Night of the Jaguar jp-3

by Michael Gruber

  His thoughts here were interrupted by a man in the doorway, gesturing urgently. Finnegan left Ramirez to his work and went out with the man, whose name was Wyman, and who was the head of the crime scene crew. Crime scene crews had become somewhat more importunate of late, a result of the fame of their fictional counterparts on television. In former times, a CS tech would never have interrupted a witness interview. Finnegan had even noticed some of them doing the work of detectives, actually talking to live people at crime scenes, just like on TV. He did not approve.

  So he was a little gruff with Wyman in the hallway.

  “What is it, Wyman? I’m in the middle of an interview here.”

  “We found a bullet in the study, a nine millimeter, in the couch back. It’s in real good shape. So the story about the shot is true, at least.”

  “This is what you came in there for, a fucking bullet?”

  “No, Finnegan, not the bullet. It’s something out in the back.” With that, the technician turned away and went out through the living room and a large semi-enclosed, tile-floored room with many plants and miniature orange trees in pots, through French windows to the patio. There was the usual swimming pool, covered now, and extensive plantings of ornamental shrubs. There were lights and epiphytes in the three large live-oak trees and the whole yard was surrounded by a hibiscus hedge ten feet high and precisely trimmed into a square-topped vertical wall.

  “Look up there,” said Wyman, pointing to the rear wall of the house. “That’s where we think the perp entered.”

  Finnegan saw what he meant. They were directly under the study window, a tall casement, and both wings of the window were standing straight out from the wall.

  “It was open at the time of entry. I guess the victim felt pretty secure because there was a guard in that Florida room we just passed through. We found cigar butts and coffee cups.”

  “Yeah, that’s what the maid said.” Finnegan looked up at the window. The lower edge was at least fifteen feet from the ground. A little less than halfway up this wall was a rolled awning. He said, “He could’ve moved the table and climbed onto that awning.”

  “He could’ve,” said Wyman, “but what he actually did was, he jumped right up to the window from the ground there and grabbed the wall and the window frame with his claws.”

  Finnegan looked at the man to see if he was joking, but Wyman’s face was serious, with worry lines creasing his broad forehead. He pulled a flashlight from the pocket of his coveralls and shone it on the wall. “There they are, four parallel gouges times two in the stucco and”-here he shifted the bright beam-“same again in the wood of the window frame.”

  “It could’ve been some kind of ladder, with hooks…,” Finnegan offered.

  “Yeah, that was our thought at first. Until we found these.”

  Shining the flashlight on the limestone slabs of the patio, he led the detective some twenty-five feet from the house. There in the center of the path were four reddish marks. They were smeared but unmistakably the pad marks of a large cat.

  “The floor of the study and the area just outside were soaked with blood. I mean, both victims were almost entirely exsanguinated, that’s over two gallons of blood. There are these same pad marks all over the place up there and on the windowsill, too. It jumped from the window and landed here, then a couple of steps and it jumped over that hibiscus hedge and landed in the next yard. Then it, or they, turned the inside key of a wrought iron gate and went down a service alley out to Montoya Avenue. And then they were gone.”

  “So what’re you saying, a guy and some kind of animal?”

  “I can’t think of any other explanation,” said Wyman. “And believe me, I tried. It certainly explains the apparent damage to the victim. The man’s skull was crunched up like a piece of tinfoil. His belly was ripped open, and it looks like half the liver is gone. And look over here.”

  Wyman went to an island of plantings under one of the live oaks. He moved the foliage of a ginger plant aside and directed his flashlight beam to the loose earth below it.

  “This is where it set itself before jumping over the hedge. We’re going to take casts, of course, but I can already tell you you’re dealing with a big animal. If I had to take a wild-ass guess, from the depth of that footprint, I’d say around four hundred pounds.”

  “Good Lord! What, some kind of lion?”

  “A tiger, more probably. Lions aren’t much for that kind of jumping. Or the world’s largest leopard. Or the jaguar from hell. Or extraterrestrials. This is a strange one, my friend.”

  Finnegan looked up at the tall, thick, unbroken hedge and then down to the ground. There were no human footprints of any kind visible. “So how did the guy get over the hedge?”

  “I don’t know, Finnegan,” said Wyman. “You figure it out-you’re the goddamn detective.”

  Santiago Iglesias’s cell phone went off, snapping him out of his light doze. He looked out the window. The painted VW was still parked there, silent now. Beside him Dario Rascon snored intermittently.

  Prudencio Martinez was on the line. “I need you here right now,” he said, and gave an address on Fisher Island.

  “What’s up, boss?”

  “The chingada got himself killed, and whoever it was took out Torres, too.”

  “?Maldito! How could that happen?”

  “How the hell should I know,cabron? The thing is to stop it from happening again. Get moving!”

  “What about the VW here?”

  “Forget it. We have plates on them. We can find them when we want to.”

  After being Jaguar, it is necessary for Moie to wash himself, to submerge fully in running water. At home he would naturally use the river, and although he knows there is a river in Miami, he does not like its smell, so here he uses the water of the bay. He is up to his neck off Peacock Park amid the little skiffs and tenders of the marina, with the bright face of Jaguar shining down on him. He licks his lips and laughs. He is still not used to the fact that salt is present in infinite quantities in the land of the dead. It is the single weirdest thing about being here. Where he comes from, cakes of salt are used to buy brides.

  He finishes the ritual chanting and emerges from the water. He brushes the drops from his skin and pulls on the priest’s clothes. He feels his belly full of meat, and he both knows and does not know what the meat is. He once tried to explain this mental state to Father Tim (although not discussing the origin of the meat in that case), but it was an unsatisfactory conversation. Another ontological confusion, but Father Tim did not seem disturbed by this. He always seemed delighted by things he couldn’t understand about the Runiya and their ways. It didn’t make his head hurt that way Moie’s head hurt when Father Tim talked to him about theology and the ways of the wai’ichuranan. So Moie learned a new word at that time: ineffable.

  Eleven

  Paz got the news in the morning. He came up out of sleep in a hurry and the sort of mild panic we experience when we become aware that someone is watching us as we sleep. Here it was his wife, the normally earlier riser, and she was sitting at the foot of their bed, with the Miami Herald in her hand and a troubled expression on her face, although not exactly the troubled expression she had worn for what Paz felt to be months. Time itself had become funny around the house, it seemed; he thought it might have something to do with having variants of the same dream nearly every night. That could throw your calendar off a little. Lola’s look now was not one of interior pain, as before (with “No, I can’t talk about it” being the response when asked, “What’s wrong?”), but a gentler and more accessible expression, suggesting that the problem was exterior to herself.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Bad news. Or maybe you’ll think it’s good, I don’t know.”

  With that she handed the paper to him. The Herald had run it above the fold, on the right margin: Developer Slain in Coral Gables, was the headline, and the subhead read: Second Killing of a Prominent Cuban-American Businessma
n Strikes Fear. He read it and felt a strange pang, as if he had been clutching something alive to his vitals without knowing it, and it had just died with a sigh.

  He felt her watching him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It must be a shock.”

  “A little,” he agreed.

  “Any feelings?”

  He shrugged. “I guess. Surprising feelings of…not loss, because I never had anything from the guy, but…something. You know I never think about the bastard from one year to the next, and then a couple of weeks ago Major Oliphant drops by the place and asked me do I know him, and as usual I say no, which is the truth, and now this. The only reason he’s my father is because my mother screwed him to get a small-business loan, and we had exactly one conversation my whole life, in which he told me he’d kill me if I ever came around him again. My position was nobody outside the family needs to know any of that shit.”

  Paz stared at the paper for a while here, until the black letters in the murder story ceased to have any semantic content. He took a deep breath and let it gush out.

  “Did I have some little pathetic hope that he was going to have a change of heart and…and what, take me to a Dolphins game, introduce me to all his pals? Guys, I want you to meet my nigger bastard son, Jimmy Paz. I don’t think so. I don’t know, you read these stories about women, refugees or whatever, they’re carrying this baby in their arms, ducking bullets, starving, bleeding, and then they arrive at the refugee camp and the doctor takes a look and the baby’s been dead for a week. How does she feel? I mean she had to have known it, but she talked herself out of it. And now it hits her. Does that make any sense?”

  “Yes, in a strange way. What will you do?”

  “I don’t know, Lola. You think I should send a wreath?”

  At this sarcasm, she started to rise from the bed, her face closing again, but he grabbed her hand and pulled her back down.

  “I’m sorry. It’s a little hard to take first thing in the morning.” He stroked her hand. “More important, when are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Nothing’s going on. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You do. You’re nervous and crabby-that fight we had, it wasn’t right, it wasn’t just a fight. You come back from work and you’re all glassy-eyed, like you’ve been taking dope.” He paused and craned his neck elaborately, trying to catch her eye. She dropped her head, refusing this. “Areyou taking dope?” he asked.

  “Of course not! I’m under a lot of strain. Working neuropsych in an ER is no picnic. I take an occasional Valium.”

  This was a lie. Lola has been stuffing herself with buspirone, alprazolam, chlordiazepoxide, diazepam, and halazepam in varying combinations and dosages for weeks, ever since the dreams started, the same dream every night. She’s a psychiatrist, for God’s sake, she knew the signs of incipient breakdown. She also knew that there was no shame involved in mental disease; still she felt shame at her condition and would not speak about it to her husband. She has mentioned obsessive dreaming to her training therapist. They have talked about it. They have discussed what it means to dream obsessively about your husband giving your child to a jaguar to be carried off and eaten. What does it mean that, in the dream, you wish for it to happen? That your husband is dressed in furry skins and carrying a bow and arrow in one hand, and in the other hand a little model of a jail? You think that he’s a savage perhaps, a little unconscious racism here? Or that you feel trapped in the marriage? A little jail? It’s a common thing. And what about the woman in blue and white who stands behind the husband: your mother, perhaps? And the seven arrows your husband shoots in the dream, do they hit the daughter or the beast? Ambiguous, a source of anxiety, yes? What would it mean if they hit the beast? What do the arrows symbolize? Why seven? It might be sexual, yes, fears of rivalry with the daughter, sexual aggression by the husband against the daughter feared and repressed? What does the jaguar symbolize?

  Nothing, Doctor, they symbolize nothing. That’s what she always says, a failure at her own game when it strikes so close to home. Sometimes a jaguar is only a jaguar. What she has not told the doctor is that her husband has also dreamed of great spotted golden beasts and also her daughter, all dreaming of the same thing, which is impossible, it’s not happening, mere coincidence. If she told him that, they’d look at her sympathetically and put her on the other side of the locked wards. The requirement for absolute materialism is the great unspoken given of her profession; spooks, messages from beyond, visions, are all symbols of something else, some repression, some trauma in the meat. Not to believe that is to be crazy.

  She knew that her husband did not buy into that at some level, believed that the unseen world might be as real as fire hydrants and mangoes. He denied it in public, but it is why he took the child to that ritual. And the mother-in-law, a true believer, and they would turn her girl against her, and she would be alone…

  “How occasional is that, Lo?” asked Paz, and unconsciously, a little of the old cop tone insinuated itself into his voice. He heard it, she heard it: it was how you talked to junkies.

  “I said, I’m fine!” Lola snapped back, with which she shot up from the bed and went into the bathroom. There she looked into the mirror and made a professional assessment. Patient is a thirty-nine-year-old female Caucasian, well nourished but could drop a few pounds, looks like shit, bags under eyes, dry lips, bitten nails, twitches, dull skin. Reports insomnia, stupid fights with husband, night terrors, reduced sexual energy, recurring dreams. History of hypochondria but nothing recent. Patient is, or was, happy with career and relationships, no prior trauma except one voodoo ceremony, one life-saving miracle by a God in which she does not believe, and a few incidences of murderous violence…

  She decided to sign up for a CAT scan. Let’s rule out the brain tumor, shall we? Meanwhile, she thought, on with the day. She opened the medicine cabinet and took down a vial of 5 milligram Valium tablets.

  In the bedroom, Paz rose and threw on a sweatshirt and jeans. He would make breakfast for Amelia and take her to school and then return to shower and smoke a cigar and have some more coffee, just as if this were an ordinary day. In fact, by the time he completed these routines it would have become an ordinary day: again his extraordinary ability to bury unwanted thoughts. Had the drug companies been able to bottle it, Valium and its sisters would have been driven from the market.

  Nor did the subject arise again that day or in the ensuing week. Paz watched his wife covertly for more signs of mental distress. He found them in plenty but felt helpless to intervene, having learned over the years how difficult it was to comment effectively on the mental states of one’s wife, if one’s wife was a psychiatrist. He was a patient man, however, patience on the Jobian scale being a requisite for homicide detectives, and so he waited to see what would evolve and paid a lot of attention to his daughter.

  A week and a day after the killing of Yoiyo Calderon, after the elaborate funeral (not attended by Paz) and after the murder had vacated the front pages of the paper for others more recent, if less gaudy, Paz was at work at the end of the lunch rush running a wire brush over his grill and thinking that he should take his wife and kid on a vacation this year, take the boat and run down the Inland Waterway to the Keys, stay in a nice marina, let the sun bake all this shit out of the three of them. He began to think about what the best time would be to take this break, maybe have to wait until school break around Christmas, which would leave his mother alone on Christmas, no, couldn’t do that. After Christmas, then. Would Lola go for it?

  A tug on his apron, and he started and spun around with a curse in his mouth. He was not wound as tight as his wife yet, but he’d dropped a lot of calm.

  “What!” he said, more harshly than he meant, and he saw the child blink and draw back. He knelt and gave her a hug. “I’m sorry, baby. I was just thinking, and you startled me.”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “Something nice. Going out on the boat dow
n to Islamorada with you and Mommy. A vacation.”

  “Could we take Felix and Louis?”

  “I don’t think cats like to go on boats. We could send them to the cat vacation hotel, though.”

  “There’s no such thing.”

  “There is. They can order fried mice from room service and there’s a bar where they eat catnip and get crazy. They’ll love it.”

  “Okay, but there’s a lady out in the room who wants to talk to you. She didn’t order anything but cafe con leche and a guava tart.”

  Paz thought immediately of Beth Morgensen. What if the woman was getting aggressive and starting to hunt him? It was all he needed just now.

  “What does she look like?”

  “She has blond hair. I never saw her before, I think. Table ten.”

  Paz washed his hands and face and removed his greasy apron. As always when coming into the dining room after a shift, he paused for a moment to adjust to the shock of moving from the zone of controlled chaos and heat to that of calm, luxury, and cool. He’d never seen the woman at table ten either, but she seemed familiar in an odd way, something about her eyes and the set of her jaw. An old flame? No, he was eidetic on those. Someone from the police? Possibly. He observed her from the cover of the philodendron-draped woven screen that separated the service hallway from the dining room. She was indeed blond, the hair fine and well cut in a businesslike neck-length style, and wore a tan linen suit, also well cut, over a pale lavender blouse. Paz had an eye for clothes and color, and he could tell that those particular shades of tan and lavender were not colors available at Target or on the bargain racks. So, a wealthy woman, late twenties or early thirties, smooth tanned skin, not pretty. Her features were heavy, the nose prominent, the mouth too wide for the face, a fairly masculine face, really, one of those women who turn out looking a little too much like Dad. Her large hazel eyes, set a little aslant, catlike, with thick lashes, were, however, quite fine.