American Tropic (6 page)

Moxel calls after her, “You don’t have a gun.”

Luz looks back down. “Stay where you are and keep me covered.”

Moxel pulls his gun from its holster and aims it up.

Luz keeps climbing until she reaches just below the pointed peak of the tower; she stops. She tries not to inhale the overwhelming stench suddenly engulfing her. From the crossbeam rafter above swings the naked body of a man hung by a rope noosed around his neck. The man’s face is a puffed-up purple blotch. Slimy maggots worm out from the orbs of his chalk-white eyes. His ears have been cut off. His pale lips are sewn shut with fishing line. The pallid skin of his body is spotted with green flies sucking at caked flecks of blood. A steel spear is
pierced through the man’s chest and out his back. A red
X
is slashed on the skin of his stomach.

T
hick brown hard roots of towering Spanish laurel trees heave up the sidewalk ahead of Noah in an uneven roll of cracked cement. The sidewalk glimmers in the morning mist coming in from the sea. He follows the sidewalk with the deliberate movements of a rum-soaked man overcompensating for his off-balance gait, as if he was on an invisible surfboard riding a serpentine wave. Ahead of him, the massive leathery trunk of another Spanish laurel has not only cracked the sidewalk but completely lifted and shattered the cement-covered ground in its mighty thrust skyward, throwing dark limbs out to block the sun. From the tree’s overhead branches, tendrils of airborne roots cascade back to earth, forming a roped curtain that swings in front of Noah. He pushes through the dripping curtain of vegetation. A three-story tropical mansion of imposing white clapboard comes into view. The mansion is the last of the many that were built in the nineteenth century, when the island was the wealthiest place in America, a bustling port for merchant clipper ships. The ships, loaded with silk, gold, lace, and pewter, had sailed down the Florida Strait, then hugged the narrow channel along the jagged reef and put into Key West’s safe harbor at the mouth of the Gulf of
Mexico. The mansion, built by a mercantile-marine millionaire, has been battered and besieged by storms, its wood shutters slammed and splintered by high winds. The elaborately carved spindles of the second-story balcony circling the exterior have been shrunk by the sun and snapped in half. The tin-stamped roofs of the cupolas rising above the second story on all four corners are rusted through; past rains have entered and begun the process of a rotting collapse.

Noah weaves up to the front of the decaying structure through a spectacular riot of overgrown exotic fauna. At the entrance stand two tall faux-Roman columns, their white plaster surfaces crumbling and chipped. He walks between the columns, pushing through more entangled vines onto a dilapidated, termite-decimated porch. The stained-glass fanlight window above the weather-beaten mahogany door is spider-webbed with cracks, threatening to shatter and crash down. The door is slightly ajar. Noah pushes it open and enters a cavernous foyer. He is surrounded by overstuffed chairs and sofas shrouded in musty dust-covered sheets. From the center of the room, a circular staircase ascends, its lustrous pecan-wood steps now buffed to a dusty dung color. He climbs the rickety staircase, which is only one loose board away from collapsing.

At the top of the staircase, Noah stops and waits for a moment, then walks down a long hallway lined by dark cypress wood. At the end of the hallway, tall arched windows are open to the sea. He looks through an open doorway into a bedroom. He sees Lareck, a once-formidable and celebrated painter now ancient and, like his mansion, barely resembling past glories. Lareck reclines in his pajamas
on top of the rumpled sheets of a bed, a large sketchpad propped up on his knees. He dips a brush into the open box of watercolors next to him and paints in quick, intuitive flourishes on the pad.

Facing Lareck, from across the room in front of an expansive bay window, is Zoe, caught by a shaft of vivid sunshine. The light dapples off her high-boned cheeks. She wears a strapless white dress, exposing the tan of her smooth bare shoulders and long legs.

Lareck continues his painting of Zoe as he speaks with a rolling Southern twang; his voice rises and falls in a rush of smoothed-off syllables that nearly become a high-pitched whine. “My dear muse and inspiration, loosen those lips. I don’t want you looking like Whistler’s sour-puss mother.”

Zoe licks her lips, shifts her weight, and moves slightly. “Is this better?”

“That’s it. Turn to the right. I want more light on you. Your skin shines with promise. A lifetime of painting, and I still chase the promise.”

Zoe turns to a sharper profile angle in the shaft of sunlight. “Like this?” The light fires up her blond hair in a golden halo.

Lareck pushes up on his bed pillows for a better view. “Perfect. You’re a pensive Botticelli Madonna gazing out over the Arno River in Florence. You have, my dear, the dreamy gleam of the sassy saints that the Renaissance boys fell over each other trying to capture.”

He bends his head toward the pad and paints furiously with aggressive strokes. He puts the brush down, overcome by his creation. He takes a deep breath and sighs, rubs his eyes, and looks around. He glimpses Noah standing
outside the open door in the hallway. His voice mellows in a warm greeting. “Noah, come in and sit with me.”

Noah enters and sits in a wicker chair with chipped white paint. He is mesmerized by Zoe illuminated in tropical light streaming through the window. She shifts her body nervously at being so close to him. He looks back at Lareck. “Sorry to interrupt. I forgot you have your painting session with Zoe on Wednesday afternoons.”

Lareck nods, picks up his brush, and continues his strokes on the large pad. “She’s the beautiful daughter I never had. But I’ve got to paint fast—beauty doesn’t last forever.”

Zoe gives Lareck a pert, ironic smile. “And you aren’t lasting forever. So hurry up, this is a hard pose to hold. I’m getting a muscle pull in my left calf.”

Noah looks back at Zoe. “As a poet said, nothing lasts forever, not beauty, not marriage, not even eternal love. But I’m still holding out for you on the eternal love part.”

Zoe snaps at him, “Your philosophy comes straight from the bottom of a rum bottle. Too simple, too sugary.”

Lareck huffs. “Quiet, your marital bliss is distracting me.”

Noah and Zoe stay silent as Lareck continues his strokes on the pad. From the outside hallway, the sound of approaching footsteps is heard. Hogfish appears in the doorway. He steps into the room, bobbing back and forth manically to the musical beat blasting through his earbuds.

A look of dismay spreads across Lareck’s wrinkled face. “Ah, my son pops up out of nowhere.” Hogfish doesn’t hear the words, bobbing agitatedly to his music. Lareck
rolls his eyes at Noah and Zoe. “What can I say? Only that a man sends his sperm into a woman’s womb like a blind ambassador hoping to make a good deal—but a man never knows what’s going to emerge from that womb. It could be a president or a jackass.”

Hogfish screams at Lareck: “Pop! You can’t stay here! El Finito’s coming! His hurricane wind is going to blow right through this window to get you! Run!”

Lareck sighs. “What a cross I must bear. Where I sought the complexities of art, my son sought the simplicity of war. He thought that war was nothing more than a video game played in foreign countries with tanks and guns.”

Noah keeps his eyes on Hogfish. “Some men fight for their truth with paintbrushes or pens. Other men fight with bullets and bombs.”

Lareck points the sharp end of his paintbrush at Hogfish. “What’s necessary about war? The army medics rebuilt my boy’s skull with titanium plates and sent him home. Now he’s somebody I don’t know, convinced a hurricane is coming to wipe us out. I don’t know if he hears music through those damn things stuck in his ears or if he’s getting instructions from space aliens.”

Zoe walks to Hogfish in the center of the room. She stops before him and pulls out his earbuds. His eyes widen with apprehension at her close body. He shudders and stiffens. She stares into his eyes, speaking in a firm voice: “Hogfish, you’ve survived a personal hell most people can’t even imagine. I want you to know, I believe all of your fears are justified.”

Hogfish jams the earbuds back into his ears, wraps his arms around himself, and bobs violently.

L
uz is ushered into the bright fluorescent-lighted autopsy room of the police morgue by a white-coated lab technician. She nods hello to the Police Chief and Moxel, standing next to a high-wheeled gurney. On the gurney’s aluminum surface is laid out the naked dead body of the man Luz found hanging in the bat tower. His skin is a waxy parchment-yellow; the sides of his head are dark gashes where his ears have been slashed off. A gaping purple hollow is in his chest, where the steel arrow was extracted. His lips are riddled with puncture holes from having his mouth sewn shut with fishing line. Luz shakes her head at the brutal sight. “Poor Bill Warren.”

The Chief holds up a micro–digital recorder. “One like this was found inside Warren’s mouth. The reason his lips were sewn shut was to hold it in. I sent that recorder to Miami for further forensics.” He sets the recorder on the gurney, next to Warren’s head. “You’re going to hear an exact duplicate of the original recording.”

The Chief presses the play button on the recorder. From the speaker, a stream of static rises, as if emanating from a deep void and traveling a great distance. Out of the static explodes an electronically altered violent voice in a scathing wail:

The raging voice stops. Static noise vibrates the air.

Moxel shifts uneasily. He tries to hide his unease with a sneer of bravado as he peers down at Warren. “Now we have two of Neptune Bay’s three partners chopped up like they were attacked by a blind sushi chef. Shit-in-your-pants bizarro stuff.”

The Chief clicks off the recorder. “Bizango? It took me a while to recall this monster’s strange name. Back in the 1980s, when Luz’s father was head homicide detective here, he shot dead a man who called himself by that name. It was a big sensation. You remember that, Luz? When your father killed Bizango?”

“I was just a kid when that happened, so I didn’t know much about it at the time.” Luz takes a deep breath. “Later I was told the story. Bizango was a serial killer, thought of himself as some kind of righteous assassin. My dad tracked him to where he was hiding and shot him. Bizango had terrified the island. No one knew who he was, because he always dressed in a full-body rubber skeleton suit.”

“If this Bizango was shot dead years ago, who the hell is calling himself Bizango now?”

“My dad always said, an evil thing never dies.”

Moxel spits out a mocking laugh. “That’s mumbo-jumbo, like out of some weird old zombie movie.”

Luz stares down at the mutilated body on the gurney. “Bill Warren isn’t out of an old zombie movie. He’s lying here dead, right before our eyes. We have to deal with it.”

The Chief looks quizzically at Luz. “What kind of name is Bizango? You’re the one on the detective squad who would know that kind of thing.”

“You mean I’d know because I’m the only one who has African blood?”

“Don’t play your race card on me. Besides, you’re only half black.”

Moxel gives Luz a snarky up-and-down look. “Why don’t you try playing your gender card instead of your race card? What gender are you, anyway?”

Luz ignores Moxel and answers the Chief. “Bizango is a voodoo avenger; he kills people he regards as traitors. Dad told me that. I don’t know more, because voodoo is Haitian and I’m Cuban. We don’t practice voodoo—we practice Santería, which is different.”