Night of the Jaguar jp-3

by Michael Gruber

  “They were…they left for a while,” she lied. Paz saw the lie but declined to call her on it. He left then and hung around with Amelia at the nurses’ station until Lola returned, with a don’t-ask look on her face and a Target shopping bag in her mitt. She vanished into Jenny Simpson’s room. Shortly thereafter, Robert Zwick rolled by in a wheelchair, hoisting a cane.

  “Still got the foot, I see,” said Paz. “Are you comfortably medicated?”

  “Barely. Are you going to drive me home?”

  “It might be a while. I have to check out something to do with a police case. The mystic jaguar we were talking about.”

  “Can I come along?”

  “You want to? I’ll ask.”

  Morales was talking on his cell phone. Paz called out, “Hey, Tito, Zwick wants to come on this run with us.”

  “No,” said Morales.

  “He’s the world’s smartest man. He could be a big help if there are any subtle clues.”

  “No,” said Morales and continued his conversation into the cell phone.

  “That means yes,” said Paz.

  Morales detailed a couple of Miami cops to keep an eye on the hospital, and on Jenny Simpson, and then he took Paz and Zwick along in his car and they drove down to the place the girl had described, a blocky buff-colored building south of Dixie near Eighty-second Street with a large FOR LET sign in front. The corrugated steel doors that led to the repair bay of the garage were down and locked, but the door of the garage office had been left open, and even from outside they could hear the insistent nasty buzz that signaled woe in South Florida, and caught a whiff of the sweetish heavy odor that went with it. In the office the TV was still crackling out a snowy image, apparently ofJeopardy! and they passed through to the service bay. Morales found the light switch.

  It was like looking at the defective television, so thick were the swarming flies feeding on the blood and the red meat strewn on the floor, although they could not actually see the meat very well because of the giant cockroaches that covered the body and its severed lumps. When the light went on, hundreds of these took to the air in a crackle of chitinous wings. The three men crouched and waved their arms instinctively, ridiculously, and Zwick spun and exited at a remarkably fast hobble. They could hear him being sick outside.

  “At least he didn’t puke up the scene,” said Morales sourly. He flicked a giant cockroach casually off his sleeve. People who refuse to have giant flying roaches crawling on them do not long survive as Miami homicide detectives. “Christ, it looks like…what is that down there, a chunk out of this one or is it another guy?”

  “Another guy, I think. Let’s go see.”

  Morales led the way, waving his hand continuously before his face to ward off the flies, like a band conductor in hell.

  Paz said, “Let’s see your flashlight, this looks like something…”

  Morales handed over a powerful miniature Kel-Light and Paz directed it at the floor. “We’ve seen those footprints before, right, Tito? Your imposters must’ve had a whole collection of jaguar paws.” Paz directed the beam at a scatter of glass on the floor and then up to the dim skylight. “He broke out the pane and dropped through. What is that, a twenty-inch pane, would you say? A small guy could’ve dropped through there and…yeah, here, check this out, barefoot prints in the dust. He dropped down and someone must have spotted him because, following these footprints, he ducked behind this parts cabinet and…”

  “Shine it over here, will you?” said Morales. He was squatting near a substantial pattern of dried blood-spatter. In the beam that Paz now provided it was clear that an angular object about the size and approximate shape of a carpenter’s try square, or a semiautomatic pistol, had lain in that spot when the blood had been squirted on the floor. The negative shape was clear, like the patterns of leaves that kindergarteners make on paper with toothbrushes dipped in water paints.

  “The killer picked up the gun,” said Morales. “Look, there’s the mark of a shoe, a partial heel there.”

  “So you think the guy who gutted these two boys was being, what,tidy?”

  “It could’ve been the weapon used to shoot Kevin Voss. They didn’t want the connection made.”

  “Well, maybe,” Paz replied. “But obviously, this is the place they held the girl.” He directed the flashlight beam to the car hoist. “The tape is still on that thing from where they tied her up. But the guy who picked up the gun was from the people who hired the hit on Voss and the kidnap, not whoever did these, um, dismemberments. They must’ve called the guys who were supposed to be watching our girl, got no answer, and came by to check it out. They found this, grabbed up the guns, and split.”

  “How do you know they didn’t kill them? These guys let the girl get away, and the boss had them whacked and chopped up to set an example.”

  “You believe the girl’s story? That she just happened to wriggle loose and escape from at least two armed Colombian desperados?”

  “She got lucky,” said Morales with a shrug. “Why, what’s your theory?”

  “I’ll show you. With the dust and grease layer on this floor, it’s like reading a book. Our little guy gets up on the roof, breaks the skylight, and drops down to the floor, here.” Paz pointed with the beam, like a teacher with a red laser gadget in front of a classroom slide. “He gets spotted by the deceased number one and whips around that parts cabinet. You can see the smeared mark where he made his jump…hey, Zwick, how’re you feeling?”

  Zwick had come into the garage. He looked green in the dimness. “I’m fine,” he said, fanning away flies. “What’s happening?”

  “We’re reconstructing the crime.” Paz reviewed his recent conversation with Morales and then shone the beam on the floor. “Here’s where the barefoot prints end. They go behind the cabinet and stop. Then we have jaguar prints. The jaguar walks around the other side of the cabinet, and here, you can see where the rear claws dug into the cement when it pushed off. Then it zooms through the air and takes the deceased down, from behind probably, because it bit the back of the man’s skull right off, then it flips him over, disembowels him, lots of blood on the paws, because you can see it’s walking toward the front of the garage. Then deceased numero dos comes in, and here you can see, again, the thing digs in, those scratches, and takes off in one bound, there, and he’s on the guy, rips his throat out, tears out his belly, snacks on some liver there, and then he walks over to the hoist and has a conversation with our girlfriend Jenny. By the way, she would have been able to see the whole thing. Now, we observe, here, a pair of barefoot prints standing right where the jaguar prints are, and look at that! If you look real close, you can see that one of them is actually on top of the cat paw print, thus subsequent in time. Also note that the tape’s been slashed with a very sharp blade, all four tapes treated the same way, meaning our girl was definitely blowing smoke about wriggling free. She was sprung by the little Indian after he wasted the desperados.”

  A silence ensued, which Morales broke with “So you’re saying your Indian gets in, turns into a jaguar, kills the bad guys, turns back into a man again, frees the girl, and disappears.” Morales was speaking slowly and with care, as if to a defective or a child, but Paz could imagine the man’s mind scuttling around like one of these cockroaches, trying to find a safe hole where his worldview would be safe from the clear evidence that Paz had presented. He wasn’t green like Zwick, but he was sweating and twitchy, his hands plucking, scratching at himself. “Um,” said Morales, and was saved from a more articulate response by Zwick’s loud snort.

  “Oh, you can’t be serious, Paz. That’s just stupid.”

  “Why? That’s what the evidence clearly shows.”

  “Then the evidence is wrong,” said Zwick. “Look, guys, if something clearly can’t happen, and there’s evidence that it has happened, then one of two things is true: you’ve mistaken the evidence, or you’re being hoaxed.”

  “I thought science was based on evidence,” said Paz.r />
  “To an extent. If you’re adding a data point to an established field, the evidence can be modest. If you’re upsetting the entire known order of the physical universe, you better have an enormous shitload of solid gold evidence. Which we don’t have here.”

  “So we forget jumping in and out of the seven Calabi-Yau dimensions for now?”

  Zwick gave him a frosty look. “Drunken speculation is one thing; believing a proposed explanation for a particular phenomenon is something else.”

  “So what would make you believe what this evidence suggests?”

  “Did you ever see the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Yeah? Remember when the mother ship came down? There was a row of cameras rolling, they had every piece of recording apparatus known to man on site. Same thing here. If you want me to believe that an Indian turned himself into a jaguar, I want it to happen in a floodlit room. I want there to be cameras picking up the entire spectrum from infrared to gamma radiation. I want a complete telemetry suite-mass detectors, radiation detectors, electromagnetic chemosensors. I want your Indian wired to the gills, like a guy in intensive care. Then maybe, just maybe, I’ll believe it. This shit?” Here he gestured at the footprints. “I could set this up in an hour with some simple tools. If the guy who did it is any good, I bet you’ll even find jaguar hairs and DNA traces on the bodies. Fancy, but no sale.”

  “Why would anyone go to all that trouble?” Paz asked.

  “Hey, you’re the fucking detectives. Maybe so you’d think it was a mystical beast instead of a couple of slicks with knives and phony footprint makers, like they do at summer camp to scare the girls. When you find the guy who did it, you could ask him. I got to get out of here.” He did so, crunching the roaches in his path.

  “And there you have it,” said Paz. “The world’s smartest man hath spoken.”

  “You believe him?” asked Morales.

  “No,you’re the detective, Tito. I’m just a superstitious Cuban cook.” He put an idiotic smile on his face, and after a moment Morales smiled, too. “Yeah, I keep forgetting,” he said. “Anyway, we’re in the county here, so I’m going to call Finnegan and let him worry about it. I’m sure it’ll make his day just like it made mine.”

  Paz did not wait around for the county detectives to arrive but called a cab. He dropped Zwick off at his apartment in Coral Gables, near the university. Zwick had taken a double dose of Vicodin, dry, and was somnolent on the drive.

  “Well, that was a fun day!” he said as he got out of the cab. “Let’s go fishing again real soon.”

  “I’ll call you if I see that Indian,” said Paz. “See how he feels about telemetry.”

  “You do that,” said Zwick sourly and limped away.

  When Paz arrived at his house the smell of grilling meat was rich in the air and he felt a pang of hunger that reached down to his knees. He realized he had not had anything to eat since his predawn breakfast, and that the garage scene had effectively suppressed his appetite until just now. He went to the bathroom, stripped off his clothes, took a quick hot shower. When he left the shower, as he was drying himself, he noticed a rich odor that penetrated the scent of soap and the fainter one of the meat cooking. It came from his clothes; he had forgotten how the stink of a murder scene stuck to clothing. It was worse than cigar smoke, and his cleaning bills as a homicide detective had been astronomical. He deposited the garments in the washing machine, seized a Beck’s from the refrigerator and, now dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, went out to the back patio.

  There he found his wife in a chaise, taking her ease like a duchess, while the food was prepared. This was no surprise; the Lola did not cook. What was surprising was that the grill-person was Jenny Simpson, working under the detailed supervision of Amelia Paz. The two of them were having a fine time, chortling away. Jenny looked about twelve in her new clothes, aqua shorts and a short-sleeved cotton shirt covered with blue flowers and bright green leaves.

  Paz greeted everyone affably, complimented the two chefs, finished his beer.

  “Where’ve you been?” asked Lola.

  “Out. Could I talk to you for a second?” He indicated with a motion of his head where he wished this conversation to take place. The two of them went to the kitchen, where Paz asked, “What’s she doing here?”

  “I brought her home with me. You said the hospital might be dangerous and I wanted to keep her under observation. And she seemed like such a lost soul.”

  “Did anyone see you leave with her?”

  “I don’t think so. We went out the back way and down to the parking garage. Why?”

  “Why? Because the kind of people who’re looking for her, when they remove people, they don’t like to leave witnesses. What’re you going to do if they come here? God, Lola, didn’t youthink?”

  “Don’t yell at me! She’s my patient, all right? I was worried about her.”

  “You had a zillion patients. You never brought one home before.”

  Lola opened her mouth to say something nasty and aggressive. If she did that, she knew there would be a fight and a frosty dinner, with both of them speaking with unnatural calm to the child and not to each other and she didn’t have the emotional energy to endure one of those. So instead of snarling she let the toxic feelings out in a sigh and said what was the simple truth. “I don’t know why, Jimmy. It was just something I thought I had to do. And, you know, I thought of Emmylou Dideroff and how we smuggled her out of the hospital that time. She’s the same kind of…no, not really the same. Emmylou was some sort of genius and this girl, I don’t know, she seems mildly impaired, but there’s something unworldly and helpless about her. I was going to leave and I stopped in to check on her, and she was sitting there with her hands on her knees looking like she didn’t have a friend in the world and I invited her home for dinner and snuck her out. I honestly didn’t think about the danger. What it is, I think I’m beyond scared. I hear that people get that way in combat. Or with the cops. Do they?”

  Paz felt his voice get thick. “Yes, they do.”

  She said, “If you want, I could drive her back to her place on Ingraham-”

  Paz flung his arms around his wife and hugged her. They stayed that way for a long time, so long that both of them felt a little strange, felt that they had fallen marginally out of ordinary time, and that as long as they stayed this way, nothing could harm them.

  A call from the back of the house broke in-their daughter: “Hey you guys, the food is ready.”

  “Oh, hell, let her stay the night,” said Paz, pulling away with some reluctance. There was a damp patch on his cheek where her flesh had rested. “I’ll get out my gun.”

  They ate: sausages and chicken, banana chips and dirty rice. The adults drank California jug red. Paz kept Jenny’s glass full, turned on the charm, and without seeming to, got Jenny to tell the story of her life, or at least those parts suitable for a child’s ears. Lola was no mean interrogator herself, and she found in this subtle pumping yet another thing to admire and deplore about her husband.

  Then it was dark, in the sudden light-switched way of tropical climes. Lola brought out the candles; Paz carried the wiped-out Amelia to bed. The conversation continued as it had but uncensored now, all the horrible tales of the fostered child. Jenny had never been the center of attention in an adult gathering before, no one but Cooksey had ever focused on her in this way, and she did not want it ever to stop, she sucked their attention in, spongelike, tubules long dry expanded, softened. Cooksey’s attention had been this intense, but that was about discipline, turning her into an instrument she could use in his service. She mentioned this, half embarrassed, and the conversation turned to Cooksey himself; all that she knew of his background, his tragedies, emerged into the candlelit air.

  The wine slowed her speech at last, then stopped it; her head nodded. Lola took her to the daybed in the home office. The girl was instantly asleep. Lola laid a light blanket over her and went back to the patio.

  Paz was in a c
haise with a glass of wine. She slid in next to him, the wineglass was drained, now a little postmarital necking, too long absent, they both thought.

  When breathing resumed, Lola said, “Poor kid! What a miserable life!”

  “Yeah, but there’s something intact in there. Somehow she learned how to protect herself. I mean, why isn’t she a crack whore? She’d at least have an excuse.”

  “One of the great mysteries, like you and me. I couldn’t help noticing you kept steering her back to this Cooksey. Why the interest?”

  “Because, aside from our mystical Indian, he’s the most interesting character in this whole strange tale.”

  “How so? The way she described him he seemed like just another sad refugee who washed up in Miami and couldn’t get it together to return to civilization. Not unlike myself.”

  “I beg to differ. Miami is the center of civilization. It’s the only place that has Cuban food, cheap cigars,and electricity twenty-four hours a day. Anyway, Professor Cooksey. Sad, all right, but not a refugee. He could work anywhere, but he’s here, operating out of a minor environmental group-slash-commune, whose other members seem slightly nuts, or at any rate a little low-end. Why?”

  “To forget his sad past?”

  “No, Cooksey is not a forgetter. He’s a rememberer. Look, you’re from another planet, you’re walking on a deserted beach on a desert island and you find a watch. What does that tell you?”

  “The time?”

  He punched her gently in the ribs. “No, you know what I mean. It implies a watchmaker. So put together the story this kid just told us, all the stuff she’s picked up from Cooksey and this Moie character, plus the strange events of the last months, the mysterious killings and so on. Somehow a priest in the middle of the jungle knows the names of the people who’re behind the Consuela deal. How? Somehow just that priest who knows these names also has a faithful Indian companion, a kind of Stone Age guided missile, who flies to Miami in his little canoe and starts knocking off those very names. And somehow a Colombian guapo gangster is also involved in this timber-cutting scheme, and he gets called to Miami and comes, and now his boys are getting knocked off, too. What’s so important about chopping down trees that would make a Colombian drug baron leave his safe haven and travel to the U.S.? Okay, he’s laundering money through the Consuela company, we know that, but why the personal involvement? It suggests there’s something bigger going on than trees and money laundries. And in the middle of all this is the professor, who just happens to have a background in clandestine warfare. Who lost his wife because someone was illegally cutting down rain forests, indirectly, true, but maybe he doesn’t see it that way. Maybe, somehow, he made all this happen….”