Valley of Bones (6 page)

As she was. As she sometimes still thinks she is. She is tall, and has to stoop a little to get her face in the mirror. She will retain part of this stoop when she leaves the ladies’ room, for it is her habitual posture. Stand up straight, her father was always telling her, but here as in so many other aspects of life she had not been a dutiful daughter. She walks with her broad shoulders rolled slightly forward and her neck drooping slightly from the vertical. This is to hide her breasts, which are large and round. Jutting, as the pulp writers like to say. She has also a defined waist, and broad hips, which she conceals with her suit jacket. This she removes briefly to dab her underarms with industrial strength antiperspirant. Lorna was not made for the tropics, and once again a vagrant query registers in her mind: why does she stay here? Again, no answer, for the answer is inertia. Although she is courageous in defense of self and her prerogatives, she fears change.

Her other good feature is her hair, which is long, silky, honey-colored. She knows she should cut it into a sensible shape, but she resists this and wears it instead pulled back in a troublesome French knot. She adjusts this now and tucks back the various pennants that have come loose. Jacket back on, a final frowning inspection. A century ago, Lorna Wise would have stopped traffic in any large city of the western world, teams of horses would have run wild through shop windows, and even fifty years before she would have been considered Marilynesque, but now she is 180 degrees out of fashion, and women are required to resemble seventeen-year-old male basketball players. Lorna has what she thinks of as good feminist credentials, but her conviction stops at her skin. So she dresses subfusc and stoops.

Stooping then, she leaves the bathroom and the building, waving to Ernesto in his security window on her way out. Ernesto sighs with desire as he watches the sway of her fine ass, but Lorna does not hear this, and would not have appreciated it if she had, not because of any class or ethnic bias (from which she is remarkably free) but because she has only ever been attracted to men who want her to lose weight. All her psychological training has not hipped her to this catastrophic twist of taste.

Outside it is, of course, hot and humid, although not as hot and humid as it will be in a few hours. It is late September, still summer in Miami, and the city yearns for the relief of tourist season. She crosses to the shady side of NW Thirteenth and pauses on the curb, in the shadow of the huge redbrick jail. Even in the shade she begins to sweat, and she hopes that she can avoid armpit stains on her suit. Before long, a silver Chrysler sedan pulls up to the curb and she enters it, grateful for the air-conditioning within. Sheryl Waits, her best friend, is wearing a linen suit too, but hers is fuchsia. Under it she wears a white polyester shirt gushing ruffles at the throat. Her lipstick is fuchsia too, and glossy, startling in its effect against her skin, which is the color of a large drip coffee into which one of those little plastic cups of half-and-half has been poured. Sheryl is nearly as tall as Lorna and twenty pounds heavier, but she has absolutely
no body image problem. She thinks she looks terrific. She goes dancing with her husband all the time, and from what Lorna can observe, he thinks she looks terrific too. Lorna often wonders if this difference is basic to their friendship, and she is occasionally subject to shaming thoughts, yet another exploitation of black womanhood, fat white girl gets fat black friend so she doesn’t look bad? But she genuinely loves the woman and feels loved in return. Is that an illusion too? Who can tell nowadays?

The two have been friends since the first day of classes at Barry College, where they both took their MSW degrees. Except for the years when she went north to do her psych Ph.D. at Cornell, she has had lunch with Sheryl Waits on average once a week and is thoroughly integrated, so to speak, into the Waits family circle. Sheryl is a psychiatric social worker and runs a unit in a community mental health center in Liberty City, an impoverished black district of Miami, where she is considered both a saint and a tough-ass bitch, often by the same people on different days.

They go to a moderately expensive restaurant in a waterfront hotel, with a nice view of Biscayne Bay. It is rather overpriced, they both agree, but they are worth it. They are scrupulous about taking turns picking up the tab; what they never do is to minutely divide up the bill, arguing about who had what and how much to tip. While they wait for their meal, they exchange news, which given their lives means that 80 percent of the news will be Sheryl’s, always announced with the phrase “dysfunction in the intact black family,” a torrent of amusing folderol about the husband, Leon, a patrol lieutenant in the Miami PD, the most useless husband ever invented, and the three children, defective, insubordinate, no ’count, doomed to failure and the streets. None of this is true. Sheryl is creating a mythos, propitiating the gods to continue what Lorna knows she believes is the most colossal good fortune. In return, Lorna tells some anecdotes about her patient load, including the Dideroff woman and her saints—no names, of course. Sheryl seems particularly interested in this one, but Sheryl is a church lady, a Catholic, strangely enough,
and thus pretty much in the same bin, in Lorna’s mind, as Dideroff. The remainder of their conversation is devoted, as it usually is, to Lorna and men.

“Anybody on the horizon?” Sheryl asks.

“Not as such.”

“Ticktock.”

“Oh, stop! I’m only thirty-four.”

“Uh-huh. And as far as I know, you ain’t never yet been out with anybody really gave a damn about you. All of them’re these skinny little white-boy intellectuals want you to be they momma, while they play around on you. You need to get your life sorted out, girl.”

“I’m
fine,
Sheryl. Being between men is not a felony in this state. And, you know, I’m wondering why every lunch we have ends up with an elaborate critique of my sex life. I mean it’s getting a little old, don’t you think?”

“I’ll tell you what else is getting
old,
darlin. You ringing on my phone at two
A.M.
in the morning, oh, wah, Sheryl, he done it
again,
boo hoo hoo!”

“All right, I’ll never call you except during business hours,” snaps Lorna.

“Oh, for God’s sake! That’s what friends are for, you nut! All I mean is it just breaks my heart. I want you to be
happy
! Regular. Walking in green fields full of flowers with a nice guy.”

“Like in a toilet paper commercial.”

“Exactly. And every fourth commercial the couple is black, except you can tell the dude is, like, a little queer? Seriously, hon, you got to change your way of living.”

“And if that ain’t enough, I’m gonna change the way I strut my stuff.”

“Oh, right, be a smart-ass about it. But the songs don’t lie, honey. Uh-uh. They don’t lie.”

“You’re bound and determined to reshape my life into domestic bliss, aren’t you? Guided by the eternal wisdom of old popular song lyrics?”

“And my highly honed social worker skills. Let me ask you something: you ever thought about a cop?”

“When I got my stereo ripped off, sure.”

“Moron. I mean to date one.”

“You’re still confusing me with you, dear,” Lorna says uncomfortably. “It’s not my kind of thing.”

“Because…?”

“Because. Let me think. Look, you know I love Leon, but I need…how can I say this without sounding like an arrogant shithead…?”

“Oh, go on, go on! If I was going to dump you for being an arrogant shithead, I would’ve done it years ago.”

“Thank you. I want someone I can talk to. I don’t respond well to ‘how about those Marlins’ as a conversational gambit. I want someone who reads books.”

“Leon reads books.”

“I mean
books
. Come on, Sher, I don’t want to get into a fight. You’re happy, God bless you, but I need something different. Let it go.”

“Got to be an intellectual, huh?”

“I think so.”

“Just like Daddy.”

Lorna mimes looking around, as if searching for a public notice. “Excuse me, I thought this was a psychotherapy-free area. Waiter!”

Sheryl ignores this and studies her friend appraisingly. “Mm, I just had an interesting thought.”

“What? And I don’t like that look on your face.”

“My thought was you ought to meet Jimmy Paz.”

“And why is that? He’s an intellectual?”

“He reads books is what I hear. Leon says most people in the department think he’s the smartest guy who ever worked there.”

“And he’s probably got three semesters at Miami-Dade Junior College too.”

“Now you
are
being an arrogant shithead.”

Sheryl is now giving her the stare she usually reserves for one of her children gone seriously over the line or a junkie trying to hustle her. Lorna feels herself blushing again. “All right. That was low.”

“I forgive you, or I will forgive you if you show up at our place the Saturday from next. We’re throwing a retirement party for Amos Greely. You’ve met him.”

“The mentor.”

“Uh-huh. Anyway, Paz will be there. We’ll have white folks too. We ain’t prejudice or nothin.”

“He’s a Cuban, right?” There is some eye-rolling action here.

“An Afro-Cuban.”

“So
not
another male chauvinist piggie?”

Sheryl laughs long and loud, drawing looks from some of the neighboring tables.

“Darlin, they’re
all
male chauvinist piggies, and your skinny whiteboy intellectuals are the worst kind because they’ll never admit it. And Paz cooks too.”

“He cooks?”

“Yeah, he’s a chef in his off hours. His mom owns Guantanamera.”

“Very impressive,” says Lorna, who is actually impressed. She has eaten at that restaurant, widely considered to be the finest Cuban place in Miami, the best of a tough league. “Let’s see, reads books, cooks for his mother, unmarried at what…? Thirty-five?”

“About there.”

“Gay.”

Another laugh from Sheryl, even louder than before. She has to dab at her eyes with her napkin. “Oh, no, sugar. You don’t have to worry about that. Not Jimmy Paz. The book on him is he likes smart girls. Smart white girls. I am going to get cast out of the sisterhood for setting this up, but I’ll have to learn to live with it.”

“Lucky me,” say Lorna sourly.

“No, this is right,” says Sheryl. She looks up, cups her hand to her ear. “What’s that you say? No lie? Made in
heaven
? Well, lawsy me!”

“I’m calling 911,” says Lorna.

“You may laugh, but I got a good feeling about this. And let me slip a little professional note into your file, honeybunch. Us Catholics talk to the saints all the time. And sometimes they talk back. You need to find out some more about Emmylou’s religious background before you toss her among the lunatics.”

Lorna finesses this uncomfortable moment by signaling for the waiter, and then she makes much out of checking the time and fretting about an appointment she has at one-thirty. That Sheryl is sincerely religious she regards as an amusing flaw, like the fat. On the other hand, Sheryl’s point is a good one and supported by the
DSM.
She will find out about that the next time she sees Emmylou. As they leave the restaurant, she is already planning her questions. She will have to get through the consult first, but that should not pose a problem. Mickey Lopez thinks
everyone
is crazy, which means she will only have to roll Howie Kasdan, which she knows she can do and will take grim pleasure in doing.

P
AZ WAS AT
last having sex again. It had been a long time between and he should have been more excited, for although he rammed away valiantly, and although the woman sighed and moaned beneath him, he seemed to have become somewhat detached from his sexual apparatus and also disturbed because he could not recall the woman’s name. They finished, leaving him drained but not satisfied. What the
fuck
was her name? He rolled off her. She chuckled. “That was great, Jimmy,” she said. So she knew who he was, why couldn’t he…?

“Could we turn on the lights?” he asked.

“You sure you want to?” she asked. She had a throaty, pleasant voice.

“Yeah, turn it on.”

He felt her moving, reaching for the switch, and then the light went on, a little pink bedside lamp. Paz was out of bed in an instant going for the door, scrabbling, kicking at it, although it was clear now that the door was just painted on the wall, crudely at that, a child’s drawing of a door. There was no way out of the room. The woman was still chuckling, although it was hard to know how she managed it, since her face was as smooth and featureless and white as an egg.

It was the pain that woke him up, the pain from his toes. He cursed vividly in the two languages he commanded when he realized
he was standing in the little hallway leading to the rear door of his apartment. He’d kicked his right toe bloody against its base. Paz staggered to the kitchen sink and leaned into it, running cold water over his head. He turned the water off, dried himself with a dish towel, and listened. Mrs. Ruiz, his upstairs neighbor, was moving around. The old lady was a light sleeper and his screams and the kicks had awakened her, as they had before. Maybe the rest of the neighborhood too. He prayed no one had called the cops.

He had a tendency to be paranoid about his status in the department. At present he was untouchable because he had almost single-handedly cracked the biggest mass murder case in the history of the city, but that was fading in memory, or rather the false story of the so-called Voodoo Murders was fading. The memories of what had really happened were still pretty fresh in Paz’s mind.

He limped to a kitchen chair and examined his foot. The big toe on the right foot was nearly half again as large as its mate on the other foot and turning plum. The nail looked loose and was rimmed with drops of blood black as India ink in the crime-light glow coming in through the kitchen jalousies. He wiped the blood away with a paper napkin and used it also to wipe the sweat from his forehead and neck. Paz had been having nightmares every night for the past week, and walking in his sleep, and he took this as touching on his mental stability, a real concern after what had gone down last year. A flashback, a delayed thing from those events? Maybe, but there was also that…
whatever
in the interview room with Emmylou Dideroff. Was madness contagious? Or something even scarier? As this thought emerged, Paz used all his considerable intellectual and emotional energy to shove it back in its box.

The main thing was that it not happen again. The next time he’d be out the door and walking through the staid Cubano neighborhood, a black guy dressed in a T-shirt and nothing else, howling. Some householder would shoot him, or the cops would grab him up, and that would be it. They’d give him a rubber gun and sit him behind a property room grille for the rest of his career. Which was
also why he couldn’t go to the department headshrinker. What he ought to do, had he any real balls, was talk to his mother…Uh-uh, no; he dismissed the thought.

He checked the clock on the stove: four-ten, too late to go back to bed. He put on a bathrobe and grabbed the
Herald
off the tiny front lawn, noting that he was going to have to cut it this weekend, or else Mrs. Ruiz was going to complain to his mother. His mother owned the duplex, and Paz lived in it rent free, which was where he got the money to buy the kind of clothes he wore. It was not exactly a free deal, because besides the routine maintenance around the place, Margarita Paz expected her son to help out at her restaurant. Paz did not mind helping his mother, but Mrs. Paz often failed to understand the exigencies of police work and gave Paz considerable grief when he chose to catch murderers rather than chop up snappers in her kitchen. She did not consider police work a real job.

Paz fired up a big hourglass metal espresso pot and made half a pint of Cuban coffee. He was getting hungry. Ordinarily, he took breakfast out, but he didn’t want to drive to an all-night joint. He opened his refrigerator. Paz did not dine at home, but sometimes he used his place to store the restaurant’s overstock of perishables. In the refrigerator were ten-pound bags of flour, a box of butter pats, a bag of powdered sugar, a box of salted cod, six dozen eggs. Stacked near the refrigerator were three five-gallon cans of peanut oil and a crate of mangoes.

Paz took flour, butter, salt, and water and made a dough, to which he added a healthy shot from a bottle of Anis del Mono that happened to be keeping company with the bottle of Ketel vodka in his freezer. He heated up oil in his only big pot and hand rolled the churros because he didn’t have a star press. As he dropped the pastries into the fat, he recalled, as he always did at such moments, how his mother had taught him at the age of seven to test the temperature of the hot fat by flicking drops of water at it, listening for just the right sort of crackle. He made a dozen, eating two and a half fresh from the fat after sprinkling them with powdered sugar. The others he put into a paper bag.
He ate a mango over the sink, dripping juice, and washed his face again.

This apartment had two bedrooms, in one of which lived a rowing machine and a set of weights. Paz put on headphones and listened to Susana Baca sing Afro-Peruvian songs for thirty minutes of rowing. Then he did a routine with twenty-pound barbells and a set of crunches and push-ups. He exercised every other morning, and ordinarily he used the tedium to think through his day. A methodical man, Paz, despite his reputation on the cops as something of a cowboy.

Slow steps sounded above him. Mrs. Ruiz would wait until he was out of the house before calling his mother to report in. Mrs. Ruiz was a pretty good spy, and Paz often wondered if his mother gave her a deal on the rent in return for this information. Or maybe it was just a normal service of the Cuban Mothers’ Mutual Aid Society. Mrs. Ruiz’s boy was a graduate of Florida Atlantic University, a certified public accountant, married with two, and he was a year younger than Jimmy Paz. He also resembled a Barlett pear, but this fact cut very little ice with the mom when Paz pointed it out, as he did whenever she started on the why-can’t-you-be’s. Paz thought once again of discussing the dream and the other weird stuff with his mother but again dismissed the idea. He had spent most of his conscious life defending his privacy from her, and this habit was now too strong to break. Although his mother, as it happened, knew a great deal about dreams and other states of consciousness that differed from plain vanilla awake-and-aware.

Dressed, he poured another cup of coffee, added hot milk, grabbed a dish towel and the remains of his third churro, went out to the small backyard. There he wiped the dew from a seat of a redwood picnic set and sat down. The eastern sky was rosy with dawn and the air was as cool as it was going to get, scented with jasmine, citrus, the hot dough and coffee of his breakfast. So by dawn’s early light, Paz drank, ate, and read the
Miami Herald
. He skimmed the national news, checked the local news for crime and scandal, then the obituaries: here was
a guy dropped dead in an office lobby, a developer, clipped at forty-seven. Paz was still a relatively young fellow, but being the sort of young fellow he was, he had discovered unusually early that he was not immortal, and so he had started this past year to read the obits with interest. Then he read the sports pages to have something to talk about to the men at work, and then he turned with somewhat more attention to the arts page. Paz was not a regular close reader of this section, which counted (if column inches of space meant anything) the movies and TV as the primary arts of mankind, but recently he had studied it with some care, especially the continuing coverage of the Miami Book Fair. There was a half-page announcement of the day’s event at Miami Dade’s downtown campus, and he found the name he was looking for and noted the time at which this particular author would appear. For the first time since his cruel awakening he felt a smile blossom in his heart.

That morning, Paz was the first one in the homicide unit, a suite on the fifth floor of the Miami PD headquarters building. Unlike the versions presented by the cop shows on TV, police work is largely desk work, using phone, typewriter, ballpoint, and, latterly, the computer. Despite the drop in the murder rate, the homicide unit remained busy, because it was also responsible for assault and domestic violence, which had not declined at all.

The unit was commanded by a lieutenant named Posada and was part of the Criminal Investigation Section, under a major named Oliphant. Paz thought Posada was a useless excrescence but had not made up his mind about the major. Major Oliphant was a newcomer. The city fathers had finally concluded that after two generations of almost continuous scandal and corruption they would try an outsider. This was fine with Paz; he didn’t have many friends among the old guard. Oliphant was ex-FBI, which did not endear him to the Miami cops. There were rumors, too, about why he had left the Bureau, some obscure Bureauesque imbroglio.

Paz was making phone calls, looking for a gold Lady Rolex watch bearing the inscription “To Estelle from Eddie, Love Always”
because the love hadn’t lasted quite that long. Eddie had just put Estelle into a coma and proved to be a cad in the bargain, making off with all his gifts. On the eighth call, he found the right pawnshop. He put the phone down, smiling, and spun around on his swivel chair like a small boy but stopped when he saw that Major Oliphant was standing in the doorway of the detail bay, looking at him curiously. Paz stood up.

Douglas Oliphant was an offensive-tackle-size man, a shade or two darker than Paz. He smiled and asked, “Good news?”

Paz told him about the case. Oliphant nodded and gestured in the direction of his own office. “Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

“Want a churro with it?”

A little hesitation at the sight of the greasy bag Paz held up and then, shrugging, “Sure, whatever.”

Oliphant’s office had a big window looking north, but the blinds were already drawn against the glare of early morning. He poured Paz a cup and one for himself and sat behind his desk. Paz noticed that his cup was a souvenir item from the 1998 National Association of Chiefs of Police convention, and that Oliphant’s had “FBI” on it, with a golden seal. Oliphant examined the churro with interest and took a bite.

“Mm, my, that’s good! Where do you get these?”

“I made them.”

“You
made
them?”

“Yes, sir. I’m really a girl, but they make me cross-dress because otherwise I would have too much affirmative action. They’d have to make me the chief.”

This was delivered deadpan, and it took Oliphant a few seconds to get it, but he managed a laugh.

“Yeah, I heard you were a pisser…is it Jimmy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yeah. Why don’t you have a partner?”

The unexpected pertinent question of a skilled interrogator. Paz was impressed but not discomfited. “I prefer to work alone, sir. They
fired my partner last year and none of the new guys seem to have worked out.”

“No, and what I hear is you ran them off. I also hear you got an attitude.” Paz did not comment on this. Oliphant regarded him over the rim of his coffee cup for a while. “And a perfect disciplinary record, an unusual combo in my experience. Well. The fact of the matter is, your preferences aside, you have to have a partner and you know why. This department, I can’t have detectives wandering around the town all by their lonesome. You make a case, I got to have two people saying what went down. And if the shit happens to hit the fan…” He made an indeterminate gesture with his hand, and Paz filled in, “You want to be able to get each of them in a room with a bunch of snakes and get one of them to rat the other one out.”

“You got it.”

“You could hire Barlow back.”

“Uh-huh, I could, just before I handed in my resignation and packed my bags. Your guy held the former chief of this department hostage at gunpoint while spouting all kinds of racist crap.”

“He was emotionally disturbed. The perp slipped him some kind of drug.”

“That’s the story, although I have to note that the docs found no drugs whatever in his system after you arranged for his capture.” He paused and waited, but Paz was not forthcoming. “I always thought there was something really fishy about that whole Voodoo Killer thing. Care to comment?”

“I wrote a report. Eighty-seven pages without appendices. And there was a book out.”

“I read both of them,” said Oliphant and pinched his nostrils together meaningfully. Paz kept mum. The major went on: “Okay, you need a partner and I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Since I think we can call this a special case, I’ll let
you
pick your guy. Anyone in the department who’s got the right grade and time in service. I want a name by close of business tomorrow. And this arrangement stays between you and me. Are we clear on that?”

“Yes, sir,” said Paz and stood up.

“Sit down,” said Oliphant. “That wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.” He took another churro out of the bag, then smiled, patted his belly, and placed it on his desk blotter.

“Later, I think. Okay, this homicide at the Trianon you put away the other week. That was fast work.”

“A grounder. The perp was sitting there, the murder weapon was at the scene.”

“Still. There’s no doubt the doer was this woman Dideroff?”

“Not in
my
mind,” said Paz, and then had an uncomfortable feeling. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, no reason. Know anything about the victim?”