Valley of Bones (10 page)

Lorna arrives at her house, a stuccoed ranch in South Miami, enters it, and cranks up the window air conditioner in the living room, pausing a moment to stand in front of a chill blast. The living room is simply furnished—a Bahama sofa covered in beige Haitian cotton, a glass-topped coffee table, several canvas butterfly chairs in pale lemon, a cotton rug on the hardwood floor. Lorna’s taste in painting runs to witty surrealism, and there are several pictures on the walls, all bought at art fairs in Coconut Grove. She goes into her bedroom and takes off all her clothes. It is cool in the bedroom because she runs the AC continuously from May to November, twenty-four/seven. Into the bathroom then, where she takes a quick, tepid shower and turns her eyes away from the black mildew springing from the tiles and the ceiling.
A Guatemalan lady comes once a week, but she does not do mildew and neither does Lorna.

Naked but for a yellow towel, she goes into the kitchen and makes herself a gin and tonic, with a whole Key lime from the tree in the backyard, and drinks half of it down. Gasping a little, she returns to the bedroom and dresses in a light cotton shirt and bermudas. Then she goes into her office.

Lorna is a freelancer who works out of her home. The office is the largest room in the house, assembled by knocking out the wall between the second bedroom and what locals call the Florida room, a kind of enclosed stone-floored patio separated from the back garden by glass jalousies. From her desk she can look out through these to the croton bushes and yellow allamanders of the backyard. She sits in her swivel chair and enjoys this view, and the sound of birdsong, sipping her drink.

It is a strong one and she has not had anything for lunch. In a few minutes the buzz comes on. She relaxes and feels her face start to numb up. Doctors now recommend a drink a day as being good for the heart, she recalls (for she is an assiduous reader of medical advice), and drinks some more, enjoying the slosh and knock of the ice cubes against her teeth. She feels now the pleasant sense of accomplishment that eluded her upon leaving Dr. Lopez’s office. Howie has been put in his place, an alliance with Lopez on a case, a professional opportunity to explore what could be a new species of craziness, maybe even a suggestion for a whole new subscale for the MMPI-2. That would really make her name in the world of psych testing.

Musing thus, she casts her eye around her office and finds it good. She has a large modern birch desk, an almost new computer with all the accessories, an expensive desk chair with lumbar adjustments, and lots of books. Except for a swath of wall devoted to diplomas and professional certifications, all the wall space is taken up by bookshelves. Lorna buys her clothes (nor are there many of them)
on sale, takes few vacations (and these to the cheaper nearby islands), drives a six-year-old car. Her only luxuries are medical examinations and books. She has over four thousand volumes, and she has read them all, some of them twice. There is a teetering stack on a side table, books she has read but not shelved. She is about to stand up and shelve them, a practice that gives her a keen pleasure, when she notices that the light on her answering machine is blinking. She punches the button. The mechanical man in the device tells her she has three messages.

Betsy Newhouse’s light voice: “Kiddo. Your reminder call—four-thirty at the gym. Be there or be pear.” Beep. “Hi, it’s me. Nice seeing you today. Give me a buzz. I’ll buy you a salad.” Kasdan, the rat bastard. Beep. An unfamiliar but pleasant voice says: “Dr. Wise, this is Detective Paz, Miami PD. I was the arresting officer in the Emmylou Dideroff case, and I’d like to talk to you about her. You can reach me anytime on my cell phone.” He gives a number and hangs up.

Lorna reaches for the phone and starts to dial this number, if only to stop herself from calling the rat bastard
instantly,
then stops and hangs up. She has to think about this for a moment first. Paz is the cop Sheryl was talking about, the voodoo one, the potential date. She knew he had the arrest on Emmylou, but what could he possibly want with her?

Then, like a shark fin on a night ocean, a thought breaks the surface of her mind. The story about a new wrinkle in abnormal psych was enough to convince Mickey Lopez, and was a good story to tell herself, and might even turn out to be true. But that is not the reason she very much wants to (and, she just now realizes, is positively
driven
to) continue with Emmylou Dideroff. She now realizes, with a feeling that mixes wonder and dismay, and includes a funny hollow just below the belt line, that she has no idea what this reason is. Suddenly she is terrified, nothing to do with the case, she is convinced that there is someone else in her house. She freezes, listens. Someone breathing, a heavy rasping sound…or is that the air conditioner?
Now she is in full panic mode, heart pounding, sweat springing freely. The sense of an alien presence is undeniable, it’s in the room, it’s right behind her. Her heart feels like it’s bursting through her ribs. She lets out a gasp and spins around in her chair. Nothing.

It takes her the better part of an hour and two Valium to feel herself again. A panic attack, maybe a little fallout from the tension of the earlier meeting. So she tells herself, speaking aloud in the empty house. Her hands have stopped shaking now, and she picks up the telephone.

JIMMY PAZ FELT
his cell phone vibrate against his hip but ignored it, allowing the voice mail to pick it up. He was standing in the auditorium of Miami-Dade Community College in a long line of people, all of whom were carrying copies of the same book. They were all waiting to get their copies signed by a pale young woman seated behind a table on the stage. The woman had marvelous corkscrew curls of red gold that glittered like a nest of Slinkys under the stage lighting. Her features were sharp and her eyes small and a little too bright, but she had a broad sensuous mouth. A few minutes ago she had finished reading from her poetry.

He arrived at the table and handed her the slim volume. She looked up, gave him the same nice smile she’d given to the fourteen people ahead of him, and said, “What should I write?”

“Whatever you want,” he answered.

She wrote. He picked up the book and turned to the title page, where she had inscribed:
Come up to room 923 at the Grand Bay tonight at about eleven and I will fuck your brains out. Best Wishes, Willa Shaftel.

“Do you write that kind of thing in everyone’s book?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said. “That’s how you get to be a best seller.”

“Then I better get in line right now,” he said and, waving, took his leave.

Willa Shaftel had been one of Jimmy Paz’s three main squeezes
for a year or so, back when she’d worked as a librarian in Coconut Grove. Then she’d left and gone to Iowa on a writing fellowship, and when the first winter hit she’d spent three weeks in Miami, most of it with Paz and most of that in bed. During that time she had inveigled the story of how Paz had caught the Voodoo Killer, as well as details about the various ancillary characters attached to the story, and she had written a fairly successful novel about it, and no longer had to work in libraries. She came during the succeeding winter too, staying for six weeks this time, during which they saw each other nearly every day. Paz had never been deeply into fidelity, but after that he had found himself unwilling to look very hard for alternates. He’d even spent some long weekends at her tiny apartment in Ames, Iowa, a place nearly devoid of Cuban coffee.

Now he thought about her mouth. She really did have a most excellent mouth, and a hot skillful tongue, and she was the most actual fun to fuck of any woman he had ever known. He thought this might be the basis of a relationship more serious and permanent than any he had engaged in before. And she had spent a year in Spain studying Lorca and spoke a peculiar but elegant form of Spanish. No breasts to speak of, but she got along fine with his mother. All in all…

By this time he was out of the building facing the main plaza of the campus, which was tricked out in decorations and awninged booths for the book fair. Avoiding a mime, he found a little coffee bar, ordered a café con leche, and took out his cell phone. The voice mail service had a number of messages on it, only one of which was worth replying to just now.

“Dr. Wise? Detective Paz here. Thanks for returning the call.”

“Uh-huh. Why…I mean, excuse me, I mean what can I do for you, Detective?” said the voice. Nice voice, he thought, husky, but a little slurred. And somewhat breathless. A few predinner cocktails maybe?

“This is about Emmylou Dideroff. I was the arresting officer on the case.”

“Yes, you said.”

“Well, she’s writing a confession.”

“That must’ve made your day.”

“Not really,” said Paz, starting to get a little annoyed. “I mean if she’s crazy, the confession doesn’t do anything for us. But it wasn’t, I mean it’s not a regular confession. She asked for a bound notebook, the schoolroom kind, not a spiral. I got her four of them at Staples. She wants to write down all her crimes, she says.”

“She’s delusional,” said Lorna. “As a matter of fact, she mentioned a confession in our interview, but in any writing she does it’s going to be hard to distinguish fantasy from what really happened.”

“Just what I thought,” said Paz brightly. “That’s why I called you.”

“I see. And why me specifically? I mean there are a zillion shrinks in Miami, and a lot of them are on government payrolls already. And I guess you know I’m not a psychiatrist.”

“Yes, Doctor, I know. I’m a detective. The reason is I wanted someone independent, not an employee of the criminal justice system. So I happened to run into Leon Waits because I yanked one of his troopers for the detective squad, and he was giving me heat over it, and I remembered that his wife was some kind of therapist and I asked him could I call her and get a recommendation, and I did and the first name she came up with was you. And then I checked the file and found you were on the case already. It was magic. So the question is, will you do it?”

There was a pause on the line and what sounded like a sigh. “Do what?”

“Just read what she writes. Help me figure out what’s what from a psych perspective. We’ll get you a rate from the department. I cleared it already.”

“Okay, right, but what I don’t understand is why you’re so concerned with Emmylou Dideroff. I mean is this something to do with clearing the case? Getting a conviction? Because if that’s the situation, then I’m not sure I—”

“No, it has nothing to do with the murder we got on board now.”

“Then what does it have to do with?”

“Are you using a cordless phone?”

“Yes, why?”

“And I’m on a cell. I don’t want a guy who ordered some electronics off the Internet listening in on this. We can talk at the party.”

“What party?”

“Tomorrow. At Sheryl and Leon’s. You’re coming, right?”

She laughed for what seemed to him no particular reason, quickly stifled.

“How did you know?”

“I told you, I’m a detective,” he said. “See you there.”

D
O YOU HAVE
any brains left,” she asked into his ear, “or shall we continue?”

“No, I think you got the last neuron,” said Paz. “And let me say that was quite a performance. Don’t they have fucking in Iowa?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Willa Shaftel disdainfully. “All I do is read and write. No, I tell a lie. Writers are horny creatures, and I have dabbled, but one has always the sense that they’re collecting material, and that your every spasm is going to wind up in some novel.”

“As mine did in yours, I couldn’t help noticing.”

“Oh, yeah, but that wasn’t serious. It was just to make a shitload of money so I could escape from the poet’s poverty ghetto.” A long sigh. “My God, I haven’t been truly
nailed
like that in a coon’s age.” She stretched luxuriously and picked several of his chest hairs from her exiguous breasts.

“My pleasure,” he said. “Anyway, you did good writing. I liked that line about the herds. ‘There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing.’ ”

“ ‘Through them the belled herds travel at will. Long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.’ Yes. Did you actually read the whole book?”

“Yes, but the words don’t stick in my mind the way they do when
you say them. It’s because I’m still in touch with the primitive oral tradition.”

“As you so amply demonstrated this evening,” she said. “Is this paradisical or what?” she asked the world. “He’s not a wuss, packs a rod, and likes my poetry. A ten.” She laughed and hoisted herself up on an elbow to look at him more closely. He had a more sober expression on his face than she was used to seeing there.

“Something the matter?” she asked.

“No.” Meaning yes. “I was just thinking about something you said once. You were going on about how great I was, like you just did, one of your complimentary litanies…”

“Complimentary litanies is good.”

“Yeah, all about how I was polite but not a sensitive New Age man, buy a girl champagne, show her a good time, a great lay, albeit with a penis of only moderate size, and then you said there was a forty-foot-wide state highway sign over me that read
DON’T GET SERIOUS
, or something like that.”

“Yes,
DANGER! HEARTBREAK AHEAD
. I remember. It was the night of one of the murders, when I went out to the crime scene and got you in trouble.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I was thinking that I should take down the sign.”

“Really.”

“Yes, and you remember something else you said around back then, about Afro-Cuban-Jewish babies. When you were leaving for Iowa?”

“Ye-es?” Cautiously.

“Well, we should have some.”

Her mouth dropped momentarily and then she laughed. “Jimmy Paz, are you
proposing
to me?”

He swallowed. Most of the blood seemed to be gone from his forebrain. “In a manner of speaking. The fact is that for, what is it now, fourteen months, you’ve been my only, I guess you could say, girlfriend. I think about you a lot, and not just lustful stuff…anticipation. And I’ve been thinking, okay, if not now, when?” He paused
to check out her face. Paz was a professional judge of facial expressions, but he couldn’t quite read hers now. Her eyes were wide, bright, and sharply focused, and there was a faint rosy blush on her cheeks. Romantic fascination? Or horrified traffic-accident fascination? He added, “I mean I didn’t get a ring or anything. I wanted to sound you out first.”

“That was wise,” she said. “But then prudence has always struck me as one of your virtues.” She groaned softly and wriggled half-upright, so that she was leaning against the headboard. “Gosh, I’m a little stunned. I had no idea. I mean, I thought we were great fuck-buddies and all, and now this. But it’s not just
time,
is it? Not just, ‘But at my back I always hear…’ ”

“ ‘Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near.’ No, not completely. I changed, more than I thought I had, since that summer, you know, with the killings. I used to—I mean this can’t come as a surprise to you—have multiple girlfriends.”

“Yes, I recall, having been of their number.”

“Right. Three, four, five at any one time, up front about it and all, no sneaking, and either it was right for them or not, but I played it pretty straight, and I don’t think anyone got hurt. Fun and games for healthy young adults, right? But since…what happened and all that, I don’t know. I tried to, like, get back on the circuit, but nothing doing. I couldn’t…I mean fun and fucking and fun…I started to feel like a jerk, like one of those assholes out on the Beach, forty-eight, on their second peel job, with the Tom Jones shirt and the gold chains. That’s not me. So what is? And like I just said, the more I started thinking about that, the more I started thinking about you.”

“And why me particularly, from out of the thousands? Now’s the time for any litany of compliments you may have prepared.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I like you. We’re funny together. You got your own life, you wouldn’t be hanging on me to make you feel like a real person. Some of the people I work with have wives like that.” He paused and added, “My mom likes you.”

“Oh,
there’s
a selling point!”

“Laugh if you want, but Margarita is a great judge of people. Plus you’re not
like
her.”

“No, I’m not. Continue…”

“You’re smart as shit. You tell me poetry out of your head. I love your hair. And your skin. And your mouth. You have the hottest mouth in the world. And, finally, I believe I can say without fear of contradiction that we are sexually compatible.”

“Mm. Of course, it’s easy to be sexually compatible when there’s nothing else on the table.” Ten seconds later, without warning, she expelled a loud sob and then began to cry woefully.

Paz sat up in bed and held her while she trembled and dripped tears and snot down his chest. “What’s wrong? What’d I say?” he kept saying, but for once she couldn’t find the words.

A little later, when she had gone to the bathroom and washed her face and dressed in the hotel’s white terry cloth robe, she sat down on the edge of the bed and said, “Well, that was unexpected. I’m sorry.”

“No problem. Let me guess. You like me, but not enough to marry me, and you didn’t want to hurt my feelings. I’m assuming now it wasn’t tears of happiness and we’re going to rent the hall.”

“No and no. No hall. And no, it’s not about you at all. Oh, how to explain this so it doesn’t sound like total lunacy? Come on, Shaftel, use your vaunted word power! It’s like this: I don’t have a heart. No, that’s wrong, I have, but not one like you have. Not like regular people.”

“Like the tin woodman?”

“Almost. The part that in normal people is occupied by living in a couple, loving, having children, making a home, is consumed by what I do. I fall in love, I have affairs. Hell, I’m in love with
you,
if it comes to that. You’re my absolutely favorite man in the world right now. But it doesn’t
mean
anything, Jimmy. Because I’m never going to
be
any different than I am now. All the growth and change is going to be in connection with the poetry and not within a couple. It’s
a little like being a nun, the kind that gets bleeding palms. And, you know, I’m on my super very best behavior when I’m with you. You haven’t seen it working, when it’s really voracious, when I stop washing and combing my hair and talking to people, and I eat cold chili out of a can. I’m talking weeks here. I’d kill a baby, I really think I would, just leave it in a car or in the bath and forget about it, like you read about.”

“What, that’s a rule, poets don’t have kids?”

“Few do, and the ones they have are generally sad ones. It’s probably not as bad for males. They can have
wives
. You’re not a wife. Shit, I don’t know, maybe it’s the ghost of Sylvia Plath. Or Virginia Woolf…”

Paz stared at her. Virginia Woof? Fuck Virginia Woolfe! She was
rejecting
him? Fucking blowing him off? Smash her face. Smash her, break her nose, knock out her teeth, this fucking fat, white bitch this fucking
gusano
maggot was rejecting
him
? Stick his gun up her fucking
cunt…

“Jim
eeeee
!” A high wail, a shriek.

Somehow Willa had slid off the bed and was now cringing in the corner of the room, on the other side of the night table. Her face, normally pale, was skim milk blue, except for heavy red marks around her neck and her eyes were rimmed with tears.

“What!” he cried. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s
wrong
? Jesus Christ, Jimmy, I thought you were going to kill me. It was like fucking Jekyll and Hyde. You grabbed my neck and you had your fist all balled up and cocked and you had an expression on your face…it was like something out of my goddamned
book
.” She rose shakily to her feet. “I guess you’re back to normal now, ha ha. What happened? A little problem with handling rejection?”

But Paz had no desire to return to badinage. He felt a wash of self-contempt, mixed with confusion and not a little terror. He started grabbing up his clothes and jamming his limbs into them. He was
sticky and badly wanted to take a shower, but it didn’t seem the thing to do just then.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I drove you literally crazy.”

He stopped and looked at her. “No, I’m the one should be sorry. I don’t know what the fuck just happened, but I don’t think I should be alone with you right now. I’ll call you,” he said, picking up his jacket. He started for the door and then made himself stop and give her a nice hug.

“Shouldn’t we sort of talk about this?”

“Nah, I don’t think so. Sorry.”

“The search for Miss Right begins immediately?”

“I guess.” He embraced her again. “No hard feelings, Willa,” he said into her hair. “You’ll send me your next book.”

“I’ll do that,” she said to his back and the closing door.

PAZ WENT TO
his car and sat there for a while, watching his hands tremble. Gradually this passed as the rationalizing part of his mind, an industrial-strength unit, reinterpreted what had just occurred into something more normal, a mere flash of anger, mistaken by a hypersensitive and overimaginative woman as being something weird and alien. This done, he fell into a desperate numbness. It had simply never occurred to him that he would get turned down. Willa liked him, she’d said so, they got along fine. Everyone
knew
that girls wanted a permanent hookup, just like everyone knew that gravity sucked. Meeting the contrary was like observing an object falling upward. He noticed the yellow poetry book on the passenger seat. Suddenly seized by fury again, he grabbed it and flung it into the dark. Two minutes later he cursed himself, went out into the night-deserted street, and picked it up again. It was lying open, facedown, its bright yellow cover looking like a painting mistake on the yellow traffic line. He stood there in the middle of South Bayshore and read the poem on the page that had fallen open:

Paz felt a chill that was unconnected with the freshening bay breeze. He didn’t like it when books fell open with meaningful messages showing. Even more irksome was that he actually felt consoled by reading it. He got back in his car and drove to his apartment, where he made himself a stiff drink of freezing vodka and lime. He changed into cutoffs and a sweatshirt and sat in a lawn chair in his backyard, chewing on the taste of the drink, dozing fitfully while the soft Florida night passed away.

When the sun was fully risen and he could no longer pretend that sleep was a possibility, he hit the bathroom, and afterward he pulled on a pair of checked pants from the restaurant service and a pair of greasy boots, and walked around the corner to Calle Ocho, where he had a café con leche and a fruit tart at his usual little no-name joint, and read the
Herald
and smoked a short, fat, strong, black cigar. Then he went across the street and opened his mother’s restaurant.

There was something entrancing, he thought, about an empty restaurant early in the morning, rather like looking at a beloved but aging mistress at about the same time of day. You could see the scratches and wear that candlelight would obscure in the hours to come, but the revelation just added to the intimacy; no one else knew this side of her. He went into the kitchen, donned a tunic, a plastic
apron, switched on the oil-splashed kitchen boom box. A samba band came on loud, Martinho da Vila, “Claustrofobia.” Paz, bouncing a little on his toes, used his keys to open the meat reefer, walked in, came out with a whole round of beef, the entire boned hip of a steer. At the sink he stripped off the purveyor’s thick plastic integument, washed the blood off the meat, dried it, and slapped it down on the butcher’s block set against the wall between the two standing refrigerators.

If you sell a lot of beef in a restaurant, then the difference between profit and loss on those items is portion control, and at Guantanamera portion control was Jimmy Paz. Paz sharpened his favorite knife, licked the back of his left wrist, shaved a swipe of hair off with the blade, wiped it carefully away. Now he proceeded to turn a thirty-two-pound full round into (ideally) 102
palomilla
steaks, each one weighing within a speckle of five ounces.

Paz sliced without obvious effort, peeling the red wafers off the mass, weighing each, and tossing each into a steel pan. This work took absolute attention if one were both to keep one’s thumbs and make a buck, but made little demand on the higher functions, and from an early age Paz had used portion control to let his mind roam free. He belonged to that small fraternity of extremely bright men who have no patience at all with academics, from which is drawn most of history’s entrepreneurial billionaires as well as those responsible for the physical maintenance of Western civilization: carpenters, masons, firefighters, soldiers, cops. Like most autodidacts, Paz had an original rather than a disciplined intellect, and much of what composed it had been put there across the pillow by a long skein of brainy women, the only sort he liked to take to bed.