He was still reading some ten minutes later, when the goddamn cracker emerged blinking into the sun. He got into the car.
“What’s that you’re reading, Jimmy?”
“Oh, nothing much. A scientific paper. Guys in Africa making themselves invisible. Jane Doe wrote it.”
“You don’t say? Well, right from the beginning I said you was going to be the expert on that end.”
Paz tossed the paper into the backseat, gunned the engine, scattering gravel, swerving, as if something nasty was on his tail. Barlow gave him a sharp look. Paz said, “By the way, did you catch what he said down by the dock, when I asked him if he had a boat?”
“Yeah, he said, ‘I’ll go to sea no more.’ “
“I’ll go to sea no more? Why would he say that? The guy’s loaded. He could buy a boat, any boat he wanted.”
“Why don’t you turn around and go ask him?” replied Barlow. “You might learn something.” This was one of the very many moments at which “Fuck you, Barlow!” was the only response that came to Paz’s mind, and since he couldn’t say it, he compressed his lips and said it a number of times in his head.
Just before they got to the highway, Barlow said, “Well, if you sit anymore on what you been sitting on, you’re gonna have a heck of a sore fanny. Talk to your partner, son.”
Paz wrenched the wheel hard over and stomped the brake, so that they turned into the access road of a small business park. He threw the lever into P and reached into the backseat for his briefcase, from which he withdrew the murder case files they had been given by Agent Robinette. He yanked from the folder the photograph he had spent so much time studying and thrust it at Barlow. “Nice picture,” said Barlow. “My daddy wouldn’t’ve liked it much, him being a big shot in the Florida Klan, but …”
“Oh, darn it, Cletis, the guy’s in Miami! That’s our guy!”
“You know this, do you?”
“The guy was here when Mary Doe got it. He was in Miami when our two cases got theirs.”
“You see him yourself?”
“No, but I checked with the Grove Theater management. He was definitely in Miami during the time of, in both our cases. I went to his show myself, as a matter of fact, and people were giving me the eye, waving, like I was a celebrity. What murder suspect do we know who I seem to resemble? The guy who killed Deandra Wallace, right? They thought I was him in the lobby. I didn’t think anything about it then, but now it makes sense. In this show of his, he wears white makeup, so there’s our white guy on a bike. Heck, I probably saw him on the stage when I went to his show the night Vargas was killed. He doesn’t drive?remember what Robinette said, how extremely unusual that was? He’s American, he’s personable, a good talker, also just like Robinette said. Okay, the clincher? He’s got the African witchcraft background, him and his wife. It’s all in that paper, unless she was lying to her fellow scientists. And his old lady’s probably still with him, she probably faked that suicide to take the heat off her husband. And your pal Doe is covering for her.”
“No, he’s not.”
“You know that for a fact, huh?”
“He’s an honest man.”
“Yeah, right! What were you guys doing in there, taking a polygraph?”
Barlow’s face hardened. “Jimmy, you’re a good cop, but you got a cop’s view of people. The man’s suffered and it’s made him stronger. It’s increased his faith. You don’t see that kind of faith much in the world today, and I never saw the beat of him, not personal like just now. I call myself a Christian, but I couldn’t tie that fella’s shoes. So he ain’t no conspirator, and being that he ain’t, how do you make it that your suspect did the crime if he was twenty miles or so away from the house all day? We used to call that an alibi.”
“I don’t know how he did it,” Paz admitted, “but Jane Does says she does, right in that paper. It’s African plant chemicals, and it’s also how he can get in and out of the crime scenes with no one noticing. He drugs them, he slips out of the car, does the crime, and then slips in when they come back and they think he’s been there all the time. They can’t recall anything he did, but they know he’s been there.”
Barlow studied the photo. “Well, yeah, he does favor you a little. You’re prettier, though, if you want my opinion.”
Paz snatched the photo back and put it away. “Go soak your head. It’s the guy.”
Barlow looked at him with humor in his tin-colored eyes.
“I think you just might be right. I think that’s the fella, too.”
Paz experienced a rush of relief. He wanted to grab Barlow and kiss him. “Well, good,” he said, “I thought I was going crazy there for a while.”
“Well, you got your bad points, but crazy ain’t one of them. Proving it’s going to be a whole ‘nother story, though. I’ll have to think on that for a while. Meanwhile, we’re not getting any closer to him sitting here on this road.”
They drove back to La Guardia and flew uneventfully to Miami, arriving just after seven in the evening. Paz made some calls from their car en route from the airport and learned from the manager of the theater company that DeWitt Moore was staying at the Poinciana Suites, a low-rise stack of studios on Brickell. They went by there; he was out. They checked with the theater in the Grove; not around. So they went back to the PD, spoke to Mendes, told him that it was definitely the same guy did the New York murder and that they had some promising leads, but no real suspects, a strategic lie to avoid broaching the witch-doctor theory of the case. The detective chief did not press them, for he was up to his neck in what he considered a PR stunt, the housing and guarding of ready-to-pop women, 194 of them. The housing was in the Hotel Milano, a fourteen-story structure on Biscayne, that had been constructed somewhat too obviously with dope money and seized by the city as part of a narcotics bust. It had been vacant for months, while the city searched for someone who would run it as a hotel rather than a cash laundry, but it was still in reasonably good shape. Now the lights of the Milano blazed again, the air-conditioning was on, and cops from the whole city were engaged in moving women around. Paz thought it was a pretty impressive operation and that they were damned lucky to have the Milano; they might have had to use the Orange Bowl.
Barlow went home. Paz went home, too, but left at about eight-thirty and parked in front of the Poinciana. There he smoked several big, slow maduro cigars, watching the people come in and go out. Moore had not shown by midnight, and Paz figured the man was out doing witch doctor shit, maybe with faithful Jane by his side, and would be gone all night. Or maybe the cops had got even luckier and Moore was going to fall by the Milano, which was guarded by two dozen heavily armed police. Paz went home, where he changed into shorts, drank two Coronas, and skimmed through the Salazar book on Santeria. The main thing he derived was that people at the ceremonies hallucinated that they had been possessed by the orishas. He could deal with that. Could someone make another person have a hallucination through some influence, a … he searched for a term … posthypnotic suggestion? Possibly. The phrase had a nice scientific ring to it, anyway. Something real, like “myocardial infarct,” or “piezoelectric ignition.” Putting Salazar aside, he turned to the Vierchau book that Nearing had given him. He read the introduction with growing discomfort. Now he could see what Nearing meant; this guy was off the reservation. Vierchau seemed to be saying that hallucination could be induced from a distance, that these Chenka sorcerers could make you see things that weren’t there even if you were miles away. He read on, absorbed, disbelieving, becoming more and more restless.
The phone rang. Checking the caller ID, he saw it was his mother. He knew what she wanted, and he didn’t feel like it. He left the apartment and drove down to the Miami River, where he kept his boat. His mother didn’t know he owned a boat, and would not have approved of it if she did, not this boat. It was a twenty-two-foot plywood thing, hand-built by a local, painted aqua. It was rough inside, a couple of bunks with raw foam slabs, a cooler, a Coleman stove and lantern, plywood cabinets. It was messy inside and out, but the 115-horse Evinrude that powered it was new and spotless. Paz cranked it up, ran it downriver to the Bay, and raced it around in circles for a couple of hours, until he was sure the restaurant had closed down. He felt better than he had in days, and wondered, as he always did after these marine jaunts, why he didn’t do it more often. Back home, he read Vierchau for a while and fell asleep in his white leather chair with the book on his chest.