“Damn!” he cried and grabbed a file folder, riffling through it until he found the county’s sketch of the mysterious Indian. “I’ve seen this guy. I took Amelia to Matheson and he was standing in a little Styrofoam skiff talking to her. He couldn’t’ve been more than ten feet away, and when he saw me, he scooted off in big hurry.”
Morales was staring at him with a disbelieving, sickly grin on his face. “Jimmy, ah, what’s your daughter and dreams got to do with two murders and a bunch of Colombians?”
“I don’t know. Look, Tito, bear with me here. You weren’t on the force when the Voodoo Killer thing went down, but believe me, it wasn’t what you think. We covered up a lot of it, or I did, I concocted a plausible story about drugs and cults, but it wasn’t like that. It was deeply weird. Mind-bendingly weird. And this is another one.”
“Uh-huh. And we’re going to go in there and explain this to Finnegan?”
“No, forget Finnegan. He’s fucking around with us, anyway. This file’s not complete.”
“It’s not?”
“No. They’ve got a surveillance going on Garza and Ibanez, right? But there’s nothing here on any such surveillance, no telephoto shots, no phone taps, which means they think they’ve got something hot and they’re not going to share it with us. I expect both houses are crawling with suspicious-looking Latin-American gentlemen.”
“But you said it wasn’t Colombians…”
“No, I said the killings weren’t mob hits. The Consuela people are in deep with some kind of Colombian mob. Victoria Calderon told me that much. But these guys are trying to protect the Cubans. They got nothing to do with killing them. And the idea that there’s a rival gang doing it is just stupid: it puts us back with our sloppy ninja pseudo-jaguar, who can’t exist. No, it’s connected with this Indian. And our one lead to this Indian is through Mr. Dreadlocks here, and our one lead to him is through his T-shirt. We need to go see this secretary again.”
They left the sheriff, after smearing a thin coat of bullshit on Finnegan and Ramirez, and while they were in the car, Paz called Victoria Calderon, and learned that the Consuela Holdings office was temporarily closed. Ms. Tuero, the secretary, was on leave at home until the surviving principals could decide how to proceed with this aspect of their affairs.
“How’re you doing so far?” asked Victoria after conveying this information, as well as the woman’s address and phone number.
“Pretty good. Just going through the police files. Like you said, they’re thinking Colombians.”
“And what’re you thinking, Jimmy?”
“Not Colombians. Or not only. And not on the phone. How do you like being the big boss?”
“I’d like it better if I knew what was really going on. Dad kept a lot of stuff in his head, and what wasn’t in his head was in Clemente’s.”
“Who is…?”
“Oh, Uncle Oscar, the old family retainer. I’m going to have to get rid of him or ease him out, and it’s going to make a mess, but he still treats me like he did when he was sneaking me candy, age six. The books make no sense. Money coming in and out with no paper attached, purchase invoices for stuff I never heard of, I mean big expenditures: three Daewoo grapplers for twenty-two grand a pop, thirty grand for a Hydro Ax feller-buncher, all kinds of other timber industry machines…”
“You’re in the timber business.”
“So it seems, but we’re not in the timber business as far as I know. We buy a lot of construction equipment, obviously, but all this other stuff is stuck in among the legitimate purchases. I mean, what’s a boring machine?”
“The opposite of an interesting machine?”
She laughed, a little harder than the remark warranted. “Oh, Christ, Jimmy, am I glad I found you! Do you realize I have no one I can talk to about this stuff?”
“Hey, what’s family for?”
“You laugh, but I mean it. Why did we buy a fifty-grand machine for making lots of holes in wood? I mean, it’s a furniture plant item. We’re all of a sudden in the furniture business, too? Also, it’s not just the crazy expenditures I worry about, it’s the income. There are huge payments, I mean seven-figure entries, without any invoicing to show what we got paid for.”
“Another topic not to discuss on the phone,” said Paz.
Elvira Tuero lived in a modest apartment in a Souesera duplex, on a street familiar to Paz. It was just around the block from his mother’s ile, which he took to be a good omen. They had called beforehand, and she had agreed to see them, somewhat reluctantly, it seemed to Paz. There was something frightened in her voice.
And in her face, too. Ms. Tuero was highly decorative, or had been: fashionable shoulder-length blond curls, helped out by chemicals, an attractive oval face, nicely plucked eyebrows over large dark eyes. She was wearing a loose white shirt, tight toreador pants (pink), and toeless gold slippers. Paz noted that her red nail polish needed fixing on both fingers and toes, and that there were unbecoming smudges under her eyes. She took them to the living room and sat them on a dark blue velvet couch, taking for herself an armchair covered in the same stuff, across from a coffee table in which beer coasters from many lands sat under glass.
“I don’t know what I can tell you,” she said. “I told the cops everything I could remember just after Mr. Fuentes died.”
“Yes, but memory is funny,” said Paz. “Sometimes we remember things after a while that we forgot right after the event. That’s why the police sometimes reinterview after some time has gone by.”
“Yeah, that’s what those guys said.”
“What guys?”
“A couple of men, day before yesterday. They said they were from the security firm working for Mr. Garza. They wanted to know about those people who came in the day before the, you know…”
“The murder, yes,” said Paz. “And what did you tell them?”
“Well, one of them mostly wanted to know about the shirt the white guy was wearing, the logo on it.”
“And did you recall what it was?”
“Not really, but then he started asking me was it this, was it that, and it kind of came back to me. To tell you the truth, I kind of wanted to get rid of him.”
“Oh? Why was that?”
“He was creepy, you know. Like if I didn’t answer right he would do something, or he wanted to do something mean. He sat too close, and stared, like I was lying. This was just one of them. The other guy asked the questions.”
“These were regular American-type people?”
“No. We spoke in Spanish, but they weren’t Cubans. Some kind of South American accent, but not Argentinean. I used to have a boyfriend from Buenos Aires. Not Mexican either. Venezuela, Colombia, like that.”
“I see. And what did you recall about this logo?”
“No, like I said, the guy knew about the logo, he described it to me and he just wanted me to say if I saw it in the office that day. It was a black T-shirt, with a big globe on it, the earth like they show you from space, the blue marble. And around the rim of it were some kind of teeth, like a gear in a watch, but green. And three letters in white on the globe and some writing below it. But he didn’t know what the letters were and neither did I. I hope this is the last time I have to go through this.”
“I’m pretty sure it will be,” said Paz. “Thank you for your time.”
“Because I won’t be in town. I’m going to stay with my sister up in Vero Beach. I don’t want anything more to do with this stuff. Those guys, ever since they came by I’ve been having nightmares.”
“What do you make of that, senor?” asked Paz when they were in the car again.
“Our Colombians are doing the same stuff we’re doing.”
“Not just that. They had another source for that logo, maybe something directly associated with the killings. They want whoever’s doing the jaguar act to stop, and they’re just figuring that the same organization that sent those guys to yell at Fuentes might have had something to do with killing him and Calderon. Very thorough, and it means they have information we don’t. Also, and this doesn’t go anywhere else, I just found out from my half sister
