Valley of Bones jp-2 Page 7

  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 theMiami 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.”

  “Youmade 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 letyou 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 inmy mind,” said Paz, and then had an uncomfortable feeling. “Why do you ask?”

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

  “A guest in the hotel. Flew in from Mexico City three days before he died. Some kind of Arab businessman is what I gathered from his stuff. A Sudanese passport.”

  “Uh-huh. I got a call about the case.”

  “Oh?”

  “You know I used to be with the Bureau.”

  “Yes, sir, I heard that.”

  “The call was from a guy who works for the people who watch certain individuals from that part of the world. At the Bureau, I mean. This Jabir Akran al-Muwalid was on a watch list.”

  “That’s interesting. Did he say why they were watching him?”

  “Not really,” said Oliphant brusquely, discouraging curiosity. “He was mainly interested in knowing if it was really him, Muwalid. I had the file faxed up to D.C. He also wanted to know if the woman, the suspect, was going down for it. Is she?”

  “That’s not up to me, sir, but you read the file: I can’t see how we could deliver a more unbreakable case. What’ll happen at trial…” Here Paz shrugged elaborately. “She’s a wack job wa
s my take on her. Talking about mystic voices. She might try an insanity defense, I don’t know.”

  “That would be a long shot, in my opinion,” said Major Oliphant. “But it might strengthen the case if we had a good sense of what the connection was between them. She say anything about that?”

  “Only that the vic was her enemy and that he’d done some bad things back home in Africa. I gathered she was talking about massacres and stuff, war crimes.”

  “Uh-huh. She elaborate any on that? What went down in Africa?”

  “No, sir, not to me. But she’s writing out what she calls a confession.”

  “Really. What does it say?”

  “Well, actually I haven’t seen it yet. She says she has to write it in a special kind of notebook.” Paz had a certain expression on his face when he said this, and Oliphant’s eyebrows rose.

  “Oh,that kind of confession.”

  “It’s a good bet. She’s a total loon.”

  “Mm. Be that as it may I’d feel more comfortable with a fatter file. More of the background. So follow up, her movements, her background, the vic’s movements. It’d be nice to paint a picture she had a major hard-on for this character and was lying in wait. That would speak against the insanity plea.”

  “Okay, sir, I’ll get on it. Was that all?”

  Oliphant nodded. Paz rose, and the major said, “And thanks for the…” He gestured to the bag.

  “Churros, sir,” said Paz helpfully, and left.

  Back at his desk, Paz found the bay had filled with its usual complement of detectives and cops and clericals, and that the usual noise of telephones and talk and clacking machines had replaced the quiet of a few minutes before. Paz’s mind was also considerably less quiet than it had been. All right, the partner business, put that to one side, he’d deal with that in some way. What bothered him was Oliphant’s interest in a firmly closed case. Bosses were normally interested only in open cases, and in these mainly when there was some political pressure to catch some particularly egregious villain, someone, for example, who had made the grave error of killing a white person in the state of Florida. They were interested in closed cases only when there was some suspicion that a cop had screwed up, had, for example, dropped a gun to cover a bad shooting, or strong-armed a witness into perjury. But Paz knew the Dideroff collar was Tide clean, so that couldn’t be it.

  So it was the FBI connection, someone in D.C. was interested in his little grounder. And interested in seeing Emmylou Dideroff go to prison, maybe to a berth on death row. Okay, let’s take another look at Ms. D. He pulled a file from the vertical rack on his desk. He read through the A form, the arrest affidavit in the case, the initial summary of why the cops thought the arrestee had in fact committed the crime. Then he read the transcript of the interview tapes he’d made with the woman, and as he read them there arrived in his mind the memory of what had happened in that interview, what he had seen. Or thought he had seen. And then came the intense desire never to look her in the face again. Suppress that. Divert to something else: ah, here was a search warrant. With relief he fled the office to do some police work.

  The address on the warrant led him to a houseboat moored on the Miami River, in an undesirable location shadowed by the East-West Expressway overpass. The houseboat was an undistinguished mass-produced unit, flat-bottomed, flat-roofed, made from peeling beige fiberglass. He stepped down onto its deck and broke open the jalousied aluminum cabin door. Inside, a plain Formica table with a philodendron in a clay pot in its center, some aluminum and nylon mesh deck chairs, a stove, a sink, a small refrigerator. A long padded seat ran over storage cabinets on the opposite bulkhead. Yellow plaid curtains, much faded, covered the windows, mellowing the sunlight that passed through them. Paz checked the storage and the pantry and the refrigerator and found only the usual kitchen equipment and linens and food: no drugs, no guns. The one berth was forward, a tiny place with barely room for a double bed. The storage here was built into its base. Paz tossed it quickly, finding only a simple selection of clothes?straight cotton skirts, Tshirts, one cotton sweater, cotton socks, cotton underwear, all with low-end labels from Penney’s and Kmart. In a plastic bag was what looked like a cook’s apron, a gray wool dress, a white scarf, and a pair of high lace-up black boots. A cheap slicker hung from a peg.

  Was he missing something? No, the occupant seemed to be the only woman in South Florida with no bathing suit, no shorts. No suntan oil or makeup either, on the shelves in the tiny toilet-shower room. Hairspray, though, which seemed a little out of place for a woman with two inches of hair. He checked the can, shaking it, and did not hear the little ball rattle. Uh-oh. A hard twist and the top came off, revealing a wad of currency. But it was only two hundred and some dollars, what you would expect a working stiff without a bank account to have squirreled away.

  Back in the bedroom, Paz stood for a moment in thought, as he always did in such situations?home of victim, home of suspect?and tried to feel the character of the occupant. The place was first of all spotless. Paz had done a hitch in the marines, and he believed that the boat would have passed an inspection by any gunnery sergeant in that organization. And he had also been in any number of women’s dwelling places and he had never seen one so sparse. The woman owned next to nothing. He knelt on the bed and examined the contents of the box shelf behind it. Books first: a New American Bible in the paperback study edition, much thumbed and containing numerous bookmarks. If the distribution of these were any indication, then Job and the Gospel of John were her favorites. A book written in Arabic script, also heavily thumbed, with gilt edging, that Paz supposed was the Quran. A life of Catherine of Siena, and theDiscourses by that saint, and a Penguin edition of the autobiography of Teresa of Avila. A thin book with crumbly yellowed pages calledFaithful Unto Death: The Story of the Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ, by Sr. Benedicta Cooley, SBC, and a paperback of Simone Weil’sGravity and Grace, quite worn. Paz leafed quickly through each book. In the Weil he found a Polaroid photo. It showed a white woman in the center of a group of a dozen or so very tall, very black soldiers, with a background of thin tree trunks and dark foliage. The white woman was deeply tanned and wore a blue mechanic’s overall and a white scarf covering her hair, like the headdresses worn formerly by nurses or currently by some nuns. The woman and the soldiers were all grinning at the camera, the teeth and eyes of the latter startling against skin that was almost purple. The soldiers were dressed in ragged khaki tunics, shorts, and sandals. They had bandoliers crossed on their chests, and they were brandishing AKs and big dark rifles of an older design. Paz took a folding hand lens from his pocket and brought it to the photo. As he had expected, the woman was Emmylou Dideroff. The surprise was that all the soldiers were young women. He slipped the photo into his pocket and resumed his search.

  The books were held in place by half a brick on one side and a big pink conch shell on the other. There was a large-beaded rosary sitting in the opening of the conch, as if it had been spawned there, a disconcerting sight. Behind the books was a cheaply framed photo of a statue of a woman in three-quarter view. Her head was swathed in a nun’s veil, the face strongly featured and beautiful, with remarkable long, narrow eyes that seemed to be squinting against the sun or focused on some inner reality. Paz thought he’d seen those eyes somewhere, but he couldn’t quite connect them to a person. Stuck between the glass and the frame was a color photo of a handsome freckle-faced woman wearing a white apron, white headdress, and gray dress, standing in front of an elaborately carved doorway. A nun of some kind, and Paz had the cruel thought, What a waste! The woman was hotter-looking than nuns were supposed to be.

  Next to the big seashell was a small, free-standing crucifix. Paz picked it up and examined it closely. It was finely carved from some dark, hard, and heavy wood. The corpus was not shown peacefully expired, as in most such items, but writhing in agony, the body twisted nearly into an S, each individually carved finger curled to indicate pain. The crucifying nails were act
ual metal nails, driven through the wrists rather than into the conventional palms. He was excruciatingly thin, ribs and joints staring, and he had a Negro face, with the cheeks marked with parallel scars. Paz felt the skin prickle on his neck when he saw this. First that weirdness in the interview room, now Africa, again. And he thought also that, although the figure was not strictly realistic, the artist was not just using his imagination. It looked almost as if the artist had sculpted from life, as if he had actually seen a crucifixion. He found a canvas suitcase and loaded it with the personal items and books, including the money. It was none of his business whether the woman lost all this through theft, as was almost inevitable on the river, but for some reason he could not bear for someone who had so little to lose the little she had.

  A motion of the boat snapped Paz out of this unpleasant reverie. Someone had come aboard, and now a voice called out, “Can I help you?”

  Paz emerged from the sleeping cabin to confront a soft-looking man of about forty with a buzz cut over an undistinguished set of white-bread American features. His eyes were uncertain and nervous behind horn-rimmed glasses, and he held his right hand out of sight.

  Paz slowly withdrew his badge wallet from his breast pocket and showed his ID.

  “Paz, Miami PD. Who’re you?”

  The man leaned forward and examined the credentials for longer than most people did when so confronted. Seemingly satisfied, he straightened and brought his other hand into sight.

  The man said, “I’m David Packer. This is my boat.”

  “You’re renting it to Emmylou Dideroff?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and then his brow knotted with concern. “Hey, did anything…I mean, is she okay?”

  “She was fine the last time I saw her. How is she as a tenant?”

  “Perfect. Doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, doesn’t have skanky men come by all the time, or dope parties, like the last one I had in here. No broken glass. So if she’s okay, how come you’re here?”