Michael Gruber - Tropic of Night

Driving back south, Paz ventured, “You starting to like Youghans?”

“Could you do that to a woman you been with? You saw the baby. Could you do that to your own flesh and blood?”

“If I was drunk, or zonked behind angel dust or crank, and if she just told me the baby wasn’t mine? And I had a knife handy? Yeah, I could. Anybody could. It explains how the killer got into the apartment; the vic let him in. And the missing picture fits there, too. It was Julius’s picture up there, and he snatched it off the wall when he left.”

“That wasn’t the only thing he took out of there,” said Barlow pointedly.

“There’s that, yeah, but if we assume he’s crazed …”

“And your crazed jealous killer takes the time to drug his lady friend before he slits her open? And to do what looks to me like a neat little operation on that baby?” He looked at Paz sideways, out of the long white eyes. “You’re about to fall in love, you’re not careful, son.”

That was the first rule of Barlow. Don’t fall in love with a suspect until you know all the other girls.

“Okay, point taken,” said Paz, not at all offended. He had no problem admitting that Barlow had more experience than he did, was at present a better detective. After a brief silence, Barlow said, “I’ll be real interested in what the doc says about those cuts.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I seen some hogs butchered, and deer, and calves, and done it myself a time or two. I seen it done by people knew what they were doing and by people didn’t have an idea in the world how to go about it, and you can tell. What I mean to say, the man that did that, what we saw up there in that apartment, knew what he was doing. He done it before.”

This last remark hung in the air like a smear of greasy smoke.

“I don’t want to hear that, Cletis.”

“No, and I don’t particularly care to say it, neither, but there it is. The hearing ear and the seeing eye, the Lord hath made both of them, Proverbs 20:14. We got to follow the ear and the eye wheresoever they may lead.”

“Cletis, all I’m saying, can’t we just hope it’s a regular domestic? Because if it’s a serial, a loony, well, it’s going to tie us up forever and have the politicians on our necks and the guy is probably in Pensacola anyway …” Paz gave up. He was conscious of the faint blips in his communication, little subvocal hiccups where, had he been speaking to a regular person, he would have inserted the verbal lubricants fucking, hell, goddamn. He also sensed that Barlow knew this and was enjoying it, to the extent that Barlow could ever be said to enjoy something. Barlow said, low-voiced, almost to himself, “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? No one.”

There seemed to Paz no good comeback to this, and the two men drove the rest of the way to their station in silence. There they found that Julius Youghans had a modest sheet on him, some drunk driving and two counts of receiving stolen property. Paz was ready to go out and pick him up for a conversation, but Barlow said, “He’ll keep. If he ain’t run yet, he’ll set. I want to go see the autopsy.”

This was fine with Paz. Barlow had taken the call and was, by rule, the primary detective on the investigation. They’ll probably eliminate suicide right off, he thought, but kept the thought to himself. After Barlow retired he was going to get a partner with a sense of humor.

“You want me there?” Paz could live without autopsies.

“No, no point the two of us going up to Jackson. Why don’t you find out what that nut thing is, and I’ll meet you back here around five and we’ll both of us go see Mr. Youghans.”

Also fine. Paz went back to his car and took I-95, going south this time. He lit one of the unbanded maduro seconds he bought in bundles of fifty from a guy on Coral Way. Paz had been smoking cigars since he was fourteen, and was amused by the recently renewed fashionableness of the vice among downtown big shots. You were not supposed to smoke in police vehicles, which Paz thought was another indication of the end of civilization. Man smoked; it was what made him man, and distinguished him from the beasts.

Puffing contentedly, he turned off Dixie Highway at Douglas Road and then onto Ingraham. The roadside trees had not fully recovered from the ravages of Hurricane Andrew in ‘92, and Ingraham was not yet the continuous lush tunnel it had once been, but it was cooler and shadier in here than on the unforgiving sun-blasted Dixie Highway. Fairchild Tropical Gardens, his destination, is the largest tropical arboretum in the nation and a center for the study of tropical botany. It, too, had been knocked flat by Andrew but was nearly back to where it had been, a small paradise of lush growth and flowers. Paz flashed his badge at the gate guard and parked in the shadiest corner he could find. The heat of the day was building to its usual apex. Afterward, around three-thirty, when the air was nearly too thick and hot to suck into the lungs, it would be doused by the predictable thunderstorm. Now dense scent hung in the unmoving air: rot, divine perfume, clipped grass. Paz took a deep cleansing snort of this, and strolled past the fish pond and the immense banyan to the two-story gray Florida limestone building that housed the research and administration offices.

After a few false turns he found himself in the office of Dr. Albert Manes, a gangling, pleasantly ugly fellow about Paz’s age, tanned, spectacled, and looking very much the intrepid plant explorer in a green T-shirt and khaki shorts. He took Paz’s card with interest.

“A cop, huh? Looking for dope in the garden again?” He grinned.

Paz kept his face blank. “No, sir, this is in reference to a homicide.”

Manes’s face took on a suitably chastened look. “Wow, who got killed?” he asked, and then paled. “Oh, shit, wait a second, you’re not here because …” His eyes darted over to a family portrait on his desk.

“No, sir, nothing like that. We just need a little botanical advice.”

Manes took a deep breath, blew it, laughed nervously, and sat down on the edge of his desk. “Sure, what about?”

Paz handed him the thing in its evidence bag.

Manes peered at it, holding the bag up to eye level. He sat on a steel stool, took the nutshell from its bag, examined it in a hand lens, measured it, took down a thick green volume from the shelf above him, thumbed through it for two minutes, and said, “Here it is.”

Paz looked past his shoulder at the open book. There was a black-and-white photograph of a similar nutshell joined to its mirror image at the narrow end.

“It’s Schrebera golungensis, ” said Manes. “The ewe’s-foot tree. Also called the opele tree, although what an opele is I couldn’t tell you. Did you want to know anything else besides what it is?”

“Does it grow around here?”

“Well, it probably would, everything else does. But it’s native to West Africa, Nigeria down though the Congo and up to Senegal.”

“Have you got one here? In the gardens, I mean.”

“Alive and growing? I could check our database, if you’d like.”

Paz would like, and the scientist sat down in front of a large monitor and started pressing keys. Lists scrolled, windows flashed into existence and vanished.

“It doesn’t look like we do. If you made me guess, I would doubt that anybody else in Miami does, either.”

Paz wrote this into his notebook. “What do they use this tree for? I mean, they eat the fruit, or what?”

“Oh, it’s not a cultivar,” said Manes. “This grows wild in the jungle. The locals might use parts of it, but I’m not up on that kind of thing. If you have a couple of minutes, I could check on the Net.”

“Let’s do it.”