“What about the giant confession she’s supposed to be writing?”
“Apparently still scrawling away. I’m dying to curl up and read it.”
“I bet. Look, I’m going to talk to Posada, get you both on this thing full-time. You need to find out more about this victim and our suspect, where they intersected, and we’re no longer just interested in strengthening the case against Dideroff. I want to know the whole story if possible. Use what she writes, but don’t stop there. I want her life story checked and cross-checked. Find out who our Arab was and what he was doing in Miami besides selling a shipload of oil. It can’t just be that. He could have done that from anywhere. He was in Miami for a reason. He was after something and someone was after him, and he knew it, or he wouldn’t have told your oil guy about getting some backup. Maybe he did get some backup?if so, find out what or who it was.”
“Okay, sir, but would you like to tell me why we’re putting a full-court press on something that looks a lot like a grounder.”
Oliphant made an impatient gesture. “Oh, hell, you know damn well it’s not a grounder anymore. You ever have a rat die in a wall? It doesn’t matter how much deodorizer you spray, there’s still that stink that sticks in the back of your throat. This thing has a stink like that. People are fucking with us, major players are playing us, and I’m goddamned if I’m going to be played. We need to go into the walls and find the rat.”
Paz took a breath and asked, “Sir, this wouldn’t have anything to do with why you left the Bureau?”
Oliphant stared at him so long that Paz was forced to drop his eyes. “That’s really none of your business. But if anything from my FBI experience ever becomes relevant to this case, I’ll bring it to your attention. Are we done?”
Paz stood. “Yes, sir.”
Oliphant was still staring at him. “You getting enough sleep, Jimmy?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t look like it. You got red rims on your eyes and you yawned three times in the last half hour. Maybe you need to lay off some of that Cuban coffee.”
“Yes, sir,” said Paz, “maybe I do.” He was in the hallway before he realized that Oliphant had steered the conversation away from revealing why the name David Packer had caused the security gates to slam down at the State Department.
Ten
Lorna wise lies in bed and considers her symptoms. It is Saturday, so she can lie in bed doing this for longer than she usually does. A scratchiness in the back of the throat. A twitching in her calf muscle. A sort of deadened area just above her left elbow. She blinks one eye, then the other. Perhaps a slight blurring of vision in the left, or maybe that’s a bit of sleepy dust. Although, it’s worrisome that it’s the left one. The left calf muscle too, bad, speaks to central nervous system malfunction: an ischemia, a smallish brain tumor, the subtle onset of MS. As she lies, she palps her breasts, although she knows she should be upright, and although she will do it again when she showers. Probing for the tumor she knows is lurking, surely her fingers, so competent after all these years, can catch the nodule at the earliest possible stage and she can have the surgeon pluck it out. Although she knows that’s not true, although she is by now a fairly decent amateur oncologist, although she knows there are cancers so treacherous that by the time they show a palpable tumor they have spread througout the body. Not the kind her mother had, however, her mother was carrying a tumor the size of a tangerine around before she went to the doctor. Why, Mom, why didn’t you go to the doctor? Because I thought it was nothing. Because I hate doctors.
Lorna drops her breasts and sits up on the edge of the bed, experiencing a wave of dizziness and perhaps a slight nausea, the infallible sign of a brain wracked with metastases or else mere sickness and disgust at herself. Unlike Mom, Lorna happens to love doctors, occasionally in a sexual way, as with Rat Howie, and for this reason has decided that her personal physician should always be a woman, and so it is. She suppresses an urge to call Dr. Greenspan. But she saw her only thirty-four days ago and does not wish to acquire a rep as a crock. For some reason, she thinks as she starts her Saturday routine, the first minutes of the day are always the worst, the times when she feels most fragile and afraid.
She breakfasts on grapefruit and health pills and coffee on the little patio in the back, surrounded by flowers and twittering birds. She receives both theMiami Herald and theNew York Times every morning and reads both all the way through, except for the sports sections. TheHerald is an excellent paper, but she does not feel civilized without theTimes; theTimes and theNew Yorker, banners her dad flew, declaring that although he now lived in the New Jersey burbs, he had not surrendered to barbarism. And she likes the crossword puzzle, which she now does in twenty minutes, not as good as her dad but not disgraceful either.
After that, she sits in a sling chair, sipping the cooling coffee and recounting all the various tasks she has put off until the weekend and now must do or feel like a slacker. The phone rings, and she reaches for the cordless she has brought out with her and it is Sheryl Waits. Who asks if she is ready. Ready for what? It now turns out that Lorna’s mind has erased the appointment she made with her friend to go shopping for a dress to wear to Sheryl’s party, an actual party dress, which I don’t believe you own one of, sugar, because you are not entering my domicile looking like bark. Uh-uh!
That evening Lorna shows up at Sheryl’s party more than fashionably late in a scarlet spaghetti strap dress with a Saran Wrap cling and a built-in bra that offers her breasts up like twin servings of flan. The place is jumping, cars lining both sides of the street, people standing on the sidewalk and on the front lawn, holding drinks, lights strung among the branches of the pines and around the trunks of the palms on the property, light pouring from every window of the good-size split-level house, and thumping music.
She finds Sheryl in the kitchen taking a tray of fried chicken wings out of the oven. Sheryl screams how good she looks and requires everyone in range of her voice to see how good. Lorna says, “I hate you. This is the least fabric I’ve worn on my body outside a pool since I was four.”
“You’re such a fool, child! You look fantastic. Don’t she look fantastic, Elvita?”
Elvita agrees she looks fantastic. Lorna mugs for them, a pulp temptress. Hilarity.
In general, Lorna is bored by parties, by the way people act when they are drinking, nor does she like dancing with or being pawed by strangers. At loud parties, she usually finds a quiet corner, sits down with a glass of white wine, and observes the various species at their social rituals, an ornithologist in a rain forest. But because it is Sheryl’s party she feels obliged to be social. She circulates, sipping a wine and soda. Most of the people here are connected to the police, somewhat over half of them black, the rest a mix of Anglos and Cubans. As she expected, the men are standing about in clumps, clutching drinks in big plastic cups and talking sports or shop. The women are in clumps too, talking shop, shopping, vacations, clothes, kids, of which there are large numbers running underfoot and shouting in the yard. Some people are dancing under colored lights on the patio, to the Weather Girls, “It’s Raining Men.”
A man comes up to her, introduces himself as Rod, identifies himself as a friend of Leon’s. He is muscular, hairy, a cop, has only small talk to offer; he stares at her tray of breasts. Another man, taller, Ben, with the kind of big Adam’s apple she rather dislikes comes and joins them. He also stares at her breasts. She feels like she should be on a rotating platform, like a new model at an auto show. And another, Martin, younger and better looking, and what does he stare at? Not her flawless skin. They are all Miami PD and they engage in a joking rivalry, saying amusing bad things about one another to her, all of them eyeing her body. She can almost hear the saliva gurgle, the blood surging through their genitalia. This is it, then, sexual triumph: she finds she can’t take it seriously, it’s like thinking that a construction worker’s whistle signals the start of a meaningful relationship. Yet she feels obliged to play, to bat back the slightly salacious repartee, tosimper, for God’s sake! And to sweat. A good thing about this outfit is that it doesn’t come close to her armpits. A drink in a large plastic cup is placed in her hand and she drinks: sweet and very cold. Leon must be making his famous frozen daiquiris.
Somewhat of a blur after this. She dances with several men, feels several sets of genitals against her unprotected belly, several sets of hands on her ass. The dancing is to funk and disco, music she does not care much for. Then, suddenly, the music changes, a Latin beat, but unlike any Latin music she has heard before. It is layered, multivoiced, with rhythms that are incredibly complex yet still engaging of the groin area. Now she is dancing with a man who is leading her in steps she doesn’t know but seems to be able to do fairly well, or perhaps that is a result
