Tropic of Night (41 page)

Paz pulled the bell. The door opened?a young woman, rounded, pretty, with pale blond hair done up in a bun, her face pink and damp from some distant kitchen. She wore a white uniform and a pin-striped apron over it. Paz goggled; he had never seen a white servant before, except in movies depicting foreign nations or earlier ages. Barlow displayed his shield.

“Miss, we’re police officers. From Miami, Florida? We’d like to see Mr. John Francis Doe.”

She said, calmly, as if police visits were routine at Sionnet, “Oh, uh-huh, Mr. D. said you’d be by. He’s over there, you must have walked right past him.” Here she pointed at the work crew at the balustrade. “He’s the tall one in the Yankees ball cap.”

The four men were replacing a copper gutter that ran along the pedestal of the balustrade. Doe seemed to know what he was doing, as did the three men?all young, two white kids and one who might have been Latino. Doe stood up and looked the detectives over. He looked a little longer at Paz than at Barlow, and Paz knew why. Barlow made the introductions and Doe shook their hands, saying, “Jack Doe.”

The man was taller than either of them by a good few inches, late fifties, with a leathery, bony face and a jutting square chin, his skin burned a few shades darker than the bricks of his home. He had sad, deep-set eyes the color of Coke bottles. “Let’s go sit out back,” he said.

Doe led them through a breezeway, across a pebbled courtyard, past a white wooden gate, and out to the rear of the house. Below them there was another terrace with a long green swimming pool on it, and beyond that, a lawn that sloped down to a two-story white boathouse and a dock. Doe flung his long frame down in an iron lounge chair covered in faded green canvas and motioned the others to similar seats around a white metal table, under a patched dun canvas umbrella. He offered them iced tea. When they accepted he pressed a button set into a patinaed brass plate cemented into the wall behind him. Paz thought about that, just a detail, what sort of person you had to be to have a buzzer for calling servants set in an old brass plate cemented into a stone wall on your terrace overlooking your pool.

A man came out through French doors. He was older than Doe, silver haired, and he wore a tan apron over navy blue trousers, a white shirt, and a striped tie. Again, Paz had the peculiar sense that he had fallen out of regular life. A butler was going to bring him iced tea. This soon arrived on a silver tray, in tall, sweating glasses, which Paz was certain were never used for anything but iced tea. There was a long silver spoon in each glass, and a straw made out of glass, and there was a fat round of lemon stuck on the lip of the glass, as in advertisement illustrations. The tea was strong and aromatic.

They exchanged small talk?the nice weather, the pleasant temperature, Florida, the fishing in the Keys. Both Barlow and Doe had been bonefishing down there. The cops studied Doe and he seemed to study them. Barlow said, “This is a fine place you got here, Mr. Doe. I take it your people have been here a good while.”

“Yes, since 1665. On the land, that is. This house dates from 1889. Before that, there was a wooden structure from 1732, which burned. That barn you can see from the front of the house is preRevolutionary, 1748. I keep my car collection in it.”

“My, my,” said Barlow. “And you and your missus live here all by yourselves?”

A pause, long enough for one intake of breath and an exhalation. “No, my wife is unwell. She lives in a care facility in King’s Park, not far from here. So I’m on my own, except for the help, of course. They’re all students. We put them through school, any college they can get into, graduate school, whatever they want, and in return they put in some time here. Except for Rudolf, who brought the tea, and Nora, who was my children’s nurse and has a room here. And, of course, when I go, the state’ll get the whole shebang. A museum, I guess. And that’ll be that.”

“End of an era,” said Paz. Doe nodded politely, and Paz felt like a jerk. After a brief silence, Barlow said, “Mr. Doe, as we told you on the phone, we’ve had some trouble down our way, and the FBI believes that the fella who killed our victims is the same man who murdered your daughter Mary. So, painful as it must be to you, we’d really like to hear anything you can tell us about the circumstances surrounding your daughter’s death.”

Doe rubbed a big gnarled hand across his face. Paz noted that the fingernails were cracked and dirty. It was not what he had thought a rich man’s hand ought to look like.

“We all left for the car show in Port Jefferson just after lunch,” Doe began, “me and my two sons-in-law, Witt and Dieter.” He had a deep, soft voice and Paz had to strain to hear him over the hiss of the breeze and the gulls’ calls. “The girls didn’t want to go?I mean Jane didn’t; Mary and Lily?my wife, I mean?never were much interested in the cars. Jane was?she used to help me fix them when she was a kid. Anyway, we got there around ten of two. There was a Pierce-Arrow they were showing I wanted to take a look at, a 1923 Series 33 with the Demorest body and the 414-cubic-inch six. A heck of a car, all custom made. It was blue …”

Here he stopped and shook himself slightly and a little light that had started up in his eyes faded out. “So, we were there for, oh, maybe four hours, for the auction, and I got the Pierce. Never actually took delivery on it. I kind of gave up on the cars, after. We got back around five. Jane was right here, right in this chair here, sleeping, with a book on her lap. Dieter went up to their room to check on Mary, and we heard him yell. And I called the police.”

Paz said, “So you all, you three men, were all together all the time at this show? Neither of you were out of the sight of the others for the whole four hours?”

Doe sighed. “Yes, they asked me that. I guess you have to ask questions like that. It’s part of your job. And I know people do terrible things in their families. Lizzie Borden and all. So … it was a big lot, there at the show, and we wandered around a good deal. Dieter was taking pictures. Were they with me every minute? I can’t swear to that. So it’s remotely possible that Dieter could have slipped off, driven back, done it, and come back to the car show. Or I could have, for that matter, although I talked to enough people who knew me to give myself an alibi.”

“What about your other son-in-law?Mr. Moore?” asked Paz.

“Oh, Witt didn’t drive. Didn’t even have a license. Jane tried to teach him a couple of times, but it just didn’t take. It was hard enough showing him how to ride a bike. But, you know, that’s just so far-fetched …”

Barlow said, “We know that, Mr. Doe. Like you said, it’s part of our job. Where is Mr. Von Schley now, do you know?”

“Back in Germany. Berlin. We keep in touch. A nice kid, really. I hate to say it, but I was surprised he was so decent, the people Mary used to pal around with. Eurotrash, I think they call them, and being so pretty and going into modeling at such a young age, she had a lot of temptation to have the kind of life I wasn’t comfortable with. And we thought she kind of settled down, with the baby coming and all.” A long pause here. “Witt keeps in touch, too. He’s in New York.”

No he’s not, thought Paz, and said, “Mr. Doe?another hard question. We’ve heard there was … well, tension between your daughters, and we’ve heard that your elder daughter was, maybe, not completely in her right state of mind, that she had a history of … say, imbalance, an unhealthy interest in cults and black magic. It’s probably no secret that people in the local police think it’s possible that, well, that she was involved in Mary’s death. Do you think there’s anything to that?”

Doe turned his glass-green gaze onto Paz, and they stared into each other’s eyes for what seemed like a very long time. Paz kept his own eyes steady, as a cop must, but he grew increasingly uneasy. Doe’s look was far from hostile; more like curiosity, but he seemed to be sucking out of his inspection more than Paz was giving, was assessing various hidey-holes in Paz’s highly compartmentalized soul, and not liking much what he found there. Paz’s mother, of course, did this all the time. Barlow broke in then, or, Paz imagined, they might have been there until the sun sank.

“Sir, we’d really appreciate anything you could tell us. I have to say there are some mighty scared folks down there right now, and the only thing we really got to go on now is that this perpetrator was very likely connected in some way to your family. And I personally got no doubt in my mind that if we don’t catch him real quick some other poor girl’s gonna end up like your Mary.”

Doe seemed to sag in his chair; he closed his eyes and let out a long, long breath. They waited, and watched him suffer. It was perfectly pure suffering, uninterpreted by words or relieved by cries. “You have to understand, Jane almost died in Africa,” Doe said. “When my son, I should say my stepson, Josiah Mount, found her in that hospital in Bamako, she weighed ninety-seven pounds. She was covered with sores, and she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, talk. Just made these cat sounds. It was the scariest thing I ever heard. I was sure we’d lose her. In any case, we got her into a clinic in the city that specializes in liver diseases; this was at New York Hospital, because we all thought that’s what it was?hepatitis. She was yellow as a canary when she got here, from jaundice, we thought.”

“And was it hepatitis?”

“It was not. The tests for hep A, B, and C were all negative. Her liver had shut down pretty good, but there was no what-d’y’-call-it, no pathogenic agent, not that they could find. No cancer either. I sat with her, sometimes all day long, and Josey did, too. My wife doesn’t much care for hospitals. And after a while she started in talking, not talking to me, mind you, just sort of babbling, sometimes in other languages, too. What I could make out of it, well …” Here he seemed to choose his words with some care. “It was all about magic, black magic, I guess, and a kind of war that they were fighting in this native tribe she was visiting, a guy named Oo-looney, she was on his side, against some people named Doo-rack and Mundeli and there were a lot of other funny names, but those came up most. And … well, there was one part where they, this guy Doo-rack sacrificed a pregnant woman, and ate parts of her and the baby, and Jane couldn’t stop it, and somehow, this sacrifice gave the bad guy some kind of power over her. And the good guy, Oo-looney, couldn’t help her for some reason. That’s a summary of what went on for the eighteen weeks she was more or less out of it. It didn’t make much sense to me then, and when Witt came back she seemed not to babble as much. And that’s also when she started to get better. The liver necrosis vanished, her color came back, and she started to put on weight.” He paused. “Of course, the part about the sacrifice … I remembered that when the thing happened with Mary.”

“Did you tell the police about that at the time, sir?” asked Paz.

“I did not. It was just one of a lot of details that she was babbling. By the time I thought of it, I mean, by the time the autopsy told us what was really done to Mary, Jane was gone, and why bring it up then?”

“Just a moment, Mr. Doe,” said Barlow, breaking in, to Paz’s annoyance, “her husband didn’t come back from Africa with her?”

“No, he was still out with the natives when she came back to Bamako. Apparently, it’s a very isolated village. Josey had people try to locate him, spent a good deal of money there, but they never did. Then he just walked into the hospital one day.”

“And what was your daughter’s reaction to her husband?” Paz asked.

“Well, as I say, she started to get better. I can tell you, I was glad to have some relief. But you mean on a personal level. I don’t know. I liked Witt, I always did. He’s funny, doesn’t take himself too seriously. A tremendously talented fellow, too, and Jane seemed to love him. That’s all I was interested in. My children both more or less decided what they were going to do with their lives with no help from me, I have to say. But there was … I won’t say something was wrong, maybe hollow, or missing, is the right word. I mean before. I hope this won’t sound narrow, but he hadn’t any faith. Well, that’s common enough nowadays, I mean the lack of actual religion, but most irreligious people set up something else they can believe in?their families, say, or the environment, or justice; or money, for that matter, that’s fairly popular, I believe. But Witt didn’t seem to have anything like that, and it was like he had no … bottom, and all the verbal fireworks seemed to me to be filling that hole. Anyway, when he got back from Africa, he seemed steadier, more sober. I thought maybe he had had an experience, some epiphany, to use an old-fashioned word, but he never said, and, of course, you can’t just ask a man. But I’ve gotten off the track?you wanted to know about Jane and Mary. I’m sorry, I don’t talk much about these things anymore.”

“That’s all right, sir,” said Barlow, “you just take your time.”

“They were not close, let me start by saying that. It would’ve been hard to pick sisters more different. Mary was close to her mother, Jane was my kid. Families often break out that way. Jane was like me, also, in that she kept it all pretty close, a private person, not demonstrative. Mary was, let’s say, operatic. Like her mother. When she was down, the whole house knew it, and when she was up, she lit the place like a floodlight. And, also, I guess you know, she was fantastically beautiful, from an early age, and she found that she could use that to get her way. She kind of ruled the roost, if you want to know.”

“And Jane resented it?” asked Paz.

Doe thought for a few moments. “You know, I can’t really say that she did. Maybe my stepson would know about that. He was sort of in the middle, and Jane and he were like that”?here he held the first two fingers of his right hand up, closely touching?”all while they were growing up. We sent the girls to different schools, though, because Jane kind of just faded into the wallpaper when Mary was around. But resentment? No. Jane was always trying to get closer to Mary, be a real sister. She was the one who tried to keep in touch, even when she was traveling. Letters and photos and all. I don’t think Mary ever wrote a letter in her life. But what you really want to know is, did Jane hate Mary enough to kill her? Was she jealous enough? And believe me, I’ve lain in bed all night running it through my mind. Did it happen that way? Could I have done something? Was it our fault, the way they were raised? I have to say that I don’t know. The Jane I knew, or thought I knew, I’d have no trouble saying, no, never. But … her profession, the places she’s been, the things she’s seen … maybe something was released from a dark place. We’ve all got those dark places. I guess you know that in your business better than I do.”