Night of the Jaguar jp-3

by Michael Gruber

  Ararah. Ararararh.

  Terrified now, he scrambles up, kicking the quilt away, reaching for the light switch. The light goes on, and there it is, huge and golden, in the room. He thinks he is still dreaming, a new and even more horrible nightmare, until just a few seconds before he dies.

  In the hallway, Rafael Torres is awakened by a noise coming from Calderon’s den, a hard sound, like a piece of furniture falling over. He walks down the hall to the door of this room and listens. He hears odd liquid noises and a low growling. It is an embarrassing sort of noise, and Torres hesitates. On the other hand, maybe the guy is sick. He taps lightly on the door. He asks in Spanish, “Mr. Calderon-everything okay in there?” No answer. He sees that the light is on inside the room, so what could be wrong? He opens the door.

  It takes him a second to understand what he is seeing; it takes him another second to pull out his pistol. Whatever it is that has killed Calderon is already moving toward him, impossibly fast, but he is a tough young man with the reflexes of youth. He manages to get one shot off before he goes down.

  In the kitchen, Garcia heard the sound of the shot. With pistol in hand he rushed up the stairs. Victoria Calderon was awakened by the shot, too, but thought at first that it had been part of her dream. Her dreams were of war in a steaming land. Soldiers were attacking a village, and she was trying to gather up the children and take them to shelter among the trees, but the horror of it was that she always missed one or two of them and had to go back, and didn’t want to and tried to think up excuses while the people stared at her with dark, accusing eyes. Then she heard heavy steps outside her door, and as she comprehended that this was no dream, her heart started to pound. She threw a robe over her pajamas and ran out of her room. There was a big man standing with his back to her, one of the men her father called “a little security.” Victoria had led a somewhat sheltered life, but she was no fool, and she had understood at her first sight of them that these people did not come from Kroll or Wackenhut, that they were thugs of some kind and that her father was therefore in terrible trouble. The big man was talking into a cell phone in his dialect Spanish. She called out, “What happened?”

  The man turned and held his palm up like a traffic cop. She stopped automatically, and this gave her time to see what was lying at the man’s feet. The floor here was tile, pale green, against which the scarlet blood made a vivid contrast. It was still crawling in little rivulets toward her along the channels of the grout. It took her a few seconds to make her throat work. “Where’s my father?” she demanded.

  The man put his phone away. Victoria started forward, but the man blocked her path, shaking his head. She heard the front door open and steps on the stairs. The hallway was suddenly full of rough-looking dark men, some of them carrying weapons. One of them stood before her, his broad face grave and angry. She recognized him as Martinez, the one her father had called the head of the security detail.

  “I want to see my father,” she said.

  “That’s not a good idea, miss. You should go back to your room now. We’ll take care of this.”

  “Is he hurt?”

  “Mr. Calderon is deceased, miss,” said Martinez. “You have my profound condolences. Somehow the assassins got through to-”

  Victoria Calderon struck him in the mouth. “Moron! Imbecile! How could you-” she began, and then to her immense surprise, Prudencio Martinez slapped her across the face hard enough to bounce her off the wall. Her vision went red and she slid down to a sitting position against the baseboard. She looked up and saw Prudencio Martinez waggling a finger at her, as at a naughty child. The counterblow was instinctive and without malice; he did not belong to a culture where a woman of whatever exalted rank could strike a man with impunity in front of his subordinates. And in any case the man was dead and she was no longer of any consequence. He left her where she lay, and shouted orders at his men.

  It had not taken Martinez long to recover from the shock of the attack, not that he cared, or his boss cared, about the life of Yoiyo Calderon: the failure was less in preventing murder than in not apprehending the assassins. Therefore, the correct move was to quickly reinforce the guards at the other houses, in case there should be another attack. The Colombians left the house, carrying their dead comrade wrapped in a blanket.

  When they were gone, Victoria struggled to her feet and leaned against the wall. Her head ached, and the side of her face felt hot and swollen. A slight breeze blew through the corridor, carrying with it a butcher shop smell. She felt her stomach heave and made herself take several deep breaths. She could not be sick now, because…

  “Victoria? Victoria, what’s happening?”

  Her mother, blinking in the doorway of her bedroom, looking decorative even in the middle of the night, even fuddled with sleep and the three regular scotches and the sleeping pills. Victoria moved toward her mother.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” she said, “everything’s all right…we had a little break-in but it’s okay now. Why don’t you go back to bed?”

  “A break-in? Oh, my God! Where’s your father?”

  “It’s fine, Mom, everything’s fine,” Victoria said in the most soothing tone she could manage, but Olivia Calderon, while a stupid woman, was not insensitive to the tone of her daughter’s voice, and so she stepped out into the hallway and looked wildly around for some sign of her husband, and saw the blood on the tiles and screamed shrilly and went running down the hallway to the study and there let out a noise that Victoria had never heard emerging from a human throat and fainted, landing facedown in the pool of clotting blood.

  I am not, thought Victoria Calderon, going to collapse into hysterics or faint. This is why I can’t be sick or have any feelings. My father is dead, my mother is useless, my brother is an idiot and is in any case far away. I am in charge of this situation and I will do what’s necessary. That piece-of-shit thug punched me because he thought I was not a significant player, which means that if I don’t make the right moves in the next few days, we will lose everything my family has. She actually voiced these words under her breath, a habit she had acquired as a child when it had become clear to her that her best efforts were never going to make her either a boy or beautiful, and that she was thus fated to disappoint her father and her mother, respectively. It was her way of staying sane; if no one would really talk to her, she could at least talk to herself, and talk sense at that.

  But that’s for tomorrow, she continued, right now the first thing I have to do is to call the police, and she did, calling 911 from the phone in her bedroom. She reported it as a homicide, although she had not yet seen her father’s body. She was going to take the word of Martinez for that. She also reported that her mother had fainted and asked the dispatcher to send an ambulance.

  She hung up the phone and walked back to where her mother was lying. She noticed that there were footprints in the pools of blood and decided that these might be of interest to the police. She did manage to turn her mother onto her back, however, so that her mouth was clear of the blood. She wet a washcloth in the bathroom and wiped as much blood as she could off her mother’s face and hair. Then she stepped carefully over the puddles and into her father’s study.

  She made herself look at the thing on the floor. It’s peculiar, she thought, that I don’t feel much. I’m nauseated by the sight and the smell, but I would be the same at a traffic accident or an explosion, if I were a survivor. Maybe it’s because it’s not recognizable, the way the head is all squashed, it could be anyone, even though I know it’s him. I always thought I loved my father and I should be devastated by this, but I’m not. I feel like my life is starting over by this death. I must, she thought, be the cold monster my family always claimed I was, why they said I could never hold a man, I wasn’t a real woman and so on. All right, I saw it, he’s dead, and now I have to-

  A scream from the hallway. Victoria stepped out of the room, carefully again, and saw that it was Carmel, the maid, standing there in a pink robe and fu
rry slippers with her hands theatrically at her mouth. Her wiry hair seemed actually to be standing up, but whether this was from fright, as in the movies, or a product of recent sleep, Victoria did not know. In any case, she went to the woman and shook her, as much to stop the mumbling prayers as to rally her to action.

  “Oh, my God, is the senora dead?”

  “No, the senor is dead. My mother has fainted from the shock. You have to help me move her.”

  This was said in a tone that the maid had never heard before from the Little Senora, as she was known in the kitchen, a tone of command more familiar from her father’s mouth, and her training overcame her natural repugnance. Together the two women carried Mrs. Calderon to her bathroom, where they stripped off the blood-sodden nightgown, sponged her off as best they could, dressed her in a fresh nightgown, and placed her on her bed, all without a murmur from the woman, who almost seemed to have already joined her husband in death.

  The downstairs bell sounded. Victoria went down and let in the Coral Gables policeman, a man several years her junior. She told him that her father had been murdered. He asked to see the body. She took him up to the study. On seeing what was in the room he uttered an unprofessional oath and turned nearly as green as the tiles. Murders of this kind, of any kind actually, are rare in the City Beautiful, as Coral Gables likes to call itself, and the chief duty of any CG cop who discovers one is to call the county police department, which this man now did.

  Then sirens announced the arrival of the ambulance. The paramedics determined that Mr. Calderon was beyond help and removed the unconscious Mrs. Calderon to Mercy Hospital. After they left, Victoria went back to her bedroom to make some calls. The first was to her Aunt Eugenia.

  “This better not be a wrong number,” said the voice that answered after twenty rings.

  “Aunt Genia, it’s me. Look, there’s been a disaster here. You have to go to Mercy and take care of Mom.”

  “Oh, Christ! Oh, Jesus, what happened?”

  “We’re not really sure. Some kind of accident, an, an explosion. The police are here and I have to stay and answer questions. Mom’s not really hurt, but she got knocked out. Could you please get over there? I don’t want her to be alone when she comes out of it. And could you get in touch with Dr. Reynaldo, too?”

  “Where’s your father, Victoria?”

  The obvious question. “He’s, uh, he was killed. He died, in the, uh, in the thing…oh, no, please, Aunt Genia, if you start crying now I’m going to lose it and I can’t afford to. I’ll talk to you later and tell you all about it, but could you just…go?”

  The distressing noises on the other end of the line faded. “Okay, good. Christ in heaven! Jesus, let me pull myself together here. All right, I’m on my way. Have you called Jonni yet?”

  “Next on my list. Thanks for this, Aunt G., I’ll never forget it. I’ll call you later.”

  She broke the connection and dialed a New York number. After four rings, she heard music and her brother’s light, pleasant voice singing a line from a hip-hop song she didn’t recognize, which faded and then the same voice said, “You’ve almost got Jonni Calderon. I can’t come to the phone right now, but leave a message and I’ll be right back at ya.” She disconnected and did the same again six times. On the last of these she heard her brother snarl, “What?”

  “It’s Victoria, Jonni.”

  “What’s wrong?” with a little quaver of fear. She told him, a truncated version, but with the central fact revealed. He said he’d be on the first plane down, and after very little further conversation, they hung up. They were not close.

  The detectives from the county arrived a few minutes later. They showed her their ID and identified themselves as Detectives Finnegan and Ramirez of the Metro Dade Police. She said, “I don’t understand. We’re in Coral Gables,” and they, or rather Ramirez, had to explain to her, as he had so often before, that the metropolitan county government provided a variety of services to the smaller cities of the county, among which was the investigation of homicides. “You’d been in Miami, ma’am, they have their own homicide unit, but being in the Gables you have us.” He smiled sympathetically; he was a medium-size Cuban-American of about forty with clear aviator glasses and a brush mustache. Finnegan was much taller, and a little older, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair and the reserved and respectful mien of a quality mortician. They were both dressed in cheap, simple clothes, sports jackets and polyester slacks, and Ramirez had on a shirt of a particularly repellent green. They both wore ugly, thick-soled black shoes. Neither of them, Victoria reflected, looked like the cops of the media who, even if craggy-faced character actors, projected some kind of personality from the large or small screen. Like most people, she experienced this as disappointment: these guys were clerks, post office types.

  Finnegan asked, “Could you show us where the body is, Miss Calderon.”

  They all ascended. Victoria noted that the blood pool had dried on the edges now and clotted into small jellied islands. The detectives snapped on rubber gloves and slipped white booties over their shoes. They entered the study. Shortly thereafter, they were joined by crime scene technicians in white Tyvek coveralls. Victoria waited in her room, lying flat on her back in bed, and thought about the things she had to do the next day. In the midst of these thoughts, making lists, generating strategies, her mind decided to turn itself off.

  She snapped awake to the sound of tapping, to find Detective Ramirez regarding her from the doorway. She was on her feet in a second, woozy, trying to shake herself into full functionality without appearing to need to. Her face truly ached now where the thug had slapped her, and she wished for a chance to fix herself up in a mirror. I should have put ice on it, she mused, and felt shame at this thought.

  “We’d like to talk to you now,” said the detective.

  They sat at the long mahogany table in the dining room downstairs. The tall clock in the corner said 4:45, which meant, hard as it was for her to believe it, that less than two hours had passed since that pistol shot had roused her into this horror.

  The questioning, unlike the appearance of the two detectives, was apparently something that Hollywood got more or less right. The questions were the obvious ones, and she told the story without prevarication, but also without any of the background.

  “So this guard hit you?” asked Finnegan after she’d described the events following the shot.

  “Yes. I was so upset that I guess I went crazy. I hit him. I was hysterical and I guess he thought slapping me would calm things down.”

  “From the look of your face that was a heck of a punch. Who were these guys?”

  “I have no idea. The one who hit me, the one in charge, was called Martinez. I don’t know the names of the others. My father hired them. I don’t know where. Is it important?”

  “Well, yeah!” said Finnegan. “According to you, they removed a victim of a crime from a crime scene, and as far as I know they’ve failed to report any of this to the police. We’d definitely like to talk to these fellows. I assume your father will have records, payments, contracts with the security firm, and so on.”

  “As I say, I have no idea.”

  “Fine. Then what happened?”

  Victoria described the scene with her mother, the call to 911, the ambulance, and the calls to the relatives.

  And now the classic question, from Ramirez: “Ms. Calderon, do you know of anyone who might have wanted to hurt your father?”

  “Nearly everyone who knew him at one time or another, myself included. He wasn’t an easy man. He had some business rivalries that got pretty intense, but that kind of thing gets settled by lawyers, or by screaming over the phone, not by…not, you know, by someone breaking into a man’s home and chopping him up with an ax.”

  “You think the killer used an ax?” asked Finnegan. “Why is that?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t, I mean, I couldn’t look at the body, I mean, examine it, but it was just smashed and torn up so much, I
guess…you know the phrase ‘ax murder’ just came into my mind. And that kid they took away, the guard. I saw him pretty well. His face and his neck were just shredded.”

  “All right,” said Finnegan, “but maybe when you’ve had a chance to think, you might put together a list of, as you say, ‘rivals,’ people your dad had a beef with. There must have been someone on his mind, right? Because he hired guards.”

  “Oh, that was the vandalism. Someone clawed up our front door about-what’s today, the twenty-fourth? — oh, maybe three weeks ago. And left, um, some fecal matter on our walk.”

  “Fecal matter,” said Finnegan with a quick look at his partner. “What kind of fecal matter?”

  “I don’t know, Detective. I’m not an expert on fecal matter. We disposed of it and replaced the door.”

  “And you didn’t call the police about this.”

  “No, my father likes…liked his privacy. He wanted to take care it himself, so he hired guards.”

  Now the follow-up questions, as the detectives tried to reconstruct the events of the victim’s last day on earth. Finnegan let Ramirez lead on this, listening and watching the woman. He knew there was something deeper going on here; the crazy story of the so-called guards, and the dead man they had dragged away, went to demonstrate that, and the blow to the woman’s face, also out of line. In Finnegan’s experience, security guards did not strike their clients, and he was beginning to put together in his head a story he liked better. The vic was in with some mob and this was a hit, and one of the bad guys had got shot or killed, too. They’d slapped the woman around as a warning. All this could be checked out, and he intended to do so, should he be allowed to proceed along those lines. The Metro Dade PD was in general a cleaner outfit than the Miami PD, but murders involving high-end Cubans were subject to strenuous review from the upper levels of the department, especially if they might have political or organized-crime coloration. So however it fell out, this one was going to be a pain in the ass, and…