Valley of Bones (38 page)

“What did he want you to do?”

“Following. Looking in bags, drawers. Maybe distracting bodyguards in the process. He didn’t say nothing about no killing, though.”

“This was on al-Muwalid?”

“There were no names mentioned at the time. So I call my lawyer and he calls back and says he talked to the feds, and the word is I need to talk to a guy name of Floyd Mitchell, and whatever he needs I should give him, because he’s connected up to the top. This is terrorism bullshit, or something, he wasn’t all that clear on it, you know? Okay, so a couple days after that, Wilson calls and says a Mr. Mitchell and him will call on me. And they do.”

“What did Mitchell look like?”

Hoffmann shrugged. “A white-bread American. Chunky build. Blue eyes.” Hoffmann touched the top of his head. “That kind of short haircut, like the astronauts. But not a hard guy, you know what I’m saying? I’m a hard guy, and you’re a hard guy, but this guy was a papers guy, a phone call guy. Anyway, we sat down. He told me this Arab was going to be in Miami, and he was going to be raising money for terrorist activity over there in the Middle East and they wanted to watch him, maybe break into his room, go through his stuff. I say,
what’s the matter you don’t have people who do that working for the
federales
anymore, and he says yeah, but they don’t want to go for a warrant because they think there’s leaks somewhere, they don’t want to spook this guy, they want to see where the money goes and so on and so forth. Bullshit, I’m thinking, but I listen and after he’s done I say, well, no problem, Mr. Mitchell, but what’s in it for me, does Uncle Sam have a present for Ignacio? He says there’s money available, but I say I got plenty of money, what I need is some help with my legal problems and there he says, I’m not sure we have the pull to get that fixed. And then Jack jumps in and he says, ‘Come on, you’re saying Serpu can’t get an indictment dropped?’ And Mitchell gives him a look, I swear you could’ve fried a steak in it and Wilson goes all pale, and at this point I’m kind of amused by this pair of
pendejos
and I say, well why don’t we call Mr. Serpu and find out, and Mitchell gets real calm and says, well, thanks for your time, we’ll get back to you. And that was it.”

“That was
it
?”

“Yeah. I never heard from them again. But before they left, while the big
guapo
was taking a leak, I said to Jack, listen what the fuck is the matter with you? You don’t want anything to do with this
cagada
. But it turns out he didn’t take my good advice.”

“You’re saying he was freelancing with Dodo Cortez?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. They fucked with the bull and got the horns.”

“Uh-huh. You know they whacked the Arab.”

“I heard. Popped on the head and out the window. A little show-off, if you ask me. You got the whole Glades and the ocean you want to get rid of someone.”

“Who’d you hear that from?”

“What? He got whacked? It was in the
Herald.
”

“Not the part about him getting clubbed over the head. We kept that close. Dodo called you, didn’t he?”

Hoffmann’s genial mien evaporated. “What is this, Jimmy, you’re
interrogating
me? In my own home, where you’re a guest?”

“Ignacio, this’s got nothing to do with you. You tell me Dodo paid you a piece of what he got, I’m cool. You tell me you whacked Hoffa, I’m still cool. But I have to know what went down in that hotel room and why, and you’re the only one standing who knows.”

“Jimmy, it’s been nice. Give my very kind regards to your mother.”

Paz took out his cell phone. “You can do that yourself. She said to me, ‘Ignacio will help you, and if he gives you any trouble, you’ll call me, we’ll straighten it out.’ ” Paz punched buttons, waited. “Hello, Donna? Jimmy. My mom around? Uh-huh, well put her on…”

Hoffmann was waving his hand, as if to distract a charging bull. He said, “Come on, Jimmy, don’t bother the lady with this crap.” Paz said, “Hey, Donna? Forget it. Just tell her I’ll call her when we get back.” He put the cell away and turned expectantly to Hoffmann, who cleared his throat and said, “I’m only doing this because your mother, she’s like family to me. I don’t want you to think you can take advantage, you know?”

Paz agreed that he would never.

“Okay, then. Dodo calls me up, a couple of days before it went down. They had a meeting: him, Wilson, and another guy, who was running the whole thing.”

“This was Mitchell?”

“No, another guy. Harding, Hardy, something like that. Tell the truth I didn’t pay that much attention. Anyway, it was fifty K straight up, but they had to do it a certain way. This guy had it all figured. They had this woman they were going to pin it on, she worked for Wilson at his shop.”

“Why? Why her?”

“Hey, how the fuck should I know? Is it my operation? So Wilson sends the woman to a parts place for an engine part, long and heavy, like a club, and then they call this Arab and tell him to wait by a phone booth right near the parts place. They want the woman to see him and follow him back to the hotel. They call him at the phone booth—go back to the hotel and we’ll meet you there. It turns out the guy wants information about this woman. So that goes down,
and Dodo and Wilson are at the hotel. Wilson calls 911 and says there’s a disturbance at the hotel. Dodo has this monkey jacket like a hotel waiter. He waits for her to leave her truck, he opens the truck and gets the fuckin’ rod or whatever and goes to the guy’s room. He’s a waiter, says he’s got a basket of fruit, the guy lets him in. Bang over the head, and out the window, he leaves the part out there, and he splits. The whole thing took half a minute. He leaves the door open and hangs around until he sees the woman go in. A couple of days after it went down, my lawyer calls me with good news. Justice is making nice in ways they never did before. That’s it, the whole thing, all right?”

AGAIN HIGH OVER
the spangled sea, Lorna said to Paz, “You can’t say I haven’t been patient.”

“You’re right, I can’t say that. But I didn’t want to get into it until we were off the island. Call me paranoid, but…”

“I would never.”

Paz explained what he’d learned in his Spanish conversation with Hoffmann.

Lorna said, “So this Mitchell guy is Mr. Big?”

“His name’s David Packer. Or who the fuck knows what his real name is? And who’s Harding or Hardy? Packer rented Emmylou her houseboat. I was ordered not to go near him.”

“What about this Mr. Serpu?”

“There is no Mr. Serpu. ‘Serpu’ is how you say the acronym for Strategic Resources Protection Unit. Packer works for them. He’s the last actual government employee before you get to the criminals. He ordered the murder of al-Muwalid and concocted this whole scheme to get Emmylou working for Wilson and framed for the crime, so that…so that…” Paz stumbled. It was hard to keep the mind on all the facets. Perhaps this too, this oily, murky confusion, was part of the plot.

“She would reveal this great secret,” said Lorna in a tired voice.
“Which Muwalid was also after and which has to have something to do with oil.”

“You forgot the dope lord’s hidden gold.”

“Oh, right, that too. And there’s the mysterious jade idol and the Nazi diamonds and the missing Rembrandt.” Lorna lay her head back against the seat and looked down at the distant ocean. “It’s so boring. How can people spend their lives this way, plotting and killing and stealing? What’s the win for them? After everything works out perfectly and all the people who need to be dead are dead and the treasure is in the safe, what happens? Nice vacations? Wristwatches? A slightly larger office? A promotion to GS fucking fifteen? What?”

“It’s the oil,” said Paz. “This whole things smells of out-of-control bureaucrats. They’re protecting strategic resources. It’s a dangerous world. The bad guys play rough, and so the good guys have to play rough too. That’s the theory.” Paz thought back to his conversation with Oliphant, and about how easily Oliphant’s passion and outrage had been derailed by the threat of a lost job and pension. He wondered briefly what would derail him from this strange wild-goose chase he was on. Not the job and pension anyway. “It’s just a guy thing, I think. There’re people like that on the cops too. They like to get away with stuff, and they want a small group of players to know it too. Shooting drug dealers and taking their cash, inventing evidence, lying to make a case. They like the wink, they like thinking they’re inside something and everyone else is on the outside looking in. Hell, you’re the psychologist, you explain it. But it has fuck all to do with national security. All that kind of shit is personal.”

Lorna heard what he was saying, and it made sense, but she lacked the energy to follow on with the discussion. What did it matter after all? She squeezed his hand and settled more deeply into her seat. Her head felt hot and she rested against the cool of the glass. She never slept on planes, she was a white-knuckle flier usually, but now she could not keep her eyes open. Yet another upside of dying, she thought as she dropped off.

FROM TAMPA THEY
fly to Atlanta and then to Roanoke, arriving that night and checking into the airport Holiday Inn. She sits on the bed, staring at the floor while he goes out to get some ice, and when he comes back she is in the same position.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, and she gives her usual answer, “Nothing.”

He feels her forehead. “It’s not nothing. You’re hot and you’re always tired and you’ve thrown up about ten times since we left Miami.”

“It’s just a flu,” she says. How tedious, she thinks, to be fussed over. She wishes he was a brute, an animal, who saw her merely as a set of warm, slick orifices.

“Do you want to cancel out on the trip? You could crash here while I go.”

“No. I’ll be fine. It’s just some bug.” She hates lying to him. Worse, she now feels too miserable to contemplate sex. Galloping lymphoma. Is there such a thing? She recalls that lymphoma is one of the slower cancers and relatively easy to treat, but she also recalls that there is a wide range of types within both Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s. She will have contracted the worst type, or maybe it’s a new type, violently metastasizing, they’ll be amazed at the autopsy, faces will grow pale, oncologists will scurry to their terminals to get the news out, her cells will be preserved for research, she will live forever in tiny tubes all over the world. Someday, maybe, when science advances far enough she will be cloned and wake up on a table in a white laboratory. Of course, she will have superpowers then….

“What’s so funny?” he asks in response to the sound she now makes.

“Oh, just thinking about the peculiar life I seem to be leading.” He mixes drinks, vodka tonics, they click glasses, she looks him in the eye and says, “You’re really nice to me, Jimmy Paz. Is that ’cause you like me, or are you this way with everyone?”

“I think I’m marginally nicer to you than I am to most people.”

“You don’t seem to have many faults. Is that the case, or are you just good at concealing them?”

“The latter. It’s just because we’ve been working together plus socializing that it hasn’t come up, but when I’m on a case, I mean forget it, I get totally lost. That might be something you should think about. I mean missed dates, no calls for days. Often you might have to take little Jason or Jennifer to soccer when I promised I would. Like that.”

“It’s something to consider,” she says, looking away. “I appreciate being told in advance.” She gulps the rest of her drink. “Excuse me,” she says and goes into the bathroom. She turns the water in the sink on full force and by wrapping her head in the bath towels and lying on the floor with her face jammed into the corner near the tub, she is able to weep hysterical tears for a good long time without Paz the detective detecting anything.

IN THE EARLY
morning they drove south out of Roanoke on 81 with the mountains ghostly on their right hand. He was worried about her. The ravening desire mixed with an obvious debilitation, something he had not experienced before in a partner, but he did not pry. Margarita Paz’s little boy, although a professional detective, had a horror of personal prying.

“This is nice country,” he said after an hour or so of silence. “The Blue Ridge is actually blue. It’s nice to know you can trust something nowadays.”

She looked out the window. “They probably spray it so the tourists don’t complain,” she said, and then gave him a weak smile. Her eyes were red, and he almost confronted her, he almost said, Oh fuck this, Lorna, the next time I see a hospital sign we’re going to the emergency room, but he didn’t. The moment passed and he started playing with the radio.

He had called ahead and explained briefly what they were about, and made an appointment with the prioress at St. Catherine’s. They
drove through an ornate iron gate and up a graveled road and parked in a corner of a pleasant quadrangle made by solid bluestone buildings. A group of sisters dressed in blue overalls were playing a vigorous game of volleyball on the lawn behind a large statue. A tiny brown-skinned sister in full habit greeted them solemnly and ushered them up to the office of the prioress, Sr. Marian Dolan.