Valley of Bones (20 page)

“I’m sorry,” said Paz. “You’re…?”

“Frank Wilson. You’re here about the missing persons report, right?”

“Who’s missing?”

“Jack, my brother. You’re not from missing persons?”

“No, homicide,” said Paz.

“Oh my God!” said Wilson and paled beneath his tan.

It took them a few minutes in the little office to straighten it out. Jack Wilson had not been seen for nearly a week. His car was gone, he did not answer repeated pages or cell phone calls, he hadn’t deposited a couple of large checks made in payment for work. Frank, it turned out, was the technical guy, Jack took care of the business end, although he knew his way around a marine diesel. Frank seemed anxious to talk and they let him. He assumed the cops knew that Jack had worked on Cigarette boat engines for some shady characters and made no attempt to hide this, but he assured them that all that was in the past. No, there had been no large withdrawals of money from the company account. No, he hadn’t heard of anyone named Cortez nor did he recognize the photo they showed
him. They left after half an hour of similarly fruitless questioning.

“That was a waste,” said Morales when they were back in the car.

“No it wasn’t,” said Paz. He got on the radio and made Jack Wilson a wanted man, giving the specifics on his vehicle. Then he said to Morales, “Jack Wilson took off right after Dodo Cortez showed up dead on the evening news. Probably not a coincidence. Assume he was running Dodo. A well-known hit man tries to steal a piece of evidence connected with our suspect, and that leads to the thought that maybe the suspect’s been framed, that the well-known hit man did it. He knew we’d ask around and pick up on the connection between him and Cortez. He tried to keep it dark but he didn’t bother to get an old beater for his meetings with Cortez, and a new silver Lexus is going to catch the eye in that neighborhood. Speaking of which, let’s take a look at Mrs. Dodo. You know the address, right?”

“Yeah, Second and Fifteenth. I told you I already talked to her. She’s uncooperative.”

“I’ll use charm,” said Paz. “Go.”

It was the kind of Miami neighborhood where the front lawns are used to park cars, meaning that the small houses are occupied by large numbers of recent immigrants, not necessarily in the same family. The small concrete-block-stucco house formerly occupied by Dodo Cortez had a patchy lawn with no cars, indicating a slight elevation in social status. Paz told Morales to wait at the front door while he looked in the windows to check out the grieving widow. From the side of the house he was able to see through partly open blinds into the living room, where a woman lay stretched out on a Bahama couch. She was dressed in a sleeveless orange blouse, a pair of black panties and one shoe, which hung like an ornament off her toes. The television was on, a Spanish soap it sounded like, but the woman was not watching it. Among the clutter on the nearby coffee table he saw a burning candle, several glassine bags, a bent spoon, and a hypodermic needle, all of which explained the woman’s stunned lassitude.

Paz went back to the street. He told Morales, “Give me two minutes and then pound on the door and yell ‘Police, open up!’ ” He
then went around to the back of the house. It took very little time to wiggle a glass jalousie pane out of the rear door and pop the lock, and by the time Morales made his demonstration, he was moving through the kitchen and was in plenty of time to keep the woman from flushing her heroin down the toilet.

After a lot of noise and some weeping, the two cops had the woman settled down and handcuffed on the couch. She said her name was Rita and she didn’t know nothing, and hadn’t done nothing and they planted that dope and she wanted her lawyer. She looked about nineteen.

“I told you,” said Morales.

Paz smiled and spoke to the girl in Spanish, sitting down next to her on the couch, as if they were about to go on a date, the usual cop endearments, he wanted to help her out, he’d be happy to go away and leave her with her dope, provided she gave a little, helped them out, they were murder cops, not narcs, they could care less about her habit. And then he sketched out what would happen to her if not, the heroin looked like felony weight; maybe they could fatten up the bag, if not; the state’s attorney really wanted to clear this murder that her boyfriend had pulled off, and so did they, and so they would put her
under
the jailhouse on the dope charges, if not. And it wasn’t like she was ratting Dodo, Dodo was dead on a tray in the county morgue and he didn’t give a shit, and so on in a calm voice in soft Spanish, like he was talking her into bed.

A long silence and then, “So what do you want to know? I don’t know shit about Dodo’s business, you know?”

“He ever mention a guy named Wilson?”

“Wilson? No, not that I heard.”

“How about Jack. Big guy, blond hair like a surfer, drives a silver Lexus?”

“Oh, yeah, Jack—him I know. He came by, picked up Dodo a couple of times.”

“Good. You want me to take the cuffs off?” She nodded, and he did. Some further questioning and it became clear that she was
telling the truth. She could connect her boyfriend with Jack Wilson, but that was all.

Paz said, “Could we check out his stuff?”

She nodded glumly and led them to a bedroom, rubbing her wrists.

The room was small and paneled in cheap imitation white pine. It contained a bed, unmade, a dresser, a bedside table, a TV on a metal stand, a color reproduction of Jesus, framed, and a large closet with mirrored doors. The two cops searched the place carefully, going through the pockets of all the clothes and checking the undersides as well as the insides of the bureau drawers. They took their time; the woman got bored. She asked, “Can I go back and watch my program?”

“Yeah, go,” said Paz, and then, “Hey, wait: what’s this hole in the paneling from?”

“Oh, that’s from Dodo. He used to hit the wall when he got mad. He was going to get it fixed.”

Paz brought his face close to the wall, then took a penlight out of his pocket and shone it into the space between the walls. His arm disappeared into the void up to the shoulder, and when it came out there was a white garment in his hand. It was a waiter’s monkey jacket with the seal of the Trianon Hotel on the left breast and a plastic name-plate with
LUIS
stamped on it on the right. There was also a small, dark brown stain on the right cuff.

LORNA HAS BEEN
feeling out of sorts for a week or so and thinks she may be coming down with something. Also, she does not know whether she is falling in love with Jimmy Paz, and so she has decided not to think about it. Low key, take it easy is her current mantra. Conversations with Sheryl Waits, which have heretofore acted as the analytical retort of her emotional life, have proven unsatisfactory. She does not seem to want advice or a sympathetic ear. Sheryl is too pressing, too avid for this to be a success, or rather a success in Sheryl’s terms. Give Sheryl any encouragement at all and she is offering
consumer reports on bridal salons. Lorna hasn’t mentioned Paz at all to Betsy Newhouse, whose interest in Lorna’s emotional life is limited to a casual “getting any yet?” whenever they meet. She has twice turned down invitations from Betsy to go out with the less attractive pal of one of Betsy’s current squeezes, and this has caused remarks and comments about keeping a stock of new batteries for the vibrator.

In fact, Lorna has not gotten any from Paz. She has received three fairly chaste if sincere kisses from the man, one on each of their three dates: the beach outing, a dinner at a Chinese-Cuban restaurant, and an evening of dancing. All of these have been pleasant, but no one is talking about buying a ring. She wonders sometimes if he likes her at all, and as soon as this thought crosses her mind, well-oiled valves open automatically and her mental pool fills with all the reasons why Jimmy Paz is not quite suitable. A high school graduate? Please! Lorna has an album of set pieces in her mind representing mating satisfaction. She wishes to admire his brains and his career, with, naturally, equal respect for
her
career; she wishes masterly decisions to be made as to lifestyle, vacations, dwellings, but with due consideration of her tastes; she wishes a healthy sexual relationship, in which he will take the lead but not do anything perverse or disturbing; she wishes to be carried away but also to stay in more or less the same place; she wishes for coziness and comfort, doing the
Times
crossword puzzle on Sundays, but also for unpredictability and excitement; she wants fidelity, but not tedium.

Yes, Paz comes up short in many of these areas. She can’t imagine him doing the
Times
crossword puzzle. Or sitting through the ballet, not that she frequents the ballet, but still…. And then there is the whole gun and violence thing, which is faintly disgusting, and she is not sure she will ever be able to expunge from her mind the sight of him actually slaying a human being right there in front of her house, never mind that he probably saved her life.

On the other hand…there is the memory of his hands on her body, and his body, its controlled stillness, the violence perfectly contained. She considers the Zen-like simplicity of his life. She
reflects on how many of the men she has been with have been putterers, nudges, how Rat Howie had to have a particular brand of wood-strawberry preserves, or he couldn’t eat breakfast, how often he would send food back to the restaurant kitchen with elaborate directions for the chef, and the whole wine thing, the yacht thing…although he did finish the Sunday
Times
in less than half an hour, and Paz’s eyes, she had never seen eyes like that on a man, interested eyes, interested in
her,
and then a guilty thought but no less real for that, an end to a certain kind of liberal naggery, because if your man was black then that was proof, wasn’t it? Yes, probably he didn’t like her that much, but then he
had
called her three times in one week, although that might have been cultivation for business purposes, but…or maybe she was simply going crazy, sinking into the early stages of erotomania, she’d end up parked outside his house slashing the tires of his real girlfriend’s car….

She laughs out loud, since if she is crazy she is certainly in the right place. Many of the people in the locked-ward dayroom would, like her, be conversing with the unseen (but out loud) were they not stupefied with drugs. Or nearly so: a big white man looms over her, about forty, ginger hair in outflung wisps like a circus clown’s. On his doughy face he wears the tight-lipped staring visage of the paranoid psychotic. “Are you laughing at me?” he demands.

Professional calm kicks in; this guy needs to have his meds cranked up a little, she reflects automatically, and puts on her bland-but-caring expression.

“Not at all,” she replies. “I just thought of something funny.”

“Liar,” he says in a hoarse whisper, but she slips past him and notes that the powerful Darryla and Ferio, the dayroom orderly, have picked up on the interaction. They begin to drift a little closer to the big man. Not her problem in any case.

She spots Emmylou off by herself in a corner, scribbling away in one of her school notebooks. When Lorna greets her she looks up, startled, like someone who has just awakened, and when she sees who it is, out comes her church-painting smile.

“I see you’re still writing.”

“Yes. It’s an interesting process. Painful, but interesting.”

“Why painful?” Lorna pulls up a plastic chair and sits facing her. She is a little frightened, she finds; she has not quite extinguished the memory of what she saw the last time, what appeared before the woman’s seizure. She hopes this session will involve only psychology and that she can steer the discussion away from the weird stuff.

“Inhabiting the former self,” Emmylou says. “Recollecting feelings I had, seeing things through my former eyes. I wish I was a better writer, but then I think, no, it’s a confession, not a novel, so I have to leave out most of the stuff that sets up what I was feeling at the time, people mostly, but also the air of a place, the essence of the other people, the way Flaubert and Dickens do. I’m afraid it makes pretty dull reading. Although I have to believe the truth can’t be dull, since it partakes of God. I just pray I can make myself do it. I finished another book. Would you like to take it?”

Lorna takes the proffered notebook and says, “I don’t think you have to worry about your writing. It’s very clear and vivid and not dull at all. And conscious. It’s really amazing, considering…”

“That I have no formal education? Higher education. Plenty of the lower kind, though.”

“Yes, and it’s remarkable that you’re able to write about that material so…dispassionately,” Lorna says. “Most people, it would take years of therapy to be able to confront all of that abuse, but you seem to have no trouble. That speaks to a lot of psychological toughness. It’s a good sign.”

“Not that good, since I seem to be locked in the loony bin.”

“Well, clearly you do have some problems. My God, who wouldn’t after what you’ve been through?”

The woman gives Lorna one of those searching, discomforting looks. She says, “Dr. Wise, I know you want to help me and I appreciate it, but we might be getting ourselves all crosswise, if you’re looking at my life from that point of view. You’re thinking of all the bad things that happened to me as traumas, leaving psychological
scars that grew into a mental disease, which you think I have. I look at them as afflictions sent by God to attract my attention to him. Can I tell you about a dream I had once?”

“Yes, of course, but I’d like to continue our session in the therapy room.”

“Oh, this won’t take but a minute,” Emmylou replies, and her gaze shifts away from Lorna’s face. Lorna follows the look and sees the big man who confronted her in the hallway standing by one of a row of folding wooden bridge tables set up for card playing and the working of jigsaw puzzles. The man is standing over a small woman working a puzzle. His shoulders are hunched and his fists are clenched. Darryla and Ferio are standing a dozen feet from him, watching.