Valley of Bones (7 page)

“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 was 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, T-shirts, 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 the
Discourses
by that saint, and a Penguin edition of the autobiography of Teresa of Avila. A thin book with crumbly yellowed pages called
Faithful Unto Death: The Story of the Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ,
by Sr. Benedicta Cooley, SBC, and a paperback of Simone Weil’s
Gravity 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 actual 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?”

“She’s involved in a crime and we’re checking her out. Look, could we go up on deck, it’s getting warm in here.”

“Yeah, it’ll do that. Boat’s got an AC, but she don’t use it much.”

The man turned and walked out. He was overweight, and his T-shirt was too tight to conceal the butt of the pistol he had shoved into the waistband of his faded cutoff jeans.

On deck, Packer said, “We could go to my place, get out of the sun if you want to talk.” He gestured to the next moorage where loomed a large structure covered with redwood shingles. Technically a houseboat, it was more like a house
on
a boat, flat-roofed, wooden-shingled, with big picture windows, a balcony, and a deck full of redwood lawn furniture and well-grown potted plants.

“Lead the way,” said Paz, and they both walked off Dideroff’s houseboat, along the bulkhead and up a ramp onto the larger craft. They had to squeeze past a huge motorcycle on their way to the deck facing the river.

Packer directed Paz to a padded mahogany chaise lounge, but he chose a canvas chair instead. Packer dropped down into another lounge, winced, pulled the pistol out from behind him, and placed it carefully on a side table. He said, “Sorry about my attitude. We’ve had break-ins, theft, vandalism.”

“Uh-huh,” said Paz. See a black guy, naturally you reach for your gun. He looked at the pistol. It was a Walther PPK/S. The man saw his look and said, “Don’t worry, Officer, I have a license.”

“Detective, and I’m not worried, sir,” said Paz. “So…Mr. Packer. You know Emmylou for long?”

“Just since she’s been here. A year or so. I could check my records.”

“She just showed up one day?”

“No, she was…I mean I was recommended to her by mutual friends. She was looking to settle here in town, I had a boat to rent…like I said, she’s been a tenant from heaven.”

“And you’re here most of the time?”

“Oh, I’m out and about. Got a motorcycle over there on the stern deck, you probably saw.”

“Yeah, the Harley. And you’re what? Independently wealthy?”

Packer laughed. “I wish. No, I’m just a retired civil servant with some lucky investments. And a pension.”

“Mm. What agency were you with when you were working, if I may ask?”

“Excuse me, but I thought we were going to talk about my tenant,” said Packer. “You said she was involved in some crime?”

“Yes, sir. A homicide.”

“Emmylou
killed
someone?”

“That’s what we’re trying to determine, sir. Now, did you ever see her with anyone who might have been African or Arab?”

“No, we didn’t socialize, and I never saw anyone visit at the boat.”

“Did you ever know or hear her talk about a man named Jabir Akran al-Muwalid?”

“No. Is that who she’s supposed to have killed?”

Paz ignored this and took a steno book and a pen from his breast pocket. “We’re trying to find out something about Emmylou, her background, where she’s from. Can you fill in any of that?”