Tropic of Night jp-1

by Michael Gruber

  “Nice view,” said Paz, pulling back and facing the girl, who stood nervously in the doorway. “You ever look out the window? At that apartment building?”

  A dull nod. He pointed out the window at the Wallace building. “Maybe you can tell me about some of the people who live over there.”

  “My friend Amy live there.” She indicated a first-floor window.

  “That must be fun. You could wave to her. How about that apartment above where Amy lives and a little to the right. It’s dark now. Do you know who lives there?”

  “Lady got killed.”

  “That’s right. Did you ever look in there before she got killed?” Paz felt a little excited now, a tingle of detective instinct. Strictly speaking, the regs prohibited him from questioning a child without an adult guardian present, but he did not want to break this off just yet. This kid must spend a lot of time in this room looking out the window. It was like having real-life cable, with continuous soaps and no PG-13 ratings. She had a wary look, however, and so he asked if he could sit on her bed and wait for her grandmother to return. Would she mind sitting next to him so they could talk? She sat on the very corner of the bed, as far from him as she could.

  “Tanzi, you could really be a big help to us and do yourself some good here. Did you know that the police pay money for people to help them?”

  A spark of interest. “Yeah? Like, how much?”

  “Depends on what they tell us.” He pulled a clip of currency out of his pocket. “Let’s try me asking some questions and see how much you can earn. Okay, first question. Did you ever see anyone in that apartment besides the lady who lived there?”

  Nodding. “Yeah, her boyfriend.”

  Paz peeled a couple of singles off the roll and dropped them on the bed. “Very good. Now let’s talk about last Saturday. Did you watch TV?”

  “Uh-huh. I watched Saturday Night Live. ‘Cause my gran went to sleep before. She don’t let me watch it usually.”

  “Okay, and after the show, did you look out the window, maybe wave to Amy?”

  A nod, a looking-away.

  “And, so, Tanzi, did you see anything that went on in that apartment?”

  “He slap her.”

  “Who?”

  “Her boyfriend. They was running back and forth and he was throwing stuff around and out the window and she trying to stop him and he slap her in the head. And then he run out.”

  Paz stripped a five from the roll and placed it on the other bills. “And after that, what happened?”

  Shrug. “Nothing. I went to sleep.”

  “Uh-huh,” Paz replied, and then, carefully, “You went to sleep right after the other man came in, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” Her eyes were on the pile of money.

  “What did the other man look like?”

  The girl took a breath, as if to answer, and then without any warning she sucked in two more whooping breaths and then collapsed on the bed, her face screwed into a knot, howling.

  Paz made a feeble attempt to comfort her, but she shrank from him, curled into a ball, and continued her noise, a horrible high-pitched yowl, like a cat. He heard footsteps. The bedroom door flung open and there stood Mrs. Meagher and a little boy. The woman rushed to her granddaughter, crying, “Oh, honey, what did he do to you?”

  “I didn’t do anything to her,” said Paz. But she glared at him and pointed to the door. “Get out, you! I’ll tend to you later.”

  He paced in the living room, wanting a smoke, a drink, baffled as to what to do next. The girl had clearly seen something, an event so terrifying that the mere mention of another man in the Wallace apartment had sent her over some psychic edge. After some minutes, the little boy came into the room and sat on a worn upholstered rocker. Paz recognized him as the landing urinator.

  “How come you beat on my sister?”

  “I didn’t beat on your sister. Do I look like someone who beats on little girls?”

  “You the po — lice,” said the boy, as if in explanation. “How come she crying, then?”

  “I don’t know. We were just talking normal, and then I asked her a question and she went bananas.”

  “What you ax her?”

  “The window of you guys’ room looks out on a window where a woman was murdered last weekend. I wanted to know if she saw anything.” He paused. “Did you see anything?”

  “I saw a ho naked.”

  “That’s nice. Tell me something … what’s your name, by the way?”

  “Randolph P. Franklin. Show me your piece.”

  “Later. Randolph, tell me something. How come if you live right here you were pissing on the landing?”

  “‘Cause my gran, if she be there, she make me stay in after school, and I got to hang with my homes.”

  “What you got to do is do your homework and mind your granma.”

  The boy shook his head in disgust. “You so lame, man. Now can I see your piece?”

  Paz flipped his jacket aside to reveal the.38 in its belt holster.

  The boy said, “Oh, man, that a pussy gun. You should get you a nine, man.” He adopted a crouched shooting stance and made the appropriate noises. “That’s what I’m gonna get me, a nine, a Smith or a Glock. I got a friend got a two-five.”

  “You don’t need friends like that,” said Paz. Mrs. Meagher came in.

  “How is she?” Paz asked.

  “She’s sleeping, no thanks to you. I got a good mind to call your boss and complain. And you a colored man, too.” The woman was only somewhat over five feet in height, but she was crackling with outrage, and formidable.

  “Ma’am, I didn’t do anything to your grandchild. I didn’t yell at her or threaten her or touch her. In fact, all I was doing was giving her money and asking if she saw anything to do with the crime I’m investigating. And she did. I think she did see the actual killer, through that window. But as soon as I asked her to describe the man, she went into this screaming fit.”

  Mrs. Meagher narrowed her eyes. “Why would she go and do that?”

  “You know, ma’am, I’ve been asking myself the same thing, and the only thing I can come up with is that Tanzi saw something so awful that it somehow hurt her mind, so that whenever she has to think about it she goes off like she just did. And let me tell you something, Mrs. Meagher. I’ve been a homicide detective for six years now, and this murder we’re talking about was the worst thing I ever saw. I’m not talking about some hyped-up kid who shot a clerk in the 7-Eleven store. This guy’s a monster. And what if he does it again?”

  “Sweet Jesus!”

  “Yeah. And besides that, what about Tanzi? She could be messed up for life behind this, end up in an institution.”

  And more of the same, until the woman was frantic and thoroughly bamboozled. She was a confirmed watcher of the kind of daytime television in which children were indeed turned into monsters by the shock of witnessing something nasty.

  Smoothly, he closed with “So, if it’s okay by you, ma’am, I’d like to arrange to have her looked at by a doctor, somebody who could talk to her and figure out what the damage was and how to fix it. No charge to you, of course; the Miami PD will take care of the whole thing.”

  It was okay by her. Later, driving back to the department, Paz felt only somewhat ashamed of himself. He knew that there was no way that the PD would pay for any kind of counseling for a kid like Tanzi, even if she knew who got Hoffa. At a light, therefore, he used his cellular phone to dial a familiar number, the office of Lisa Reilly, Ph.D., child psychologist. The last remaining girlfriend.

  THIRTEEN

  My transmission does a little hesitation and a lurch before it pops into third gear. It’s leaking fluid, too, and is the main thing that dissuades me from packing Luz and my scant trunkful of possessions in the Buick and heading out the next day toward some city picked at random. If Lou Nearing actually spotted me walking down the halls of Jackson pushing a records cart, and if he wants to come after me, say hello, talk a
bout old times, it shouldn’t take him long to find me, and then what? No, more probably he’ll recall that I committed suicide. It was in all the papers. I wonder if Lou is still friendly with him. Maybe they call each other a couple of times a year. Hey, man, funny thing happened, I thought I saw Jane the other day in the hospital. And my husband would remind Lou that I was dead, but at the same time he would be thinking, triumphally, happily (if “happy” is still a word that applies), she’s alive. Because there wasn’t any body, which should have made him a little suspicious in the first place. On the other hand, if I were going to kill myself, for reasons he alone knew, he would have to figure I’d do it in a way that left no body for him to find?and use, in the various ways he must have learned. Immolation by fire. Drowning at sea. I chose a boat explosion and drowning, being a nautical person.

  Or maybe Lou’s in with him. Maybe he’s the disciple. Maybe he killed that woman. I can’t think this way, or I’ll go mad. Madder.

  Unpleasant times at the office today. Mrs. Waley tells me to push the records cart around again and I refuse to leave the Medical Records Office. Mrs. Waley is vexed. I say that it is the job of the messengers to carry records, and she points to the section of my job description where it says other duties as assigned, and I say that is only true of duties having to do with clerkship. She says in what she imagines is an intimidating voice, are you refusing a direct order, as if we were in the marines, and I put on an air of mulish obstinacy and repeat that I am not going out of the office anymore. As I do so, because I am so frightened of running into Lou Nearing again, I let Crazy Jane peek out from behind my eyes for a few seconds and I see the expression on her face change. She remembers that I am a bat and envisions a scene, maybe even violence, and she backs off, muttering about a written reprimand in my personnel jacket. I will have to bear it.

  Later, Lulu and Cleo grab me in the file warrens, mad to know what the fuss was about. I tell them a version of the truth, that I don’t want to wander the halls because there’s a man I’m avoiding, someone who’s annoying me. They stare at me in amazement, and a look passes between them. A man? Dolores?

  Later in the car thinking, Yes, drive to some anonymous city. Dayton. Boise. Indianapolis. Get a place to live and a meaningless job moving paper or electrons from one box to another, raise Luz, each day scratch another line on the wall, like the bearded prisoners in cartoons.

  There are long shallow steps leading to the day-care center, and on one of these sits Luz in close conversation with a little blonde. She flickers a hand at me as I approach but doesn’t move. Their perfect cheeks are close together, dark as bread crust, pale as milk. I have a moment of faintness. A little unstuck in time for a moment there: I was thinking of my husband’s brown hand moving over my body, how happy I felt there at the beginning. Oh, it was love, true, but it was also a certain self-satisfaction, the world convulsed with the hallucination of race, and little Jane had beat it, gone beyond. I dig my nails into the palms of my hands and summon up a ghastly smile. But they are not watching me.

  The blonde is Amanda, the new best friend, the subject of continuous commentary recently, a Talmud in pink sneakers. Luz has been to Amanda’s house, on Trapp Avenue in the good white Grove, the earthly paradise, and desperately does she want Amanda to come to her house. I had not anticipated this, I confess. I thought she would be as I am now, a solitary, the two of us for ourselves and no one else. But no, she is now a regular little kid, the insanity of her first four years has been put out with the trash, and now she wants Barbies and My Little Pony and pals.

  A thin, elegant woman gets out of a silver Audi and comes over to the girls and me. She has big sunglasses pushed up on her hair, which is beautifully cut and a few shades darker than her daughter’s. She is wearing a fawn suit, and a peach silk blouse. She is something with an airline. The mister is a big-time lawyer. Julia Pettigrew is her name. Amanda runs to her and asks if she can go home with Luz, and Luz does the same to me. Mrs. Pettigrew looks at me kindly, the sort of patronizing look Dolores Tuoey deserves, the look saying of course I don’t mind if my precious goes in your horrible dangerous junker and visits your half-caste kid in your white-trash household, and I am far too liberal, and proud of it, to ever by word or deed imply that there is any objection to the association between our children. And in response I sort of shuffle and begin to shake my head negatively, so that Mrs. Pettigrew rescues me, as I knew she would, by saying, “Girls! Why don’t we go to Cocowalk and get an ice cream!” Cries of delight, the bribe effective, and “I’ll bring her back in a couple of hours.”

  A couple of hours, good, that will give me enough time to pack my little box and my ugly clothes, and write a note, please take care of my little girl, and by the time they get there I can be in Vero Beach. The transmission will get me to Jacksonville and then I can take a bus. I can travel faster alone, dumb in the first place to take the kid. The ogga, grasping at the controls.

  Later I sit in the car in my driveway listening to it tick. We are both troubled by transmission problems; like my Buick, I can’t get into gear. This happened after I left Marcel, too. It is hard to leave the Chenka. Impossible to find them if they don’t want to be found, but leaving is no simple thing either, especially in the spring, when everything turns to bog. I went with Marcel and a party of Chenka on their semiannual shopping trip to Ust-Sugoy. Kmart has not come to Ust-Sugoy yet, but you can buy salt there and tools and cloth if you have wool to trade. Marcel put me on the weekly boat that runs up the Kolyma River to the roadhead at Seymchan. My eyes slid off his face, there was a repulsion there, where once there had been attraction. He volunteered to leave his work and come with me, but I flatly refused, I think I even got angry with him, accused him of treating me like a child, of wanting to continue his control. Being a good modern girl I had reinterpreted the cosmic evisceration I had just gone through as personal growth! I need my freedom?I actually said that to him. Freedom, the one pathetic virtue of the Americans, that and honesty. I was disappointed in him, I said, being honest. I didn’t cry when the greasy old boat pulled away, but, now that I recall it, he did, the slow embarrassing tears running down his face.

  At Seymchan, while one waits for one’s bus, one stays at the exclusive Gulag Hilton, a two-story structure in cracked and rusty concrete, where the rooms are little boxes without TVs, mini-bars, or windows. You get an iron bedstead and a mattress stuffed with felt and vermin and a twenty-watt bulb that turns off all by itself at ten. You can get kvass at the bar, though, and pepper vodka, which I did in some quantity. From Seymchan, it is a two-hundred-mile bus ride through the lovely Commie death camp district to Magadan, stopping for the evening at romantic Myakit. There was a hotel in Myakit, too, but it had burned down while I was in the field, and so we all stayed the night in the bus terminal. My fellow passengers were all Siberians and so the temperature in the cement-block building?maybe ten degrees of frost?did not trouble them. There was a red-hot stove going, and a boiling samovar, and there was ample vodka traveling around in a jolly enough manner.

  I fell in with a Yakut family named Turgaliy, a man, his wife, and three children, two girls and a little boy. They had some bread, sausage, and tea, which they kindly shared with me, and I passed on a Bic lighter for Mr. T., and for Mrs. T. an almost-full purse spray of L’Air du Temps (oh, yes, I actually brought it along for my romantic idyll among the Chenka), and push-button ball pens for the kids. They also had a bottle of unbranded local vodka, which stood by me during much of the evening. We drank from little silver cups. I learned some doleful, droning Yakut songs and passed out singing.

  And awoke in my sleeping bag, into which the Turgaliys had stuffed me, at dawn, to find myself in the middle of what appeared to be a nervous breakdown. The tiny little lady in the control room was baffled. The body refused to move. The vital levers and switches had been taken over by an ogga, a sad and frightened spirit, who thought that the best thing to do was to lie here in this cozy sleeping bag, zipped up over the he
ad, until death intervened or the entropic curtain descended upon a universe grown terminally stale. I could see through my eyehole the Turgaliys moving about gathering their things. The children peered in, grinning, clicking their ballpoints like microcastanets. I heard the bus arrive, the worried pleading of the Turgaliys. They shook me, they attempted to uncocoon me, but I rolled into a ball and wept until they left. The bus pulled out, farting gaily. Silence. I had to pee. I staggered to the smelly hole provided, then back to the bag. It’s just the bag I’m in, I said to myself, or rather that is what the ogga said to the tiny little lady, and thought it very witty, a stopper. That’s just the bag I’m in, an old Fred Neil song it appears to know. I was clutching my notebook like a holy relic.

  Some days passed. The daily bus pulled in and out. Someone went through my backpack, removing all valuables, then someone else removed the backpack itself. I stopped going to the hole to pee, but there was not much pee to pee anymore, since I had stopped eating and drinking.

  Time went by. A shadow fell over my little blowhole. I opened my eye and there was Josiah Mount, my half brother. This was such a shock that for a moment, I regained control. I licked my cracked lips and formed the obvious “What are you doing here?” He said, “Don’t you know that if you stay in the bus station in Myakit long enough, everyone you ever knew in your life will walk by?” Always a kidder, Josey.

  Marcel, through some unknown, but probably nonsorcerous, means, had caused an e-mail message to appear in my brother’s office describing my route and suggesting I might be in some serious trouble. My brother immediately chartered an airplane. He can do things like that because he made a remarkable amount of money in the telephone business; he claims to have invented the annoying dinnertime phone call asking if you want to switch your long-distance carrier.

  He picked me up, stinking sleeping bag and all, and placed me in the bed of a truck parked outside. The truck roared and started. He washed my face with water from a plastic bottle and dribbled some into my mouth. Then black. Then an oatmeal sky, too bright. I was out of the sleeping bag and didn’t stink anymore. I was lying flat, being carried on a stretcher by two squat Asians in brown uniform into a pale blue jet aircraft that smelled of kerosene and hot plastic. The engines made a shrill sigh. My brother’s face, smiling; he stroked my hair from my eyes. A slight sticking pain. More black.