“No, I didn’t say that. I believe you got the real Jane there, and this Moore character is the killer. That’s good. Far as the rest of it goes … it’s pretty tall.”
“Tall? A little while ago you were saying that Satan was loose in Dade County.”
“Oh, he’s loose all right,” said Barlow, unfazed. “But that’s not the kind of fact I take to the state’s attorney. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, which in this case means evidence and a story they can eat and not spit up. Meanwhile, your girl there ain’t exactly a reliable informant.”
“Then talk to her yourself! See what you think. Whether she’s criminally involved or not, she’s still protecting him with all this witch doctor crapola.” He laughed humorlessly. “Crazy? Yeah, crazy I’ll give you.”
They brought Jane Doe out of the holding cell and back to the little interview room. Paz watched while Barlow talked to her, in his usual quiet and effective way. No sarcastic remarks, no one-liners from old Barlow, just two people talking. They had a tape recorder on, getting it all. Paz had seen it many times before, and it pissed him off, because he couldn’t do it himself, he always had to show the mutt he was in charge, that he couldn’t be fooled. He knew it, he knew it was dumb, but he couldn’t help himself, which was why he was doomed to be the bad cop, and never the one who got the confession and cleared the case.
The story she told was essentially the same one she had told to Paz earlier, but more detailed and easier in the telling. Barlow ran her through the nights the women were murdered. No alibi for Wallace, she was at home alone with the kid. Vargas, she was with friends all evening. At the time of this latest, Alice Powers at the Milano, Jane told them, she had been at a bembe.
“Come again?”
“A bembe is a Santeria ritual,” Doe explained. “People dance and the orishas, the spirits, come down and take them over for a while and give advice.”
“You don’t tell me! And did you get any advice from these spirits, ma’am?”
“I did. I was advised that before I close the gate it must be opened. And that I was to bring the yellow bird to the father. I was advised to flee by water.”
“That’s real interesting. What do you make of it?”
“I’m not sure. Ifa is often indirect. The fleeing by water part is fairly clear, though.”
“By water, hm? Why didn’t you?” Paz noted that Barlow was enjoying himself. And, more remarkably, so was the woman. There was a light in her face, now, and Paz looked at her with more interest. Her bony features were never going to be on a magazine cover, but besides that she’d let herself go a good deal, and she didn’t have any taste. Paz liked women with taste. Flair. That hairdo was a disaster.
She said, “I don’t have a boat. Also, I have to find some allies first, and I have to stop my husband. I feel responsible.”
“I see,” said Barlow. “Well, you’ll give us some names and we’ll check it out. Now, these allies … you’re talking about this gang that Detective Paz here thinks your husband has got?”
She shot Paz a look. “No, I meant magical allies. There isn’t any gang. It is a figment of Detective Paz’s imagination. My husband is doing this all by himself.”
“Would you like to explain how?” asked Barlow.
The woman did so, the whole story, thousands of years, the various botanicals, the pineal body, the melanocytes, the exohormones, the supporting neurophysiological research, with actual references added. Barlow was silent for a while after this, the tape softly whirring, recording nothing.
“You got any idea why, ma’am?” he asked.
“Why what?”
“Why he’s doing this?”
“I thought I explained that. The neuroleptic substances in the excised and consumed organs …”
“No, I got that part. He’s going to get some boosted power for his witchcraft. I mean why does he want it? What’s he going to do when he gets it?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea what he’s like now. I think maybe he sees himself as the revenge of Africa on white America. He wants to show us that there’s a black technology that sets all our technology at naught. Stuff like that. He’s an extremely angry man.”
“I reckon,” said Barlow. “And he got this idea in Africa?”
“He got the means in Africa. Maybe he always had the idea. No, that’s not true. He had a desire to be seen, really seen, as himself, not as a ‘black’ fill-in-the-blank, a black poet, black playwright, black husband of a rich white woman. And he thought he never could be, I mean seen in that way, and it made him crazy. He got the idea that what the race needed was a Hitler, that the white people would never take blacks seriously until then. And Africa, where we went, what he learned there, I think it transformed him, the sad, angry stuff that was deep inside?it just took over and ate everything else, until only the Hitler part was left. It happens. Maybe it even happened to Hitler. That’s one theory. A friend of mine used to say that dealing in the magical world without some transcendent moral authority was about the most dangerous thing anyone could do. And Witt didn’t have one.”
“That’s quite a story, Jane,” said Barlow, after a long pause.
“Tell us about your sister,” said Paz, abruptly, and got a questioning look from his partner. He didn’t care. He felt angry, and not just at the killer.
Jane Doe asked for some water then, and Barlow stepped out and brought a large plastic cup back with him. She drank deeply and resumed. “I got sick in Africa. Ended up at a Catholic hospital in Bamako. I was out of it for a long time, dying really, and someone got in touch with my brother and he came and got me and took me back to Long Island, and they stuck me in a fancy clinic. I don’t recall any of this. They couldn’t find anything wrong with me, no pathogens, but I seemed to have lost the ability to metabolize food. Witt showed up a month or so later, looking just like he always did, being charming. I started getting better around then. Of course, he had got me sick in the first place, for amusement, to punish me for … whatever, and then he made me better. I didn’t say anything to my family about this, or about what had happened. It’s hard to describe, or explain, but … being back in Sionnet, Africa seemed like a long bad dream. I think I wasn’t in my right mind. I was sick for a long time, I told myself, I wanted all of it not to have happened, and so I convinced myself that it hadn’t really happened. And he had a power about him now, an aura … terrifying. It was like a bird hypnotized by a snake. I had dreams, too. He was getting at me through my dreams.” She let out a peculiar nasal sound, like the start of a hysterical laugh, throttled. “It sounds crazy. Anyway, I didn’t do anything. And one day he killed Mary and her baby. I think it was just to show me he could, and to hurt me and my family. Who were never anything but kind to him. I was terrified that he was going to kill them all. So, really, to save them I took Kite out and killed myself.”
“But you didn’t kill yourself,” said Paz.
“Didn’t I? It felt like it. I decided to become Dolores. I had all her ID because of a mix-up in Bamako, and I took that tin box, with that in it and some other stuff. I filled the bilges with diesel and poured gas from the outboard around, and cracked off the regulator on the butane gas tank for the stove. And then I couldn’t do it. I wanted to live, to, I don’t know, bear witness to what he was. I felt my line wasn’t ready to be cut, that Ifa had something for me to do. I had a pistol. I was going to light it off and shoot myself, but I didn’t. We had an emergency inflatable aboard. I inflated it, crying like a baby. Then I rigged the boat to explode. I used a kitchen timer, ran two wires from the starter battery and fixed them with duct tape, one to the pointer, one to the dial at zero. I opened the gas valve, set the timer for half an hour, sealed the cabin, and got into the rescue dinghy. I paddled to a beach outside of Bridgeport, shoved the dinghy and paddle into a Dumpster; while I was doing that, the boat exploded and burned. I didn’t look. Then I walked into town. I checked into a motel under Dolores’s name. I had big sunglasses on and a floppy hat pulled down low, and it was the kind of motel where they don’t look at your face. I bought dye and changed my hair and stuffed cotton wads in my cheeks and then I went and bought a cheap car in a Vietnamese used car lot.”
“What did you use for money?” Paz asked. “You didn’t touch your accounts. They checked.”
“Dad always kept a couple of grand in a jar in the sail locker, for emergencies in foreign ports. I drove to Miami and set up housekeeping.”
“You thought he’d come after you?” Barlow asked.
“Yes. He … some things he said, before … Mary. He wanted to … recruit me, I think. He thinks we belong together. He wants me to observe his deeds and admire him. Because I understand what he is, what he can do. And you guys don’t.” She looked at Paz. “You can’t really stop him, you know. You think you can, because at some level you think all of this is lunatic garbage. You think guns and handcuffs and jail cells and the rest of it are going to work for you. But they’re not.”
