Valley of Bones

Thirteen

Paz got his shield back a week after the shooting, not a record for a shooting panel, but still pretty fast. Paz detected the hand of Major Oliphant in this and wondered whether he finally had a rabbi in the department, also whether he liked this or not. Lieutenant Posada, from whom he collected his shield and his service weapon that morning, was his usual morose self. He slid the items across his desk with the elan of a convenience-store clerk delivering a package of chewing gum, together with the information that the major wants to see you. Paz had never done a bad deed to Posada and didn’t know why the head of the assault and homicide unit disliked him. It could have been mere race prejudice, or the natural enmity of some dull people for some smart ones, or something more political. It did not keep Paz up nights. Tito Morales was standing in the squad bay when Paz left Posada’s office, and he got a thumbs-up and a grin from his partner, but not from any of the other detectives.

Oliphant poured him a ritual cup of coffee and sat him in a comfortable side chair. Paz noted that his cup was marked with the seal of the FBI Academy at Quantico; perhaps meaningful, perhaps not.

After the shortest possible interval of pleasantries, Oliphant said, “So, does it connect up?”

Paz was pleased with the shorthand. His old partner used to do that too, jump over the details and express the thought that two equally smart cops ought to have been thinking at a particular juncture. Cletis would say stuff like “Where was the key?” and Paz would almost always know what key and where the key should have been, even though no one had mentioned a key before. He said, “It has to, sir. Dodo Cortez got no business burglarizing a South Miami home with a gun in his pants. He was a shooter, basically, and more than that, he worked for Ignacio Hoffmann, who also employed our suspect’s current employer, Jack Wilson.”

“Hoffmann?”

Paz recalled that Oliphant was still with the Bureau when Ignacio had his non-day in court, so he explained who Ignacio Hoffmann was, the dope running, the bail jumping.

“Interesting,” said Oliphant, “but of course I wasn’t thinking of that aspect.”

“No, it’s an extra. The real connection is between our original killing and someone burglarizing the home of Emmylou Dideroff’s psychologist. So I’m thinking, what’s the prize? Why kill a guy, why burglarize a shrink? The answer has to be information. Someone wants to know something they think our suspect knows and they’re willing to use violence to get it.”

“You’re saying they pressured the victim to tell something, it went too far and they killed him?”

“Maybe, but I have a feeling al-Muwalid was a rival for the same information. I’ve gone over my notes and talked to my partner and I think we had him wrong. He was hiring muscle around town and we assumed that he wanted to protect himself. What if he was hiring them to look for Emmylou? The oil guy he met, Zubrom, actually told us he was looking for someone, and I ignored it because I was only thinking about dangerto Muwalid, not that he might be a danger to someone else. I mean,he was the one who got whacked. So the odds are that whoever killed Muwalid sent Dodo Cortez to find whatever it was Emmylou might have told her therapist.”

“I thought this Dideroff woman killed Muwalid.”

“That’s the official position.”

“But you no longer believe it.”

“I’m not sure what I believe, Major. It all depends on who Emmylou D. really is. People think she knows something, but does she know she knows it? Is she a player playing cagey? Or is she a victim?”

“What does she say in that confession she’s writing?”

“Not much. A lot of childhood memories and religion. We’re awaiting the later installments.”

Oliphant swiveled for a moment and sipped thoughtfully from his own FBI mug. “It doesn’t work.”

“I know,” Paz admitted. “The hole in it is that if they thought Emmylou knew something, why didn’t they just snatch her up and put the irons to her? Why all this rigmarole with framing her for Muwalid and going after the confession? Well, one possibility is she doesn’t know what she knows. She’s already been tortured once. Maybe that was their first shot at trying to get it.”

“Tortured?”

“Yeah, the docs say she’s got recent dislocations in both shoulders and whipping scars on her back and soles of her feet. Burns too. So maybe they think that in a situation she feels is safe, with a therapist who’s got no interest in any secrets, she’ll let something slip.”

“It’s plausible,” said Oliphant. “Barely. So…next move?”

Paz had prepared for this question, of course, and he answered fluently, although with more confidence than he actually felt. Since the early passages of this affair he had caught glimpses of a brewing chaos, weirdness, conspiracy in high places, international crap, the stench of Africa again. It was important to have a tale to cling to, as children do, and now he spun it out.

“Basic fact: Emmylou Dideroff, if she acted at all didn’t act alone…”

“Because of the missing cell phone.”

“Right. There’s no cell phone. Next fact: my partner talked to the late Dodo’s associates. About a week before the murder Dodo got a phone call that excited him. Apparently Dodo has not had an organizational home since the Hoffmann gang went down, but now he’s talking about steady work. He was seen a couple of times by two different people getting into and out of a silver Lexus with a big Anglo guy at the wheel, always at night. According to the regulars at the lounge he hung out in, Dodo’s talking big, he’s got more money to spend.”

“You’re starting to like him for the hit on the Arab.”

“And Jack Wilson, who drives a silver Lexus. Look, Wilson knew that Emmylou was in the vicinity of a particular machine shop at a particular time, because he sent her there. There’s a phone booth across the street from this machine shop. We know that Muwalid got a cell phone call in Zubrom’s office and he took off like a bullet after it. Maybe the call said something like we have your information, go to such and such phone booth and wait. That second call both shows him to Emmylou and sets up a meet in his hotel room. He goes there, followed by Emmylou. Emmylou parks the car and begins her search for Muwalid’s room. But Cortez already knows the room. He picks up the connecting rod from Emmylou’s truck, goes to Muwalid’s room, kills him, dumps him over, and leaves. Emmylou arrives and is waiting like a patsy when we walk in.”

“Or Emmylou and Wilson are in it together. Maybe she fingered Muwalid for Dodo.”

“Then why wouldn’t she take off?” Paz asked. “Why was she waiting there praying, or whatever?”

“A deeper game? She wanted to be locked up in a nuthouse for some reason?”

“That’s pretty deep. Although, given that it’s Emmylou, we can’t rule it out.”

“Get more facts,” said Oliphant.

“Fine. The main fact I need is, do you know anything about the guy who owns her houseboat, David Packer, the man of mystery?”

“Why would you think that?” A little glaring here, which Paz ignored.

“Because you were with the feds and the feds are involved in this in some way, unless you think it’s a coincidence that the guy who rented Emmylou her domicile has got the State Department covering up for him when a cop calls for information. I got the sense that there are calls whizzing back and forth between that phone there on your desk and Washington, D.C., and there’s a bunch of you watching me to see what I’ll turn up, like a bunch of kids watching an ant on a sidewalk, maybe poke it with a stick once in a while. Because if that’s the case then, with all due respect, sir, fuck it.”

They played eye games then for what seemed like a long while to Paz. He had been thinking about this aspect of the case, the week off duty had given him plenty of time to think, and about what Oliphant had said the last time they’d discussed it, and how unsatisfactory it had been even then. He had called David Packer a dozen times during that week and got his answering machine and left a message, but had not been called back. No big deal, it was not a crime to leave town, but still….

“Not whizzing,” said Oliphant, “I wouldn’t say whizzing. But I’ve gotten some calls. And made a few. And the fact is that you’re going to have to let me be the judge of what I can and can’t tell you, and the reason for that is that people I respect are feeding me information that they’ve got no legal right to release to me, they’re putting their jobs and pensions on the line.”

Oliphant leaned back in his chair, lacing his hands across his midsection, which to Paz looked about as soft as a steel-belted radial. “Let’s talk a little more about the intersection between national security and the work of the FBI. We’re interested in bad guys in that area just like we are in O.C., mail fraud, computer crime, and so on, and obviously the best way to penetrate the bad guys is to turn a bad guy. That’s how we got the Klan and the mob. Not so easy with terrorists, because the kind of terrorists we’re mainly interested in nowadays are pretty impenetrable by your average FBI-type person. So we look on the periphery. Terror cells need services like any other organized body. They need false IDs, they need money moved, they need transport and weapons and ammo. And there are, naturally, all-American scumbags who will supply this stuff for a price.”

“So you penetrate the scumbags.”

“We do. But you can see the problem. In order for your penetratee to work effectively, he has to continue with his scumbaggery, for which he now has effective immunity, because he’s been doubled. He keeps selling, let’s say, fake IDs, and even though he lets us know what he’s doing, we are still not going to pick up all the evildoers he’s selling to, because these guys are not dumb, they can figure out that if everybody who bought bad paper from old Charlie got busted, there must be something funny going on with old Charlie. And there you have the great conundrum: you’re licensing guys to commit criminal acts, in the hope that you can prevent even greater criminal acts. It’s inherently corrupting. Inherently.”

“So what do you do?”

“Well, it depends on whether you believe in our system,” said Oliphant. “If you believe that justice under law is essentially weak, then you’ll bend the law until it breaks. You’ll have killers and rapists and every kind of human garbage on the payroll of the United States. And you’ll stop some terror and some will take place anyway. If you believe that justice under law is inherently strong, then you won’t license criminals. You might use them or squeeze them but you won’t fucking protect their criminal acts. And the result of this is that you’ll stop some terror and some will take place anyway. Will you have more victims? Unclear. I tend to doubt it. You can stop ninety-nine percent of terror attempts just by taking your thumb out of your ass, like we could’ve stopped nine-eleven if we hadn’t been having turf wars and snoozing in our deck chairs. The rest of it is like lightning strikes or traffic fatalities, it’s part of life in any open society, get used to it, not that the attorney general is ever going to get up on the TV and say that. But if you play it straight, at least you won’t have blowback, you won’t have impunity, you won’t have the corruption of law enforcement.”

“This is why you left the Bureau,” said Paz; a statement, not a question.

Oliphant shot a hard look over, but Paz met it, and after a bit the man nodded. They were in a new country now. “A guy in New Jersey snuffed a teenager he was fucking and we gave him a pass because he was buying air tickets for some al-Qaeda types. Maybe coulda-been al-Qaeda types, I mean they didn’t even fucking know! This was a high-level decision, by the way.” He pointed to the ceiling. “Very high. I thought of blowing the whistle, but I decided that at the end of the day…at the end of the day I’m not a whistle-blower, not that I couldn’t respect someone who was, but it wasn’t me. So I handed in my papers instead. My sad story, now you know, and if I hear it from anyone else, I’ll make sure you spend the rest of your career guarding the concession stand at the Orange Bowl.”

A long uncomfortable silence followed this remark. “And yes, I am a fucking fanatic on this issue. And why?” Here he pointed to his face. “This. People like you and me, the law is all we got going for us. Corrupt as it is, unjust as it is, without the law we’d both still be chopping cotton.”

“Chopping sugarcane in my case,” said Paz.

“Chopping whatever, but not in a suit and tie in a nice office, with authority over white folks. No fucking way.”

“That was very inspiring, boss.”

“Fuck you, Paz,” said Oliphant without ill-humor. “I wasn’t trying to inspire you, I was trying to illustrate why I’ve been getting phone calls from pissed-off guys.”

Paz didn’t budge. “So who in the federal government is hiring bad actors? No, let me guess. David Packer?”

“The name came up. He was in Sudan, I hear. He was employed by SRPU. And now he’s here. And you are not to fuck with him.”

“Why not?”

Oliphant’s face took on a harder expression. “Two reasons. One is that I just told you not to and I’m the fucking commander of this organization. The other is if Packer yells to the people he reports to, all kinds of shit is going to hit the fan, and the helpful calls from Washington will dry up, and a big chunk of federal law enforcement will stop hunting bad guys and start looking for who leaked it. So follow up on Wilson, follow up on Cortez and your suspect. Find out who killed Muwalid and why. That’s your job. Go do it.”

It was a dismissal. Paz got up and left and flagged Morales from his desk in the squad bay. Out in the parking lot, Morales asked, “What did the major have to say?”

“He said you’re looking sharper since you got some decent suits. He likes the Fendi.”

“Really.”

Paz told him really. Morales said, “Holy shit.”

“My thoughts exactly,” said Paz, getting into an unmarked Chevrolet. “Let’s go see what Jack Wilson has to say for himself.”

But when they arrived at Wilson Brothers Marine they found not Jack but a smaller, stouter version, who greeted them at the door to the shop with an air of relief.

“That was fast,” he said. “I just called it in a couple of hours ago.”

“I’m sorry,” said Paz. “You’re…?”

“Frank Wilson. You’re here about the missing persons report, right?”

“Who’s missing?”

“Jack, my brother. You’re not from missing persons?”

“No, homicide,” said Paz.

“Oh my God!” said Wilson and paled beneath his tan.

It took them a few minutes in the little office to straighten it out. Jack Wilson had not been seen for nearly a week. His car was gone, he did not answer repeated pages or cell phone calls, he hadn’t deposited a couple of large checks made in payment for work. Frank, it turned out, was the technical guy, Jack took care of the business end, although he knew his way around a marine diesel. Frank seemed anxious to talk and they let him. He assumed the cops knew that Jack had worked on Cigarette boat engines for some shady characters and made no attempt to hide this, but he assured them that all that was in the past. No, there had been no large withdrawals of money from the company account. No, he hadn’t heard of anyone named Cortez nor did he recognize the photo they showed him. They left after half an hour of similarly fruitless questioning.

“That was a waste,” said Morales when they were back in the car.

“No it wasn’t,” said Paz. He got on the radio and made Jack Wilson a wanted man, giving the specifics on his vehicle. Then he said to Morales, “Jack Wilson took off right after Dodo Cortez showed up dead on the evening news. Probably not a coincidence. Assume he was running Dodo. A well-known hit man tries to steal a piece of evidence connected with our suspect, and that leads to the thought that maybe the suspect’s been framed, that the well-known hit man did it. He knew we’d ask around and pick up on the connection between him and Cortez. He tried to keep it dark but he didn’t bother to get an old beater for his meetings with Cortez, and a new silver Lexus is going to catch the eye in that neighborhood. Speaking of which, let’s take a look at Mrs. Dodo. You know the address, right?”

“Yeah, Second and Fifteenth. I told you I already talked to her. She’s uncooperative.”

“I’ll use charm,” said Paz. “Go.”

It was the kind of Miami neighborhood where the front lawns are used to park cars, meaning that the small houses are occupied by large numbers of recent immigrants, not necessarily in the same family. The small concrete-block-stucco house formerly occupied by Dodo Cortez had a patchy lawn with no cars, indicating a slight elevation in social status. Paz told Morales to wait at the front door while he looked in the windows to check out the grieving widow. From the side of the house he was able to see through partly open blinds into the living room, where a woman lay stretched out on a Bahama couch. She was dressed in a sleeveless orange blouse, a pair of black panties and one shoe, which hung like an ornament off her toes. The television was on, a Spanish soap it sounded like, but the woman was not watching it. Among the clutter on the nearby coffee table he saw a burning candle, several glassine bags, a bent spoon, and a hypodermic needle, all of which explained the woman’s stunned lassitude.

Paz went back to the street. He told Morales, “Give me two minutes and then pound on the door and yell ‘Police, open up!’ ” He then went around to the back of the house. It took very little time to wiggle a glass jalousie pane out of the rear door and pop the lock, and by the time Morales made his demonstration, he was moving through the kitchen and was in plenty of time to keep the woman from flushing her heroin down the toilet.

After a lot of noise and some weeping, the two cops had the woman settled down and handcuffed on the couch. She said her name was Rita and she didn’t know nothing, and hadn’t done nothing and they planted that dope and she wanted her lawyer. She looked about nineteen.

“I told you,” said Morales.

Paz smiled and spoke to the girl in Spanish, sitting down next to her on the couch, as if they were about to go on a date, the usual cop endearments, he wanted to help her out, he’d be happy to go away and leave her with her dope, provided she gave a little, helped them out, they were murder cops, not narcs, they could care less about her habit. And then he sketched out what would happen to her if not, the heroin looked like felony weight; maybe they could fatten up the bag, if not; the state’s attorney really wanted to clear this murder that her boyfriend had pulled off, and so did they, and so they would put herunder the jailhouse on the dope charges, if not. And it wasn’t like she was ratting Dodo, Dodo was dead on a tray in the county morgue and he didn’t give a shit, and so on in a calm voice in soft Spanish, like he was talking her into bed.

A long silence and then, “So what do you want to know? I don’t know shit about Dodo’s business, you know?”

“He ever mention a guy named Wilson?”

“Wilson? No, not that I heard.”

“How about Jack. Big guy, blond hair like a surfer, drives a silver Lexus?”

“Oh, yeah, Jack?him I know. He came by, picked up Dodo a couple of times.”

“Good. You want me to take the cuffs off?” She nodded, and he did. Some further questioning and it became clear that she was telling the truth. She could connect her boyfriend with Jack Wilson, but that was all.

Paz said, “Could we check out his stuff?”

She nodded glumly and led them to a bedroom, rubbing her wrists.

The room was small and paneled in cheap imitation white pine. It contained a bed, unmade, a dresser, a bedside table, a TV on a metal stand, a color reproduction of Jesus, framed, and a large closet with mirrored doors. The two cops searched the place carefully, going through the pockets of all the clothes and checking the undersides as well as the insides of the bureau drawers. They took their time; the woman got bored. She asked, “Can I go back and watch my program?”

“Yeah, go,” said Paz, and then, “Hey, wait: what’s this hole in the paneling from?”

“Oh, that’s from Dodo. He used to hit the wall when he got mad. He was going to get it fixed.”

Paz brought his face close to the wall, then took a penlight out of his pocket and shone it into the space between the walls. His arm disappeared into the void up to the shoulder, and when it came out there was a white garment in his hand. It was a waiter’s monkey jacket with the seal of the Trianon Hotel on the left breast and a plastic name-plate with LUIS stamped on it on the right. There was also a small, dark brown stain on the right cuff.

Lorna has been feeling out of sorts for a week or so and thinks she may be coming down with something. Also, she does not know whether she is falling in love with Jimmy Paz, and so she has decided not to think about it. Low key, take it easy is her current mantra. Conversations with Sheryl Waits, which have heretofore acted as the analytical retort of her emotional life, have proven unsatisfactory. She does not seem to want advice or a sympathetic ear. Sheryl is too pressing, too avid for this to be a success, or rather a success in Sheryl’s terms. Give Sheryl any encouragement at all and she is offering consumer reports on bridal salons. Lorna hasn’t mentioned Paz at all to Betsy Newhouse, whose interest in Lorna’s emotional life is limited to a casual “getting any yet?” whenever they meet. She has twice turned down invitations from Betsy to go out with the less attractive pal of one of Betsy’s current squeezes, and this has caused remarks and comments about keeping a stock of new batteries for the vibrator.

In fact, Lorna has not gotten any from Paz. She has received three fairly chaste if sincere kisses from the man, one on each of their three dates: the beach outing, a dinner at a Chinese-Cuban restaurant, and an evening of dancing. All of these have been pleasant, but no one is talking about buying a ring. She wonders sometimes if he likes her at all, and as soon as this thought crosses her mind, well-oiled valves open automatically and her mental pool fills with all the reasons why Jimmy Paz is not quite suitable. A high school graduate? Please! Lorna has an album of set pieces in her mind representing mating satisfaction. She wishes to admire his brains and his career, with, naturally, equal respect forher career; she wishes masterly decisions to be made as to lifestyle, vacations, dwellings, but with due consideration of her tastes; she wishes a healthy sexual relationship, in which he will take the lead but not do anything perverse or disturbing; she wishes to be carried away but also to stay in more or less the same place; she wishes for coziness and comfort, doing theTimes crossword puzzle on Sundays, but also for unpredictability and excitement; she wants fidelity, but not tedium.

Yes, Paz comes up short in many of these areas. She can’t imagine him doing theTimes crossword puzzle. Or sitting through the ballet, not that she frequents the ballet, but still…. And then there is the whole gun and violence thing, which is faintly disgusting, and she is not sure she will ever be able to expunge from her mind the sight of him actually slaying a human being right there in front of her house, never mind that he probably saved her life.

On the other hand…there is the memory of his hands on her body, and his body, its controlled stillness, the violence perfectly contained. She considers the Zen-like simplicity of his life. She reflects on how many of the men she has been with have been putterers, nudges, how Rat Howie had to have a particular brand of wood-strawberry preserves, or he couldn’t eat breakfast, how often he would send food back to the restaurant kitchen with elaborate directions for the chef, and the whole wine thing, the yacht thing…although he did finish the SundayTimes in less than half an hour, and Paz’s eyes, she had never seen eyes like that on a man, interested eyes, interested inher, and then a guilty thought but no less real for that, an end to a certain kind of liberal naggery, because if your man was black then that was proof, wasn’t it? Yes, probably he didn’t like her that much, but then hehad called her three times in one week, although that might have been cultivation for business purposes, but…or maybe she was simply going crazy, sinking into the early stages of erotomania, she’d end up parked outside his house slashing the tires of his real girlfriend’s car….

She laughs out loud, since if she is crazy she is certainly in the right place. Many of the people in the locked-ward dayroom would, like her, be conversing with the unseen (but out loud) were they not stupefied with drugs. Or nearly so: a big white man looms over her, about forty, ginger hair in outflung wisps like a circus clown’s. On his doughy face he wears the tight-lipped staring visage of the paranoid psychotic. “Are you laughing at me?” he demands.

Professional calm kicks in; this guy needs to have his meds cranked up a little, she reflects automatically, and puts on her bland-but-caring expression.

“Not at all,” she replies. “I just thought of something funny.”

“Liar,” he says in a hoarse whisper, but she slips past him and notes that the powerful Darryla and Ferio, the dayroom orderly, have picked up on the interaction. They begin to drift a little closer to the big man. Not her problem in any case.

She spots Emmylou off by herself in a corner, scribbling away in one of her school notebooks. When Lorna greets her she looks up, startled, like someone who has just awakened, and when she sees who it is, out comes her church-painting smile.

“I see you’re still writing.”

“Yes. It’s an interesting process. Painful, but interesting.”

“Why painful?” Lorna pulls up a plastic chair and sits facing her. She is a little frightened, she finds; she has not quite extinguished the memory of what she saw the last time, what appeared before the woman’s seizure. She hopes this session will involve only psychology and that she can steer the discussion away from the weird stuff.

“Inhabiting the former self,” Emmylou says. “Recollecting feelings I had, seeing things through my former eyes. I wish I was a better writer, but then I think, no, it’s a confession, not a novel, so I have to leave out most of the stuff that sets up what I was feeling at the time, people mostly, but also the air of a place, the essence of the other people, the way Flaubert and Dickens do. I’m afraid it makes pretty dull reading. Although I have to believe the truth can’t be dull, since it partakes of God. I just pray I can make myself do it. I finished another book. Would you like to take it?”

Lorna takes the proffered notebook and says, “I don’t think you have to worry about your writing. It’s very clear and vivid and not dull at all. And conscious. It’s really amazing, considering…”

“That I have no formal education? Higher education. Plenty of the lower kind, though.”

“Yes, and it’s remarkable that you’re able to write about that material so…dispassionately,” Lorna says. “Most people, it would take years of therapy to be able to confront all of that abuse, but you seem to have no trouble. That speaks to a lot of psychological toughness. It’s a good sign.”

“Not that good, since I seem to be locked in the loony bin.”

“Well, clearly you do have some problems. My God, who wouldn’t after what you’ve been through?”

The woman gives Lorna one of those searching, discomforting looks. She says, “Dr. Wise, I know you want to help me and I appreciate it, but we might be getting ourselves all crosswise, if you’re looking at my life from that point of view. You’re thinking of all the bad things that happened to me as traumas, leaving psychological scars that grew into a mental disease, which you think I have. I look at them as afflictions sent by God to attract my attention to him. Can I tell you about a dream I had once?”

“Yes, of course, but I’d like to continue our session in the therapy room.”

“Oh, this won’t take but a minute,” Emmylou replies, and her gaze shifts away from Lorna’s face. Lorna follows the look and sees the big man who confronted her in the hallway standing by one of a row of folding wooden bridge tables set up for card playing and the working of jigsaw puzzles. The man is standing over a small woman working a puzzle. His shoulders are hunched and his fists are clenched. Darryla and Ferio are standing a dozen feet from him, watching.

“I dreamed I was getting a guided tour of heaven?” Emmylou says. “I was wearing a jumpsuit and a hard hat and my tour guide, he was an angel, of course, but he looked just like a regular man, dressed the same as I was, and we were in this giant building, kind of an industrial shed like in those boring old movies they used to show us in high school, how they make paper or ice cream. And there was this big huge machine in it, whirring and clanking away, and there was a conveyor belt coming out of one end of it, and on the conveyor belt were rows of golden bricks, but softer: they looked like giant Twinkies, row after row of them, and when they got to the end of the conveyor belt they fell off of it. I looked to see where they were falling to and I saw that there was a big hole in the floor there and through it I could see clouds and blue sky and the earth far below. I asked the guide what the Twinkie things were, and he said they were blessings, and I remember thinking, in the dream, how marvelous is the Lord showering all these blessings down on us. Then we moved on, across an alley and into another big huge shed with the same kind of machine cranking away, the same conveyor belt, the same giant Twinkies falling down, and I said to the guide, ‘Oh, these are more blessings,’ and he said, ‘No, those are afflictions,’ and I said, ‘Oh, but they look just the same as the blessings,’ and he said, ‘Theyare the same!’ Excuse me…”

Emmylou rises while Lorna sits there dumbfounded a little by what she has just heard, and then the dayroom is shaken by a roar. “I knew it! I knew it!” shouts the big undermedicated psychotic, and now he has pushed over the jigsaw lady and snatched up the folding table, scattering like snow the tiny bits of a view of Mount Shasta. He holds the table over his head, bellowing, and smashes it down on the floor. Darryla and Ferio close in warily, Darryla pressing some kind of electronic device as she does so. The man smashes the table down again, and this time the wood shatters and he is swinging one of the table legs, which has a long, sharp screw and jagged splinters sticking out of one end of it. The man is now bellowing in tongues, incomprehensible. The table leg whirs like a fan as he swings it around his head. Now his direst paranoid fantasy becomes flesh as half a dozen orderlies and nurses rush into the dayroom. Theyare all out to get him!

Darryla talks soothingly as Ferio circles around to get behind the madman, but the madman sees him and strikes at his head with his club, and Ferio goes down with a cry, holding his forearm, grimacing in pain. He is gushing blood from a long cut on the top of his skull. Darryla rushes the patient like a linebacker, hitting him in a low tackle, and he goes over onto his back, striking repeatedly at Darryla with the butt of the table leg. One blow connects with her skull and she rolls off him, stunned.

Now the rest of the inmates have joined the fun, screaming, tossing things around, getting into fights and in the way of the reinforcements. Lorna is frozen in place, standing by her chair. She sees the madman and his blood-spattered club, he is on all fours now, roaring like a bear, and there is Darryla, blood pouring from a wound in her temple, trying to rise. Ferio is struggling to his feet, but it is clear that his arm is useless.

And suddenly Emmylou Dideroff is crouching in front of the madman. Lorna sees her mouth moving. Saliva drips from the madman’s mouth. Emmylou places a hand on either side of the man’s face, and then from his open mouth issues a sound Lorna has never imagined coming from the vocal machinery of a human being, a roar-scream-howl-sob of such intensity and pitch that for an instant everything in the room seems to freeze.

Emmylou falls away from him, down on her back, Lorna can hear above all the other racket the clunk of her skull against the linoleum, and she goes into what looks like a grand mal seizure. Lorna starts moving now, but Darryla is there before her, fitting the padded tongue-depressor she always carries into Emmylou’s champing frothing mouth. A drop of blood falls from Darryla’s head onto Emmylou’s forehead. Lorna swallows, fearing that she is going to faint.

Meanwhile, the psychotic is swarmed by many orderlies, although he has quite ceased to struggle. Lorna happens to look at his face and sees that it is the face of a confused man, a fellow caught in an embarrassing situation that he hopes will soon resolve itself, but the madness has gone from his eyes. Nevertheless, a hypo is slammed into his butt, a gurney is fetched, and he is strapped down to it and rolled away.

They shoot up Emmylou as well, and the spasms disappear into deep sleep. After she too is rolled off on her gurney, Lorna finds that her limbs are trembling uncontrollably. Instructed by the movies that violence is of long duration, balletic, and easily followed, she is unprepared for the way it really is. From the first psychotic roar to the takedown, perhaps forty seconds have elapsed. A heavy hand lands on her shoulder and presses her into a chair. “You okay, dear heart?” asks Darryla. “Look at me. You all right?”

Darryla is holding a gauze pad to her own temple. It is soaked in blood, as is the front of her green scrubs. Lorna locks eyes with the nurse, nods, and then a wave of nausea rises, with cold sweat breaking over her face. She drops her head between her knees until the worst passes.

“Wow, I wasn’t ready for that,” she says. “How areyou?”

“Oh, I’ll survive,” the nurse replies, and her face creases up in a grin. “I been cut, bruised, abused, and misused, dear heart. Just another day on the lock ward.”

“I don’t think so,” says Lorna. “What happened? Who was that man?”

“Oh, Horace Masefield? Horace killed his wife some years ago, mashed her up with a meat cleaver. It was a big deal on the TV, the Hialeah Hacker. He did five years up in Chattahoochee, and he got out all cured of his mental disease, and then he married a woman who probably didn’t pay much attention to the local news and guess what? He used a hatchet this time, which is why he’s here. He’s carrying a load of Haldol that’d stun a Brahma bull, but like you just saw, he still got his attitude going.”

“But whathappened, Darryla?”

“Oh, that. Well, dear heart, I got myPDR, and myDSM, and I attend the Sunset Park A.M.E. church on Sundays, and that all’s what I believe in. If we was living in Bible times, I’d say we just saw an unclean spirit driven out, but that ain’t what I’m going to put down on my violent incident report form. Uh-uh!”

Now a searching professional look. “You sure you’re okay? You want some water? A Valium?” Lorna tells her no; with a final grin and a hug, Darryla lumbers off to her duties.

Emmylou’s notebook is still clutched under Lorna’s arm. She gathers up her stuff and the bag that Emmylou has left, and drops this last off at the nurses’ station on her way off the ward. As usual, she has a review session scheduled with Mickey Lopez, who, the moment she walks into his office, asks, “What happened?”

She collapses into a chair and has a little weep, which she thinks is allowable in the circumstances, and after some heavy Kleenex work she describes the events in the dayroom, but she cannot bring herself to convey the part that Emmylou Dideroff played. Or seemed to play, for by now the concrete sense memory of what she saw has fought against her belief system and her training, and has predictably tossed in the towel. Itcould not have happened like that, thereforedid not. She says instead that their patient had another epileptic fit in response to the violence, and Mickey nods sagely and says that such a thing is not unusual and actually a confirmation that there is a physical trauma at the root of Emmylou’s problems. They agree that an MRI scan is warranted and discuss for some time how this is to be paid for under the labyrinthine budgetary relationships among the university, the hospital, the county, and Medicaid.

Now she summarizes the information in the first notebook and then adds the material from the morning session. She has saved the dream, the best part, for last. Mickey focuses on this description, nodding, making encouraging sounds. This is, after all, his meat. He asks, “So, what do you make of this?”

“A coping mechanism? She can’t really admit the emotional effect of the trauma she was subjected to, so she lays it off on the will of God. She’s got guilt feelings too about the death of her mother and the little boy, so she…so if blessings and afflictions are really the same thing, she can resolve both the guilt and the trauma. She’s suffered, she caused suffering, but it balances out, and it’s all God’s fault anyway.”

Mickey nods, smiles. “Mm, yes, a good reading. And also I think some of the problems we have with this kind of sexual abuse are on the guilt side too. The little girl is being rubbed, the feelings of pleasure are genuine, she’s got Daddy all to herself, and this especially when the mother is cold and rejecting, as we have here. You would agree?”

Of course she agrees, even though at some deep level she does not believe a word of it, she does not believe that Emmylou Dideroff fits into the standard psychological paradigm, much less its Freudian province, but what else does she have?

Mickey Lopez is regarding her closely, and the expression on his face is turning from collegial to therapeutic. “Speaking of trauma, you don’t look so good.”

“I’m fine, Mickey.”

“You’re twitchy, and you got no color in your face. You want a Valium? A Xanax? Half a milligram, you’ll relax….”

Everyone wants to dope me, she thinks, I’ve seen something I shouldn’t have seen and they want me to go back to sleep, and then, Oh, great! Paranoid ideation, just what I fucking need on top of the obsessing and the hypochondria, and she really does feel a little flu-ish….

“No, I just need a break,” she answers, forcing a smile. “I’ll go home and take a shower. I’ll be fine.”

Outside the building she makes a cell call, leaves a message, and by the time she has returned to her car, Paz is ringing back. She tells him she has the next notebook and he tells her he’ll meet her at her house.

She gives herself over to driving, pretending that she has just learned how and has to consciously will every action: red light means stop, so foot off the gas foot on the brake press gently, glide….

Paz is there when she arrives.

He takes the notebook, locks it in his car trunk. He says, “You doing anything right now?”

“Not really, but you know, Jimmy, I’m wiped. I just want to go and lie down.”

She turns away from him, her door is a blur ahead of her, but now he reaches out and holds her by the arm. “What happened?” he asks, and she pivots neatly and puts her face against the hollow of his neck. And without her planning in any way for this to happen, now it all comes out, the full story: the demon face earlier, the maniac today, the violence, Emmylou, the dream, and the casting out of the evil spirit, especially that part because she knows somehow that Paz will understand this, that it will not scare him or make him think she is nuts herself.

And he is the first significant person of the day who does not offer to tranquilize her. Instead, he hugs her for a sufficient time, and she is proud of herself for not blubbing against his nice suit, and then he says, “Let’s go for a ride. I want you to meet my old partner, Cletis. He’s good on this kind of stuff.”