Tropic of Night

by Unknown

  “And that original one would involve human sacrifice?”

  “If we’re talking about Africa, who knows? Certainly not me. There have been any number of cultures in which human sacrifice was accepted?the Aztecs are the most famous, but also we have Carthage, and thuggee in India, and ritual headhunting in the South Pacific, and there may be some similar cults in Africa. The Ibo certainly had some of it, by informal report. They are neighbors of the Yoruba, which is where Santería comes from. There’s a published account by a former so-called juju priest in which a white man is tortured to death to help Idi Amin’s career. True? Who knows? But I’ve never heard of it being part of the formal Yoruba religion. You said that drugs were involved? Yes? Then I would say that you are not dealing with religion, but with witchcraft.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  The deep-set black eyes hardened surprisingly. “Witchcraft, or sorcery, is about power, and religion is about grace. The religionist supplicates a supernatural power, and prays for spiritual benefits. The sorcerer attempts to bend occult forces to his will. The religionist prays, the sorcerer manipulates.”

  “But religions make sacrifices, even human sacrifices, as you said.”

  “Yes, but as part of a settled order of the universe. Santería is largely concerned with divination and the direct experience of holiness. The santero, the babalawo, the members of an ile , are supplicants. They believe they are taking their places in a world ordered by Olodumare and impregnated by ashe, a kind of spiritual energy. Devotees desire to conform themselves to this energy through honoring the ancestors, through opening themselves to direct contact with the orishas, the spiritual beings who are different aspects of the Godhead, or through divination. This is why Santería is identifiable as a religion. The sorcerer’s world on the other hand is not ordered in this way. It is chaotic, filled with violent and often malevolent powers, which the sorcerer seeks to understand and control. Control, do you see? At least that’s always been the theory.”

  She stopped, her eyes drifting. Paz waited, keeping his face neutral. Then she looked at him, and it seemed to him that she read his thoughts.

  “You are not a believer, are you, Detective Paz?”

  “To tell the truth, I’m not.”

  “Well, it’s a gift, and not given to everyone, at every time. But I should refine my position to say that sorcery and religion tend to blend around the edges. Submission to the will of God has never been very common. Most of us would wish to influence him, if we could, or to know what he has in store for us. You might say that Santería itself fulfills that purpose among people who are nominally Catholic. This can blend imperceptibly into sorcery, and we then see the drugs, the curses, the love potions. Voudoun, as you know, which has antecedents similar to those of Santería, has gone far in this direction. I recall a line of research that suggests just that, dark doings on the fringes of the Yoruba culture. Tour de Montaille and others.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A name. Charles Apollon de la Tour de Montaille was a French officer who did a good deal of ethnography in West Africa, back around the turn of the last century. He published some short articles about his discovery of a cult group of some sort who claimed to have preceded the Yoruba, who actually taught them Ifa divination. He said furthermore that this group supported a clan, I suppose, of witches with remarkable powers. I can’t recall the name of the cult group, but I do recall there was a ritual involving the sacrifice of a pregnant woman. You didn’t mention it, but tell me: was the fetal brain excised?”

  “Yes, it was,” said Paz, and felt a chill ripple his scalp. “So, what you’re saying is this mutilation reminds you of some tribal cult ritual described in a French anthropologist’s report around a hundred years ago.”

  “Yes, and I wish I could remember more details, but, you know, it is nearly a hundred years since I was a student and read of it.” She laughed. “Or so it seems. But I’ll tell you something else. Much more recently there was a paper. Where was it?” She struck her temple with the heel of her hand. “My God, I am growing dim. No, it was not a published paper. It was sent to me by a journal to referee, and I recall that it referenced Tour de Montaille. The author?oh, what was his name? I can’t recall it. In any case, the author claimed to have found the same cult Tour de Montaille had studied so long ago. I tell you what?you have got me intrigued, young man. I will do some looking for you and perhaps I can find the paper. Would that be helpful?”

  “It sure would. We’d be very grateful. But in the meantime, could you give me any ideas about the man I’m looking for? I mean, are there any particular likes or dislikes he might have? Like he wears only blue and can’t eat hamburgers?I mean assuming he thinks he’s some kind of sorcerer in that tradition.”

  “I see, yes. Well, a man, certainly, with African contacts, and he has probably spent much time in West Africa. Doesn’t like to have his photograph taken, cuts his hair himself. A powerfully commanding personality, may be the head of a small group, political, let’s say, or an extended family. The number sixteen is important.”

  “Sixteen?”

  “Yes.” She tapped the opele. “If he uses this. The number is sacred to Ifa. Tell me, do you think you’ll find this man?”

  “Well, we’ll do our best, but the fact is, the more time that passes after the murder, the harder it gets. Unless, God protect us, he does it again.”

  “Oh, he will certainly do it again. As I recall, he has to do it four times within sixteen days. Or sixteen times in one hundred twenty-eight days. Or is that from some other ritual? I can’t recall. I’ll certainly have to look for that paper.”

  The interview with Dr. Maria Salazar was the last substantive addition to the case file on Deandra Wallace for several days. Jimmy Paz and Cletis Barlow both had their snitches and they had come up blank. No African juju man was known to any of them. No one had seen or heard anything connected to the crime. The case did not vanish from their minds, but it had receded from the foreground, replaced by more recent slaughter.

  Today’s corpse, the one they were on now, had been in life Sultana Davis, and had dwelled a street north of Deandra Wallace in a similar building, this one painted faded blue. Except that she was just as dead, Ms. Davis’s murder differed in all other respects from that of her predecessor-in-death. The chief suspect in the case was Ms. Davis’s estranged boyfriend, Jarell McEgan. He had gotten drunk, broken into Ms. Davis’s apartment the previous evening, provoked a violent argument, stabbed her twenty-one times with a steak knife, finished Ms. Davis’s alcohol, and made his escape in his car, or tried to, since he had merely turned on the ignition and passed out. There the police found him the next morning. He had blood on his hands, always a good clue, and on his clothes.

  McEgan denied knowing anything about Ms. Davis or the blood, or the origin of the bloody fingerprints on Ms. Davis’s bottle of vodka. He was now cuffed and snoring in the back of a patrol car. Barlow was in the apartment still, making sure of the evidence. Paz was in the front seat of his car, with the door open, scratching on his steno pad, getting a head start on the 301, the investigative report. As he did so, he reflected, with some shame, on his effort to shape the Wallace killing into the far more familiar pattern represented by this one.

  Barlow came out of the building with an armful of plastic evidence bags. He stashed them in the trunk and said, “Take a look at this.”

  Paz got out of the car. Barlow pointed to the apartment house he had just left.

  “That’s a four-story building there.”

  Paz made a show of counting floors. “Yeah, Cletis. Four. You counted right, and here you told me you never went to college.”

  “As the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of a fool. You happen to look out the window of the vic’s apartment?”

  “Why?”

  “The Wallace woman’s place was on the second floor back. You probably can see into her kitchen pretty good from nearly the whole line of third-and
fourth-floor apartments here, from the kitchens and the back bedrooms.”

  “And you want me to hang around here and talk to all the residents.”

  “Only those that’re home. You’ll want to come back this evening and speak to the people who’re at work now. I’ll go off and put our suspect into the system.”

  “You’ll write up the three-oh-one?”

  “No, you will. It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. Lamentations 1:27.”

  The afternoon inhabitants of the building were women on pensions or welfare, the old, the unemployed, and a few crooks. At the end of three frustrating hours, he had nearly the same nothing he had started with, except that he had been offered sex once, dope twice, and a glass of iced tea, only the last of which he had accepted, from a Mrs. Meagher, sixty-eight. She lived with her two grandchildren, eight and fourteen, currently at school, their mother having recently died of the Virus, the children apparently healthy, praise Jesus, and would he like another sugar cookie? Paz confirmed that the Meagher apartment had a good view of the Wallace kitchen, but Mrs. Meagher had not seen anything out that window, her eyes not being what they were. Paz said he would return when the kids were back from school. He left and continued his canvass, which yielded nothing.

  He returned to his oven of a car, drove to a convenience store on Twelfth, and bought a packaged ham and cheese sandwich and a Mountain Dew soda.

  Outside the store Paz observed a group of youths cutting school, dressed in costumes?hugely baggy pants worn at the level of the pubes, cutoff team sweatshirts, expensive athletic shoes worn unlaced?donned in hopes that they would be mistaken for ex-convicts, the highest status of which they could conceive. They went past him into the store to do some light shoplifting.

  Paz had no particular sympathy for the youths. The previous generation of the same type had made his own life very difficult, as had (to be fair) their Cuban analogues. Whatever sympathy he might have had for the shopkeeper vanished when he started to eat: the sandwich was both stale and soggy, and tasted like clay, and the soda was warm. It was not revived even when he saw the kids running out of the store, laughing, clutching purloined bags of Fritos and M&M’s. As he trashed his uneaten lunch, some lines from a poem ran through his mind:

  Those that I fight I do not hate

  Those that I guard I do not love

  And this led him naturally to thoughts about the woman who had taught him the poem, and he drove away south.

  Paz walked into the Coconut Grove library near Peacock Park, an elegant building made of gray wood and glass, and approached the woman behind the information desk. She was short, and slightly plump in a luscious way, with hair like polished copper wires and large round horn-rimmed glasses. Her skin was smooth, creamy, and freckled.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Yes,” said Paz, “I was looking for some books with pictures of naked ladies in them and not a lot of printing.”

  “I see. Well, we do have an extensive split beaver collection. It’s on that low shelf right by the children’s section.” She grinned at him, showing small, shiny, even teeth. Willa Shaftel was not a conventionally attractive woman?the bodice on the print sundress she was wearing was barely filled and the rest of her torso departed only slightly from the cylindrical?but she had a bright and knowing face, a big, lush mouth, remarkable blue eyes, and there was that hair. “It’s been a while, Jimmy. To what do we owe?”

  “Police business. There’s a big push on library-fine scofflaws.”

  “Those dirty vultures, but I thought you worked for homicide.”

  “I do. We’ve found that murderers often move on to more serious things like not returning library books or even scribbling on the pages. We want to nip it in the bud. Also, I came by to see if you wanted to go to lunch.”

  “I only have a half hour,” said Shaftel.

  “Take it,” said Paz.

  After buying food they went to Peacock Park and sat on a bench in the shade of some casuarinas, right by the bay, watching children poke sticks in the gray mud. Paz ate from a box of conch fritters and fries, Shaftel from a little plastic salad plate and a container of yogurt.

  “I was just thinking of you a while ago,” he said.

  “Yes, I get that all the time. Some men can’t stop obsessing about my body for a minute.”

  “That too, but it was that poem.” He described the circumstances, his morning activities, a sketch of the case, his abortive lunch, and his recall of the lines.

  “Oh, ‘Irish Airman,’ Yeats,” she said. ” ‘Not law nor duty made me fight, nor public men nor cheering crowds, a lonely impulse of delight, drove to this tumult in the clouds.’ “

  “Yeah, I like that. ‘A lonely impulse of delight’ is good.”

  “Is that why you work homicide? Clearly there’s no great attachment to the public weal. As you’ve often said, by and large, both killers and their victims are jerks. It’s not a racial chip on the shoulder …” She glanced sideways at him. “… or at least not entirely. So … what? Hard work, dirty work, tedious knocking on doorways …”

  “You’re going to use this in your book?” He was skilled at evading her frequent probes.

  “Of course. I use everything. Not one of my relatives still speaks to me, and I’ve only published one novel. But you? Well, maybe just in a short story. Or a brief lyric. I don’t know you very well.”

  “You don’t? We know each other … what? A year and a half?”

  “Yes, and you fall by every week or so, and take me out, and treat me like a lady, and jump on my bones afterward, and God knows it’s pleasant, you’re a very nice guy, and it’s not like I need a velvet rope to keep all the others from rushing the door, but I probably know the checkout ladies at Winn-Dixie better than I know you.”

  “Get out of here! We talk all the time.”

  “About me and poetry and what to read, and what I think about writing, and my little-girl dreams. But we don’t talk about you. I know you’re a homicide cop and your mother owns a restaurant, and your partner is a quaint old redneck. Anecdotes, data, but the man is hidden. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “All right, what do you want to know?” said Paz, nor was he able to keep the edge of challenge from his voice.

  She grinned and patted his hand. “It doesn’t matter, Jimmy. It’s not an interrogation.” She collected their trash and walked to a basket. When she returned she sat down on the grass in front of him cross-legged, exposing soft white thighs.

  He said, “Well, at least it’ll give us something to talk about as the years slide by. You can pry out my shameful secrets.” He used his ordinary light bullshitting tone, but she smiled only faintly.

  “I was going to call you,” she said. “My grant came through the other day.”

  “What, the Iowa thing? Congratulations, babe!” He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “So, you’re leaving in the fall?”

  “No, as soon as I can sublet my place. Maybe a week. Anything to avoid another whole summer here.”

  Paz kept his expression neutral and friendly but began to feel that stiffening of the features that follows when we separate the face from the heart. “Well. Bye-bye, Willa. We should give you a big send-off.”

  “Mm. I’d rather slink away, if you don’t mind. But if you want to take me out, I’m dying to see Race Music. It’s at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. What, you don’t like it?”

  Paz was not aware that his face had registered anything at all, and he said, “I don’t know. I get enough of that oh-how-our-people-have-suffered shit on the job. Picking at the scab?I mean, what good does all that do?”

  “No, the guy is funny! He’s not heavy, he’s not portentous. It’s a musical, for God’s sake. You like musicals.”

  “I don’t like messages.”

  “We went to My Fair Lady last month. That has a message.”

  “What message?”

  “People who change superficial behaviors become different people, one
, and two, the old fart still can get the girl. That’s why they love it on Miami Beach.”

  Paz had to laugh. “Okay, it’s a date. Friday.”

  “What a guy!” she crowed, and got up and sat on his lap and kissed him on the mouth. She really did have the most excellent mouth, Paz reflected, like a teacup full of hot eels.

  Paz put in a couple of hours of routine work on this morning’s shooting, which scrubbed personal musings from his surface mind. Barlow was out. He placed the folder with the completed investigation and arrest report on Barlow’s pristine desk and left for the remainder of his canvass.

  Traffic was building up to the afternoon rush on 95, so he took surface streets, arriving a little after four. The courtyard under the landings was now running with children back from school. He climbed the stairs. At the third-floor landing, he came upon a boy urinating in a corner. “Don’t do that!” Paz said, and the boy said, “Shut the fuck up, motherfucker!” and continued his pee. Paz walked around the spreading puddle without further comment and rang Mrs. Meagher’s bell.

  A chunky young girl with cornrowed hair and plastic-rimmed glasses opened the door and looked him up and down suspiciously. “What you want?” she demanded. She wore a pink sweatshirt with some cute animals appliquéd upon it in plastic, and blue slacks. She looked younger than fourteen.

  “I want to talk with you, if you’re Tanzi Franklin,” Paz said.

  “How you know my name?”

  He showed her his badge. “I’m the police. I know everything.” Big smile, not returned. “Could we go inside?”

  After an instant’s hesitation, the girl backed away from the door and let him in.

  “Where’s your grandma?”

  “She out, shopping or whatever. What you want to talk to me about?”

  “Let’s go back to your bedroom and I’ll show you.”

  The bedroom was a ten-foot square, walls painted powder pink, much grimed, and divided by a hanging brown plaid curtain to the right of the doorway. The girl’s side of the room contained a white-painted bed, neatly made up with a yellow chintz cover, and a low dresser in battered brown wood, with a mirror over it. A poster of Ice-T hip-hopping and one of Michael Jordan leaping were taped to the walls. Paz looked through the half-window allotted the girl by the room divider. Over the low roofs of the intervening street he could see directly into Deandra Wallace’s kitchen, now a dark rectangle.