“Uncle Tito says he needs to talk to you,” said the child, “table eight.” She departed, and after buttoning his tunic and telling Yolanda to mind the grill, so did Paz.
The dining room at Guantanamera was high, cool, white, and gold, with rattan fans moving the air-conditioned air around; many-armed chandeliers cast the bright light characteristic of Cuban restaurants. It was in every respect except size a replica of the dining room at the great tobaccofinca where Paz’s mother had worked as a child before the revolution, and her mother before her, and back to slavery days, all helping to invent the cuisine of Cuba. Paz didn’t know how much of this pastiche was irony and how much was clever marketing. The original custom of the place had consisted of exiles nostalgic for the kind ofcomidas criollas that white Cubans believed only black people could authentically produce. That was one of the problems Paz had with his mother’s operation. The oldsters were running thin, the tourists were seasonal, and the yuppies did not much fancy sitting down in a room lit like a stadium to a meal rich in carbs and spicy greases. Paz was always trying to darken the room and lighten the menu, hence that seafood salad, but it was hard to tell anything to Margarita Paz.
Tito Morales waved him over. As always when he saw Morales, Paz experienced a stab of regret, tinctured with envy and some resentment. The man was a detective on the Miami PD, as Paz had been, before he discovered that shooting people was an experience he could not ever repeat and had resigned from the force. He himself had put Morales in the detectives, brought him in off patrol as his partner, and although Morales had his own partner now (significantly absent at present), he occasionally came by to have a meal and pick Paz’s brain.
Paz sat. “What’d you have?”
“Theajiaco.”
“How was it?”
“Incredible. I got Mina to make it a time or two at home, but it wasn’t anything like yours.”
“Just as well. You’re getting fat, Morales. You should’ve gone with the salad.”
Morales laughed comfortably. He liked having a man who sold food tell him he was fat. In the seven years Paz had known him, Morales had turned from a baby-faced kid into a solidly built man of thirty, wife-and-two-kids, and a competent, if not particularly brilliant, detective. If he required brilliance, he had Jimmy Paz for the price of a meal.
They bantered for a while about family, sports, the department and its discontents, the latest cop scandal, one of a seemingly infinite series of stupid Miami cop tricks. Then, the reason for the visit, besides Morales’s taste for Cuban stewed beef.
“We caught a weird one last night. Tony Fuentes got killed. You heard about it?”
“I saw it in theHerald. Struggle with a burglar and he fell off his balcony. The perp got away.”
“That’s what we’re giving out,” said Morales darkly.
“And what are you not?”
“The perp ate him. And we doubt it was a burglary.”
“That’s good police work, Tito. Your average burglar usually goes for the jewels rather than the liver.”
An odd look appeared on Morales’s face, and Paz thought that this was one reason why the man would never be an absolutely first-class police detective-he was far too transparent; basically, he was a nice, regular guy, unlike Paz. “How did you know it was the liver?” the detective asked.
“It’s the tastiest part, if you want to snack off a corpse in a hurry. I speak as a food service professional here. What else did he eat? Orit eat?”
“The heart and some thigh muscles. It was quite a scene, my friend. Fuentes was opened up like a can of beans in his garden. Somebody yanked him off his balcony a little past one-thirty this morning. They ripped his throat out first. He was probably dead before he hit the croton bushes. I sure as shit hope so, anyway. The wife got up at seven and found him. Aside fromthat, Mrs. Fuentes, how was your day?”
“You probably don’t like the Mrs. for it.”
“No, we’re stupid, Jimmy, but we’re not total morons. No sign of trouble in the family. Business rivals, the usual shit. The only unusual thing that happened to Antonio in the twenty-four hours prior was a couple of guys turned up at his office and yelled at him about how he was ruining some nature preserve down in South America somewhere.”
“These were Latino types?”
“No, one was a white-bread gringo. A hippie, the secretary said. Do we still have hippies?”
“He probably thought of himself as an anarchist.”
“Whatever. He was the one who yelled. Long blond dreadlock hair, in a black T-shirt with a logo on it, but she couldn’t ID it. They had to call security, and the guy was violent, wouldn’t leave. We drew a blank with the security guards on the logo, too. I don’t understand why nobody ever sees anything.”
“They’re mainly not trained observers like you, is why. Who was the other guy?”
“He was an Indian. At least that’s what they all agreed on. A little Indian.”
“Tomahawk or dot-head?”
“Tomahawk, but I got the feeling from the description he wasn’t a local type, more like one of those from south of the border. He had these tattoos on his face.” Morales drew lines with his finger on his cheeks and chin. “That’s what they do down in, like, the Amazon, right?”
“If you say so.”
“The other thing is, there was a cat there.”
“A cat? You mean at the crime scene?”
“Yeah. Or so it appears. A big one, like a cougar or a leopard. We took casts of the prints, and we’re waiting on the zoo guys to ID them. It sounds weird, but from the look of the wounds, the forensic people say that maybe the cat did them, you know? I mean, can you train a cat to kill someone? There was a weird story I remember reading in school about a guy trained an ape to kill for him…”
“‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ by Poe. He made that up in his head, though.”
“So how do you figure this?”
“It’s open and shut, in my view. Guy owns a tiger, he’s feeding him Friskies tuna out of those little tiny cans, and one day he says, ‘Fuck this, why should I keep opening these little tiny cans, two for a dollar twenty-nine, when I can feed Lucille here on Cuban businessmen for free.’ And there you have it.”
Morales laughed, but briefly. “No, seriously.”
“Seriously? You see this outfit I got on? The white color clues you in that I’m in the food service industry and not the weird crime detection industry.”
“The Major asked me to ask you, Jimmy,” said Morales with an appropriately serious change of mien.
“Oh, theMajor. Well, let me drop everything, then, and really focus on it.” Paz said this as sarcastically as he could manage, and as he did he felt an unpleasant pang of self-contempt. Major Douglas Oliphant had been pretty decent to Paz when Paz had been a detective under him, and did not deserve that. And was Paz getting more bitchy recently? He took a breath, released it. “I don’t see what I could do to help,” he said in a milder tone. “I mean, you’re going to do the obvious, check out the people who own big cats, follow up on the tree hugger and his Indian…”
“Yeah, of course, but what the Major wanted me to ask you about is the possibility that there could be some kind of ritual involved.”
“And I’m the expert on cannibalistic ritual?”
“You know more than me,” said Morales bluntly.
“Guilty. But I thought we agreed the perp fed him to the pussycat. Where’s the ritual?”