, marvelously educated, prosperous people went crazy and ripped the heart out of their own civilization.

I must suppose that he is waiting to complete the four sacrifices before paying me a visit. But one can only be frightened so much, and I am at this point nearly beyond fear. Numb. I take some tiny comfort in the realization that it can’t be much longer now. Meanwhile, I find that the kind of hard, precise, physical work I am doing keeps actual paralysis away during whatever meantime remains. I prime the walls and ceiling of Luz’s room, and while this is drying, I install the patent ladder. It is spring-loaded and has its own trapdoor. A cord with a red knob hangs down and when you pull it the trapdoor falls and the ladder slides smoothly down into place with a pleasant sproing . A slight lift of the lowest step, and it sucks itself out of sight. I work it several times when I am done, for the pleasure of seeing something elegant, simple, and functional, much like the sort of gear one sees in boats. Then I install the exhaust fan in its hole, switch it on, and apply the top coat of semigloss to the walls (dove) and ceiling (eggshell). More downtime for drying, during which I drive over to the unpainted-furniture store on Twenty-seventh Avenue and buy, with some of my transmission money, a little bed frame, a four-drawer chest, a night table, a toy chest, and a wooden lamp base jigsawed to represent a crescent moon on a ball. A Cuban discounter sells me a mattress, and I drive away with it stacked on top, like the Joads, and don’t I wish I were driving to California too. Back at the garage, I assemble these and paint them with quick-drying enamel.