route of entry lungs and skin.”
Paz cursed himself. He was usually careful with reports, and he prided himself on being the more literate member of the team. Florida education had not been up to much when Barlow finished high school, and the man had trouble with reports. On the other hand, Barlow kept a lot close to his vest, so maybe that was an act, too, like the cracker slowness.
“Oh, so he burned some stuff and she breathed it,” snapped Paz. “What does it matter?”
“Him wearing his gas mask while he done it. And it all matters, Jimmy, every little thing.” He got up and walked toward the door. “Let’s see him and ask him how he done it. Go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in. Luke 13:23.”
Julius Youghans lived in a frame house on one of the better streets in Overtown. It had trees, now dripping from the recent rain, and the lawns were cut and watered and the newish large cars parked out in front, Caddys and Chryslers and giant SUVs, indicated that the people in the houses had jobs and could probably have afforded better housing had they not been black and dwelling in one of the most viciously segregated and redlined housing markets in the United States. A lot of the houses had bars on the windows. Mr. Youghans’s did not. When the two cops got out of their car a dog started to bark somewhere in the back and did not cease barking during the time they remained. Cheaper and better than bars, a bad dog.
Push the front doorbell. They heard it ringing in the house. There was a late-model red Dodge Ram pickup in the driveway, rain-speckled and steaming vapors in the returned sunlight. The two cops exchanged a look. Barlow pushed the bell again and Paz went down the driveway around the side of the house. The dog was a pit bull, white with a big black spot over one side of his head. It was leaping up and down like a toy in a nightmare, crashing against the chain-link fence that confined it to the backyard, spraying slaver past its bared fangs. Paz ignored it and stood on tiptoe to look through the window. A kitchen. Crusted dishes in the sink, a single twelve-ounce can of malt liquor on the table still wearing six-pack plastic rings in memory of its vanished brothers. He went back to the front of the house.
“Checked the back door, did you?” asked Barlow.
“No, I’d thought you’d want to do that, Cletis. You’re the one with the special gift for animals.”
” ‘Fraid of a little old dog, huh?”
“Yes, I am. So. Julius must be a heavy sleeper, you think?”
“That, or he could be in some trouble,” said Barlow, withdrawing a set of picks wrapped in soft leather from his breast pocket. “Maybe fell out of bed and bust his hip. I believe it’s our Christian duty to try and help him if we can.”
The door opened on a living room, which was furnished with the sort of heavy furniture, cheaply made but expensive to buy, available in local marts. Youghans had gone for the red velvet and, his lust for velvet unslaked, had sought it as the matrix for the paintings hanging on the walls: African beauties in undress, a Zulu with spear and shield, and Jesus preaching were the themes. Some care and expense had been taken with the decoration, but the room had a neglected air. There were dust bunnies in the corners and cobwebs on the ceiling. A bottle of expensive cognac, empty, stood on a coffee table with a couple of dirty glasses. Picture: a man with some disposable income, proud, but recently distracted. The walls of the hall they entered next were hung with several examples of the same sort of wooden Africana they had found in the dead woman’s apartment, of a somewhat better quality, real ebony rather than stained softwood. Kitchen to the right, two doors to the left: bathroom, a small bedroom clearly used as an office, and at the end of the hall a closed door through which issued interesting sounds: bouncing bedsprings, squeals in a high register and groans in a low one.
In a loud, stagy voice, Barlow said, “They must be having church in there, Jimmy, that sister calling on the Lord like that. What do you think?”
“I would have to disagree with you there,” said Paz in a similar false bellow. “I believe we’re listening to the sounds of fornication.”
The sounds ceased.
“That’s hard to believe,” said Barlow, and, in a good parody of himself as a peckerwood preacher, continued, “What kind of low, no-count, scoundrelly hound would be fornicating when the mother of his child just been murdered and is lying all cut to pieces in the morgue? Why, no self-respecting woman would truck with a man like that. A man like that would have to turn to the skankiest, drugged-outest, most disease-infested, ugliest whore in town, and serve him right. Evil man: Cursed shalt thou be in the city and cursed shalt thou be in the field. Deuteronomy 28:16.”
Within, sounds of argument, heating up. The door swung open and out popped a girl in her midteens, plump, brown, and spitting angry, wrapped in a sheet, and carrying an armful of clothes. She pushed past the two detectives, went into the bathroom, and slammed the door. They stood in the bedroom doorway.
“Who the fuck are you and what the fuck are you doing in my house?” yelled the man on the bed.
Youghans was a solidly built redbone man in his early forties with a wide brush mustache and thinning hair, thick gold chains at neck and wrist, and a face full of dull sensuality, upon which now bloomed a scowl of frustrated rage. He sat up on the edge of his bed, his loins covered by a scant drape of blue chenille.
After showing their badges and telling him to get dressed, they left the room, and while they waited, they looked around, so that anything in plain sight that might suggest a violation of the law might fall under their eye. They even nudged a few objects into plain sight for that purpose.
“Take a look at this, Cletis.” It had been in plain sight, leaning against a pile of magazines devoted to either sex or autos that sat on one of the side tables in the living room. Barlow pursed his lips, but said nothing. Paz stripped an evidence bag from a roll in his jacket pocket and put the thing in it. He was smiling.
They got the girl’s name before she slammed out. Youghans shuffled into the kitchen some minutes later, dressed in greasy Bermudas and a red tank top. He grabbed and popped the tallboy can of malt liquor, drank half of it, belched, and said, “You boys picked a hell of a time to crash in here. Little bitch was polishing my pole, man, tight as a three-dollar shoe, mmm-mm! Shit, I was two minutes from getting my nut …” He rubbed his crotch mournfully. “This is about Deandra, right? Yeah, I heard she got killed. Fucking building she was in, I told her to move out of there, but she was the stubbornist bitch alive, ‘bout that and every other goddamn thing else.”
“When was the last time you saw her, sir?” asked Barlow.
Youghans scratched his head. “What is this, Monday? Must’ve been Saturday night.”
“She was okay when you left her, was she?”
“Sure, running her mouth like always. I’ll tell you, because you’re probably gonna hear it in the ‘hood, we did have us some words, shouting and all.”
“What did you fight about?” Paz asked.
“Oh, this hoodoo shit she was into. Hey, I got no problem with mother Africa dah-dah-de-dah, I got my kente cloth and all that, stuff on the walls, okay, but she had this mojo man coming round …” He finished his can in three great swallows. “Okay, first thing, right away, I don’t appreciate that, I mean him coming round. I mean, am I the man or ain’t I? Two, that nigger messing with her head, you know what I mean? Can’t eat this, can’t drink that, quit smoking, take this herb, that herb. Even told her when she could fuck. Shit! So I told her, you know, girl, get real! I told her I didn’t want her to see him no more and she threw a shit fit. She said he was this great man, dah-de- dah-dah. Because he give her a number that hit and she bought the fuckin’ store out. Like I didn’t never give her nothing. She said he was going to make her baby this big deal, used a lot of bullshit African words … I lost it, you know? Dumb-ass bitch!”
“You smack her around any?” Paz asked.
“Yeah, I popped her a couple, just before I bugged out of there. Nothing heavy, and I tossed some of her hoodoo crap out the goddamn window.”
A look between the two cops. Paz said, “Oh, yeah? Like what?”
“Some fucking statue, a little basket full of weeds and shit. Some kind of chain, with, like, big nuts strung along it. Tell the truth I was drunk. I wanted a little piece of ass and no horseshit about the great Wandingo …”
“That his name, this guy?” asked Barlow.
“Nah, it’s something else, em, something. Mepetene, something like that. Tell you the truth I didn’t pay none of that no attention.”
“You ever see him?”
“I had he would’ve needed a new face. But, no. And I tried, man. She told me he was gonna come one night,
