Valley of Bones jp-2

by Michael Gruber

  “What, that’s a rule, poets don’t have kids?”

  “Few do, and the ones they have are generally sad ones. It’s probably not as bad for males. They can havewives. You’re not a wife. Shit, I don’t know, maybe it’s the ghost of Sylvia Plath. Or Virginia Woolf…”

  Paz stared at her. Virginia Woof? Fuck Virginia Woolfe! She wasrejecting him? Fucking blowing him off? Smash her face. Smash her, break her nose, knock out her teeth, this fucking fat, white bitch this fuckinggusano maggot was rejectinghim? Stick his gun up her fuckingcunt…

  “Jimeeeee!” A high wail, a shriek.

  Somehow Willa had slid off the bed and was now cringing in the corner of the room, on the other side of the night table. Her face, normally pale, was skim milk blue, except for heavy red marks around her neck and her eyes were rimmed with tears.

  “What!” he cried. “What’s wrong?”

  “What’swrong? Jesus Christ, Jimmy, I thought you were going to kill me. It was like fucking Jekyll and Hyde. You grabbed my neck and you had your fist all balled up and cocked and you had an expression on your face…it was like something out of my goddamnedbook.” She rose shakily to her feet. “I guess you’re back to normal now, ha ha. What happened? A little problem with handling rejection?”

  But Paz had no desire to return to badinage. He felt a wash of self-contempt, mixed with confusion and not a little terror. He started grabbing up his clothes and jamming his limbs into them. He was sticky and badly wanted to take a shower, but it didn’t seem the thing to do just then.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I drove you literally crazy.”

  He stopped and looked at her. “No, I’m the one should be sorry. I don’t know what the fuck just happened, but I don’t think I should be alone with you right now. I’ll call you,” he said, picking up his jacket. He started for the door and then made himself stop and give her a nice hug.

  “Shouldn’t we sort of talk about this?”

  “Nah, I don’t think so. Sorry.”

  “The search for Miss Right begins immediately?”

  “I guess.” He embraced her again. “No hard feelings, Willa,” he said into her hair. “You’ll send me your next book.”

  “I’ll do that,” she said to his back and the closing door.

  Paz went to his car and sat there for a while, watching his hands tremble. Gradually this passed as the rationalizing part of his mind, an industrial-strength unit, reinterpreted what had just occurred into something more normal, a mere flash of anger, mistaken by a hypersensitive and overimaginative woman as being something weird and alien. This done, he fell into a desperate numbness. It had simply never occurred to him that he would get turned down. Willa liked him, she’d said so, they got along fine. Everyoneknew that girls wanted a permanent hookup, just like everyone knew that gravity sucked. Meeting the contrary was like observing an object falling upward. He noticed the yellow poetry book on the passenger seat. Suddenly seized by fury again, he grabbed it and flung it into the dark. Two minutes later he cursed himself, went out into the night-deserted street, and picked it up again. It was lying open, facedown, its bright yellow cover looking like a painting mistake on the yellow traffic line. He stood there in the middle of South Bayshore and read the poem on the page that had fallen open:

  “Nothing lasts”?

  how bitterly the thought attends each loss

  “Nothing lasts”?

  a promise also of consolation

  Grief and hope

  the skipping rope’s two ends,

  twin daughters of impatience.

  One wears a dress of wool, the other cotton.

  Paz felt a chill that was unconnected with the freshening bay breeze. He didn’t like it when books fell open with meaningful messages showing. Even more irksome was that he actually felt consoled by reading it. He got back in his car and drove to his apartment, where he made himself a stiff drink of freezing vodka and lime. He changed into cutoffs and a sweatshirt and sat in a lawn chair in his backyard, chewing on the taste of the drink, dozing fitfully while the soft Florida night passed away.

  When the sun was fully risen and he could no longer pretend that sleep was a possibility, he hit the bathroom, and afterward he pulled on a pair of checked pants from the restaurant service and a pair of greasy boots, and walked around the corner to Calle Ocho, where he had a cafe con leche and a fruit tart at his usual little no-name joint, and read theHerald and smoked a short, fat, strong, black cigar. Then he went across the street and opened his mother’s restaurant.

  There was something entrancing, he thought, about an empty restaurant early in the morning, rather like looking at a beloved but aging mistress at about the same time of day. You could see the scratches and wear that candlelight would obscure in the hours to come, but the revelation just added to the intimacy; no one else knew this side of her. He went into the kitchen, donned a tunic, a plastic apron, switched on the oil-splashed kitchen boom box. A samba band came on loud, Martinho da Vila, “Claustrofobia.” Paz, bouncing a little on his toes, used his keys to open the meat reefer, walked in, came out with a whole round of beef, the entire boned hip of a steer. At the sink he stripped off the purveyor’s thick plastic integument, washed the blood off the meat, dried it, and slapped it down on the butcher’s block set against the wall between the two standing refrigerators.

  If you sell a lot of beef in a restaurant, then the difference between profit and loss on those items is portion control, and at Guantanamera portion control was Jimmy Paz. Paz sharpened his favorite knife, licked the back of his left wrist, shaved a swipe of hair off with the blade, wiped it carefully away. Now he proceeded to turn a thirty-two-pound full round into (ideally) 102palomilla steaks, each one weighing within a speckle of five ounces.

  Paz sliced without obvious effort, peeling the red wafers off the mass, weighing each, and tossing each into a steel pan. This work took absolute attention if one were both to keep one’s thumbs and make a buck, but made little demand on the higher functions, and from an early age Paz had used portion control to let his mind roam free. He belonged to that small fraternity of extremely bright men who have no patience at all with academics, from which is drawn most of history’s entrepreneurial billionaires as well as those responsible for the physical maintenance of Western civilization: carpenters, masons, firefighters, soldiers, cops. Like most autodidacts, Paz had an original rather than a disciplined intellect, and much of what composed it had been put there across the pillow by a long skein of brainy women, the only sort he liked to take to bed.

  His thoughts: how dumb could he have been, nearly twenty years of selecting from just that restricted set of women whodeclined to pursue permanent arrangements, and he’s surprised when one of them turns him down, hilarious really when you considered it, what a jerk; possibilities of love, romantic love as against love that lasts, how to transit;jerk, Christ!; elective affinities, Goethean phrase whispered into his ear by German grad student white-blond Helga, idea that linkage of romance between two people was as natural and irresistible as chemical bonding, sodium and chlorine, no, not Helga, Trude, Helga was the Danish geologist, marine oolites, radio-carbon dating thereof in shallow seas, he’d taken her diving down at Pennekamp, should get the boat hauled and scraped soon, shouldgo out in the boat sometime, find a girl, maybe run across to Bimini, where to find the time?; like a nun she said, with bleeding palms, stigmata, abnormal psych, varieties of religious experience, William James, skeptical acknowledgment of the reality of same, Beth the sociologist, not a believer but agreed with James’s rejection of the “agnostic veto” insisting on rationality in decision imposssible to decide on rational grounds. Nature of faith, why can’t he jump, given what he’s seen, given his mother…and the crazy woman, Dideroff, or not crazy, thoseeyes, no, didn’t happen, sleep deprivation, and the shrink, Wise, nice voice on the phone, and Sudan, Emma the geographer, the Sudan, sahel, savannah, ecotypes, ecotopes, dry, seasonal rains, thorny growth, the acacia, the baobab, somethi
ng too about a civil war, she’d had to cancel a winter field trip, check that out…

  He finished cutting and took the twenty-ounce cast-iron toothed mallet down from its hook above the butcher block and pounded steaks, making each one a quarter of an inch thick with just the correct number of blows, and afterward throwing each one into a bucket of the house marinade?garlic, lime juice, salt, pepper, and a bouquet of herbs whose composition was known only to Paz, his mom, and God. He pounded, pounded to the samba beat, and found (for this is why he had come in to do this task) that, as always, the work tenderized his heart along with thepalomillas. Just before nine Rafael, the prep cook, came in and started parboiling a hundred pounds of potatoes, saying not a word to Paz, as he understood as well as any man the meditative aspects of poundingbiftek. The kitchen grew warmer, sweat dripped from Paz’s face, and he pounded the drops into the meat. His mother, demonstrating the process in the cramped steaming hole-inthe-wall kitchen of their first restaurant, twenty years previously, had said that Paz sweat was the real secret ingredient in theirpalomilla. Paz had believed it as a boy and believed it now.

  The last steak dropped into the bucket. Paz washed and put away his knife and his mallet, stretched, doused his head under the sink, dried his face on a towel, and when he put it down there was his mother, yellow pantsuit, hair in its afternoon turban, a flowered one, hands and wrists ringed with pounds of gold.

  “What’s wrong,” she demanded.

  “Nothing’s wrong, Mami,” he said.

  “You didn’t sleep last night. You come in here, where I usually have to drag you, and you cut and pound out a whole round of beef. And”?here she waved her hand around his head, around the aura that she claimed to be able to see, jingling her many golden bracelets?”you’re all cloudy and brown. So don’t tell me nothing’s wrong. It’s some woman, hmm?”

  “If you know, why do you even have to ask?”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing, I told you. I just kind of broke up with Willa.”

  Mrs. Paz faced the heavens and jingled her hands at the uncaring gods.

  “I willnever have grandchildren. This is my fate. And there is something else…” She passed her hands through the air, as if trying to net a vapor. “An influence, a curse? God forbid! No, not a curse, but something heavy, dark…”

  He turned away from her abruptly and covered the motion by taking off his apron. “Cut it out, Mami! You know I’m not interested in that kind of stuff.”

  “No, you’re not interested, but it is interested inyou. I tell you again, you have to be washed.”

  “No washing. I told you, I’m fine.”

  “Your woman left you, you’re not fine, my son. And here I was so sure you were going to ask her to marry you.”

  “I did. She told me no.”

  “What! You said you loved her, that you could not live a moment more on this earth without her, and she said…what?”

  “I didn’t say that, Mami. I said we got along great together and we should, you know, make it formal, permanent. And she said no thanks.”

  “Of course she said no, youbesugo!Zoquete! Don’t you know that women like to hear that you love them?”

  “Actually, I do know that, but I guess it turned out that I didn’t. Sorry.”

  Cesar, the chef, walked in, picked up the vibes, decided he had forgotten something in his car, turned on his heel and vanished.

  Paz had always had a hard time meeting his mother’s glare, especially since, as he had observed from an early age, when Margarita was out of temper she seemed to increase alarmingly in size. She was a broad-shouldered woman, well muscled from years of heavy work, nearly as tall as her son, teak-colored, with elaborately processed and braided hair, glossy as licorice, still stunning in a harsh way at fifty. Now she towered over Paz (so it seemed to him) like a Latina Godzilla, and her nostrils were flaring preparatory, he knew, to reciting the tale of his failures, starting at age four. He therefore felt immense relief when a tingle at his belt line informed him that he had a cell phone call. He whipped it out and punched the button.

  “Sorry, Mami, I got to take this. Police business.”

  “Don’t give me police business when I’m talking to you!”

  Paz headed for the rear of the kitchen with a parting mumble: “Why don’t I just give you a sperm sample, you can forget about marrying me off.”

  “What! What did you say?”

  He ignored this and scooted out the rear door. In the parking lot, he leaned against his car, put the phone to his ear, and heard the voice of his new partner, tentative.

  “Jimmy? Morales. I’m not disturbing you or anything?”

  “No, I explained this, man?youcan’t disturb me, I’m your partner. You got something I need to know, then any hour of the day or night is cool. I could be getting a piece of ass, I got to take your call. And the same the other way around.”

  “I mean what you were saying about a sperm sample? I thought…”

  “No, that was just my mother. What’ve you got?”

  A pause here. Then Morales said, “Okay, I checked out David Packer off of the motorcycle license. He’s had the bike for a year and change, no violations. I called the credit bureaus, like you said, and they got nothing on him.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “I mean there’s no credit history on a David Packer, SSN 092-71-9116. He must pay cash.”

  “Do you believe that? A middle-class-looking guy, owns a boat and a twenty-eight-grand motorcycle, never had a credit card? What does the phone company say?”

  “Pays the minimum by check, no long-distance calls. The bank says he gets a U.S. government check for $2,467.18 deposited every month, and various checks from brokerages quarterly. He’s good for about fifty grand a year, but he owns the boat and the bike free and clear, so he’s doing all right, I guess.”

  “I guess. You call that passport bureau number I gave you?”

  “Yeah, and that was another funny thing. I couldn’t find out if he has a passport or not. I gave the girl on the line his information and there was a long hold and then she said she couldn’t release that data, it was restricted and she gave me a number to call, her supervisor. Floyd Mitchell.”

  “And what did Mr. Mitchell have to say?”

  “I couldn’t get him. The phone just rang, no answering machine or anything. So I called the State Department locator and asked for a Floyd Mitchell, and they said there was no such person there. So I called the passport number again and the same thing happened, and I told them all about no Floyd Mitchell, and then after about ten minutes on hold, a guy came on and said he was Floyd and could he help me.”

  “And did he?”

  “Not much. He said the computer was messed up and they couldn’t extract the information I wanted, but if I left my name they’d get it to me when the computer got fixed.”

  “Yeah, Florida’ll be underwater by then. Well, well. A man of mystery, old Dave. What about the other guy?”

  “Oh, he was no problem. John F. Wilson, aka Jack Wilson, bought the business about two years ago. Before that he worked as a chief mechanic for Empire Boat Livery in Hallandale, eight years; before that he was in the navy. Credit’s good, he pays his bills on time, owns a house in the Gables and a two-year-old Lexus. Plus the truck.”

  “He worked for Empire,” said Paz. “Well, what d’you know?”

  “You heard of it?”

  “Oh, yeah. It belongs, or belonged, to a guy named Ignacio Hoffmann. Ignacio had a fleet of Cigarette boats, which he typically did not rent out to Dad and Johnny to go fish for snapper off Fowey Rocks. Did a lot of night work out in the Straits.”

  “But he’s not still in business?”

  “No, the feds busted him, must’ve been three or four years back. One of his people ratted him out, they got him on a federal indictment, he paid his million-dollar bail in cash, and took a hike. Interesting. I bet Wilson bought his business for cash.”

  “I
don’t know,” said Morales. “I could check.”

  “Hm. Hell, what does it matter? We’re not interested in Hoffmann or Wilson except where they connect to Emmylou. You do any good with all those business cards?”

  “Yeah, he visited one of them the morning of the day he got it. I called but the guy was out.”

  “Just hold off on that until I get there. We’ll go see him together.”

  “Okay, what do we know about this guy?” Paz asked when they were in the official Impala and heading east on Flagler. Morales was driving while Paz took his ease, like a prince, and smoked a cigar. Paz was pleased with himself and looked at his new partner benignly.

  “He’s in the oil business,” said Morales. “The spot market, whatever that means. Our guy had an appointment with him the day he died. Seems okay, a citizen.”

  “But an Arab.”

  “That’s not a crime.”

  “So far. No, but it’s another ruffle on a shirt that’s a little too fancy already. I wanted him to be a Cuban-American or a white-bread Presbyterian. A Jew would’ve been okay too. Our vic’s an Arab on a federal watch list, the last person we know he saw before getting whacked is an Arab….” He shrugged. “It’s probably nothing.”

  “Could I ask you something?” said Morales, after a pause. Now they had turned onto Second Avenue. Traffic was heavy, but they were in no rush.

  “Ask.”

  “What the fuck is going on?”

  “Be more precise.”

  “I meet you by accident and a couple of days later I’m a homicide detective. My lieutenant knows diddly-squat about it. I go into the squad bay and everyone treats me like I got a contagious skin condition. Then you get me working on a case I know is closed. Is that enough to start? This is our building here.”

  “Park it in the bus stop,” said Paz. “Okay, I was wondering when you would get around to asking. You’re in because I needed a partner. Oliphant’s orders, and I pulled some strings of my own. Why you? Whynot you? First, while you haven’t done anything particularly brilliant, you haven’t fucked up either, and I liked the way you handled yourself at the crime scene. You didn’t puke and that scene was fairly puke-worthy. A small thing, but what you might call a sine qua non for a homicide dick. No heaving. It fucks the crime scene and disturbs the witnesses, if any. Also, you followed my lead at the scene without me having to write it out in big letters and pin it to your shirt. You’d be surprised at the number of guys who can’t do that. Finally, I kind of like giving orders to a white Cuban. That enough on your first question?”