conversation. Margarita Paz had heavy eyes; sometimes Jimmy felt them upon him when he was many miles away, often when he was doing one of the very many things of which she would not approve.
“Who were you talking to, tying up my phone like that?”
“Nobody, Mami, just some business.”
“That phone’s for my business, not your business. You going to work in those fancy clothes?” She looked him up and down. Cesar the prep cook had retreated to the reefer on Mrs. Paz’s entry.
Paz and his mother locked eyes. Hers were on a level with his own because she was wearing four-inch cork platforms on her feet. And a yellow dress, and a yellow diamond on her finger, and a comb in her black hair, elaborately done up. Real lace around the collar of the dress and a plain gold cross against the dark throat. Her uniform of every evening.
Paz had been working in the restaurant in various capacities since the age of seven, and his mother made no distinction between working a meal after school and working a meal after an eight-hour shift with the cops, except that after a shift he was even more available, since there was no homework. Paz had tried to explain the difference between after-school work and after-work work many times, but Mrs. Paz was skilled at the art of not listening.
He smiled to break the stare and said, “Okay, Mami,” which was the right answer, because she gave a la- reine-le-veult nod and turned away. Paz loved his mother and because of this he allowed her to believe that she was still in control of his life, Cuban fashion. But in his mother’s mind, Jimmy Paz was not at all a satisfactorily controlled son. He had, for example, not finished college and gone on to a medical or law degree. He was not even a dentist! Mrs. Paz did not consider law enforcement an acceptable profession for her son. Nor had he married a girl of suitable family and skin tone (pale), thus supplying her with a daughter-in-law to dominate and grandchildren to spoil. Instead, he ran around with a succession of American women, all of whom, despite their fancy educations, were little better than whores.
Paz understood that until he had an acceptable profession and a wife, his mother would continue to treat him like a schoolboy. This did not bother him much, as he had no compunction about cutting out of the restaurant when cop work called, and the restaurant work paid for, in his mind, if not in hers, a rather nice apartment.
He left the kitchen and went into the dining room. As always, this brought him a moment of delight, this contrast between the organized chaos of the kitchen and the calm of the dining room. It was high-ceilinged, decorated in shiny white, yellow, pink, and cream; the tiles underfoot were coffee-colored; the chairs and tables were of heavy rattan, painted white. The rear wall was decorated with gilt mirrors, and the two side walls bore a series of Roman arches in white plaster, through which one looked out at brightly painted representations of Guantanamo Bay. Rattan and brass fans rotated slowly and exiguously overhead, stirring the chilled, conditioned air. The room was as close as the memory and resources of Margarita Paz could come to reproducing the dining room at Tanaimo, the great tobacco finca where her mother had served as a cook.
Paz reflexively checked the house. Every table was occupied, most of them by pale Americanos, but there were several tables of Germans and two of Japanese. A group of crisply dressed foreign tourists waited with their tour guide on the other side of a huge saltwater fish tank. Margarita Paz was a spectacularly good cook, and her place was listed in any number of restaurant guides as worth a special trip. She trained her waiters well, they all spoke English, and Jimmy had written for the menu concise explanations of the contents and preparation of the various dishes. A tourist-friendly place, by design. Later, when the Cubans showed up, there would be larger crowds waiting for a table. In Cuban Miami they said you went to the Versailles to be seen, but to eat you went down the street. The street was Eighth Street, aka the Tamiami Trail, called Calle Ocho by nearly everyone now. (Barlow still called it the Trail.) Down the street meant this place. Every Cuban man is obliged to defend his mother’s cooking as the best in the world, but in Paz’s case it might have been true.
Then he went home, which was around the corner and four houses down from Calle Ocho, in a yellow stucco two-unit owned by Mrs. Paz. Jimmy Paz had the top unit, and the bottom was rented out. His mother lived next door. It was more space than a single man needed, two large bedrooms, a kitchen, one and a half baths, and a living room facing the street. Paz believed that his mother let him have it so that there would be no excuse for him not putting in the hours in the kitchen and because it allowed her to keep an eye on his doings. The Cruzes, the elderly couple who inhabited the lower floor, were efficient spies, who kept Mrs. Paz well informed. Paz thought it not a bad deal, having had a whole lifetime to get used to his mother’s disapproval. He also was an expert nonlistener.
Paz went to his refrigerator and selected a Corona beer. There was little else in his refrigerator?a couple of bottles of Piper champagne, some limes, some mixed nuts. The freezer was loaded with cylindrical pints of fruit sherbet supporting a bottle of Finlandia vodka. Paz did not dine at home.
Beer in hand, he switched on the television and watched the local news. There had been a shoot-out and car chase down Collins Avenue on Miami Beach that afternoon, with plenty of good aerial footage. The murder of Deandra Wallace, which might otherwise have led, came a poor third (after the usual corrupt-official story) and got extra juice because of the bizarre nature of the crime and the thrill value of a possible cult killing. No interviews, just a mannequin reporter in front of Ms. Wallace’s dreary building, who said “bizarrely mutilated” but did not supply the details, nor did she specify the cult involved. Paz would have liked to know that himself.
He put on a white tunic and check trousers, laced on greasy Doc Marten boots, and went back to the restaurant. There he brought a box of snapper on ice out of the reefer and began to make snapper hash, one of the place’s specialties. Being the boss’s son, he was not subject to the outrageous abuse that is the common lot of sous-chefs the world over, for the chef stayed out of Paz’s way and Paz stayed out of his, and all involved?waiters and kitchen staff?got along unusually well, for Margarita Paz believed that you could taste bad feelings in the food and would not tolerate any prima donnas other than herself. Among restaurant kitchens, this one was unusual in having no actual crazy people in it. The scullion was not even an alcoholic.
Around nine-thirty Paz took his first break. He went out into the alley, sat on an upturned shortening barrel, drank an iced coffee black as tar, and smoked a chico. He felt calm and at peace, with an interesting case just starting up, and the various tensions of the day worked off by the meditation of simple cooking. He finished his cigar and coffee, and thought that a woman would be nice after work, so he went back through the kitchen and used the pay phone outside the rest rooms to call Beth Morgensen and ask if he could come over late. As a readiness to entertain gentlemen arriving at midnight was a universal quality among the girlfriends of Paz, she said he could.
After work, he drove his battered orange Z Datsun to her apartment on Ponce de Leon hard by the university, still dressed in his cook’s outfit and carrying a cold bottle of Korbel and a bouquet assembled from the floral displays at the restaurant. Generous, but not wildly so, was Paz, and the women he chose understood this and found it endearing.
Beth Morgensen opened the door and looked at Paz distractedly over wire-rimmed spectacles. She was a hefty one, as tall as Paz, with a braid of cornsilk hair thick as a python running down her back to her waist, and the broad shoulders and narrow hips of a competitive swimmer. Now she was a graduate student in sociology, all-but- dissertation, which study was on homeless people in Dade County.
“Oh, my!” she said. “The old flowers-and-champagne routine. Paz, you’re a living fossil.” She stuck out her face and he planted a nice kiss on her pale lips. Paz liked the way she moved, loose-jointed, swaying the big body as to some inner tune. He watched her roll away into her tiny kitchen. She was wearing frayed jean cutoffs and a black T-shirt that said punish me across the front. He followed her through a living room/studio that was stacked with books and folders and so littered with sheaves of papers that the floor was scarcely visible. A desk sat in the middle of the room, similarly littered, upon which a computer glowed. In the kitchen, he watched her pop the champagne and pour out into two not-squeaky-clean juice glasses. She read the distaste on his face. “Yeah, I know, it’s a pigsty, and you’re such a neat freak, and I beg your pardon, because I’m crashing on this fucking diss, and I swore before Jesus and all the saints that I would finish chapter five tonight.”
“Why did you let me come over, then?”
“Oh, well, a girl needs a little break.” She grinned, stretching the long mouth over her front teeth, the lips like pale rubber bands. They sat in two straight chairs and drank companionably.
“Want to go and hit some clubs?” he asked.
“Oh, no, not that much of a break. I thought we could finish this nice wine and have a delicious little fuck and then I’ll kick your sweet ass out the door. How does that sound?”
“It sounds like you’re only interested in me for my body,” putting an artificial sob into his voice.
