The blood from Willis Walker’s groin had spread on the bathroom floor into a huge, tormented circle of blackish grue. The blood behind his head is another story-this, a dark-purple paste, flecked with bits of skull, rootlets of hair.
Next to the body is a. 25 caliber pistol, recently discharged.
Paris snaps on a pair of gloves, crouches by the body. He carefully explores the man’s front pants pockets. Empty, save for a blood-soaked pack of matches from Vernelle’s Party Center, a cheat spot located a few blocks west of the motel on St. Clair.
Paris pokes about Willis Walker’s body, probing here and there, putting off the inevitable. Finally, he can avoid it no longer. He hears a brief salvo of stifled laughter from behind him and turns around to see Reuben Ocasio, one of Cuyahoga County’s deputy coroners, looking grim and serious and thoroughly guilty of the laughter.
“You want to do it?” Paris asks.
“Not a chance,” answers Reuben. “I’m confident in my sexuality and all. But you’re the fuckin’ detective.”
Paris takes a deep breath of air curiously redolent with cigar smoke. Curious, because there were no cigar ashes in either of the room’s two ashtrays, no cigar butts in or near Room 116. The other smell was more explainable-rum. It seemed to be everywhere. A tart, acidic scent that probes some catacomb of Paris’s memory, a place webbed in shadows at the moment, just beyond recall.
Shit, Paris thinks.
It is time.
He reaches into Reuben’s black bag, removes a long, narrow tongue depressor. He then leans forward with supreme reluctance, glacial speed, and begins to separate the two sides of the unzipped fly on Willis Walker’s blood-drenched pants with the sole intention of verifying the obvious-that Willis Walker not only had his head bashed in but also had been violently separated from his penis and/or testicles sometime within the past twelve hours.
Paris grits his teeth, looks inside.
They are truly gone.
The whole set.
And they hadn’t been found in the motel room or, so far, on the grounds of the Dream-A-Dream Motel.
“Well,” Paris says, jumping to his feet, dropping the wooden stick into the wastebasket as if it were radioactive. “Nothing there. All yours, Reuben.”
Reuben shakes his head. “There goes that myth, eh?”
Paris laughs, but it is more from nervous relief than Reuben’s bon mot.
“Move aside, boot,” Reuben says. “Let a detached professional do his job.”
Paris steps into the December morning, grateful for the frigid air. He lights a cigarette and looks down the walk at the scarred and battered doors of the Dream-A-Dream Motel. All the same. A million mournful dramas behind each. A million more to come.
He flicks his cigarette onto the asphalt, disgusted with himself for lighting it, bone-weary from the previous night’s lack of rest. He hadn’t had the courage to stay and see if Beth’s intentions were romantic in nature, having all but sprinted from the apartment, knowing that his heart couldn’t have taken the disappointment if he had miscalculated the signals. He hadn’t slept more than twenty minutes since leaving Shaker Square.
“Get in here, Jack,” Reuben says, that all-business tone now in his voice.
Paris steps back into Room 116, across to the bathroom. Reuben is leaning over the body, his skin ashen, the good humor gone.
Reuben has seen a ghost.
“What do you have?” Paris asks.
Reuben looks at the floor, at the ceiling, at the walls, anywhere but at the corpse. He is Cuban American, a fairly big man at six feet, two-forty, but at the moment he looks small and troubled. He points to Willis Walker’s mouth, specifically, to the man’s tongue, which lolls to the side, lifeless and gray. He presses on the tip of the tongue with a depressor, flattening it out. “Look.”
Paris leans in. At first he cannot see anything, but, as he moves closer, it appears as if there is something drawn on Walker’s tongue. “What is it, a scar?”
“No scar, amigo. It’s fresh.”
Paris squints, and the shape comes into focus. “It’s a bow and arrow?” As odd as it sounds to Paris, the shallow carving on Willis Walker’s tongue does look like a small, stylized bow and arrow. Crosshatches, sharp angles, curved lines-all made of drying blood.
“I’m no expert, but it looks like some kind of voodoo symbol. Or something similar,” Reuben says. “Palo Mayombe, maybe.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Palo Mayombe is a very dark side of Santeria,” Reuben replies, making a quick sign of the cross with a not- so-steady hand. “I think this is one of their marks.”
“I’m lost, Reuben.”
“You’ve heard of Santeria?”
“Yes. But I’m not at all familiar with it.”
“Most of the people who follow Santeria are good people, Jack. Ordinary folks practicing a religion with some odd-seeming rituals attached. But Palo Mayombe? That kind of shit?” Reuben crosses himself again, touching his fingers to his lips. He finds Paris with wet, frightened eyes. “It’s about torture. Mutilation. Black ceremony.”
“You’re saying this was a religious sacrifice?”
“I don’t know,” Reuben says. “I’m just saying that there may be something worse coming, padrone. Something very bad.”
10
The snowstorm starts at noon. Five inches by rush hour, the radio says. More on the way. As always, whenever the city of Cleveland is pummeled for the first time of the season, a general traffic-psychosis descends upon the town and everyone seems to forget how to drive on ice. On his drive to the west side restaurant, Paris had seen a trio of rear-enders, had heard a half-dozen accident calls go out on the police radio.
He is sitting in a back booth at Mom’s Family Restaurant on Clark Avenue and West Sixty-fifth Street, waiting for Mercedes Cruz, whom he fully expects to be late.
On the table, next to his coffee cup, sits his leather handcuff case. He had never gotten used to sitting in a booth with it at the bottom of his spine. Next to the case: a small but daunting pile of material on the religion called Santeria, courtesy of a quick jaunt through Google.
He has learned that Santeria originated in the Caribbean and means, literally, “way of the saints.” It is a religion that combines the beliefs of the Yoruba and Bantu people in southern Nigeria, Senegal, and the Guinea coast with the god, saints, and beliefs of Roman Catholicism.
Paris is a long-lapsed Catholic, spiritually afloat between the Latin mass and the English mass, between the austere dictates of Vatican I and the somewhat looser views of Vatican II. It was a time when the church was beginning to get bombarded with issues it had not had to deal with in two thousand years: birth control, abortion, open homosexuality, women in the priesthood.
But long before the reforms of Vatican II, when Catholicism was forced on African slaves, native practices were suppressed. The slaves developed a unique way of keeping their old beliefs alive by equating the gods and goddesses of their traditional religions with the Christian saints. Slaves would pray openly to St. Lazarus over a suffering child, but the offering was really to Balbalz Ayi, the Bantu patron of the sick.
Since that time, the religion, and its many offshoots, has continued to flourish in a number of Latin countries. Mexican Santeria favors its Catholic beginnings; Cuban Santeria leans toward African origins. In Brazil, the followers of Candomble and Macumba are said to number one million.
Like many Catholics, Paris was scared shitless by movies like The Exorcist. And his own mystic vision of hell. But the liturgy of being a Catholic-especially the rites of confession and communion-had long since dissolved into
