Valley of Bones jp-2

by Michael Gruber

  “A little numb. I never saw anyone killed before. I never even saw a dead body, except for my mom.” She took a long, deep breath. “I guess you have, though.”

  “Lots.” He paused and smiled slyly. “Would it be more comforting if I said you never get used to it or if I said oh, yeah, after a while it stops bothering you?”

  “How about the actual truth?”

  “Ah, the truth! Okay, the truth is, it depends on the condition and type of the corpse. A three-year-old kid’s been in a cardboard box for a week in August is rough, and a fresh gangbanger with one through the ear is no big deal.”

  “What about killing people. Does that depend too?”

  “I’m not sure on that one. I only ever killed two people, including your guy.”

  “The other was that voodoo one.”

  “Yeah, that one,” said Paz in a tone that closed the subject like the hatch on a sub.

  He drank some tea and said, “So. We need to discuss a little. Off the record, for starters. I noticed you policed up that book your guy dropped. Emmylou’s notebook.”

  “Yes. And please stop calling him ‘my guy,’ like we were dating.”

  “Sorry. Anyway, the notebook. Technically, that’s violating the integrity of a crime scene.”

  “Is it? I noticed you didn’t say anything about it to your colleagues. Technically, isn’t that abetting the violation of the integrity of a crime scene?”

  He twitched his eyebrows like Groucho. “Yeah, we’re a couple of felons together. Meanwhile, are you going to let me read the thing?”

  She put her iced tea down on the picnic table and walked off. Paz watched her body as she did so. Paz was an ass man, although he was amusedly conscious of how banal that preference was in a man of his culture. There it was, however, and it could not be denied that Lorna Wise had a terrific butt, although she had no idea of how to display it. In fact, he did not think he had ever seen a woman less at ease with her body. He studied her also as she came out of the house toward the little patio. A Gap dresser, naturally, khaki bermudas and a light blue T-shirt, wonderfully convexed. Paz did not mind a decent rack, the absence not a deal breaker for him as it was for some men, more of a nice-to-have, but clearly their owner did not agree. It was like she was trying to cross her shoulders over them. Peculiar, but interesting in a way.

  “What?” she said, noticing at last. “Do I have egg on my shirt?”

  “No, you’re egg free,” he replied and gestured at the notebook. “There it is. Do you mind if I read it now?”

  “Not at all. I have some things to do around the house. Take your time.”

  He did and it wasn’t easy, a little battle between his detective’s urge to seek out and absorb all evidence and his personal desire never to have anything more to do with Emmylou Dideroff or any of her works. He had hoped that it would be a regular confession, a list of facts, of crimes committed, not something so intimate, not something directed at him, Paz, as if he were a literal confessor. He felt as if she were looking into him in that hideous way she had in the interview room,something looking at him through her. He made himself finish it and then leaned back and closed his eyes. He was going crazy, getting undeniable now, it was affecting his work already, and now this flesh-crawling nauseated feeling as he read the notebook, he was going mad, or else…

  His mind skipped a little, like a scratched record. He was going mad, or else…or else it was…Paz’s well-oiled circuit breakers popped. When he opened his eyes again, Lorna was sitting across from him, in the warm mango-scented shade.

  “So, what do you think?”

  He blinked and sat up. She said, “You were sleeping. Was it that boring?”

  “No, I was just thinking,” he said, rubbing his face.

  “No one will ever admit that they’re asleep, except when they’re in bed. I wonder why that is?”

  “You’re the psychologist, Lorna. You tell me.”

  She let this pass, pointing to the notebook. “Any conclusions?”

  With some effort, Paz reinhabited his cop persona. “No, but I’m dying to hear the rest of it. Any chance of us doing a full-scale interrogation at this point?”

  “On a mental patient? Look, this has to come out as it comes. She gets extremely hostile when you press her on stuff that’s outside the stream of the narrative. She seized the last time I pushed her.”

  “But she’s playing with us. I mean you picked that up, right? You got that whole cornpone peckerwood thing, and there’s what sounds like an educated woman looking over her shoulder and making wiseass remarks, and then there’s the religious nut quoting St. Augustine. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not anything like a real confession.”

  “No, but you’re not looking at an integrated personality here. We all agree that she’s seriously deranged.”

  Paz got up abruptly and paced a few times across the flagstones, then turned to face her, pointing. “Say I give you that. Say it’s sound and fury, she’s traumatized, whatever, multiple personalities?”

  “I didn’t say multiple personalities….”

  “Well, whatever?deranged, like you said. The key thing here, thekey thing, is what’snot in that book. Hm?”

  “The dog that didn’t bark in the night.”

  “That dog.” A quick grin. “Which is, there is absolutely nothing there that would make anyone take the risk of doing a B and E to get it. An armed burglary, which is very rare. Burglars are almost never armed. I mean why risk it?the whole point of burglary is in-and-out, nobody sees you.”

  “There’s the sexual stuff.”

  “You mean for blackmail? No, the perp is dead, and I can’t see old Ray Bob’s family wanting to protect his good name after all these years. Okay, there’s the Foy dope dealing too, but I can’t see that either. She could say she bought smack from the governor, it’s not probative, it don’t mean anything without concrete evidence. It could be the ravings of a lunatic, no, itis the ravings of a lunatic. So why is it maybe worth killing for?”

  “You think it’s connected to…”

  He rolled his eyes. “Well, hell, yeah! The vic, the Arab, comes to town, he sells some oil and talks about a huge oil find, it’s going to change the world oil situation, and he also says he’s hiring muscle, he’s scared of something. Then, of all the people he could possibly meet in Miami, who does he run into but our girl Emmylou, who has a reason to whack him, and who gets found in his place after he gets slammed on the head with an auto part out of her truck and tossed off his balcony? You think that’s a coincidence?”

  “It could be,” she says weakly.

  “No way. My boss said it, and it’s true. Somebody’s playing with us, and…hm.” Paz stopped and stared off into the middle distance for a long half minute. Then he pulled a cell phone out of the pocket of his jeans. “Excuse me a second,” he said and called up a number. He walked a small distance away and turned his back.

  “Yo, Tito, it’s me. Yeah, I’m good. Look, man, I want you to do something for me. Get the package on Dodo Cortez, tour his usual places, talk to his known associates. No, this’s got nothing to do with the shooting; the shooting is cool, but I want to know what he’s been up to recently, his source of income, who he was working for. I especially want to know if there’s any connection whatever between him and Jack Wilson. No, don’t go see Wilson. No, we’ll go see him together. Just get all the background you can. Are you following me here? You know why I want this, right?”

  “Right,” said Paz after a longer pause. “Good man. Get back to me at my place tomorrow, on the land line, not the cell. Okay, take care.”

  Paz sat down across from Lorna, his face more serious than it had been. “Lorna. Look, here’s the thing. I don’t want to freak you out or anything, but it just now hit me: I don’t like that they sent Dodo Cortez on this.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s not a breakin artist at all. He’s a shooter. You would’ve been home that morning if I hadn’t called you an
d asked you to come to my place.”

  A small gasp from Lorna. “What, you think he would’vethreatened me? But I don’tknow anything.”

  “Yeah, butthey don’t know that. All they know is that she’s writing stuff down and you’re her therapist. People tell stuff to therapists. Maybe she told you the thing.”

  “What thing?What? Oh, God, this is ridiculous! It’s like some movie…secret messages, guns, people getting shot. No, thank you, this isnot part of my job, this isnot happening to me.” She looked away from him. “I’m sorry. This is starting to look like a mistake on my part. I mean an interesting case and all, but, ah, I can’t have this kind of stuff, threats and bloodshed. No, I’m sorry, that’s not me.”

  Nearly a minute slipped by in silence. Then Paz said, in a neutral voice, “Okay, you can pass the case on to somebody else. I mean, I think we can reduce the risk to…whoever, but if you can’t handle it, you can’t. I’ll keep this notebook and we’ll make arrangements to get any others she produces.”

  He picked up the notebook. He said, “If you do decide to drop out, you’ll let me know who the new man is, okay? Nice seeing you again.”

  He started to leave.

  Lorna finds herself up on her feet, the metal chair scraping the flags with an unpleasant violent noise, and she hears her own voice saying, “No, please, stay. I didn’t mean it that way.”

  She knows she did mean it that way. The new man. The new man. Did he do that on purpose, is he that manipulative? Doesn’t matter; she’s manipulated. He cocks his head a little and gives her a searching look, connecting, not staring at her tits this time; she’d thought Oh, no, not another one of those, and now she sees he’s not, although she doesn’t know quite what to think of his eyes on her body, and here they’re in the middle of a desperate professional conversation. The strong light through the mango tree renders a camouflage pattern on his tan face and lends glitter to his odd light eyes. She is frightened of him, there’s a voice in her head sayingStupid stupid crazy you’re crazy get away from this stupid crazy…. It’s a voice she knows well, her father’s voice, and these were and are his favorite expressions for anything outside the pale of his rationality.Don’t be stupid, Lorna! That’s crazy, Amy! The dead mom.Don’t be crazy, Amy, there’s nothing wrong with you. Was that something he actually said? Or something she imagined him saying. No,focus, Lorna…

  The cop is still looking at her, but now there is a tiny wrinkle on his smooth forehead. “Are you okay?” he says.

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  He grins impudently. “No one will ever admit they have a problem, except when they’re bleeding. Why is that?”

  She can’t catch her breath and there is no strength in her legs. She goes down hard into her chair, and again that scraping sound.

  After clearing her throat, swallowing some tea, she finds her voice. “I’m sorry, really. I guess it all just hit me at once. There was a…a killer in my house and you shot him dead right on my sidewalk.” She cries, not hysterics thank God, just a slow ooze of tears. She dabs delicately with a paper napkin, careful of her eye makeup.

  “Oh, good, finally!” he says.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means it’s okay to come apart a little when something like that goes down. They have therapy programs for incidents, people who’re involved in violence. Christ, you of all people should know that. I’ve been watching you, after it went down and now today, and I’m thinking where does she keep it and how is it going to come out? And here it is. You looked like you were about to keel over just then.”

  “I was,” she says, but she knows it’s not just post-traumatic stress working here. There is deep stuff stirring, stuff that Mickey Lopez never got to in over two years of therapy, she thinks, and then quickly excuses Mickey, it’s all her fault really, but now some combination of Emmylou Dideroff, and violence, and this strange man on her patio, attractive and repellent at the same time (That body! That gun!), is working on the toxic sludge, raising clouds of fear, of excitement. She does not choose to explain this to the cop. She takes a number of deep breaths, attaining control. The tears dry.

  “Uh-huh, and about continuing with Emmylou, you still want to pull out?”

  “No!” Too vehement. More calmly, she says, “I mean, no, I don’t think it would be good for her to…change therapists at this point.”

  She has to look away from him, for even to her own ears it sounds like sanctimonious bullshit. The moment passes. He sits down.

  “Fine. Good. And now that we got that settled, I have to say I thought you showed a lot of class in this whole deal.”

  “Class?”

  “Yeah. Guy knocks you down and there’s a gun battle outside your house, you don’t run around in circles screaming, you calmly call 911 and then you calmly hide the vital evidence, and even though you’re scared right now, you decided to do the right thing. And you got a nice smile. Thank you.”

  She feels like an idiot, grinning as she now is, and he is grinning too, that thin cat grin with the little lights in his eyes. “And there’s more,” he says, “truly the coolest thing, is that you didn’t ask me even once what I was doing handcuffed to my bed.”

  “Well, we psychologists are trained to discretion.”

  “You didn’t want to embarrass me.”

  “You don’t strike me as someone easily embarrassed.”

  “Trained to perception too. Cool, discreet, perceptive: that’s a nice trifecta.”

  She laughs, not a maidenish titter, but a real laugh of pleasure. It is pleasant being tossed compliments by this attractive man, and she understands that these compliments are not mere sexual flattery, but the honest assessment of a potential comrade with whom she may be about to go in harm’s way. He really wants her to know what he thinks of her. It is unutterably refreshing and unlike any experience she has had with a man before. Some beaming here, and then this moment passes too.

  “So,” he says with a brisk clap, “I owe you a boat ride. We could get some food and beer, run over to Bear Cut and have a picnic, get some fishing in. You up for that?”

  She is. She goes into the house and dons the blue bikini without examining herself in the full-length mirror, and puts shorts and a Hawaiian shirt over that, and plops a canvas beach hat on her head. In his Z car they head north, and in the region known as Souwesera, he cuts into a strip of stores near the tan bulk of a rent-a-locker storage operation and enters a tacky-looking Cuban joint to get their picnic. She sits in the warming car, looking at the store-fronts through her sunglasses, slowly translating the signs in Spanish, wishing she had paid more attention during her single year of the language. She feels ridiculously content, the only little cloud being that at some point in the afternoon she may have to take off her shirt and shorts and stand revealed in this insanely revealing bathing suit.

  It is well that she has stopped giving a shit, although she wonders why this is so. Perhaps a brain tumor in the rostral portion of the frontal lobes. As it grows, she will lose more and more inhibitions until she is putting out not only for her colleagues, but also for everyone, jail guards, this fat guy sitting in front of the Cuban joint in the wife-beater undershirt and the black cigar, or patients, maybe even Rigoberto Munoz, tardive dyskinesia and all, and just as she thinks this, who should appear within her field of vision but Rigoberto himself. He has deteriorated since the last time she saw him. He has his own wife-beater undershirt on, with an open dotted seersucker shirt over it, both filthy and torn. He is mumbling, grimacing, sticking his tongueall the way out and otherwise demonstrating that he is off the meds. He is attempting to correct this by self-medicating via a forty-ounce malt liquor clutched in a paper bag, and yes, he has spotted her, although she is now crouching low in her seat and pulling down on the brim of her beach hat.

  He grins horribly and waggles his tongue. “Hey, Doc,” he calls and bellies up to the car, giving off a mighty stench: the beer train has crashed into the vomit factory.r />
  “Hey, Doc, hey, I gotta job.”

  “That’s wonderful, Rigoberto.”

  “Yeah, hey, I gotta a job onna fish boat with, hey, you know my cousin Jorge? I gotta job with him cleaning fish up by, uh, that bridge, what you call it? The fish boat.”

  In case she does not know how fish are cleaned, he demonstrates by taking a thick-handled, black-bladed knife out of a belt sheath and waving it in front of her nose.

  “Them, hey, them people are back, Doc,” he says. “You know they talkin in my head again. They say to do bad things but I don’t listen to them no more, uh-uh. Like you said, um. Where you goin’ in the car, hey?” Waving the knife. She watches it, semihypnotized, feeling the smile straining at her lips.

  Then Paz is there, with an arm around Munoz’s shoulders, gripping hard.”Oye, Rigoberto, mi hermano, zque tal?” he says, walking the man away from the car. There is a brief conversation in rapid Spanish, and the lunatic shambles off. Paz has taken the beer away, which he flings neatly into a trash barrel.

  He returns to the car, places a paper bag and a plastic bag of ice onto the backseat.

  “You know Rigoberto?” she asks.

  “Oh, yeah, me and him go way back. He was one of my first collars when I was in uniform. He didn’t scare you, did he?”

  “No, me and Rigoberto go way back too. But you get credit for another rescue.”

  “I don’t know about rescue. He’s pretty harmless if you don’t set him off.”

  “Yes, harmless for a violent paranoid schizophrenic with a big knife. But the amazing thing is I was just thisinstant thinking about him and here he is.”

  “Plate o’ shrimp,” says Paz, tooling out of the lot and onto Twelfth Avenue.

  “Pardon?”

  “Plate o’ shrimp.Repo Man? The movie?”

  “You lost me.”

  Paz puts on a drawling accent. “Say you’re thinkin’ about a plate of shrimp, and all of a sudden somebody says ‘Plate o’ shrimp’ or ‘Plate of shrimp,’ just like that, out of the blue. No explanation. No point in lookin’ for one either.” In his ordinary voice he adds, “A little later in the movie you see this sign in a restaurant: ‘Plate of Shrimp $2.99.’ It’s a classic.”