Paz waited, staring.
The big man shrugged. “It’s the black economy.” A little grin, here. “There’s thousands of people not in the system. They don’t pay taxes. They’re into cash, barter. A lot of them pass through Miami, and a lot of them end up on the water. You gonna turn me in to the feds for this?”
Paz didn’t bother to answer this. With a few more questions he determined that the woman had in fact been sent out after a connecting rod an hour or so before the murder.
Paz thanked Wilson and made to leave.
“What about my truck?” Wilson asked.
“You can pick it up at the police pound. I don’t think we’re going to need it.”
“And my C rod?”
“I believe you ought to think about getting another one of those,” said Paz with a smile, and left.
Paz sat in his car with the engine and the AC running and gave himself over to discontent. If this was a grounder, and the woman had done it in the way the evidence suggested she had, then these interviews should have been simple formalities. But both men were clearly lying. Now his view of the case began to shift; he tried to fight it, but the little nagging details kept adding to the mystery. Why the lies? Why was a cop right there when the victim went out the window? Someone had called the cops to report a disturbance was why, but the only disturbance had been the murder itself. Someone had wanted the police at the scene. And the strangeness of the woman herself…he didn’t really want to think about that. Instead he thought about his need for a new partner, and the face of the policeman from the hotel, Morales, was right there at the surface of his mind. Well, why the hell not?
For a long time after Sophie died Georges de Berville sat disconsolate in the darkened bedroom in the house on Rue d’Orleans in Sedan. He neglected his business, leaving the burden of his affairs to fall on his eldest, Alphonse, then barely sixteen. He rarely emerged and spoke to no one, not even the servants, for very long. Marie-Ange’s nanny, Mlle. Rosicre, was instructed to keep the child away from her father, for the sight of her little face, so similar to that of her mother, reduced him to such sobs and cries of grief that they feared for his sanity.
Yet, Marie-Ange, even at the tender age of seven years, had a powerful will and a mighty desire to bring comfort to the afflicted, and she loved her father very much. One evening, while Mlle. Rosicre nodded by the nursery fire, the child slipped out and trotted down the corridor to her father’s bedroom. She found him tossing in fitful slumber, often waking with a cry and then falling back into his uneasy dreams. She sat on the edge of the bed and held his hand, and prayed to the Blessed Virgin and to St. Catherine to give her dear father peace. Now her father opened his eyes and, as he later confided to his eldest son, he saw around his daughter’s head a halo of light, and heard a voice saying, “Be at peace, Georges de Berville, for your wife is with us in Paradise!” After that he fell into a deep and refreshing sleep, and when he awoke he was himself again. This occurrence was in later times regarded as a true miracle in the de Berville family, and was the first notable instance of the special favors the Bd. Marie-Ange was to receive from Our Lady during the course of her life.
— FROM FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST, BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.
Five
I took up with Hunter Foy again, but it wasn’t exactly the same as it was before, because the little tiny part of me that was still able to love had got totally squashed by what all had happened at the house and there was nothing in my heart but gravel and old oyster shells. I started to help him in his dope business at that time and I was amazed to learn how big it was. Hunter used to make regular trips into Gainesville and Panama City to sell to his customers there, bulk sales, bricks of compressed seedless marijuana, shiny with brown resin. He had a very superior product, Hunter, and it made me curious. I watched TV like everyone else, and I wondered how he was able to do like that, without other drug gangs coming in and how he got it all organized and who his supplier was. I wondered pretty hard because it wasn’t long before I knew that Hunter Foy did not figure all of that out for himself, him being smart enough for a Foy but not by any means the sharpest knife in the drawer.
It was February 3, 1985, a Monday, when I found out the secret. I biked over to Hunter’s trailer, and there was an old rusted Dodge pickup with Virginia plates sitting in the yard with a couple of big feist dogs in it that growled at me when I went by. I wasn’t supposed to be there that night but I had forgotten a book and I wanted it. The book was Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and like every ill-educated fourteen-year-old in the world I thought it was hot stuff. I went barging into the trailer like always, saying Hey whose truck…and then I stopped because I was looking into the barrel of a big revolver. On the other side of the pistol was my first sight of Percival Orne Foy. Hunter said real quick and nervous oh that’s just my girlfriend, unc, and the older man slowly dropped the pistol off of me and said we got business, girl, you’d best be on your way, and I said sorry, I just forgot my book, and I went and got it.
When he saw the book he gave me another look. He was fair and rangy with the white-gold hair and the blue eyes that all the Foy clan have and around thirty-five at the time. He favored Hunter a little, or I guess you could say Hunter favored him, on account of him being the son of Orne’s brother, but where Hunter was soft around the jaw and mouth and a little empty in the eye department, Orne Foy was steel hard in both places, and not like any other man I’d met until then, and the first thought that raced through my mind as he held that pistol was this man could kill Ray Bob Dideroff for me, if I could get him to want to. He looked at me for what seemed like a half hour but couldn’t’ve been more than a couple of seconds, and I felt a little like I had when I first got that look from Ray Bob, like he couldsee me not the mask I showed to the world, but there wasn’t any of that evil in it, no lust at all, only an interested regard from a being higher than me, one of those winged lions from mythology, or like a man sizing up a dog he was thinking about buying. He said you reading that book and I said yes and he asked me how did I like it, and I said I thought it was great. He said I guess you think you’re one of the people who hold up the world and I didn’t say anything and he said, what you got there is a shadow of a shadow of a shadow. Would you like to see the real thing, the source of the light? And I said, yes, sir, and he got up and took my arm and took me out to his truck. I guess there might be another major drug trafficker somewhere who travels with a copy of The Viking Portable Nietzsche never more than a reach away, but if so I never met him. He handed me it, and I looked at it and said Nitscha? And he said it right, and I said, I teach you the superman. Man is something to be surpassed. He looked at me funny like I might want to bite him and said you’ve read Nietzsche? And I admitted it was just Collier’s Book of Quotations, although it was on my lips to say oh, sure all the time, I wanted him to respect me so much, and that was the first time I had that particular and useful feeling. He told me to get out and he’d be back in a month and we might talk about it. Later I found out he bought them by the case and gave them out like Gideon does Bibles, a missionary in his way was Percival Orne Foy.
Well, started reading that night and I’ll admit that there was a lot that left me confused in it, mostly references to things I never read and philosophical terms. I had to look up Wagner and all the Greeks he mentions in the encyclopedia, which wasn’t a bad thing. But the core of it set me on fire, seemed pretty much designed to set on fire any bright heartbroken fourteen-year-old with a lust for revenge. The will to power! The tyranny of the weak! And fuck Christianity while you’re at it, all those hypocrites at Amity Street. Mediocrities! Slaves! I did the usual blasphemies, including dragging poor Hunter out and busting into Amity Street and making him fuck me on the table up front while I howled and laughed like a goblin.