Valley of Bones (16 page)
Authors: Michael Gruber
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense
An hour later, the car has been dropped off, she has showered (after confirming that the only pubic hairs clinging to her skin are those she grew herself) and eaten Advil and drunk half a pot of black coffee. She is lying in the lounge chair in her office, trying and failing to get interested in a recent novel. She is restless, wired, the sheaths of her nerves scraped raw by toxic ethanol metabolites, but at the same time exhausted, lacking even the energy to stroll through a fictive garden. She spies the school notebook on her desk, puts the novel aside, fetches it back to the lounger. Emmylou’s confessions now sprout a shrubbery of Post-its. She thumbs through to one in particular, examines the page. Emmylou’s writing is large and bold.
This has happened to you too, hasn’t it?
Underlined, directed at the reader, at Paz obviously, some relationship established there already. Why? A Catholic thing?
Exterior voices a common enough phenomenon, she knows, particularly in childhood, here we had an extreme case, the impulses of the id projected out and turned into an imagined figure, this shiny man. Why shiny? Some early visual hallucinations too, fading with age. Fascinating. There is a whole line of therapy that she can generate from this. Lorna goes to get a pen and her own notebook.
The phone now rings. Twice and the machine picks it up. A voice, distorted by the cheap speaker: “Lorna…Jimmy Paz here, hope you’re okay. Look, I need you to give me a call—”
“Hello?” She has flown across the room and snatched up the receiver.
“Oh, good,” says Paz. “You survived. I’m not going to ask you how you feel.”
“That’s very considerate of you. I assume you got me home last night. I’m sorry, I don’t usually act like that.”
“Like how? Get drunk at a party and have fun?”
“Did I have fun? I can’t remember.”
“You were laughing a lot. That’s usually an indication.”
“Well, it was nice of you to take the trouble.” A little pause here, both of them in the embarrassment of forced intimacy, waiting for the other to make the first move, which eventually Paz does, saying, “I hope you don’t mind about me getting that dress off you. It looked uncomfortable to sleep in. I didn’t realize about the top. The no-bra aspect.”
“That’s okay.”
“I kept my eyes closed the entire time, I want you to know.”
“That was very considerate of you. Was it hard?” Guffaw, shared. “No, I mean was it difficult getting it off….”
“Not at all. It was like skinning a mackerel.”
Lorna thinks this is the sexiest thing anyone has ever said to her. She tries to think of a rejoinder, but all she can do is breathe stupidly into the mouthpiece, like a telephone tormentor.
“Look, um, another reason I called is I need a favor.”
“Sure, what is it?” she asks.
“Could you, like, come over to my place?”
“You mean now?”
“Yeah, if it’s no trouble. I’m in sort of a jam and you were the only one I could think of to call.”
“What kind of jam?”
“Um, it’s hard to explain over the phone. It’ll just take you a minute.”
Lorna agrees right away. He gives her the address and tells her where a key to the back door is stashed, under the near-left foot of the picnic table. He thanks her warmly before he hangs up. She dresses in haste, the crisp look today, khaki shorts and a white short-sleeved shirt, like a camp counselor. She drives to Little Havana, SW Nineteenth off Calle Ocho, lets herself in, feeling a little odd but not uncomfortably so. Anticipatory, even.
“Jimmy?”
“In here. The bedroom.”
She follows the voice. Jimmy Paz is lying in a brass bed, covered from the waist down by a light quilt and showing from the waist up an impressive expanse of buffed musculature coated in smooth dark golden skin. Gold chain and crucifix too, and another small dark object on a thong. That was strange and a little exciting in a scary way. Lorna can almost feel her pupils expand.
“Thanks for coming,” he says. “I did something really dumb.” He wiggles his foot, and she sees that it is fastened with handcuffs to one of the bed’s pipes. “I had the key right here on the table, and to be extra sure I didn’t lose it I had it inside my watchband, right? So, of course, I wake up in the middle of the night and the first thing I do is check the time, and the key kind of hooks on the band and skitters off across the floor. Over there.” He points. “Can you locate it?”
She can and hands it to him. He unlocks the cuffs.
“Thank you.” He gives her the grin. “Free at last, free at last, great God almighty…”
“And so on,” she says. “Well, it looks like my work here is done.”
“Time for play, then. You doing anything today?”
“I’m free more or less except for some errands. What were you thinking of? It can’t involve alcoholic beverages.”
“Of course. Yet numerous teetotal experiences are available here in Miami, it being the sun and fun capital of the world. Do you like the water?”
“To drink?”
“To float upon. To dip into. The sea. Boating.”
“You mean sailboats?”
“No, I mean a Cuban workboat with fish scales all over it. We could run down to the reef, throw a line over, get lucky maybe, catch some redfish.”
“You know all the good places, I bet.”
“Some of them. You up for that?”
“Sure, if I can go by my place and get some stuff.”
“I’ll come with you,” he says, “or I would if I could figure out a way to get dressed with you in here.”
“I’ll close my eyes,” she says. And she does, nearly, while he slides naked and truly terrific-looking from under his quilt and pulls on a pair of faded cutoff jeans and a black T-shirt that says
GUANTANAMERA COMIDAS CRIOLLAS
on it, and a baggy plaid cotton shirt with the sleeves ripped off over that. Then he clips on his pistol and slides a shield wallet into his rear pocket.
He catches her stare. “Regulations,” he says. “Does it bother you?”
“I don’t think so. But I never spent any time with a man who had a gun.”
“You did last night, with about fifty of them.”
“I mean consciously. It must be weird.”
“You get used to it,” he says shortly and leads her out.
They take his car, a Datsun Z of a certain age, in sun-faded orange. At the curb in front of her house she tells him that she’ll just be a minute. As she opens her front door she stops for a second as it strikes her that her hangover is quite gone, and more interestingly, that she has not had a hypochondriacal, neurotic, or self-conscious thought since the minute Paz called her. She feels terrific, in fact,
better than she has in ages. She is arranging her beach bag in her mind as she turns the key and enters her front room. She needs a tube of industrial-strength sunblock and a towel, and yes, she intends to wear an electric blue bikini she purchased on Antigua and has never summoned up the nerve to wear locally.
She barely sees the man before he clubs her aside with his fist and races out the front door. Paz is leaning against the driver’s side of his car, staring contentedly after Lorna, and so he has a perfect view of what has just happened. The man trips slightly on a little rag rug Lorna keeps inside her front door, and when he is halfway down the path, just building up speed again, Paz is already leaning over the top of his car with his Glock out, yelling, “Freeze, freeze, police! Get down!”
The man slows, startled, staring. Paz sees that he is a thin Latino man dressed in satiny black warm-up pants and a black tank top with
Heat
written on it in red cursive letters and big white Air Jordans, with his head wrapped in a shiny black cloth. Maybe twenty-something, Paz figures, and he’s got a dark flat object in his hand that Paz can’t quite identify, because he is focused on the man’s face, and all of a sudden he can see what the man’s going to do and ice enters his belly. He fills his lungs with air to shout again.
The man’s right hand snakes behind him and comes out with a dark angular shape that could be anything, a toy, a knife, a Walkman, but Paz doesn’t wait to see what it is. He fires twice, and the man sits down at the head of Lorna’s walk in that cut-string-marionette way of shot people, with dark leaking punctures above and below the
a
in
Heat
. Paz rushes to the man, sees he isn’t breathing, plants his mouth over the blood-filled mouth, feels the sparse hairs that rim it. He pushes down on the sternum, blood squirts up between his fingers.
“I called 911,” says a voice behind him. Lorna, smart lady. He keeps working, although it is clearly hopeless. His prayer now is that it was a real gun in the guy’s hand, although he can’t see one when he lifts up his head to breathe. What he can see is a small school notebook standing on the sidewalk, its spine perkily upward like a tiny house. It’s exactly like the ones he bought for Emmylou Dideroff.
Remarkably, we have a vivid description of that scene from the viewpoint of the uhlan captain, Manfred Ems von Frisch, recorded in his memoir,
To Paris with the Thirteenth Uhlans
(1889):
Suddenly there appeared before us a pretty girl of about fourteen, tousled from sleep, and dressed in silk slippers and a French cavalry cloak. She presented a remarkably calm mien, as if finding lancers in her yard before breakfast were a common occurrence. I saluted her and said, in French, “Little miss, have you by any chance seen the French army?” To this she answered, in good German, “I am surprised that you dare to ask me such a question, sir, for you make me choose between polluting myself with a lie and betraying my country. No gentleman would place a lady in such a position.” I was somewhat taken aback by this sally, and irritated at being made to look the fool in front of my troop. Therefore, I said to her, “The exigencies of war, mademoiselle, preclude such nice distinctions.” She replied, “I must differ with you there, sir. War or peace, there is no excuse for rudeness. Your king would not approve, nor would your mother, I believe.”
A better exhibition of Marie-Ange’s spirit and fearlessness could not be found! Ems von Frisch further reports that she offered him and his men refreshment and fodder for their animals, but gave no information whatever. After the Prussians left, Marie-Ange dressed hurriedly and ordered the coach to be prepared. She intended to travel with speed to Metz, as she knew that her father would be frantic for her safety when he heard that the enemy had crossed the Moselle.
The road east from Gravelotte was jammed with advancing French troops and local people fleeing the battle, whose guns could already be heard to the east and north. The coach was forced off the road by an artillery train, and while they
waited, Marie-Ange heard the sound of a woman crying. She got out to see what was the matter and found a farm cart in which were lying a man and two children, covered in blood. The woman stilled her tears long enough to explain that they were from Villers-au-Pois and that their farmhouse had been taken over as a strong point by French soldiers. While the family hid in an outbuilding, a Prussian shell had scored a direct hit upon it, with the present sad results. Immediately, the girl abandoned her original plan, loaded the wounded peasants into her coach, and drove back to Bois Fleury.
—
FROM
FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST,
BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.
This never happened before first you detective and now this doctor. It’s not like him to show and then I fainted I probably scared the poor woman half to death. I don’t understand it, he doesn’t usually manifest like that, usually it’s just a little tickle, like tickling a trout until practically asleep and you can grab it up, a little tickle, hey that girl, that man, looks so fine, who would it hurt, the wife the husband doesn’t have to know, the money was just sitting there, I’ll give it back, can’t you shut the goddam kid up and so on, so something important is happening around you all, like in Bible times, unless we’re all of us as crazy as
It was night when I took off, with nothing but the shorts and shirt I was wearing and a denim bag full of makeup and spare panties and my bra, which I had slipped off, and I popped open the first two buttons on the shirt. I walked over to the first big
street with traffic on it and hitched a ride with some old guy in a Buick. We drove around for a while talking, him staring at my tits at every stoplight. He was wasting time, so when he offered what do you like to do as a conversational gambit I said I liked to suck cock at twenty-five dollars a pop. Which I did behind a Phillips station on 112th Street, my entrée into the profession. I got about six more rides that night, tending northward as I did, and had the last guy drop me at one of those crummy old-fashioned motels, just a line of low concrete buildings and a fizzing neon sign in peach and blue TUD R COURT VACAY.
I worked out of that motel for the rest of the week, making pretty good money. It is easy to accumulate reasonable sums at whoring if you are not blowing it on drugs and if you have no pimp or kids. The worst thing about this time (and I really thought that was the worst thing, God forgive me!) was that I had nothing good to read and Miami is so spread out I couldn’t get from where I was to a good secondhand bookstore and they won’t give you a library card without proof of a permanent address. I could’ve asked one of my tricks to drop me at a mall with a Borders, but for some reason I never did. I could recollect pages of things I had read, of course, but that’s not quite the same thing, is it? I was forced to read wire-rack garbage from the local 7-Eleven store, science fiction, thrillers, westerns, romances, although I read them faster than the book company truck could refill the racks. It’s hard to be a street prostitute with advanced literary tastes.
The third week I was on the street I got picked up by a man in a new black Cadillac Eldorado with gold-plated trims. He didn’t say anything but just started driving pretty fast, east on the highway, and when I asked him what he thought he was doing he said shut the fuck up bitch so I did. He had the same dank stink of evil that Ray Bob had, except he wasn’t making any moves to hide it, far from it, he was proud of it, it was his stock-in-trade. When we got off the highway, he started in talking
about what all he was going to do to me to teach me not to be whoring on his territory and when we got to his apartment in Liberty City he did all that plus some stuff he hadn’t got around to threatening. I think he did more to me than what he usually did to a regular kid because I wasn’t scared of him particularly. All he could do in the end was to deprive me of my life, which I didn’t think was worth much, although at the time I sort of regretted not ever making it with Percival Orne Foy. Jerrell Robinson was his name. He isn’t hardly worth describing, about as individual as one of a school of sunnies, whipped up by the movies and the street, nothing in his mind but More.
Anyway, the usual pimpish workup of an amateur, nothing I hadn’t done before except for the ass-fucking, which was quite painful, and the shooting up with heroin, which made me sick as a dog but tended to dull the pain. I did not get addicted, strange to say, except physiologically, and that amounts to twenty-four hours of discomfort, nothing I couldn’t handle. I’m not an addictive personality, it turned out. I pretended to be, though. He got a deal of pleasure out of making me beg for my next shot. What gave me pleasure was thinking of how I would kill him.
I say that now, but when I really try to recall how I felt, day to day, I draw a blank. Maybe I didn’t have any feelings at all. I know that I lived a good deal of the time outside my body, in a waking dream fed by books. Some sweating pig would be on me and I would be floating through an English garden chatting with elegant ladies and gentlemen, or landing with a roar of white fire on a new planet. There is a level of not caring what happens to you next that is difficult to describe to people whose lives are governed by expectations and entitlements. One good thing was that Jerrell put me in one of his whore apartments so I had an address and could get a library card.
I was actually a very good whore. I never stole, either from the johns or from Jerrell. He had me in a two-bedroom hole on NW Thirty-fourth Street with two other girls, Marlys and Tammy,
both lily teens like me, but genuine junkies. They stole all the time, stupidly, fruitlessly, and on an average of once a week he would whip both of them with wire coat hangers. Then he would whip me, if anything a little harder than he did them, because he couldn’t find my loot or my dope nor could his imagination expand to contain the notion of an honest whore, as if he had come across dry water. This was part of the plan, of course. Then he would usually fuck me in a particularly degrading fashion and then fall asleep. Part of the plan, as well.
Jerrell had a rival pimp named T-bone Carter. T-bone prided himself on being a cut above the ordinary piece of street shit, and in fact he was somewhat more intelligent than Jerrell, although this was not an epic feat. He drove a Mercedes rather than the Cadillacs the other street dudes had, and he dressed English style, always a nice suit and tie and handmade shoes for T-bone, and he liked jazz rather than funk. I knew some of his girls, and they said he was okay for a scumbag, light on the torture and easy with gifts and dope. A prince.
T-bone ran a poker game that Jerrell joined every Thursday, and of course he always lost, being a dumb shit, and blamed it on bad luck. Yet another aspect of my plan, but the core of it was Marlys, the stupider and prettier of my two roomies. I got Marlys scared of Jerrell, or more scared than she already was. I said he had killed girls just for fun. I said he told me he was pissed at her ripping him off all the time, that he was going to make an example of her for the other girls. I told her what he was going to do to her, and here my recent reading of crappy thriller fiction furnished the details. When I had got her sufficently petrified, I suggested that a way out might lie with T-bone Carter. Jerrell was scared of T-bone, I said, and T-bone would get a kick out of stealing one of Jerrell’s best earners.
I happened to be in Jocko’s Tropical Lounge on Second Avenue, my usual hangout, and it was early, maybe four, and I was thinking about heading for my stroll, which was fishing the exits
off 395 for squares going home to the burbs, when Jerrell came in fuming, having just heard the news. He slapped me around a couple just on general principle and to show the onlookers that he was still da Man. He had a drink and began whining about what he was going to do to T-bone, how he was nobody’s bitch, and I took this opportunity to tell him that maybe T-bone was treating him like a bitch because it wasn’t any different from ripping off his money at cards all these years, and how I had heard T-bone joking about it right here, and then I gave him some details of the way he’d been shafted, which I had cribbed from Gambling Scams by D. Ortiz, borrowed from the Miami Public Library. Jerrell got real quiet then and went out to his car and came right back and I knew just what he had gone out there for. He drank Courvoisier and 7UP, his favorite, for the next half hour, one after another, and then I had to go to work. It’s a pity I missed it, because I would’ve loved to have seen the look on his face when he pulled his Colt Commander out on T-bone and held it in that stupid sideways way they all do now and pulled the trigger a couple of times. T-bone never carried a weapon, claiming that packing a gat ruined the line of his suit, but he always had a sidekick with him, and on this particular evening his boy was carrying a TEC-9. I heard that Jerrell was still pulling the trigger of the Colt when T-bone’s boy shot him to pieces.
I was on the street after a trick, rinsing my mouth with Lavoris, when one of the girls told me the news, and I spat it out high into the air, a victory fountain yellow-green under the anticrime lights and then dancing my devil dance down NE Seventh Street heart on fire with demonic glee yelling and screaming, not knowing then that it was the squealing of an animal in a trap. The people I passed stared at me, probably thinking what’s that ho so happy about. Shameful to me now, but if I have to speak the truth, the truth was that it was glorious to feel the strength of his evil hand in me.
I grabbed a cab for Jerrell’s place. Of course I had made
a copy of his house key too. During one of his after-torture snoozes I’d taken wax impressions in a little tin box I got from one of my regulars, a car thief, who made the house key and car keys up for me in return for a couple of free fucks. That’s how I got into Jerrell’s glove compartment, so I could pull the firing pin out of his Colt, as Ray Bob had taught me to do during one of his famous gun maintenance and safety sessions.
But no cash did I find there. Either someone had beat me or he was carrying his whole roll or he’d lost it all at cards. There was a nice bag of blow, however, and some gold junk. I’m trying to think of what my plan was for after that. Get out of town was the first part of it, or at least away from the part of town where I was known. I had a fugitive warrant out on me, and it wouldn’t take the cops long to figure out that Jerrell getting shot had to be an inside job. Maybe T-bone would be unjustly accused of setting it up, with me as an accomplice. I got into another cab and told the guy to drive south. I was thinking the Keys eventually, but I needed a little time to get myself together, so I told the driver to take me to Coconut Grove because I had heard that kids hung out there and I wanted to be a kid again, even a homeless kid.
As I recall, it was a Friday night a balmy evening and the streets were full. I got some strange looks, as I was wearing a silver threaded halter top and tiny pink shorts and white platforms. I went into a Gap and bought jeans, a couple of T-shirts, a shoulder bag, and tossed the whore garments in the trash. I washed the whore makeup off in a restaurant bathroom, dropping several years in the process. I was finished with whoring, or at least finished with it on the street level. I was not that gorgeous I knew, but I had technique and I was a good enough actress and I had a look some men liked. I did a couple of lines of coke in the Gap dressing room to improve my attitude and went out to see what I could turn up in the way of shelter.
I went to the park they have there down by the water, and there were plenty of kids hanging out to the sound of Def Leppard from a boom box. There were a couple of bicycle cops too, but they didn’t give me a glance. I am a good fitter-in. I went over to the raggediest bunch of kids I could find, looking for the telltale bedrolls and bags, was asked for spare change, handed over a couple of bills, got to talking to a gangly Mohawked and tattooed white boy holding a string leash attached to a black and white mutt. Tommy and Bo. Tommy had a girlfriend, Carmen, brown skin, buckteeth, dreads, bracelet tats on the wrists, heavily pierced about the face and navel. Told some plausible lies, learned the ropes on how to be a homeless teenager in Miami. Right now they were staying in a squat set up in an old commercial building on Douglas off Grand. It was scheduled for demo, but there was some legal delay and really nobody owned it. There were some bad junkies hanging there and guys, you know, looking to score young girls. And boys. But you could avoid them. They usually spent the night there, in the Market, as they called it.
I bought them both a meal at a fast-food place, and late that night we crawled through the chain-link and crossed the rubbled parking lot. It was a two-story concrete block building whose main distinguishing feature was a high square tower that held a water tank and had once displayed the logo of the defunct retailer. The main squat was a cavernous former drugstore. There were a couple of dozen people there sitting around candles, making it sort of like a cathedral, although one whose god had taken a hike. Tommy and Carmen were obviously well known. People petted Bo and talked quietly. There were smaller kids there, with parents and without. Carmen lent me one of her blankets and showed me how to make a pallet out of plastic bags and newspapers. Not the Hilton, but after all that had happened that day I found I was exhausted. I would have slept pretty well except I had shoved the bag with my gold jewelry
down into my underpants, and every time I rolled over it woke me up.
In the morning I got on the Metrorail and took it downtown, where I found a no-questions pawnshop and got rid of Jerrell for four hundred and change.
Why these details? I am drifting, am I not? The tone is drifting too, isn’t it, the person I am now oozing back into the past, coloring the story with later experience. The voice problem again. Oh, Jesus, if you could just help me get out of my own way for two minutes at a time…!
Okay, back to the park, hook up again with Tommy and Carmen. Smoked some mediocre dope. Was offered crack but declined. Got hit on by two guys in their twenties, offered money too, I guess it showed, I mean what I really was, but declined that too. It was the world of no-plans, we were like pigeons pecking at bits and pieces. Restful in a way, much easier than whoring. A week or two or three passed like this. Then one morning Carmen said it was her birthday, sixteen, and cried. It turned out she came from a family that did not believe in parties, some religious nut thing, and she had never had one. So I did the first fairly selfless thing I ever did in my life—hey I got some money, I’ll throw you a party tonight at the Market, and I did, cake and candles from the Winn-Dixie, KFC, beer on my fake ID. I don’t know where it came from, maybe the first feathery light touch of my saint.
