Tropic of Night Read online

  He inscribed the name in his notebook. “Is she around?”

  “From time to time. She’s semiretired now. Works mostly out of her home. You’d have to call her. You might also want to talk to Pedro Ortiz.”

  Paz wrote this name down too. “And he is …”

  “He’s a babalawo, ” said Dr. Herrera, smiling again, into his eyes. “He’s considered the best babalawo in Miami.”

  He returned her look and he had to concentrate on keeping his expression neutral. He knew he had a problem with Cubans of this class, and he worked at it, on his cool. Coolly, then, he asked, “So anyway, you’re not a devotee yourself? You don’t believe in this … ?” He left the word hanging. It could have been “crap,” or something more respectful.

  “I’m a scientist. Santería uses a lot of herbs, and that’s my business, to identify pharmacologically interesting folk medicines. As for the rest, the divination, the orishas … let’s just say that for a certain social class it provides a relatively inexpensive form of therapy and psychological security. If a bunch of uneducated people want to believe that they can call gods down to earth and interest them in Aunt Emilia’s bronchitis and Uncle Augusto’s sandwich shop, then who am I to say no?” Meaning, people like you.

  Paz stood and put his notebook away. “Thank you very much, Dr. Herrera,” he said. “You’ve been very helpful.” He walked out, with the patronizing smile burning on his back.

  Back in his car, with the A/C roaring, Paz called the university locator number and demanded, with the authority of the police, the home address and phone number of Dr. Maria Salazar. The operator hesitated, he bullied, she gave in. A Coral Gables address. But he did not wish to have another interview with another upper-class Cuban lady just yet, although he did not bring this reluctance fully to mind. Instead, he imagined a more important appointment. He called Barlow, got the beeper, left a message. He sat in the car, burned gas to make cool air, watched the fountain play on Lake Osceola, watched the students stroll languorously in and out of the cafeteria, the bookstore, the immense outdoor swimming pool. There was not much evidence of heavy intellectual activity to be observed. Most of the students were dressed as for a day at the beach. A young man walked by the car, stooped over, taking tiny steps. Paz craned his neck and saw that he was following a toddler, a little goldenheaded boy. The kid started toward the roadway, and the father scooped his son up in his arms, embraced him, tickled him until the child crowed with delight. Paz turned his face away, and did not feel what most normal people feel when they see paternal love. His stomach tightened and he took several deep breaths.

  Paz refocused his attention, and did some light ogling of the undergraduate girls gliding by. Suntan U. He was not a big fan of the suntan. He preferred wiry women with red hair or blond hair, milky, silky skin and pale eyes, a cliché, he well knew, but there it was. Exogamous, a word he enjoyed. Either like Mom, or not like Mom, one of his girlfriends, a sociologist, had said of male tastes in women. Paz had at the moment three girlfriends in the steady-squeeze category: that sociologist, a child psychologist, and a poet working as a library clerk. He had always had several relationships going on, never more than four, never less than two. Women drifted in and out of this skein at their will. He did not press them to stay, nor did he insist on an exclusivity he was not ready to submit to himself. He was frank with them all about this arrangement, and was rather proud of himself that he never (or almost never) lied to get laid.

  His cell phone rang: Barlow. Paz learned that the autopsy was done and also that Barlow had rammed the toxicity screens through as well, which was remarkable. Barlow said, “Yeah, I pushed them boys some. I figured it was going to be worth it.”

  “Was it?”

  “Un-huh, I guess so.” This was Barlow-talk for spectacular revelation.

  “What?”

  “Not on the line. I reckon y’all ought to get back here, though.”

  Homicide is on the fifth floor of the Miami PD fortress, a small suite of modern rooms accessible via a card-eating lock. Only homicide detectives have cards. Inside there is industrial carpeting and a bay with steel desks at which the worker bees sit, and there are private offices for the brass, the captain in charge of the unit and the shift lieutenants. No one was in the bay when Paz walked in but Barlow and the two secretaries.

  Barlow nodded to Paz and pointed at a thick manila folder sitting on the corner of his desk. Barlow always had the neatest desk in the bay. It was devoid of decoration, unlike those of the other homicide cops, nor did Barlow have little yellow Post-it notes stuck all over his desk surface and lamp. Barlow kept everything in his head, said the legend, or under lock and key.

  Paz went back to his own desk and read the medical examiner’s report. First surprise: Deandra Wallace had not died of massive exsanguination resulting from the butchery that had been done on her. Her heart had ceased beating before blood loss would have stopped it. The baby, called Baby Boy Wallace in the report, had been withdrawn alive and operated upon shortly thereafter. The cuts on both mother and infant had been precise, with no hesitation marks observed. Tissue had been removed?here followed a short list?from the heart, liver, and spleen of the mother, and from the heart and brain of the infant. Unlike the mother, the infant had expired from its wounds. The instrument used had been extremely sharp, a short, wide, curved blade, much larger than a surgical scalpel, but smaller than a typical hunting knife. Both mother and infant had been healthy before the events under consideration. The infant was full term and?here another interesting surprise?labor had begun just before death intervened.

  Next, the toxicology report. List of organs examined. Findings: negative for a whole list of recreational drugs, including alcohol and nicotine. Positive for: here followed a list of substances Paz had never heard of: tetrahydroharmaline, ibogaine, yohimbine, ouabane, 6-methoxytetrahydroharman, tetrahydra-ß-carboline, 6-methoxyharmalan, plus “several alkaloids of undetermined structure” for which the chemical formulas were given. He sighed, went over to Barlow’s desk.

  “Any thoughts?”

  “None worth a dern until we find out more about what was in that poor girl’s body. I can’t hardly get to the end of some of them words, and I’m a high-school graduate. You have any luck?”

  “Some,” said Paz, and related the results of his recent visits to the two scientists.

  After a pause, Barlow said, “Well. I figured all that’d be something y’all’d know about.”

  “Oh, come on, Cletis! Why, because I’m Cuban ? Where do your people come from? England, way back there, right? You know a lot about Stonehenge? We get some druid dancing around town whacking people with a flint dagger, you’re gonna be all over his butt.”

  “Y’all a lot fresher off the boat than that.”

  Paz rolled his eyes. “Look: you know my mom, right?”

  “I do. A fine Christian woman.”

  “Uh-huh. Not your brand of Christian, but yeah. Think about it. You think my mom would give the time of day to that kind of sh … cow patty? As far as she’s concerned, Cuba is the Spanish language and food, period. That’s how I was raised. I know as much about Santería as you know about European satanism.”

  “Still. Somebody got to talk Spanish to a bunch of witch doctors …”

  “Santeros.”

  “See? Y’all’s the expert.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake! Cut it out!”

  Ordinarily, Paz did not mind this sort of teasing from Barlow. But Dr. Herrera had gotten under his skin, the incurable wound prickled, or maybe it was that this case was turning in directions he did not like. The notion that he was going to be some kind of ethnic front man exploring mambo babalou-ay-yay penetrated the armor, as no amount of teasing could. Did Barlow know this? No, Paz was not going to pursue this line.

  “What did the tox guy make of all this stuff?” he asked, waving the report.

  “Oh, well, they had all the books out, jabbering like a bunch of monkeys. It was hard to get a s
traight answer out of them, or anyhow, one I could understand, being a country boy. Your ethnowhatdyacallit lady’d probably know. What I got out of it was a bunch of plant poisons. That one with the jawbreaker name’s a hallucinogen, and the others are too, mostly. Plus a narcotic. She might’ve thought she was at the junior prom while he was cutting her.”

  “What about cause of death? One of the drugs?”

  “Not that they could tell,” Barlow replied, “but like it says there, they found stuff they never seen before. Could’ve stopped her heart with them, or it could’ve been the shock, but her heart was full of blood when it turned off.”

  “Well, I’ll go back and show this to Herrera,” said Paz valiantly, suppressing the repugnance, “and see if she can match these chemicals up with some plants. Meanwhile, we should go have a talk with Youghans. Maybe we’ll wrap it up with him.”

  Barlow gave him a sidelong look. “What, you think a homeboy trucker could come up with a bunch a poisons nobody ever heard of?”

  “Heck, he don’t have to be a pharmacologist. There’s two hundred herb joints in this town. He could’ve just walked into one with a stack of cash and said, ‘Hey, I’ll take a pound of the worst knockout stuff you got.’ “

  “Read it again.”

  “Read what?”

  “That report. No drugs in the stomach contents. Found ‘em in her liver and her brain and lungs. Probable route of entry lungs and skin.”

  Paz cursed himself. He was usually careful with reports, and he prided himself on being the more literate member of the team. Florida education had not been up to much when Barlow finished high school, and the man had trouble with reports. On the other hand, Barlow kept a lot close to his vest, so maybe that was an act, too, like the cracker slowness.

  “Oh, so he burned some stuff and she breathed it,” snapped Paz. “What does it matter?”

  “Him wearing his gas mask while he done it. And it all matters, Jimmy, every little thing.” He got up and walked toward the door. “Let’s see him and ask him how he done it. Go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in. Luke 13:23.”

  Julius Youghans lived in a frame house on one of the better streets in Overtown. It had trees, now dripping from the recent rain, and the lawns were cut and watered and the newish large cars parked out in front, Caddys and Chryslers and giant SUVs, indicated that the people in the houses had jobs and could probably have afforded better housing had they not been black and dwelling in one of the most viciously segregated and redlined housing markets in the United States. A lot of the houses had bars on the windows. Mr. Youghans’s did not. When the two cops got out of their car a dog started to bark somewhere in the back and did not cease barking during the time they remained. Cheaper and better than bars, a bad dog.

  Push the front doorbell. They heard it ringing in the house. There was a late-model red Dodge Ram pickup in the driveway, rain-speckled and steaming vapors in the returned sunlight. The two cops exchanged a look. Barlow pushed the bell again and Paz went down the driveway around the side of the house. The dog was a pit bull, white with a big black spot over one side of his head. It was leaping up and down like a toy in a nightmare, crashing against the chain-link fence that confined it to the backyard, spraying slaver past its bared fangs. Paz ignored it and stood on tiptoe to look through the window. A kitchen. Crusted dishes in the sink, a single twelve-ounce can of malt liquor on the table still wearing six-pack plastic rings in memory of its vanished brothers. He went back to the front of the house.

  “Checked the back door, did you?” asked Barlow.

  “No, I’d thought you’d want to do that, Cletis. You’re the one with the special gift for animals.”

  ” ‘Fraid of a little old dog, huh?”

  “Yes, I am. So. Julius must be a heavy sleeper, you think?”

  “That, or he could be in some trouble,” said Barlow, withdrawing a set of picks wrapped in soft leather from his breast pocket. “Maybe fell out of bed and bust his hip. I believe it’s our Christian duty to try and help him if we can.”

  The door opened on a living room, which was furnished with the sort of heavy furniture, cheaply made but expensive to buy, available in local marts. Youghans had gone for the red velvet and, his lust for velvet unslaked, had sought it as the matrix for the paintings hanging on the walls: African beauties in undress, a Zulu with spear and shield, and Jesus preaching were the themes. Some care and expense had been taken with the decoration, but the room had a neglected air. There were dust bunnies in the corners and cobwebs on the ceiling. A bottle of expensive cognac, empty, stood on a coffee table with a couple of dirty glasses. Picture: a man with some disposable income, proud, but recently distracted. The walls of the hall they entered next were hung with several examples of the same sort of wooden Africana they had found in the dead woman’s apartment, of a somewhat better quality, real ebony rather than stained softwood. Kitchen to the right, two doors to the left: bathroom, a small bedroom clearly used as an office, and at the end of the hall a closed door through which issued interesting sounds: bouncing bedsprings, squeals in a high register and groans in a low one.

  In a loud, stagy voice, Barlow said, “They must be having church in there, Jimmy, that sister calling on the Lord like that. What do you think?”

  “I would have to disagree with you there,” said Paz in a similar false bellow. “I believe we’re listening to the sounds of fornication.”

  The sounds ceased.

  “That’s hard to believe,” said Barlow, and, in a good parody of himself as a peckerwood preacher, continued, “What kind of low, no-count, scoundrelly hound would be fornicating when the mother of his child just been murdered and is lying all cut to pieces in the morgue? Why, no self-respecting woman would truck with a man like that. A man like that would have to turn to the skankiest, drugged-outest, most disease-infested, ugliest whore in town, and serve him right. Evil man: Cursed shalt thou be in the city and cursed shalt thou be in the field. Deuteronomy 28:16.”

  Within, sounds of argument, heating up. The door swung open and out popped a girl in her midteens, plump, brown, and spitting angry, wrapped in a sheet, and carrying an armful of clothes. She pushed past the two detectives, went into the bathroom, and slammed the door. They stood in the bedroom doorway.

  “Who the fuck are you and what the fuck are you doing in my house?” yelled the man on the bed.

  Youghans was a solidly built redbone man in his early forties with a wide brush mustache and thinning hair, thick gold chains at neck and wrist, and a face full of dull sensuality, upon which now bloomed a scowl of frustrated rage. He sat up on the edge of his bed, his loins covered by a scant drape of blue chenille.

  After showing their badges and telling him to get dressed, they left the room, and while they waited, they looked around, so that anything in plain sight that might suggest a violation of the law might fall under their eye. They even nudged a few objects into plain sight for that purpose.

  “Take a look at this, Cletis.” It had been in plain sight, leaning against a pile of magazines devoted to either sex or autos that sat on one of the side tables in the living room. Barlow pursed his lips, but said nothing. Paz stripped an evidence bag from a roll in his jacket pocket and put the thing in it. He was smiling.

  They got the girl’s name before she slammed out. Youghans shuffled into the kitchen some minutes later, dressed in greasy Bermudas and a red tank top. He grabbed and popped the tallboy can of malt liquor, drank half of it, belched, and said, “You boys picked a hell of a time to crash in here. Little bitch was polishing my pole, man, tight as a three-dollar shoe, mmm-mm! Shit, I was two minutes from getting my nut …” He rubbed his crotch mournfully. “This is about Deandra, right? Yeah, I heard she got killed. Fucking building she was in, I told her to move out of there, but she was the stubbornist bitch alive, ‘bout that and every other goddamn thing else.”

  “When was the last time you saw her, sir?” asked Barlow.

  Youghans scr
atched his head. “What is this, Monday? Must’ve been Saturday night.”

  “She was okay when you left her, was she?”

  “Sure, running her mouth like always. I’ll tell you, because you’re probably gonna hear it in the ‘hood, we did have us some words, shouting and all.”

  “What did you fight about?” Paz asked.

  “Oh, this hoodoo shit she was into. Hey, I got no problem with mother Africa dah-dah-de-dah, I got my kente cloth and all that, stuff on the walls, okay, but she had this mojo man coming round …” He finished his can in three great swallows. “Okay, first thing, right away, I don’t appreciate that, I mean him coming round. I mean, am I the man or ain’t I? Two, that nigger messing with her head, you know what I mean? Can’t eat this, can’t drink that, quit smoking, take this herb, that herb. Even told her when she could fuck. Shit! So I told her, you know, girl, get real! I told her I didn’t want her to see him no more and she threw a shit fit. She said he was this great man, dah-de-dah-dah. Because he give her a number that hit and she bought the fuckin’ store out. Like I didn’t never give her nothing. She said he was going to make her baby this big deal, used a lot of bullshit African words … I lost it, you know? Dumb-ass bitch!”

  “You smack her around any?” Paz asked.

  “Yeah, I popped her a couple, just before I bugged out of there. Nothing heavy, and I tossed some of her hoodoo crap out the goddamn window.”

  A look between the two cops. Paz said, “Oh, yeah? Like what?”

  “Some fucking statue, a little basket full of weeds and shit. Some kind of chain, with, like, big nuts strung along it. Tell the truth I was drunk. I wanted a little piece of ass and no horseshit about the great Wandingo …”

  “That his name, this guy?” asked Barlow.

  “Nah, it’s something else, em, something. Mepetene, something like that. Tell you the truth I didn’t pay none of that no attention.”