you need to get behind the barrier with the other press.”
“Oh, I’m moving along, like the cops are always telling us to do. I just wanted to let you know there’s a young woman sitting in your car. A real interesting young woman. I didn’t realize you had such good taste. Me and Willa, why, we just talked and talked. In fact, I might even do a piece on the after-hours life of Miami’s hardworking dicks, how they bring their girlfriends to crime scenes so as not to lose a minute …”
Paz grabbed the woman’s arm and backed into the dense shadow of a ficus tree. “What do you want, Doris?”
“Everything. This is the biggest murder in a decade. I hear it’s bloody. Is it the same guy?”
“Looks like it.”
“Any clues about who it is?”
“Not as yet. It’s early days.”
“It’s a black man, though. The same as with Wallace?”
“We don’t know that. We have no ID, no witnesses …”
“Oh, please! White boys don’t kill black girls in Overtown in the middle of the night and then just stroll away. It’s the same guy here, so he’s black. What did the murder scene look like?”
He told her, and answered all her avid questions, omitting and changing some small details, as always. He left her full of sucked blood, a happy woman.
They buttoned the place up at about one, the crime-scene lights packed away, the cop cars gone, and the press vans, the corpse now down at the morgue, the rest of the extended family still in the house, unbuttoned and wailing loudly enough for the noise to reach Paz where he stood with his partner on the street.
“He come on a bike, huh?” Cletis ventured.
“He could’ve,” said Paz. “He sure didn’t come by car. If he came by bike, then according to our witnesses he turned himself white, which should be right up this guy’s alley. Or maybe he walked on water. And someone let him in there, like before. Any luck with the family?”
“Some. The sister-in-laws say the victim was talking to someone about a lucky charm thing for her baby, but they didn’t know much more than that. I got a bunch of stuff I took out of the victim’s room, address books, handbags. I’ll study it some and see if there’s any good for us there.” He pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket. “Whyn’t y’all take this glass splinter, seeing as how you’re in with the boys at the U. See what it is, what it come off of.”
Paz put it away. They spoke briefly about arrangements for the morrow. Barlow was heading for the morgue, where he would observe the autopsy and generate zeal among the toxicologists. Paz walked back to his car, where he found Willa dozing. He got in and drove off. She awoke, stretched.
“Well, was it as exciting as you dreamed?” he asked sourly.
“Yes,” she replied, “it was like watching an anthill poked with a stick. And I had a real interesting conversation with Doris Taylor. She told me all about your exploits.”
“I bet she did. But because she spotted my car and you, and you spilled your guts, instead of, for example, saying you were a witness, she now has me by the balls. She’ll pump me dry on this goddamn case.”
Willa looked genuinely remorseful. “Gosh, Jimmy, I’m sorry. She seemed so friendly, and like she really liked you.” She paused and slid closer. “Would it make it up a little if I got you by the balls and pumped you dry?”
“To an extent,” said Paz.
An hour later, upon her hard futon, this had been accomplished, and they were back at it again, she on top, he solidly engulfed, she not moving very much, her little breasts occasionally brushing his face, and chatting away as she generally did during the second act. This feature of Willa Shaftel’s sex life was not actually one he would have ordered off a menu, but he had grown used to it. Every so often, she would pause and utter a pleasant small cry, and shudder, her face and chest would flush, her eyes would roll back in her head, and there would be a delightful spasm in the moist flesh that gripped him, and then she would take up where she left off.
“Gosh, that was a lovely one,” she said huskily after one of these caesuras, “and I can hardly bear it that this is our penultimate fuck.”
“Penultimate?”
“Unless you’re not staying over. I was planning on a lazy one tomorrow morn, plus the usual shower encounter.”
“I have a gigantic day tomorrow. A serial killer who whacked someone important is about the worst thing that can happen to a police force, and I’m in the bull’s-eye. Sorry.”
“The ultimate, then. This will have to last you all the lonely nights, or all the lonely twenty minutes before you find someone superior to me in every way, with even more gigantic tits, if your imagination can encompass that. Unless you contrive to visit Iowa City. Do you think you ever might?”
“Every weekend.”
A chortle. “Yeah, we could meet in the airport Marriott. Ah, Jimmy, you know even though I’ve realized these many months that you were fucking everything above room temperature, I guess in my little girl’s heart I still wished that you’d say, ‘Willa, love of my life, you’re the best pony in the stable, so stay, stay, stay and be my tender bride, and spawn delightful Judeo-Afro-Cubano babies, each with your blazing intelligence and my preternatural beauty.’ Like in the movies.”
Paz said, “Would you, if I did?”
She stopped her slow grinding and looked him in the face. “Oh, wait a minute, I have to consider this. Here’s a good-looking man, a body from heaven, luscious skin, smart, good steady job, sensitive but not a wuss, a penis of adequate size and function …”
“Adequate?”
“A great kisser, at both ends, too, a lover who, while slowing down a bit with approaching middle age, can still fuck one’s brains out, a great dresser, polite, decent, generous to a point, not anything of a pig. A catch, you would say, and so I ask myself, why is there hanging over his head a forty-foot state highway sign with yellow flashers that reads ‘Heartbreak Ahead! Do Not Get Serious!’? Why is that, Jimmy? No quick answers? I’ll leave you to consider it while I work up another one, and I believe I’ll ask you to join me here.”
And that was Willa gone, he thought, as he strode with shaky steps to his car. After they finished she had been almost businesslike, not willing to chat at length, not cold exactly, but anxious to close out a chapter. She’d kissed him quickly after he was dressed and very nearly hustled him out the door. He thought about her forty-foot highway sign. His sign. Yes, he knew about that. It was part of what he considered his honesty, almost his honor. He knew that guys lied to get laid, cops joked about it in cop bars after work, but Paz had a horror of false pretenses.
As he got in his car he experienced a pang of remorse so powerful that his breath choked for an instant. He thought for a moment of going back. This was it, something he needed, a grenade to blast him out of that pleasant long, slow slide. But Paz had a good imagination and brought it into play to rescue him, as it had so many times before, from living real life in the moment. Okay, sure, Willa was cute, smart, a terrific piece of ass, but she was a little plump, even at twenty-six, and in a decade or so she might look like a fireplug. And she had a mouth on her, too, that might get boring after a few years. He thought of Willa getting together with his mother. His mother would hate anyone he got close to, that was a given, and he considered this as a revenge fantasy for a moment. It would be amusing, at least. But maybe Willa would love his mother. Willa claimed to be able to talk to anyone. She might get in good with Margarita and then he’d have the two of them running his life. And it would pinch the money, too, he’d have to get his own place and support her, poets didn’t bring in the cash, that was for sure, and they’d fight about money, and then the sex would fade, and who the hell needed it? So the ogga slyly chatted, and soothed, and stifled all real feelings, and Jimmy Paz drove off into the night, himself again.
NINETEEN
Iwork like an animal all Sunday, or as my husband was fond of saying when I used to ask him how the writing went that day, like a nigger. It was okay for him to use this vile expression, he explained to me at length, and many times, because for his race the N-word was communal, warm, palsy. I never believed this, and I always felt a slight repugnance on the many occasions when he used it. Jews don’t warmly call one another kikes, I believe.
