Can we talk?” Paz asked. “I could come back later or meet you someplace, if you’re busy now.”
“Now is fine,” said Dr. Salazar, “but not here.” Something in her tone and look reminded Paz of the characteristic wariness of the fugitive, what you saw in a snitch. Dr. Salazar, he thought, was on the lam.
“We could go for coffee,” he said. “There’re plenty of places on Le Jeune …”
“The faculty club, I think. The coffee isn’t so good, but we won’t be disturbed.”
Seated at a quiet table overlooking the campus lake, they passed some minutes in small talk, in Spanish, Paz consciously upgrading his diction and idiom to match hers, which was that of the prerevolutionary Havana gratin. After a pause, Paz asked, “What you said before … who did you think was going to disturb us?”
“Oh, you know … unpleasant people. The last time I ate in a public restaurant, a man came up and spat into my food. I’d prefer to avoid such scenes.” Paz gave her a questioning look.
“You don’t keep abreast of politics in the Cuban community? No, why should you? The politics of the Cuban community has little to do with people who look like you. I should explain, though, that I’m considered inadequate in my hatred of Fidel and his regime. I signed a petition, for example, asking that the embargo be lifted to allow the importation of medicines and baby formula. Also, I was so remiss as to tape an interview that was shown on Cuban television. It wasn’t about politics, but only about my field of study; still, it was construed as being a comfort to the enemy. I was also friendly with Fidel beyond the time when it was considered appropriate, that is, when he began to seize the property of the rich.”
“You knew Fidel?”
“Everyone knew Fidel,” she said dismissively. “Cuba is a small country and he never desired to hide his candle under a barrel. Also, we were at the university together.” He saw her eyes unfocus for an instant, something he had seen his mother do often, when the lost world of the Cuban past presented itself in some particularly vivid way. “But you didn’t search me out to speak of ancient history. You wish to consult me on … what?”
“Lydia Herrera suggested I talk to you. I went to see her because this showed up at a murder scene.” He took out the opele nut and put it on the table. She looked at it but did not pick it up. He went on, “Besides this, the murder was … it looked like it might be some kind of ritual killing, and the victim’s body was loaded with a bunch of exotic drugs. Narcotic and psychotropic drugs.”
“And you think it might have something to do with Santeria?”
“Do you?”
“With organized Santeria as it exists in the United States and Cuba? No, absolutely not. There’s no tradition of drug use in Santeria, aside from a few ritual swallows of rum, nor, of course, is there human sacrifice.”
“There’s animal sacrifice, though,” said Paz, and got a sharp look.
“Yes, and Catholics eat their God during communion, but no one supposes that they’ll depart from the symbolic to the literal and consume actual flesh and blood. You of all people should know this.”
“Why, because I’m a black Cuban? I’m sorry, but that’s as wrong as assuming you’re a rabid Alpha 66 supporter because you’re a white Cuban.”
A bristling moment, Paz cursing himself for getting miffed at a potential information source again, but to his surprise, Dr. Salazar smiled. “There you have it in a nutshell, why Fidel is still in power and we are all over here. We are a waspish, disagreeable little people, are we not? I beg your pardon for my unwarranted assumption, which smacked, too, of racism.”
“No offense taken,”said Paz. “But the fact is, my ignorance of Santeria is practically total. My mother was particularly against it. She thought it was low.”
His mother. A memory flashed into his mind. He had come home from school with a slip of paper. It explained that in the fifth grade he was going to start in a remedial class. He explained to her that this was where they put the dumb kids. The mother was surprised. But you can make change, you can add up in your head, you read everything, and from an early age. Why are they doing this, in the school? It was embarrassing to say the real reason; perhaps his mother had not yet observed this element of American culture. He shrugged. He didn’t answer. His mother was smarter than he thought, however. There was a Herald reporter who came to the restaurant. He was in love with her food, also a little with the cook. At his table one evening she stopped and told him the story. A smart boy, why do they want to put him with the estupidos? The reporter knew why. He knew that the school system had determined that although it could not get away with actual racial segregation, it could do the next best thing by insuring that little black and little white children would never have to sit in the same classrooms, for it was an element of the American creed that the reason They do not do well in life is that They are not very smart. A story was duly run about tracking and its discontents. Jimmy was placed in the gifted and talented track and became officially part of the Talented Tenth along with Oprah and Colin, so the Americans could go back to thinking that all was well in that area of national life.
Dr. Salazar was staring at him peculiarly. Had he missed something? He said, “Sorry, I got distracted by the past for a second there. You were saying?”
Through a faint smile she said, “I was saying that I should have acknowledged that any deeply held faith can produce monstrosities. Some years ago in Matamoros, a group of men who called themselves santeros committed more than a dozen murders, supposedly as part of a ritual. But that had as much to do with the true religion as the Jonestown atrocity or that terrible man in Waco had to do with Christianity. So, it’s entirely possible that you’re dealing with someone, a madman, who’s warped Santeria to his own sick ends. Can you tell me something about the ritualism associated with this murder?”
Paz did, leaving out, as usual, some important details. Dr. Salazar’s face became very grave, nearly stricken. She picked up the opele nut in its plastic envelope.
“This is African,” she said.
“So I understand. Does that make a difference?”
“Yes. It’s quite possible that you are dealing not with a Cuban or an Afro-Cuban, but with an African, a practitioner of the original religion from which the various New World religions were derived.”
“And that original one would involve human sacrifice?”
“If we’re talking about Africa, who knows? Certainly not me. There have been any number of cultures in which human sacrifice was accepted?the Aztecs are the most famous, but also we have Carthage, and thuggee in India, and ritual headhunting in the South Pacific, and there may be some similar cults in Africa. The Ibo certainly had some of it, by informal report. They are neighbors of the Yoruba, which is where Santeria comes from. There’s a published account by a former so-called juju priest in which a white man is tortured to death to help Idi Amin’s career. True? Who knows? But I’ve never heard of it being part of the formal Yoruba religion. You said that drugs were involved? Yes? Then I would say that you are not dealing with religion, but with witchcraft.”
“What’s the difference?”
The deep-set black eyes hardened surprisingly. “Witchcraft, or sorcery, is about power, and religion is about grace. The religionist supplicates a supernatural power, and prays for spiritual benefits. The sorcerer attempts to bend occult forces to his will. The religionist prays, the sorcerer manipulates.”
“But religions make sacrifices, even human sacrifices, as you said.”
“Yes, but as part of a settled order of the universe. Santeria is largely concerned with divination and the direct experience of holiness. The santero, the babalawo, the members of an ile, are supplicants. They believe they are taking their places in a world ordered by Olodumare and impregnated by ashe, a kind of spiritual energy. Devotees desire to conform themselves to this energy through honoring the ancestors, through opening themselves to direct contact with the orishas, the spiritual beings who are different aspects of the Godhead, or through divination. This is why Santeria is identifiable as a religion. The sorcerer’s world on the other hand is not ordered in this way. It is chaotic, filled with violent and often malevolent powers, which the sorcerer seeks to understand and control. Control, do you see? At least that’s always been the theory.”
She stopped, her eyes drifting. Paz waited, keeping his face neutral. Then she looked at him, and it seemed to him that she read his thoughts.
“You are not a believer, are you, Detective Paz?”
“To tell the truth, I’m not.”
“Well, it’s a gift, and not given to everyone, at every time. But I should refine my position to say that sorcery and religion tend to blend around the edges. Submission to the will of God has never been very common. Most of us would wish to influence him, if we could, or to know what he has in store for us. You might say that Santeria itself fulfills that purpose among people who are nominally Catholic. This can blend imperceptibly into sorcery, and we then see the drugs, the curses, the love potions. Voudoun, as you know, which has antecedents similar to those of Santeria, has gone far in this direction. I recall a line of research that suggests just that, dark doings on the fringes of the Yoruba culture. Tour de Montaille and others.”
“Excuse me?”
“A name. Charles Apollon de la Tour de Montaille was a French officer who did a good deal of ethnography in West Africa, back around the turn of the last century. He published some short articles about his discovery of a cult group of some sort who claimed to have preceded the Yoruba, who actually taught them Ifa divination. He said furthermore that this group supported a clan, I suppose, of witches with remarkable powers. I can’t recall the name of the cult group, but I do recall there was a ritual involving the sacrifice of a pregnant woman. You didn’t mention it, but tell me: was the fetal brain excised?”
“Yes, it was,” said Paz, and felt a chill ripple his scalp. “So, what you’re saying is this mutilation reminds you of some tribal cult ritual described in a French anthropologist’s report around a hundred years ago.”
“Yes, and I wish I could remember more details, but, you know, it is nearly a hundred years since I was a student and read of it.” She laughed. “Or so it seems. But I’ll tell you something else. Much more recently there was a paper. Where was it?” She struck her temple with the heel of her hand. “My God, I am growing dim. No, it was not a published paper. It was sent to me by a journal to referee, and I recall that it referenced Tour de Montaille. The author?oh, what was his name? I can’t recall it. In any case, the author claimed to have found the same cult Tour de Montaille had studied so long ago. I tell you what?you have got me intrigued, young man. I will do some looking for you and perhaps I can find the paper. Would that be helpful?”
“It sure would. We’d be very grateful. But in the meantime, could you give me any ideas about the man I’m looking for? I mean, are there any particular likes or dislikes he might have? Like he wears only blue and can’t eat hamburgers?I mean assuming he thinks he’s some kind of sorcerer in that tradition.”
“I see, yes. Well, a man, certainly, with African contacts, and he has probably spent much time in West Africa. Doesn’t like to have his photograph taken, cuts his hair himself. A powerfully commanding personality, may be the head of a small group, political, let’s say, or an extended family. The number sixteen is important.”
“Sixteen?”
“Yes.” She tapped the opele. “If he uses this. The number is sacred to Ifa. Tell me, do you think you’ll find this man?”
“Well, we’ll do our best, but the fact is, the more time that passes after the murder, the harder it gets. Unless, God protect us, he does it again.”
“Oh, he will certainly do it again. As I recall, he has to do it four times within sixteen days. Or sixteen times in one hundred twenty-eight days. Or is that from some other ritual? I can’t recall. I’ll certainly have to look for that paper.”
The interview with Dr. Maria Salazar was the last substantive addition to the case file on Deandra Wallace for several days. Jimmy Paz and Cletis Barlow both had their snitches and they had come up blank. No African juju man was known to any of them. No one had seen or heard anything connected to the crime. The case did not vanish from their minds, but it had receded from the foreground, replaced by more recent slaughter.
Today’s corpse, the one they were on now, had been in life Sultana Davis, and had dwelled a street north of Deandra Wallace in a similar building, this one painted faded blue. Except that she was just as dead, Ms. Davis’s murder differed in all other respects from that of her predecessor-in-death. The chief suspect in the case was Ms. Davis’s estranged boyfriend, Jarell McEgan. He had gotten drunk, broken into Ms. Davis’s apartment the previous evening, provoked a violent argument, stabbed her twenty-one times with a steak knife, finished Ms. Davis’s alcohol, and made his escape in his car, or tried to, since he had merely turned on the ignition and passed out. There the police found him the next morning. He had blood on his hands, always a good clue, and on his clothes.
McEgan denied knowing anything about Ms. Davis or the blood, or the origin of the bloody fingerprints on Ms. Davis’s bottle of vodka. He was now cuffed and snoring in the back of a patrol car. Barlow was in the apartment still, making sure of the evidence. Paz was in the front seat of his car, with the door open, scratching on his steno pad, getting a head start on the 301, the investigative report. As he did so, he reflected, with some shame, on his effort to shape the Wallace killing into the far more familiar pattern represented by this one.
Barlow came out of the building with an armful of plastic evidence bags. He stashed them in the trunk and said, “Take a look at this.”
Paz got out of the car. Barlow pointed to the apartment house he had just left.
“That’s a four-story building there.”
Paz made a show of counting floors. “Yeah, Cletis. Four. You counted right, and here you told me you never went to college.”
“As the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of a fool. You happen to look out the window of the vic’s apartment?”
“Why?”
“The Wallace woman’s place was on the second floor back. You probably can see into her kitchen pretty good from nearly the whole line of third-and fourth-floor apartments here, from the kitchens and the back bedrooms.”
“And you want me to hang around here and talk to all the residents.”
“Only those that’re home. You’ll want to come back this evening and speak to the people who’re at work now. I’ll go off and put our suspect into the system.”
“You’ll write up the three-oh-one?”
“No, you will. It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. Lamentations 1:27.”
The afternoon inhabitants of the building were women on pensions or welfare, the old, the unemployed, and a few crooks. At the end of three frustrating hours, he had nearly the same nothing he had started with, except that he had been offered sex once, dope twice, and a glass of iced tea, only the last of which he had accepted, from a Mrs. Meagher, sixty-eight. She lived with her two grandchildren, eight and fourteen, currently at school, their mother having recently died of the Virus, the children apparently healthy, praise Jesus, and would he like another sugar cookie? Paz confirmed that the Meagher apartment had a good view of the Wallace kitchen, but Mrs. Meagher had not seen anything out that window, her eyes not being what they were. Paz said he would return when the kids were back from school. He left and continued his canvass, which yielded nothing.
He returned to his oven of a car, drove to a convenience store on Twelfth, and bought a packaged ham and cheese sandwich and a Mountain Dew soda.
Outside the store Paz observed a group of youths cutting school, dressed in costumes?hugely baggy pants worn at the level of the pubes, cutoff team sweatshirts, expensive athletic shoes worn unlaced?donned in hopes that they would be mistaken for ex-convicts, the highest status of which they could conceive. They went past him into the store to do some light shoplifting.
Paz had no particular sympathy for the youths. The previous generation of the same type had made his own life very difficult, as had (to be fair) their Cuban analogues. Whatever sympathy he might have had for the shopkeeper vanished when he started to eat: the sandwich was both stale and soggy, and tasted like clay, and the soda was warm. It was not revived even when he saw the kids running out of the store, laughing, clutching purloined bags of Fritos and M amp;M’s. As he trashed his uneaten lunch, some lines from a poem ran through his mind:
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love
And this led him naturally to thoughts about the woman who had taught him the poem, and he drove away south.
Paz walked into the Coconut Grove library near Peacock Park, an elegant building made of gray wood and glass, and approached the woman behind the information desk. She was short, and slightly plump in a luscious way, with hair like polished copper wires and large round horn-rimmed glasses. Her skin was smooth, creamy, and freckled.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes,” said Paz, “I was looking for some books with pictures of naked ladies in them and not a lot of printing.”
“I see. Well, we do have an extensive split beaver collection. It’s on that low shelf right by the children’s section.” She grinned at him, showing small, shiny, even teeth. Willa Shaftel was not a conventionally attractive woman?the bodice on the print sundress she was wearing was barely filled and the rest of her torso departed only slightly from the cylindrical?but she had a bright and knowing face, a big, lush mouth, remarkable blue eyes, and there was that hair. “It’s been a while, Jimmy. To what do we owe?”
“Police business. There’s a big push on library-fine scofflaws.”
“Those dirty vultures, but I thought you worked for homicide.”
“I do. We’ve found that murderers often move on to more serious things like not returning library books or even scribbling on the pages. We want to nip it in the bud. Also, I came by to see if you wanted to go to lunch.”
“I only have a half hour,” said Shaftel.
“Take it,” said Paz.
After buying food they went to Peacock Park and sat on a bench in the shade of some casuarinas, right by the bay, watching children poke sticks in the gray mud. Paz ate from a box of conch fritters and fries, Shaftel from a little plastic salad plate and a container of yogurt.
“I was just thinking of you a while ago,” he said.
“Yes, I get that all the time. Some men can’t stop obsessing about my body for a minute.”
“That too, but it was that poem.” He described the circumstances, his morning activities, a sketch of the case, his abortive lunch, and his recall of the lines.
“Oh, ‘Irish Airman,’ Yeats,” she said. ” ‘Not law nor duty made me fight, nor public men nor cheering crowds, a lonely impulse of delight, drove to this tumult in the clouds.’ “
“Yeah, I like that. ‘A lonely impulse of delight’ is good.”
“Is that why you work homicide? Clearly there’s no great attachment to the public weal. As you’ve often said, by and large, both killers and their victims are jerks. It’s not a racial chip on the shoulder …” She glanced sideways at him. “… or at least not entirely. So … what? Hard work, dirty work, tedious knocking on doorways …”
“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 appliqued 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.