“By definition. And, Jimmy, I want you to know that you are the first and only man I have ever discussed epistemology with under the shower.”
“I appreciate that,” he said. “I know that was hard to admit.”
“It was. In any case, science looks for causality. Event B only occurs after Event A, or is associated with it more than chance alone would allow. Lightning always precedes thunder, and so we assume that lightning causes thunder, and we look for a physical connection between the two events, and in that case, we find it, and science marches on. Synchronicity … thank you, I’ll clean that myself, if you don’t mind … synchronicity proposes a linkage between two events that is meaningful without being causal or related in a reproducible or deterministic way. For instance, I have this terrible plumbing problem and I meet a guy in a bar and we fall in love and it turns out he’s a plumber. Or me wanting to get together with you and you happen to call me from among all your hundreds of women. Pretty, but scientifically meaningless. The Jungians make a big deal of it, which is another reason for not taking it seriously.”
“It’s like luck.”
“In a way. But it’s supposed to be meaningful on the psychic level, too. The cosmos or the collective unconscious is trying to reach us. Horseshit, in other words.”She looked down at him and let out a yelp. “Yikes, get that thing away from me,” she cried, and hung her washcloth on it, then turned the cold tap all the way on.
Later, driving home, Paz experienced the usual letdown, and the fetid backwash of self-contempt. He could sense that his relationship with Morgensen was approaching its conclusion. When they started talking about other, more eligible, men and the passion level went up a notch or two, as was here the case, the final kiss-off loomed not far distant. So Morgensen would get her full professor, or similar, and Paz get another bright, white lady to replace Morgensen, and so on and so on, until he was a fat sixty-year-old cop, turtle-faced with corruption and booze, paying chippies to suck him off in crime-lighted parking lots. Paz had heard about love, and believed it to be real, as he had heard about Mongolia and believed that place to be real as well. Yet while he thus believed, Paz thought that a voyage to the latter was as likely as one to the former: not very, given his record. If milk is free, why buy a cow? Paz had said this to himself and others, even to women. He said it now, waiting for a light, puffing his cigar.
Something was wrong, something was intensely disturbing, but he could not nail it down; it was like forgetting a phone number or leaving tickets home, an absence, felt but not comprehended. He ought to feel good, he told himself: an interesting and exciting day’s work, a terrific piece of ass, what more could a man desire? Now came a new thought, Mr. Youghans and the dead woman, and the girl he was screwing, and Barlow’s contempt for the man. Which Paz shared. He wasn’t like Youghans. He didn’t seduce high-school girls. Only college graduates. That was a significant difference. Or was it? No, it was. A good deal, for both parties, a square deal. Like he had with his mother.
Driving, the windows open to the thick, slowly cooling air of Miami nights, Paz rolled a different sort of life around in his mind, the words settle down scuttling across the surface of his brain. Pick one of them and settle down. Or some other, to come. Fall in love. Move out of the free apartment, quit the restaurant. A three-bedroom ranch in Kendall. Pool and barbecue. Kids. Make friends. Invite the Barlows over.
It had no real taste, it was like water, like meringue without sugar. He would have to be a different man from the one he was now. He supposed he might become that man, but not through any act of personal will. He didn’t know the way there.
In the morning, first thing, Paz called Dr. Maria Salazar at home and got an answering machine that informed him, first in English, and then in a particularly limpid and refined Spanish, that Dr. Salazar would be out of the country until a date three weeks in the future. Paz cursed in muddy and impure Spanish and then punched in Dr. Lydia Herrera’s number. Dr. Herrera was busy, the secretary said, she had no room on her schedule that morning. Paz bullied, abandoning Barlow’s rule. He threatened that if Dr. Herrera did not see him, he would have her dragged down to police headquarters and charged with obstructing a homicide investigation, and wouldn’t that screw up her busy schedule? The line went briefly dead, and then the secretary came back again and, in a stiff voice, gave Paz his appointment. Paz put on a fawn-colored Palm Beach suit and walked over to the hole-in-the-wall on Calle Ocho where he took breakfast, cafe con leche and a couple of Cuban fruit pastries. While he ate he read Doris Taylor’s story in the Herald, which had made page 1 below the fold. Doris didn’t spare the gory details, and he guessed that she had gotten to the medical examiner’s staff. The police, he learned, had refused to rule out the possibility of a cult killing. It could have been worse, although he now expected that the brass would be more interested in the case than was optimal. He ripped the story out, pocketed the clip, and drove directly to the university.
Dr. Herrera was dressed in mango color this morning and she frowned in a way that brought her plucked brows together like a child’s drawing of a gull. The patronizing smile was missing. She stood in the doorway of her little office and radiated honest outrage.
“This is really inconvenient, Detective,” she said. “And I resent being threatened.”
“Murder is often inconvenient, Doctor,” said Paz blandly. “And citizens have a positive duty to help the police in an investigation.” He gestured past her. “The sooner we start …”
She stalked back into her office and sat behind her desk. Paz placed before her a copy of the toxicology analysis on Wallace.
“This is a list of the chemicals we found in the victim’s body. If you could, we’d like to know what plants they came from.”
She snatched up the paper, frowning. As Paz watched, her expression changed; irritation gave way to confused fascination. She spun her chair, pulled a reference volume from the shelf, paged through it, pulled down a batch of reprints, shuffled through them, read a page of one, shook her head, muttering.
“Stumped, huh?”
She stared at him, but not with hostility. “This is remarkable. Amazing.”
“Do you know what plant that stuff comes from?” asked Paz.
“Plant? My God, there’s a whole pharmacopoeia in this. The harmalines here are botanical psychedelics, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, incredibly powerful, used by shamans in both the New World and Old World tropics. In the New World they come from the Banisteriopsis vine, they call it yage or ayahuasca; in Africa they’re derived from Leptactinia densiflora. As to which we’ve got here, I’d have to look it up, but this set of indoles they have listed looks like typical contaminants from Leptactinia preparations. Yohimbine is from Alchornea floribunda, African again. Ibogaine is a powerful stimulant and psychedelic, also African, from Tabernanthe iboga. It’s called the cocaine of Africa. It may not be purposeful here because it’s a common contaminant of yohimbine preparations. It’s an intoxicant and supposed aphrodisiac. Ouabain is an African arrow poison, from Strophantus species. It’s a cardiac glycoside.”
“A poison?”
“Yes. Extremely potent. I don’t know what it’s doing here. Was the woman poisoned, too? I read the story in the paper this morning. I thought it was an evisceration.”
Paz decided to yield a scrap of information. “Apparently she died before she had time to bleed to death. Her heart stopped. Could this ouabain do that?”
“No question. In Central Africa they use it to kill elephants.” She gestured at the tox report. “As I said, this is remarkable. The cocktail of substances?I have no idea what the result of this combination would be.”
“We figure he wanted to knock her out, so he could, um, do his operation.”