Night Of The Jaguar

Thirteen

The restaurant Guantanamera did not collapse when Jimmy Paz announced that he was leaving its kitchen to pursue his father’s killer, which discovery made him feel both less guilty and more miserable: an even split, he thought, or maybe a little better than even, since his mother had been telling him since early adulthood that absent his daily help, ruin faced the family Paz. In the event, Mrs. Paz made a few calls and came up with Raul, a steady man of middle age who not only knew how to grill meat but also followed Mrs. Paz’s instructions to the last tomato, and was not interested in concocting outlandish dishes that had no place in a traditional Cuban restaurant.

Lola was mildly encouraging. It would do him good to get out from under Mom, was the doctor’s opinion, and maybe he’d get used to it. After playing cop for a while, maybe he could think about going back to school. It wasn’t too late: just look at her. Indeed, look at her: she went to work, came home, ate briefly, and then went to sleep exhausted. She had a glazed, frightened look and blamed it on various work-related stresses, although she hadn’t looked like that in her intern year, when the stresses were far greater, and there had been a lot more kidding and sex back then, too. He had a pretty good idea what was going on by now, he could hear her thumping around the house in the middle of the night and he could tell by the pill bottles in their medicine cabinet that she was taking some fairly serious stuff. He wondered if she was an actual addict yet. It happened to docs a lot, he knew, but he’d never figured Lola for the type. So that was another thing on his list, which he decided to cross off before he left the house. Feeling stupid and disloyal he went into the bedroom and plucked a tuft of blond hair from Lola’s hairbrush and in the girl’s bedroom plucked a few darker hairs from hers.

Securing these items in separate envelopes, he turned to something he had more confidence in. He settled himself in a comfortable chair with a fresh cup of coffee and called a woman named Doris Taylor at theMiami Herald. Taylor had been covering crime for theHerald since (according to her) before the invention of gunpowder, and had waxed fat on Jimmy Paz’s exploits in pursuit of the infamous Voodoo Killer. She was delighted to hear he was, in a manner of speaking, back on the street and was elaborately forthcoming with what she knew about the Miami Ripper, as she now called him or it, asking only to be leaked when he had something new. Thus prepared, Paz called Tito Morales and had him set up a meeting with Major Oliphant to discuss the Calderón murder and how Jimmy Paz could help with their investigation.

The meeting was set up for that very day. Paz dressed in one of his old detective suits, and polished up a pair of four-hundred-dollar shoes and arrived at police headquarters looking very much as he had when he’d walked off the job seven years ago. Oliphant was all smiles until it turned out that Jimmy Paz did not just want to help with the investigation. He wanted to investigate.

The Major scowled at this and said, “This is because he was yourfather?” He had just learned this interesting fact from Paz’s own lips.

“More or less,” said Paz. “More, really. My mother and my half sister wanted me to, so here I am.”

“You know, it would’ve been really cool if you’d told me about this family connection the last time we talked.”

Paz shrugged. “It wasn’t something I was proud of. I kept it pretty close. Tito didn’t know either.” Morales confirmed this with a sour grunt and a nod.

“And now,” said Oliphant, “you want to…what, be a freelance cop on this thing?”

“No. I’ll work with Tito. Under Tito, really; I mean he’s got the badge and the gun. It’s nothing unusual. The department hires consultants all the time.”

“Not to catch killers, we don’t. We like to keep that in the immediate family. So, just for the sake of argument, how do you see this so-called consultancy playing out?”

“Well, the first thing is, I have to see the file on the Fuentes case. Tito can fill me in on whatever he’s done since the day of. Then you’ll have to call the sheriff and get me into the Calderón file and clear Matt Finnegan to talk with me.”

“Oh, I’m really going to enjoythat conversation.” Oliphant held his hand up to his head in the phone-call gesture. “Say, Frank? I got Calderón’s kid here, we’d sort of like you to help him track down his daddy’s killer. No, he’s not a cop, he’s a cook, but we here at the Miami PD always like to help out anyone on a personal vendetta…”

Paz inclined his head and smiled. “I know you’d be more subtle than that, Doug.”

“The answer is still no.”

“That’s funny because the two of you were just a while ago all over my ass asking for help and now I want to go full-time on the thing and what do I get? Stonewall. Whereas, if I can speak without offense, neither of these investigations is going anywhere.”

“Who told you that?” asked Oliphant, with a bristle.

“Oh, you know-around. There are plenty of people in this town who make it their business to know what the cops are up to, and back when I was a famous police hero and the savior of the community, I got to know most of them.”

“You’ve been talking to the press,” said Oliphant. He made it an accusation, something like molesting a minor.

“Yeah. Look, the fact of the matter is I’m going to do this, and I’d like to work with you guys and not against you. If not, there are other investigative resources in the city. What you don’t want and what the sheriff doesn’t want is to read all about how I found this guy while you all were standing around looking into the middle distance.”

There was the usual staring contest after this remark, which Paz let the Major win. Who then remarked, “You know, I always thought you were a modest kind of guy, Jimmy. Unless being a cook has vastly increased your criminological skills. Or unless you know something you’re not telling us, in which case you’d be obstructing an investigation, which you might recall is a felony in this state.”

Paz nodded and grinned. “Okay, I threatened you and you threatened me back and we’re even, so could we chuck this horseshit and get off the dime here? Am I blowing my trumpet a little? Yeah, guilty. But let’s review for a second-you got two rich white Cuban guys ripped to shreds, you got claw marks, you got jaguar tracks, you don’t have a lead that’s worth a shit, except for some literal shit, and you got cannibalism, or something-ibalism. It adds up to weird and uncanny, and it so happens that when it comes to weird and uncanny in the Greater Miami Metropolitan area, I am The Man. And cross my heart and hope to die, I don’t know anything about these cases that every newsie in town doesn’t know already. Nothing against Tito here or your guys or Finnegan, but you know and I know that there is such a thing as instinct and flair. There is stuff that I’ll catch that other guys won’t, not because I’m a great genius or anything, but there isn’t a lot of experience around town with off-the-wall cases like these, and I got most of it.”

Oliphant fiddled with his coffee cup, seeming to be fascinated by the information on it, which wasFOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON CHILD PORNOGRAPHY,PHILADELPHIA 2001. It was a gesture familiar to Paz. The man was doubtful but he was about to roll right.

“That would be the consultancy, then, expert on weird and uncanny criminal behavior?”

“That’s us,” said Paz. “No job too small.”

Oliphant said, “I’ll think of something more bureaucratic after I take a Gelusil.” He turned to Morales. “Detective Morales. Show this guy the files and fill him in. I’ll call Sheriff McKay and call in some chips and I’ll let you know when it’s clear to go over to their shop. Meanwhile, I expect you to stay close to Mr. Paz at all times as he consults. I expect you to cup his scrotum in your hands as he consults. I expect you to be there when he awakes and to tuck him into bed at night. You’re off of all other cases. Am I making myself clear?”

“Yes, sir,” said Morales, straightening a little in his chair.

“And you’re clear, too, Jimmy? Straight pool, use our playbook, and no leaking to your slimeball pals up there by the bay.”

“Yes, sir,” said Paz. “But could you explain to Detective Morales that the part about my scrotum was just a figure of speech?”

“Get the fuck out of my office, the both of you,” said Oliphant in a reasonably friendly manner, considering the circumstances.

The Hurtado organization had rented a whole floor of a condominium on Fisher Island, convenient to the homes of the two surviving Consuelistas. Hurtado and El Silencio had one apartment to themselves and the dozen or so gangsters he had brought along shared the others. They had an adequate number of cars and a couple of fast boats. The only thing they lacked was a target. They watched; nothing happened. Hurtado had limited patience. This operation was important, to be sure, but not important enough to risk being out of Cali for an extended time. Therefore, after some days of stewing, Hurtado sent his enforcer out with Prudencio Martínez and a couple of boys to see what he could find.

Hurtado was enjoying a late-afternoon drink poolside at the condo when the shadow of El Silencio fell across him.

“Anything?” he asked.

“Everything,” said El Silencio. He pulled up a lounger and looked at the girl in the thong bikini who was keeping his employer company. The girl went away without a word. Leaning close so that Hurtado could catch his whisper, he elaborated. “The kid in the painted van is the same kid who was in Fuentes’s office. Fuentes’s secretary remembered his hair. Also he had a shirt with the same sign that was all over the van. Martínez described it and she said she remembered.”

Hurtado said, “It seems a little too easy. You know, Ramon, people remember things that didn’t happen sometimes when you talk to them. It’s part of your charm.”

El Silencio shrugged. “I didn’t touch her. She talked to him.”

“Fine. So what does that get us? Who are these people and where do we find them?”

In answer, El Silencio passed his boss a small brochure.

“What’s this?”

“We joined the Florida Audubon Society. A hundred-dollar contribution, the woman wouldn’t shut up. There’s a list of local nature clubs on the back. With the logos. I marked the one that the boys spotted on that VW van.”

Hurtado flipped the brochure over. “Forest Planet Alliance? What is this, environmentalists?”

“That’s what it looks like, but who knows what they really are? There’s something else. Look at this.” He handed Hurtado a color photograph of a young woman with blond-streaked hair leaving the doorway of Felipe Ibanez’s mansion and said, “We’ve been taking pictures of everyone who goes in and out of both houses. This is Ibanez’s granddaughter, a woman named Evangelista Vargos. You see her shirt?”

“That’s interesting. Another connection, the girl belongs to the same group. And…?”

“Ibanez wants to knock off his partners. He knows this organization from his granddaughter-maybe he even set it up. The bitch is some kind of spy, say. He figures we’ll look into these killings, we’ll think maybe someone is trying to get a piece of the Puxto deal, someone from home, but this way he can lay it off on these Americans. The environmentalists are all of a sudden killing people who piss them off.”

Hurtado shook his head. “That doesn’t explain the Indian, though. And these American kids, I can’t see them doing these kinds of things to Fuentes and Calderón, not to mention getting past our boys and taking out Rafael. And Ibanez or whoever would know we’d never go for the idea that this came out of some nature lover club. No, what I think is that Ibanez brought a bunch of toughIndios up from somewhere as muscle and he’s just parking them with these Americanpendejos. Americans love the fuckingIndios, and why should they make a connection? So he gets cover and a team of killers at the same time. That has to be it.”

“He must think we’re stupid,” said the other. “So…we take them out? I mean Ibanez and the girl.”

“No, there’s plenty of time for that. And we need Ibanez to run the timber and transport operations. For the time being. What we need to do is find thoseIndios. Take some people and check out this”-he consulted the card-“Forest Planet Alliance. See what they have, who’s associated, and so on. Low-key, Ramon. I don’t want blood on the ceiling yet, understand? Speaking of that, did you get that garage we talked about?”

“Yeah. No problem. It’s south of here, off the highway, very quiet.”

“Good man. And the machinery is there? If we need it.”

El Silencio nodded, rose from his chair and started to leave. “And Ramon?” Hurtado added, “Send the girl back.”

“Here’s the file,” said Morales, dropping two heavy cardboard folders with a thump on his desk in the homicide squad bay. “Knock yourself out.”

“You’re pissed at me, right?” said Paz, catching the other man’s tone.

“At the prima donna act, yeah. I come to you like a pal, I ask for help, and I get shit, and now you set up this…situation, where I got my boss’s boss with his nose up my ass, and I got no fucking idea where you’re going with this thing. And it would’ve been nice if I’d fuckingknown about you and Calderón beforehand, instead of looking like a complete and total asshole in there. I mean, I was your fuckingpartner… ”

“Right, and I’m sorry. I apologize. And the reason I changed my mind is because when Calderón got it, it became a family thing. You don’t think I was blindsided, too? You’re a Cuban, you know how it works.”

“Right, and if my father got whacked, I would be the absolutely last person allowed on the case. But exceptions get made for Jimmy Paz.”

“That’s right, Tito. They do. Meanwhile, I am a fucking supernumerary mugwump on this case and when it clears, you and you alone will pick up the glory.”

“Assuming it clears,” said Morales, trying to keep a grin from forming. “A supernumerary mugwump, huh? You’re a piece of work, Paz.”

“I love you, too,” said Paz. “Let me read this shit, okay? It doesn’t look like it’ll take that long.”

Nor did it. Paz already knew the broad outlines on the Fuentes killing, but it was useful to study the forensic reports and the actual photographs taken at the scene. And there were details Morales had not shared when he’d discussed the case in Paz’s restaurant the previous month. They had found claw marks on the wooden railing of the balcony from which Fuentes had been hurled. They had calculated the weight of whatever had made the paw marks in Fuentes’s garden-a little over 453 pounds, and this was a puzzle. There was a report from the Metrozoo, from a Dr. Morita, attesting that although the cast of the paw print shown to him was undoubtedly that ofPanthera onca, it was nearly 50 percent too large, nor had a jaguar of such a size ever been recorded by science: the largest males rarely topped 300 pounds. Dr. M. expressed keen interest in studying the beast should they ever secure it. I bet, thought Paz as he read this and turned to the interviews with the staff at the Consuela Company offices-Fuentes’s secretary, Elvira Tuero, and the three building security men. The police had constructed Identi-Kit likenesses of both men. One was a young kid, good-looking in a wispy way, with a scraggily beard and a nest of blond dreadlocks. The other was the famous Indian.

Paz studied this one rather more closely. Identi-Kit photographs all have a certain sameness about them and serve mainly to ensure that the cops don’t pick up someone of a different sex or race from that of the suspect, but this one caused a little chill in Paz’s belly. Like many detectives, Paz was extremely good on faces. He could summon up a fair picture of nearly everyone he had ever met, and while at the police academy had spent a good deal of time with the Identi-Kit reproducing faces from brief looks at photos of people on the faculty. He could do movie stars, too, to the amazement of staff and students both. The kit had recorded a man of uncertain age, but no longer young, with the broad mouth, high cheekbones, dark eyes, and bowl hairdo of a Central or South American Indian.

What caused the chill was Paz’s certain knowledge that he had seen this particular Central or South American Indian before. It annoyed him exceedingly that he could not immediately determine where, but this he put down to rustiness. One item he had expected was missing. Although the witnesses had all stated that the young white male had been wearing a T-shirt with a logo on it, no one had tried to reconstruct it or find out what it represented.

Morales returned, carrying a couple of paper cups of Cuban coffee, and said, “Oliphant said it’s okay to see Finnegan.”

“Great. What about this logo on the white kid’s shirt?”

“What about it? Kids wear all kinds of shit on their T-shirts-rock bands, concert tours, college teams…”

“True, but according to the secretary, this office invasion they pulled was a political action about the environment. The guy’s in an organization, it stands to reason he’s going to wear his organization’s logo, right? This Tuero woman, the secretary, said he was yelling about something called”-Paz leafed through a report-“the Puxto, whatever that is.”

“It’s like a game preserve in Colombia. The kid thought Consuela was going to cut it down.”

“Are they?”

“Not according to Felipe Ibanez and Cayo Garza. And your father. They got nothing going on down there. They said.”

“That’s not in the file. Or did I miss something?”

“It’s a lead that didn’t pan.” Morales caught Paz’s dark look and said, “I should have put it in the file, I know, I know, but it just didn’t figure that some tree hugger would chop a man up for some, I don’t know, failure of conservation. It didn’t fit.”

“You thought it was a coincidence that Fuentes had a screaming fight in his office the day before he got killed?”

“Since Calderón got it, I do,” said Morales, somewhat more aggressively. Paz realized that the man did not like being cross-examined by a civilian at his own desk, never mind that the civilian had once been a cop who’d got him into the detectives in the first place. Unfortunately, there was no help for this; if Morales had screwed up, and he had, he would just have to take his lumps.

Paz drank some of his coffee. “This is the Colombian gangster theory?”

“Where did you hear about it?”

“My sister. Finnegan told her, and somebody over in the county must have leaked it because Doris Taylor knew about it, too. What’s the basis?”

“Well, it’s obvious. Two identical killings of people associated with business in Colombia. When we just had Fuentes, it could have been anything, a cult, a random maniac. Weird and uncanny. With two, there’s a connection, plus the vandalization and jaguar shit incidents at all four of the Consuela principals’ houses. Someone is saying, you fucked with us and now you’re going to die. And the Colombians like to get fancy, it’s well known.”

“Yeah, I heard. So what I’m picking up here, Tito, is you think this is a lot simpler than what Oliphant thinks, that all the weirdness is like camouflage for a piece ofcolombianismo.”

“That’s how it’s looking. And that’s how it’s going to look up at the county.”

“I assume there’s people watching the other two guys, Garza and Ibanez.”

“Right. They live in the Beach, so the county’s covering that.”

“Okay, I’m done here. Let’s go over and see what Metro has to say for itself.”

They drove over in Morales’s unmarked Chevrolet, with Paz in the passenger seat.

“Just like old times,” Paz remarked.

“Not really,” said Morales, and they drove the rest of the way in morose silence.

Finnegan, as predicted, was not happy to see them, nor was Ramirez, his partner. The four men sat in a windowless interrogation room in the sheriff’s headquarters in Doral, northwest of the city of Miami, a large modern building that looked like an airport terminal, except not as cozy. Finnegan dispensed with the small talk, saying, “Let me make a couple of things clear. I’ve been ordered to cooperate and I’m cooperating.” He indicated a pile of folders and a large cardboard carton on the table. “There’s the file on the Calderón killing. I understand he was your father.”

“That’s right,” said Paz.

“Well, it’s against county policy for an investigator to work on a case where a member of his immediate family is the victim. I don’t understand what made the sheriff go along with this horseshit.”

“Just covering his ass, I guess,” said Paz politely. “I know you’re busy and we’ll try not to take up a lot of your time.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” said Ramirez, not sounding the least bit sorry.

Paz gave him the kind of look you give a farting drunk and turned back to Finnegan. “It’ll take me a couple of hours to go through this stuff. I’d like to see both of you after I’m done.”

“If we’re free,” said Finnegan. The two county detectives got up and went out of the room. Ramirez was singing “That Old Black Magic” as he left.

“You read this stuff yet, Tito?”

“No, but Finnegan briefed me on what they had.”

“Yeah, the county doesn’t love it when we get involved with them on account of they’re so professional and we’re so corrupt.”

“I’mso corrupt,” Morales corrected.

“My mistake. Why don’t you take advantage of this special situation and read this, too. I bet there’s all kinds of shit in here he didn’t tell you about.”

The two men read quietly together after that. Paz wrote notes to himself in a pocket notebook. Morales just read. Paz noted that Morales was a quicker reader, or perhaps just less thorough.

“What do you think?” Paz asked when they were both done.

“It’s consistent with the theory that this is a Colombian mob thing.”

“Anything is consistent with any theory if you pick and choose your evidence right. But for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right. Why the stuff with the jaguar?”

Morales shrugged and made a dismissive gesture. “Hey, we don’t know dick about these people. Maybe it’s a trademark. Some gangs cut the throat and pull the tongue through the hole, some gangs cut the guy’s pecker off and stick it in his mouth. This gang chops them up and takes body parts, makes it look like they’ve been killed by a jaguar. I mean they’re wack-job Colombians, who the fuck can tell why they do anything?”

“Oh, so you think there’s no actual jaguar?”

“Not really. They could’ve made those tracks with a stick and a cast of a jaguar foot.”

“And the same with the claw marks.”

“Right.”

“And the damage to the vics was done with some kind of blade.”

“Could have been, but-”

“And the same with jumping up fifteen feet into Calderón’s window, and then jumping over a ten-foot hedge after he did the job.”

“Maybe the guy’s a pro, he’s got mountaineer training.”

“That’s good, Tito, a mountaineering Colombian pseudo-jaguar assassin. Who, armed only with some kind of blade, scales a fifteen-foot blank wall, opens a window catch while hanging on to this blank wall, takes out Calderón, who’s armed and expecting trouble, takes out a Colombianchutero, who’s got a weapon out and gets off at least one shot, escapes from a shitload of other similarly armedchuteros, and nobody catches sight of him, because there was no more gunplay that night, even though your usual person of that type is inclined to expend many rounds with small provocation. Sounds like more of a ninja mountaineering Colombian pseudo-jaguar assassin, if you ask me. On the other hand, we do know two important things about him.”

“What?”

“Well, one, he leaves fingerprints. The county picked up a nice set off the iron gate at the house next door, where the guy escaped. No matches with anyone they could find, but never mind that. The guy pulls off the caper of the year but forgets about wearing gloves. Thus asloppy ninja mountaineering Colombian pseudo-jaguar assassin.”

“Okay, so what’syour theory?”

“You’re not going to ask me what the other thing is?”

Morales took a deep breath. “You know, Jimmy, until just now I don’t think I ever got why every fucking detective in the Miami PD hated your guts.”

“And now you can join the crowd,” said Paz coolly. But he had to reflect on his recent observation that he had spent over two hours in a squad bay among men he had worked with for over ten years and not one had acknowledged his presence with a word or even a friendly nod. So he added, “I’m sorry, Tito. I’m a wiseass. I admit it. But those two bozos just now browned me off and I’m taking it out on you.”

“You’re forgiven,” said Morales, “and now I’m going to play the sucker: what was the other thing?”

“It was that the county lab did the same analysis on their paw print that you all did on the one at the Fuentes scene, to calculate the weight of whatever made it. And they got a figure within a pound of the first one, four hundred fifty-three point two pounds. That speaks seriously against your model-paw-on-a-stick theory.”

“Why? They could’ve had two guys stepping on a plate or something.”

“Oh, now it’s two guys, two huge fucking guys that nobody saw? I know, theythrew the sloppy ninja pseudo-jaguar assassin through the window and over the hedge and then they just melted away.”

“So what’re you saying, we’re back to the trained cat?”

“No, I’m baffled, too.”

Morales raised his eyes to heaven and crossed himself. “Oh, thank you, Jesus, I’m not a total moron.”

“Fuck!” said Paz. “I hate this shit!”

“What?”

“There’s other stuff, Tito, and I’m going to tell you and I want it to stay between the two of us. Agreed?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“Okay, starting about a month ago, me and Amelia have been having dreams almost every night about a big spotted cat, starting about the time of the Fuentes murder, but before you came to see me. I think Lola’s been having the same kind of dreams, but she won’t say anything about it to me. But she’s a wreck, not sleeping, popping all kinds of pills. Also, I went to my mother’s santero and he threw Ifa for Amelia. You know what that is?”

“Sure, Santería fortune-telling.”

“Right, and he got all upset and said Amelia was in danger from some kind of beast, a carnivore like a lion. And then I gave her myenkangue and her dreams stopped, but mine haven’t and Lola’s probably…” and then Paz stopped talking and stared at nothing for a long moment, and then banged his hand down hard on the table.

“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 Calderón told me that much. But these guys are trying toprotect the Cubans. They got nothing to do with killing them. And the idea that there’s arival 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 Calderón, and learned that the Consuela Holdings office was tem porarily 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 ilé, 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 guyknew 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, señor?” 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 Calderón. 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 that old Dad was running what looks to be a money Laundromat out of his construction business.”

“The plot thickens,” said Morales. “These guys were skimming, and the Colombians whacked them.”

Paz shook his head vigorously. “No, no, try to follow me here, Tito, because it’s important. The Colombians are involved, but not in the two murders. It’s the Indian who’s doing the murders. The Colombians are trying to nail the Indian.”

“How can you know that?”

“I don’tknow it, Tito. It’s my operating theory. It’s part of my flair, why you guys wanted me involved. The Indian is part of the structure of weirdness, and Colombian mobsters are not. They’re probably as confused as Finnegan.”

“What? Jimmy, give me a break! You tossed out my ninja assassin, and now you tell me some little guy with a Three Stooges haircut got in there and did all that damage? How do you figure that?”

“If I tell you, you’ll say I’m nuts.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“The little guy knows how to turn himself into a four-hundred-pound jaguar and back again.”

Morales stared at Paz, laughed out loud, stared again when Paz didn’t join in the laugh, saw something in Paz’s eyes he had not seen before, something deeply disturbing, and said, “That’s nuts.”

“See? I told you you’d say that,” said Paz with a laugh. “Relax, I’m just jerking your chain. But I had you for a second there, didn’t I?”

“Fuck you, Paz,” said Morales glumly. “So why are the bad guys after the Indian? And how did he do the murders? Or was that a joke, too?”

“I don’t know how he did it yet, but that’s the way it has to be. Tito, I have seen, with my own two eyes, a man with a certain kind of training walk away from a whole SWAT team and out of a locked police car containing two veteran police officers, me being one of them. This Indian could be that kind of guy, you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Deeply weird,” said Morales.

“You got it, and the truth will emerge in its own good time. Meanwhile, we need to do two things right away. You have to go by the Florida Defenders of the Environment and find out what local group uses a logo like that and get whatever information they have on it, personnel, activities, location. And you have to drop me off at my mom’s place. I need to talk to her.”

“We’re supposed to stick together, Jimmy.”

“Yeah, but I’m with my mother,” Paz replied. “How much trouble can I get into? Come on, Tito, we got to play catch-up. Thosechuteros could wipe out that whole organization and then we’ll never find the Indian.”

Grumbling, Morales put the car in gear and headed toward Eighth Street and the restaurant. “They could take out the Indian, too,” he said. “Then we could all go home.”

“I don’t think so, man. I don’t think it’s going to be so easy to take out the Indian, not for them and not for us. That’s what I need to talk to my mom about.”