This isn’t the way to the beach,” Jenny said.
“Yeah, I know, I just want to cruise by this place in the Gables for a second.”
She didn’t ask why, nor was she hurt or disappointed, as she might have been a few weeks ago. Kevin always had something else going on when he was with her, and whereas before she had taken this as a personal slight, now she saw it as a taxonomic indicator of the genusKevin, as:
always has another deal going on when with girlfriend…Kevin sp.
never has another deal going on when with girlfriend…see 14
Jennifer had never got to that part of the taxonomic key but thought it would be nice to find one of those someday, a true 14, or whatever. She knew they existed, because Cooksey was one. Out of habit, she half blamed herself. Had she been more interesting, she might have occasioned more interest. She looked out past Kevin at the house he seemed to be more interested in than in her. It looked vaguely familiar, a big two-story Gables mansion, glowing pale pink in the moonlight, but she was not inspired to ask what was so special about it. Instead she was thinking about Cooksey and Cooksey’s dead wife, about what his conversation had suggested regarding the nature of their relationship. She wondered if it were true, that people could love each other that much, or if it was just a fantasy that Cooksey had concocted, like the fantasies of love on TV or in the movies. She had certainly never seen such a love in real life, and she now understood that what she thought she’d felt for Kevin was as unsubstantial as the images on a flickering screen. How strange to have thoughts like this, she thought, wrenching and horrible in a way but also how totally cool, almost like she was in charge of her own life, like it had a steering wheel.
Prudencio Rivera Martínez is parked in a Dodge Voyager with two of his men at the end of the street. He is half asleep but rouses whenever a car drives by. This is not a frequent occurrence, for Cortillo Avenue in the Gables is short and untraveled, except by those who live in the great homes that line it and those who had business there: guests, servants, contractors. None of the other houses on the street were guarded like the Calderón house. Instead, they had ridiculous little signs warning that if anyone did anything bad, someone would call the police. Martínez understood that things were run differently in America than in Cali, where he came from. In Cali, homes like this would have three-meter walls around them topped with razor wire or broken glass, and each would have a crew of guards on duty and there would be armored limousines and outriders whenever the family emerged.
He was not a thoughtful man as a rule, but he couldn’t help wondering what a couple of gangs of Colombians could do to such a street. It would be like scooping up a plate of beans, that easy. For this reason, he didn’t think he would have much trouble if this little problem of Hurtado’s was being caused by Americans. He personally agreed with his boss that it was a Colombian operation. He had seen the police photographs of Fuentes, supplied by Mr. Calderón from a source within the Miami cops, and he thought it looked like something a Colombian would do: an odd kind of patriotic pride. He himself knew people who liked to spray blood around like that. The eating part he wasn’t so sure about, although he had heard rumors from the south, where a civil war had been going on for half a century, about guys in the jungle who ate enemies. He himself was a more fastidious killer, specializing most recently in car bombs. He had people he used when wetter things were required, and he had brought several along on this job, in case of need.
Now the sound of a vehicle again brings Martínez up out of his doze to full alertness. A brightly painted van passes slowly by his window. The glass in his van is heavily tinted, but even so he can make out leaves, parrots, monkeys in the design, and some words in English he doesn’t quite get. But he can see the license plate as it rolls by and he records it in a little notebook. That is something he does on jobs like this, writing down license numbers. Obviously, if anyone is going to try something, especially if Colombian, they will use false plates, but still it is a good practice. The painted van slows to a stop before the Calderón house, pauses for a moment, and then moves slowly on. Martínez punches a button on his cell phone. It is answered immediately and he says, “Find out who that is.”
“Pick them up?” asks the voice in the phone.
“No, just follow them. I want to know who they are and where they come from.” He disconnects the circuit. At the far end of the street, another Dodge van with dark windows moves away from the curb and follows the painted VW around the corner.
Kevin and Jennifer drove across Rickenbacker Causeway to Virginia Beach, a relatively undeveloped strip of public land north of Bear Cut. Kevin took a terry cloth blanket and half of a bottle of Rupert’s wine out of the car, and they both walked out of the little parking lot away from the causeway down toward where the mangroves started. Kevin spread the blanket in a little sandy cove covered with the needles of the overhanging Australian pines. It was dark here, the strong moonlight blocked by the overhanging boughs, and cool. It had been a cool day, and the biting insects were hardly active. Jennifer knew why Kevin had chosen a dark spot. She walked on crunching hard sand toward the water.
“Where’re you going?” he called.
“To the water. I want a moon bath.”
This girl she once knew, Rosalind, had told her that the rays of the moon were healthy for women, that they strengthened the subtle energies and prevented menstrual cramps. Jenny recalled a tiny little straw-haired girl with lots of face piercings and dark bracelet tattoos, into crystals and astrology, too. She had done a horoscope for Jenny on a piece of notebook paper, sun and moon in Cancer, Scorpio rising, and Rosalind had explained what it all meant, you are probably attracted to the sea. Your home environment is very important to you, and you like to make it cozy. You may be very touchy emotionally, and need to hide in your shell sometimes. You are a strong defender of family and tradition. Although your temperament is changeable, people will come to you readily for nurturing and care. You look to your mother for protection and nurturing. That last part was a little off, also the touchy emotionally, but maybe what she was feeling now was some of that kicking in. Or maybe it was all bullshit, like Kevin said.
She slid out of her sandals and waded into the water. It was warmer than the air and had the feel of light oil. The creamy moon rode high, silvering every wavelet. She stood immersed to her knees and let the rays sink into her skin, and wished greatly that it was not all bullshit. She heard the squeak of steps in the sand. Kevin, coming for a little of her famous and astrally correct nurturing and care. “Hey…,” he said.
Without thinking, Jenny stepped back on the sand and in an instant was free of her T-shirt and shorts; then she dived into the reflected moon. The water was shallow here, less than five feet. She shot down to the sand and coasted just above the bottom. It was perfectly black, disappointing because she wanted it to be moonlit under the water, magical and strange, and she wondered briefly why it was not. She would ask Cooksey. She could hold her breath for a long time now because of all her practice in the fish pool, and she did, suspended in the utter dark.
There was a splash, heard faintly, and a disturbance in the water, a pressure of something moving. Did sharks come at night? she wondered, and felt a little tug of fear and self-contempt. Yet another thing she didn’t know. She kicked off from the sand and shot to the surface. But it was only Kevin, sputtering and thrashing a dozen yards away.
“God, Jenny, I thought something happened to you!”
“I’m fine. Were you going to rescue me?”
“Yeah, right,” he said, laughing, “my action-hero phase.” He drifted over and embraced her, squeezing her breasts against his chest, kissing her neck. This was a little new, she thought, it wasn’t only that he wanted sex. He almost always wanted sex, and just now, as a matter of fact, so did she. But even when they had first hooked up, it hadn’t had this feel to it, like he was afraid she was going away and wanted to be extra loving. If true, if she wasn’t just imagining it, then why did he act so shitty when they were going to make her leave the property? He had his hand inside the waistband of her panties now, the longest finger searching downward like a killifish after a crumb. She thrust away from him and paddled away on her back.
On the dry sand she stripped her clinging panties off and pulled shorts and T-shirt on, and found her sandals. She trotted to the blanket and used it to dry her face and hair. Kevin came trailing along, with a confused look on his face, which he was trying to hide behind his usual lopsided smile. She folded the blanket. “Let’s go in the van,” she said.
In the mangrove thicket, Santiago Iglesias put down his eight-byten night glasses and said to his companion, Dario Rascon, “Looks like the show is over. Let’s go back to the van.”
Rascon said, “That’s some piece of ass. I’d like to fuck that bitch. I’d like to fuck that bitch right up her white ass. You know something? I never fucked a redhead pussy before. How about that? I just thought of that when I was watching her flash her cunt at us. Not a real one, anyway. You want to know what I think? We should toss the littlemaricón in the woods and fuck her into the ground.” Here he made a sucking noise with his mouth and manipulated his genitals, indicating a high level of sexual interest.
“He told us to see where they go,” said Iglesias. “You want to explain to him why you thought a piece of ass was more important than doing what the man said, go ahead. I wish you the best of luck.”
“¡No me friegues, pendejo!Give me ten minutes with that cunt and we’ll know not only where she comes from but what she had for breakfast last Tuesday.”
“That’s a good plan, and I can see you understand the situation a lot better than Prudencio does.”
“He just wants the information, man. I bring it in, he won’t do shit to me.”
“If not, could I have your boots?” Instinctively Rascon looked down at his boots, which were crocodile, elaborately tooled, and tipped with silver caps. Then he snarled,“¡Chingate!” and stomped away, followed by the softly giggling Iglesias.
They sat in their van. Rascon wanted to turn the radio on and roll up the windows against the occasional mosquito, but Iglesias said no, partly to annoy the other man and show who was in charge, and partly because he wanted to see what the Americans were going to do. He had a good idea of what, but he wanted to observe it. The two Americans entered the van via the side door. Iglesias saw the van settle on its springs. After a few minutes the body of the VW began to rock rhythmically. Its windows were all open, and shortly thereafter the slight breeze brought to the two watchers the sound of heavy breathing and then a series of short cries, like that of a small bird, rising in register, and then a distinctively male groan.
“She’s getting it now, the little whore,” said Rascon sourly. “I’m getting sore balls listening to that shit.” He massaged these.
“If you’re going to jerk off, go outside,” said Iglesias.
“¡Pela las nalgas!”
“When we get back, you can ask Torres for a piece of his fine white ass.”
“¡Cállate, cabrón!”snapped Rascon. “You’ll see, I’m going to fuck that girl before we’re done here.”
“Again I wish you the best of luck, my friend,” said Iglesias. “In the meanwhile…¡Ay, coño! Listen, they’re going at it again!”
Prudencio Martínez thinks for a moment and then reaches into the backseat and shoves the man sleeping there into wakefulness.
“What’s up?” says the man in the backseat. His name is Rafael Alonzo Torres. He is slim and young, the youngest of the men Martínez has brought with him, a hungry and aggressive kid from the Cali slaughterhouse district, blessed with a mild-looking angel face. He reminds Martínez of himself twenty years ago. Martínez says, “You slept enough. Go into the house. Sit in the chair I showed you. And stay awake.”
The youth yawns and stretches. He says, “What about Garcia and Ochoa?”
“Garcia’s in the kitchen and Ochoa’s watching the back. I want you on the bedroom floor.”
“Did something happen?”
“No, it’s quiet, but we had a car drive by I didn’t like.”
“A car?”
Martínez gives him a look. “Hey,cabrón, just go! And Raphael: make sure your phone is on.”
Torres leaves the van and goes to the back of the house. He taps on the door, and Benigno Garcia lets him in. They exchange a few words. Garcia goes back to watching the maid’s television in the kitchen. Torres walks through the hallway to the main foyer and up the stairs to the second floor. There are four bedrooms on this floor, each with a bath, and there is also the room at the rear of the house that Mr. Calderón uses as a study or home office. Torres sits in a chair between the door to this room and the one to the master bedroom. The chair is uncomfortable, and he curses softly as he sits in it, but he doesn’t really mind. This is a very easy job compared to some he has been on. And he can sleep anywhere.
Unlike his client. Yoiyo Calderón is sleepless tonight, as he has been for more nights than he can remember. Weeks at least, maybe months. No, he thinks, it started around the time Fuentes died, or maybe a little after, when the Puxto deal began to go sour. He attributes this insomnia to stress, although he is scrupulous about following all the stress-reduction hints in the business and fitness magazines he reads. These helpful sources do not discuss nightmares, however. Successful take-charge American businessmen do not mention their dreams, or even acknowledge that they have dreams, except in the figurative sense of projecting a scheme for increasing material wealth.
Calderón is an educated man, and he is familiar with the ideas underlying Freudian psychotherapy. Dreams, especially repetitive dreams, have some deep meaning, are the signals indicating the repression of an unacceptable desire. He has looked into this on his own, for his daughter has all those how-to-feel-good-about-yourself books, and he has sneaked looks, but they seem like a lot of crap to him. He has never had the slightest problem feeling good about himself. He considered that the Yoiyo Calderón who existed up until a month or so ago was as fine a man as could be found anywhere in Miami-good-looking, decisive, sexually potent, rich, getting richer, a decent husband and father, generous to his various mistresses, a man of his word when dealing with equals, philanthropic to a fault, well respected in the community-and not about to see a goddamned headshrinker either, that was out, although he had asked his family doctor for some Xanax as a stress reliever. Half a milligram before retiring is the dose recommended on the vial, but tonight he has loaded himself with three milligrams in the hope that this will stop the dream.
It is always the same one. In it, he is somewhere in the tropics, dressed in explorer garb. It’s hot and dark and he’s at a table. A line of natives in fancy regalia stretches out into the dark, and one by one they sell him all their ornaments, which he pays for with bits of paper he tears off a pad and writes banal phrases on, like those found in fortune cookies. New friends will help you. You are greatly admired. He is happy to be getting rich in this way and has convinced himself, in the logic of dreams, that the natives are better off with his scraps of paper than they are with their gold jewelry and plumes. As he works, he becomes conscious of a noise, soft at first, but growing louder, like something breathing, in and out, like the purring of an immense cat, a cat the size of a hill. Then there are no more natives and he is alone with the noise. And now the fear starts, and he feels an urgent need to get away. He shoves his swag into a sack and leaves the hut. He is on a muddy jungle trail in the dark. All around him is the sound.
Ararah. Ararararh.
Now he can hear the thud of the monstrous paws, close behind him in the dark, getting closer. He runs, clutching his sack. He feels its hot breath on the back of his neck. He can’t possibly escape, his limbs are caught in some sticky mud, and now he screams. He is crawling now in the slow paralysis of nightmare. He turns and looks up and sees its golden eyes, its jaws…
And he is awake, sweating, cursing; and when he looks at the clock it is always around three in the morning and he can’t return to sleep, the night is ruined for him again. But tonight there is no dream of jungles. Tonight he falls into blackness and awakes on the daybed in his study. He has taken to sleeping there to avoid the shame of his nightmares, the screaming and thrashing. The blinds are closed and the room is very dark. The only light comes from the digital clock on his desk, green numbers telling him it is 3:06. It is cool in the room, and at first he thinks someone has switched on the air-conditioning, because there is a rumble in his ears. No, not a mechanical sound.
Ararah. Ararararh.
Terrified now, he scrambles up, kicking the quilt away, reaching for the light switch. The light goes on, and there it is, huge and golden, in the room. He thinks he is still dreaming, a new and even more horrible nightmare, until just a few seconds before he dies.
In the hallway, Rafael Torres is awakened by a noise coming from Calderón’s den, a hard sound, like a piece of furniture falling over. He walks down the hall to the door of this room and listens. He hears odd liquid noises and a low growling. It is an embarrassing sort of noise, and Torres hesitates. On the other hand, maybe the guy is sick. He taps lightly on the door. He asks in Spanish, “Mr. Calderón-everything okay in there?” No answer. He sees that the light is on inside the room, so what could be wrong? He opens the door.
It takes him a second to understand what he is seeing; it takes him another second to pull out his pistol. Whatever it is that has killed Calderón is already moving toward him, impossibly fast, but he is a tough young man with the reflexes of youth. He manages to get one shot off before he goes down.
In the kitchen, Garcia heard the sound of the shot. With pistol in hand he rushed up the stairs. Victoria Calderón was awakened by the shot, too, but thought at first that it had been part of her dream. Her dreams were of war in a steaming land. Soldiers were attacking a village, and she was trying to gather up the children and take them to shelter among the trees, but the horror of it was that she always missed one or two of them and had to go back, and didn’t want to and tried to think up excuses while the people stared at her with dark, accusing eyes. Then she heard heavy steps outside her door, and as she comprehended that this was no dream, her heart started to pound. She threw a robe over her pajamas and ran out of her room. There was a big man standing with his back to her, one of the men her father called “a little security.” Victoria had led a somewhat sheltered life, but she was no fool, and she had understood at her first sight of them that these people did not come from Kroll or Wackenhut, that they were thugs of some kind and that her father was therefore in terrible trouble. The big man was talking into a cell phone in his dialect Spanish. She called out, “What happened?”
The man turned and held his palm up like a traffic cop. She stopped automatically, and this gave her time to see what was lying at the man’s feet. The floor here was tile, pale green, against which the scarlet blood made a vivid contrast. It was still crawling in little rivulets toward her along the channels of the grout. It took her a few seconds to make her throat work. “Where’s my father?” she demanded.
The man put his phone away. Victoria started forward, but the man blocked her path, shaking his head. She heard the front door open and steps on the stairs. The hallway was suddenly full of rough-looking dark men, some of them carrying weapons. One of them stood before her, his broad face grave and angry. She recognized him as Martínez, the one her father had called the head of the security detail.
“I want to see my father,” she said.
“That’s not a good idea, miss. You should go back to your room now. We’ll take care of this.”
“Is he hurt?”
“Mr. Calderón is deceased, miss,” said Martínez. “You have my profound condolences. Somehow the assassins got through to-”
Victoria Calderón struck him in the mouth. “Moron! Imbecile! How could you-” she began, and then to her immense surprise, Prudencio Martínez slapped her across the face hard enough to bounce her off the wall. Her vision went red and she slid down to a sitting position against the baseboard. She looked up and saw Prudencio Martínez waggling a finger at her, as at a naughty child. The counterblow was instinctive and without malice; he did not belong to a culture where a woman of whatever exalted rank could strike a man with impunity in front of his subordinates. And in any case the man was dead and she was no longer of any consequence. He left her where she lay, and shouted orders at his men.
It had not taken Martínez long to recover from the shock of the attack, not that he cared, or his boss cared, about the life of Yoiyo Calderón: the failure was less in preventing murder than in not apprehending the assassins. Therefore, the correct move was to quickly reinforce the guards at the other houses, in case there should be another attack. The Colombians left the house, carrying their dead comrade wrapped in a blanket.
When they were gone, Victoria struggled to her feet and leaned against the wall. Her head ached, and the side of her face felt hot and swollen. A slight breeze blew through the corridor, carrying with it a butcher shop smell. She felt her stomach heave and made herself take several deep breaths. She could not be sick now, because…
“Victoria? Victoria, what’s happening?”
Her mother, blinking in the doorway of her bedroom, looking decorative even in the middle of the night, even fuddled with sleep and the three regular scotches and the sleeping pills. Victoria moved toward her mother.
“It’s okay, Mom,” she said, “everything’s all right…we had a little break-in but it’s okay now. Why don’t you go back to bed?”
“A break-in? Oh, my God! Where’s your father?”
“It’s fine, Mom, everything’s fine,” Victoria said in the most soothing tone she could manage, but Olivia Calderón, while a stupid woman, was not insensitive to the tone of her daughter’s voice, and so she stepped out into the hallway and looked wildly around for some sign of her husband, and saw the blood on the tiles and screamed shrilly and went running down the hallway to the study and there let out a noise that Victoria had never heard emerging from a human throat and fainted, landing facedown in the pool of clotting blood.
I am not, thought Victoria Calderón, going to collapse into hysterics or faint. This is why I can’t be sick or have any feelings. My father is dead, my mother is useless, my brother is an idiot and is in any case far away. I am in charge of this situation and I will do what’s necessary. That piece-of-shit thug punched me because he thought I was not a significant player, which means that if I don’t make the right moves in the next few days, we will lose everything my family has. She actually voiced these words under her breath, a habit she had acquired as a child when it had become clear to her that her best efforts were never going to make her either a boy or beautiful, and that she was thus fated to disappoint her father and her mother, respectively. It was her way of staying sane; if no one would really talk to her, she could at least talk to herself, and talk sense at that.
But that’s for tomorrow, she continued, right now the first thing I have to do is to call the police, and she did, calling 911 from the phone in her bedroom. She reported it as a homicide, although she had not yet seen her father’s body. She was going to take the word of Martínez for that. She also reported that her mother had fainted and asked the dispatcher to send an ambulance.
She hung up the phone and walked back to where her mother was lying. She noticed that there were footprints in the pools of blood and decided that these might be of interest to the police. She did manage to turn her mother onto her back, however, so that her mouth was clear of the blood. She wet a washcloth in the bathroom and wiped as much blood as she could off her mother’s face and hair. Then she stepped carefully over the puddles and into her father’s study.
She made herself look at the thing on the floor. It’s peculiar, she thought, that I don’t feel much. I’m nauseated by the sight and the smell, but I would be the same at a traffic accident or an explosion, if I were a survivor. Maybe it’s because it’s not recognizable, the way the head is all squashed, it could be anyone, even though Iknow it’s him. I always thought I loved my father and I should be devastated by this, but I’m not. I feel like my life is starting over by this death. I must, she thought, be the cold monster my family always claimed I was, why they said I could never hold a man, I wasn’t a real woman and so on. All right, I saw it, he’s dead, and now I have to-
A scream from the hallway. Victoria stepped out of the room, carefully again, and saw that it was Carmel, the maid, standing there in a pink robe and furry slippers with her hands theatrically at her mouth. Her wiry hair seemed actually to be standing up, but whether this was from fright, as in the movies, or a product of recent sleep, Victoria did not know. In any case, she went to the woman and shook her, as much to stop the mumbling prayers as to rally her to action.
“Oh, my God, is the señora dead?”
“No, the señor is dead. My mother has fainted from the shock. You have to help me move her.”
This was said in a tone that the maid had never heard before from the Little Señora, as she was known in the kitchen, a tone of command more familiar from her father’s mouth, and her training overcame her natural repugnance. Together the two women carried Mrs. Calderón to her bathroom, where they stripped off the blood-sodden nightgown, sponged her off as best they could, dressed her in a fresh nightgown, and placed her on her bed, all without a murmur from the woman, who almost seemed to have already joined her husband in death.
The downstairs bell sounded. Victoria went down and let in the Coral Gables policeman, a man several years her junior. She told him that her father had been murdered. He asked to see the body. She took him up to the study. On seeing what was in the room he uttered an unprofessional oath and turned nearly as green as the tiles. Murders of this kind, of any kind actually, are rare in the City Beautiful, as Coral Gables likes to call itself, and the chief duty of any CG cop who discovers one is to call the county police department, which this man now did.
Then sirens announced the arrival of the ambulance. The paramedics determined that Mr. Calderón was beyond help and removed the unconscious Mrs. Calderón to Mercy Hospital. After they left, Victoria went back to her bedroom to make some calls. The first was to her Aunt Eugenia.
“This better not be a wrong number,” said the voice that answered after twenty rings.
“Aunt Genia, it’s me. Look, there’s been a disaster here. You have to go to Mercy and take care of Mom.”
“Oh, Christ! Oh, Jesus, what happened?”
“We’re not really sure. Some kind of accident, an, an explosion. The police are here and I have to stay and answer questions. Mom’s not really hurt, but she got knocked out. Could you please get over there? I don’t want her to be alone when she comes out of it. And could you get in touch with Dr. Reynaldo, too?”
“Where’s your father, Victoria?”
The obvious question. “He’s, uh, he was killed. He died, in the, uh, in the thing…oh, no, please, Aunt Genia, if you start crying now I’m going to lose it and I can’t afford to. I’ll talk to you later and tell you all about it, but could you just…go?”
The distressing noises on the other end of the line faded. “Okay, good. Christ in heaven! Jesus, let me pull myself together here. All right, I’m on my way. Have you called Jonni yet?”
“Next on my list. Thanks for this, Aunt G., I’ll never forget it. I’ll call you later.”
She broke the connection and dialed a New York number. After four rings, she heard music and her brother’s light, pleasant voice singing a line from a hip-hop song she didn’t recognize, which faded and then the same voice said, “You’ve almost got Jonni Calderón. I can’t come to the phone right now, but leave a message and I’ll be right back at ya.” She disconnected and did the same again six times. On the last of these she heard her brother snarl, “What?”
“It’s Victoria, Jonni.”
“What’s wrong?” with a little quaver of fear. She told him, a truncated version, but with the central fact revealed. He said he’d be on the first plane down, and after very little further conversation, they hung up. They were not close.
The detectives from the county arrived a few minutes later. They showed her their ID and identified themselves as Detectives Finnegan and Ramirez of the Metro Dade Police. She said, “I don’t understand. We’re in Coral Gables,” and they, or rather Ramirez, had to explain to her, as he had so often before, that the metropolitan county government provided a variety of services to the smaller cities of the county, among which was the investigation of homicides. “You’d been in Miami, ma’am, they have their own homicide unit, but being in the Gables you have us.” He smiled sympathetically; he was a medium-size Cuban-American of about forty with clear aviator glasses and a brush mustache. Finnegan was much taller, and a little older, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair and the reserved and respectful mien of a quality mortician. They were both dressed in cheap, simple clothes, sports jackets and polyester slacks, and Ramirez had on a shirt of a particularly repellent green. They both wore ugly, thick-soled black shoes. Neither of them, Victoria reflected, looked like the cops of the media who, even if craggy-faced character actors, projected some kind of personality from the large or small screen. Like most people, she experienced this as disappointment: these guys were clerks, post office types.
Finnegan asked, “Could you show us where the body is, Miss Calderón.”
They all ascended. Victoria noted that the blood pool had dried on the edges now and clotted into small jellied islands. The detectives snapped on rubber gloves and slipped white booties over their shoes. They entered the study. Shortly thereafter, they were joined by crime scene technicians in white Tyvek coveralls. Victoria waited in her room, lying flat on her back in bed, and thought about the things she had to do the next day. In the midst of these thoughts, making lists, generating strategies, her mind decided to turn itself off.
She snapped awake to the sound of tapping, to find Detective Ramirez regarding her from the doorway. She was on her feet in a second, woozy, trying to shake herself into full functionality without appearing to need to. Her face truly ached now where the thug had slapped her, and she wished for a chance to fix herself up in a mirror. I should have put ice on it, she mused, and felt shame at this thought.
“We’d like to talk to you now,” said the detective.
They sat at the long mahogany table in the dining room downstairs. The tall clock in the corner said 4:45, which meant, hard as it was for her to believe it, that less than two hours had passed since that pistol shot had roused her into this horror.
The questioning, unlike the appearance of the two detectives, was apparently something that Hollywood got more or less right. The questions were the obvious ones, and she told the story without prevarication, but also without any of the background.
“So this guard hit you?” asked Finnegan after she’d described the events following the shot.
“Yes. I was so upset that I guess I went crazy. I hit him. I was hysterical and I guess he thought slapping me would calm things down.”
“From the look of your face that was a heck of a punch. Who were these guys?”
“I have no idea. The one who hit me, the one in charge, was called Martínez. I don’t know the names of the others. My father hired them. I don’t know where. Is it important?”
“Well, yeah!” said Finnegan. “According to you, they removed a victim of a crime from a crime scene, and as far as I know they’ve failed to report any of this to the police. We’d definitely like to talk to these fellows. I assume your father will have records, payments, contracts with the security firm, and so on.”
“As I say, I have no idea.”
“Fine. Then what happened?”
Victoria described the scene with her mother, the call to 911, the ambulance, and the calls to the relatives.
And now the classic question, from Ramirez: “Ms. Calderón, do you know of anyone who might have wanted to hurt your father?”
“Nearly everyone who knew him at one time or another, myself included. He wasn’t an easy man. He had some business rivalries that got pretty intense, but that kind of thing gets settled by lawyers, or by screaming over the phone, not by…not, you know, by someone breaking into a man’s home and chopping him up with an ax.”
“You think the killer used an ax?” asked Finnegan. “Why is that?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t, I mean, I couldn’t look at the body, I mean, examine it, but it was just smashed and torn up so much, I guess…you know the phrase ‘ax murder’ just came into my mind. And that kid they took away, the guard. I saw him pretty well. His face and his neck were just shredded.”
“All right,” said Finnegan, “but maybe when you’ve had a chance to think, you might put together a list of, as you say, ‘rivals,’ people your dad had a beef with. There must have been someone on his mind, right? Because he hired guards.”
“Oh, that was the vandalism. Someone clawed up our front door about-what’s today, the twenty-fourth?-oh, maybe three weeks ago. And left, um, some fecal matter on our walk.”
“Fecal matter,” said Finnegan with a quick look at his partner. “What kind of fecal matter?”
“I don’t know, Detective. I’m not an expert on fecal matter. We disposed of it and replaced the door.”
“And you didn’t call the police about this.”
“No, my father likes…liked his privacy. He wanted to take care it himself, so he hired guards.”
Now the follow-up questions, as the detectives tried to reconstruct the events of the victim’s last day on earth. Finnegan let Ramirez lead on this, listening and watching the woman. He knew there was something deeper going on here; the crazy story of the so-called guards, and the dead man they had dragged away, went to demonstrate that, and the blow to the woman’s face, also out of line. In Finnegan’s experience, security guards did not strike their clients, and he was beginning to put together in his head a story he liked better. The vic was in with some mob and this was a hit, and one of the bad guys had got shot or killed, too. They’d slapped the woman around as a warning. All this could be checked out, and he intended to do so, should he be allowed to proceed along those lines. The Metro Dade PD was in general a cleaner outfit than the Miami PD, but murders involving high-end Cubans were subject to strenuous review from the upper levels of the department, especially if they might have political or organized-crime coloration. So however it fell out, this one was going to be a pain in the ass, and…
His thoughts here were interrupted by a man in the doorway, gesturing urgently. Finnegan left Ramirez to his work and went out with the man, whose name was Wyman, and who was the head of the crime scene crew. Crime scene crews had become somewhat more importunate of late, a result of the fame of their fictional counterparts on television. In former times, a CS tech would never have interrupted a witness interview. Finnegan had even noticed some of them doing the work of detectives, actually talking to live people at crime scenes, just like on TV. He did not approve.
So he was a little gruff with Wyman in the hallway.
“What is it, Wyman? I’m in the middle of an interview here.”
“We found a bullet in the study, a nine millimeter, in the couch back. It’s in real good shape. So the story about the shot is true, at least.”
“This is what you came in there for, a fucking bullet?”
“No, Finnegan, not the bullet. It’s something out in the back.” With that, the technician turned away and went out through the living room and a large semi-enclosed, tile-floored room with many plants and miniature orange trees in pots, through French windows to the patio. There was the usual swimming pool, covered now, and extensive plantings of ornamental shrubs. There were lights and epiphytes in the three large live-oak trees and the whole yard was surrounded by a hibiscus hedge ten feet high and precisely trimmed into a square-topped vertical wall.
“Look up there,” said Wyman, pointing to the rear wall of the house. “That’s where we think the perp entered.”
Finnegan saw what he meant. They were directly under the study window, a tall casement, and both wings of the window were standing straight out from the wall.
“It was open at the time of entry. I guess the victim felt pretty secure because there was a guard in that Florida room we just passed through. We found cigar butts and coffee cups.”
“Yeah, that’s what the maid said.” Finnegan looked up at the window. The lower edge was at least fifteen feet from the ground. A little less than halfway up this wall was a rolled awning. He said, “He could’ve moved the table and climbed onto that awning.”
“He could’ve,” said Wyman, “but what he actually did was, he jumped right up to the window from the ground there and grabbed the wall and the window frame with his claws.”
Finnegan looked at the man to see if he was joking, but Wyman’s face was serious, with worry lines creasing his broad forehead. He pulled a flashlight from the pocket of his coveralls and shone it on the wall. “There they are, four parallel gouges times two in the stucco and”-here he shifted the bright beam-“same again in the wood of the window frame.”
“It could’ve been some kind of ladder, with hooks…,” Finnegan offered.
“Yeah, that was our thought at first. Until we found these.”
Shining the flashlight on the limestone slabs of the patio, he led the detective some twenty-five feet from the house. There in the center of the path were four reddish marks. They were smeared but unmistakably the pad marks of a large cat.
“The floor of the study and the area just outside were soaked with blood. I mean, both victims were almost entirely exsanguinated, that’s over two gallons of blood. There are these same pad marks all over the place up there and on the windowsill, too. It jumped from the window and landed here, then a couple of steps and it jumped over that hibiscus hedge and landed in the next yard. Then it, or they, turned the inside key of a wrought iron gate and went down a service alley out to Montoya Avenue. And then they were gone.”
“So what’re you saying, a guy and some kind of animal?”
“I can’t think of any other explanation,” said Wyman. “And believe me, I tried. It certainly explains the apparent damage to the victim. The man’s skull was crunched up like a piece of tinfoil. His belly was ripped open, and it looks like half the liver is gone. And look over here.”
Wyman went to an island of plantings under one of the live oaks. He moved the foliage of a ginger plant aside and directed his flashlight beam to the loose earth below it.
“This is where it set itself before jumping over the hedge. We’re going to take casts, of course, but I can already tell you you’re dealing with a big animal. If I had to take a wild-ass guess, from the depth of that footprint, I’d say around four hundred pounds.”
“Good Lord! What, some kind of lion?”
“A tiger, more probably. Lions aren’t much for that kind of jumping. Or the world’s largest leopard. Or the jaguar from hell. Or extraterrestrials. This is a strange one, my friend.”
Finnegan looked up at the tall, thick, unbroken hedge and then down to the ground. There were no human footprints of any kind visible. “So how did the guy get over the hedge?”
“I don’t know, Finnegan,” said Wyman. “You figure it out-you’re the goddamn detective.”
Santiago Iglesias’s cell phone went off, snapping him out of his light doze. He looked out the window. The painted VW was still parked there, silent now. Beside him Dario Rascon snored intermittently.
Prudencio Martínez was on the line. “I need you here right now,” he said, and gave an address on Fisher Island.
“What’s up, boss?”
“Thechingada got himself killed, and whoever it was took out Torres, too.”
“¡Maldito!How could that happen?”
“How the hell should I know,cabrón? The thing is to stop it from happening again. Get moving!”
“What about the VW here?”
“Forget it. We have plates on them. We can find them when we want to.”
After being Jaguar, it is necessary for Moie to wash himself, to submerge fully in running water. At home he would naturally use the river, and although he knows there is a river in Miami, he does not like its smell, so here he uses the water of the bay. He is up to his neck off Peacock Park amid the little skiffs and tenders of the marina, with the bright face of Jaguar shining down on him. He licks his lips and laughs. He is still not used to the fact that salt is present in infinite quantities in the land of the dead. It is the single weirdest thing about being here. Where he comes from, cakes of salt are used to buy brides.
He finishes the ritual chanting and emerges from the water. He brushes the drops from his skin and pulls on the priest’s clothes. He feels his belly full of meat, and he both knows and does not know what the meat is. He once tried to explain this mental state to Father Tim (although not discussing the origin of the meat in that case), but it was an unsatisfactory conversation. Anotherontological confusion, but Father Tim did not seem disturbed by this. He always seemed delighted by things he couldn’t understand about the Runiya and their ways. It didn’t make his head hurt that way Moie’s head hurt when Father Tim talked to him about theology and the ways of thewai’ichuranan. So Moie learned a new word at that time:ineffable.