“Yes, uh-huh, and …?” She sat on his lap and undid a few of the frogs on the front of his chef’s tunic. “Mm, what is this taste on your neck? It’s terrific.”
“Deep fat, mostly, plus grilled snapper, salsa, garlic, mango, dark rum, some secret stuff.”
He let her take off the rest of his chef’s clothes, including the boots, while he drank champagne. She licked him thoroughly, the entire front of his body, like a child getting all the frosting out of the bowl, and then stripped herself and straddled him, and they had a short, sharp fuck to, as she said, take the edge off. Just after this she picked up the champagne and shook the bottle with her thumb over the opening and let it shoot out, icy, over their joined groins. He chased her into her bedroom, where he gave her a good one on top of piles of books and folders, until she howled like a wolf.
She grunted and withdrew from under her buttocks a thick tome. “Oh-ho,” she laughed, ” Nonparametric Statistics for the Social Sciences, no wonder.” She lowered her voice an octave. “Good study, Morgensen, but your statistics are fucked. Oh, Christ, Jimmy, I don’t want you to go, but you have to.”
“That’s okay, I got two more girls to see tonight.”
She rapped him on the head with the book. “Monster! There’s a full professor who’s been trying to get into my pants for months, and he wanted to come over tonight and I blew him off because I thought you might call.”
“A full professor. I’m honored. Are you going to fuck him to get ahead in your chosen profession?”
“I might. Everyone else seems to be doing it. But I’m glad it was you.” She kissed his neck.
“Serendipity that I called, huh?” he said.
“No, serendipity is when you’re looking for something and you find something else that’s even better. Penicillin. Columbus too, I guess. What you mean is synchronicity, which is when two independent variables happen at the same time, in a pseudo-meaningful way. Serendipity is scientific, synchronicity isn’t.”
“Why not?”
She tossed the stat book onto his belly and slipped out of bed. “Read the book.”
“Why should I when I have you? Where are you going?”
“The shower, where you can join me, if you promise not to get me started again.”
Under the lukewarm stream, he soaped her long back, while she held her braid away from the water. He said, “So tell me, why isn’t synchronicity scientific?”
“By definition. And, Jimmy, I want you to know that you are the first and only man I have ever discussed epistemology with under the shower.”
“I appreciate that,” he said. “I know that was hard to admit.”
“It was. In any case, science looks for causality. Event B only occurs after Event A, or is associated with it more than chance alone would allow. Lightning always precedes thunder, and so we assume that lightning causes thunder, and we look for a physical connection between the two events, and in that case, we find it, and science marches on. Synchronicity … thank you, I’ll clean that myself, if you don’t mind … synchronicity proposes a linkage between two events that is meaningful without being causal or related in a reproducible or deterministic way. For instance, I have this terrible plumbing problem and I meet a guy in a bar and we fall in love and it turns out he’s a plumber. Or me wanting to get together with you and you happen to call me from among all your hundreds of women. Pretty, but scientifically meaningless. The Jungians make a big deal of it, which is another reason for not taking it seriously.”
“It’s like luck.”
“In a way. But it’s supposed to be meaningful on the psychic level, too. The cosmos or the collective unconscious is trying to reach us. Horseshit, in other words.”She looked down at him and let out a yelp. “Yikes, get that thing away from me,” she cried, and hung her washcloth on it, then turned the cold tap all the way on.
Later, driving home, Paz experienced the usual letdown, and the fetid backwash of self-contempt. He could sense that his relationship with Morgensen was approaching its conclusion. When they started talking about other, more eligible, men and the passion level went up a notch or two, as was here the case, the final kiss-off loomed not far distant. So Morgensen would get her full professor, or similar, and Paz get another bright, white lady to replace Morgensen, and so on and so on, until he was a fat sixty-year-old cop, turtle-faced with corruption and booze, paying chippies to suck him off in crime-lighted parking lots. Paz had heard about love, and believed it to be real, as he had heard about Mongolia and believed that place to be real as well. Yet while he thus believed, Paz thought that a voyage to the latter was as likely as one to the former: not very, given his record. If milk is free, why buy a cow? Paz had said this to himself and others, even to women. He said it now, waiting for a light, puffing his cigar.
Something was wrong, something was intensely disturbing, but he could not nail it down; it was like forgetting a phone number or leaving tickets home, an absence, felt but not comprehended. He ought to feel good, he told himself: an interesting and exciting day’s work, a terrific piece of ass, what more could a man desire? Now came a new thought, Mr. Youghans and the dead woman, and the girl he was screwing, and Barlow’s contempt for the man. Which Paz shared. He wasn’t like Youghans. He didn’t seduce high-school girls. Only college graduates. That was a significant difference. Or was it? No, it was. A good deal, for both parties, a square deal. Like he had with his mother.
Driving, the windows open to the thick, slowly cooling air of Miami nights, Paz rolled a different sort of life around in his mind, the words settle down scuttling across the surface of his brain. Pick one of them and settle down. Or some other, to come. Fall in love. Move out of the free apartment, quit the restaurant. A three-bedroom ranch in Kendall. Pool and barbecue. Kids. Make friends. Invite the Barlows over.
It had no real taste, it was like water, like meringue without sugar. He would have to be a different man from the one he was now. He supposed he might become that man, but not through any act of personal will. He didn’t know the way there.
In the morning, first thing, Paz called Dr. Maria Salazar at home and got an answering machine that informed him, first in English, and then in a particularly limpid and refined Spanish, that Dr. Salazar would be out of the country until a date three weeks in the future. Paz cursed in muddy and impure Spanish and then punched in Dr. Lydia Herrera’s number. Dr. Herrera was busy, the secretary said, she had no room on her schedule that morning. Paz bullied, abandoning Barlow’s rule. He threatened that if Dr. Herrera did not see him, he would have her dragged down to police headquarters and charged with obstructing a homicide investigation, and wouldn’t that screw up her busy schedule? The line went briefly dead, and then the secretary came back again and, in a stiff voice, gave Paz his appointment. Paz put on a fawn-colored Palm Beach suit and walked over to the hole-in-the-wall on Calle Ocho where he took breakfast, cafe con leche and a couple of Cuban fruit pastries. While he ate he read Doris Taylor’s story in the Herald, which had made page 1 below the fold. Doris didn’t spare the gory details, and he guessed that she had gotten to the medical examiner’s staff. The police, he learned, had refused to rule out the possibility of a cult killing. It could have been worse, although he now expected that the brass would be more interested in the case than was optimal. He ripped the story out, pocketed the clip, and drove directly to the university.
Dr. Herrera was dressed in mango color this morning and she frowned in a way that brought her plucked brows together like a child’s drawing of a gull. The patronizing smile was missing. She stood in the doorway of her little office and radiated honest outrage.
“This is really inconvenient, Detective,” she said. “And I resent being threatened.”
“Murder is often inconvenient, Doctor,” said Paz blandly. “And citizens have a positive duty to help the police in an investigation.” He gestured past her. “The sooner we start …”
She stalked back into her office and sat behind her desk. Paz placed before her a copy of the toxicology analysis on Wallace.
“This is a list of the chemicals we found in the victim’s body. If you could, we’d like to know what plants they came from.”
She snatched up the paper, frowning. As Paz watched, her expression changed; irritation gave way to confused fascination. She spun her chair, pulled a reference volume from the shelf, paged through it, pulled down a batch of reprints, shuffled through them, read a page of one, shook her head, muttering.
“Stumped, huh?”
She stared at him, but not with hostility. “This is remarkable. Amazing.”
“Do you know what plant that stuff comes from?” asked Paz.
“Plant? My God, there’s a whole pharmacopoeia in this. The harmalines here are botanical psychedelics, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, incredibly powerful, used by shamans in both the New World and Old World tropics.
