which made it hard to observe their informant’s face.
“It’s like a kick in the gut, this is,” Wilson said. “I still can’t believe it. It’s just so not Jack.”
“What isn’t, sir?” asked Paz.
“Oh, drinking, driving…” The voice trailed off.
Morales asked, “He drink much vodka, Mr. Wilson?”
“Couldn’t stand the stuff,” said the brother. “He thought it tasted and smelled like rubbing alcohol.”
The two detectives considered this for a moment and then Paz asked, “How would you describe your brother, Mr. Wilson? What kind of man was he?”
Wilson sat up a little and stared at Paz. “What kind of…I don’t understand. This is a traffic death in Broward. I mean why does a Miami cop want to know that?”
“Well, sir, as I guess you know, Jack was peripherally involved in another case and we’re just trying to tie up the pieces on that. Also…we think your brother’s death might stand further investigation. You say your brother had no head for liquor and hated vodka, so, ah, you could ask what he was doing with a point three six blood alcohol and an empty vodka bottle in the car.”
Wilson goggled at him. “What…you think someone killed him? They forced him to drink all that vodka?”
“That or they knocked him out with Nembutal and ran a naso-gastric tube into him.”
Wilson gaped and stammered, “But that’s crazy! Who would do something like that?”
This was of course the very question that now engaged Paz and Morales. They were driving to Jack Wilson’s domicile, having obtained the keys from the brother, along with a description of the late Jack’s character. A little wild, bored with the business, a ladies’ man, a good conscientious mechanic, if a little too ready to party after hours. On the assumption that Jack Wilson had been murdered and that no one was going to let them near the case, not the tribe, and not the FBI, then the whole thing had come to more or less a dead end. Wilson had been the last thread that led from al-Muwalid’s murder. Whoever had arranged that killing knew how to cover their tracks. Paz shared with his partner the observation that Cletis Barlow had made, that the point of all this was not the Sudanese but Emmylou Dideroff, and that all this bloodshed was designed to draw from her something that she knew.
Morales said that it sounded far-fetched, but what didhe know, Cletis Barlow was the great detective. Paz detected a little envy here but let it go. He might have agreed with Morales about far-fetched, had he himself not traveled personally over even farther fetches, but he declined to mention this now. They arrived at the Wilson house, a small, tile-roofed Spanish colonial over Coral Way not far from the Palmetto Expressway. Jack Wilson had fancied a nautical theme: signal flag upholstery, marine landscapes on the walls, captain’s chairs around a hatch- cover table in the dining room, ship models in a glass display case. “Everything looks shipshape,” said Paz. They laughed, but everything actually did. Wilson was something of a neat freak, in his home if not his personal appearance. He liked Peg-Board, and where the pots and kitchen implements hung on one of these, he had painted a silhouette of each implement under its hook, lest one be hung out of place.
They tossed the place rapidly, Paz with the skill of long practice, Morales learning as he went. Paz took the master bedroom and got a little shock off what he found there; Morales searched another bedroom fitted out as a den or home office and was intrigued by what he didn’t find. His partner called out to him, and he walked into the master bedroom, where he found Paz staring at a brightly painted statue. It was nearly two feet high and depicted a haloed woman in a gold dress and a red cloak holding a sword and a chalice, which rested upon a vertical cannon.
“Somebody’s been through the place,” said Morales.
“Yeah, they have,” Paz agreed. “They were real neat about it, though. How could you tell?”
“There’re no personal papers in that office aside from a folder full of paid bills. No address book, no files, no Rolodex, no personal mail. No diaries with an entry that says ‘I’m scared shitless thatX is gonna get me.’ He’s got a big wooden desk with two file drawers, both practically empty, but you can see from the dust marks that they were full of file folders at one time. There’s a fancy digital phone that can store twenty numbers, but they’ve all been cleared, and you can see where he had a little list, maybe about which buttons called which people, taped to the desktop, the wood is unfaded and there are tape marks. Someone took the trouble to rip it off.”
“Very good, very interesting,” said Paz. “It goes with the rest of the picture. Someone is clipping connections, the connections that lead up from Jack Wilson to whoever was running him. There’s something strange here too. First of all, the clothes in the drawers were all jumbled around. Someone had been through them because the rest of the house suggests neat, and they weren’t neat. So that confirms that they were searching for some physical object or objects. What is the most interesting absent physical object in this case?”
“Muwalid’s cell phone.”
“Right. I’d bet that’s what they were looking for. The other thing is that.” He pointed to the statue. “You know what that is?”
“A religious statue?”
“It’s a Santeria cult figure, Santa Barbara, aka Shango, theorisha of thunder and violence. That’s not supposed to be in a regular straight-up white guy’s house.”
“I don’t know, people collect all kinds of weird shit.”
“True. But he’s also got this.” Here Paz held up a double-bladed axe made of wood, painted red and yellow, from which depended a string of red and white beads. “This little axe is anoshe, the symbol of Shango, and the bracelet is aneleke. You only get aneleke at an initiation, when you’re made to anorisha. Also, you notice that sweet smell? That’somiero. They smear it on objects and people during ceremonies. No, this isn’t a tourist item. It’s a working shrine. Wilson, or someone he knew real well, was involved in Santeria.”
“You know about this stuff?”
“More than I would like,” said Paz, putting down the axe. Suddenly there was too much spit in his mouth. He said, “Are you hungry, by the way? I only had some cookies for breakfast.”
A little startled by this change of subject, Morales replied, “I could eat, yeah.”
“We’ll swing by the restaurant,” said Paz. “My mom’ll make us something.”
Lorna drives to the hospital and wonders yet again if she is in love. No, that’s crazy, the man is delightful, sure, but also a completely unreliable womanizer, he has the whole act down, the charm, the showing off the new sweetie and so forth, the mom even, but even as she thinks this she knows she is making it up and feels hollow and helpless, as if caught up in a current. Circling the drain, she thinks cynically and laughs.
Speaking of circling the drain: the first person she meets when she passes through the locked ward is her old boyfriend Howie Kasdan, M.D. As always when he leaves his office and ventures into the clinical world, Dr. Kasdan is wearing a long white coat, from the pocket of which peeks a stethoscope, although to Lorna’s knowledge Dr. Howie has not checked for heart sounds in a long while. He has his foot propped up on a chair and is writing on a clipboard braced against his knee, but he notices Lorna despite her usual camo costuming and flashes his caps at her.
“Lorna! Hey, you look great. You look like you dropped some weight.”
“Thank you, Howie,” says Lorna coolly. “What brings you into actual patient contact?”
“Oh, one of my drug test subjects, paranoid schiz, just went into a complete remission. It could be a real breakthrough. I mean this guy is likenormal? He wants to know what he’s doing in a loony bin. I mean he only chopped two of his spouses into wife stroganoff?”
“Wait a minute, this isn’t Horace Masefield?”
“That’s the guy. A friend of yours?” More caps.
“I was there when he went ballistic. I actually saw him remiss. What kind of drug is this?”
“It’s called traxomonide. It’s a completely new approach to brain chemistry, operates directly on the SEF2-1 mutation, which shows increased allele frequency in schizos. It codes for a helix-loop-helix protein that we think may have a significant role in?”
“How big is your N, Howie?” Lorna asks.
Kasdan frowns; he is not often interrupted in his expositions. “A hundred ten. They’re here, and in Chatahootchee, and in a couple of other sites.”
“Have there been any other remissions like this?”
“Not that I know of, but we just started the study, the drug’s barely reached therapeutic levels. I wanted to get Masefield scanned as soon as possible, and I know we’re going to see changes. I’m totally pumped about
