were back from school. He left and continued his canvass, which yielded nothing.
He returned to his oven of a car, drove to a convenience store on Twelfth, and bought a packaged ham and cheese sandwich and a Mountain Dew soda.
Outside the store Paz observed a group of youths cutting school, dressed in costumes?hugely baggy pants worn at the level of the pubes, cutoff team sweatshirts, expensive athletic shoes worn unlaced?donned in hopes that they would be mistaken for ex-convicts, the highest status of which they could conceive. They went past him into the store to do some light shoplifting.
Paz had no particular sympathy for the youths. The previous generation of the same type had made his own life very difficult, as had (to be fair) their Cuban analogues. Whatever sympathy he might have had for the shopkeeper vanished when he started to eat: the sandwich was both stale and soggy, and tasted like clay, and the soda was warm. It was not revived even when he saw the kids running out of the store, laughing, clutching purloined bags of Fritos and M amp;M’s. As he trashed his uneaten lunch, some lines from a poem ran through his mind:
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love
And this led him naturally to thoughts about the woman who had taught him the poem, and he drove away south.
Paz walked into the Coconut Grove library near Peacock Park, an elegant building made of gray wood and glass, and approached the woman behind the information desk. She was short, and slightly plump in a luscious way, with hair like polished copper wires and large round horn-rimmed glasses. Her skin was smooth, creamy, and freckled.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes,” said Paz, “I was looking for some books with pictures of naked ladies in them and not a lot of printing.”
“I see. Well, we do have an extensive split beaver collection. It’s on that low shelf right by the children’s section.” She grinned at him, showing small, shiny, even teeth. Willa Shaftel was not a conventionally attractive woman?the bodice on the print sundress she was wearing was barely filled and the rest of her torso departed only slightly from the cylindrical?but she had a bright and knowing face, a big, lush mouth, remarkable blue eyes, and there was that hair. “It’s been a while, Jimmy. To what do we owe?”
“Police business. There’s a big push on library-fine scofflaws.”
“Those dirty vultures, but I thought you worked for homicide.”
“I do. We’ve found that murderers often move on to more serious things like not returning library books or even scribbling on the pages. We want to nip it in the bud. Also, I came by to see if you wanted to go to lunch.”
“I only have a half hour,” said Shaftel.
“Take it,” said Paz.
After buying food they went to Peacock Park and sat on a bench in the shade of some casuarinas, right by the bay, watching children poke sticks in the gray mud. Paz ate from a box of conch fritters and fries, Shaftel from a little plastic salad plate and a container of yogurt.
“I was just thinking of you a while ago,” he said.
“Yes, I get that all the time. Some men can’t stop obsessing about my body for a minute.”
“That too, but it was that poem.” He described the circumstances, his morning activities, a sketch of the case, his abortive lunch, and his recall of the lines.
“Oh, ‘Irish Airman,’ Yeats,” she said. ” ‘Not law nor duty made me fight, nor public men nor cheering crowds, a lonely impulse of delight, drove to this tumult in the clouds.’ “
“Yeah, I like that. ‘A lonely impulse of delight’ is good.”
“Is that why you work homicide? Clearly there’s no great attachment to the public weal. As you’ve often said, by and large, both killers and their victims are jerks. It’s not a racial chip on the shoulder …” She glanced sideways at him. “… or at least not entirely. So … what? Hard work, dirty work, tedious knocking on doorways …”
“You’re going to use this in your book?” He was skilled at evading her frequent probes.
“Of course. I use everything. Not one of my relatives still speaks to me, and I’ve only published one novel. But you? Well, maybe just in a short story. Or a brief lyric. I don’t know you very well.”
“You don’t? We know each other … what? A year and a half?”
“Yes, and you fall by every week or so, and take me out, and treat me like a lady, and jump on my bones afterward, and God knows it’s pleasant, you’re a very nice guy, and it’s not like I need a velvet rope to keep all the others from rushing the door, but I probably know the checkout ladies at Winn-Dixie better than I know you.”
“Get out of here! We talk all the time.”
“About me and poetry and what to read, and what I think about writing, and my little-girl dreams. But we don’t talk about you. I know you’re a homicide cop and your mother owns a restaurant, and your partner is a quaint old redneck. Anecdotes, data, but the man is hidden. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“All right, what do you want to know?” said Paz, nor was he able to keep the edge of challenge from his voice.
She grinned and patted his hand. “It doesn’t matter, Jimmy. It’s not an interrogation.” She collected their trash and walked to a basket. When she returned she sat down on the grass in front of him cross-legged, exposing soft white thighs.
He said, “Well, at least it’ll give us something to talk about as the years slide by. You can pry out my shameful secrets.” He used his ordinary light bullshitting tone, but she smiled only faintly.
“I was going to call you,” she said. “My grant came through the other day.”
“What, the Iowa thing? Congratulations, babe!” He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “So, you’re leaving in the fall?”
“No, as soon as I can sublet my place. Maybe a week. Anything to avoid another whole summer here.”
Paz kept his expression neutral and friendly but began to feel that stiffening of the features that follows when we separate the face from the heart. “Well. Bye-bye, Willa. We should give you a big send-off.”
“Mm. I’d rather slink away, if you don’t mind. But if you want to take me out, I’m dying to see Race Music. It’s at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. What, you don’t like it?”
Paz was not aware that his face had registered anything at all, and he said, “I don’t know. I get enough of that oh-how-our-people-have-suffered shit on the job. Picking at the scab?I mean, what good does all that do?”
“No, the guy is funny! He’s not heavy, he’s not portentous. It’s a musical, for God’s sake. You like musicals.”
“I don’t like messages.”
“We went to My Fair Lady last month. That has a message.”
“What message?”
“People who change superficial behaviors become different people, one, and two, the old fart still can get the girl. That’s why they love it on Miami Beach.”
Paz had to laugh. “Okay, it’s a date. Friday.”
“What a guy!” she crowed, and got up and sat on his lap and kissed him on the mouth. She really did have the most excellent mouth, Paz reflected, like a teacup full of hot eels.
Paz put in a couple of hours of routine work on this morning’s shooting, which scrubbed personal musings from his surface mind. Barlow was out. He placed the folder with the completed investigation and arrest report on Barlow’s pristine desk and left for the remainder of his canvass.
Traffic was building up to the afternoon rush on 95, so he took surface streets, arriving a little after four. The courtyard under the landings was now running with children back from school. He climbed the stairs. At the third- floor landing, he came upon a boy urinating in a corner. “Don’t do that!” Paz said, and the boy said, “Shut the fuck up, motherfucker!” and continued his pee. Paz walked around the spreading puddle without further comment and rang Mrs. Meagher’s bell.
A chunky young girl with cornrowed hair and plastic-rimmed glasses opened the door and looked him up and down suspiciously. “What you want?” she demanded. She wore a pink sweatshirt with some cute animals appliqued upon it in plastic, and blue slacks. She looked younger than fourteen.
