table, books she has read but not shelved. She is about to stand up and shelve them, a practice that gives her a keen pleasure, when she notices that the light on her answering machine is blinking. She punches the button. The mechanical man in the device tells her she has three messages.
Betsy Newhouse’s light voice: “Kiddo. Your reminder call?four-thirty at the gym. Be there or be pear.” Beep. “Hi, it’s me. Nice seeing you today. Give me a buzz. I’ll buy you a salad.” Kasdan, the rat bastard. Beep. An unfamiliar but pleasant voice says: “Dr. Wise, this is Detective Paz, Miami PD. I was the arresting officer in the Emmylou Dideroff case, and I’d like to talk to you about her. You can reach me anytime on my cell phone.” He gives a number and hangs up.
Lorna reaches for the phone and starts to dial this number, if only to stop herself from calling the rat bastardinstantly, then stops and hangs up. She has to think about this for a moment first. Paz is the cop Sheryl was talking about, the voodoo one, the potential date. She knew he had the arrest on Emmylou, but what could he possibly want with her?
Then, like a shark fin on a night ocean, a thought breaks the surface of her mind. The story about a new wrinkle in abnormal psych was enough to convince Mickey Lopez, and was a good story to tell herself, and might even turn out to be true. But that is not the reason she very much wants to (and, she just now realizes, is positivelydriven to) continue with Emmylou Dideroff. She now realizes, with a feeling that mixes wonder and dismay, and includes a funny hollow just below the belt line, that she has no idea what this reason is. Suddenly she is terrified, nothing to do with the case, she is convinced that there is someone else in her house. She freezes, listens. Someone breathing, a heavy rasping sound…or is that the air conditioner? Now she is in full panic mode, heart pounding, sweat springing freely. The sense of an alien presence is undeniable, it’s in the room, it’s right behind her. Her heart feels like it’s bursting through her ribs. She lets out a gasp and spins around in her chair. Nothing.
It takes her the better part of an hour and two Valium to feel herself again. A panic attack, maybe a little fallout from the tension of the earlier meeting. So she tells herself, speaking aloud in the empty house. Her hands have stopped shaking now, and she picks up the telephone.
Jimmy Paz felt his cell phone vibrate against his hip but ignored it, allowing the voice mail to pick it up. He was standing in the auditorium of Miami-Dade Community College in a long line of people, all of whom were carrying copies of the same book. They were all waiting to get their copies signed by a pale young woman seated behind a table on the stage. The woman had marvelous corkscrew curls of red gold that glittered like a nest of Slinkys under the stage lighting. Her features were sharp and her eyes small and a little too bright, but she had a broad sensuous mouth. A few minutes ago she had finished reading from her poetry.
He arrived at the table and handed her the slim volume. She looked up, gave him the same nice smile she’d given to the fourteen people ahead of him, and said, “What should I write?”
“Whatever you want,” he answered.
She wrote. He picked up the book and turned to the title page, where she had inscribed: Come up to room 923 at the Grand Bay tonight at about eleven and I will fuck your brains out. Best Wishes, Willa Shaftel.
“Do you write that kind of thing in everyone’s book?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said. “That’s how you get to be a best seller.”
“Then I better get in line right now,” he said and, waving, took his leave.
Willa Shaftel had been one of Jimmy Paz’s three main squeezes for a year or so, back when she’d worked as a librarian in Coconut Grove. Then she’d left and gone to Iowa on a writing fellowship, and when the first winter hit she’d spent three weeks in Miami, most of it with Paz and most of that in bed. During that time she had inveigled the story of how Paz had caught the Voodoo Killer, as well as details about the various ancillary characters attached to the story, and she had written a fairly successful novel about it, and no longer had to work in libraries. She came during the succeeding winter too, staying for six weeks this time, during which they saw each other nearly every day. Paz had never been deeply into fidelity, but after that he had found himself unwilling to look very hard for alternates. He’d even spent some long weekends at her tiny apartment in Ames, Iowa, a place nearly devoid of Cuban coffee.
Now he thought about her mouth. She really did have a most excellent mouth, and a hot skillful tongue, and she was the most actual fun to fuck of any woman he had ever known. He thought this might be the basis of a relationship more serious and permanent than any he had engaged in before. And she had spent a year in Spain studying Lorca and spoke a peculiar but elegant form of Spanish. No breasts to speak of, but she got along fine with his mother. All in all…
By this time he was out of the building facing the main plaza of the campus, which was tricked out in decorations and awninged booths for the book fair. Avoiding a mime, he found a little coffee bar, ordered a cafe con leche, and took out his cell phone. The voice mail service had a number of messages on it, only one of which was worth replying to just now.
“Dr. Wise? Detective Paz here. Thanks for returning the call.”
“Uh-huh. Why…I mean, excuse me, I mean what can I do for you, Detective?” said the voice. Nice voice, he thought, husky, but a little slurred. And somewhat breathless. A few predinner cocktails maybe?
“This is about Emmylou Dideroff. I was the arresting officer on the case.”
“Yes, you said.”
“Well, she’s writing a confession.”
“That must’ve made your day.”
“Not really,” said Paz, starting to get a little annoyed. “I mean if she’s crazy, the confession doesn’t do anything for us. But it wasn’t, I mean it’s not a regular confession. She asked for a bound notebook, the schoolroom kind, not a spiral. I got her four of them at Staples. She wants to write down all her crimes, she says.”
“She’s delusional,” said Lorna. “As a matter of fact, she mentioned a confession in our interview, but in any writing she does it’s going to be hard to distinguish fantasy from what really happened.”
“Just what I thought,” said Paz brightly. “That’s why I called you.”
“I see. And why me specifically? I mean there are a zillion shrinks in Miami, and a lot of them are on government payrolls already. And I guess you know I’m not a psychiatrist.”
“Yes, Doctor, I know. I’m a detective. The reason is I wanted someone independent, not an employee of the criminal justice system. So I happened to run into Leon Waits because I yanked one of his troopers for the detective squad, and he was giving me heat over it, and I remembered that his wife was some kind of therapist and I asked him could I call her and get a recommendation, and I did and the first name she came up with was you. And then I checked the file and found you were on the case already. It was magic. So the question is, will you do it?”
There was a pause on the line and what sounded like a sigh. “Do what?”
“Just read what she writes. Help me figure out what’s what from a psych perspective. We’ll get you a rate from the department. I cleared it already.”
“Okay, right, but what I don’t understand is why you’re so concerned with Emmylou Dideroff. I mean is this something to do with clearing the case? Getting a conviction? Because if that’s the situation, then I’m not sure I?”
“No, it has nothing to do with the murder we got on board now.”
“Then what does it have to do with?”
“Are you using a cordless phone?”
“Yes, why?”
“And I’m on a cell. I don’t want a guy who ordered some electronics off the Internet listening in on this. We can talk at the party.”
“What party?”
“Tomorrow. At Sheryl and Leon’s. You’re coming, right?”
She laughed for what seemed to him no particular reason, quickly stifled.
“How did you know?”
“I told you, I’m a detective,” he said. “See you there.”
Seven
