A long pause here. Lorna thought that Paz was ignoring the question and she felt a small pang of regret for having asked it. They drove out of the sugar regions and into a pleasanter country, green pastures occupied by humped white cattle staring stupidly from behind wire fencing.
“The short version,” said Paz, after clearing his throat, “is he’s a rich white Cuban. He loaned my mom the money to get her started in catering, and used her ass as collateral. I was the product. He does not have paternal feelings. When I got a little famous around that case and was on local TV a lot, he took his family on a world tour, lest anyone make the connection.”
“That’s really sad. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. But,amor fati.”
“Pardon…?”
“Amor fati. Love your fate. A friend of mine used to say that. The secret of happiness.”
Lorna did not respond to this, as she did not wish to explore the source of the Latin tag, whom she suspected was on the staff of the University of Girl. She looked out the window. Soon they turned off the blacktop onto a gravel road and off that onto a narrow dirt track between rows of dusty pines, past a sign readingBARLOW Registered Charolais, and into a yard containing a red-painted, tin-roofed farmhouse with a wide screen porch, a barn, some outbuildings, and a tall, rangy woman in her early sixties, wearing a tattered straw hat and an apron.
Paz got out of the car and into this woman’s warm embrace.
Introductions then: Dr. Wise, Edna Barlow, Paz slipping the doctor in there, Lorna wondering why. She shook the woman’s hand, which was hard and strong, and looked into her face, which was plain, strong, seamed, tanned, a stranger to the spa, obviously, and equipped with sharp blue eyes. Lorna wore her formal face, as she did with people who might be offended by advanced ideas. She felt like she had walked into a 1930s movie.
They sat on the porch, which Mrs. Barlow called a veranda, and drank sweet iced tea from clunky glasses. Paz and Mrs. Barlow chatted about what he’d been doing and what they’d been doing, and the doings of the three junior Barlows (college, the marines, high school basketball), and although Mrs. B. attempted to bring her into the conversation, it was awkward, leaving Lorna wondering what she was doing here. She caught Edna looking searchingly at her several times and wondered what that was about.
A white Dodge pickup came dusting into the yard, and proved to hold Cletis Barlow and his sixteen-year-old son, James. More greetings, but apparently men didn’t hug chez Barlow. Lorna thought Cletis Barlow had the meanest face she ever saw on a man, the face of the leader of a lynch mob from central casting, except there was a nice person living inside it by mistake. It was all scars, lumps, bad teeth, and wrong angles, and the eyes were the color of a washboard.
They got a tour of the rancho then, the two guests in borrowed rubber boots moving gingerly among the big cattle in the barn, swatting, but not too obviously, at the many flies. Paz was trying to sense the mental status of his former partner; Lorna felt like she was on a school trip, a feeling enhanced by James, who seemed fascinated by her, although he called her ma’am and told her more about Charolais cattle than she wanted to know.
An early supper is the custom here. Through a manipulation that is proof against all of Lorna’s psych skills and feminist principles, she finds herself in the kitchen with Edna, preparing snap beans and tomatoes from their garden and peeling potatoes. Lorna realizes that she has never actually peeled a potato. At home she was an honorary boy, the children were called in to a laden board, the mother never requesting her daughter’s help. Message: This girl is for higher things, Dad things, feminism clearly not applying to Mom, although Dad talks a good game, and just as clearly she has fallen into a time warp here in south-central Fla. Who peels potatoes? Lorna’s entertainments are infrequent, and at those few that involve spuds, she bakes them, and while they bake she dispenses wit in the living room.
Edna is watching, incredulous. Finally, she speaks. “Honey, I believe you haven’t peeled many potatoes.”
“Not even one,” admits Lorna, and now she can put down the peeler and apply paper toweling to her wounds.
“Well, sit yourself down then. I only asked you to be sociable,” says Edna, who now stands by the sink and with rapid flicks of the instrument causes the skins to practically leap off the pesky tubers.
Lorna feels obliged to compliment the woman on this skill, which she does and then feels unutterably patronizing, so adds a personal slamette. “I’m not very domestic, I guess.”
“Well, you being a doctor and all, I figured you had enough to be doing. I just drug you in here so the boys could talk by themselves.”
“Are they telling secrets?”
“I don’t know, but they do like to get off alone. The two of them’re real close, and Cletis has missed it something awful, although he’d never say a word. Anyway, I can’t abide a man in the kitchen. It gets me all nervous.”
“But if you feel that way, you get stuck with all the cooking and serving. And the cleaning up.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘stuck,’ exactly,” says Edna. “There’s enough work to do in the world and I don’t see why it can’t be divided up so’s we all know what we’re supposed to do and get good at it. I believe the Lord intended it that way. I’ve changed truck oil, and greased bearings, and run farm machinery, and hauled feed. Who d’you think ran this place while Cletis was off being a policeman down south?” She holds up the peeler. “Honey, if you think this is hard, you try castrating a bull calf. No, thank you! Which is why I thank the good Lord for men. Although they can be a trial. How long have you known our Jimmy?”
The unexpected out-of-context question of the skilled interrogator. Lorna feels suddenly off balance. “Not long at all. We’re working on a case together.”
Edna seems a little disappointed in this answer, so Lorna adds, “He seems very good at what he does.”
Here Edna turns on her an unexpectedly radiant smile. “Oh, my, yes, he is. Oh, but we think the world of Jimmy Paz. He’s just the sweetest thing!”
The sweetest thing was at that moment in a sagging wicker chair on the porch vaguely wishing that Cletis had not added total abstinence to his skein of virtues. Paz wanted a drink and a cigar. He had told Cletis what Lorna had told him about the events in the locked ward, and was now relating what he knew about the Muwalid murder; it was tough going, Paz fearing that any moment Cletis would interrupt with a question about whether Paz had performed some action that might have broken open the case, which Paz had forgotten to do, and now it was too late. But when Cletis did stop him, it was about a detail from the first interrogation of Emmylou Dideroff.
“She saidwhat?”
“She said it would be an honor to be executed unjustly, like Jesus.”
“Well, well. If that don’t beat all! I’d sure like to meet this woman.”
“Yeah, the two of you’d get along real well, putting the pope to one side for a while.”
“You think she was serious?”
“I guess. That was the saint part talking, though. There’s another part in there that’s not so nice.”
“That don’t signify,” said Barlow dismissively. “There’s demons in us all. Go ahead, what happened then?”
Paz finished his tale, adding the business about Wilson and Packer and Cortez and the material from the first volume of the diaries. After that, Barlow thought for a while, leaning his ladderback chair up against the side of his house and chewing on a toothpick, staring into space. Paz knew better than to interrupt him at this juncture.
They were called to supper.
Barlow let his chair go forward with a thump. “It don’t work, Jimmy,” he said. “I can’t say for sure without seeing this girl, but she didn’t do it. The frame’s too obvious and sloppy. I think she was telling the plain truth. She was set up and she just walked into that room like she said. They knew you’d be up, and they knew you’d find her, and the murder weapon, and they knew you’d believe she was crazy. Uh-huh, I see you’re confused. That’s cause we always look at the victim, why was he killed, who were his enemies, what was he doing in the twenty-four hours before he died and so forth.”
“Boys!” from the house. Barlow opened the screen door.
Paz followed him in. “And…?”
“It ain’t him, it’s her. She was why he was killed. He was just a convenience. They wanted her, not him. Well
