“I made them.”
“Youmade them?”
“Yes, sir. I’m really a girl, but they make me cross-dress because otherwise I would have too much affirmative action. They’d have to make me the chief.”
This was delivered deadpan, and it took Oliphant a few seconds to get it, but he managed a laugh.
“Yeah, I heard you were a pisser…is it Jimmy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yeah. Why don’t you have a partner?”
The unexpected pertinent question of a skilled interrogator. Paz was impressed but not discomfited. “I prefer to work alone, sir. They fired my partner last year and none of the new guys seem to have worked out.”
“No, and what I hear is you ran them off. I also hear you got an attitude.” Paz did not comment on this. Oliphant regarded him over the rim of his coffee cup for a while. “And a perfect disciplinary record, an unusual combo in my experience. Well. The fact of the matter is, your preferences aside, you have to have a partner and you know why. This department, I can’t have detectives wandering around the town all by their lonesome. You make a case, I got to have two people saying what went down. And if the shit happens to hit the fan…” He made an indeterminate gesture with his hand, and Paz filled in, “You want to be able to get each of them in a room with a bunch of snakes and get one of them to rat the other one out.”
“You got it.”
“You could hire Barlow back.”
“Uh-huh, I could, just before I handed in my resignation and packed my bags. Your guy held the former chief of this department hostage at gunpoint while spouting all kinds of racist crap.”
“He was emotionally disturbed. The perp slipped him some kind of drug.”
“That’s the story, although I have to note that the docs found no drugs whatever in his system after you arranged for his capture.” He paused and waited, but Paz was not forthcoming. “I always thought there was something really fishy about that whole Voodoo Killer thing. Care to comment?”
“I wrote a report. Eighty-seven pages without appendices. And there was a book out.”
“I read both of them,” said Oliphant and pinched his nostrils together meaningfully. Paz kept mum. The major went on: “Okay, you need a partner and I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Since I think we can call this a special case, I’ll letyou pick your guy. Anyone in the department who’s got the right grade and time in service. I want a name by close of business tomorrow. And this arrangement stays between you and me. Are we clear on that?”
“Yes, sir,” said Paz and stood up.
“Sit down,” said Oliphant. “That wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.” He took another churro out of the bag, then smiled, patted his belly, and placed it on his desk blotter.
“Later, I think. Okay, this homicide at the Trianon you put away the other week. That was fast work.”
“A grounder. The perp was sitting there, the murder weapon was at the scene.”
“Still. There’s no doubt the doer was this woman Dideroff?”
“Not inmy mind,” said Paz, and then had an uncomfortable feeling. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, no reason. Know anything about the victim?”
“A guest in the hotel. Flew in from Mexico City three days before he died. Some kind of Arab businessman is what I gathered from his stuff. A Sudanese passport.”
“Uh-huh. I got a call about the case.”
“Oh?”
“You know I used to be with the Bureau.”
“Yes, sir, I heard that.”
“The call was from a guy who works for the people who watch certain individuals from that part of the world. At the Bureau, I mean. This Jabir Akran al-Muwalid was on a watch list.”
“That’s interesting. Did he say why they were watching him?”
“Not really,” said Oliphant brusquely, discouraging curiosity. “He was mainly interested in knowing if it was really him, Muwalid. I had the file faxed up to D.C. He also wanted to know if the woman, the suspect, was going down for it. Is she?”
“That’s not up to me, sir, but you read the file: I can’t see how we could deliver a more unbreakable case. What’ll happen at trial…” Here Paz shrugged elaborately. “She’s a wack job was my take on her. Talking about mystic voices. She might try an insanity defense, I don’t know.”
“That would be a long shot, in my opinion,” said Major Oliphant. “But it might strengthen the case if we had a good sense of what the connection was between them. She say anything about that?”
“Only that the vic was her enemy and that he’d done some bad things back home in Africa. I gathered she was talking about massacres and stuff, war crimes.”
“Uh-huh. She elaborate any on that? What went down in Africa?”
“No, sir, not to me. But she’s writing out what she calls a confession.”
“Really. What does it say?”
“Well, actually I haven’t seen it yet. She says she has to write it in a special kind of notebook.” Paz had a certain expression on his face when he said this, and Oliphant’s eyebrows rose.
“Oh,that kind of confession.”
“It’s a good bet. She’s a total loon.”
“Mm. Be that as it may I’d feel more comfortable with a fatter file. More of the background. So follow up, her movements, her background, the vic’s movements. It’d be nice to paint a picture she had a major hard-on for this character and was lying in wait. That would speak against the insanity plea.”
“Okay, sir, I’ll get on it. Was that all?”
Oliphant nodded. Paz rose, and the major said, “And thanks for the…” He gestured to the bag.
“Churros, sir,” said Paz helpfully, and left.
Back at his desk, Paz found the bay had filled with its usual complement of detectives and cops and clericals, and that the usual noise of telephones and talk and clacking machines had replaced the quiet of a few minutes before. Paz’s mind was also considerably less quiet than it had been. All right, the partner business, put that to one side, he’d deal with that in some way. What bothered him was Oliphant’s interest in a firmly closed case. Bosses were normally interested only in open cases, and in these mainly when there was some political pressure to catch some particularly egregious villain, someone, for example, who had made the grave error of killing a white person in the state of Florida. They were interested in closed cases only when there was some suspicion that a cop had screwed up, had, for example, dropped a gun to cover a bad shooting, or strong-armed a witness into perjury. But Paz knew the Dideroff collar was Tide clean, so that couldn’t be it.
So it was the FBI connection, someone in D.C. was interested in his little grounder. And interested in seeing Emmylou Dideroff go to prison, maybe to a berth on death row. Okay, let’s take another look at Ms. D. He pulled a file from the vertical rack on his desk. He read through the A form, the arrest affidavit in the case, the initial summary of why the cops thought the arrestee had in fact committed the crime. Then he read the transcript of the interview tapes he’d made with the woman, and as he read them there arrived in his mind the memory of what had happened in that interview, what he had seen. Or thought he had seen. And then came the intense desire never to look her in the face again. Suppress that. Divert to something else: ah, here was a search warrant. With relief he fled the office to do some police work.
The address on the warrant led him to a houseboat moored on the Miami River, in an undesirable location shadowed by the East-West Expressway overpass. The houseboat was an undistinguished mass-produced unit, flat-bottomed, flat-roofed, made from peeling beige fiberglass. He stepped down onto its deck and broke open the jalousied aluminum cabin door. Inside, a plain Formica table with a philodendron in a clay pot in its center, some aluminum and nylon mesh deck chairs, a stove, a sink, a small refrigerator. A long padded seat ran over storage cabinets on the opposite bulkhead. Yellow plaid curtains, much faded, covered the windows, mellowing the sunlight that passed through them. Paz checked the storage and the pantry and the refrigerator and found only the usual kitchen equipment and linens and food: no drugs, no guns. The one berth was forward, a tiny place with barely room for a double bed. The storage here was built into its base. Paz tossed it quickly, finding only a simple selection of clothes?straight cotton skirts, Tshirts, one cotton sweater, cotton socks, cotton underwear, all with low-end labels from Penney’s and Kmart. In a plastic bag was what looked like a cook’s apron, a gray wool dress, a white
