They were in the homicide unit, at Barlow’s desk, and Barlow had the whole story now, as reconstructed by Paz, with the weird parts edited out, smoothed, made rational. Barlow chewed on it silently for a while, and Paz experienced the familiar and unpleasant feeling of being assessed.
“You told anyone else about this, Jimmy?”
“No. I thought I’d run it by you first.”
“Good,” said Barlow. “Let’s see if I got you straight, now. Here’s this lady you got locked up, who used to be Tuoey, but she’s really Jane Doe. She’s married to DeWitt Moore, a famous writer who happens to be in town, doing his show in the Grove, but also doing these murders, because he’s also an African witch doctor in his spare time, which is why he’s doing the murders and cannibalism in the first place. Also, besides thinking he’s a witch doctor, with strange powers, he also has a gang of accomplices and some kind of African witch powder drug that he’s using to mess up the minds of his victims and the folks who’re trying to guard them. And he also killed Mary Doe a couple years back, even though we found he had a perfect alibi. Those African powders again. Have I got it all?”
“You don’t believe it, right?”
“No, I didn’t say that. I believe you got the real Jane there, and this Moore character is the killer. That’s good. Far as the rest of it goes … it’s pretty tall.”
“Tall? A little while ago you were saying that Satan was loose in Dade County.”
“Oh, he’s loose all right,” said Barlow, unfazed. “But that’s not the kind of fact I take to the state’s attorney. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, which in this case means evidence and a story they can eat and not spit up. Meanwhile, your girl there ain’t exactly a reliable informant.”
“Then talk to her yourself! See what you think. Whether she’s criminally involved or not, she’s still protecting him with all this witch doctor crapola.” He laughed humorlessly. “Crazy? Yeah, crazy I’ll give you.”
They brought Jane Doe out of the holding cell and back to the little interview room. Paz watched while Barlow talked to her, in his usual quiet and effective way. No sarcastic remarks, no one-liners from old Barlow, just two people talking. They had a tape recorder on, getting it all. Paz had seen it many times before, and it pissed him off, because he couldn’t do it himself, he always had to show the mutt he was in charge, that he couldn’t be fooled. He knew it, he knew it was dumb, but he couldn’t help himself, which was why he was doomed to be the bad cop, and never the one who got the confession and cleared the case.
The story she told was essentially the same one she had told to Paz earlier, but more detailed and easier in the telling. Barlow ran her through the nights the women were murdered. No alibi for Wallace, she was at home alone with the kid. Vargas, she was with friends all evening. At the time of this latest, Alice Powers at the Milano, Jane told them, she had been at a bembe.
“Come again?”
“A bembe is a Santeria ritual,” Doe explained. “People dance and the orishas, the spirits, come down and take them over for a while and give advice.”
“You don’t tell me! And did you get any advice from these spirits, ma’am?”
“I did. I was advised that before I close the gate it must be opened. And that I was to bring the yellow bird to the father. I was advised to flee by water.”
“That’s real interesting. What do you make of it?”
“I’m not sure. Ifa is often indirect. The fleeing by water part is fairly clear, though.”
“By water, hm? Why didn’t you?” Paz noted that Barlow was enjoying himself. And, more remarkably, so was the woman. There was a light in her face, now, and Paz looked at her with more interest. Her bony features were never going to be on a magazine cover, but besides that she’d let herself go a good deal, and she didn’t have any taste. Paz liked women with taste. Flair. That hairdo was a disaster.
She said, “I don’t have a boat. Also, I have to find some allies first, and I have to stop my husband. I feel responsible.”
“I see,” said Barlow. “Well, you’ll give us some names and we’ll check it out. Now, these allies … you’re talking about this gang that Detective Paz here thinks your husband has got?”
She shot Paz a look. “No, I meant magical allies. There isn’t any gang. It is a figment of Detective Paz’s imagination. My husband is doing this all by himself.”
“Would you like to explain how?” asked Barlow.
The woman did so, the whole story, thousands of years, the various botanicals, the pineal body, the melanocytes, the exohormones, the supporting neurophysiological research, with actual references added. Barlow was silent for a while after this, the tape softly whirring, recording nothing.
“You got any idea why, ma’am?” he asked.
“Why what?”
“Why he’s doing this?”
“I thought I explained that. The neuroleptic substances in the excised and consumed organs …”
“No, I got that part. He’s going to get some boosted power for his witchcraft. I mean why does he want it? What’s he going to do when he gets it?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea what he’s like now. I think maybe he sees himself as the revenge of Africa on white America. He wants to show us that there’s a black technology that sets all our technology at naught. Stuff like that. He’s an extremely angry man.”
“I reckon,” said Barlow. “And he got this idea in Africa?”
“He got the means in Africa. Maybe he always had the idea. No, that’s not true. He had a desire to be seen, really seen, as himself, not as a ‘black’ fill-in-the-blank, a black poet, black playwright, black husband of a rich white woman. And he thought he never could be, I mean seen in that way, and it made him crazy. He got the idea that what the race needed was a Hitler, that the white people would never take blacks seriously until then. And Africa, where we went, what he learned there, I think it transformed him, the sad, angry stuff that was deep inside?it just took over and ate everything else, until only the Hitler part was left. It happens. Maybe it even happened to Hitler. That’s one theory. A friend of mine used to say that dealing in the magical world without some transcendent moral authority was about the most dangerous thing anyone could do. And Witt didn’t have one.”
“That’s quite a story, Jane,” said Barlow, after a long pause.
“Tell us about your sister,” said Paz, abruptly, and got a questioning look from his partner. He didn’t care. He felt angry, and not just at the killer.
Jane Doe asked for some water then, and Barlow stepped out and brought a large plastic cup back with him. She drank deeply and resumed. “I got sick in Africa. Ended up at a Catholic hospital in Bamako. I was out of it for a long time, dying really, and someone got in touch with my brother and he came and got me and took me back to Long Island, and they stuck me in a fancy clinic. I don’t recall any of this. They couldn’t find anything wrong with me, no pathogens, but I seemed to have lost the ability to metabolize food. Witt showed up a month or so later, looking just like he always did, being charming. I started getting better around then. Of course, he had got me sick in the first place, for amusement, to punish me for … whatever, and then he made me better. I didn’t say anything to my family about this, or about what had happened. It’s hard to describe, or explain, but … being back in Sionnet, Africa seemed like a long bad dream. I think I wasn’t in my right mind. I was sick for a long time, I told myself, I wanted all of it not to have happened, and so I convinced myself that it hadn’t really happened. And he had a power about him now, an aura … terrifying. It was like a bird hypnotized by a snake. I had dreams, too. He was getting at me through my dreams.” She let out a peculiar nasal sound, like the start of a hysterical laugh, throttled. “It sounds crazy. Anyway, I didn’t do anything. And one day he killed Mary and her baby. I think it was just to show me he could, and to hurt me and my family. Who were never anything but kind to him. I was terrified that he was going to kill them all. So, really, to save them I took Kite out and killed myself.”
“But you didn’t kill yourself,” said Paz.
“Didn’t I? It felt like it. I decided to become Dolores. I had all her ID because of a mix-up in Bamako, and I took that tin box, with that in it and some other stuff. I filled the bilges with diesel and poured gas from the outboard around, and cracked off the regulator on the butane gas tank for the stove. And then I couldn’t do it. I wanted to live, to, I don’t know, bear witness to what he was. I felt my line wasn’t ready to be cut, that Ifa had something for me to do. I had a pistol. I was going to light it off and shoot myself, but I didn’t. We had an emergency inflatable aboard. I inflated it, crying like a baby. Then I rigged the boat to explode. I used a kitchen timer, ran two wires from the starter battery and fixed them with duct tape, one to the pointer, one to the dial at zero. I opened the gas valve, set the timer for half an hour, sealed the cabin, and got into the rescue dinghy. I paddled to a beach outside of Bridgeport, shoved the dinghy and paddle into a Dumpster; while I was doing that, the boat exploded and burned. I didn’t look. Then I walked into town. I checked into a motel under Dolores’s name. I had big sunglasses on and a floppy hat pulled down low, and it was the kind of motel where they don’t look at your face. I bought dye and changed my hair and stuffed cotton wads in my cheeks and then I went and bought a cheap car in a Vietnamese used car lot.”
“What did you use for money?” Paz asked. “You didn’t touch your accounts. They checked.”
“Dad always kept a couple of grand in a jar in the sail locker, for emergencies in foreign ports. I drove to Miami and set up housekeeping.”
“You thought he’d come after you?” Barlow asked.
“Yes. He … some things he said, before … Mary. He wanted to … recruit me, I think. He thinks we belong together. He wants me to observe his deeds and admire him. Because I understand what he is, what he can do. And you guys don’t.” She looked at Paz. “You can’t really stop him, you know. You think you can, because at some level you think all of this is lunatic garbage. You think guns and handcuffs and jail cells and the rest of it are going to work for you. But they’re not.”
Barlow said, “Well, what would you recommend we do? Give him a free pass?” She mumbled something. Paz snapped, “Speak up! What’s the answer? Holy water?”
“Jiladoul.”
“What the fuck is that?” snapped Paz. He saw Barlow’s mouth tighten.
There was a knock on the door and a harassed-looking policewoman burst in and told them that Ms. Doe’s lawyer had arrived, demanding to speak to her immediately, and that Captain Mendes wanted to see both of the detectives, also immediately. The two detectives looked at each other. Paz snarled something under his breath and stomped out. Barlow turned off the tape machine and walked out with it, leaving the cop with the detainee.
Mendes was not in good shape. Paz thought he was on the edge of collapse and he felt a tremor of fear. The captain had always been a neat, even dapper, man, a cool manipulator of people and situations. Now he had his tie halfway down his chest, the first two buttons of his silk shirt open, and the shirt had a large coffee stain at the belt line. The ashtray on his desk was filthy with cigarette and cigar butts. Paz and Barlow sat down, but Mendes continued to pace. The phone was buzzing, but he made no effort to pick it up.
“The mayor got a call from the governor’s office about that bitch you picked up,” Mendes began, “that rich bitch. You got any idea who the fuck she is? The fucking archbishop was on the horn, too. You talk to her lawyer?”
“No, boss, the guy just got here, and then …”
“Did she do it? Do you have evidence to charge her?”
“No,” said Barlow, “and no. She says her husband did it. Witt Moore.”
Mendes stopped his pacing. “Did he?”
“If she ain’t completely crazy, it looks like he might’ve. The problem is, there’s no physical evidence, and he’s going to be alibied up to the neckbone for all the murders. And he’s no homeboy. He’s a famous black writer.”
“I don’t care who he is. I need someone to show here. You got any idea what’s going on out there? Half the goddamn reporters in the country are outside the building right now. It’s not local anymore. There’s network TV people here now. They want to know how some maniac slipped into a building guarded by the police and chopped up a woman in her own room, without waking up the woman sleeping next to her. I’d like to know, too. I got to go down and talk to those people. I got to explain to Horton and the mayor. So what do I say? You’re the fucking detectives?what do I say? “
Mendes’s eyes bulged and his face grew dark. Paz said, “He used drugs, psychedelic powders from Africa. He confused the guards and did it.”
Mendes stared at him. “Who, Moore? You know this?”
“It’s the only explanation that makes sense,” offered Paz, carefully. “He can confuse people, put them to sleep temporarily. That’s how he does it.”
Barlow said, “It’s a theory, Arnie. We got no evidence for …”
“Then fucking find some! Concoct some! I don’t give a nickel shit. But I got to have something. I can’t go up there naked with my dick waving. Go pick up this guy. Use the whole SWAT team, gas masks, disaster suits, whatever you need. I’ll clear it. Go!”
They got up. Paz said, “And about Jane Doe?”
Mendes made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, cut her loose! That’s all I need, the archbishop on my ass in the middle of all this.”
They went back to the interview room, Barlow marching ahead, silent, his back stiff. Paz could tell he was angry, although whether at Mendes or himself he didn’t know. In the room, Jane Doe was speaking with a large, balding man wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a gray suit of marvelous silkiness and cut: the lawyer, Thomas P. Finnegan. He informed them that Ms. Doe was through talking for the day.
“I don’t think so,” said Paz. He did not wish to let go of the woman. “Ms. Doe is in possession of essential information on a extremely important serial murder case. We haven’t finished questioning her.”
“Yes, you have,” said Finnegan.
“Plus, we can charge her with impersonation.”
“Go ahead,” said Finnegan. “In which case, she will definitely not say anything.”
Some stereotypical glaring here. Jane broke the tense silence. “They don’t believe me anyway. They think I’m crazy.”
“Is that true, Detective?” asked Finnegan, gently.
Paz realized it showed in his face. He did think she was a nutcase. But … He felt blood rushing to his cheeks, and considered bringing up the little girl as leverage, but found he could not do it. Barlow said, “You can take her away, Counselor. I guess you know not to go anywhere we can’t find you.”
The lawyer made the obligatory rumblings about false arrest and harassment. As she left, Paz touched her arm.
“What’s a jillado?” he asked.
“Jiladoul,”she corrected. “A sorcerer’s war. Good luck, Detective Paz. Be careful.”
When they had gone, Barlow said, “Well, Jimmy, you got us into it now. You feel like calling the SWATs and getting into a gas mask?”
“I had to say something.”
“A fool’s mouth is his destruction and his lips are the snare of his soul, Proverbs 18:7. You got no evidence at all the man’s spraying drug powders around the city.”
“Okay, great! Why don’t you waltz back in there and give Arnie the Jane version? He can go on national TV with it. Miami police baffled by witch doctor, film at eleven.” He walked away.
Barlow caught up with him and grabbed his shoulder. “Where’re you running off to?”
Paz shrugged him off. “I’m going to pick up Moore.”
“What about them drugs of yours?”
“I’ll hold my breath.”
“This is wrong. We should think this through, calm down a little.”
“I’m calm. I’m not scared, though. That your problem? You really believe this witchcraft crap, don’t you?”
Barlow had the kind of white eyes that get harder than any other kind. “Listen, boy: Captain said take a team, and we’re going to take a team. You want to come along, fine; you don’t want to play that way, I’ll turn around and march into Arnie’s office and get you pulled off this case. I mean it.”
Paz let out a breath and said, “Fine. What do you want me to do?”
They got to the Poinciana Suites a little after seven. It was a four-story, cream-colored stucco building full of small apartments for well-off transients, set back from the street across from Brickell Park. They parked on the street out front, Barlow and Paz in Paz’s car, a big van full of SWAT guys in white plastic suits and gas masks, and a crime-scene-unit van. Barlow told the SWATs to stay put while he and Paz made the arrest. The SWAT commander, Lieutenant Dickson, objected strenuously to this plan; the whole point of his unit was to go in first and overwhelm the suspect. And what about this gas?
“They ain’t no gas, son,” said Barlow. “It’s something else, what our man’s got, and I think we can handle it. Now look here: that’s why they call y’all backup. Back up! We’re going in, me and Jimmy here, and we’re coming out with the guy. You do what you have to do to secure the building, the back exits and such. If we ain’t out in half an hour, you mask up and go in shooting. But it ain’t going to come to that.”
Dickson relented and started to dispose his troops. Paz and Barlow rode the elevator to the top floor in silence. Paz pushed the buzzer at the door of number 303. The door opened. Moore was standing there, dressed in a yellow T-shirt and baggy gray cotton pants, with leather sandals on his feet. They showed him their ID.
“Malcolm DeWitt Moore?” Barlow asked.
“That’s me.” He looked straight at Paz, ignoring Barlow. Paz saw a man of about his own size, with a lighter build and eyes that were hazel rather than brown. Paz said, “We’d like to talk to you.”
Moore backed away from the door. “Sure, come in. I’m in the middle of something. Just let me put it away.”
They followed him into the apartment, which consisted of one large room, furnished in modern light woods and Haitian cotton rugs and upholstery, high-class motel equipage, and a smaller bedroom, which they could see through an open door. Moore went to a desk, bent over it, and wrote something in a notebook. Then he sat down in a straight chair that stood in front of the desk.
He hasn’t said what’s this all about, Officer, thought Paz. Everybody the cops come visiting asks that, but he doesn’t. Moore said, “I just had something in my head I wanted to get down. It’s funny, when you buzzed I was working on a poem about a crime.” He held up the notebook. “Would you like to read it?”
Paz stayed where he was. “Not right now.” Then he saw the bike, just the front wheel and the handlebars, leaning against something in the bedroom. The front wheel had a smear of dirt on it, which Paz was as sure of as he had ever been of anything would match up with the dirt at the side of Teresa Vargas’s house. Moore said, “It’s better if you have the whole context. Basically, it’s a very long poem about the black experience in America. It’s called Captain Dinwiddie. This part comes when the hero has gone back to Africa after being a slave …”
“Mr. Moore …”
“And he finds a sorcerer there who teaches him how to break free of time and space. Anyway, he gets to travel through the decades, observing, you know, the black experience, and this part I was just working on has him watching two kids in New York in the eighties pull off a store robbery and kill a Korean grocer …”
Paz said in a louder voice, “Mr. Moore, your name’s come up in connection with a series of killings of pregnant women. We’d like you to come down to headquarters and see if you can help us out.”
Moore’s smile got broader. There was something wrong with his eyes, Paz thought. A glassiness? No, but something strange. Maybe a drug …
“Fruit and blood in a shower, the grocer dead among the rolling mandarins, I thought that was pretty good. Of course, usually when you think it’s pretty good, you have to cut it out later.” He chuckled. They both stared at him. “You’ve been talking to Jane,” said Moore. “I’m sure she told you an interesting story. She has a vivid imagination. Doesn’t quite get it, though.”
Paz looked at Barlow. This was funny; Barlow usually took the lead, but he hadn’t said a word. “Doesn’t get what, Mr. Moore?”
“What I’m doing. Jane insists on a certain antique Judeo-Christian worldview; I mean, she takes it seriously, if you can believe that, even though it’s demonstrable that it’s a scam, always has been a scam, always will be a scam, although, of course, incredibly useful for keeping all the assholes down in the mud. Whereas, the only reality is the reality of power. The only point of life is to make people do your bidding, so that you get all the good stuff and they get the shit. Wouldn’t you agree, Detective … Paz, is it? Wouldn’t you, I mean speaking as a man who’s had to eat shit every day of his life from people like your redneck pal there?”
Paz slid his eyes over to glance at Barlow. He was standing there like a phone pole. Moore said, “See, you can’t even answer me without checking with whitey. You got the badge, you got the gun, you got your civil service and your affirmative action, and you’re still a nigger in your own head. You fucked white women? Sure you have. Still a nigger in your head. Isn’t that amazing? It always amazed me. And I thought, What could possibly change that?”
“Witchcraft?”
“Not a word I use. A completely different way of seeing the world. As different as science was from religion in the Middle Ages. And it works, my man! It works.”
“You did those murders. You killed a black girl and cut out her baby.”
Moore was still smiling, like they were having an argument in a dorm room. “Hey, equal opportunity. But, really, man, none of that shit matters anymore. I’m telling you, it’s a whole different world.”
“Terrific, you can tell us all about it downtown. Malcolm DeWitt Moore, I’m arresting you for the murders of Deandra Wallace, Teresa Vargas, and Alice Powers and their infant children,” and he rattled off the Miranda warning, while he handcuffed Moore.
“Look, I have no bitch with you or the city of Miami,” Moore said, “but this is something you don’t want to get on the wrong side of. I tell you that as a brother. You’re over your head here.”
“Yeah, yeah, you have mystic powers,” Paz said. “You’ll tell us all about them downtown.” He grabbed Moore by the elbow and led him toward the door. Then he stopped. Barlow was still standing in the same spot. “Cletis?” Barlow gave him a blank look, then followed.
“You okay, Cletis?”
“Sure, never better,” said Barlow.
They went down in the elevator, standing in a row, Paz holding Moore, and Barlow on the other side. This is real, thought Paz, I am actually holding this guy by the arm. He studied the fake rosewood grain of the car walls, the little nicks and fingerprints, the dim reflections in the brushed stainless of the car door. All were as they should be, the light reflecting or being absorbed according to the immutable laws of physics, the eye capturing the light in its lens, casting it onto his retinas, into his brain, according to the immutable laws of biochemistry: natural. The door opened. They walked from it into the lobby. There were two SWATs there, suited grotesquely, masked, their MP-5s squat and menacing in their hands.
“Everything okay?” asked one of them, his voice distorted by the mask speaker.
“Yeah, we’re good to go here,” said Paz. “You guys can stand down now. We left the door unlocked. CSU can go right in.”
They walked to Paz’s car. It was dark out already, darker than it should have been on a summer’s night at seven-thirty. Paz put Moore in the back, guiding his head in under the roof gutter, as he always did with a prisoner, and felt on the palm of his hand the warm head, with its yielding skin, the prickle of hair. He started the car and drove away. He looked in the rearview. The prisoner was there, the same pleasant smile on his face.
Then in the rearview, Paz also saw flashing lights, red and blue. The SWAT van was pursuing them. Paz pulled over to the curb and got out. The SWAT commander, now in his native blacks, with flak vest and helmet, jumped athletically out of his van.
“What the fuck is going on?” he shouted. “I been trying to get you on the radio. Where’s the guy?”
“In the back,” said Paz. “There was no problem.”
Lieutenant Dickson stared at him, and then meaningfully at the rear seat of Paz’s vehicle. The rear seat was empty. Paz popped the door, dived into the rear, and felt the seat and the floorboard. Stupid. He upended the seat cushions. Nothing. In a panic now, he shouted, “Cletis! Where the hell did he go?”
Barlow swiveled and looked back at Paz. On his face was an expression Paz had never seen there before, brutal and mean, the mouth twisted in a sneer, the eyes filled with icy contempt. In an unfamiliar nasal snarl, Barlow said, “You dumb-ass nigger! Can’t even pick up a fuckin’ prisoner, can you?”
Paz stared in shock at the stranger’s face. Then the lights went out, the streetlamps first and then the lights of the cars. Paz heard Dickson shout, and the sound of car doors opening as the SWATs leaped out. They had flashlights on their weapons and these snapped on, cutting white beams through the blackness. That was wrong, was Paz’s initial thought. It shouldn’t be that dark. The city was never that dark, not even when the power went out in a hurricane, there was always some light source, bouncing against the cloud cover. Even in the middle of the Glades it never got this dark. It only got this dark in a cave. Then the shooting started, automatic fire from the SWATs, lighting the darkness. Paz couldn’t see anything to shoot at. A bullet cracked by his head. He dropped and rolled under the car. He heard men scream, the tinkle of brass falling from the machine guns, the thud of bodies hitting the pavement. He closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears. He listened to his own breathing and the pump of his own heart for a while.
He opened his eyes and took his hands away from his ears. There was dim light, going red blue red. He rolled out from under the car. The streetlights were on again, and so were the top lights of the SWAT vans. Someone groaned, and he heard sirens a long way off. There were ten or so bodies lying on the street, mostly cops, but it looked like they had shot several ordinary pedestrians too. An elderly lady lay across a curb in a blood pool, her rucked-up flowered dress lifted by a faint breeze, a teenage kid was lying nearby, cut nearly in half by a burst of automatic fire. Cletis Barlow was nowhere in sight.
Paz looked at his car. The side window was blown out, the front end bore the marks of a burst. Coolant ran in a thick stream down the gutter. Paz started to run. It was about five miles to Jane’s. He figured it would take a little over an hour if he didn’t stop running at all.