Tropic of Night

by Unknown

  “I don’t know how he did it,” Paz admitted, “but Jane Does says she does, right in that paper. It’s African plant chemicals, and it’s also how he can get in and out of the crime scenes with no one noticing. He drugs them, he slips out of the car, does the crime, and then slips in when they come back and they think he’s been there all the time. They can’t recall anything he did, but they know he’s been there.”

  Barlow studied the photo. “Well, yeah, he does favor you a little. You’re prettier, though, if you want my opinion.”

  Paz snatched the photo back and put it away. “Go soak your head. It’s the guy.”

  Barlow looked at him with humor in his tin-colored eyes.

  “I think you just might be right. I think that’s the fella, too.”

  Paz experienced a rush of relief. He wanted to grab Barlow and kiss him. “Well, good,” he said, “I thought I was going crazy there for a while.”

  “Well, you got your bad points, but crazy ain’t one of them. Proving it’s going to be a whole ‘nother story, though. I’ll have to think on that for a while. Meanwhile, we’re not getting any closer to him sitting here on this road.”

  They drove back to La Guardia and flew uneventfully to Miami, arriving just after seven in the evening. Paz made some calls from their car en route from the airport and learned from the manager of the theater company that DeWitt Moore was staying at the Poinciana Suites, a low-rise stack of studios on Brickell. They went by there; he was out. They checked with the theater in the Grove; not around. So they went back to the PD, spoke to Mendés, told him that it was definitely the same guy did the New York murder and that they had some promising leads, but no real suspects, a strategic lie to avoid broaching the witch-doctor theory of the case. The detective chief did not press them, for he was up to his neck in what he considered a PR stunt, the housing and guarding of ready-to-pop women, 194 of them. The housing was in the Hotel Milano, a fourteen-story structure on Biscayne, that had been constructed somewhat too obviously with dope money and seized by the city as part of a narcotics bust. It had been vacant for months, while the city searched for someone who would run it as a hotel rather than a cash laundry, but it was still in reasonably good shape. Now the lights of the Milano blazed again, the air-conditioning was on, and cops from the whole city were engaged in moving women around. Paz thought it was a pretty impressive operation and that they were damned lucky to have the Milano; they might have had to use the Orange Bowl.

  Barlow went home. Paz went home, too, but left at about eight-thirty and parked in front of the Poinciana. There he smoked several big, slow maduro cigars, watching the people come in and go out. Moore had not shown by midnight, and Paz figured the man was out doing witch doctor shit, maybe with faithful Jane by his side, and would be gone all night. Or maybe the cops had got even luckier and Moore was going to fall by the Milano, which was guarded by two dozen heavily armed police. Paz went home, where he changed into shorts, drank two Coronas, and skimmed through the Salazar book on Santería. The main thing he derived was that people at the ceremonies hallucinated that they had been possessed by the orishas. He could deal with that. Could someone make another person have a hallucination through some influence, a … he searched for a term … posthypnotic suggestion? Possibly. The phrase had a nice scientific ring to it, anyway. Something real, like “myocardial infarct,” or “piezoelectric ignition.” Putting Salazar aside, he turned to the Vierchau book that Nearing had given him. He read the introduction with growing discomfort. Now he could see what Nearing meant; this guy was off the reservation. Vierchau seemed to be saying that hallucination could be induced from a distance, that these Chenka sorcerers could make you see things that weren’t there even if you were miles away. He read on, absorbed, disbelieving, becoming more and more restless.

  The phone rang. Checking the caller ID, he saw it was his mother. He knew what she wanted, and he didn’t feel like it. He left the apartment and drove down to the Miami River, where he kept his boat. His mother didn’t know he owned a boat, and would not have approved of it if she did, not this boat. It was a twenty-two-foot plywood thing, hand-built by a local, painted aqua. It was rough inside, a couple of bunks with raw foam slabs, a cooler, a Coleman stove and lantern, plywood cabinets. It was messy inside and out, but the 115-horse Evinrude that powered it was new and spotless. Paz cranked it up, ran it downriver to the Bay, and raced it around in circles for a couple of hours, until he was sure the restaurant had closed down. He felt better than he had in days, and wondered, as he always did after these marine jaunts, why he didn’t do it more often. Back home, he read Vierchau for a while and fell asleep in his white leather chair with the book on his chest.

  He was awakened at 4:45 a.m., by Mendés.

  “The fucker did it again,” said Mendés. Paz did not wonder which fucker and what he had done. He noticed, however, that the chief’s voice was uncharacteristically shrill.

  “Some woman didn’t go in.”

  “No, he did her right in the Milano. Get over here, now!” Click.

  Paz hung up the phone, got to his feet, and rubbed his face. He was not dreaming.

  They had the street blocked off in front of the Hotel Milano, and a dozen police vehicles of various sizes stuffed the access drive to the building. A helicopter flapped overhead, beaming its powerful light on nothing much, but looking good for the TV cameras. The media vans were being kept well away. Paz parked on Biscayne Boulevard, affixed his badge to the front of his jacket, grabbed his briefcase, and walked in.

  The lobby was full of cops, some of them in SWAT team gear, in case the perp decided to stop cutting up women with a knife and started blasting away with an automatic weapon. There was a continuing tinny susurrus of radio voices, but the police were moving, Paz observed, with an uncharacteristic hesitancy. The faces of many of them showed fear, bafflement, a profound, nearly existential doubt, something that the faces of cops never showed, in his experience. He got directions to the murder scene and proceeded to room 416, passing a fourth-floor corridor packed with more cops, crime-scene people, wailing women in nightclothes, and social worker types trying to keep the hysteria under control. Mendés looked as if it were he and not (as Paz soon learned) one Alice Jennifer Powers, aged twenty-two, unmarried white female, who had just experienced an evisceration. Mendés was talking to a couple of patrol lieutenants, so Paz went into room 416, finding, as he expected, Barlow already there.

  “Well, here we are again,” said Paz, looking at the meat on the bed, a chubby girl with short brown hair and skin that shone blue as skim milk. Like the others, she looked peaceful.

  “Any ideas how our boy got in here?”

  Barlow said, “We grope for the wall like the blind, we grope as though we had no eyes; we stumble in noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places, as dead men. Isaiah 59:10. That’s what we got to find out, Jimmy. All the fellas that were on duty tonight in the lobby, and the fella who was on this floor, they got them all down in the coffee shop. The chief wants us to interview them individually. There’s a little manager’s office down there you can use. I think I can handle the scene by myself.”

  “Yeah, we’re getting real good at it with all the practice. It looks just the same as the others, right?”

  “Not quite,” said Barlow. “He took the baby with him this time. Also, as you can see, this here room is a double. There was a woman sleeping right in the next bed. That’s how we knew. Woman got up to use the bathroom around ten of three and found her roommate like this. They got her under sedation.”

  Which meant she would not be available for questioning for some time. Paz thought that a small loss; it was unlikely that she would be able to tell them any more about the killer than Tanzi Franklin had.

  There were four cops waiting in the coffee shop, a sergeant named Mike Duval and three patrolpersons, Bobby Ruiz, Dick Laxfelt, and Mercedes Aparicio. They all looked up at Paz with an expectant air when he came in, as if he could save them. Paz took th
e sergeant first.

  Duval had been on the force for eighteen years and had a decent rep, which is why he had been given this peculiar job. He knew how to give a report, too, and Paz respected that, and let him speak.

  “Two-twenty-five: I’m behind the hotel desk with Aparicio, we’re going over the watch list for the next shift and I’m about to go check the foot posts, which I did every hour, more or less on the half hour, but varying, just to keep ‘em awake. I got a guy out at the service entrance, a guy out front?that was Laxfelt?and a guy by the elevator on each floor. Ruiz was the one on four. So, I look up and there’s this guy walking across the lobby toward the elevator bank, like he was a guest going to his room. I almost figured it was one of you guys, but he should’ve checked at the desk, and so I yelled at him, like, Hey, sir, where’re you going? And he waved at me and mashed the button. The doors opened and he went in. Just like that.

  “So, shit, I freaked, I got on the radio and alerted the floor posts we had an intruder, and called Laxfelt and asked him how the fuck he let this guy walk right by him, and he swore that there hadn’t been anyone by. He’s standing right at the front door, which is fucking made of glass, and I could see him standing there myself from the desk. He swears there was no guy. But we?me and Aparicio?we saw the guy. So I call for backup, I figure we’ll search every room. Meanwhile, we see from the indicator there that the car’s stopped at four, and I alert Ruiz, he’s getting off on four, and Ruiz says, over the radio, I see him, I got him. Then nothing. I can’t raise him. I get in the other elevator and go up to four. No Ruiz. So I’m shitting now. I hear the sirens. I take the car down to the lobby again. There’s Lieutenant Posada with ten guys and more are coming up the drive, so I tell him what’s happened, and we get set to search the whole hotel, every room, the service areas … we put two people on every exit. We search the rooms.” Here he took a deep breath. “We searched all the rooms on four, including 416. I looked in them myself. All sleeping, real peaceful. Same in the rest of the place. By this time it’s nearly four o’clock. That’s when the fucking house phone rings and it’s the woman in 416, screaming her head off.” Duval rubbed his big face and ran fingers through his hair. “And you want to know what the guy looked like, right?”

  “That might be helpful, Sarge.”

  “Yeah, well, the thing is, I can’t describe him. I looked right at him across a lobby, maybe twenty yards away, all the light in the world, and I can’t tell you if he was black, white, yellow, tall, short, fat, thin, or wearing a fucking Santa Claus outfit. I got no fucking memory of it. Okay, I thought I was going crazy, but Aparicio’s the same. It’s a blank, like in a dream; one second you’re there, you’re balling some terrific piece or whatever, walking on Mars, and the next you’re lying in bed and thinking, What the fuck … !”

  “Okay, I got that?also, just to make you feel better, we have evidence that this guy’s got access to all kinds of drugs, mind drugs?he could’ve sprayed something, who knows? What about Ruiz, what happened to him?”

  “Oh, Ruiz!” Duval snorted. “We found Ruiz in a utility closet about ten minutes after we found the girl. He looked like he was drunk or doped. Ruiz got a story too. I’ll let you get it from him.”

  Paz took Aparicio next, who confirmed her sergeant’s story in every detail, and then Laxfelt, who was completely baffled by the night’s events and mulish in his conviction that no one had come by him into the lobby. Ruiz was a thin, nervous kid, less than a year out of training. He had sweat beading on his forehead, and he chain-smoked Camel filters. Ruiz took up his story at the point when the elevator door opened.

  “I was in a crouch, with my weapon out. The door opens and this guy steps out. So I drop him flat. He goes down, no problem, and I cuff him. I call the sarge on the radio and I tell him, I got the guy, he’s cuffed. I search his pockets and sure enough, I find this knife …”

  “What kind of knife, Bobby?”

  “One of those wood-carving knives, an X-Acto, with a red plastic handle, and like a long scalpel blade in it. I bag that. Then the sarge comes up the other elevator with Dick. And they take the guy away. And Lieutenant Kinsey’s there, my shift loo, and he goes, great job and all, everyone’s slapping me on the back. I mean I remember this. It happened. And the loo goes, Hey, take the rest of the shift off, it’s all over. So I take my car back to the precinct, and change, and go home. I go to bed. And it’s like I’m having a dream, like a nightmare, there’s this smell, a sharp smell, and I’m in this dark place, cramped, like a coffin, but I’m standing up. And then … I realize, I’m not dreaming, I’m not in bed, I really am in a dark place, with this smell, like strong bleach. It was a maid’s closet on the fourth floor. I walk out and there’s cops all over the hallway and all of them looking at me, and Sergeant Duval goes, Where the fuck you been? My cuffs are still on my belt. The first thing I say is, You got the guy, right? You got the guy! And they look at me. And they tell me what went down.”

  Ruiz put his face in his hands, saying, “Ah shit! Ah, fuck it!” Dry sobs followed. Paz did his little talk about exotic drugs, but it did not seem to help. The perp had somehow stolen this kid’s sense of reality, and it was a violation like the rape of a virgin, but of the mind not the body, an incurable wound.

  Paz wound up the interview; Ruiz could not recall a face either, not a big surprise. Paz walked out of the hotel to get some air, but what air there was was full of fumes from the vehicles, both police and press. The copter chattered uselessly above. He sat down on a stone bench and looked through his notes as the sunrise lightened the horizon over the sea, the dawn of a day that no one in the Miami PD was anticipating with joy. He felt his phone ring.

  “Where’s your car?”

  Paz told him. “What’s up, Cletis?”

  “Call just came over TAC One. They found the baby.”

  “Where at?”

  He gave an address. “I’ll meet you at the car.”

  Ten minutes later, they pulled up in front of a foliage-clotted front yard on Hibuscus, behind which stood a two-story flat-roofed house built in the old Grove style, crumbling tan stucco over Dade County pine. A patrol car was parked there, its bubble-gum lights making weird patterns against the overhanging trees. As they left their car, an ambo from Jackson arrived, adding its own crimson flickerings to the scene. The young patrolman looked pale as he led them back to the yard.

  The baby, a female, was lying in the center of several blood-soaked sheets of the Miami Herald, yesterday’s edition, the sports pages. The top of its skull was placed neatly to one side, just above the shoulder, and the excised brain was on the other side. Early flies had taken an interest and there was at least one palmetto bug rooting around in the empty skull. Barlow spoke gently to the patrolman and sent him back to secure the street entrance to the yard. The crime-scene people arrived. Shortly thereafter, Echiverra from the M.E. showed up.

  Barlow said, “The owner and her family’s in the house. I’ll go talk to them. Woman named Dolores Tuoey lives in the garage apartment with her kid. Why don’t you take charge out here, talk to the garage lady, see if anything strikes you funny.”

  “Like what, a clue?” snapped Paz.

  “Hey, this is a break for us here, son,” said Barlow.

  “How do you figure that? Because he didn’t kill the mayor too?”

  “No, because he changed a successful pattern. He had us foxed six ways to Sunday the way he was going. We’re stumped, right? So why’d he change it? Why move the baby? Why’d he leave it here, of all places, and not a Dumpster or the bay? Think about it.” He walked away. Paz spoke to the crime-scene captain and to Echiverra, both of whom looked tense and frightened. There was no graveyard humor.

  Paz walked around the yard, trying to keep his vision clear. The back and the north side of the yard were blocked off by high hedges of croton, allamander, and hibiscus, whose pink flowers were just responding to the oncoming day. Besides the large mango, heavy with fruit, a guava, a key lime, and a lemon
tree also stood in the yard, perfuming the neighboring air. The lawn beneath them was rough and patchy but neatly clipped.

  A stir among the crime-scene people; they had found a liftable footprint on one of the patches of bare earth near the mango. Paz went and took a look. A nice print, the herringbone pattern of a good boat shoe. Paz showed polite interest, and strolled over to the garage that nearly closed off the third side of the yard.

  Paz looked up at the garage apartment. For an instant he saw a face at the window, then nothing. He walked away and then back again, slowly. He was not looking for anything physical now; the crime-scene people would pick up all that sort of thing, like the footprint, for whatever good it would do. He was thinking about what Barlow had just said. This was not a random dump. This was a message, important enough to the perp for him to risk carrying absolute for-sure death-penalty evidence around with him (on a bicycle!) between the Milano and Coconut Grove, with every cop in the city having no other thought but to grab his ass. He snapped another look at the window of the garage apartment. Again, nothing.

  Paz felt strange now. People were moving around him, talking, doing their technical tasks, but he felt as if they were wraiths, that he was the only real person in the yard. The colors of the flowers, of the brightening sky seemed more vivid than usual; he looked up. The clouds overhead were boiling, as they are shown to do in horror movies. Then things moved back in the direction of bland normality, without quite arriving. There was something about this place, this instant; he searched for a word one of his women had used … nexus? It all came together here, in this scruffy yard, not just the case, but in a way he could not begin to explain, his whole life. He walked up the stairs to the garage apartment. He knocked on the door.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Aknock at my door. I am busy stashing my Mauser, my journal, and the jar of Olo witch sauce back in my box. It’s funny that through all this, my absurd hegira, I have never thought about avoiding the police. Because I haven’t done anything wrong, except maybe sink my father’s boat, and use some bad paper. And kill Luz’s mom, I always forget that one, because I can’t feel it was very wrong to defend myself and Luz. Ifa cut her line and used me as his instrument. But clearly my husband wants the police involved with me, or he wouldn’t have decorated Polly’s garden with his latest victim. A test? Does he want to see if I will rat him out? Does it matter to him?