Night of the Jaguar (30 page)

They left the sheriff, after smearing a thin coat of bullshit on Finnegan and Ramirez, and while they were in the car, Paz called Victoria Calderón, and learned that the Consuela Holdings office was tem
porarily closed. Ms. Tuero, the secretary, was on leave at home until the surviving principals could decide how to proceed with this aspect of their affairs.

“How’re you doing so far?” asked Victoria after conveying this information, as well as the woman’s address and phone number.

“Pretty good. Just going through the police files. Like you said, they’re thinking Colombians.”

“And what’re you thinking, Jimmy?”

“Not Colombians. Or not only. And not on the phone. How do you like being the big boss?”

“I’d like it better if I knew what was really going on. Dad kept a lot of stuff in his head, and what wasn’t in his head was in Clemente’s.”

“Who is…?”

“Oh, Uncle Oscar, the old family retainer. I’m going to have to get rid of him or ease him out, and it’s going to make a mess, but he still treats me like he did when he was sneaking me candy, age six. The books make no sense. Money coming in and out with no paper attached, purchase invoices for stuff I never heard of, I mean big expenditures: three Daewoo grapplers for twenty-two grand a pop, thirty grand for a Hydro Ax feller-buncher, all kinds of other timber industry machines…”

“You’re in the timber business.”

“So it seems, but we’re not in the timber business as far as I know. We buy a lot of construction equipment, obviously, but all this other stuff is stuck in among the legitimate purchases. I mean, what’s a boring machine?”

“The opposite of an interesting machine?”

She laughed, a little harder than the remark warranted. “Oh, Christ, Jimmy, am I glad I found you! Do you realize I have no one I can talk to about this stuff?”

“Hey, what’s family for?”

“You laugh, but I mean it. Why did we buy a fifty-grand machine for making lots of holes in wood? I mean, it’s a furniture plant item. We’re all of a sudden in the furniture business, too? Also, it’s not just the crazy expenditures I worry about, it’s the income. There are huge
payments, I mean seven-figure entries, without any invoicing to show what we got paid for.”

“Another topic not to discuss on the phone,” said Paz.

Elvira Tuero lived in a modest apartment in a Souesera duplex, on a street familiar to Paz. It was just around the block from his mother’s ilé, which he took to be a good omen. They had called beforehand, and she had agreed to see them, somewhat reluctantly, it seemed to Paz. There was something frightened in her voice.

And in her face, too. Ms. Tuero was highly decorative, or had been: fashionable shoulder-length blond curls, helped out by chemicals, an attractive oval face, nicely plucked eyebrows over large dark eyes. She was wearing a loose white shirt, tight toreador pants (pink), and toeless gold slippers. Paz noted that her red nail polish needed fixing on both fingers and toes, and that there were unbecoming smudges under her eyes. She took them to the living room and sat them on a dark blue velvet couch, taking for herself an armchair covered in the same stuff, across from a coffee table in which beer coasters from many lands sat under glass.

“I don’t know what I can tell you,” she said. “I told the cops everything I could remember just after Mr. Fuentes died.”

“Yes, but memory is funny,” said Paz. “Sometimes we remember things after a while that we forgot right after the event. That’s why the police sometimes reinterview after some time has gone by.”

“Yeah, that’s what those guys said.”

“What guys?”

“A couple of men, day before yesterday. They said they were from the security firm working for Mr. Garza. They wanted to know about those people who came in the day before the, you know…”

“The murder, yes,” said Paz. “And what did you tell them?”

“Well, one of them mostly wanted to know about the shirt the white guy was wearing, the logo on it.”

“And did you recall what it was?”

“Not really, but then he started asking me was it this, was it that, and it kind of came back to me. To tell you the truth, I kind of wanted to get rid of him.”

“Oh? Why was that?”

“He was creepy, you know. Like if I didn’t answer right he would do something, or he wanted to do something mean. He sat too close, and stared, like I was lying. This was just one of them. The other guy asked the questions.”

“These were regular American-type people?”

“No. We spoke in Spanish, but they weren’t Cubans. Some kind of South American accent, but not Argentinean. I used to have a boyfriend from Buenos Aires. Not Mexican either. Venezuela, Colombia, like that.”

“I see. And what did you recall about this logo?”

“No, like I said, the guy
knew
about the logo, he described it to me and he just wanted me to say if I saw it in the office that day. It was a black T-shirt, with a big globe on it, the earth like they show you from space, the blue marble. And around the rim of it were some kind of teeth, like a gear in a watch, but green. And three letters in white on the globe and some writing below it. But he didn’t know what the letters were and neither did I. I hope this is the last time I have to go through this.”

“I’m pretty sure it will be,” said Paz. “Thank you for your time.”

“Because I won’t be in town. I’m going to stay with my sister up in Vero Beach. I don’t want anything more to do with this stuff. Those guys, ever since they came by I’ve been having nightmares.”

“What do you make of that, señor?” asked Paz when they were in the car again.

“Our Colombians are doing the same stuff we’re doing.”

“Not just that. They had another source for that logo, maybe something directly associated with the killings. They want whoever’s doing the jaguar act to stop, and they’re just figuring that the same organization that sent those guys to yell at Fuentes might have had something to do with killing him and Calderón. Very thorough, and it means they have information we don’t. Also, and this doesn’t go anywhere else, I just found out from my half sister that old Dad was running what looks to be a money Laundromat out of his construction business.”

“The plot thickens,” said Morales. “These guys were skimming, and the Colombians whacked them.”

Paz shook his head vigorously. “No, no, try to follow me here, Tito, because it’s important. The Colombians are involved, but not in the two murders. It’s the Indian who’s doing the murders. The Colombians are trying to nail the Indian.”

“How can you know that?”

“I don’t
know
it, Tito. It’s my operating theory. It’s part of my flair, why you guys wanted me involved. The Indian is part of the structure of weirdness, and Colombian mobsters are not. They’re probably as confused as Finnegan.”

“What? Jimmy, give me a break! You tossed out my ninja assassin, and now you tell me some little guy with a Three Stooges haircut got in there and did all that damage? How do you figure that?”

“If I tell you, you’ll say I’m nuts.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“The little guy knows how to turn himself into a four-hundred-pound jaguar and back again.”

Morales stared at Paz, laughed out loud, stared again when Paz didn’t join in the laugh, saw something in Paz’s eyes he had not seen before, something deeply disturbing, and said, “That’s nuts.”

“See? I told you you’d say that,” said Paz with a laugh. “Relax, I’m just jerking your chain. But I had you for a second there, didn’t I?”

“Fuck you, Paz,” said Morales glumly. “So why are the bad guys after the Indian? And how did he do the murders? Or was that a joke, too?”

“I don’t know how he did it yet, but that’s the way it has to be. Tito, I have seen, with my own two eyes, a man with a certain kind of training walk away from a whole SWAT team and out of a locked police car containing two veteran police officers, me being one of them. This Indian could be that kind of guy, you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Deeply weird,” said Morales.

“You got it, and the truth will emerge in its own good time. Meanwhile, we need to do two things right away. You have to go by the Florida Defenders of the Environment and find out what local group uses a logo like that and get whatever information they have on it,
personnel, activities, location. And you have to drop me off at my mom’s place. I need to talk to her.”

“We’re supposed to stick together, Jimmy.”

“Yeah, but I’m with my mother,” Paz replied. “How much trouble can I get into? Come on, Tito, we got to play catch-up. Those
chuteros
could wipe out that whole organization and then we’ll never find the Indian.”

Grumbling, Morales put the car in gear and headed toward Eighth Street and the restaurant. “They could take out the Indian, too,” he said. “Then we could all go home.”

“I don’t think so, man. I don’t think it’s going to be so easy to take out the Indian, not for them and not for us. That’s what I need to talk to my mom about.”

O
n Sunday night Nigel Cooksey told Rupert Zenger that there were Colombian gangsters in town with an interest in the Forest Planet Alliance. By Monday afternoon Rupert was gone, off to an important conference in Bhutan about the mountain forests of that nation, taking Luna Ehrenhaft with him and leaving Scotty in charge of the property, and the name of his attorney with Cooksey.

“Gosh, that was fast, just like you said,” observed Jenny at the gate of La Casita as the airport limo pulled away. “How come he took Luna?”

“Oh, Rupert needs a little entourage. And Luna, despite her bravado, has nearly as strong a sense of self-preservation as Rupert.”

“You’re kidding! Poor Scotty! No wonder he’s been moping.”

“Yes, but moping has always been part of Scotty’s demeanor. I think Luna was growing tired of it. She has something of an instinct for the alpha male.” He drew the gate closed and barred it. “He asked me to come as well, you know.”

“Really? Why didn’t you?”

“I prefer it here. Bhutan is utterly fascinating I’m sure, but I feel obliged to stay with my collections and…things. Nor am I particularly fearful of gangsters.”

“Do you really think they’ll come?”

“Oh, they’re here already.”

Jenny couldn’t help a quick scan of the surroundings. “What do you mean, ‘here already’?”

“Well, as you must know, Rupert’s tower provides the only view of the road over all our foliage, and while I was up there last night discussing this and that with him I happened to notice a large black van cruising by, more slowly than the empty road would require, and then it came by again and stopped briefly. We’re fortunate that there’s no road verge wide enough to park such a machine on Ingraham across from this house, but in any case, the van returned about an hour ago and is now parked just beyond the curve of the road.”

“Are you going to call the cops?”

“I think not. After all, what would we tell them? That an illegal alien bush Indian suspect in two murders intimated that, via mystic powers, he has sensed danger from a group of men innocently parked by the side of a public road? No, I believe we’re on our own for the present. However, they’re likely to wait until nightfall before making any attempt to interfere with us, and we are not without resources.”

They walked back to Cooksey’s rooms. Jenny felt somewhat stunned by these developments and silently wondered why Cooksey seemed so cheerful. Then she thought of something. “Oh, God, we should call Geli Vargos. They might go after her.”

“I’m sure Miss Vargos knows more about it than we do.”

“What do you mean, she knows?”

“I mean that your friend is the granddaughter of Felipe Ibanez, one of the principals of Consuela Holdings. Rupert told me last night.”

“I don’t understand. She was, like,
spying
on us?”

“Not at all. Rupert thinks it was something like guilt, a subject on which I believe he is by way of being an expert. Wealthy people who have grown rich from various forms of exploitation often have the urge to recover their self-respect through good works. Rupert, who as you may know was in public relations for a large oil company, is one such, and Geli Vargos seems to be another, although in her case it was the family fortune that bore the curse.”

“So she’s still on our side.”

“In a manner of speaking. I’m sure she still wishes us well, but now that there is real danger afoot, I doubt if she’ll go out of her way to help us if it’s to the detriment of her family. Or so Rupert believes.”

“He
knew
about this all along?”

“Oh, yes. He was quite upset when we all found out about the Consuela company’s plans for the Puxto from our little friend. Geli gave quite a lot of money to the organization, you know.”

“But the point for all of us was to
save
the rain forest,” Jenny cried. “How could he take money that came from cutting it down?”

“You’d have to ask Rupert that, and I’m sure you’d get a good temporizing answer. In any case, we have little time and we have to prepare this property to resist intrusion.”

“How? By throwing grapefruits?”

“Not quite. Scotty has a shotgun and a full box of shells. I think we can prepare some surprises for anyone creeping about in the dark. We’re in Scotty’s workroom if you’d like to join us.”

“Yeah, but first I got to tell Kevin about all this,” said Jenny, and she hurried off.

Kevin was lying in bed with the headphones on. The stink in the room made it clear that he had ignored Rupert’s clean-up-dope command. She obtained his attention by yanking his cable and, after the usual snarling from him, told her story, which he thought was hilarious, and he got in some zingers about how he’d been right all along about that Cuban bitch. She let this pass. When she told him about Cooksey’s plans and Scotty’s shotgun he said, “Big deal. I got a gun, too.”

“No you don’t.”

He reached quickly under the mattress, yanked out a big blued semiautomatic pistol, and waved it in her face. “Then what the fuck do you think this is? A pamphlet?”

“Where did you get it? And don’t wave it around like that.”

“Never mind where I got it. And fuck this pissy little operation anyway. I got something major going on.” He hopped out of bed and struck action-hero poses with the gun, crouching, whirling, pointing it clutched in both hands. She stared at his antics and with a part of her mind registered that he had obviously never had a pistol in his hands
before. Jenny herself had been raised among a population rich in guns of all kinds.

“What do you mean, major?”

“You’ll read about it in the papers. Oh, I forgot, you can’t read the papers.”

She let this slide by. In fact, although she didn’t read the papers, her reading had improved a good deal over the past months. “Kevin, you’re so full of shit. Did you ever even shoot a gun like that?”

“Fuck you, yes! And you know, the best thing about pulling this thing off is after tonight I am gone from here, baby, and I won’t have to listen to you putting me down anymore.”

“What thing, Kevin? What are you pulling off?”

He grinned and stuck the pistol in the waistband of his cutoff jeans. “A disciplined revolutionary never discusses operations with outsiders.”

“And probably doesn’t smoke dope all the time either. What’s the operation? This is something that skank Kearney thought up, isn’t it?”

“He’s not a skank,” said Kevin, “and Kearney’s not his real name.”

“Kevin, I don’t care what his name is. He’s nuts. And besides, you can’t go out anywhere now. Cooksey said there’s a bunch of gangsters watching the place.”

“Fuck Cooksey and fuck you. He’s an old lady anyway. I’m going.”

Jenny had another and stronger line of invective in her mouth, when she suddenly realized that she was not Kevin’s mother, and that scenes like this had undoubtedly played out while he was at home, with no good outcome. So she walked out of the cottage without another word and started for the tin-roofed shed where Scotty kept his workshop. Halfway there she stopped, turned on her heel, and walked back to the little parking area, where she opened the engine compartment of the VW van and deftly removed and pocketed the distributor rotor. As she walked past the pond, she saw that the surface was dotted with leaf-fall. Scotty hadn’t been skimming them lately. Nor, she recalled, had Rupert been keeping up with feeding offal to his piranhas. She paused to throw in a scoop of fish food from the big can placed there and watched the water boil as the population attacked the morsels. The piranha would have to wait. In fact, she found she didn’t much
care about them; let the sneaky bastards starve, she unecologically thought.

In the work shed she saw that Scotty was at his pipe cutter dropping short pieces from a length of two-inch irrigation pipe. Cooksey was mixing something in a washtub, a pink jellylike substance with a sweet stink.

She wrinkled her nose and asked, “What is that stuff?”

“A kind of napalm. Soap flakes and gasoline and a little diesel. Would you like to help?”

She nodded. Under his direction she began to disassemble twelve-gauge shotgun shells, placing the shot and the gunpowder into different containers and snipping out the primers with an aviation shears. Cooksey poured his mixture into bottles, which he stopped with rags. Then he began to construct small objects out of lawn mower throttle springs, strips of sheet metal, epoxy glue, and small nails. After she finished with the shells, she watched him work. It was obvious from the way his long brown fingers moved over the materials that he had done this kind of work before.

“What’re you making?” she asked.

“Booby traps. Scotty, have you one of your pipes ready yet?”

Scotty handed him without comment a length of capped pipe with a small hole drilled through the center of the cap. Cooksey unscrewed the cap and glued a shotgun shell primer into the opening with quick-drying epoxy, and then, using the same adhesive, attached one of his springed constructs to the side of the pipe. He replaced the cap and locked the pipe into a table vise. He attached a long piece of flower wire to the device and handed the free end to Jenny. “Go over there and pull on this,” he ordered.

She pulled, the catch snapped, and a nail came down on the primer, producing a satisfying small pop.

“Splendid,” cried the Professor. “I see it’s like riding a bicycle.”

“Where did you learn how to do this kind of stuff?” she asked.

“Ah, as a youth I ran off to join the Royal Marines, over my mother’s strenuous objection, I might add. I ended up in the Special Boat Service.”

“Simply messing about in boats?”

“Yes, but at a very elevated level. They teach one how to mess about with this sort of thing as well. As I will now teach you.”

Margarita Paz lived in a low-rise condo near Marti Park, a building old for Miami, and inhabited by respectable, elderly Cubans. She had once owned a house near her restaurant but had sold it a few years ago and moved here. This was vaguely attributed to Paz’s lax progenitive abilities. Who needed a house when it was clear it would never be filled with grandchildren? Her condo was on the top floor, with a nice view of the park, and she had purchased it for cash, because it was the kind of building that no savings and loan in Miami would have financed for a black woman. Literal cash: she had seen the ad, determined over the phone (in Spanish) that it was still available, and had within the hour walked into the real estate office with a small suitcase from which she had extracted neat bricks of one hundred $100 bills, thirty-one in all. The white Cuban person behind the desk had grown somewhat whiter at this display; if a comic-book thought balloon had appeared over her head at the time, it would have contained the word
narcolista
. The papers got signed without delay.

Paz directed Morales into the small parking lot, observed that his mother’s pale blue ’95 Coupe de Ville was in its stall, and bid farewell to his supervisor-companion. He rang at the outer door. No answer. He used his key. At her apartment door he rang again with the same result, and after a brief wait, he let himself into the small foyer. He called out, “Mamí, it’s me.” Nothing. Now a little prickle of concern.

In the foyer, on a small wooden stand was a half-life-size clothed statue of a black woman holding a paler infant. The woman wore an elaborate silver crown, and there were silvered metal rays emanating from behind her gown of blue brocade, which was covered with silver embroidery depicting shells, fish, and other marine life. Below her feet tossed plaster sea waves, from which emerged a miniature steel anchor. When Paz was a little boy, this image had been a cheap framed poster; later, that had been replaced by a plaster statue, and then another more elaborate one, and finally this one, probably the most luxurious available image of La Virgen de Regla, aka Yemaya, the
orisha
of maternity and of the sea, to whom his mother was dedicated in
Santería. As a little boy he’d imagined it was a representation of Mom and himself.

The living room, which he now entered, was furnished in pale pink velvet and mahogany, heavy, expensive pieces—a tall breakfront, a long couch, armchairs, a coffee table inlaid with a marine scene in pale woods. The lamps on the side table were plaster sculptures, whose pale silken shades were protected by clear plastic. Mrs. Paz, in a flowered blue robe, was lying on the couch like a corpse, one arm and one foot resting on the floor, a copy of
People en Español
fallen from her slack hand, reading glasses dangling from one ear. Her breath came in snorts and hisses.

Paz had not seen his mother asleep all that often, despite having lived in her house for eighteen years. In his mind she was always up and pushing, often pushing Paz as well, full of angry energy focused on never, ever, falling back into the nothing from which she had finally emerged. Here was the consequence: utter exhaustion. Paz was struck by a tender compassion and was wondering whether to tiptoe out and leave the poor woman in peace when she suddenly awoke. A lightning flash of fear appeared on her face when she knew that she was not alone, and then, when she observed who her visitor was, she quickly reassembled her normal stern mask. She made her glasses vanish, sat up, and said, “What?”

“What do you mean, ‘what?’ I’m your son, I’m visiting you on your day off.”

“Do you bring Amelia?”

“No, she’s still at school. Look, Mamí, the reason I came is I need your help.”

“Money?”

“No, money’s fine. This is a spiritual thing.”

Eyebrows climbed on her dark face. “I’ll make coffee,” she said and left for the kitchen.

They sat there at the old, chipped enamel-topped table he recalled from their days of poverty, drinking her bitter brew, and he told her about the dreams, his and Amelia’s, of the spotted beast, and about what he thought was happening to his wife, and how he had given the
child the charm, the
enkangue
he had received from her years ago.

“That wasn’t wise,” she said when she heard that. “
Enkangue
are made for one person.”