Valley of Bones (17 page)
Authors: Michael Gruber
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense
It was nice for her and for the kids I guess. I was pretty out of it because I started having bad cramps around four in the afternoon and they just got worse, and Motrin didn’t do anything for them. I was bleeding like crazy too, not like usual at all. I started to think seriously about my plumbing, writhing there on my pallet, and realized that my cycle had been screwy for months, although I laid that to my career choice at the time. I should also say that, weirdly enough, while I was having sex with hundreds of men a week the idea that it would have some
effect on my body never once crossed my mind, I was that young.
Anyway Carmen asked me what was wrong and I told her and she said I ought to go to the hospital and I said no way, for obvious reasons, and then Audrey, an older woman with two kids, said I ought to try the sister van, which was this nun who drove a white bread truck around where the homeless hung out and handed out medicine and did exams and never asked about anything. You’re on the run, right? she asked, and I admitted I was.
Tommy and Carmen half carried me to a parking lot on Dixie Highway off Douglas where an old white-painted bread van stood under the orangey anticrime lights surrounded by a small group of homeless patients. I was dripping blood down my pants leg, so they let me through first. The van’s interior was brightly lit off the idling engine and held a gurney, a metal stool, shelves, and cabinets. The proprietress was about forty, smooth brown skin looking darker against a white head cloth with red piping across the brow and under the broad forehead black serious eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses. Something wrong with her face, the right side drawn up in a funny way, so that it looked like a smirk but there was no smirking in the rest of it, the opposite really, deep serious. Gray dress, white apron like a restaurant cook, a chain with a heavy silver crucifix on it, a pin at her breast, another lighter chain around her neck with something small and brassy on it. She looked like she weighed ninety pounds wet, but her grip as she helped me on the gurney was like a jockey’s. She slammed the door on the interested crowd. Trinidad Salcedo, my very first Blood Sister.
Off with the jeans and underpants, soaked red. Temperature taken, blood pressure. I was weeping with pain. She looked, probed gently and at length. A smell of antiseptic and a sting. More pain. I howled. She was between my thighs, busy. What’s wrong with me? Her head rose above my belly. How long have you been pregnant? Are you nuts? I’m not pregnant! You were,
she said, you just had a miscarriage. More antiseptic, stick in the arm, a tiny cylinder filling with red. Wave of nausea. Take these. Pills. I swallowed, asked for another glass of water. I pulled up my bloody jeans.
What’s your name? I gave her Emily, and she introduced herself. You in the life? No small talk from Sister Trinidad. A lie leaped nimbly to my lips but a sudden and unfamiliar impulse batted it away. Yeah, I said, but I quit. Good girl, she said, and it wasn’t until that very moment that I realized that it was true. She handed me a bottle. You have crab lice. This is insecticidal shampoo. She gave me a photocopied list of places where I could get a shower.
There was a knocking on the van door. She opened it, and there was an old deteriorated piss bum with a gash on his forehead. She ushered him in and motioned me into a corner of the van. I sat on a padded chest and watched her work. She talked to him more than she had to me, she knew his name, apparently not the first visit. He stank, and I wondered how she could stand to touch him, and felt obscurely jealous and then felt angry with myself for giving a rat’s ass.
Stitched and bandaged, he left. A couple of more customers then, mostly first aid, but one baby too, the mother a little older than me, speaking Spanish, frightened. The nurse seemed to have forgotten me. I may have dozed.
Her hand on my shoulder, face close to mine. I have to move to my next stop, she said, and asked me if I had a place to stay? I said I did. I asked her if she was a nun. She said she was a sister, she explained that nuns are sisters who live in communities, which she and the others of her order did not, and told me the name of it, which meant nothing to me. I don’t think we had any sisters or nuns in Caluga County. She waited for me to go, but for some reason I was reluctant to leave her presence, no not for some reason, no this was the Holy Spirit making his first little chip at the ashes impacted around my heart. I said what do
those letters mean, pointing at her badge. It was a gold cross on white enamel with a red bleeding heart in the center and on the arms of the cross U V I M and around the gold rim
SNSBC * FAM
She said pointing this means Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ and Fidelis ad Mortem, and these letters stand for
ubi vadimus ibi manemur.
I asked what it meant and she said it means faithful unto death and where we go there we stay. I must have looked blank because she explained that it meant that when they decided to go someplace and take care of people, they stuck with their patients even if it meant the sisters had to die. I asked whether any of them had ever died, and she said only about a hundred or so. In Miami? She let out a surprising guffaw then hid her face in her hands, a strange sort of oriental gesture, and begged my pardon. No, in other countries. We specialize in helping people hurt by wars, she said, and asked if I wanted to go to the hospital. I said no and asked her why she was here there wasn’t any wars in Miami except dope wars and she said she was taking a break, this was like a vacation for her.
I had a lot more questions, like what was that little brass angel she wore around her neck, but although she wasn’t looking impatient or anything I could feel her vibing me out of there. She handed me a package of thick sanitary pads. Take care of yourself, Emily, she said, and God bless you. She looked at me and I could feel that she could see through me just like I thought Ray Bob could that time, but instead of seeing all the bad she was just seeing the good. It surprised the hell out of me at the time since I didn’t think I had any in there. Then I was outside thinking that aside from Percival Orne Foy she was the most interesting person I ever met.
T
HEY PUT PAZ
on administrative leave while they investigated the shooting. He didn’t think it would be much of an investigation, because they had the guy’s gun, there was a civilian witness (Lorna Wise) backing up Paz’s story to the letter, and the victim was a well-known local scumbag named Amando Cortez, Dodo Cortez to his friends and the police, who knew him as a head breaker and enforcer for the dope people. He had a pair of murder arrests on his sheet, both of which he had beat at trial, and a thirty-six-month jolt for aggravated assault/attempted murder. He was also a whiteish Cuban and so could be shot by a cop of any color whatever without hysteria breaking out.
Paz was spending his first day of administrative leave with Lorna Wise, who had also taken the day off, and had called him early and then turned off her phone. He was surprised to have been thus called, but he had driven over, and now they were sitting in her little terrace out back under a mango tree, drinking iced tea together like old friends, which they certainly were not, but there was something working there, under the surface.
She asked whether he was in any trouble, and he explained that it was what they called a good shooting, and why.
“ ‘A good shooting,’ ” she said. “What an expression!”
“As opposed to a bad one, the old lady shot in the back because
a cop was under the impression that she was a crazed felon with a shotgun about to attack.”
“Does that happen?”
“In Miami? More than it should. We got a bunch of detectives on trial now for running sort of a death squad, whacking bad guys they didn’t like. How are you feeling, by the way?” He had noticed a crinkling around her eyes, as if she were going to cry.
“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, the
key
thing, is what’s
not
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, it
is
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 break-in artist at all. He’s a shooter. You would’ve been home that morning if I hadn’t called you and asked you to come to my place.”
A small gasp from Lorna. “What, you think he would’ve
threatened
me? But I don’t
know
anything.”
“Yeah, but
they
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 is
not
part of my job, this is
not
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 saying
Stupid 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?”