Tropic of Night

by Unknown

  Later in the car I tried to be all clinical about it, stupidly, really. What was really happening in the curing ceremony, talking about hysterical conversion and oh so interesting recent speculations about the connection between mental states and the immune system and Greer said, Yeah, I know all that, and the fact is, most traditional healers are charlatans, but Ibekwe isn’t, he really does it, and it’s outside the science zone, and so when I write about him, I’m going to have to fudge and do all that hand waving about the fucking immune system. Fact is, we know fuck-all about the immune system and its connection to the psyche. Ibekwe thinks he’s dealing on the psychic level, and we have no tools to study the psychic level because we don’t think it exists. We say weak effects, uncertain effects, no causality, small N, ergo not a fact. But it is a fact. Ibekwe turns a lot of people away, people he says he can’t help, and they mostly die, and the ones he helps get better.

  Reflect later?a familiar experience, with that woman. I recall that jolt from somewhere?hair standing up on arms and neck, a tingling in the sexual parts, I thought my nipples were going to pop through my shirt. A déjŕ vu? I asked Greer who she was consecrated to and he said Oshun. The Yoruba Venus. Am a little frightened, also excited. Thinking of M. now, and Siberia, wishing I had more memory of what happened there, not just the events, but memory of the body.

  FIFTEEN

  For conventional pretty, Lisa Reilly was hard to beat, Paz thought, and she had the non-butter-melting look, too. Demure. She drove a red Saab 900 convertible, which made sense if you knew her the way Paz did. He glanced over at her from the driver’s seat of his Impala. She was excited, her cheeks colored, her eyes bright. Riding in a cop car at last, helping the cops on a murder case. Reilly was a cop buff, but of a more select sort than the types that hung around cop bars. The way he met her, she had been a witness in a case. The suspect, Earl Bumpers, had been raping his two daughters for years and pounding on them, too, and he had eventually killed the older one, which brought him to the attention of Paz. The younger daughter, a nine-year-old named Cassie, was the chief witness, and Reilly had therapized away her terror and prepped her for the trial, and the guy went down for it, death, and the two of them, Paz and Reilly, had gotten a little play in the press. He had spotted her in the witness bullpen, and been attracted, the big frank china blues, the golden hair in a staid little knot at the back, the thin, tight body, and he had struck up a conversation. Later, he had spotted her in the Friday six o’clock meat market at the Taurus in the Grove with all the other single women, which surprised him. He’d moved on her in his usual respectful way, and they’d started in. Six or so months, maybe once a week. She was married but separated, no problem there.

  She had a practice in the Gables, a nice paneled office, with the dolls and toys, but she dealt mainly with the eating problems of teenage girls. Getting a terrified murder witness to talk was a little out of her line, although she had done it that once and was clearly hot to do it again. Paz was stretching his authority way past the gray area, providing a private shrink for a potential witness, a minor. He had not mentioned it to Barlow, never mind his shift commander, and he was a little nervous. Excited too; both of them nervous and excited.

  They were going to do it in the Meagher apartment, Paz’s suggestion, a nod toward the color of legality in his mind. Just a cop who felt sorry for a scared kid, a welfare kid, too, and was bringing a personal friend by to give a little counseling. Should some constructive evidence happen to emerge, why there was nothing wrong with using it, just like you would use a piece of evidence lying in plain sight. Paz figured he could work out a plausible story if anything popped right, which was why he had not told anyone. He wanted to present this to Barlow all tied up, as a coup, as something to make up for the boner about Youghans.

  Mrs. Meagher offered sugary iced tea and butter cookies, the tea in tall glasses set in raffia sleeves, with a long spoon in each. They sat around in the tatty, spotless living room, in which the smell of lemon furniture polish fought bravely the base stink of the building and neighborhood. The boy was impatient and resentful of being denied either release to the streets or TV, the girl her usual silent and sullen self. The small talk did not take off. Reilly shot Paz a look: this isn’t working. She changed her approach, asked to speak to the grandmother alone. They went into the kitchen. Paz could hear low talking. Randolph got up and turned on the television, a sitcom, canned laughter. Paz saw no reason to object. After ten minutes or so, Reilly came back with the grandmother. Reilly’s face wore her courtroom expression of neutral goodwill. She approached the girl.

  “Tanzi, your grandmother and I have been talking, and we’ve agreed that, if it’s all right with you, I’d like to try hypnosis with you. Do you understand what that means?”

  The girl nodded. Randolph said, excitedly, “Yeah! I saw this show where the guy went into his past lives and shit.” Mrs. Meagher said, “Hush your mouth, boy!”

  They shut off the television and moved a straight chair in front of the girl, and turned down the lights. Reilly sat in the straight chair and began to speak in the traditional low, insinuating tone. She had tried to do it with Paz once, but it hadn’t worked. It worked with Tanzi Franklin, though?she went off like the television in less than three minutes: head sunk to her chest, eyes closed, breathing with the deep and regular pace of slumber.

  “All right, Tanzi,” said Reilly. “It’s last Saturday, around eleven-thirty at night. Do you know where you are?”

  “My room.” The girl’s speech was slow, and muffled, as if coming through a blanket.

  “Okay, I want you to look out the window of your room and tell me what you see.”

  “Roofs. Windows. I was looking for Amy, but she ain’t home. I see them. Theys fighting. The pregnant lady and her boyfriend. He starts in busting up stuff and she be trying to stop him. He hit her on the head. She fall down and he yell at her some more. Then he leaves. She gets up. She’s crying.”

  Stopped. A few words of encouragement put the needle back in the groove.

  “She’s trying to pick up stuff off the floor. She’s on the couch. He’s talking to her.”

  Reilly glanced at Paz and said, immediately and carefully, to Tanzi, “Who’s talking to her, Tanzi? The boyfriend came back?”

  “No,” she said. “Not the boyfriend. Him.”

  “Can you tell us what he looked like, Tanzi?” said Reilly. Paz could hear the excitement in her voice, under the professional drone.

  Tanzi opened her eyes. She looked directly at Paz. Her right arm rose slowly, until the extended index finger pointed straight at him. Mrs. Meagher let out a small cry.

  Reilly said, “You mean he looks like Detective Paz?”

  “Yes.” The eyes shut again. The arm dropped.

  “Tanzi, do you know who he is?” asked Reilly.

  “Yes.”

  “Who is he?”

  The child’s eyes opened again. Paz heard Reilly’s gasp, and then the eyes looked at him, and it was not any fourteen-year-old girl who gazed out through them either. A voice far too deep and rumbling ever to have come out of the larynx of a Tanzi Franklin said, “Me.”

  It came in a long extended syllable, striking them all with the nauseating effect of an earthquake’s first tremors. Mrs. Meagher screamed. Tanzi rolled her eyes back in her head, twisted off the couch, and went into a back-arching, teeth-chattering, foaming convulsion. Randolph P. Franklin leaped from his chair and onto Paz, tearing at his face and clothes, trying to get at Paz’s pistol. He was shouting something like “I’ll get him, I’ll get him!” Paz stood up, the boy clinging to him with his legs, holding on with one hand and grabbing for the gun with the other. He seemed to have an unnatural energy. Paz himself felt blurry, as if he, too, had been somewhat hypnotized. He saw Reilly drop down to attend to the convulsing girl. Mrs. Meagher was yelling something that Paz couldn’t make out. He had just pinned Randolph P. Franklin’s arms when something smacked heavily against the back of his head. He
looked around and saw Mrs. Meagher holding the handle of a big saucepan in a two-handed grip, getting ready to whale him again.

  “Ma’am, please put down the pot …” he began. She swung at his head, but he twisted away and this time the pot hit his shoulder. He tripped over the writhing Randolph and fell down. Mrs. Meagher couldn’t bend over very well and so she could only pound him in a grandmotherly way, but managed all the same to sprinkle him with the contents of the pot.

  After a while Mrs. Meagher became exhausted and dropped her weapon. She sat down on a chair, looking gray, and cried. The boy extricated himself and embraced his grandmother. He was crying, too. Tanzi’s convulsions had stopped. Lisa Reilly had moved her so that she was lying flat on the couch. She was holding the girl’s hand, talking softly, but eliciting no apparent response. Paz stood and brushed white gobbets from his clothes. He walked over to the couch. The girl looked destroyed; her mouth was flecked with blood and foam.

  “How is she?”

  “Jesus, Jimmy, I don’t know,” Reilly said in a frightened whisper. “She’s breathing okay. She’s not convulsing. But I’m not a doctor. I think I’m over my head here. What do we do now?”

  “I don’t know,” Paz whispered back. “I think we should offer to get the kid to a hospital and then get out of here. Why don’t you talk to the old lady, smooth things over?”

  Reilly gave him a sharp look but did as he suggested. She spoke softly. Paz saw the old woman shake her head emphatically, her sparse hair flying. Reilly came back to him and said, “She doesn’t want any more help. Not from us. We should get out of here. I left my card, in the unlikely event …”

  They left. Randolph P. Franklin had the last word. Glaring at Paz, he said, “I see you around here again, nigger, I’m gonna bust a cap on your sorry black ass.”

  In the car, Paz looked at Reilly and said, “What can I say? I didn’t expect that. It came out of left field.”

  “Farther off than that, I think. Good Christ!” She shuddered. “You still have some stuff in your hair.”

  “Mashed potatoes,” he said, picking at himself. She brushed at him, annoyingly. “Leave it!” he snapped, and slammed the car into gear. They drove in silence.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snarl. I’m a little shook.”

  “A little ? Jesus! I’m jelly. Jimmy, what the hell was going on there?”

  “You’re asking me ? You’re the shrink.”

  “No, I have a doctorate from the Barry College School of Social Work. I talk to Gables teens about their body image. I don’t fucking do exorcisms !”

  “You did great with Cassie Bumpers.”

  “Oh, Cassie Bumpers! All she wanted was someone to tell her she wasn’t the spawn of Satan and didn’t deserve to have the devil fucked out of her by her daddy’s holy prick. I can deal with frightened little kids. Back there … back there, that was something else entirely. I don’t know what the hell that was. No, I do know, I think …”

  “What?”

  “Possession,” she said, and he looked over at her to see if she were joking, but her face was grim and pale.

  “What do you mean, possession ? Like with the head turned around backward and the green vomit?”

  “Yeah, right. Go to a library sometime. There’s yards of documentation on it from nearly every culture in the world, from nuns with stigmata to snake handlers in the Ozarks to Siberian shamans. I won’t even mention Africa or what goes on right down the street in Miami fucking Florida. Santería. Christ, you should know more about that than I do.”

  “Yeah, that’s what everybody says,” said Paz sourly. “So … what? The hypnosis, like, triggered this … thing?”

  “I guess. You saw the girl. She went under like a lead sinker. Hence suggestible in the extreme. She pointed at you.” She paused and looked at him appraisingly. “You know, it’s possible that the killer really did look like you.”

  “Come on.”

  “Why not? Both times she freaked out it was when you were around. It’s no crime. One of my brothers-in-law looks like Ted Bundy. Of course, a lot of us think he actually is a serial killer …”

  “I take your point. Say more about suggestible.”

  “Okay, I’m a pro, so I was very careful not to make any suggestions. That’s the big confusion factor when you work with hypnosis, especially with kids. Tiffany, are you sure Mr. Jones didn’t put his hands up your panties? Didn’t Mr. Jones dress up as a devil and sacrifice to Satan? Oh, yes, he did, the kid agrees, and then he made me eat poo-poo. You can get people to say anything, you can implant all kinds of false memories, even without meaning to, and the subjects will swear themselves blue that the shit really happened. I know I didn’t suggest anything of the kind to her, and then, when I ask her who the guy was, out comes this voice two octaves lower. Did you see her eyes?”

  “Yeah, I saw.”

  She shuddered. “Jimmy,” she said, “buy me a drink. Buy me two drinks.”

  They stopped on a bar on West Flagler east of the freeway, a neon-lit, beer-smelling place with a night game from Atlanta on the TV and a mixed crowd of boat bums and genial rummies in it. They got a couple of dirty looks, but no one made any trouble and the service was fine. He ordered a Bud, she a double scotch. She inhaled it and immediately flagged the barmaid for a refill.

  When he thought she was ready, he spoke. “You said she was real suggestible. But somebody had to plant that suggestion in her head. Somebody who knew she was a potential witness.” He thought for a moment. “That means somebody knew I was going to question her. So they grabbed her and, I don’t know, hypnotized her so she would block what she saw.”

  Reilly took a sip of her new drink. Her face was flushed now and her eyes were showing white around the blue iris. “I thought you said she went nuts the first time you talked to her.”

  “Yeah, but they still could have …” His voice trailed off.

  “Right. How did they know to grab that particular kid? Unless you’re proposing that a crack team of homicidal hypnotists fanned out and did everyone on that side of the building. Come to think of it, the boy and the granny weren’t acting all that tightly wrapped either. Why the hell should they get homicidal all of a sudden? Maybe we’re dealing with induced mass hallucination here.”

  “There’s such a thing?”

  “Oh, yeah. Flying saucers. Thousands of people think they’ve been abducted by aliens. That’s now, in a materialist age. In other cultures, in the past, the sky’s the limit. My point … did I have a point? Oh, yeah, my point was that there’s more to human psych than they teach in college. Your guy does ritual murders, nobody can see him coming or going, and if somebody does happen to spot him, he throws a fit on them from long distance. You don’t need a nice lady social worker, baby: what you need is a fucking witch doctor.”

  “You making a referral?” Trying to lighten it up a little, but she was serious.

  “Yeah, for your information. Dr. What’s-his-face. Works at Jackson. He gave us a lecture at Barry about the dark forces rampant in Miami. Medical anthropophagist. No, that’s who we’re looking for. Anthropologist. Newman? Began with an N . I could think of it if I had a little more scotchie. I’ll tell you one thing, darling. I’m fucking glad I’m not nine months pregnant.” She finished her drink and started softly to weep.

  Paz took her home, which was an apartment on Fair Isle in the Grove. She opened a bottle of white wine and they finished it off. Paz had never gone to bed with Lisa Reilly without her being fairly drunk, but she was really drunk this time. She liked to get on top and pound it. He usually had bruises across his pubic bone the next day. Paz made it a point to concentrate on one woman at a time during the actual act, but now, as she pumped away, he found himself thinking of Willa Shaftel, about how plump and soft and jolly she was and how much, really, he was going to miss her. Reilly was making steam-engine noises through her teeth and moving more violently, working herself up and down and grinding, an altogether industrial sort of sex, Paz
thought, and when she went off, she would flail at him with hard little fists and bony knees and elbows.

  She finished and collapsed on him, drooling on his cheek. This was merely the first round, he knew. It was not mere lust. It was the kind of screwing people do in wartime, to keep away the terrors.

  At work the next morning, Paz found a note from Barlow on his desk, directing him to interview room one. There he found his partner with a rummy?a sagging, middle-aged, freckle-skinned black man with bloodshot eyes. You could smell it coming off him. He seemed startled to see Paz, although Paz could not remember seeing the man before.

  “Jimmy, this here’s Eightball Swett,” Barlow said. “Mr. Swett got some information about our case up there in Overtown. He seen a fella with Deandra Wallace.” Paz sat down on a reversed chair and gave Swett the eye. Swett looked down. His face twitched.

  “Go ahead, Mr. Swett,” said Barlow. “We’re all listening.”

  “Was in that Gibson park,” said Swett. “I hang there sometimes, you know, have a couple, shoot the shit. Anyway, last Thursday, maybe, or Friday, I seen her. She big as a house, couldn’t hardly walk, and she sat on a bench, and there’s this dude sitting with her. She talking to him and he talking to her, but real sincere, like he trying to get into her, which was dumb, ‘cause sure as shit he already got into her, him or someone else. ‘Cause she be big as a motherfuckin’ house.”