the last person we know he saw before getting whacked is an Arab….” He shrugged. “It’s probably nothing.”
“Could I ask you something?” said Morales, after a pause. Now they had turned onto Second Avenue. Traffic was heavy, but they were in no rush.
“Ask.”
“What the fuck is going on?”
“Be more precise.”
“I meet you by accident and a couple of days later I’m a homicide detective. My lieutenant knows diddly- squat about it. I go into the squad bay and everyone treats me like I got a contagious skin condition. Then you get me working on a case I know is closed. Is that enough to start? This is our building here.”
“Park it in the bus stop,” said Paz. “Okay, I was wondering when you would get around to asking. You’re in because I needed a partner. Oliphant’s orders, and I pulled some strings of my own. Why you? Whynot you? First, while you haven’t done anything particularly brilliant, you haven’t fucked up either, and I liked the way you handled yourself at the crime scene. You didn’t puke and that scene was fairly puke-worthy. A small thing, but what you might call a sine qua non for a homicide dick. No heaving. It fucks the crime scene and disturbs the witnesses, if any. Also, you followed my lead at the scene without me having to write it out in big letters and pin it to your shirt. You’d be surprised at the number of guys who can’t do that. Finally, I kind of like giving orders to a white Cuban. That enough on your first question?”
“Yeah,” Morales snapped.
Paz didn’t answer immediately. He was staring at the side mirror.
Morales said, “What’s up?”
“Nothing, I thought I saw something. I’m getting paranoid in my old age. And you’re pissed, but I’m being truthful with you. I’m modeling the right behavior. Lie to your wife, your girlfriend, your mother, whatever, but never lie to your partner. Get mad at him if you want, but don’t lie. Okay, next question. A kid patrolman with no apparent clout gets a high-visibility, high-prestige appointment. What do the other members of his new organization believe? Think!”
Morales thought for a while and then a look of dismay came onto his face. “They think I’m a rat?”
“Half of them do, given this is the Miami PD. They think IA is putting a mole into the bosom of the homicide unit. The other half is trying to figure out who you know, who’re you connected to, what faction you’re from, so they know if they should kiss your ass or kick it. Also, you’remy partner, so that adds a little extra salsa to it, guys are going to give you grief just because you’re with me. They don’t much like me on the fifth floor. It hurts, but I try to live with it.” He smiled, and after a brief hesitation, Morales returned it.
“Okay, I can live with it too. Now tell me why we’re working on a closed case.”
“Because we’ve been told to. And the case may not be all that closed. You understand what I’m saying?”
Morales nodded vigorously. “Packer is wrong, Wilson is wrong, the victim’s on an FBI watch list, the suspect is nuts, and this Arab in the oil business. Too many ruffles on the shirt.”
“You got it. Speaking of which, do you have any money?”
“You meanon me?”
“No, in the bank. Like a couple of grand you can spare.”
“I guess. Why?”
“You need to get some serious clothes. I’m wearing a fourteen-hundred-dollar suit and three-hundred-dollar shoes and you’re wearing a piece of shit looks like you got it for first communion. What does that say, if someone looks at the two of us?”
“You like clothes more? I’m cheap?”
“No, it says I’m on the take and you’re not. I want us both to look dirty.”
“You want people to offer us bribes?” said Morales.
“See, I was right about you. You look like a choirboy, but you have a devious mind. Exactly right. Since I’ve been working solo I had three people offer me money. Best way of breaking a case ever invented. The guy’s got money in his hand, you got it on tape, it’s like his dick is hanging out of his pants. Prosecutors love it. After this, we’ll go shopping.”
The building was a ten-story brick near the Metro elevated route, white marble/black glass with a coral stone fountain in the lobby. Michael Zubrom had an office on the eighth floor fronted by a teak door on which raised bronze letters told the passerby that Polygon Brokers, PLC, would be found within. The reception area was small, with a glass gate for the receptionist. Zubrom himself, who came out to greet them, was a short, compact, olive- skinned man of around forty, with a fine head of dark hair, a beaked nose, and a look of knowing more than he ever said. They showed their badges and followed him in.
His office was messy, a place of work rather than a stage for acting successful?framed maps of the world on the wall, with pins in them, bookcases full of technical reports, drooping piles of printouts, and a rack of television monitors, four in all, silently flickering. They sat on dusty chairs, and Mr. Zubrom sat behind his cluttered desk, peering at them from between a computer monitor and a tall stack of oil industry journals.
“So, the police,” he said. “I have to tell you at the start that I really don’t know very much about this Sudanese.” His voice was slightly accented, a familiar one.
“Excuse me, sir,” said Paz in Spanish. “Is it possible that you are Cuban?”
A little smile. “No, I’m Mexican,” he answered in the same language, “actually, Palestinian-Mexican. This is a branch of my family’s Mexico City office.”
Paz switched back to English. “And what was Mr. al-Muwalid’s business with you on the day he died?”
“He sold me some oil.”
“Like a sample?”
“More than that. Do you know what the spot market in petroleum is?”
“Not really,” said Paz.
“Well, it’s simple in concept, complex in practice. Perhaps police work is the same? Let me try to explain the concept at least. Oil is a valuable and fungible commodity. A barrel of sweet light crude, let us say, is the same in a tank in Dubai, on a ship in midocean, in a pipeline in Russia, and the rights to these barrels are traded just like currency. I come from a family that is fluent in Arabic, Spanish, and English, and so we can deal with most of the people in the world who have oil to sell.”
“Why Miami?” asked Morales. “Why not Houston?”
“Good question. For that matter, why not stay in Mexico? The answer is that sometimes it’s better that nobody knows your business. In oil towns everybody is looking to see who is visiting who, who’s in town from Venezuela, the Gulf, Norway, Nigeria. In Miami, this little hole-in-the-wall office, it’s better for privacy, for certain deals that require discretion.” Zubrom’s eyes kept flicking from Morales to his array of screens.
“And al-Muwalid had that kind of deal?” asked Morales.
An elegant shrug. “Mm. You understand that the spot market is abstract. We bid and contract for, you could say, only chips, markers, as in a casino. Promises to deliver at a certain price. But occasionally we have a situation where someone is selling to us a specific lot of actual petroleum, and this was the case with him. He said he had eleven thousand barrels in a tanker at Port Sudan. He had the papers, the clearances from the government there, so I did the deal. Oil is fungible, as I said, it’s all one big pool more or less. Just a moment, please.”
He looked at his screen and tapped his keyboard. “Sorry. There is something in Singapore I have to attend to.”
Paz said, “Mr. Zubrom, what you have to attend to is us, right now. You were probably the last person to talk to the victim before he was murdered. He might have been murdered because of something that happened in this room. Maybe we should go downtown….”
This remark obtained somewhat more of the man’s attention, although they could see he was straining his peripheral vision to keep track of the flickering numbers and the feeds on the Bloomberg and the set tuned to CNN. “No, please. And I really don’t see how that could be. It was a very simple deal from my standpoint. Let me see what I paid….” He punched some keys. “Yes. Twenty-nine-dollars-forty a barrel, base price, less commission, less fees, less insurance and so on, made $303,533.76, which I had transferred to a numbered account at the ARPM bank. In Jersey.”
“Where in Jersey?” asked Morales.
Zubrom gave him a peculiar look. “Not the state. It’s an island in the English Channel with loose banking
