Then Paz said, “I tell you what, Morales. This guy isn’t going anywhere. Why don’t you and me go on up to that room and try to find out what he was doing before he came down?”
“His name’s Jabir Akran al-Muwalid. I got it off the manager. He’s a guest, 10 D.”
Another big grin from Paz.
“Very good, Morales. Great! Terrific! Thank you. I wasn’t looking forward to going through that guy’s pockets for ID.”
Morales was thinking that maybe the book on Paz was wrong, that he wasn’t an arrogant pain in the ass after all. Morales had been on the force for nine months, and this was the first time a detective had treated him like anything but a useless doughnut-dunker who had probably messed up the crime scene and helped the perp on with his coat. The other funny thing was that the guy didn’t have a partner. All the homicide guys worked in pairs, but apparently not Jimmy Paz.
They picked up a key card from the desk and went up in the elevator, which was, like the lobby, decorated in cream and gold. It even had a little Louis Quinze chair in it, with a brocade seat. As it turned out, they did not need the key card. A rolled towel had been placed on the floor to thwart the automatic-closing feature of the room door. They stepped over it and into the room.
It was a suite, furnished in the same Louis Quinze style as the lobby and the elevator; and they were now in the spacious sitting room thereof. One whole wall was lined with gilt-framed mirrors, and on the opposite side they had a view of the balcony and the French windows that led onto it; the heavy drapes, printed with heraldic ancien regime designs were pulled back, and the filmy white sheers fluttered in the breeze from Biscayne Bay.
Paz started to walk toward this balcony but caught a glimpse of something in the mirror and stopped. There was a woman in the room. She was kneeling on the faux Aubusson, her hands clasped to her breast, eyes wide open, staring. Paz moved into her field of vision, but she didn’t appear to notice him. He observed that she was speaking in a low voice. Praying? He moved closer, at the same time gesturing for Morales to check out the bedroom.
It didn’t sound like prayer, not that Paz was particularly familiar with the sound. She seemed to be talking to someone conversationally, although he could not make out the words. It was much like the one-sided conversations one heard lately on the streets from the people with cell phones. Paz looked carefully: no cell phone. The woman was tall and thin and had the bony good looks of a country-and-western star, a little faded. A C amp; W singer who’d never really made it, or one thathad made it and then got ruined by drink and/or shiftless men, living small in a Hialeah motel. A hard face, he might have said, the kind you saw in the tank when the cops had rounded up a bunch of whores, except that there was something transcendent in the expression on her face that didn’t go with the picture. She was dressed in a faded blue T-shirt, very loose and a little soiled, a calf-length brown cotton skirt, and tire-tread sandals. Dusty feet. Her hair was crow black and cut into a boy’s cap from which small lobeless ears emerged, close to the head. No earrings. Her eyes, set deeply within a hedge of thick dark lashes, were (surprisingly, given her hair and complexion) the color of washed blue jeans, against which the pupils looked unusually small, like BBs. Drugged, maybe? That might explain that expression too. She wore neither makeup nor nail polish, and her skin was sallow in the way that indicates a deep tan faded. Against her neck, just above the fabric of her shirt, he could make out a thin leather cord, perhaps attached to some ornament she wore under the T-shirt.
“Excuse me,” said Paz. To his surprise, the woman rolled her eyes back into her head so that only the whites showed and toppled gently over onto her side. Paz immediately knelt beside her and put his hand to her neck. Her skin was moist and felt unusually hot, but the pulse beating beneath it was strong and regular. A scent came off her, sweat and something gas-station-ish, like oil or gas, and a faint floral note. Paz had handled many floral arrangements in his time and recognized the odor: lilies.
The woman’s eyelids fluttered, her eyes opened, she jerked and looked surprised when she saw Paz staring down at her.
“What happened?” she asked. “Who’re you?” A rural-sounding voice.Hur yew.
“You were kneeling and then you kind of keeled over,” Paz said. “I’m Detective Paz, Miami PD. Who are you?”
“Emmylou Dideroff. Is he here?” She sat up and looked around the room.
“He would be Mr. al-Muwalid, yes?”
“Uh-huh.” She rose somewhat shakily to her feet, and Paz saw that she was tall indeed, somewhat taller than his own five ten.
“You ought to sit down,” he said, “you look a little shaky.” She did, on one of the silly uncomfortable-looking French chairs. “You’re from the police?” she asked, and when Paz nodded, she said, “Are you here to arrest him?”
“Why would we want to do that, Ms. Dideroff?”
“Oh, he’s a murderer,” she said. “A criminal. That’s why I followed him. I couldn’t believe it, walking down the street in Miami, like nothing. He drove into the parking garage and I parked my truck on the drive?where you check in? And I waited in the lobby for him to come by. I wanted to go up to him and look him in the face, I mean to make sure it was really him. And he didn’t show up and I thought, Oh darn, he probably came up right from the parking garage.”
She met Paz’s eyes and said, “Oh my gosh, I fainted again, didn’t I?”
“Yes, ma’am. What exactly were you doing before you went out?” In the mirror Paz saw Morales in the doorway of the bedroom. Their eyes met, Morales shrugged and gestured with his thumb at the room behind him, meaning, no one there. With a slight motion of his head, Paz indicated the balcony. Morales slipped along the wall, silently for a cop, and went through the open French windows.
“Oh, talking to Catherine,” the woman said. “Anyway, I just took the elevator up to the top floor and found the chambermaid and asked her which was his room, but he wasn’t on that floor, and then I just went down floor by floor, talking to the ladies there, until I got to ten and that one knew him right off. So I went to the room and I saw that the door was propped open and…I went in. I guess I shouldn’t have, right?”
“Not really. Who’s Catherine?”
“Catherine of Siena.”
“As in Saint?”
“Uh-huh. She’s extremely wise in the ways of the world.”
“Was. I thought she was dead.”
The woman gave him a smile. He saw that she was missing two teeth on the right side, but besides that it was a lovely open smile. “Well, yes. But the dead are all around us. It’s the communion of saints. Are you a Catholic?”
“Raised. I’m not much of a churchgoer.” The woman had nothing to say to that.
Throat clearing behind Paz: he turned, and there was Morales with the curtain flapping around him and an excited look on his smooth face. “Ah, Detective, I think you need to see this out here.”
Paz waved him in and walked across the room. They conversed in low voices.
“What’ve you got?” Paz asked.
“I think the murder weapon’s lying out there. Looks like an engine part with…ah, like blood and hair on it. I didn’t touch it or anything.”
“Good. Anything interesting in the bedroom?”
“The vic’s ID. A Sudan passport with a bunch of business cards stuck in it. A wallet with a couple of grand in fresh hundreds. I looked in the top drawer of the dresser. Was that okay?”
“Not really, but we’ll let it slide. The dead have no rights, but we like to wait for crime scene before we touch stuff. Now, why don’t you keep Ms. Dideroff there company while I take a look at your clue.”
“What’s her story?”
“Damned if I know,” said Paz and walked through to the little balcony terrace. He squatted low and peered at the thing. When he was sixteen and poor as dirt, Paz had rebuilt the blown engine on his first car, a ‘56 Mercury, and so he knew just what he was looking at. It was a rod, the short, strong, steel forging that connects the piston of an internal combustion engine to the crankshaft, larger than the Merc’s was, maybe from a big diesel. It consisted of a ring designed to grip the crankshaft and a smaller ring that went around a fat pin inside the piston. There was a smear of blood along the side of the large ring and a few curly dark hairs that looked like they could have come off the head of the victim. He leaned closer, balancing like a chimp on the knuckles of one hand. The rod
