Tropic of Night

by Unknown

  “Yes, we know that,” said Barlow. “Could you hear what they were talking about?”

  “Nah, they’s too far away. Anyway, they left together. I ain’t see them no more after that.”

  “What did this man look like?” asked Barlow.

  “Just a regular dude,” said Swett. Again he threw a quick glance at Paz. “Nothing special. Dap, though. Had a suit on, white or tan, light color anyway, shiny shoes, fresh shine. I used to do it, so I knows.”

  “What did the man look like, Mr. Swett?” Barlow insisted. “Big? Small? Light? Dark? What?”

  A nervous shrug. “You know, just a regular dude … normal looking.”

  Paz said, “Mr. Swett, let me ask you something. Look at me.” Paz stood up. “Just say it right out. Did the man you saw have a resemblance to me?”

  Swett nodded vigorously. “Yeah, yeah, he did. I spotted it the minute you walked in here. I said, damn, that boy look like that other dude’s brother.” He narrowed his eyes, studying Paz. ” ‘Bout the same size, same no-hair, same shade of skin. Maybe the guy was a little … softer, a little older, I don’t know. No, something else … the dude was, I want to say, brighter …”

  “You mean a lighter complexion?” asked Paz.

  “No, it ain’t that. Something like … light coming off a him, like some kind of movie star, like they look, you know? Not like real folks. What I thought, when I seen the two of them, here be a preacher and he be trying to help this sister got herself in trouble.”

  They sent Swett off to work with an Identi-Kit technician, and the two detectives busied themselves for a time with other cases. The drawing came back and they looked at it together.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” said Barlow.

  “That’s really weird,” said Paz. The likeness was the usual anti-portrait, stripped of personality, and in Paz’s view, quite useless for actual identification. It showed a round-headed, high-cheeked, shaven-haired, light-skinned black man. It looked a good deal like Paz and several thousand others in Dade County.

  “Yes, it is. That old boy just about jumped when y’all walked in there. I guess you can account for your whereabouts on the night of.”

  “Last Saturday? Gosh, I can’t recall. Oh, I know! I wrapped up my chef knives and took a long walk all by myself.”

  “For the record, Jimmy. A lot of folks going to see this thing.”

  “For the record, I worked at the restaurant until eleven-thirty, and spent the rest of the night with a lady named Beth Morgensen. Want her number?”

  “No, but if you strike again, we may need it. Anyway, a lucky break, Mr. Swett walking in. We have a face, at least. A small reward brings in the street folks pretty good. I wonder why they call him Eightball? It looks like a long time since he was steady enough to lean over a pool table.”

  “It’s a drink,” said Paz. “Olde English 800 malt liquor. The drink and people who drink it are eightball.”

  “Well, well. I never knew that.”

  “I never knew you played pool.”

  “I don’t, anymore,” said Barlow. “But I ran some tables a time or two back when I was raising Cain. I guess you’ll tell me, after a while, how come you knew our suspect looked like you before old Eightball copped to it.”

  Paz felt blood rush to his face. In an instant a set of lies and evasions flashed through his mind, all dismissed as fast as they appeared.

  “Someone else told me the same thing,” Paz said, and went through the sorry events of the previous night.

  Barlow listened to this without reaction. When Paz was done he said, “Son, you and your girlfriend better hope that old lady don’t know any sharp lawyers.”

  “I do hope. Meanwhile, we got confirmation about the physical appearance, which is good.”

  “Unless he witched that, too, fixed it so anybody saw him would think he looked like the investigating officer.”

  “Cletis, come on!”

  “Still don’t believe it?”

  “What, you do?”

  “I got to. Like I already told you, Our Lord spent a good parcel of His time driving out unclean spirits. The smartest thing Satan ever done was making folks believe he ain’t real.”

  There seemed nothing to say to this. Paz remained silent, waiting for Barlow to come down on him for the stupidity at Mrs. Meagher’s.

  To Paz’s relief, though, he saw that Barlow was going to let it pass, because in a lighter tone, he said, “Now what about this medical anthropologist? We might catch us a lead there.”

  “I’ll get on it,” said Paz. At his desk he checked the time, then dialed Lisa Reilly’s number, reaching her between her fifty-minute client hours.

  “Did I do anything awful?” she asked.

  “No, I wouldn’t call three guys and a German shepherd awful. Unusual, maybe.”

  “Oh, stop it! I’ve been walking bowlegged all morning. Was that all you?”

  And more lascivious chatter. It was one of her habits, he knew, and Paz normally went along with it cheerfully enough, but today he found it wearing. There was something too bright about her tone. He decided to switch it off.

  “Look, Lisa, why I called?I need the name of that anthropology guy you mentioned.”

  “I’m sorry, what guy?”

  “It was after that scene at Mrs. Meagher’s?you said I needed a medical anthropologist, and you said you heard a lecture …”

  “Oh. Jesus, that really happened, didn’t it? Are you going to check on that little girl?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Paz lied, “so, if you could look it up?”

  “Right.” There was the sound of drawers opening and paper being flipped. Paz wrote down the name and phone number, and said, “Thanks, Lisa. I’ll call you later, maybe we’ll get together next week sometime.”

  “Yeah, about that … I actually was going to call you. I think maybe I’m going to get back with Alex.”

  The husband. “Oh, yeah? When did this happen?”

  “Oh, we’ve been seeing each other more over the last couple of weeks. I guess we both decided it was time. We want to have kids.”

  “That’s nice. And what was last night? A farewell fuck?” He was surprised at the vehemence with which he spoke.

  “No, I was going to bring it up, but after what happened and me getting a little blasted … and let’s face it, we went into this with no promises on either side. I thought that was the deal.”

  “Yeah, it was,” he said tightly. “Well, good. What can I say? Have a nice life, Lisa.”

  “Ah, Jimmy, don’t be like that. We can still be friends.”

  “Yeah, the pair of you can have me over sometime. It’ll be great. I got to go now.”

  And that was that, thought Paz, good-bye, Lisa. He called Ticketmaster and got a couple of tickets to Race Music for that Friday night, and then called Willa Shaftel’s machine and left a message confirming the date. Then business again: a call to Jackson Memorial put him in touch with the Medical Anthropology Unit and he made an appointment with a Dr. Louis Nearing.

  Medical Anthropology, Paz found, was stuck in a short blind corridor in building 208, out of the way of real doctors but convenient to the ER, where nearly all of its clients arrived. Outside Nearing’s office there was a corkboard nearly covered with witch-doctor cartoons cut out of magazines. He knocked, received a “Yo!” in response, and walked in. It was a tiny place, hardly larger than a suburban bathroom, and it was the messiest office Paz had ever seen. Nearly every horizontal surface?desk, floor, shelves, the computer monitor, and the seats of a pair of side chairs?was covered with paper: stacks of books, some of them splayed open, journals, clipped articles, stuffed file folders, magazines, cardboard cartons, reprints, notebooks, and stapled computer printouts. In the interstices and hung from the walls and ceiling were impedimenta in startling variety, adding to the wizard’s-cave effect: cult statues, masks, bundles of herbs and feathers, crystals, stuffed animals and birds, colorful and folkish-looking pouches and bags, a g
reen-and-white Notre Dame football helmet, and what looked like shrunken human body parts. The occupant sat hunched over his computer keyboard, with the light from the screen giving his face an appropriately mystic glow. He turned to Paz and grinned, showing large tombstone teeth. “Just let me finish this thought. Move that shit and have a seat.”

  Nearing pounded heavily on the keys. Paz couldn’t see how tall he was, but he was big, his neck thick, his shoulders heavy, his forearms powerful and covered with a rich golden pelt. Nearing gave a little grunt of satisfaction, punched one last key, spun around on his chair, and stood up, extending a meaty hand. Six four, at least, Paz estimated, a moose. He had a wide, flat, ingenuous face, blue eyes behind cheap plastic frames, the lenses none too clean. He wore a plaid, short-sleeved shirt and wrinkled chinos with a military belt.

  “What can I do for you, Detective?”

  Paz told him the story, the killing and its aftermath, omitting the usual small details about the crime itself, and editing the illegal aspects out of the Tanzi incident. “I was wondering if you could throw some light, Doc,” he concluded. He was not hopeful. The guy looked like he could throw light on nothing more exotic than hog production.

  “Well, let’s see,” said Nearing, counting elaborately on his fingers, “we got ritual murder, cannibalism, and demonic possession, plus maybe some Ifa divination. Sounds like a typical day in the Magic City.” He had a deep, considering, midwestern voice. “The chamber of commerce wasn’t far wrong when they came up with that one. Where would you like me to start?”

  “Maybe with what you do here. I’m not even sure what medical anthropology is.”

  “Yeah, you and the board of this fine institution. Okay, here’s the short version. A guy comes into the ER in distress. BP off the scale, severe pain in the belly, recent history of weight loss, blood in the urine, angina, shortness of breath. So they think, uh-oh, a sundae, so they order tests …”

  “Sorry, what’s a sundae?”

  “A case where you got two or more potential fatal illnesses. In this case they’d figure he was hypertense, untreated, an abdominal cancer the size of a grapefruit, with kidney involvement and maybe congestive heart, too. That’s what they would call the cherry.”

  Paz looked blank.

  “The cherry on top. Of the sundae. Hilarious intern humor.”

  “Got it. Go on.”

  “Anyway, the guy’s hopeless, but they give him the tests anyway. And to their surprise, he passes the cancer panel, his EKG is normal, guy’s got arteries like a twelve-gauge Mossberg. He’s got what they call idiopathic symptomology, sick as hell but nothing wrong with him that they can find. Then they get the idea of asking the guy what he thinks is wrong with him, and he says a sorcerer has put the curse on him. So they call me in. I do the interview, and say the guy is Haitian, I’ll call in my own hougan to examine the patient. He’ll confirm the diagnosis: the patient is suffering under a pwin, a curse, sent by a bokor, a sorcerer. We come to some arrangement, and believe me, Medicaid doesn’t want to know about this, and my hougan sets up a curing ceremony?that, or he finds out who the bokor is, and starts a countercurse, so the bad guy will lay off.”

  “Does it work?”

  Nearing waggled a hand and tilted his head ruefully. “Sometimes, sometimes not. Like chemotherapy. Or surgery.”

  “Right. Okay, but what I don’t get is why should a Haitian or anybody who believes they’re cursed come to Jackson? Why don’t they just get their own witch doctor?”

  Nearing looked confused. “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  “I mean, they get sick because they believe in voodoo or whatever. Their minds control their bodies in some way. So if they believe, they should know the local what-do-you-call-‘ems …”

  “Oh, I see,” said Nearing, with a grin. “I should have explained it better. The patients who show up at Jackson aren’t believers. That’s the point. You’re right, in that if they were really into traditional practices they wouldn’t even think about coming here. They come here because they think they’re in America and Jackson Memorial is the big hougan where they dispense the powerful American magic. But it’s not.”

  “But they must believe in the voodoo at some level, or it wouldn’t work.”

  “That’s a theory,” said Nearing, cheerfully. “It’s certainly what the NP staff subscribes to. Psychosomatic yadda-yadda-yadda, tied to primitive superstition, blah-blah and dismiss it. I’m not so sure.”

  “Then what’s the explanation?”

  Nearing shrugged. “The explanation is, we don’t know squat about a lot of this stuff. There are drugs in some of these preparations they use, psychotropic drugs, like the ones you described in your murder victim. Okay, that’s rational, that’s inside the, let’s say, protective circle of the scientific paradigm. We also believe that there’s stuff that traditional practitioners can do that’s outside that paradigm but still real. Okay, that’s cool, that’s how science works. We see a baffling phenomenon?radioactivity, life itself?we study the hell out of it and we figure out what shelf it goes on, fit it into the structure. Sometimes the phenomenon is so weird we have to expand the structure, what they call a paradigm shift. That’s what radioactivity did to physics, and that’s basically what we’re doing here, studying weird phenomena and trying to find out how to fit it in.” He grinned. “So, Detective, now you know the secrets of medical anthro. Any questions?”

  “Yeah. How do you explain Tanzi Franklin and what happened up in that apartment?”

  A helpless gesture. “I can’t really explain it. Not enough data. The way you tell it, as a starting hypothesis, the girl looked out her window and saw the killer. Let’s say the killer saw her. He finds her, he blows some powder on her, makes her extremely suggestible. He implants a suggestion: throw a fit and do weird stuff if anyone asks you what you saw. That’d be one explanation. It’d also be a partial explanation for why this guy is so hard to find.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are any number of traditions in which magic workers can render themselves invisible, and there are hundreds of anecdotal reports of shamanic invisibility by supposedly reputable observers. How do they do it? One answer is drugged suggestion of the observers. The other is the same way David Copperfield does it on TV, by technical illusion. Thus we stay inside the paradigm.”

  Paz looked at his notebook. “You said that there could be stuff that’s outside the paradigm but still real. What’s that about?”

  Nearing leaned back in his chair, with a humorous expression on his face. “Oh, now we come to the sticky part.” He waved his hand, taking in the office and the facility beyond. “This here is a scientific establishment. Medical anthro is tolerated as long as it plays by the rules, and the main rule is that the poor benighted heathens think they’re hexed and that belief produces psychosomatic symptomology. But the notion that magic has the same reality as, say, molecular bio or the germ theory of disease, no, we don’t go there, uh-uh. That’d be a completely different paradigm. To actually find out anything about it, you’d have to immerse yourself in it, actually become a practitioner, and then of course no one would take you seriously, because you would have lost your scientific objectivity. It’s a sort of catch-22.”

  Paz thought about Barlow, who was certainly operating under a different paradigm, especially in regard to this case. Something popped into his head and he flipped back through his notebook to his interview with Dr. Salazar and found what he was looking for. “You mean like Marcel Vierchau or Tour de Montaille.”

  Nearing’s ginger eyebrows shot up. “Hey, I’m impressed. You really did some homework.”

  “Is there anything in it? Vierchau, I mean.”

  “You read his book? No? Here, you can borrow mine.” Nearing reached unerringly into a pile of books and brought out a hardcover. “You can judge for yourself. In the field, it’s pretty much agreed he went off the deep end. For one thing, no one’s been able to find the people he said
he stayed with. The Russians haven’t got any records about them.”

  “So, what?he made it all up?”

  “Well, not entirely. Fieldwork is a tricky business. A lot of times you see what you want to see. Margaret Mead wanted to see girls growing up without sexual hang-ups and that’s what she brought back from Samoa. Bateson wanted to see family dynamics causing schizophrenia, so that’s what he brought back. Vierchau wanted a traditional people to have powerful magical weapons, he called it a ‘technology of interiority,’ and that’s what he found in Siberia. What the truth is …”

  Nearing broke off. Paz observed a dreamy look come over the man’s open face. Paz asked, “What is it?”

  Nearing snapped to. “What?”

  “You were someplace else.”

  Nearing gave an embarrassed laugh. “I guess. A little private magic. No, just thinking about Vierchau … I knew his ex-girlfriend in grad school. Her take on him was pretty much what I’ve suggested. Brilliant but flaky. She was quite a girl, though. You know, I’m happily married, two kids, but a week doesn’t go by without me thinking about her. She was a remarkable, remarkable woman. Not particularly gorgeous, but … she had something.” He laughed. “Magic, so to speak. I mention that because it might color my, um, let’s say negative opinion of Vierchau, and theories of that kind.”

  “What happened to the girl?”

  “She married someone else, a hot-shit poet, who I of course introduced her to. The guy was an old pal of mine and I was very happy for them. Broke my little heart. I got the feeling she never recovered from what happened in Siberia.”

  “Which was … ?”

  “Oh, he filled her full of shaman drugs, she had a breakdown, and apparently she kept slipping back into it. I heard she went to Africa, went crazy again.” He shook his head. “A damn shame.” He sighed. “Anyway, she died. Killed herself.”