Valley of Bones

by Michael Gruber

  “He worked for Empire,” said Paz. “Well, what d’you know?”

  “You heard of it?”

  “Oh, yeah. It belongs, or belonged, to a guy named Ignacio Hoffmann. Ignacio had a fleet of Cigarette boats, which he typically did not rent out to Dad and Johnny to go fish for snapper off Fowey Rocks. Did a lot of night work out in the Straits.”

  “But he’s not still in business?”

  “No, the feds busted him, must’ve been three or four years back. One of his people ratted him out, they got him on a federal indictment, he paid his million-dollar bail in cash, and took a hike. Interesting. I bet Wilson bought his business for cash.”

  “I don’t know,” said Morales. “I could check.”

  “Hm. Hell, what does it matter? We’re not interested in Hoffmann or Wilson except where they connect to Emmylou. You do any good with all those business cards?”

  “Yeah, he visited one of them the morning of the day he got it. I called but the guy was out.”

  “Just hold off on that until I get there. We’ll go see him together.”

  “OKAY, WHAT DO we know about this guy?” Paz asked when they were in the official Impala and heading east on Flagler. Morales was driving while Paz took his ease, like a prince, and smoked a cigar. Paz was pleased with himself and looked at his new partner benignly.

  “He’s in the oil business,” said Morales. “The spot market, whatever that means. Our guy had an appointment with him the day he died. Seems okay, a citizen.”

  “But an Arab.”

  “That’s not a crime.”

  “So far. No, but it’s another ruffle on a shirt that’s a little too fancy already. I wanted him to be a Cuban-American or a white-bread Presbyterian. A Jew would’ve been okay too. Our vic’s an Arab on a federal watch list, the last person we know he saw before getting whacked is an Arab….” He shrugged. “It’s probably nothing.”

  “Could I ask you something?” said Morales, after a pause. Now they had turned onto Second Avenue. Traffic was heavy, but they were in no rush.

  “Ask.”

  “What the fuck is going on?”

  “Be more precise.”

  “I meet you by accident and a couple of days later I’m a homicide detective. My lieutenant knows diddly-squat about it. I go into the squad bay and everyone treats me like I got a contagious skin condition. Then you get me working on a case I know is closed. Is that enough to start? This is our building here.”

  “Park it in the bus stop,” said Paz. “Okay, I was wondering when you would get around to asking. You’re in because I needed a partner. Oliphant’s orders, and I pulled some strings of my own. Why you? Why not you? First, while you haven’t done anything particularly brilliant, you haven’t fucked up either, and I liked the way you handled yourself at the crime scene. You didn’t puke and that scene was fairly puke-worthy. A small thing, but what you might call a sine qua non for a homicide dick. No heaving. It fucks the crime scene and disturbs the witnesses, if any. Also, you followed my lead at the scene without me having to write it out in big letters and pin it to your shirt. You’d be surprised at the number of guys who can’t do that. Finally, I kind of like giving orders to a white Cuban. That enough on your first question?”

  “Yeah,” Morales snapped.

  Paz didn’t answer immediately. He was staring at the side mirror.

  Morales said, “What’s up?”

  “Nothing, I thought I saw something. I’m getting paranoid in my old age. And you’re pissed, but I’m being truthful with you. I’m modeling the right behavior. Lie to your wife, your girlfriend, your mother, whatever, but never lie to your partner. Get mad at him if you want, but don’t lie. Okay, next question. A kid patrolman with no apparent clout gets a high-visibility, high-prestige appointment. What do the other members of his new organization believe? Think!”

  Morales thought for a while and then a look of dismay came onto his face. “They think I’m a rat?”

  “Half of them do, given this is the Miami PD. They think IA is putting a mole into the bosom of the homicide unit. The other half is trying to figure out who you know, who’re you connected to, what faction you’re from, so they know if they should kiss your ass or kick it. Also, you’re my partner, so that adds a little extra salsa to it, guys are going to give you grief just because you’re with me. They don’t much like me on the fifth floor. It hurts, but I try to live with it.” He smiled, and after a brief hesitation, Morales returned it.

  “Okay, I can live with it too. Now tell me why we’re working on a closed case.”

  “Because we’ve been told to. And the case may not be all that closed. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Morales nodded vigorously. “Packer is wrong, Wilson is wrong, the victim’s on an FBI watch list, the suspect is nuts, and this Arab in the oil business. Too many ruffles on the shirt.”

  “You got it. Speaking of which, do you have any money?”

  “You mean on me?”

  “No, in the bank. Like a couple of grand you can spare.”

  “I guess. Why?”

  “You need to get some serious clothes. I’m wearing a fourteen-hundred-dollar suit and three-hundred-dollar shoes and you’re wearing a piece of shit looks like you got it for first communion. What does that say, if someone looks at the two of us?”

  “You like clothes more? I’m cheap?”

  “No, it says I’m on the take and you’re not. I want us both to look dirty.”

  “You want people to offer us bribes?” said Morales.

  “See, I was right about you. You look like a choirboy, but you have a devious mind. Exactly right. Since I’ve been working solo I had three people offer me money. Best way of breaking a case ever invented. The guy’s got money in his hand, you got it on tape, it’s like his dick is hanging out of his pants. Prosecutors love it. After this, we’ll go shopping.”

  The building was a ten-story brick near the Metro elevated route, white marble/black glass with a coral stone fountain in the lobby. Michael Zubrom had an office on the eighth floor fronted by a teak door on which raised bronze letters told the passerby that Polygon Brokers, PLC, would be found within. The reception area was small, with a glass gate for the receptionist. Zubrom himself, who came out to greet them, was a short, compact, olive-skinned man of around forty, with a fine head of dark hair, a beaked nose, and a look of knowing more than he ever said. They showed their badges and followed him in.

  His office was messy, a place of work rather than a stage for acting successful—framed maps of the world on the wall, with pins in them, bookcases full of technical reports, drooping piles of printouts, and a rack of television monitors, four in all, silently flickering. They sat on dusty chairs, and Mr. Zubrom sat behind his cluttered desk, peering at them from between a computer monitor and a tall stack of oil industry journals.

  “So, the police,” he said. “I have to tell you at the start that I really don’t know very much about this Sudanese.” His voice was slightly accented, a familiar one.

  “Excuse me, sir,” said Paz in Spanish. “Is it possible that you are Cuban?”

  A little smile. “No, I’m Mexican,” he answered in the same language, “actually, Palestinian-Mexican. This is a branch of my family’s Mexico City office.”

  Paz switched back to English. “And what was Mr. al-Muwalid’s business with you on the day he died?”

  “He sold me some oil.”

  “Like a sample?”

  “More than that. Do you know what the spot market in petroleum is?”

  “Not really,” said Paz.

  “Well, it’s simple in concept, complex in practice. Perhaps police work is the same? Let me try to explain the concept at least. Oil is a valuable and fungible commodity. A barrel of sweet light crude, let us say, is the same in a tank in Dubai, on a ship in midocean, in a pipeline in Russia, and the rights to these barrels are traded just like currency. I come from a family that is fluent in Arabic, Spanish, and English, and so
we can deal with most of the people in the world who have oil to sell.”

  “Why Miami?” asked Morales. “Why not Houston?”

  “Good question. For that matter, why not stay in Mexico? The answer is that sometimes it’s better that nobody knows your business. In oil towns everybody is looking to see who is visiting who, who’s in town from Venezuela, the Gulf, Norway, Nigeria. In Miami, this little hole-in-the-wall office, it’s better for privacy, for certain deals that require discretion.” Zubrom’s eyes kept flicking from Morales to his array of screens.

  “And al-Muwalid had that kind of deal?” asked Morales.

  An elegant shrug. “Mm. You understand that the spot market is abstract. We bid and contract for, you could say, only chips, markers, as in a casino. Promises to deliver at a certain price. But occasionally we have a situation where someone is selling to us a specific lot of actual petroleum, and this was the case with him. He said he had eleven thousand barrels in a tanker at Port Sudan. He had the papers, the clearances from the government there, so I did the deal. Oil is fungible, as I said, it’s all one big pool more or less. Just a moment, please.”

  He looked at his screen and tapped his keyboard. “Sorry. There is something in Singapore I have to attend to.”

  Paz said, “Mr. Zubrom, what you have to attend to is us, right now. You were probably the last person to talk to the victim before he was murdered. He might have been murdered because of something that happened in this room. Maybe we should go downtown….”

  This remark obtained somewhat more of the man’s attention, although they could see he was straining his peripheral vision to keep track of the flickering numbers and the feeds on the Bloomberg and the set tuned to CNN. “No, please. And I really don’t see how that could be. It was a very simple deal from my standpoint. Let me see what I paid….” He punched some keys. “Yes. Twenty-nine-dollars-forty a barrel, base price, less commission, less fees, less insurance and so on, made $303,533.76, which I had transferred to a numbered account at the ARPM bank. In Jersey.”

  “Where in Jersey?” asked Morales.

  Zubrom gave him a peculiar look. “Not the state. It’s an island in the English Channel with loose banking regulation.”

  “Anything else?” said Paz. “Any indication of what his plans were, other appointments?”

  “No.”

  “Any mention of a woman named Dideroff?”

  “No. Really, Detective, I am in the middle of my business day….”

  “What else did he say, Mr. Zubrom?”

  “Well, we did not exchange small talk. He was not a pleasant fellow, I am afraid. But many of the people in the oil business are like that. Especially the Africans, if I may say so.”

  “And why is that, sir?” asked Paz genially. “If I may ask.”

  Zubrom seemed taken aback by this question. He licked his lip and stammered a little. “They…they…I don’t mean to be offensive, Officer.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Zubrom, I’m not an African. Go on. They what?”

  “They lack…lack the idea of public property. If a man controls something, it is his own, like his shoe or his house, his and his family’s, or clan or tribe. The nation is just a figure of speech. Now, my own nation is corrupt enough, but we have a sense of limits. We have our commissions and bribes, but we don’t think that our oil is the personal property of the petroleum minister and his friends. I think in Nigeria, in Sudan, they do think that. I believe this Mr. al-Muwalid had connections that were able to divert a quantity of crude to this tanker, so he could sell it for himself, which he certainly did. But you asked what we talked about. After the deal was over, he relaxed a little. I gave him a drink. He gave me a tip.”

  “A tip?” said Paz.

  “In a manner of speaking. He asked me what would happen if a new strike was made, an oil field say fifty times larger than the Widha and Kordofan and Adar Tel fields combined. These are the main Sudanese fields, you see. I told him that it would not have an immediate effect on the spot market, for the reason that it is still difficult to get oil out of Sudan. The oil is highly parafinized and requires heating, the pipeline through Khartoum is small, and almost all the oil is in the south, where it must be moved through the middle of a civil war. But as I said to him, a find of that magnitude might—”

  “What are we talking about here,” asked Morales, “Saudi Arabia?”

  A patronizing smile. “Of course not. Saudi is in a class by itself; it has no serious rivals as far as reserves are concerned. Do you understand that at this time Sudan is a tiny producer? Reserves of perhaps point six billion barrels. I mean tiny compared to Libya, with nearly thirty billion proven and Iraq…who knows about Iraq these days? Anywhere from one hundred twelve through to as much as two hundred twenty billion barrels. So I said to him if you multiply point six by fifty you are in a class with Libya, and that is a very serious class, and if that were to happen, it would create a change on the geopolitical level, never mind in the spot market.”

  Another shrug, a hand gesture partaking of both the Middle East and Latin America, acknowledging the futility of expectations. “Perhaps. Depending on the quality and cost of production and so on. I told him I had not heard of any such find and he said, Oh, it is there, we know it is there, but we don’t yet have the proof of it. He meant data for the oil companies, so they could begin development work. He was somewhat full of himself then, talking, I don’t know, how he was going to be a key figure in the future of Sudan, if he could get the data on this field, and he knew someone who knew where it was, right here in this city. This is why he required this money, you see, for expenses, to hire people, to look, you know, hard people.”

  “For protection, you mean?” asked Paz. “He felt threatened?”

  “I believe he did.”

  “Who by?”

  “You know, he didn’t say. We were not best buddies. He took a call on his mobile while he was here and left immediately after. In something of a rush as I recall. That is totally all I know about this man.” He looked desperately at his screens. “Honestly, gentlemen, this is ruinous. I am losing money by the minute.”

  They thanked Mr. Zubrom and left.

  In the car, Paz said, “That was good. You did good, you picked up his eyes.”

  “He was looking at me,” said Morales, somewhat uncomfortably. “He hardly ever looked at you, even when you were talking to him.”

  “Uh-huh. A black guy and a white guy show up together, and nine out of ten people are going to assume that the white guy is in charge, even when the black guy is wearing Zegna and the white guy’s got a JCPenney confirmation suit on. Life isn’t fair that way, and it gives me a bad attitude sometimes, which I intend to take out occasionally on your lily ass. In this line of work, though, it works pretty good. I can slide something in where they’re not looking. An off-balance informant is the policeman’s friend, as we just saw. So what did you make of all that?”

  “I don’t know. The vic had a hold on some serious cash. He had enemies. He was looking for something worth a zillion bucks. We know the guy wasn’t a sweetheart off of that FBI thing the major told you about, plus what the suspect said. So…” He waggled both hands.

  “So it looks a little less like a loony having a fit and clocking the vic on the head.”

  “Yeah. You think maybe she was set up?”

  “Oh, I think she did it, but I also think she had some help. We didn’t recover a cell phone off the vic, did we?”

  “No.”

  “And Emmylou sure as shit didn’t have one. She’s got one built into her head connected to a switchboard in heaven. So that means…”

  “There was someone else in the place,” said Morales instantly. “He took the cell phone so we couldn’t find out who called him at Zubrom’s, the call that got him moving.”

  “Very good. Drive on.”

  Morales pulled away from the curb and headed north of NE First Avenue. “Where are we going?”

  “Bal Harbo
ur,” said Paz, “take a look at some suits. I think you’re a keeper, but I want to see how you clean up. After that…shit, there he is again!”

  “Who?”

  “Guy in a white Explorer with tinted glass. He’s been following us. Make this next left. Now!”

  Morales stamped on the gas and swept across the oncoming traffic into a left turn, leaving screeching brakes and angry horns in his wake. Paz swiveled around in his seat, expecting to see the white SUV make the turn as well, but it proceeded north with the other traffic. He felt Morales’s stare. “Wait here,” he said, “pull over, he’ll go around the block.” Morales did so and they waited. After five minutes’ silence, Morales asked, “Did you get his plates?”

  “No, did you?”

  An uneasy pause. “No. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even see what car you were talking about. A white SUV? I didn’t spot it. Are you sure…?”

  “Fuck, yeah, I’m sure!” Paz was almost shouting. “You think I don’t know when I’m being tailed?” Paz had a moment of rage so intense he thought he was going to have a stroke right there in the unmarked. Irrational. He was seeing things. It could’ve been a white Explorer, and maybe next time it’d be a hearse with a zombie driver or a circus van playing a calliope. First that thing with Emmylou, then the craziness with Willa, now this, and he’d realized now that he’d screwed up the interview with Zubrom, he should have pulled the guy out of there, taken him downtown, and sweated him some more, the guy was laughing at them, he knew a lot more than he’d said, if he had a decent partner instead of this asshole kid, he would’ve gotten a lot more…no, that was not him, not a line of thought that should have appeared in his brain. Morales was fine. He felt cold sweat start up on his forehead and back.

  “Hey, Jimmy—you okay?” Paz looked at Morales, at his pale and worried face.

  “Yeah, it’s nothing, I’m a little…just go, drive.”

  A little what? Paz asked himself as they rolled. A little crazy? Crazy he could deal with, but not the other thing, not the…the word possession floated into his mind. He skittered away from that and took refuge in the forms of old prayers and grasped certain objects hung about his neck. By the time they got to where they were going he felt nearly human again.