Valley of Bones

by Michael Gruber

  “Look,” he said, “I know you’re shaky and I’m sorry as hell that this happened, but I have to ask. Did you get a chance to read the notebook before it got taken?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay, then you need to tell me what, if anything, in it was relevant to the case. Your memory is fresh now….”

  “Yes, I understand. But I don’t know what’s relevant and what isn’t, it’s just more amazing adventures of Emmylou.” She gave him a summary of the third notebook and added, “It’s a continuation of her sad story. She seems to have caused another killing, run off with a survivalist dope lord, and got herself shot. No secrets that anyone would want to know about, that they would shove a knife in someone’s face, unless it’s the gold….”

  “What gold?”

  “This dope lord she lived with buried pots of gold all around his mountain. She knows where they’re hidden.”

  “And some guy in Sudan came looking for it? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Although everything else make perfect sense,” she cried, her voice breaking at the end.

  He made soothing sounds and patted her hand, but she pulled it away and dashed off again to where the restrooms were.

  LORNA RETCHES, BRINGING up little. This is the second or third time today. It may be, she thinks, a nervous reaction to what happened, or something to do with being truly ill. She washes her face, stares at herself in the mirror. She thinks of extinction, that this very face will grow thin and hollow-eyed and yellow as the cancer takes over its body and then waxy on an undertaker’s slab being made up to look natural, and then be reduced by flames to nothing at all, a few grains of dust. She feels her neck and armpits again, as she does every hour or so now, and finds the same rubbery bulges. Diagnostic for lymphatic cancer, as are the sweats and the weakness, the itching and the weight loss. She has not heard of nausea being a symptom, but it is entirely possible that her gut is involved too, that the thing sneaked up on her, despite her precautions, and all the watchful diets and exercises, the too-frequent doctor’s visits. Strange how she knew from an early age that she was doomed in this way, perhaps even before her mother succumbed, maybe the cells tell us, Don’t count on long life, sweetie, the genome’s deeply fucked. What does she feel now? She consults her heart, finds an odd relief, not to have to worry anymore, death the end of neurosis at least, she is one with the kamikazes, the suicide bombers, an unearthly calm. A certain interest in religion, although that could be due to her current immersion among the snake handlers and speakers in tongues, still perhaps it would be even nicer to die thinking that a loving Jesus was set to carry you off. To where? She has never thought about eternity before, discovers she has no idea what it means. Also an urge to cry, to cry and never stop. Also an urge to find a drug, to turn off the mind entirely until the end. And other urges, surprising ones.

  She puts her face together and goes back to the restaurant again, suppresses the nausea occasioned by the food smells. A large woman in a flowered yellow pantsuit and a lot of jangling gold jewelry is standing talking to Jimmy Paz, who politely rises as Lorna approaches and introduces her to his mother. She receives a long look and returns one. It strikes her as amusing that she and Mrs. Paz are almost exactly of a height and, allowing for the twenty-year age difference, have virtually the same figure. This makes her smile and feel crazy, and amazed that she can still find humor in things. Mrs. P. smiles too, slides into the banquette and pulls Lorna down next to her. After the obligatory commiseration about the mugging, and a capsule biography from Lorna, Mrs. Paz compliments Lorna on her hair and other features, then adds, “You know, you look like a serious woman. I admit I’m surprised, this son of mine, he’s always bringing around these, what you call them, esqueletas…”

  “Skeletons,” says Paz.

  Lorna finds herself laughing. “Not guilty,” she crows.

  “Sí, sí, I can tell you are a serious person,” Mrs. Paz continues. “You have a head on your shoulders, a profession, and I have to say, although it sticks me in the heart, my son is not a serious person.”

  “Gee, thanks, Mami.”

  “See, like that, always with the sarcastic remark. You want to know the truth? I think you could do a lot better.”

  “I do too,” says Lorna, deadpan. “But you know, I can’t help myself, he’s so pretty.”

  Mrs. Paz looks at her son. “He’s not bad,” she admits grudgingly. “Not what you would call ugly.”

  Paz looks ostentatiously at his wristwatch and stands. “Well, this is so pleasant, but I got to go to work. Lorna, I’ll take you home unless you think you can do better thumbing on Calle Ocho.” He embraces his mother, kisses her cheek. “Mami, always a real treat…”

  “I need you for lunch tomorrow.”

  “No can do, Mami, tomorrow I got my day job. Speaking of which, are you going to get me with Ignacio or not?”

  “Come to the bembé tonight,” says Mrs. Paz. “Then we’ll see.”

  “Mami, please…”

  “I mean it, Iago. I have to consult the orishas about this and you have to be there.”

  This is in Spanish, and in the dialect of Guantánamo, so Lorna cannot follow it. But now the mother turns her eye upon Lorna and says in English, “And bring her too.”

  She sails off to greet some favored patrons. Lorna says, “Bring me where?”

  Paz explains about the Wilson connection to Santería, and who Ignacio Hoffmann is, and his connection to the case, and what a bembé is and how his mother has him over a barrel here, because all the leads have run out and Hoffmann, if he can get to him, is the last link, the last person who might know why someone like Jack Wilson would have been interested in killing a Sudanese in the oil business.

  “And why does your mom want me to come?”

  “Why does my mom want anything? I don’t try to figure her out anymore. But it might be interesting, part of the tour de wacky superstition I seem to be taking you on.”

  “This is like voodoo, right?”

  “Not exactly. My mother, you should know, is a big deal in Santería.”

  “What does she do?”

  “She gets help from the spirits,” says Paz, “and gets ridden by the santos when they come down to earth.” There is an astonished pause.

  “You believe this?”

  Paz shrugs. “No, but I’ve seen weird stuff happen.” Lorna senses his discomfort and declines to press him further.

  They arrive in front of Lorna’s house. Paz asks her if he should pick her up later.

  “For the voodoo jamboree? I’m game. Why not? Will they foretell my future?”

  “Maybe. I’ve never been to one of these either, so what do I know?”

  “Really? So we’ll lose our Santería cherries together.”

  “Yeah. Okay, I’ll pick you up around eight. Will you be all right?”

  “I’m fine, Jimmy,” she says. “Can you come in?”

  “No, I got to get back and follow up on some things.”

  “That’s a shame,” she says and leans over to kiss him.

  Paz thinks it would be a simple good-bye deal, but it is not. She grabs his head and plants her open mouth on his. Steam is generated, his tongue receives a fine chewing, she hikes up her skirt and throws a thigh into his lap. He feels her smoking crotch grind against his leg.

  After some time, he feels obliged to pull away and looks at her. Her pupils are unnaturally huge, nearly erasing their blue surround. “Jesus, Lorna,” he says, croaking a little, “give me a break here. I’ll have to change my shorts.” Her mouth now attacks his neck with small bites.

  “Stop, Lorna,” he insists, feeling stupid, and moves her firmly away. He examines her face. If he didn’t know she was sober he would have said she was drunk. She sags back in the passenger seat and lets out a long sigh. After that she opens the door and walks slowly down her walk, and he notices there is something off about her stride, it’s too slow and uncertain. He feels crappy about leaving her, but he has
to go back to police headquarters. “I’ll call you,” he cries out, but she doesn’t respond.

  PAZ SAW THE envelope sitting on his desk as soon as he entered the squad bay, a plain eight-and-a-half-

  by-eleven manila with no markings on it. He opened it and slid the contents out onto his desk.

  “Anybody see who left this here?” he called in a loud voice. The other four detectives looked up but none of them responded. “Nobody saw who left this here?” Apparently not. “Jesus Christ!” Paz exclaimed. “This is a restricted area. You only get in here with a fucking card. Somebody with access must have brought this in.”

  More blank looks. A detective named O’Connell said, “What is it, Jimmy? Kiddie porn?” Paz stared at his colleagues and got hostile stares back, or nasty smirks.

  He grabbed the envelope and its contents and stalked out of the bay, heading for Major Oliphant’s office. There he blew past a protesting secretary and entered the major’s office without knocking, earning a glare from the man, who happened to be on the telephone. He said, “Thanks, Arturo, but I got something here—let me get right back to you.” He hung up and continued glaring. Paz slapped the two eight-by-ten color glossies down on Oliphant’s desk. The major examined them, instinctively handling them by their edges. “Who’s the woman?” he asked.

  “Lorna Wise, the psychologist working with Emmylou Dideroff. Someone came in here and dropped this on my desk, which means either someone has a pass card who shouldn’t or one of our guys is bent. This isn’t supposed to happen.”

  “No, it’s not,” said Oliphant dully. He studied the two photographs. One was a shot of Lorna Wise and the other was of Paz, lying on his back asleep. Someone had carefully drawn, with a fine marker, a crosshair sight centered on each head. “Telephoto lens,” he said. “Probably from a boat, the angle here. You took her to the beach?”

  “Yeah, I did. We have a relationship.” Oliphant was silent, staring down at the photos. Paz said, “What are we going to do about this, sir?” No answer.

  “Sir?”

  “Well, Jimmy,” said Oliphant in a tired voice, “I don’t know. Whoever’s behind all this is cranking up the volume. I’ve had a couple of calls in the last hour, from friends. It looks like I’m going to be indicted.”

  “Indicted! For what?”

  “Malfeasance. Misappropriation of government funds. I ran a kiddie-porn sting operation at the Bureau about four years back—I think I may have mentioned it—and it involved major buys. We were posing as a big operation, trying to suck in producers all over the world, working with Interpol and foreign police…anyway there was a lot of money flowing through my office, all cash, of course. Well, you know, in an operation like that, if they want to get you, they can. The boys with the green eyeshades get busy and they find you’re a thousand short here, a couple of thousand short there. They get some scumbag to say, hey, I only got five grand, and they say you vouchered for eight. Like that. Then this call I was on when you came in, an old pal informs me the word is around DOJ that this all might go away if this thing with Emmylou falls right, meaning we act like good little locals, consider the case closed like we were supposed to, and move on. Also, I hear they’re moving to pick her up on an old warrant, something with a drug operation in Virginia, some officers got killed raiding it. You know anything about that?”

  “Yeah, I do, but the only way anyone else would know that our Emmylou and that Emily Garigeau are the same person is if they read it in the notebook that an armed robber took off Dr. Wise this afternoon. I haven’t read it yet, but Lorna did, and the connection is apparently there in detail.”

  “Mm, like I said, they’re cranking up the volume. It also means that there’s a direct link between the Bureau and Justice and whoever is doing all these crimes down here.” Oliphant raised his big brown hands to shoulder level, palms up, and then lets them drop. “Ah fuck it all, Jimmy…I don’t know what the hell to do now. I’m open to suggestions.”

  “Hey, we got beat, boss. We had the Red Sox and they brought in the Yankees. Let’s head for the showers.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Absolutely. You should immediately dictate a direct written order to me and Morales, telling us not to waste any more valuable department time on a closed case. You could send your pal in Washington a copy of it.”

  “That would get me off the hook,” said Oliphant. “And what about you?”

  “Oh, well you already noticed that I’m exhausted, you’ve actually mentioned it to me. That’s probably why I wasted so much time on this case. Probably my judgment is so impaired that you might think about directing me to take annual leave, four weeks or so. Write a letter and put it in my file. I have the hours.”

  “I could do that. What would you do on your vacation?”

  “Rest and relaxation, sir. I would take my girlfriend, Lorna, on a trip, maybe to the islands.”

  “Sounds great. But I hope you won’t take advantage of the free time to sneak in some work on this case.”

  “No, sir, that would be wrong. And if you found out about it, you could write a severe reprimand. You could break me back to patrol if you wanted, or suspend me.”

  “Yes, I could.” Oliphant was grinning now, but Paz kept his face quite straight. “Well, I think we’re done here, Jimmy. I’ll get those papers moving. Thank you for your input.”

  Paz hung around the homicide bay until Oliphant’s secretary brought him the letters, after which he filled out a leave ticket for twenty-eight days and showed it to Lieutenant Posada, together with the letter from Oliphant directing him to take it. Posada seemed delighted to sign the ticket and get rid of Jimmy Paz for a month. As he was heading to his car, Morales rang him on the cell to say that the parking garage attendant at Jackson had seen a white Explorer SUV with tinted glass tearing out of the place at about the time Lorna had been mugged.

  “Plates?” Paz asked.

  “Not any numbers. He thought maybe they were out of state.” A pause. “You saw a car like that when we were going to see that guy Zubrom.”

  “Yeah, and here it is again, and we’ll probably never find out who was driving it,” said Paz, and then told him about what he’d discussed with the major, that they had to lay off the case now, that he was being put on leave, that they would probably get back on the chart when he returned, and in the meantime, the unit would find Morales some detective work to do.

  “That sucks,” said Morales.

  “Win some, lose some,” said Paz lightly. Just then all he could feel was delight that the white Explorer actually existed outside his own mind.

  LORNA IS WONDERING what to wear to the voodoo and finds that she can still laugh at herself. She thinks this is a good sign. More than the dissolution of her flesh she dreads the breaking of her spirit, sinking into the universe of Sick. At some level, she knows she is being a little nuts, she should be planning her cure campaign in consultation with Dr. Greenspan and a squad of oncologists, she should be discussing treatment options, she should be telling her near and dear, so that they could start treating her in that smarmy half-horrified way that people treat the cancerous, she should be getting biopsied and staged and starting chemo. But she doesn’t make the calls. Instead, she looks the monster in the eye; embracing it; she says, You can have me, but first I’m going to live without fear. Then she finds herself thinking about Emmylou, about miracles, about living without fear. She wonders whether this is one of the famous stages of death, denial or whatever, but she doesn’t feel mortal just now as she goes through her closet. She feels like she has laid down a load.

  Paz arrives. He seems tense to her and she offers him a drink. They sit on her patio and drink vodka and lime. She feels his eyes on her and says, “This outfit is all right, isn’t it? I never dressed for a what d’you call it before.”

  “A bembé,” he says. “It’s a ceremony where they call the spirits down to ride people. You just picked that out?” She is wearing a white wraparound cotton skirt and
over it a yellow boatneck short-sleeved jersey with fine pale green vertical stripes, and yellow sandals.

  “Yes, too dressy? Not dressy enough?”

  “No, they’re not big on dress codes in Santería. But you picked Ifa’s colors.”

  “Ifa being…?”

  “The orisha of prophecy. You’ll get your fortune told for sure.” He drained his drink. “Let’s go.”

  IT IS JUST a regular house, on a classless street in what they called Souesera, which is a corruption of the English “South-west area,” the name for a substantial region of modest residences stretching south and west of Little Havana. The former lawn is being used as a parking lot, and both sides of the street are solid with cars. Paz parks at a hydrant, with a police card stuck on the dash.

  They hear drumming as they walk past the parked cars. Inside, the living room is crammed with people, mostly women, and lit by many, many candles. It smells of incense, and the sweet holy sprays they sell at botanicás, and the perfumes of the people, and something else, earthier, almost rank. The drumming comes from a trio of black men set up in a corner, drums of three different sizes. They tap quick riffs and turn the tuning pegs.

  Mrs. Paz drifts toward them through the crowd. She is in a white dress trimmed with blue at the hem and wears a blue turban, and around her neck a pendant fan shell. Somewhat to Lorna’s surprise (not to mention Paz’s) she greets both of them warmly, with embraces and kisses. Her eyes are huge and liquid in the candlelight, and Lorna wonders if she has taken some drug. She is starting to feel a little nauseated now, from the smells and the heat and the closeness. Mrs. Paz holds her arm and guides her around the room, greeting people, introducing her son and his friend to others, and exchanging a few words in a language Lorna doesn’t know. Mrs. Paz explains that it is Lucumi, the language of the religion, from Africa.

  The other people have the worn faces of the hardworking non-rich Cubans of Miami, the moppers of floors, the caretakers of the old, the sandwich makers. Many of these people are dressed in odd colors, and Mrs. Paz explains that these indicate the particular santos, the orishas, to whom they are bound: white for Obatala the Calmer; red and white for Shango, spirit of force; yellow for Oshun, the Venus of Africa; green and black for Ogun, the Warrior; blue and white for Yemaya, the Mother, the Sea.