They seemed to be in a park bordered by poplars in full leaf, through the trunks of which shone dappled lawns. The road ended in a broad apron of tan gravel, washed golden in pools by shafts of sun. They parked and climbed stone stairs to a terrace, and there was the house, Sionnet. It was long and rambling and many-gabled, a Queen Anne fantasy in rose brick and tan stucco, its gray slate roofing pierced by dozens of brick chimneys. There was a large white wooden barn off to the right, and through some trees they could see the glitter of a greenhouse, and beyond that the sheen of the Sound. Seabirds shrieked above, and they heard the sound of a mower in the distance.
Paz and Barlow walked to the front door, past a flagpole from which the Stars and Stripes crackled in the breeze. The terrace was nearly as large as a football field and formal in design, with neat, bright flower beds, and lozenges of lawn cut by graveled paths. A group of workmen in khaki were doing some repairs on the stone balustrade that enclosed it. The front door was iron-bound, thick-planked dark wood, pierced by a small diamond window.
Paz pulled the bell. The door opened?a young woman, rounded, pretty, with pale blond hair done up in a bun, her face pink and damp from some distant kitchen. She wore a white uniform and a pin-striped apron over it. Paz goggled; he had never seen a white servant before, except in movies depicting foreign nations or earlier ages. Barlow displayed his shield.
“Miss, we’re police officers. From Miami, Florida? We’d like to see Mr. John Francis Doe.”
She said, calmly, as if police visits were routine at Sionnet, “Oh, uh-huh, Mr. D. said you’d be by. He’s over there, you must have walked right past him.” Here she pointed at the work crew at the balustrade. “He’s the tall one in the Yankees ball cap.”
The four men were replacing a copper gutter that ran along the pedestal of the balustrade. Doe seemed to know what he was doing, as did the three men?all young, two white kids and one who might have been Latino. Doe stood up and looked the detectives over. He looked a little longer at Paz than at Barlow, and Paz knew why. Barlow made the introductions and Doe shook their hands, saying, “Jack Doe.”
The man was taller than either of them by a good few inches, late fifties, with a leathery, bony face and a jutting square chin, his skin burned a few shades darker than the bricks of his home. He had sad, deep-set eyes the color of Coke bottles. “Let’s go sit out back,” he said.
Doe led them through a breezeway, across a pebbled courtyard, past a white wooden gate, and out to the rear of the house. Below them there was another terrace with a long green swimming pool on it, and beyond that, a lawn that sloped down to a two-story white boathouse and a dock. Doe flung his long frame down in an iron lounge chair covered in faded green canvas and motioned the others to similar seats around a white metal table, under a patched dun canvas umbrella. He offered them iced tea. When they accepted he pressed a button set into a patinaed brass plate cemented into the wall behind him. Paz thought about that, just a detail, what sort of person you had to be to have a buzzer for calling servants set in an old brass plate cemented into a stone wall on your terrace overlooking your pool.
A man came out through French doors. He was older than Doe, silver haired, and he wore a tan apron over navy blue trousers, a white shirt, and a striped tie. Again, Paz had the peculiar sense that he had fallen out of regular life. A butler was going to bring him iced tea. This soon arrived on a silver tray, in tall, sweating glasses, which Paz was certain were never used for anything but iced tea. There was a long silver spoon in each glass, and a straw made out of glass, and there was a fat round of lemon stuck on the lip of the glass, as in advertisement illustrations. The tea was strong and aromatic.
They exchanged small talk?the nice weather, the pleasant temperature, Florida, the fishing in the Keys. Both Barlow and Doe had been bonefishing down there. The cops studied Doe and he seemed to study them. Barlow said, “This is a fine place you got here, Mr. Doe. I take it your people have been here a good while.”
“Yes, since 1665. On the land, that is. This house dates from 1889. Before that, there was a wooden structure from 1732, which burned. That barn you can see from the front of the house is preRevolutionary, 1748. I keep my car collection in it.”
“My, my,” said Barlow. “And you and your missus live here all by yourselves?”
A pause, long enough for one intake of breath and an exhalation. “No, my wife is unwell. She lives in a care facility in King’s Park, not far from here. So I’m on my own, except for the help, of course. They’re all students. We put them through school, any college they can get into, graduate school, whatever they want, and in return they put in some time here. Except for Rudolf, who brought the tea, and Nora, who was my children’s nurse and has a room here. And, of course, when I go, the state’ll get the whole shebang. A museum, I guess. And that’ll be that.”
“End of an era,” said Paz. Doe nodded politely, and Paz felt like a jerk. After a brief silence, Barlow said, “Mr. Doe, as we told you on the phone, we’ve had some trouble down our way, and the FBI believes that the fella who killed our victims is the same man who murdered your daughter Mary. So, painful as it must be to you, we’d really like to hear anything you can tell us about the circumstances surrounding your daughter’s death.”
Doe rubbed a big gnarled hand across his face. Paz noted that the fingernails were cracked and dirty. It was not what he had thought a rich man’s hand ought to look like.
“We all left for the car show in Port Jefferson just after lunch,” Doe began, “me and my two sons-in-law, Witt and Dieter.” He had a deep, soft voice and Paz had to strain to hear him over the hiss of the breeze and the gulls’ calls. “The girls didn’t want to go?I mean Jane didn’t; Mary and Lily?my wife, I mean?never were much interested in the cars. Jane was?she used to help me fix them when she was a kid. Anyway, we got there around ten of two. There was a Pierce-Arrow they were showing I wanted to take a look at, a 1923 Series 33 with the Demorest body and the 414-cubic-inch six. A heck of a car, all custom made. It was blue …”
Here he stopped and shook himself slightly and a little light that had started up in his eyes faded out. “So, we were there for, oh, maybe four hours, for the auction, and I got the Pierce. Never actually took delivery on it. I kind of gave up on the cars, after. We got back around five. Jane was right here, right in this chair here, sleeping, with a book on her lap. Dieter went up to their room to check on Mary, and we heard him yell. And I called the police.”
Paz said, “So you all, you three men, were all together all the time at this show? Neither of you were out of the sight of the others for the whole four hours?”
Doe sighed. “Yes, they asked me that. I guess you have to ask questions like that. It’s part of your job. And I know people do terrible things in their families. Lizzie Borden and all. So … it was a big lot, there at the show, and we wandered around a good deal. Dieter was taking pictures. Were they with me every minute? I can’t swear to that. So it’s remotely possible that Dieter could have slipped off, driven back, done it, and come back to the car show. Or I could have, for that matter, although I talked to enough people who knew me to give myself an alibi.”
“What about your other son-in-law?Mr. Moore?” asked Paz.
“Oh, Witt didn’t drive. Didn’t even have a license. Jane tried to teach him a couple of times, but it just didn’t take. It was hard enough showing him how to ride a bike. But, you know, that’s just so far-fetched …”
Barlow said, “We know that, Mr. Doe. Like you said, it’s part of our job. Where is Mr. Von Schley now, do you know?”
“Back in Germany. Berlin. We keep in touch. A nice kid, really. I hate to say it, but I was surprised he was so decent, the people Mary used to pal around with. Eurotrash, I think they call them, and being so pretty and going into modeling at such a young age, she had a lot of temptation to have the kind of life I wasn’t comfortable with. And we thought she kind of settled down, with the baby coming and all.” A long pause here. “Witt keeps in touch, too. He’s in New York.”
No he’s not, thought Paz, and said, “Mr. Doe?another hard question. We’ve heard there was … well, tension between your daughters, and we’ve heard that your elder daughter was, maybe, not completely in her right state of mind, that she had a history of … say, imbalance, an unhealthy interest in cults and black magic. It’s probably no secret that people in the local police think it’s possible that, well, that she was involved in Mary’s death. Do you think there’s anything to that?”
Doe turned his glass-green gaze onto Paz, and they stared into each other’s eyes for what seemed like a very long time. Paz kept his own eyes steady, as a cop must, but he grew increasingly uneasy. Doe’s look was far from hostile; more like curiosity, but he seemed to be sucking out of his inspection more than Paz was giving, was assessing various hidey-holes in Paz’s highly compartmentalized soul, and not liking much what he found there. Paz’s mother, of course, did this all the time. Barlow broke in then, or, Paz imagined, they might have been there until the sun sank.
“Sir, we’d really appreciate anything you could tell us. I have to say there are some mighty scared folks down there right now, and the only thing we really got to go on now is that this perpetrator was very likely connected in some way to your family. And I personally got no doubt in my mind that if we don’t catch him real quick some other poor girl’s gonna end up like your Mary.”
Doe seemed to sag in his chair; he closed his eyes and let out a long, long breath. They waited, and watched him suffer. It was perfectly pure suffering, uninterpreted by words or relieved by cries. “You have to understand, Jane almost died in Africa,” Doe said. “When my son, I should say my stepson, Josiah Mount, found her in that hospital in Bamako, she weighed ninety-seven pounds. She was covered with sores, and she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, talk. Just made these cat sounds. It was the scariest thing I ever heard. I was sure we’d lose her. In any case, we got her into a clinic in the city that specializes in liver diseases; this was at New York Hospital, because we all thought that’s what it was?hepatitis. She was yellow as a canary when she got here, from jaundice, we thought.”
“And was it hepatitis?”
“It was not. The tests for hep A, B, and C were all negative. Her liver had shut down pretty good, but there was no what-d’y’-call-it, no pathogenic agent, not that they could find. No cancer either. I sat with her, sometimes all day long, and Josey did, too. My wife doesn’t much care for hospitals. And after a while she started in talking, not talking to me, mind you, just sort of babbling, sometimes in other languages, too. What I could make out of it, well …” Here he seemed to choose his words with some care. “It was all about magic, black magic, I guess, and a kind of war that they were fighting in this native tribe she was visiting, a guy named Oo-looney, she was on his side, against some people named Doo-rack and Mundeli and there were a lot of other funny names, but those came up most. And … well, there was one part where they, this guy Doo-rack sacrificed a pregnant woman, and ate parts of her and the baby, and Jane couldn’t stop it, and somehow, this sacrifice gave the bad guy some kind of power over her. And the good guy, Oo-looney, couldn’t help her for some reason. That’s a summary of what went on for the eighteen weeks she was more or less out of it. It didn’t make much sense to me then, and when Witt came back she seemed not to babble as much. And that’s also when she started to get better. The liver necrosis vanished, her color came back, and she started to put on weight.” He paused. “Of course, the part about the sacrifice … I remembered that when the thing happened with Mary.”
“Did you tell the police about that at the time, sir?” asked Paz.
“I did not. It was just one of a lot of details that she was babbling. By the time I thought of it, I mean, by the time the autopsy told us what was really done to Mary, Jane was gone, and why bring it up then?”
“Just a moment, Mr. Doe,” said Barlow, breaking in, to Paz’s annoyance, “her husband didn’t come back from Africa with her?”
“No, he was still out with the natives when she came back to Bamako. Apparently, it’s a very isolated village. Josey had people try to locate him, spent a good deal of money there, but they never did. Then he just walked into the hospital one day.”
“And what was your daughter’s reaction to her husband?” Paz asked.
“Well, as I say, she started to get better. I can tell you, I was glad to have some relief. But you mean on a personal level. I don’t know. I liked Witt, I always did. He’s funny, doesn’t take himself too seriously. A tremendously talented fellow, too, and Jane seemed to love him. That’s all I was interested in. My children both more or less decided what they were going to do with their lives with no help from me, I have to say. But there was … I won’t say something was wrong, maybe hollow, or missing, is the right word. I mean before. I hope this won’t sound narrow, but he hadn’t any faith. Well, that’s common enough nowadays, I mean the lack of actual religion, but most irreligious people set up something else they can believe in?their families, say, or the environment, or justice; or money, for that matter, that’s fairly popular, I believe. But Witt didn’t seem to have anything like that, and it was like he had no … bottom, and all the verbal fireworks seemed to me to be filling that hole. Anyway, when he got back from Africa, he seemed steadier, more sober. I thought maybe he had had an experience, some epiphany, to use an old-fashioned word, but he never said, and, of course, you can’t just ask a man. But I’ve gotten off the track?you wanted to know about Jane and Mary. I’m sorry, I don’t talk much about these things anymore.”
“That’s all right, sir,” said Barlow, “you just take your time.”
“They were not close, let me start by saying that. It would’ve been hard to pick sisters more different. Mary was close to her mother, Jane was my kid. Families often break out that way. Jane was like me, also, in that she kept it all pretty close, a private person, not demonstrative. Mary was, let’s say, operatic. Like her mother. When she was down, the whole house knew it, and when she was up, she lit the place like a floodlight. And, also, I guess you know, she was fantastically beautiful, from an early age, and she found that she could use that to get her way. She kind of ruled the roost, if you want to know.”
“And Jane resented it?” asked Paz.
Doe thought for a few moments. “You know, I can’t really say that she did. Maybe my stepson would know about that. He was sort of in the middle, and Jane and he were like that”?here he held the first two fingers of his right hand up, closely touching?”all while they were growing up. We sent the girls to different schools, though, because Jane kind of just faded into the wallpaper when Mary was around. But resentment? No. Jane was always trying to get closer to Mary, be a real sister. She was the one who tried to keep in touch, even when she was traveling. Letters and photos and all. I don’t think Mary ever wrote a letter in her life. But what you really want to know is, did Jane hate Mary enough to kill her? Was she jealous enough? And believe me, I’ve lain in bed all night running it through my mind. Did it happen that way? Could I have done something? Was it our fault, the way they were raised? I have to say that I don’t know. The Jane I knew, or thought I knew, I’d have no trouble saying, no, never. But … her profession, the places she’s been, the things she’s seen … maybe something was released from a dark place. We’ve all got those dark places. I guess you know that in your business better than I do.”
“Do you think she killed herself?” asked Paz, hearing the brutality in his tone, not caring. “Was there a note?” Again, that long green look. Doe said, “The explosion had to be intentional. Jane was a careful sailor and Kite was a safe boat. I can’t think of another explanation for what happened.” The direct answer finessed; the man seemed practiced at such avoidances. He looked out over the descending lawn, the lonely unused pool, the boathouse, and the empty dock. The lowering sun found a break in the cloud it had paused behind and sent an oblique shaft across the scene, lighting it like a stage set in a play about the acme of domestic felicity. It was stunning enough to distract all three of them. Barlow said, “My, my!”
Doe smiled at him. “Yes, it’s lovely this time of day, and this time of year. Sometimes I think it should be covered with ashes, all the buildings burned, so I could sit on it scraping myself with a potsherd. But,” he added after another sigh, “I expect God has spared me for some purpose. I keep listening.” There seemed nothing to say to that and so they sat for a while watching the shadows play. Then Doe got to his feet and said, “Well, would you like to take a look around? Show you the place, and where it happened and all?”
“That would be real kind of you, sir,” said Barlow, and they followed him, first down to the dock and the boathouse, and they saw that the little apartment above it was fitted up as a studio, and learned that DeWitt Moore had used it as a study.
“You don’t have a boat now?” Paz asked.
“No,” said Doe curtly, and said something else in an undertone.
“Pardon?”
“Nothing,” said Doe. “Let’s get up to the house. I guess you’re not much interested in gardens and the like.”
Nor was there much of interest, in a forensic sense, in the house. The library was a library, the living room a living room, the furnishings were what one would expect of a wealthy family with traditional tastes, who had absolutely no need to impress anyone. There were more religious pictures than might be the case in other stately homes, and one crucifix that was probably not just for decoration, Paz thought. He was surprised at the general shabbiness of things, quite different from the equipage of the Vargas family. The upstairs bedroom in which Mary Doe had died was stripped, the bare floor and oyster walls reflecting the afternoon light.
They left by a side exit and went into the old barn. When Doe switched the lights on, Paz could not keep back a gasp. The cars were lined up in two rows, gleaming in heraldic colors and mirroring chrome, 1922 and 1948 Cadillacs, a 1927 Hupmobile, several Packards from various eras, a Cord, a classic Mustang, the 1956 Chevy Bel Aire ragtop? Detroit iron in all its glory.
Paz had a thought. “Did you take one of these cars the day of the murder?”
“Why, yes, we did. That one.” Doe pointed to the 1948 Cadillac, a black convertible. “Why do you ask?”
“This may sound strange, but I wonder if you’d indulge me. Could you take it out? Let the three of us go for a drive. Just up to the road and back. The reason is, it might jog something, in your memory, some observation about that day. It might be helpful.” Barlow gave his partner a sharp look, but Paz ignored it.
“Sure,” said Doe, “I don’t see why not. I have to run them all up once a month or so anyway.”
“Who was sitting where?” Paz asked. “I mean on the day?”
“Witt was in the back, Dieter up front with me.”
Paz climbed into the backseat and settled into the soft plush. Barlow got in the shotgun seat and Doe started the car and drove it out into the sun. Paz leaned forward. “Okay, Mr. Doe, say it’s that day now, what’s everyone doing? What’s going on?”
Doe thought for a moment. “Well, let’s see: Dieter was fiddling with his camera, screwing a sun hood on his Hasselblad. It was a bright day. There’s an old darkroom in the house, hadn’t been used since my dad was a kid, and we were talking about setting it up again, so he could make prints while he was here. Things like that. And then … we started talking about Berlin, he’d just been there, about all the building they were doing, and how he’d like to take some pictures of the new construction. His family’s from around there. We talked about the baby, too, and when it would be old enough to travel and show it off to his family. And then we talked about family.”
They had reached the end of the drive. “This far enough?” Doe’s voice sounded tired for the first time.
Barlow said, “That’s fine, Mr. Doe. Sorry to trouble you.”
Doe turned the car around and they drove back. Paz said, “Okay, now you’re coming back. What’s going on, now?”
“We’re talking about the car show … no, that was before. Now we’re talking about, hm, American football, I think. It was football season and we were going to catch the second half of the Pitt-Navy game. I was explaining the rules to Dieter. We talked about the differences between that and soccer and what it said about the American and European characters.”
“Did Witt have anything to add to the conversation?”
A long pause. “I’d have to say no. Why do you ask?”
“Do you recall anything he did during the trip, anything he said, any conversation you were in with him?”
Doe did not respond immediately but steered the car to its slot in the barn and shut off the engine. They all got out. “Now that you mention it, I guess I can’t. He must have been quiet that day. But he often sank into quiet moods. He was a writer, and I guess they’re like that. We used to kid him about it, as a matter of fact. Are you trying to suggest that somehow he wasn’t in the car with us? Because if you are, that’s just nonsense. I’d take my oath on it, he was there all the time.”
“But he didn’t do or say anything you remember, even though you remember a lot of what your other son-in-law did and said?”
A darkness had appeared on Doe’s cheekbones. “Detective, I’m bereaved, but I’m not crazy!”
Barlow said, “Nobody’s saying that, Mr. Doe. We’re just trying to get things straight.”
Paz walked out of the barn. He heard Barlow talking to Doe quietly, settling him, being the good cop. This went on for a lot longer than Paz thought it should. He leaned against the Taurus, lit a cigar, checked his watch. The place was starting to get on his nerves. Paz was not normally an envious man. He thought himself as good as or better than most of the people with whom he came in daily contact; he did not lust after money or fame; he had (until recently) sufficient success with women. Now, however, as he looked around the estate, he felt himself unbearably oppressed by the deep roots it implied. Generations had called this home, portraits of ancestors still lined the stairway walls and hung over the numerous hearths, all portraits (and didn’t it show in their faces!) of securely racinated folk. God’s in His heaven, and the Does are in Sionnet, world without end. Not like Paz the mongrel bastard. Since envy is the one deadly sin that no American can ever admit to, he felt it instead as resentment and personal animus against Jack Doe. Doe was lying to protect his good name, lying to protect his daughter, assuming he was above the law, and what the hell was that goddamn cracker doing in there?
In the Taurus, Paz ruffled through his briefcase for something to read, and remembered the envelope he had picked up as he left the PD. It was from Maria Salazar, he found, a manuscript in a binder, clipped to a note in beautiful looping handwriting, black on cream-colored heavy paper with an engraved address on top. No yellow Post-its for Dr. Salazar. The note said: “Dear Detective Paz: You will recall that we discussed a certain paper that referenced Tour de Montaille and various African cult practices and that this might be relevant to your investigations. With the death of yet another woman, I felt some urgency in bringing the attached to your attention. Unfortunately, as I understand it, the author is deceased, but if I can be of any assistance whatever, do not hesitate to call upon me.”
He turned to the paper. His viscera contracted. It was entitled “Psychotropic Drug Use Among the Olo Sorcerers of Mali,” and its author was J. C. Doe. He read on. Although it was a scholarly paper, Dr. Doe used little jargon and eschewed the academic passive voice. It was pure observation, told from both the inside and the outside. She had herself taken a number of the substances the Olo sorcerers used, and described their effects in some detail. The most remarkable section was one in which she recounted how an Olo sorcerer made himself invisible to her in broad daylight.
He was still reading some ten minutes later, when the goddamn cracker emerged blinking into the sun. He got into the car.
“What’s that you’re reading, Jimmy?”
“Oh, nothing much. A scientific paper. Guys in Africa making themselves invisible. Jane Doe wrote it.”
“You don’t say? Well, right from the beginning I said you was going to be the expert on that end.”
Paz tossed the paper into the backseat, gunned the engine, scattering gravel, swerving, as if something nasty was on his tail. Barlow gave him a sharp look. Paz said, “By the way, did you catch what he said down by the dock, when I asked him if he had a boat?”
“Yeah, he said, ‘I’ll go to sea no more.’ “
“I’ll go to sea no more? Why would he say that? The guy’s loaded. He could buy a boat, any boat he wanted.”
“Why don’t you turn around and go ask him?” replied Barlow. “You might learn something.” This was one of the very many moments at which “Fuck you, Barlow!” was the only response that came to Paz’s mind, and since he couldn’t say it, he compressed his lips and said it a number of times in his head.
Just before they got to the highway, Barlow said, “Well, if you sit anymore on what you been sitting on, you’re gonna have a heck of a sore fanny. Talk to your partner, son.”
Paz wrenched the wheel hard over and stomped the brake, so that they turned into the access road of a small business park. He threw the lever into P and reached into the backseat for his briefcase, from which he withdrew the murder case files they had been given by Agent Robinette. He yanked from the folder the photograph he had spent so much time studying and thrust it at Barlow. “Nice picture,” said Barlow. “My daddy wouldn’t’ve liked it much, him being a big shot in the Florida Klan, but …”
“Oh, darn it, Cletis, the guy’s in Miami! That’s our guy!”
“You know this, do you?”
“The guy was here when Mary Doe got it. He was in Miami when our two cases got theirs.”
“You see him yourself?”
“No, but I checked with the Grove Theater management. He was definitely in Miami during the time of, in both our cases. I went to his show myself, as a matter of fact, and people were giving me the eye, waving, like I was a celebrity. What murder suspect do we know who I seem to resemble? The guy who killed Deandra Wallace, right? They thought I was him in the lobby. I didn’t think anything about it then, but now it makes sense. In this show of his, he wears white makeup, so there’s our white guy on a bike. Heck, I probably saw him on the stage when I went to his show the night Vargas was killed. He doesn’t drive?remember what Robinette said, how extremely unusual that was? He’s American, he’s personable, a good talker, also just like Robinette said. Okay, the clincher? He’s got the African witchcraft background, him and his wife. It’s all in that paper, unless she was lying to her fellow scientists. And his old lady’s probably still with him, she probably faked that suicide to take the heat off her husband. And your pal Doe is covering for her.”
“No, he’s not.”
“You know that for a fact, huh?”
“He’s an honest man.”
“Yeah, right! What were you guys doing in there, taking a polygraph?”
Barlow’s face hardened. “Jimmy, you’re a good cop, but you got a cop’s view of people. The man’s suffered and it’s made him stronger. It’s increased his faith. You don’t see that kind of faith much in the world today, and I never saw the beat of him, not personal like just now. I call myself a Christian, but I couldn’t tie that fella’s shoes. So he ain’t no conspirator, and being that he ain’t, how do you make it that your suspect did the crime if he was twenty miles or so away from the house all day? We used to call that an alibi.”
“I don’t know how he did it,” Paz admitted, “but Jane Does says she does, right in that paper. It’s African plant chemicals, and it’s also how he can get in and out of the crime scenes with no one noticing. He drugs them, he slips out of the car, does the crime, and then slips in when they come back and they think he’s been there all the time. They can’t recall anything he did, but they know he’s been there.”
Barlow studied the photo. “Well, yeah, he does favor you a little. You’re prettier, though, if you want my opinion.”
Paz snatched the photo back and put it away. “Go soak your head. It’s the guy.”
Barlow looked at him with humor in his tin-colored eyes.
“I think you just might be right. I think that’s the fella, too.”
Paz experienced a rush of relief. He wanted to grab Barlow and kiss him. “Well, good,” he said, “I thought I was going crazy there for a while.”
“Well, you got your bad points, but crazy ain’t one of them. Proving it’s going to be a whole ‘nother story, though. I’ll have to think on that for a while. Meanwhile, we’re not getting any closer to him sitting here on this road.”
They drove back to La Guardia and flew uneventfully to Miami, arriving just after seven in the evening. Paz made some calls from their car en route from the airport and learned from the manager of the theater company that DeWitt Moore was staying at the Poinciana Suites, a low-rise stack of studios on Brickell. They went by there; he was out. They checked with the theater in the Grove; not around. So they went back to the PD, spoke to Mendes, told him that it was definitely the same guy did the New York murder and that they had some promising leads, but no real suspects, a strategic lie to avoid broaching the witch-doctor theory of the case. The detective chief did not press them, for he was up to his neck in what he considered a PR stunt, the housing and guarding of ready-to-pop women, 194 of them. The housing was in the Hotel Milano, a fourteen-story structure on Biscayne, that had been constructed somewhat too obviously with dope money and seized by the city as part of a narcotics bust. It had been vacant for months, while the city searched for someone who would run it as a hotel rather than a cash laundry, but it was still in reasonably good shape. Now the lights of the Milano blazed again, the air-conditioning was on, and cops from the whole city were engaged in moving women around. Paz thought it was a pretty impressive operation and that they were damned lucky to have the Milano; they might have had to use the Orange Bowl.
Barlow went home. Paz went home, too, but left at about eight-thirty and parked in front of the Poinciana. There he smoked several big, slow maduro cigars, watching the people come in and go out. Moore had not shown by midnight, and Paz figured the man was out doing witch doctor shit, maybe with faithful Jane by his side, and would be gone all night. Or maybe the cops had got even luckier and Moore was going to fall by the Milano, which was guarded by two dozen heavily armed police. Paz went home, where he changed into shorts, drank two Coronas, and skimmed through the Salazar book on Santeria. The main thing he derived was that people at the ceremonies hallucinated that they had been possessed by the orishas. He could deal with that. Could someone make another person have a hallucination through some influence, a … he searched for a term … posthypnotic suggestion? Possibly. The phrase had a nice scientific ring to it, anyway. Something real, like “myocardial infarct,” or “piezoelectric ignition.” Putting Salazar aside, he turned to the Vierchau book that Nearing had given him. He read the introduction with growing discomfort. Now he could see what Nearing meant; this guy was off the reservation. Vierchau seemed to be saying that hallucination could be induced from a distance, that these Chenka sorcerers could make you see things that weren’t there even if you were miles away. He read on, absorbed, disbelieving, becoming more and more restless.
The phone rang. Checking the caller ID, he saw it was his mother. He knew what she wanted, and he didn’t feel like it. He left the apartment and drove down to the Miami River, where he kept his boat. His mother didn’t know he owned a boat, and would not have approved of it if she did, not this boat. It was a twenty-two-foot plywood thing, hand-built by a local, painted aqua. It was rough inside, a couple of bunks with raw foam slabs, a cooler, a Coleman stove and lantern, plywood cabinets. It was messy inside and out, but the 115-horse Evinrude that powered it was new and spotless. Paz cranked it up, ran it downriver to the Bay, and raced it around in circles for a couple of hours, until he was sure the restaurant had closed down. He felt better than he had in days, and wondered, as he always did after these marine jaunts, why he didn’t do it more often. Back home, he read Vierchau for a while and fell asleep in his white leather chair with the book on his chest.
He was awakened at 4:45 a.m., by Mendes.
“The fucker did it again,” said Mendes. Paz did not wonder which fucker and what he had done. He noticed, however, that the chief’s voice was uncharacteristically shrill.
“Some woman didn’t go in.”
“No, he did her right in the Milano. Get over here, now!” Click.
Paz hung up the phone, got to his feet, and rubbed his face. He was not dreaming.
They had the street blocked off in front of the Hotel Milano, and a dozen police vehicles of various sizes stuffed the access drive to the building. A helicopter flapped overhead, beaming its powerful light on nothing much, but looking good for the TV cameras. The media vans were being kept well away. Paz parked on Biscayne Boulevard, affixed his badge to the front of his jacket, grabbed his briefcase, and walked in.
The lobby was full of cops, some of them in SWAT team gear, in case the perp decided to stop cutting up women with a knife and started blasting away with an automatic weapon. There was a continuing tinny susurrus of radio voices, but the police were moving, Paz observed, with an uncharacteristic hesitancy. The faces of many of them showed fear, bafflement, a profound, nearly existential doubt, something that the faces of cops never showed, in his experience. He got directions to the murder scene and proceeded to room 416, passing a fourth-floor corridor packed with more cops, crime-scene people, wailing women in nightclothes, and social worker types trying to keep the hysteria under control. Mendes looked as if it were he and not (as Paz soon learned) one Alice Jennifer Powers, aged twenty-two, unmarried white female, who had just experienced an evisceration. Mendes was talking to a couple of patrol lieutenants, so Paz went into room 416, finding, as he expected, Barlow already there.
“Well, here we are again,” said Paz, looking at the meat on the bed, a chubby girl with short brown hair and skin that shone blue as skim milk. Like the others, she looked peaceful.
“Any ideas how our boy got in here?”
Barlow said, “We grope for the wall like the blind, we grope as though we had no eyes; we stumble in noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places, as dead men. Isaiah 59:10. That’s what we got to find out, Jimmy. All the fellas that were on duty tonight in the lobby, and the fella who was on this floor, they got them all down in the coffee shop. The chief wants us to interview them individually. There’s a little manager’s office down there you can use. I think I can handle the scene by myself.”
“Yeah, we’re getting real good at it with all the practice. It looks just the same as the others, right?”
“Not quite,” said Barlow. “He took the baby with him this time. Also, as you can see, this here room is a double. There was a woman sleeping right in the next bed. That’s how we knew. Woman got up to use the bathroom around ten of three and found her roommate like this. They got her under sedation.”
Which meant she would not be available for questioning for some time. Paz thought that a small loss; it was unlikely that she would be able to tell them any more about the killer than Tanzi Franklin had.
There were four cops waiting in the coffee shop, a sergeant named Mike Duval and three patrolpersons, Bobby Ruiz, Dick Laxfelt, and Mercedes Aparicio. They all looked up at Paz with an expectant air when he came in, as if he could save them. Paz took the sergeant first.
Duval had been on the force for eighteen years and had a decent rep, which is why he had been given this peculiar job. He knew how to give a report, too, and Paz respected that, and let him speak.
“Two-twenty-five: I’m behind the hotel desk with Aparicio, we’re going over the watch list for the next shift and I’m about to go check the foot posts, which I did every hour, more or less on the half hour, but varying, just to keep ‘em awake. I got a guy out at the service entrance, a guy out front?that was Laxfelt?and a guy by the elevator on each floor. Ruiz was the one on four. So, I look up and there’s this guy walking across the lobby toward the elevator bank, like he was a guest going to his room. I almost figured it was one of you guys, but he should’ve checked at the desk, and so I yelled at him, like, Hey, sir, where’re you going? And he waved at me and mashed the button. The doors opened and he went in. Just like that.
“So, shit, I freaked, I got on the radio and alerted the floor posts we had an intruder, and called Laxfelt and asked him how the fuck he let this guy walk right by him, and he swore that there hadn’t been anyone by. He’s standing right at the front door, which is fucking made of glass, and I could see him standing there myself from the desk. He swears there was no guy. But we?me and Aparicio?we saw the guy. So I call for backup, I figure we’ll search every room. Meanwhile, we see from the indicator there that the car’s stopped at four, and I alert Ruiz, he’s getting off on four, and Ruiz says, over the radio, I see him, I got him. Then nothing. I can’t raise him. I get in the other elevator and go up to four. No Ruiz. So I’m shitting now. I hear the sirens. I take the car down to the lobby again. There’s Lieutenant Posada with ten guys and more are coming up the drive, so I tell him what’s happened, and we get set to search the whole hotel, every room, the service areas … we put two people on every exit. We search the rooms.” Here he took a deep breath. “We searched all the rooms on four, including 416. I looked in them myself. All sleeping, real peaceful. Same in the rest of the place. By this time it’s nearly four o’clock. That’s when the fucking house phone rings and it’s the woman in 416, screaming her head off.” Duval rubbed his big face and ran fingers through his hair. “And you want to know what the guy looked like, right?”
“That might be helpful, Sarge.”
“Yeah, well, the thing is, I can’t describe him. I looked right at him across a lobby, maybe twenty yards away, all the light in the world, and I can’t tell you if he was black, white, yellow, tall, short, fat, thin, or wearing a fucking Santa Claus outfit. I got no fucking memory of it. Okay, I thought I was going crazy, but Aparicio’s the same. It’s a blank, like in a dream; one second you’re there, you’re balling some terrific piece or whatever, walking on Mars, and the next you’re lying in bed and thinking, What the fuck …!”
“Okay, I got that?also, just to make you feel better, we have evidence that this guy’s got access to all kinds of drugs, mind drugs?he could’ve sprayed something, who knows? What about Ruiz, what happened to him?”
“Oh, Ruiz!” Duval snorted. “We found Ruiz in a utility closet about ten minutes after we found the girl. He looked like he was drunk or doped. Ruiz got a story too. I’ll let you get it from him.”
Paz took Aparicio next, who confirmed her sergeant’s story in every detail, and then Laxfelt, who was completely baffled by the night’s events and mulish in his conviction that no one had come by him into the lobby. Ruiz was a thin, nervous kid, less than a year out of training. He had sweat beading on his forehead, and he chain-smoked Camel filters. Ruiz took up his story at the point when the elevator door opened.
“I was in a crouch, with my weapon out. The door opens and this guy steps out. So I drop him flat. He goes down, no problem, and I cuff him. I call the sarge on the radio and I tell him, I got the guy, he’s cuffed. I search his pockets and sure enough, I find this knife …”
“What kind of knife, Bobby?”
“One of those wood-carving knives, an X-Acto, with a red plastic handle, and like a long scalpel blade in it. I bag that. Then the sarge comes up the other elevator with Dick. And they take the guy away. And Lieutenant Kinsey’s there, my shift loo, and he goes, great job and all, everyone’s slapping me on the back. I mean I remember this. It happened. And the loo goes, Hey, take the rest of the shift off, it’s all over. So I take my car back to the precinct, and change, and go home. I go to bed. And it’s like I’m having a dream, like a nightmare, there’s this smell, a sharp smell, and I’m in this dark place, cramped, like a coffin, but I’m standing up. And then … I realize, I’m not dreaming, I’m not in bed, I really am in a dark place, with this smell, like strong bleach. It was a maid’s closet on the fourth floor. I walk out and there’s cops all over the hallway and all of them looking at me, and Sergeant Duval goes, Where the fuck you been? My cuffs are still on my belt. The first thing I say is, You got the guy, right? You got the guy! And they look at me. And they tell me what went down.”
Ruiz put his face in his hands, saying, “Ah shit! Ah, fuck it!” Dry sobs followed. Paz did his little talk about exotic drugs, but it did not seem to help. The perp had somehow stolen this kid’s sense of reality, and it was a violation like the rape of a virgin, but of the mind not the body, an incurable wound.
Paz wound up the interview; Ruiz could not recall a face either, not a big surprise. Paz walked out of the hotel to get some air, but what air there was was full of fumes from the vehicles, both police and press. The copter chattered uselessly above. He sat down on a stone bench and looked through his notes as the sunrise lightened the horizon over the sea, the dawn of a day that no one in the Miami PD was anticipating with joy. He felt his phone ring.
“Where’s your car?”
Paz told him. “What’s up, Cletis?”
“Call just came over TAC One. They found the baby.”
“Where at?”
He gave an address. “I’ll meet you at the car.”
Ten minutes later, they pulled up in front of a foliage-clotted front yard on Hibuscus, behind which stood a two-story flat-roofed house built in the old Grove style, crumbling tan stucco over Dade County pine. A patrol car was parked there, its bubble-gum lights making weird patterns against the overhanging trees. As they left their car, an ambo from Jackson arrived, adding its own crimson flickerings to the scene. The young patrolman looked pale as he led them back to the yard.
The baby, a female, was lying in the center of several blood-soaked sheets of the Miami Herald, yesterday’s edition, the sports pages. The top of its skull was placed neatly to one side, just above the shoulder, and the excised brain was on the other side. Early flies had taken an interest and there was at least one palmetto bug rooting around in the empty skull. Barlow spoke gently to the patrolman and sent him back to secure the street entrance to the yard. The crime-scene people arrived. Shortly thereafter, Echiverra from the M.E. showed up.
Barlow said, “The owner and her family’s in the house. I’ll go talk to them. Woman named Dolores Tuoey lives in the garage apartment with her kid. Why don’t you take charge out here, talk to the garage lady, see if anything strikes you funny.”
“Like what, a clue?” snapped Paz.
“Hey, this is a break for us here, son,” said Barlow.
“How do you figure that? Because he didn’t kill the mayor too?”
“No, because he changed a successful pattern. He had us foxed six ways to Sunday the way he was going. We’re stumped, right? So why’d he change it? Why move the baby? Why’d he leave it here, of all places, and not a Dumpster or the bay? Think about it.” He walked away. Paz spoke to the crime-scene captain and to Echiverra, both of whom looked tense and frightened. There was no graveyard humor.
Paz walked around the yard, trying to keep his vision clear. The back and the north side of the yard were blocked off by high hedges of croton, allamander, and hibiscus, whose pink flowers were just responding to the oncoming day. Besides the large mango, heavy with fruit, a guava, a key lime, and a lemon tree also stood in the yard, perfuming the neighboring air. The lawn beneath them was rough and patchy but neatly clipped.
A stir among the crime-scene people; they had found a liftable footprint on one of the patches of bare earth near the mango. Paz went and took a look. A nice print, the herringbone pattern of a good boat shoe. Paz showed polite interest, and strolled over to the garage that nearly closed off the third side of the yard.
Paz looked up at the garage apartment. For an instant he saw a face at the window, then nothing. He walked away and then back again, slowly. He was not looking for anything physical now; the crime-scene people would pick up all that sort of thing, like the footprint, for whatever good it would do. He was thinking about what Barlow had just said. This was not a random dump. This was a message, important enough to the perp for him to risk carrying absolute for-sure death-penalty evidence around with him (on a bicycle!) between the Milano and Coconut Grove, with every cop in the city having no other thought but to grab his ass. He snapped another look at the window of the garage apartment. Again, nothing.
Paz felt strange now. People were moving around him, talking, doing their technical tasks, but he felt as if they were wraiths, that he was the only real person in the yard. The colors of the flowers, of the brightening sky seemed more vivid than usual; he looked up. The clouds overhead were boiling, as they are shown to do in horror movies. Then things moved back in the direction of bland normality, without quite arriving. There was something about this place, this instant; he searched for a word one of his women had used … nexus? It all came together here, in this scruffy yard, not just the case, but in a way he could not begin to explain, his whole life. He walked up the stairs to the garage apartment. He knocked on the door.