“I know what you mean,” said Jenny. And after a brief pause she asked, “So you don’t have, like, a plan?”
He burst out laughing. “Yes, my immediate plan is to drink a large whiskey.” He smiled at her. “Well, you don’t seem paralyzed with fear, although I would strongly advise you not to wear any Forest Planet Alliance T-shirts in the near term.”
“I’m fine. It all seems too weird to worry about. And I still feel kind of good. I mean about today.”
“Yes, that’s what messing about in boats will do for you. Saving the news of the apocalypse just now, itwas a lovely day.”
“But the weasels are coming.”
“Indeed they are, and the wise thing at this juncture, I believe, is to model ourselves on Rat and Mole, and stick to our cozy burrow, and wait for Mr. Badger to arrive and show us what to do. Perhaps he can save that little girl.”
Thirteen
The restaurant Guantanamera did not collapse when Jimmy Paz announced that he was leaving its kitchen to pursue his father’s killer, which discovery made him feel both less guilty and more miserable: an even split, he thought, or maybe a little better than even, since his mother had been telling him since early adulthood that absent his daily help, ruin faced the family Paz. In the event, Mrs. Paz made a few calls and came up with Raul, a steady man of middle age who not only knew how to grill meat but also followed Mrs. Paz’s instructions to the last tomato, and was not interested in concocting outlandish dishes that had no place in a traditional Cuban restaurant.
Lola was mildly encouraging. It would do him good to get out from under Mom, was the doctor’s opinion, and maybe he’d get used to it. After playing cop for a while, maybe he could think about going back to school. It wasn’t too late: just look at her. Indeed, look at her: she went to work, came home, ate briefly, and then went to sleep exhausted. She had a glazed, frightened look and blamed it on various work-related stresses, although she hadn’t looked like that in her intern year, when the stresses were far greater, and there had been a lot more kidding and sex back then, too. He had a pretty good idea what was going on by now, he could hear her thumping around the house in the middle of the night and he could tell by the pill bottles in their medicine cabinet that she was taking some fairly serious stuff. He wondered if she was an actual addict yet. It happened to docs a lot, he knew, but he’d never figured Lola for the type. So that was another thing on his list, which he decided to cross off before he left the house. Feeling stupid and disloyal he went into the bedroom and plucked a tuft of blond hair from Lola’s hairbrush and in the girl’s bedroom plucked a few darker hairs from hers.
Securing these items in separate envelopes, he turned to something he had more confidence in. He settled himself in a comfortable chair with a fresh cup of coffee and called a woman named Doris Taylor at theMiami Herald. Taylor had been covering crime for theHerald since (according to her) before the invention of gunpowder, and had waxed fat on Jimmy Paz’s exploits in pursuit of the infamous Voodoo Killer. She was delighted to hear he was, in a manner of speaking, back on the street and was elaborately forthcoming with what she knew about the Miami Ripper, as she now called him or it, asking only to be leaked when he had something new. Thus prepared, Paz called Tito Morales and had him set up a meeting with Major Oliphant to discuss the Calderón murder and how Jimmy Paz could help with their investigation.
The meeting was set up for that very day. Paz dressed in one of his old detective suits, and polished up a pair of four-hundred-dollar shoes and arrived at police headquarters looking very much as he had when he’d walked off the job seven years ago. Oliphant was all smiles until it turned out that Jimmy Paz did not just want to help with the investigation. He wanted to investigate.
The Major scowled at this and said, “This is because he was yourfather?” He had just learned this interesting fact from Paz’s own lips.
“More or less,” said Paz. “More, really. My mother and my half sister wanted me to, so here I am.”
“You know, it would’ve been really cool if you’d told me about this family connection the last time we talked.”
Paz shrugged. “It wasn’t something I was proud of. I kept it pretty close. Tito didn’t know either.” Morales confirmed this with a sour grunt and a nod.
“And now,” said Oliphant, “you want to…what, be a freelance cop on this thing?”
“No. I’ll work with Tito. Under Tito, really; I mean he’s got the badge and the gun. It’s nothing unusual. The department hires consultants all the time.”
“Not to catch killers, we don’t. We like to keep that in the immediate family. So, just for the sake of argument, how do you see this so-called consultancy playing out?”
“Well, the first thing is, I have to see the file on the Fuentes case. Tito can fill me in on whatever he’s done since the day of. Then you’ll have to call the sheriff and get me into the Calderón file and clear Matt Finnegan to talk with me.”
“Oh, I’m really going to enjoythat conversation.” Oliphant held his hand up to his head in the phone-call gesture. “Say, Frank? I got Calderón’s kid here, we’d sort of like you to help him track down his daddy’s killer. No, he’s not a cop, he’s a cook, but we here at the Miami PD always like to help out anyone on a personal vendetta…”
Paz inclined his head and smiled. “I know you’d be more subtle than that, Doug.”
“The answer is still no.”
“That’s funny because the two of you were just a while ago all over my ass asking for help and now I want to go full-time on the thing and what do I get? Stonewall. Whereas, if I can speak without offense, neither of these investigations is going anywhere.”
“Who told you that?” asked Oliphant, with a bristle.
“Oh, you know-around. There are plenty of people in this town who make it their business to know what the cops are up to, and back when I was a famous police hero and the savior of the community, I got to know most of them.”
“You’ve been talking to the press,” said Oliphant. He made it an accusation, something like molesting a minor.
“Yeah. Look, the fact of the matter is I’m going to do this, and I’d like to work with you guys and not against you. If not, there are other investigative resources in the city. What you don’t want and what the sheriff doesn’t want is to read all about how I found this guy while you all were standing around looking into the middle distance.”
There was the usual staring contest after this remark, which Paz let the Major win. Who then remarked, “You know, I always thought you were a modest kind of guy, Jimmy. Unless being a cook has vastly increased your criminological skills. Or unless you know something you’re not telling us, in which case you’d be obstructing an investigation, which you might recall is a felony in this state.”
Paz nodded and grinned. “Okay, I threatened you and you threatened me back and we’re even, so could we chuck this horseshit and get off the dime here? Am I blowing my trumpet a little? Yeah, guilty. But let’s review for a second-you got two rich white Cuban guys ripped to shreds, you got claw marks, you got jaguar tracks, you don’t have a lead that’s worth a shit, except for some literal shit, and you got cannibalism, or something-ibalism. It adds up to weird and uncanny, and it so happens that when it comes to weird and uncanny in the Greater Miami Metropolitan area, I am The Man. And cross my heart and hope to die, I don’t know anything about these cases that every newsie in town doesn’t know already. Nothing against Tito here or your guys or Finnegan, but you know and I know that there is such a thing as instinct and flair. There is stuff that I’ll catch that other guys won’t, not because I’m a great genius or anything, but there isn’t a lot of experience around town with off-the-wall cases like these, and I got most of it.”