Michael Gruber: Tropic of Night

Paz got out of his Impala and walked past two police cars and a crime-scene unit van to the front of the four-story concrete-block-stucco tenement. A couple of uniforms were holding the perimeter, looking uneasy, as cops always did in Overtown in the hot time, and beyond them a small crowd of the curious had gathered. Overtown is an area of Miami occupied by low-income African-Americans. If you are a tourist coming from the airport on your way to the sun and fun of Miami Beach and you mistakenly turn off the airport freeway and you realize your mistake and try to backtrack, then Overtown is the area you backtrack through. Every couple of seasons some tourist does this and comes to a bad end.

Jimmy Paz, in fact, had recently been involved in one of these unhappy events, a Japanese couple yanked from their car, the woman raped and brutalized, the man shot. He had cleared the case in twenty-four hours, in the time-honored fashion of hanging around the ‘hood and asking questions and keeping his eyes open until the morons who did the thing tried to buy a set of speakers with Ishiguro Hideki’s Visa card. There was even a little shoot-out, although the mope had only been wounded and nobody got on Paz’s case because he, too, was black and so, under the peculiar rules of American police practice, he had a license to shoot down citizens of whatever color with only nonhysterical investigation to follow. Even more so, in his case, because he was also of Cuban extraction, which accounted for the wit of the bystanders here, shouting, “Yo, spigger!”

Paz ignored this and kept his face neutral (a practiced skill) and made a show of checking his appearance in the car window. Paz was a stocky, muscular man of thirty-two, the color of coco matting, with a smooth round head, on which the hair had been cropped almost to the skin. His ears were small and neat and his eyes, set in lanceolate sockets, were large, intelligent, warm brown in color, but not warm at all. The roundness of his head and these eyes and the general flatness of his features gave him a feline look. This was intensified when he grinned, the bright small teeth startling against the tan of his skin.

He wore a Hugo Boss linen jacket, black Ermenegildo Zegna slacks, a short-sleeved cotton shirt in tiny black checks, and a knit navy tie, open at the neck. On his feet he wore three-hundred-dollar Lorenzo Banfi suede shoes. Paz, in other words, dressed like a cop who took bribes. But he did not take bribes. He was unmarried and undivorced and lived rent-free in a building owned by his mother. By so dressing, however, he managed to piss off both the considerable number of his MPD confreres who did take bribes and those who remained straight; which was the point.

Paz took a tube of Vicks VapoRub out of his jacket pocket as he entered the building and ran a bead around the interior of each nostril. This was an old cop trick designed to cover the stench of death, but it also helped with the background stink of the building. This had exterior stairways leading to narrow, open walks guarded by low concrete walls topped by a steel pipe. Painted a fecal brown, it had the architectural charm of a public lavatory, perhaps one reason why the entrance and stairs had been used as one. Paz felt, as he usually did when entering one of these dwellings, a blast of strong emotion?rage mixed with shame and pity?and waited until it subsided, when he became once again pure cop, strapped into that invulnerable persona, like a pilot in an F-18. He would have had to eat handfuls of Valium to otherwise create that much emotional armor. He enjoyed the pay and benefits, but, really, the armor was why he had become a policeman.

The patrolman at the door of the victim’s apartment, a fat-faced fellow named Gomez, was slouched against the wall sniffing and clearing his throat, which suggested that he had also checked out the interior scene. The armpits of his white uniform shirt were sodden and he wiped with the back of his hand at the fine oily sweat on his forehead as Paz approached. Paz was famous in the Miami PD for not sweating. During his time in uniform, he had once chased a street robber for six blocks down Flagler Street, on a day when the asphalt had been softened to something like taffy, and grabbed the kid, and brought him in, maintaining a bone-dry face, and with the press still in his shirt. This was another thing against him from the point of view of Gomez, the first thing being his color and his features and the fact that, although possessing such a color and such features, he was yet undeniably Cuban. Paz was, technically, a mulatto, and technically, so was Gomez, but Paz was clearly on the black side of the line and Gomez was on the white, like some 98 percent of the Cubans who had fled Castro for America, and therein lay the agony of Jimmy Paz’s life. He paused to pass some of it on to Gomez.

“Hey, Gomez, how you doing?” Paz asked, in Spanish.

“I’m okay, Paz,” said Gomez, responding pointedly in English.

“You don’t look okay, man, you look like shit. You look like you want to puke,” said Paz.

“I said, I’m okay.”

“Hey, you want to puke over the rail, go ahead.” Paz indicated the open side of the passage. “There’s just a bunch of niggers down there. You puke on them, hell, it’s just another day in Overtown.”

“Fuck you,” said Gomez in English.

Paz shrugged, said, “No habla ingles, senor,” and walked into the apartment. It was hot and it stank with a stink so forty-weight-crankcase-oil heavy that it seemed to drag the lungs down into the belly. The temperature had been in the nineties, cooking the carnage in the airless apartment, which would have been bad enough, but this was something else. The agents of decay and dissolution must have been helped by some elaborate butchery.

Just inside the door, Paz opened his briefcase, removed a pair of latex gloves, and put them on. He could hear noises and see strobes going off in the rear as the crime-scene crew did their work. They had already finished in here, the fingerprint powder strewn liberally about. A moment to look around, then, before he dived in.

Paz saw a small, low-ceilinged room, with walls painted a dingy yellow and the floor covered with institutional brown linoleum, worn to hairy dullness along the routes of heavy traffic. It was furnished with a blue velvet couch, relatively new, an older vinyl-covered armchair, maroon in color and cracked along the back cushion, several folding tin tables printed with a floral design, and a shiny twenty-eight-inch color TV, facing the couch and the chair. On the floor was a five-by-nine shag rug, striped to mimic a zebra’s coat. Someone had spilled something brown on it?a soda or coffee. On one wall, above a worn wicker credenza painted yellow as street lines, hung a large velour cloth illustrating several Africans hunting a lion with spears. On the other wall were two African masks, mass-produced flimsy things that were on sale in local shops: a stylized face with slanted eyes and a stylized antelope. On the same wall were family portraits in cheap fake-gilt frames. A group of respectable-looking people dressed for church; a couple of school portraits of kids, smiling hopefully; two graduation pictures, one boy, one girl, clearly brother and sister; and one formal portrait of a middle-aged woman with deep-set eyes and a glossy flip to her hair. All the people in the pictures were black. The wall and the pictures were speckled with little dots of red-brown, as if someone had goosed a can of spray paint to test the nozzle. There was one brad sticking out of the wall with nothing hanging from it, and a rectangular area of clear wall with no spots, obviously a place where a picture had hung.

A crime-scene technician came into the room lugging a fat carryall, waved to Paz, and departed. A few seconds later came another CSU guy with a camera. Paz said, “Hey, Gary, did anyone take a picture off that wall? Where the nail is?”