“The ajiaco.”
“How was it?”
“Incredible. I got Mina to make it a time or two at home, but it wasn’t anything like yours.”
“Just as well. You’re getting fat, Morales. You should’ve gone with the salad.”
Morales laughed comfortably. He liked having a man who sold food tell him he was fat. In the seven years Paz had known him, Morales had turned from a baby-faced kid into a solidly built man of thirty, wife-and-two-kids, and a competent, if not particularly brilliant, detective. If he required brilliance, he had Jimmy Paz for the price of a meal.
They bantered for a while about family, sports, the department and its discontents, the latest cop scandal, one of a seemingly infinite series of stupid Miami cop tricks. Then, the reason for the visit, besides Morales’s taste for Cuban stewed beef.
“We caught a weird one last night. Tony Fuentes got killed. You heard about it?”
“I saw it in the Herald. Struggle with a burglar and he fell off his balcony. The perp got away.”
“That’s what we’re giving out,” said Morales darkly.
“And what are you not?”
“The perp ate him. And we doubt it was a burglary.”
“That’s good police work, Tito. Your average burglar usually goes for the jewels rather than the liver.”
An odd look appeared on Morales’s face, and Paz thought that this was one reason why the man would never be an absolutely first-class police detective-he was far too transparent; basically, he was a nice, regular guy, unlike Paz. “How did you know it was the liver?” the detective asked.
“It’s the tastiest part, if you want to snack off a corpse in a hurry. I speak as a food service professional here. What else did he eat? Or it eat?”
“The heart and some thigh muscles. It was quite a scene, my friend. Fuentes was opened up like a can of beans in his garden. Somebody yanked him off his balcony a little past one-thirty this morning. They ripped his throat out first. He was probably dead before he hit the croton bushes. I sure as shit hope so, anyway. The wife got up at seven and found him. Aside from that, Mrs. Fuentes, how was your day?”
“You probably don’t like the Mrs. for it.”
“No, we’re stupid, Jimmy, but we’re not total morons. No sign of trouble in the family. Business rivals, the usual shit. The only unusual thing that happened to Antonio in the twenty-four hours prior was a couple of guys turned up at his office and yelled at him about how he was ruining some nature preserve down in South America somewhere.”
“These were Latino types?”
“No, one was a white-bread gringo. A hippie, the secretary said. Do we still have hippies?”
“He probably thought of himself as an anarchist.”
“Whatever. He was the one who yelled. Long blond dreadlock hair, in a black T-shirt with a logo on it, but she couldn’t ID it. They had to call security, and the guy was violent, wouldn’t leave. We drew a blank with the security guards on the logo, too. I don’t understand why nobody ever sees anything.”
“They’re mainly not trained observers like you, is why. Who was the other guy?”
“He was an Indian. At least that’s what they all agreed on. A little Indian.”
“Tomahawk or dot-head?”
“Tomahawk, but I got the feeling from the description he wasn’t a local type, more like one of those from south of the border. He had these tattoos on his face.” Morales drew lines with his finger on his cheeks and chin. “That’s what they do down in, like, the Amazon, right?”
“If you say so.”
“The other thing is, there was a cat there.”
“A cat? You mean at the crime scene?”
“Yeah. Or so it appears. A big one, like a cougar or a leopard. We took casts of the prints, and we’re waiting on the zoo guys to ID them. It sounds weird, but from the look of the wounds, the forensic people say that maybe the cat did them, you know? I mean, can you train a cat to kill someone? There was a weird story I remember reading in school about a guy trained an ape to kill for him….”
“‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ by Poe. He made that up in his head, though.”
“So how do you figure this?”
“It’s open and shut, in my view. Guy owns a tiger, he’s feeding him Friskies tuna out of those little tiny cans, and one day he says, ‘Fuck this, why should I keep opening these little tiny cans, two for a dollar twenty-nine, when I can feed Lucille here on Cuban businessmen for free.’ And there you have it.”
Morales laughed, but briefly. “No, seriously.”
“Seriously? You see this outfit I got on? The white color clues you in that I’m in the food service industry and not the weird crime detection industry.”
“The Major asked me to ask you, Jimmy,” said Morales with an appropriately serious change of mien.
“Oh, the Major. Well, let me drop everything, then, and really focus on it.” Paz said this as sarcastically as he could manage, and as he did he felt an unpleasant pang of self-contempt. Major Douglas Oliphant had been pretty decent to Paz when Paz had been a detective under him, and did not deserve that. And was Paz getting more bitchy recently? He took a breath, released it. “I don’t see what I could do to help,” he said in a milder tone. “I mean, you’re going to do the obvious, check out the people who own big cats, follow up on the tree hugger and his Indian….”
“Yeah, of course, but what the Major wanted me to ask you about is the possibility that there could be some kind of ritual involved.”
“And I’m the expert on cannibalistic ritual?”
“You know more than me,” said Morales bluntly.
“Guilty. But I thought we agreed the perp fed him to the pussycat. Where’s the ritual?”
“Okay, not ritual, as such.” Morales paused, and Paz saw an expression appear on his face that he had often felt appear on his own: that half smile we put on when we are about to say something that will make us appear stupid, something unbelievable or absurd. “So there’s no, like, cult that, say, worships animals and feeds people to them?”
“In the movies, maybe. Why go fancy on it? A guy with a trained tiger is bad enough. Or a maniac who for some reason wants the murder to look like it was done by a tiger.”
A little pause here before the detective said, “Because there was no guy. The ground was nice and soft, the gardener had been there that morning and spread fresh compost around the plants. There wasn’t a single human footprint anywhere on the grounds, and there’s an eight-foot wall around the whole property, alarmed, gated, with no sign of forced entry.”
“A solo by the cat, then,” said Paz. “A wild animal escaped from one of those private zoos you read about, guy’s got fourteen half-starved Siberian tigers in a double-wide trailer…”
“Which escaped and made its way to Antonio Fuentes’s house and lay in wait on his roof until just the moment the man steps onto his balcony and jumps him, even though the area is lousy with dogs and cats and coons. There were peacocks wandering around there, too. It’s that kind of neighborhood. You think it just woke up that day and said mm-mm, gonna get me some Cuban entrepreneur tonight?”
A number of wiseass remarks flitted across Paz’s brain then, but he declined them all. Instead, he shrugged and said, “Fine. You got me baffled. What do you want me to say, Tito? It was more magic in Miami?”
“That’d be a start.” He paused here and then in a hesitant tone added, “It was a near full moon last night.”
“Oh, well, then. Definitely a werewolf. Or were-tiger, in our case.”
“Do they have were-tigers?”
“Do they have…? Tito, for crying out loud, listen to what you’re saying!”
Morales laughed nervously and rolled his eyes, to show (falsely) that he knew the comment had been a joke. “Yeah, okay, but seriously, is there, like, any buzz about people using predators ritually, a cult….”
Paz stood up, suddenly tired of the whole line of conversation. “No, Tito, I’m fresh out of cults. I don’t fuck
