Paz answers the phone. There is a lot of listening interspersed with gnomic utterances from Paz. Lorna rises, slips into a light robe, takes the tray to the kitchen. It is spotless and smells of coffee and sweet bakings. As she rinses the dishes she feels tears well in her eyes and recalls feeling the same way when she was with him on the beach at Bear Cut. No, she thinks, this is too cruel, my heart won’t take this. As if her body agrees, she feels a bolt of sharp pain through her middle, a kind of pain she does not recall ever having before. Sweat breaks out on her face and back. It passes, and for the first time in a while the old fear returns. Something wrong, something wronginside. Again she suppresses the thought.
She goes back to the bedroom and hears the shower going, so she drops the robe and joins him. After some fooling around with soapy skin surfaces, he sighs and says, “I have to go to work.”
“The phone call.”
“Yeah, my partner. The autopsy on Jack Wilson found a blood alcohol level of point three six.”
“My God, that’s paralytic.”
“Yes, and they also found traces of Nembutal. Plus an empty bottle of cheap vodka in the car. The feds are treating it as an accident, and Broward County is going along. We were lucky to get as much as we did out of them.”
Paz turns the shower off. She senses he is somewhere else already.
They dress in silence, he much faster than she. Paz is in her study, looking at her books and possessions with his consuming policeman’s eye when she emerges from the bedroom in one of her bland suits.
He says, “Listen, are you going to see Emmylou today?”
“Yes, I want to check on her condition. Why?”
“Could you ask her something for me?”
Lorna hestitates. “A police question, you mean.”
“Not really. I just want to know who connected her with David Packer.”
“Jimmy, I really can’t help you in your investigation. It’s unethical.”
“Okay, no problem. You going to find out if she did the cure on what’s-his-name?”
“That’s not very likely, is it?”
He looks at her without answering for a while, then crosses the room and embraces her. “You have any plans for Sunday evening?”
She did not. “We’ll go have dinner at the restaurant. You should meet my mother.”
“Uh-oh.”
“No, she’s a charming woman,” says Paz. “Everybody loves Margarita.”
Frank Wilson lived in a condo, a modern eight-story building off Le Jeune in the Gables. When Wilson let them in, Paz could see that he had been crying. His eyes were red and his face seemed to have fallen away from the bone, gone spongy. He kept dabbing at his nose with a wad of tissues. Paz thought it was a strange reaction, but then he’d never lost a sibling, or had one. Wilson collapsed onto a leather couch. He neglected to offer the two detectives seats, but they took them anyway. Both pulled forth notebooks. The tan meshwork drapes on the big picture windows were tightly drawn, and Wilson hadn’t switched on any lights. The room was consequently dim, which made it hard to observe their informant’s face.
“It’s like a kick in the gut, this is,” Wilson said. “I still can’t believe it. It’s just so not Jack.”
“What isn’t, sir?” asked Paz.
“Oh, drinking, driving…” The voice trailed off.
Morales asked, “He drink much vodka, Mr. Wilson?”
“Couldn’t stand the stuff,” said the brother. “He thought it tasted and smelled like rubbing alcohol.”
The two detectives considered this for a moment and then Paz asked, “How would you describe your brother, Mr. Wilson? What kind of man was he?”
Wilson sat up a little and stared at Paz. “What kind of…I don’t understand. This is a traffic death in Broward. I mean why does a Miami cop want to know that?”
“Well, sir, as I guess you know, Jack was peripherally involved in another case and we’re just trying to tie up the pieces on that. Also…we think your brother’s death might stand further investigation. You say your brother had no head for liquor and hated vodka, so, ah, you could ask what he was doing with a point three six blood alcohol and an empty vodka bottle in the car.”
Wilson goggled at him. “What…you think someone killed him? They forced him to drink all that vodka?”
“That or they knocked him out with Nembutal and ran a naso-gastric tube into him.”
Wilson gaped and stammered, “But that’s crazy! Who would do something like that?”
This was of course the very question that now engaged Paz and Morales. They were driving to Jack Wilson’s domicile, having obtained the keys from the brother, along with a description of the late Jack’s character. A little wild, bored with the business, a ladies’ man, a good conscientious mechanic, if a little too ready to party after hours. On the assumption that Jack Wilson had been murdered and that no one was going to let them near the case, not the tribe, and not the FBI, then the whole thing had come to more or less a dead end. Wilson had been the last thread that led from al-Muwalid’s murder. Whoever had arranged that killing knew how to cover their tracks. Paz shared with his partner the observation that Cletis Barlow had made, that the point of all this was not the Sudanese but Emmylou Dideroff, and that all this bloodshed was designed to draw from her something that she knew.
Morales said that it sounded far-fetched, but what didhe know, Cletis Barlow was the great detective. Paz detected a little envy here but let it go. He might have agreed with Morales about far-fetched, had he himself not traveled personally over even farther fetches, but he declined to mention this now. They arrived at the Wilson house, a small, tile-roofed Spanish colonial over Coral Way not far from the Palmetto Expressway. Jack Wilson had fancied a nautical theme: signal flag upholstery, marine landscapes on the walls, captain’s chairs around a hatch-cover table in the dining room, ship models in a glass display case. “Everything looks shipshape,” said Paz. They laughed, but everything actually did. Wilson was something of a neat freak, in his home if not his personal appearance. He liked Peg-Board, and where the pots and kitchen implements hung on one of these, he had painted a silhouette of each implement under its hook, lest one be hung out of place.
They tossed the place rapidly, Paz with the skill of long practice, Morales learning as he went. Paz took the master bedroom and got a little shock off what he found there; Morales searched another bedroom fitted out as a den or home office and was intrigued by what he didn’t find. His partner called out to him, and he walked into the master bedroom, where he found Paz staring at a brightly painted statue. It was nearly two feet high and depicted a haloed woman in a gold dress and a red cloak holding a sword and a chalice, which rested upon a vertical cannon.
“Somebody’s been through the place,” said Morales.
“Yeah, they have,” Paz agreed. “They were real neat about it, though. How could you tell?”
“There’re no personal papers in that office aside from a folder full of paid bills. No address book, no files, no Rolodex, no personal mail. No diaries with an entry that says ‘I’m scared shitless thatX is gonna get me.’ He’s got a big wooden desk with two file drawers, both practically empty, but you can see from the dust marks that they were full of file folders at one time. There’s a fancy digital phone that can store twenty numbers, but they’ve all been cleared, and you can see where he had a little list, maybe about which buttons called which people, taped to the desktop, the wood is unfaded and there are tape marks. Someone took the trouble to rip it off.”
“Very good, very interesting,” said Paz. “It goes with the rest of the picture. Someone is clipping connections, the connections that lead up from Jack Wilson to whoever was running him. There’s something strange here too. First of all, the clothes in the drawers were all jumbled around. Someone had been through them because the rest of the house suggests neat, and they weren’t neat. So that confirms that they were searching for some physical object or objects. What is the most interesting absent physical object in this case?”