10/2 Lagos
Dave Berne is here. Originally a Brit, famous womanizer, not with me, tho, been at Stanford for ages. He said M. had told him all about me, and sent his love, and said we would get along. Been here many times, speaks all the languages, is completely at ease. As we drove from the airport, he regaled us with a story (in mixed English and Yoruba) about a grad student of his who couldn’t get the Yoruba language tonalities right. No one would talk to him after he asked, very politely, when the next circumcision ceremony was to take place. Berne asked him exactly what he had said and the kid repeated it amp; what he’d actually said was, ‘Please, I require to have intercourse with three billy goats.’ Tunji laughing so hard he could hardly steer.
Back at the Palm Court, Berne insisted on running off to Yaba Market for a big street lunch and so we all did, plus W. Berne found a horrible-looking little stand that he said sold the best akara in Lagos amp; we all sat around on rickety stools and ate the fried pastry, dipping it in blazing chili sauce, and washing it down with beer amp; it was very good, too. Someone tried to sell him an old Gelede mask, D.B. instantly identified it as fake, explained why, brilliant rap on aesthetics and symbology of the western Yoruba, grad students in awe. I thought it was pretty good myself, but my awe is all dried up, now, M. used to do shit like that all the time. Greer slipped into the background, grinning tho, I think he finds it a relief not always to have to be the big kahuna. W. not in awe at all, shooting D.B. daggerlike looks.
Good discussion at dinner, talked about origins?where do religious ideas arise, can you trace a myth back to some primal source and say, oh, here marks the spot where that particular belief entered the consciousness of a people? Greer talked about Mami Wata, a Ewe cult he’s been studying for years, where we know the origins with some precision, since it dates from the coming of Europeans to the West African coast. From POV of Africans, these people appeared in floating islands that arose out of the sea. Their skins were the color of drowned corpses. They possessed tools and weapons of a kind and power never before seen on earth, clearly of magical origin. They worshiped carved figures, like real people do, amp; placed them in front of their floating islands. The Ewe adapted existing water spirits into a new cult, giving it a name in pidgin?Mother Water, or Mami Wata? amp; began to worship the figureheads of trading vessels. Mami Wata wants you to be rich like the white man, is the message. Her devotees dress in white and smear their faces with chalk or flour, and dance around figures painted bright pink, which still bear the expression of benign stupidity found on the original carved figureheads.
W. is eating this up, asking questions, and scratching away on a pad?his area of expertise, the weird way in which the races ape one another. Knew he was getting it all wrong?nothing to do with race, everything to do with money?but was so happy to see him animated again that I didn’t butt in.
Greer talked about Yoruba origins, said the old bards of the kings of Oyo claimed the Yoruba came from Mecca, but that’s obvious fabrication based on prestige of Islam. That Y. not entirely autochthonous seems beyond doubt, most probably they came from the east, in waves during the early first millennium a.d. His best guess is that they came from Meroe, a kingdom in upper Egypt that flourished between the second and fourth centuries.
A little discussion of Afrocentrism here, the name of Meroe always sparks that, Meroe having conquered Egypt proper at one point, a rare example of black folks getting over on the other kind and thus to be cherished. Then a giant leap to: Egypt equals black, Egypt founded Western civ. thus white civilization another rip-off from the good guys. Demolished (I thought a bit unkindly) by Berne; he’s got a quick fuse in the presence of nonsense. He said this obsession with Egypt and Nilotic ethnic types has been a disaster in West Africa, and was invented by white colonialists in the first place, so that they could rule by favoring people who looked like them?light skins, thin lips and noses. The Tutsi in Rwanda, the Hausa in Nigeria, and it was disgusting to see Africans falling for it. You got a world-class culture right here in Yoruba and you despise it because it doesn’t have MTV and chrome trim. W. did a long angry rant about how the white man would never respect the black man until the black man had real power, power to hurt the white man. What Africa needed was a black Hitler!
Stunned silence. Greer stepped in, asked Berne to talk about the Olo.
Odd tale. A crazy Frenchman back in the 19th C. found a small group in isolated district in Fr. Equatorial who claimed to be from Ife, but Ife before the Yoruba got there. The Yoruba pantheon, they claimed, were them. They had godlike powers back then, in the golden age, now they’ve fallen on hard times. Tour de Montaille, his name was. Don’t recall hearing it before, said so?Berne explained he had discovered the original journals, but was unable to verify the existence of Olo, so assumed either the Frenchie made it all up, or they were extinguished or dispersed in the past century. Wrote a brief piece in J. African Hist., probably in library here. I said I would check it out. He said read the Fr. journals, too, they’re here also, if the termites haven’t got them.
Actually, a jolly evening, the best in a while. W. did not go out carousing with Ola and his pals as usual. Instead, later, a polite knock on my door. I succumbed. After, I wanted to talk, about us, about the craziness, about how he was feeling, for God’s sake, but he fell asleep, is sleeping now as I write this. I can’t sleep. It will have to be Xanax again. Still, maybe the worst is over.
10/4 Ado-Joga
Here in this little village west of Lagos, Berne setting me up w/ Adedayo, Gelede mask carver, most gorgeous wood-carving tradition in Yoruba art. Interesting: Gelede artists are men, but tradition pays homage to the spiritual power of elderly women, called awon iya wa, “our mothers.” Not common in Africa, needless to say. Or anywhere else. Feminist in me finds it terribly exciting. These women have such power that they have to be entertained, cosseted, praised, and placated, lest they turn into witches, and bring destruction down on communities. Result = Gelede masked dance ritual. Unlike other Yoruba dance rituals, which address the forces of the spirit world, Gelede concerned mainly with this world, as personified in the terrible old women. The dances speak to social and spiritual issues affecting daily life, like art in Europe in Greece, in Middle Ages.
Mr. Adedayo very old, dignified, aristocratic, works in a tiny yard in front of his atelier, sitting on the ground with his back against a fig tree. Berne asked him if I could video him at work, A. gave me funny look, said he “didn’t think you could take pictures of that,” meaning the spiritual work. Taped mere physical work, however, for hours, strange, a numen coming off him and off the mask he was working on, hard to describe. A sense of groundedness in culture, in the earth, in the flow of ashe?
He was using a tool that made a tiny triangular dent in the wood and he was making a pattern with it on the side of the mask, just hundreds of tiny three-cornered dents, in lines and swirls, and I could not pull my eyes away. Night fell. A woman came out with a lantern. Both Berne and I gasped and then laughed. It was like being in church used to be like. Compare artists’ studios in SoHo, they don’t have this there.
Mentioned this later to Berne, he called it the unspoken and secret rewards of anthro, far more significant than the plaudits of our peers, why we put up with the sulky camels and the insects. Said, surely he taught you that, meaning M., who actually did teach me that, or tried; he lived for it, and I have been trying to forget it, because it’s a drug for us poor etiolated, alienated, mechanical corpse-colored people, and I think I have a tendency to OD. Changed subject just then, because I knew if conversation went on in this vein, he would press me on what happened in Chenka, which I can’t talk about.
10/5 Lagos
Reading the paper on Tour de Montaille. I took our little Canon down to the library this afternoon, and copied Berne’s paper and the original French journal. Interesting stuff?the Olo or Oleau, “real magic” again? It would be like discovering a tribe in Iran or Russia who still had the oral version of Homer as a living, bardic experience. TdM. was vague about the location but somewhere north of the Baoule in present Mali. (??ethnographic traces, artifacts?) Interesting tradition of infant sacrifice, too. Not uncommon in recent Nigeria, but typically a mere ritual murder, a burial with the chief, or you knock a kid on the head in hard times, avert some curse, or the old Ibo habit of burying twins alive in jars. According to these journals this is not the same thing?this is somehow using the body of the neonate, ritual cannibalism, or drugs. M. would say drugs?using the mother-child system as a chemical retort? To produce what? If I didn’t have the Gelede project set up already, I’d take a shot at going up to Mali and poking around.
W. not at dinner, no one seems to know where he’s off to. Asked Soronmu, but got a shifty answer. He’s with some of the loki, local hard boys, getting color (so to speak) for his work.
10/6 Fucking Lagos
Total disaster. Can’t write now. The idiot!
EIGHTEEN
Where are you going?” Mrs. Paz asked as he headed for the door.
“I’m going out, Mami,” he answered. “I’m going to do some shopping, and get my car washed and cleaned up, and then I’m going to clean my place. Then I might go over to the pool and swim. Or I might do nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?” Giving him the stone face.
“Nothing means nothing. See, Mami, this is what we call in English a day off. I’m taking a day off today, and I plan on taking a day off tomorrow, too. It’s the weekend. I only get one weekend in every four off and I’m going to take it easy.”
“I need you here tomorrow,” she said, not amused.
“You may need me, but you won’t have me. I realize you don’t think the police do work, but we do, and so I’m taking what we Americans call a break.”
“You know, son of mine, you’re not too big that I can’t slap your face if you talk to me like that. What about tonight?”
“I’m going out,” Paz said.
“Who with?”
“With a young woman. I will buy her a meal, not here, and take her to the theater, and afterward I expect to take her home and have as much sexual intercourse as I can manage.”
She threw a good one at his ear, but he was ready for it and rocked back so that her fist sailed past his face, and then he made his escape out the back door of the kitchen. She stood in the door and yelled imprecations at him as he trotted down the alley. As always after these incidents, he resolved to quit working for her and move out of the rent-free apartment. The place was booming; she had more money than God and could easily afford to hire any chef in the city. These resolves never bore fruit, however, other than a dull depression that blighted a day he had anticipated for weeks. He did not do the errands he had planned, nor did he go to the pool. Instead, after showering, he sat in his shorts in his apartment with the shades pulled down and watched sports on television and drank Coronas until they were all gone, and then fell into a doze. As he slipped off he remembered the dashboard statue. He had meant to ask his mother about it but hadn’t, and probably wouldn’t now. Not that she would tell him the straight story anyway. Lies and secrets chez Paz, that was the rule. Why he had become a dick, he thought, and slept.
Willa lived in a tiny apartment on McDonald, from one window of which, when the wind was just in the right quarter to move the leaves of a royal palm, one could see a patch of bay the size of a paperback novel. She was ready, and looked as well as Willa ever looked in clothes: a loose knit top with a roll collar, made of some rough and sparkly dark purple yarn, and wide white trousers in a silky material. Her springy hair was piled high up on top, compressed, but still allowing delicious little red coils to protrude against her white neck. Paz planted a soft kiss beneath one of these. Out they went.
He took her to a ferny joint on Commodore Plaza, the kind with incompetent (hi, my name is Melanie) young women waiting table and a menu of dishes that were healthy, generally pastel in color, and pale in taste. He did not care for this sort of food, but she liked it, and she knew he didn’t, and was grateful. They walked holding hands down Main to the Coconut Grove Playhouse and took their seats.
After a few disorienting minutes, Paz to his surprise found himself enjoying the show. It was really a series of satirical sketches, loosely tied together by the story of Simple, a black kid who wanders Candide-like across America in search of the authentic black experience. When playing black people, the cast members put on “black” masks and costumes, right onstage, and sometimes they also layered “white” masks and costumes on top of the black ones. The actors exchanged masks and costumes and shifted around on the minstrel-style set, and their skill was such that after a while it was hard to tell the actual race of the performer. You saw only the masks, which was the main point.
“This is un-fucking-believable,” said Paz to Willa during the intermission. “I’m glad you talked me into it.”
“Yeah, it’s terrific. You notice people checking us out, we being the only interracial couple in the place.”
“What interracial? I’m Cuban,” said Paz, and she laughed. “Who is this guy? Moore, the writer?”
“Oh, DeWitt Moore?he was quite the enfant terrible a couple years back. He had a couple of smashes, including this one here, and since then he’s been keeping a low profile, reviews and poetry mostly. He’s got a lot of enemies.”
“I can see why. This thing’s an equal-opportunity fuck-you.”
“Indeed. He’s supposed to be here tonight, by the way.”
“Yeah?” Paz looked around the crowded lobby. “Where?”
“Onstage. He likes to show up and take one of the chorus parts, like Alfred Hitchcock. In New York, people who hated him used to buy tickets on the off chance that he’d take a bow after and they could pelt him with refuse. That man is staring at you.”
“Where?”
“Don’t look. Middle-aged white guy in a turtleneck. Arty type. Now he’s telling his date. She’s staring, too. Are you more famous than you’ve let on?”
“No, probably someone I arrested,” said Paz, turning to look the arty gent in the eye. The man nodded at him familiarly. Paz had no idea who he was.
“What’s that buzzing noise?” Willa asked.
“Shit! It’s my damn beeper.” Paz pulled it out of his pocket and studied its tiny screen, his brows twisted. “Some asshole probably misplaced a time sheet or something. Wait here, I’ll go call.”
But when Paz called on his cell phone, the operator patched him through to a radio car, and after a minute or so he found himself talking to Cletis Barlow.
“Jimmy, you got a pen? You need to get out here right now.”
“What? I’m in the middle of a date. I’m at the theater. What the heck is so important?”
“He done it again. Cuban woman. In Cocoplum.”
“Oh … fuck!” cried Paz, with his thumb over the phone mike. Cocoplum was a wealthy bayside development south of the Grove, favored by the Cuban upper crust. If the bastard wanted the absolute maximum in police attention he had made a good choice of victim.
“You still there, Jimmy?”
“Yeah. Look, are we sure it’s the same guy?”
“It’s a carbon copy of Deandra Wallace,” said Barlow. “No breakin. No struggle. The same cuts, the baby done the same. Bet you a bag of silver dollars they find the same drugs in her. Man came home and found his wife and baby like that? Jesus wept! Take down the address.”
Paz did. When he got back to Willa, they were flashing the lights and the lobby was draining of people.
“What?” she asked, seeing his face.
“That guy killed another pregnant woman. I got to go. You can watch the rest of this, if you want, or I can drive you home, but I’ll probably be tied up all night. If you want to stay, I can give you cab fare …”
“No, I want to come with you.”
Paz looked up at the ceiling, registering extreme disbelief. “Come on, babes, it’s police business. I can’t take a date to a murder scene.”
“I won’t be at a murder scene. I’ll stay on the good side of the yellow tape like the rest of the gawkers. Please, Jimmy?it’s our last night and I’ll never see you again until I’m a famous writer and I come to the Miami Book Fair and you come up to the table to get an autograph …”
Paz sighed dramatically. “It’ll be hours and hours. What in hell will you do?”
“I’ll absorb atmosphere. I’ll have conversations. I’m a writer. Puh-leeeeze …? “
So they drove down together, Paz having made her swear on the ghost of William Butler Yeats that she would keep out of trouble. In a little while they were at the crime scene, a more impressive showing than the one that had attended the death of Deandra Wallace. There were more than a dozen official cars in the cul-de-sac, radio cars and the big Ford sedans used by the brass, besides an ambulance, a crime-scene-unit van, a generator truck supplying power to the floodlights that illuminated what was clearly the victim’s home. This was a large, two-story, Spanish-style affair, with a tile roof and two wings, one of which enclosed a four-car garage, all set amid lavish plantings and irrigated lawns backing on Biscayne Bay. It looked like a stage set under the lights.
Paz parked a good distance away, reminded Willa to stay put, and walked toward the house, shoving his badge wallet onto his breast pocket to display the shield. There were little knots of neighbors at the head of the cul-de-sac, as well as three TV vans setting up to broadcast live, all under the supervision of a couple of uniforms. The neighbors looked stunned and worried. Good, thought Paz, unkindly, as he went by. He stopped by the crime-scene truck and picked up a steno pad, a set of plastic booties, and a pair of rubber gloves.
The suits were out in numbers in front of the house, among whom Paz spotted his homicide shift lieutenant, Romeo Posada, and the homicide unit commander, Captain Arnie Mendes. He did not care for either of them, but Mendes at least had a set of brains. He nodded to both of them as he stepped into the house and took in the scene. An oval entrance hall, high-ceilinged with a gilt chandelier hanging on chains, a tile floor, white, gold-flecked, underfoot, straight ahead a formal stairway, doors to the left and right. A crime-scene tech was dusting the French windows in the huge living room to the right. Paz asked him where the scene was. The guy pointed upward. “The master bedroom, hang a left at the head of the stairs. You want to bring a vomit bag, Jimmy. Fucker did a number on the poor bitch. You figure it’s the same guy from Overtown?”
“We’ll have to see,” said Paz, and headed up the staircase. The master bedroom was the size of a helipad, and done in shades of yellow?drapes, shag rug, the trim on the king-size four-poster. A cheerful color, which made the prevailing color of the bed and its occupant a particularly obscene contrast. Barlow was staring at the dead woman, motionless, his head down. A couple of CSU cops wandered around taking strobe photos and vacuuming every surface.
Paz stood next to his partner and studied the woman’s face. The eyes were slightly open, but otherwise she looked like she was sleeping. Early twenties, Paz estimated, tanned body, thick blond hair in a shag cut, a little plump in the cheeks, but nice even features.
“Where’s the baby?” Paz asked after several heavy swallows that tasted unpleasantly of semidigested grilled pompano with mango confit.
“Bathroom,” said Barlow.
Paz took a look in the adjoining bathroom, which was huge also, and brightly lit, yellow like the bedroom, and equipped with a shower stall, a Jacuzzi bath, two sinks, and a vanity table of the type used by movie stars, with the lightbulbs all around the mirror. The little gray corpse was lying half on this table and half in the sink, with its severed umbilicus hanging down like an appliance cord. There was a CSU man in the shower stall, clanking tools.
Paz pulled his eyes away from the never-born baby. “Anything good?”
“I’ll know when I get the trap up,” the CSU guy said. “He used the shower after, we know that. There’s blood marks behind the grab bar. Maybe we’ll get some hairs.” More clanking, a muffled curse. “We found one thing, near the baby. I gave it to Cletis already.”
“What?”
“Probably nothing. Looks like a sliver of black plastic or glass. Doesn’t match anything I could see in the room.”
Paz went back to the bedroom. Barlow had not moved.
“So what do you think, Cletis?”
“Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils.”
“Besides that, Cletis. Do we have anything?”
“Well, she’s fresher than Deandra. Look, the blood’s just about done setting up. He couldn’t have finished more than half an hour before Vargas got home. He says he was at a Marlins game with some clients, which I guess we’ll check out just to dot the i’s. This here’s his wife, Teresa, age twenty-four. There’s a housekeeper, too, who you need to talk to. Her English ain’t that hot. Amelia Ferrer, we’re keeping her in her room downstairs. You also need to talk to the people in the other two houses on this strip, maybe they saw or heard something.”
“Obviously Amelia didn’t or she would’ve called the cops.”
“You’ll find out. Let me handle the scene and you go talk the language to these people.”
“What about this piece of glass CSU found?”
Barlow took an evidence bag from his pocket and held it up to the light. In it was a fragment a little larger than a fingernail clipping, and with nearly the same crescent shape.
“That’s not as good as a rare nut, is it?”
Barlow said nothing and put the bag back in his pocket. Paz said, “Well, I got to admit you called it right. We’re deep in it now. The bosses are all over this already. Did Posada or Mendes have anything to say?”
“Oh, yeah. The department called the Feebs already. Guy’s flying down from Quantico, the expert on serial killers. It’s butt-covering time. Meeting Monday morning in the chief’s office.”
“Mendes’s?”
“No, the chief. Of police. Horton. This is going to be high-level right down the line. The big boys’ll be looking over our shoulders from inside of our suit jackets from now on. You better go talk to them people now.”
Barlow returned to his silent contemplation of the eviscerated Teresa, or maybe he was praying for guidance. Paz went out of the death-stinking room, down the stairs to the maid’s room near the kitchen, and found the housekeeper, a stocky, thirtyish woman a shade or two darker than Paz, wearing a tan uniform and apron. A policewoman was keeping an eye on her. Amelia Ferrer had been crying and dabbed at her reddened eyes with a wad of paper towel while he conducted the interview. She had last seen her employer alive at just before eight that evening. Mrs. Vargas had been watching television in her bedroom and Mrs. Ferrer had gone up as she usually did to see if anything was wanted before she herself settled down to watch her favorite program (Wheel of Fortune) in her own room. She had not left her room until she heard Mr. Vargas’s horrified shriek at shortly after ten, while E.R. was playing. Yes, her door had been slightly ajar, as always. Yes, she had heard Mr. Vargas enter the house. No, she had not heard anyone else come in, but she recalled dozing off for a few minutes. No, the elaborate alarm system had not been turned on; they did not turn it on, usually, until the family was ready for bed.
Mr. Vargas was in his living room, with a stiff drink. He wanted someone to blame, and it was Paz. After some shouting and raving, which Paz did not allow to affect him, he took Vargas through his day, in English. He’d worked the morning (he was in real estate, office in Coral Gables) and then gone out for a spin in the boat (a big Bayliner, docked behind the house). Then he’d had supper with his wife (here he broke down briefly) and picked up a trio of heavy investors at the Biltmore in the Gables and driven them up to Joe Robbie Stadium for the game, using his firm’s skybox. He wouldn’t have gone off with his wife just about to have a baby had it not been a major deal. He had called her on his cell phone during the seventh-inning stretch, about eight-fifty. She had been fine. The game was over at nine-twenty, he had dropped his clients at their hotel, making excuses when they invited him for drinks. He had hurried home, arriving just past ten, and found … Another breakdown.
Now there was a bustle outside the living room, voices raised. It was the family, the famous Cuban family?Vargas’s father, mother, two sisters, their husbands, the victim’s father. By the book, Paz should have isolated all these people and interviewed them separately, but it was so hideously clear that this thing wasn’t a domestic that he let them come in for a shrieking-and-comfort-fest with Alex Vargas. He did not, however, avoid a dirty look from the victim’s father, and an angry spurt of Spanish to his son-in-law?”That’s the detective? What, we don’t pay enough taxes, they stick you with a nigger?”
Paz went out through the rear of the house, through the French doors that led to a broad terrace, which included a long lit-up pool and a little palm-thatched bar. He stood and breathed salt-scented air until his gut stopped roiling. He didn’t really blame the gusanos, who were hopeless; he blamed himself for still, still, after all these years, letting it get to him.
He walked off the terrace out onto the dock, and determined that no one was lurking in the Bayliner, nor had the murderer left any obvious clues on it. Beyond the boat there was nothing but the dark bay and beyond that the lights of Key Biscayne. There were cops all around the place kneeling, squatting, looking for evidence. Paz did not think they would find much.
He checked out the other two houses on the cul-de-sac. One was closed up for the summer. The other was occupied by a frightened family who had seen and heard nothing. No cars, no boats. They would have heard. They asked Paz what had happened, and Paz told them they were investigating a homicide. Paz agreed with them that it was awful for something like this to happen in a neighborhood as nice as this one.
As Paz arrived back at the Vargas house, he was buttonholed by Arnie Mendes. The homicide chief was a burly man, of the size and shape characteristic of football tackles, with a broad, humorous, fleshy face decorated by a brush mustache and sideburns. Mendes was not a Cuban at all, but a third-generation Spaniard, who barely spoke the language. His people had come over from Segovia in 1894 to roll cigars. His name, however, had clinched him the job.
“Solve it yet, Jimmy?”
“Yes, sir. We’re pretty sure it was a mentally retarded itinerant Negro person. I’m just about to drive along under the expressway and pick him up out of his refrigerator carton. I’m sure he’ll confess.”
“It may come to that,” said Mendes, laughing. “Do you have any idea who these people are?” He gestured broadly to the house and grounds.
“Rich Cubans?”
“You could say that. The husband’s daddy is Ignacio Vargas. Owns the Southeast Company. You’ve seen their ads?”
“Developers.”
“Gigantic fucking developers, hence dear friends of every politician in the state. The dead girl’s father is Hector Guzman, the founder and president of Hemisphere Bank, which is that great big black glass thing on Brickell. What they call a dynastic marriage, and the little heir to it all is lying in that fucking yellow bathroom with his head sliced open. As of this moment, the total detective resources of the Miami PD are on this case and will remain on it until it goes down, or we give up hope of putting it down, in which case all of us will be looking for employment. So what do you have for me?”
“Boss, we just got here. We haven’t got an autopsy yet, we haven’t looked at the crime-scene stuff …”
“I mean is it what it looks like?”
Paz paused. Of course the man would’ve already spoken with Cletis. So Paz said, “What it looks like, subject to revision, is a ritual murder similar in all obvious respects to the murder of Deandra Wallace and her unborn baby. That means a ritual serial killer, and this guy is very smart, very sneaky, and he seems to move around without anyone seeing him.”
“A black, I understand. I mean seriously.”
“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.”
Mendes 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.