Night of the Jaguar

by Michael Gruber

  Hurtado said, “It seems a little too easy. You know, Ramon, people remember things that didn’t happen sometimes when you talk to them. It’s part of your charm.”

  El Silencio shrugged. “I didn’t touch her. She talked to him.”

  “Fine. So what does that get us? Who are these people and where do we find them?”

  In answer, El Silencio passed his boss a small brochure.

  “What’s this?”

  “We joined the Florida Audubon Society. A hundred-dollar contribution, the woman wouldn’t shut up. There’s a list of local nature clubs on the back. With the logos. I marked the one that the boys spotted on that VW van.”

  Hurtado flipped the brochure over. “Forest Planet Alliance? What is this, environmentalists?”

  “That’s what it looks like, but who knows what they really are? There’s something else. Look at this.” He handed Hurtado a color photograph of a young woman with blond-streaked hair leaving the doorway of Felipe Ibanez’s mansion and said, “We’ve been taking pictures of everyone who goes in and out of both houses. This is Ibanez’s granddaughter, a woman named Evangelista Vargos. You see her shirt?”

  “That’s interesting. Another connection, the girl belongs to the same group. And…?”

  “Ibanez wants to knock off his partners. He knows this organization from his granddaughter—maybe he even set it up. The bitch is some kind of spy, say. He figures we’ll look into these killings, we’ll think maybe someone is trying to get a piece of the Puxto deal, someone from home, but this way he can lay it off on these Americans. The environmentalists are all of a sudden killing people who piss them off.”

  Hurtado shook his head. “That doesn’t explain the Indian, though. And these American kids, I can’t see them doing these kinds of things to Fuentes and Calderón, not to mention getting past our boys and taking out Rafael. And Ibanez or whoever would know we’d never go for the idea that this came out of some nature lover club. No, what I think is that Ibanez brought a bunch of tough Indios up from somewhere as muscle and he’s just parking them with these American pendejos. Americans love the fucking Indios, and why should they make a connection? So he gets cover and a team of killers at the same time. That has to be it.”

  “He must think we’re stupid,” said the other. “So…we take them out? I mean Ibanez and the girl.”

  “No, there’s plenty of time for that. And we need Ibanez to run the timber and transport operations. For the time being. What we need to do is find those Indios. Take some people and check out this”—he consulted the card—“Forest Planet Alliance. See what they have, who’s associated, and so on. Low-key, Ramon. I don’t want blood on the ceiling yet, understand? Speaking of that, did you get that garage we talked about?”

  “Yeah. No problem. It’s south of here, off the highway, very quiet.”

  “Good man. And the machinery is there? If we need it.”

  El Silencio nodded, rose from his chair and started to leave. “And Ramon?” Hurtado added, “Send the girl back.”

  “Here’s the file,” said Morales, dropping two heavy cardboard folders with a thump on his desk in the homicide squad bay. “Knock yourself out.”

  “You’re pissed at me, right?” said Paz, catching the other man’s tone.

  “At the prima donna act, yeah. I come to you like a pal, I ask for help, and I get shit, and now you set up this…situation, where I got my boss’s boss with his nose up my ass, and I got no fucking idea where you’re going with this thing. And it would’ve been nice if I’d fucking known about you and Calderón beforehand, instead of looking like a complete and total asshole in there. I mean, I was your fucking partner….”

  “Right, and I’m sorry. I apologize. And the reason I changed my mind is because when Calderón got it, it became a family thing. You don’t think I was blindsided, too? You’re a Cuban, you know how it works.”

  “Right, and if my father got whacked, I would be the absolutely last person allowed on the case. But exceptions get made for Jimmy Paz.”

  “That’s right, Tito. They do. Meanwhile, I am a fucking supernumerary mugwump on this case and when it clears, you and you alone will pick up the glory.”

  “Assuming it clears,” said Morales, trying to keep a grin from forming. “A supernumerary mugwump, huh? You’re a piece of work, Paz.”

  “I love you, too,” said Paz. “Let me read this shit, okay? It doesn’t look like it’ll take that long.”

  Nor did it. Paz already knew the broad outlines on the Fuentes killing, but it was useful to study the forensic reports and the actual photographs taken at the scene. And there were details Morales had not shared when he’d discussed the case in Paz’s restaurant the previous month. They had found claw marks on the wooden railing of the balcony from which Fuentes had been hurled. They had calculated the weight of whatever had made the paw marks in Fuentes’s garden—a little over 453 pounds, and this was a puzzle. There was a report from the Metrozoo, from a Dr. Morita, attesting that although the cast of the paw print shown to him was undoubtedly that of Panthera onca, it was nearly 50 percent too large, nor had a jaguar of such a size ever been recorded by science: the largest males rarely topped 300 pounds. Dr. M. expressed keen interest in studying the beast should they ever secure it. I bet, thought Paz as he read this and turned to the interviews with the staff at the Consuela Company offices—Fuentes’s secretary, Elvira Tuero, and the three building security men. The police had constructed Identi-Kit likenesses of both men. One was a young kid, good-looking in a wispy way, with a scraggily beard and a nest of blond dreadlocks. The other was the famous Indian.

  Paz studied this one rather more closely. Identi-Kit photographs all have a certain sameness about them and serve mainly to ensure that the cops don’t pick up someone of a different sex or race from that of the suspect, but this one caused a little chill in Paz’s belly. Like many detectives, Paz was extremely good on faces. He could summon up a fair picture of nearly everyone he had ever met, and while at the police academy had spent a good deal of time with the Identi-Kit reproducing faces from brief looks at photos of people on the faculty. He could do movie stars, too, to the amazement of staff and students both. The kit had recorded a man of uncertain age, but no longer young, with the broad mouth, high cheekbones, dark eyes, and bowl hairdo of a Central or South American Indian.

  What caused the chill was Paz’s certain knowledge that he had seen this particular Central or South American Indian before. It annoyed him exceedingly that he could not immediately determine where, but this he put down to rustiness. One item he had expected was missing. Although the witnesses had all stated that the young white male had been wearing a T-shirt with a logo on it, no one had tried to reconstruct it or find out what it represented.

  Morales returned, carrying a couple of paper cups of Cuban coffee, and said, “Oliphant said it’s okay to see Finnegan.”

  “Great. What about this logo on the white kid’s shirt?”

  “What about it? Kids wear all kinds of shit on their T-shirts—rock bands, concert tours, college teams….”

  “True, but according to the secretary, this office invasion they pulled was a political action about the environment. The guy’s in an organization, it stands to reason he’s going to wear his organization’s logo, right? This Tuero woman, the secretary, said he was yelling about something called”—Paz leafed through a report—“the Puxto, whatever that is.”

  “It’s like a game preserve in Colombia. The kid thought Consuela was going to cut it down.”

  “Are they?”

  “Not according to Felipe Ibanez and Cayo Garza. And your father. They got nothing going on down there. They said.”

  “That’s not in the file. Or did I miss something?”

  “It’s a lead that didn’t pan.” Morales caught Paz’s dark look and said, “I should have put it in the file, I know, I know, but it just didn’t figure that some tree hugger would chop a man up for some, I don’t know, failure of conservatio
n. It didn’t fit.”

  “You thought it was a coincidence that Fuentes had a screaming fight in his office the day before he got killed?”

  “Since Calderón got it, I do,” said Morales, somewhat more aggressively. Paz realized that the man did not like being cross-examined by a civilian at his own desk, never mind that the civilian had once been a cop who’d got him into the detectives in the first place. Unfortunately, there was no help for this; if Morales had screwed up, and he had, he would just have to take his lumps.

  Paz drank some of his coffee. “This is the Colombian gangster theory?”

  “Where did you hear about it?”

  “My sister. Finnegan told her, and somebody over in the county must have leaked it because Doris Taylor knew about it, too. What’s the basis?”

  “Well, it’s obvious. Two identical killings of people associated with business in Colombia. When we just had Fuentes, it could have been anything, a cult, a random maniac. Weird and uncanny. With two, there’s a connection, plus the vandalization and jaguar shit incidents at all four of the Consuela principals’ houses. Someone is saying, you fucked with us and now you’re going to die. And the Colombians like to get fancy, it’s well known.”

  “Yeah, I heard. So what I’m picking up here, Tito, is you think this is a lot simpler than what Oliphant thinks, that all the weirdness is like camouflage for a piece of colombianismo.”

  “That’s how it’s looking. And that’s how it’s going to look up at the county.”

  “I assume there’s people watching the other two guys, Garza and Ibanez.”

  “Right. They live in the Beach, so the county’s covering that.”

  “Okay, I’m done here. Let’s go over and see what Metro has to say for itself.”

  They drove over in Morales’s unmarked Chevrolet, with Paz in the passenger seat.

  “Just like old times,” Paz remarked.

  “Not really,” said Morales, and they drove the rest of the way in morose silence.

  Finnegan, as predicted, was not happy to see them, nor was Ramirez, his partner. The four men sat in a windowless interrogation room in the sheriff’s headquarters in Doral, northwest of the city of Miami, a large modern building that looked like an airport terminal, except not as cozy. Finnegan dispensed with the small talk, saying, “Let me make a couple of things clear. I’ve been ordered to cooperate and I’m cooperating.” He indicated a pile of folders and a large cardboard carton on the table. “There’s the file on the Calderón killing. I understand he was your father.”

  “That’s right,” said Paz.

  “Well, it’s against county policy for an investigator to work on a case where a member of his immediate family is the victim. I don’t understand what made the sheriff go along with this horseshit.”

  “Just covering his ass, I guess,” said Paz politely. “I know you’re busy and we’ll try not to take up a lot of your time.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” said Ramirez, not sounding the least bit sorry.

  Paz gave him the kind of look you give a farting drunk and turned back to Finnegan. “It’ll take me a couple of hours to go through this stuff. I’d like to see both of you after I’m done.”

  “If we’re free,” said Finnegan. The two county detectives got up and went out of the room. Ramirez was singing “That Old Black Magic” as he left.

  “You read this stuff yet, Tito?”

  “No, but Finnegan briefed me on what they had.”

  “Yeah, the county doesn’t love it when we get involved with them on account of they’re so professional and we’re so corrupt.”

  “I’m so corrupt,” Morales corrected.

  “My mistake. Why don’t you take advantage of this special situation and read this, too. I bet there’s all kinds of shit in here he didn’t tell you about.”

  The two men read quietly together after that. Paz wrote notes to himself in a pocket notebook. Morales just read. Paz noted that Morales was a quicker reader, or perhaps just less thorough.

  “What do you think?” Paz asked when they were both done.

  “It’s consistent with the theory that this is a Colombian mob thing.”

  “Anything is consistent with any theory if you pick and choose your evidence right. But for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right. Why the stuff with the jaguar?”

  Morales shrugged and made a dismissive gesture. “Hey, we don’t know dick about these people. Maybe it’s a trademark. Some gangs cut the throat and pull the tongue through the hole, some gangs cut the guy’s pecker off and stick it in his mouth. This gang chops them up and takes body parts, makes it look like they’ve been killed by a jaguar. I mean they’re wack-job Colombians, who the fuck can tell why they do anything?”

  “Oh, so you think there’s no actual jaguar?”

  “Not really. They could’ve made those tracks with a stick and a cast of a jaguar foot.”

  “And the same with the claw marks.”

  “Right.”

  “And the damage to the vics was done with some kind of blade.”

  “Could have been, but—”

  “And the same with jumping up fifteen feet into Calderón’s window, and then jumping over a ten-foot hedge after he did the job.”

  “Maybe the guy’s a pro, he’s got mountaineer training.”

  “That’s good, Tito, a mountaineering Colombian pseudo-jaguar assassin. Who, armed only with some kind of blade, scales a fifteen-foot blank wall, opens a window catch while hanging on to this blank wall, takes out Calderón, who’s armed and expecting trouble, takes out a Colombian chutero, who’s got a weapon out and gets off at least one shot, escapes from a shitload of other similarly armed chuteros, and nobody catches sight of him, because there was no more gunplay that night, even though your usual person of that type is inclined to expend many rounds with small provocation. Sounds like more of a ninja mountaineering Colombian pseudo-jaguar assassin, if you ask me. On the other hand, we do know two important things about him.”

  “What?”

  “Well, one, he leaves fingerprints. The county picked up a nice set off the iron gate at the house next door, where the guy escaped. No matches with anyone they could find, but never mind that. The guy pulls off the caper of the year but forgets about wearing gloves. Thus a sloppy ninja mountaineering Colombian pseudo-jaguar assassin.”

  “Okay, so what’s your theory?”

  “You’re not going to ask me what the other thing is?”

  Morales took a deep breath. “You know, Jimmy, until just now I don’t think I ever got why every fucking detective in the Miami PD hated your guts.”

  “And now you can join the crowd,” said Paz coolly. But he had to reflect on his recent observation that he had spent over two hours in a squad bay among men he had worked with for over ten years and not one had acknowledged his presence with a word or even a friendly nod. So he added, “I’m sorry, Tito. I’m a wiseass. I admit it. But those two bozos just now browned me off and I’m taking it out on you.”

  “You’re forgiven,” said Morales, “and now I’m going to play the sucker: what was the other thing?”

  “It was that the county lab did the same analysis on their paw print that you all did on the one at the Fuentes scene, to calculate the weight of whatever made it. And they got a figure within a pound of the first one, four hundred fifty-three point two pounds. That speaks seriously against your model-paw-on-a-stick theory.”

  “Why? They could’ve had two guys stepping on a plate or something.”

  “Oh, now it’s two guys, two huge fucking guys that nobody saw? I know, they threw the sloppy ninja pseudo-jaguar assassin through the window and over the hedge and then they just melted away.”

  “So what’re you saying, we’re back to the trained cat?”

  “No, I’m baffled, too.”

  Morales raised his eyes to heaven and crossed himself. “Oh, thank you, Jesus, I’m not a total moron.”

  “Fuck!” said Paz. “I ha
te this shit!”

  “What?”

  “There’s other stuff, Tito, and I’m going to tell you and I want it to stay between the two of us. Agreed?”

  “Sure. What is it?”

  “Okay, starting about a month ago, me and Amelia have been having dreams almost every night about a big spotted cat, starting about the time of the Fuentes murder, but before you came to see me. I think Lola’s been having the same kind of dreams, but she won’t say anything about it to me. But she’s a wreck, not sleeping, popping all kinds of pills. Also, I went to my mother’s santero and he threw Ifa for Amelia. You know what that is?”

  “Sure, Santería fortune-telling.”

  “Right, and he got all upset and said Amelia was in danger from some kind of beast, a carnivore like a lion. And then I gave her my enkangue and her dreams stopped, but mine haven’t and Lola’s probably….” and then Paz stopped talking and stared at nothing for a long moment, and then banged his hand down hard on the table.

  “Damn!” he cried and grabbed a file folder, riffling through it until he found the county’s sketch of the mysterious Indian. “I’ve seen this guy. I took Amelia to Matheson and he was standing in a little Styrofoam skiff talking to her. He couldn’t’ve been more than ten feet away, and when he saw me, he scooted off in big hurry.”

  Morales was staring at him with a disbelieving, sickly grin on his face. “Jimmy, ah, what’s your daughter and dreams got to do with two murders and a bunch of Colombians?”

  “I don’t know. Look, Tito, bear with me here. You weren’t on the force when the Voodoo Killer thing went down, but believe me, it wasn’t what you think. We covered up a lot of it, or I did, I concocted a plausible story about drugs and cults, but it wasn’t like that. It was deeply weird. Mind-bendingly weird. And this is another one.”

  “Uh-huh. And we’re going to go in there and explain this to Finnegan?”

  “No, forget Finnegan. He’s fucking around with us, anyway. This file’s not complete.”