Tropic of Night jp-1

by Michael Gruber

  “Who were you talking to, tying up my phone like that?”

  “Nobody, Mami, just some business.”

  “That phone’s for my business, not your business. You going to work in those fancy clothes?” She looked him up and down. Cesar the prep cook had retreated to the reefer on Mrs. Paz’s entry.

  Paz and his mother locked eyes. Hers were on a level with his own because she was wearing four-inch cork platforms on her feet. And a yellow dress, and a yellow diamond on her finger, and a comb in her black hair, elaborately done up. Real lace around the collar of the dress and a plain gold cross against the dark throat. Her uniform of every evening.

  Paz had been working in the restaurant in various capacities since the age of seven, and his mother made no distinction between working a meal after school and working a meal after an eight-hour shift with the cops, except that after a shift he was even more available, since there was no homework. Paz had tried to explain the difference between after-school work and after-work work many times, but Mrs. Paz was skilled at the art of not listening.

  He smiled to break the stare and said, “Okay, Mami,” which was the right answer, because she gave a la-reine-le-veult nod and turned away. Paz loved his mother and because of this he allowed her to believe that she was still in control of his life, Cuban fashion. But in his mother’s mind, Jimmy Paz was not at all a satisfactorily controlled son. He had, for example, not finished college and gone on to a medical or law degree. He was not even a dentist! Mrs. Paz did not consider law enforcement an acceptable profession for her son. Nor had he married a girl of suitable family and skin tone (pale), thus supplying her with a daughter-in-law to dominate and grandchildren to spoil. Instead, he ran around with a succession of American women, all of whom, despite their fancy educations, were little better than whores.

  Paz understood that until he had an acceptable profession and a wife, his mother would continue to treat him like a schoolboy. This did not bother him much, as he had no compunction about cutting out of the restaurant when cop work called, and the restaurant work paid for, in his mind, if not in hers, a rather nice apartment.

  He left the kitchen and went into the dining room. As always, this brought him a moment of delight, this contrast between the organized chaos of the kitchen and the calm of the dining room. It was high-ceilinged, decorated in shiny white, yellow, pink, and cream; the tiles underfoot were coffee-colored; the chairs and tables were of heavy rattan, painted white. The rear wall was decorated with gilt mirrors, and the two side walls bore a series of Roman arches in white plaster, through which one looked out at brightly painted representations of Guantanamo Bay. Rattan and brass fans rotated slowly and exiguously overhead, stirring the chilled, conditioned air. The room was as close as the memory and resources of Margarita Paz could come to reproducing the dining room at Tanaimo, the great tobacco finca where her mother had served as a cook.

  Paz reflexively checked the house. Every table was occupied, most of them by pale Americanos, but there were several tables of Germans and two of Japanese. A group of crisply dressed foreign tourists waited with their tour guide on the other side of a huge saltwater fish tank. Margarita Paz was a spectacularly good cook, and her place was listed in any number of restaurant guides as worth a special trip. She trained her waiters well, they all spoke English, and Jimmy had written for the menu concise explanations of the contents and preparation of the various dishes. A tourist-friendly place, by design. Later, when the Cubans showed up, there would be larger crowds waiting for a table. In Cuban Miami they said you went to the Versailles to be seen, but to eat you went down the street. The street was Eighth Street, aka the Tamiami Trail, called Calle Ocho by nearly everyone now. (Barlow still called it the Trail.) Down the street meant this place. Every Cuban man is obliged to defend his mother’s cooking as the best in the world, but in Paz’s case it might have been true.

  Then he went home, which was around the corner and four houses down from Calle Ocho, in a yellow stucco two-unit owned by Mrs. Paz. Jimmy Paz had the top unit, and the bottom was rented out. His mother lived next door. It was more space than a single man needed, two large bedrooms, a kitchen, one and a half baths, and a living room facing the street. Paz believed that his mother let him have it so that there would be no excuse for him not putting in the hours in the kitchen and because it allowed her to keep an eye on his doings. The Cruzes, the elderly couple who inhabited the lower floor, were efficient spies, who kept Mrs. Paz well informed. Paz thought it not a bad deal, having had a whole lifetime to get used to his mother’s disapproval. He also was an expert nonlistener.

  Paz went to his refrigerator and selected a Corona beer. There was little else in his refrigerator?a couple of bottles of Piper champagne, some limes, some mixed nuts. The freezer was loaded with cylindrical pints of fruit sherbet supporting a bottle of Finlandia vodka. Paz did not dine at home.

  Beer in hand, he switched on the television and watched the local news. There had been a shoot-out and car chase down Collins Avenue on Miami Beach that afternoon, with plenty of good aerial footage. The murder of Deandra Wallace, which might otherwise have led, came a poor third (after the usual corrupt-official story) and got extra juice because of the bizarre nature of the crime and the thrill value of a possible cult killing. No interviews, just a mannequin reporter in front of Ms. Wallace’s dreary building, who said “bizarrely mutilated” but did not supply the details, nor did she specify the cult involved. Paz would have liked to know that himself.

  He put on a white tunic and check trousers, laced on greasy Doc Marten boots, and went back to the restaurant. There he brought a box of snapper on ice out of the reefer and began to make snapper hash, one of the place’s specialties. Being the boss’s son, he was not subject to the outrageous abuse that is the common lot of sous-chefs the world over, for the chef stayed out of Paz’s way and Paz stayed out of his, and all involved?waiters and kitchen staff?got along unusually well, for Margarita Paz believed that you could taste bad feelings in the food and would not tolerate any prima donnas other than herself. Among restaurant kitchens, this one was unusual in having no actual crazy people in it. The scullion was not even an alcoholic.

  Around nine-thirty Paz took his first break. He went out into the alley, sat on an upturned shortening barrel, drank an iced coffee black as tar, and smoked a chico. He felt calm and at peace, with an interesting case just starting up, and the various tensions of the day worked off by the meditation of simple cooking. He finished his cigar and coffee, and thought that a woman would be nice after work, so he went back through the kitchen and used the pay phone outside the rest rooms to call Beth Morgensen and ask if he could come over late. As a readiness to entertain gentlemen arriving at midnight was a universal quality among the girlfriends of Paz, she said he could.

  After work, he drove his battered orange Z Datsun to her apartment on Ponce de Leon hard by the university, still dressed in his cook’s outfit and carrying a cold bottle of Korbel and a bouquet assembled from the floral displays at the restaurant. Generous, but not wildly so, was Paz, and the women he chose understood this and found it endearing.

  Beth Morgensen opened the door and looked at Paz distractedly over wire-rimmed spectacles. She was a hefty one, as tall as Paz, with a braid of cornsilk hair thick as a python running down her back to her waist, and the broad shoulders and narrow hips of a competitive swimmer. Now she was a graduate student in sociology, all-but-dissertation, which study was on homeless people in Dade County.

  “Oh, my!” she said. “The old flowers-and-champagne routine. Paz, you’re a living fossil.” She stuck out her face and he planted a nice kiss on her pale lips. Paz liked the way she moved, loose-jointed, swaying the big body as to some inner tune. He watched her roll away into her tiny kitchen. She was wearing frayed jean cutoffs and a black T-shirt that said punish me across the front. He followed her through a living room/studio that was stacked with books and folders and so littered with sheaves of papers that the floor was
scarcely visible. A desk sat in the middle of the room, similarly littered, upon which a computer glowed. In the kitchen, he watched her pop the champagne and pour out into two not-squeaky-clean juice glasses. She read the distaste on his face. “Yeah, I know, it’s a pigsty, and you’re such a neat freak, and I beg your pardon, because I’m crashing on this fucking diss, and I swore before Jesus and all the saints that I would finish chapter five tonight.”

  “Why did you let me come over, then?”

  “Oh, well, a girl needs a little break.” She grinned, stretching the long mouth over her front teeth, the lips like pale rubber bands. They sat in two straight chairs and drank companionably.

  “Want to go and hit some clubs?” he asked.

  “Oh, no, not that much of a break. I thought we could finish this nice wine and have a delicious little fuck and then I’ll kick your sweet ass out the door. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds like you’re only interested in me for my body,” putting an artificial sob into his voice.

  “Yes, uh-huh, and …?” She sat on his lap and undid a few of the frogs on the front of his chef’s tunic. “Mm, what is this taste on your neck? It’s terrific.”

  “Deep fat, mostly, plus grilled snapper, salsa, garlic, mango, dark rum, some secret stuff.”

  He let her take off the rest of his chef’s clothes, including the boots, while he drank champagne. She licked him thoroughly, the entire front of his body, like a child getting all the frosting out of the bowl, and then stripped herself and straddled him, and they had a short, sharp fuck to, as she said, take the edge off. Just after this she picked up the champagne and shook the bottle with her thumb over the opening and let it shoot out, icy, over their joined groins. He chased her into her bedroom, where he gave her a good one on top of piles of books and folders, until she howled like a wolf.

  She grunted and withdrew from under her buttocks a thick tome. “Oh-ho,” she laughed, ” Nonparametric Statistics for the Social Sciences, no wonder.” She lowered her voice an octave. “Good study, Morgensen, but your statistics are fucked. Oh, Christ, Jimmy, I don’t want you to go, but you have to.”

  “That’s okay, I got two more girls to see tonight.”

  She rapped him on the head with the book. “Monster! There’s a full professor who’s been trying to get into my pants for months, and he wanted to come over tonight and I blew him off because I thought you might call.”

  “A full professor. I’m honored. Are you going to fuck him to get ahead in your chosen profession?”

  “I might. Everyone else seems to be doing it. But I’m glad it was you.” She kissed his neck.

  “Serendipity that I called, huh?” he said.

  “No, serendipity is when you’re looking for something and you find something else that’s even better. Penicillin. Columbus too, I guess. What you mean is synchronicity, which is when two independent variables happen at the same time, in a pseudo-meaningful way. Serendipity is scientific, synchronicity isn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  She tossed the stat book onto his belly and slipped out of bed. “Read the book.”

  “Why should I when I have you? Where are you going?”

  “The shower, where you can join me, if you promise not to get me started again.”

  Under the lukewarm stream, he soaped her long back, while she held her braid away from the water. He said, “So tell me, why isn’t synchronicity scientific?”

  “By definition. And, Jimmy, I want you to know that you are the first and only man I have ever discussed epistemology with under the shower.”

  “I appreciate that,” he said. “I know that was hard to admit.”

  “It was. In any case, science looks for causality. Event B only occurs after Event A, or is associated with it more than chance alone would allow. Lightning always precedes thunder, and so we assume that lightning causes thunder, and we look for a physical connection between the two events, and in that case, we find it, and science marches on. Synchronicity … thank you, I’ll clean that myself, if you don’t mind … synchronicity proposes a linkage between two events that is meaningful without being causal or related in a reproducible or deterministic way. For instance, I have this terrible plumbing problem and I meet a guy in a bar and we fall in love and it turns out he’s a plumber. Or me wanting to get together with you and you happen to call me from among all your hundreds of women. Pretty, but scientifically meaningless. The Jungians make a big deal of it, which is another reason for not taking it seriously.”

  “It’s like luck.”

  “In a way. But it’s supposed to be meaningful on the psychic level, too. The cosmos or the collective unconscious is trying to reach us. Horseshit, in other words.”She looked down at him and let out a yelp. “Yikes, get that thing away from me,” she cried, and hung her washcloth on it, then turned the cold tap all the way on.

  Later, driving home, Paz experienced the usual letdown, and the fetid backwash of self-contempt. He could sense that his relationship with Morgensen was approaching its conclusion. When they started talking about other, more eligible, men and the passion level went up a notch or two, as was here the case, the final kiss-off loomed not far distant. So Morgensen would get her full professor, or similar, and Paz get another bright, white lady to replace Morgensen, and so on and so on, until he was a fat sixty-year-old cop, turtle-faced with corruption and booze, paying chippies to suck him off in crime-lighted parking lots. Paz had heard about love, and believed it to be real, as he had heard about Mongolia and believed that place to be real as well. Yet while he thus believed, Paz thought that a voyage to the latter was as likely as one to the former: not very, given his record. If milk is free, why buy a cow? Paz had said this to himself and others, even to women. He said it now, waiting for a light, puffing his cigar.

  Something was wrong, something was intensely disturbing, but he could not nail it down; it was like forgetting a phone number or leaving tickets home, an absence, felt but not comprehended. He ought to feel good, he told himself: an interesting and exciting day’s work, a terrific piece of ass, what more could a man desire? Now came a new thought, Mr. Youghans and the dead woman, and the girl he was screwing, and Barlow’s contempt for the man. Which Paz shared. He wasn’t like Youghans. He didn’t seduce high-school girls. Only college graduates. That was a significant difference. Or was it? No, it was. A good deal, for both parties, a square deal. Like he had with his mother.

  Driving, the windows open to the thick, slowly cooling air of Miami nights, Paz rolled a different sort of life around in his mind, the words settle down scuttling across the surface of his brain. Pick one of them and settle down. Or some other, to come. Fall in love. Move out of the free apartment, quit the restaurant. A three-bedroom ranch in Kendall. Pool and barbecue. Kids. Make friends. Invite the Barlows over.

  It had no real taste, it was like water, like meringue without sugar. He would have to be a different man from the one he was now. He supposed he might become that man, but not through any act of personal will. He didn’t know the way there.

  In the morning, first thing, Paz called Dr. Maria Salazar at home and got an answering machine that informed him, first in English, and then in a particularly limpid and refined Spanish, that Dr. Salazar would be out of the country until a date three weeks in the future. Paz cursed in muddy and impure Spanish and then punched in Dr. Lydia Herrera’s number. Dr. Herrera was busy, the secretary said, she had no room on her schedule that morning. Paz bullied, abandoning Barlow’s rule. He threatened that if Dr. Herrera did not see him, he would have her dragged down to police headquarters and charged with obstructing a homicide investigation, and wouldn’t that screw up her busy schedule? The line went briefly dead, and then the secretary came back again and, in a stiff voice, gave Paz his appointment. Paz put on a fawn-colored Palm Beach suit and walked over to the hole-in-the-wall on Calle Ocho where he took breakfast, cafe con leche and a couple of Cuban fruit pastries. While he ate he read Doris Taylor’s story
in the Herald, which had made page 1 below the fold. Doris didn’t spare the gory details, and he guessed that she had gotten to the medical examiner’s staff. The police, he learned, had refused to rule out the possibility of a cult killing. It could have been worse, although he now expected that the brass would be more interested in the case than was optimal. He ripped the story out, pocketed the clip, and drove directly to the university.

  Dr. Herrera was dressed in mango color this morning and she frowned in a way that brought her plucked brows together like a child’s drawing of a gull. The patronizing smile was missing. She stood in the doorway of her little office and radiated honest outrage.

  “This is really inconvenient, Detective,” she said. “And I resent being threatened.”

  “Murder is often inconvenient, Doctor,” said Paz blandly. “And citizens have a positive duty to help the police in an investigation.” He gestured past her. “The sooner we start …”

  She stalked back into her office and sat behind her desk. Paz placed before her a copy of the toxicology analysis on Wallace.

  “This is a list of the chemicals we found in the victim’s body. If you could, we’d like to know what plants they came from.”

  She snatched up the paper, frowning. As Paz watched, her expression changed; irritation gave way to confused fascination. She spun her chair, pulled a reference volume from the shelf, paged through it, pulled down a batch of reprints, shuffled through them, read a page of one, shook her head, muttering.

  “Stumped, huh?”

  She stared at him, but not with hostility. “This is remarkable. Amazing.”

  “Do you know what plant that stuff comes from?” asked Paz.

  “Plant? My God, there’s a whole pharmacopoeia in this. The harmalines here are botanical psychedelics, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, incredibly powerful, used by shamans in both the New World and Old World tropics. In the New World they come from the Banisteriopsis vine, they call it yage or ayahuasca; in Africa they’re derived from Leptactinia densiflora. As to which we’ve got here, I’d have to look it up, but this set of indoles they have listed looks like typical contaminants from Leptactinia preparations. Yohimbine is from Alchornea floribunda, African again. Ibogaine is a powerful stimulant and psychedelic, also African, from Tabernanthe iboga. It’s called the cocaine of Africa. It may not be purposeful here because it’s a common contaminant of yohimbine preparations. It’s an intoxicant and supposed aphrodisiac. Ouabain is an African arrow poison, from Strophantus species. It’s a cardiac glycoside.”