Valley of Bones

by Michael Gruber

  “Not the part about him getting clubbed over the head. We kept that close. Dodo called you, didn’t he?”

  Hoffmann’s genial mien evaporated. “What is this, Jimmy, you’re interrogating me? In my own home, where you’re a guest?”

  “Ignacio, this’s got nothing to do with you. You tell me Dodo paid you a piece of what he got, I’m cool. You tell me you whacked Hoffa, I’m still cool. But I have to know what went down in that hotel room and why, and you’re the only one standing who knows.”

  “Jimmy, it’s been nice. Give my very kind regards to your mother.”

  Paz took out his cell phone. “You can do that yourself. She said to me, ‘Ignacio will help you, and if he gives you any trouble, you’ll call me, we’ll straighten it out.’ ” Paz punched buttons, waited. “Hello, Donna? Jimmy. My mom around? Uh-huh, well put her on…”

  Hoffmann was waving his hand, as if to distract a charging bull. He said, “Come on, Jimmy, don’t bother the lady with this crap.” Paz said, “Hey, Donna? Forget it. Just tell her I’ll call her when we get back.” He put the cell away and turned expectantly to Hoffmann, who cleared his throat and said, “I’m only doing this because your mother, she’s like family to me. I don’t want you to think you can take advantage, you know?”

  Paz agreed that he would never.

  “Okay, then. Dodo calls me up, a couple of days before it went down. They had a meeting: him, Wilson, and another guy, who was running the whole thing.”

  “This was Mitchell?”

  “No, another guy. Harding, Hardy, something like that. Tell the truth I didn’t pay that much attention. Anyway, it was fifty K straight up, but they had to do it a certain way. This guy had it all figured. They had this woman they were going to pin it on, she worked for Wilson at his shop.”

  “Why? Why her?”

  “Hey, how the fuck should I know? Is it my operation? So Wilson sends the woman to a parts place for an engine part, long and heavy, like a club, and then they call this Arab and tell him to wait by a phone booth right near the parts place. They want the woman to see him and follow him back to the hotel. They call him at the phone booth—go back to the hotel and we’ll meet you there. It turns out the guy wants information about this woman. So that goes down, and Dodo and Wilson are at the hotel. Wilson calls 911 and says there’s a disturbance at the hotel. Dodo has this monkey jacket like a hotel waiter. He waits for her to leave her truck, he opens the truck and gets the fuckin’ rod or whatever and goes to the guy’s room. He’s a waiter, says he’s got a basket of fruit, the guy lets him in. Bang over the head, and out the window, he leaves the part out there, and he splits. The whole thing took half a minute. He leaves the door open and hangs around until he sees the woman go in. A couple of days after it went down, my lawyer calls me with good news. Justice is making nice in ways they never did before. That’s it, the whole thing, all right?”

  AGAIN HIGH OVER the spangled sea, Lorna said to Paz, “You can’t say I haven’t been patient.”

  “You’re right, I can’t say that. But I didn’t want to get into it until we were off the island. Call me paranoid, but…”

  “I would never.”

  Paz explained what he’d learned in his Spanish conversation with Hoffmann.

  Lorna said, “So this Mitchell guy is Mr. Big?”

  “His name’s David Packer. Or who the fuck knows what his real name is? And who’s Harding or Hardy? Packer rented Emmylou her houseboat. I was ordered not to go near him.”

  “What about this Mr. Serpu?”

  “There is no Mr. Serpu. ‘Serpu’ is how you say the acronym for Strategic Resources Protection Unit. Packer works for them. He’s the last actual government employee before you get to the criminals. He ordered the murder of al-Muwalid and concocted this whole scheme to get Emmylou working for Wilson and framed for the crime, so that…so that…” Paz stumbled. It was hard to keep the mind on all the facets. Perhaps this too, this oily, murky confusion, was part of the plot.

  “She would reveal this great secret,” said Lorna in a tired voice. “Which Muwalid was also after and which has to have something to do with oil.”

  “You forgot the dope lord’s hidden gold.”

  “Oh, right, that too. And there’s the mysterious jade idol and the Nazi diamonds and the missing Rembrandt.” Lorna lay her head back against the seat and looked down at the distant ocean. “It’s so boring. How can people spend their lives this way, plotting and killing and stealing? What’s the win for them? After everything works out perfectly and all the people who need to be dead are dead and the treasure is in the safe, what happens? Nice vacations? Wristwatches? A slightly larger office? A promotion to GS fucking fifteen? What?”

  “It’s the oil,” said Paz. “This whole things smells of out-of-control bureaucrats. They’re protecting strategic resources. It’s a dangerous world. The bad guys play rough, and so the good guys have to play rough too. That’s the theory.” Paz thought back to his conversation with Oliphant, and about how easily Oliphant’s passion and outrage had been derailed by the threat of a lost job and pension. He wondered briefly what would derail him from this strange wild-goose chase he was on. Not the job and pension anyway. “It’s just a guy thing, I think. There’re people like that on the cops too. They like to get away with stuff, and they want a small group of players to know it too. Shooting drug dealers and taking their cash, inventing evidence, lying to make a case. They like the wink, they like thinking they’re inside something and everyone else is on the outside looking in. Hell, you’re the psychologist, you explain it. But it has fuck all to do with national security. All that kind of shit is personal.”

  Lorna heard what he was saying, and it made sense, but she lacked the energy to follow on with the discussion. What did it matter after all? She squeezed his hand and settled more deeply into her seat. Her head felt hot and she rested against the cool of the glass. She never slept on planes, she was a white-knuckle flier usually, but now she could not keep her eyes open. Yet another upside of dying, she thought as she dropped off.

  FROM TAMPA THEY fly to Atlanta and then to Roanoke, arriving that night and checking into the airport Holiday Inn. She sits on the bed, staring at the floor while he goes out to get some ice, and when he comes back she is in the same position.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks, and she gives her usual answer, “Nothing.”

  He feels her forehead. “It’s not nothing. You’re hot and you’re always tired and you’ve thrown up about ten times since we left Miami.”

  “It’s just a flu,” she says. How tedious, she thinks, to be fussed over. She wishes he was a brute, an animal, who saw her merely as a set of warm, slick orifices.

  “Do you want to cancel out on the trip? You could crash here while I go.”

  “No. I’ll be fine. It’s just some bug.” She hates lying to him. Worse, she now feels too miserable to contemplate sex. Galloping lymphoma. Is there such a thing? She recalls that lymphoma is one of the slower cancers and relatively easy to treat, but she also recalls that there is a wide range of types within both Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s. She will have contracted the worst type, or maybe it’s a new type, violently metastasizing, they’ll be amazed at the autopsy, faces will grow pale, oncologists will scurry to their terminals to get the news out, her cells will be preserved for research, she will live forever in tiny tubes all over the world. Someday, maybe, when science advances far enough she will be cloned and wake up on a table in a white laboratory. Of course, she will have superpowers then….

  “What’s so funny?” he asks in response to the sound she now makes.

  “Oh, just thinking about the peculiar life I seem to be leading.” He mixes drinks, vodka tonics, they click glasses, she looks him in the eye and says, “You’re really nice to me, Jimmy Paz. Is that ’cause you like me, or are you this way with everyone?”

  “I think I’m marginally nicer to you than I am to most people.”

  “You don’t seem to have
many faults. Is that the case, or are you just good at concealing them?”

  “The latter. It’s just because we’ve been working together plus socializing that it hasn’t come up, but when I’m on a case, I mean forget it, I get totally lost. That might be something you should think about. I mean missed dates, no calls for days. Often you might have to take little Jason or Jennifer to soccer when I promised I would. Like that.”

  “It’s something to consider,” she says, looking away. “I appreciate being told in advance.” She gulps the rest of her drink. “Excuse me,” she says and goes into the bathroom. She turns the water in the sink on full force and by wrapping her head in the bath towels and lying on the floor with her face jammed into the corner near the tub, she is able to weep hysterical tears for a good long time without Paz the detective detecting anything.

  IN THE EARLY morning they drove south out of Roanoke on 81 with the mountains ghostly on their right hand. He was worried about her. The ravening desire mixed with an obvious debilitation, something he had not experienced before in a partner, but he did not pry. Margarita Paz’s little boy, although a professional detective, had a horror of personal prying.

  “This is nice country,” he said after an hour or so of silence. “The Blue Ridge is actually blue. It’s nice to know you can trust something nowadays.”

  She looked out the window. “They probably spray it so the tourists don’t complain,” she said, and then gave him a weak smile. Her eyes were red, and he almost confronted her, he almost said, Oh fuck this, Lorna, the next time I see a hospital sign we’re going to the emergency room, but he didn’t. The moment passed and he started playing with the radio.

  He had called ahead and explained briefly what they were about, and made an appointment with the prioress at St. Catherine’s. They drove through an ornate iron gate and up a graveled road and parked in a corner of a pleasant quadrangle made by solid bluestone buildings. A group of sisters dressed in blue overalls were playing a vigorous game of volleyball on the lawn behind a large statue. A tiny brown-skinned sister in full habit greeted them solemnly and ushered them up to the office of the prioress, Sr. Marian Dolan.

  They were offered seats and coffee. Small talk before the coffee arrived, the pretty country, something about the history and operations of the priory. Sr. Marian talked a little about the background of the Society and then asked, “So, how can we help? You say you’re from the Miami police?”

  “I am, Sister. Dr. Wise here is a therapist attending Emily at Jackson Memorial Hospital.”

  “She’s mentally ill, is she?”

  Lorna said, “Officially she’s remanded by the court to Jackson until she’s fit to answer the indictment against her.”

  “This murder of this Sudanese Mr. Paz mentioned on the phone.”

  “Yes.” Lorna found she could not bring herself to use the title.

  “Is she in fact mad?”

  “We’re still determining that.”

  “She was prone to visions. Is she still?”

  “To an extent,” said Lorna. And drives out demons, she thought, except for the one living in her. She shuddered involuntarily.

  A silent young sister brought in a tray and left it. The coffee was in a filter pot, and excellent, as were the madeleines. Paz and Lorna shared a glance over these, which made him feel better than he had in some time.

  Sr. Marian said, “I was subprioress at the time, and I had some contact with this person. What exactly did you want to know about her?”

  Paz explained: subject originally a suspect in a murder, now not so sure, a conspiracy about some information held by Emily Garigeau, now Emmylou Dideroff; the necessity of tracking down all leads, tracing back along the course of subject’s life.

  Sr. Marian’s eyeglasses glinted, reflecting the light from the window so that it was hard to gauge her expression. Paz imagined that the desk and chairs had been set up with just this in mind. He certainly would have done so.

  “Well, you seem to know the woman better than we do. She wasn’t here very long and I’m afraid she didn’t make much of an impression. I guess you know this is a training facility, and I guess you know that the Society has a somewhat unusual means of seeking women with vocations. A good number of the women who pass through here are damaged or marginal in some way. Most of them decide the religious life is not for them and they leave here, certainly with no hard feelings on our part. On the other hand we do receive some really remarkable women, very tough, self-reliant, seasoned, the kind other religious foundations would never see. So it evens out, or it has in the past. She came in as a patient. A gunshot wound according to her records, and exposure. We patched her up and she was here for a little over a year, doing routine maintenance. Then she left.”

  “Did you know there was a felony warrant out on her?” asked Paz. “I mean you knew she was involved with that drug operation over on Bailey’s Knob, right?”

  “Detective, this Society is something like the French Foreign Legion. In fact, our foundress was a keen admirer of that organization. People come here looking for peace and a chance to serve the helpless victims of conflict and we don’t ask questions about their former lives. Obviously, as good citizens we cooperate with the authorities. But certainly no official agency ever served such a warrant on Emily while she was here.”

  “Um…Emmylou tells a story about being sent to Sudan,” said Lorna, “of fighting in the civil war there, on behalf of the Dinka tribe. She had the use of some kind of cannon…”

  “Well as to that, I’m afraid Emily’s unfortunate background gave her the sort of personality that plays a little fast and loose with the truth. I would be astounded if anything like that actually happened, and, in fact, we have no record of anyone named Emily Garigeau or Emmylou Dideroff serving the Society in Sudan, or anywhere else for that matter. I’m sorry, Detective, and Dr. Wise. I’m afraid you’ve come all this way for very little.”

  “I’m sorry for taking your time, Sister,” said Paz, in his best parochial school manner.

  They walked out of the building to their car.

  Paz said, “You get the impression we’re getting the bum’s rush here?”

  “Maybe they know we’re unworthy.”

  “No, then they’d be bending over double to be nice. It’s something else. What did you think of the boss lady?”

  “Very smart. She managed to seem cooperative and yet convey no real information, while at the same time avoiding actual lies.”

  “Yeah. She would be really astounded. I bet she was, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen the way Emmylou said it did.”

  “No, but she also could’ve made the whole thing up.”

  “Uh-uh,” said Paz. “We got what we came here for. I was worried that Emmylou had manufactured her past totally in her head, but now we know she really was shot on Bailey’s Knob and was here. That woman we just saw was shining us on, and that suggests to me that Emmylou is telling the truth. What is it?”

  Lorna had staggered and caught the side of the car for support. She opened the door and sat down.

  “You’re sweating,” said Paz.

  “It’s hot.”

  “It’s not hot, it’s cool. It’s September in the mountains. Why aren’t you telling me what’s wrong with you?”

  Lorna was silent. Somewhat to her surprise, she found herself incapable any longer of the lie direct.

  He said, “If you tell, I’ll tell you what happened to me at the bembé.”

  A long pause. They heard shouts from the volleyball game and the soughing of the wind through the old trees planted on the grounds, horse chestnuts, pin oaks, and pines.

  “All right,” she said. “You first.”

  “They washed my head,” he said. “Like at a haircut place when you get a shampoo, they sat me in a chair and leaned my head and neck back above the sink. They washed my whole head, though, not just the hair, with something that smelled like coconut. And they were burning something that smoked, incen
se I guess, the place was filled with smoke, I could barely see what was going on with the smoke and the water in my eyes. And Yemaya and the other two women, Marta and Isabel, were chanting—”

  “Yemaya…you mean your mother?”

  “I mean Yemaya. The thing was seven feet tall with a voice like a two-hundred-watt woofer. It picked me up like I was a little kid. Anyway, that went on for a while and then they smeared some kind of oil on my head, and the chanting got louder, and then…I realized there were more than the four of us in the room.”

  He stopped and had to swallow. She could see sweat beading on his forehead, although the afternoon was growing cool. “What do you mean, more?”

  “They came through the smoke. I couldn’t see their faces too good, but I knew who they were. Dodo Cortez and the other one, Moore. The Voodoo Killer. So, the theory is when you kill someone your spirit is tied to theirs and you kind of take on the evil they did in life and carry it. I mean spiritually. And before you can get free you have to experience it, what it means to kill someone, and after you do that they can wash it away. So I did and they did. Oh, the cherry on top was that there’s a demon after me, but it’s got nothing to do with Santería. Not their department, sorry, and I should be careful. Thank you very much, Emmylou Dideroff. End of story. Now, what’s the matter with you?”

  She pretended she hadn’t heard this last. “I don’t understand. You already experienced killing when you shot them.”

  “It’s the wrong word, then. I killed two human beings. It doesn’t matter that they were a couple of warped sons of bitches, or that they deserved it, or it was self-defense, or any of that legalistic bullshit. The theory is each person is a piece of Olodumare, the creator, and when you kill you disturb the order of heaven and you have to be cleansed. You have to experience the sadness of God. I was crying like a baby and I puked my guts out.”

  “But people kill hundreds, thousands even, and it doesn’t seem to bother them. Why did you have to go through all that? It doesn’t seem fair.”