Tropic of Night (16 page)

Something was wrong, something was intensely disturbing, but he could not nail it down; it was like forgetting a phone number or leaving tickets home, an absence, felt but not comprehended. He ought to feel good, he told himself: an interesting and exciting day’s work, a terrific piece of ass, what more could a man desire? Now came a new thought, Mr. Youghans and the dead woman, and the girl he was screwing, and Barlow’s contempt for the man. Which Paz shared. He wasn’t like Youghans. He didn’t seduce high-school girls. Only college graduates. That was a significant difference. Or was it? No, it was. A good deal, for both parties, a square deal. Like he had with his mother.

Driving, the windows open to the thick, slowly cooling air of Miami nights, Paz rolled a different sort of life around in his mind, the words settle down scuttling across the surface of his brain. Pick one of them and settle down. Or some other, to come. Fall in love. Move out of the free apartment, quit the restaurant. A three-bedroom ranch in Kendall. Pool and barbecue. Kids. Make friends. Invite the Barlows over.

It had no real taste, it was like water, like meringue without sugar. He would have to be a different man from the one he was now. He supposed he might become that man, but not through any act of personal will. He didn’t know the way there.

In the morning, first thing, Paz called Dr. Maria Salazar at home and got an answering machine that informed him, first in English, and then in a particularly limpid and refined Spanish, that Dr. Salazar would be out of the country until a date three weeks in the future. Paz cursed in muddy and impure Spanish and then punched in Dr. Lydia Herrera’s number. Dr. Herrera was busy, the secretary said, she had no room on her schedule that morning. Paz bullied, abandoning Barlow’s rule. He threatened that if Dr. Herrera did not see him, he would have her dragged down to police headquarters and charged with obstructing a homicide investigation, and wouldn’t that screw up her busy schedule? The line went briefly dead, and then the secretary came back again and, in a stiff voice, gave Paz his appointment. Paz put on a fawn-colored Palm Beach suit and walked over to the hole-in-the-wall on Calle Ocho where he took breakfast, café con leche and a couple of Cuban fruit pastries. While he ate he read Doris Taylor’s story in the Herald, which had made page 1 below the fold. Doris didn’t spare the gory details, and he guessed that she had gotten to the medical examiner’s staff. The police, he learned, had refused to rule out the possibility of a cult killing. It could have been worse, although he now expected that the brass would be more interested in the case than was optimal. He ripped the story out, pocketed the clip, and drove directly to the university.

Dr. Herrera was dressed in mango color this morning and she frowned in a way that brought her plucked brows together like a child’s drawing of a gull. The patronizing smile was missing. She stood in the doorway of her little office and radiated honest outrage.

“This is really inconvenient, Detective,” she said. “And I resent being threatened.”

“Murder is often inconvenient, Doctor,” said Paz blandly. “And citizens have a positive duty to help the police in an investigation.” He gestured past her. “The sooner we start …”

She stalked back into her office and sat behind her desk. Paz placed before her a copy of the toxicology analysis on Wallace.

“This is a list of the chemicals we found in the victim’s body. If you could, we’d like to know what plants they came from.”

She snatched up the paper, frowning. As Paz watched, her expression changed; irritation gave way to confused fascination. She spun her chair, pulled a reference volume from the shelf, paged through it, pulled down a batch of reprints, shuffled through them, read a page of one, shook her head, muttering.

“Stumped, huh?”

She stared at him, but not with hostility. “This is remarkable. Amazing.”

“Do you know what plant that stuff comes from?” asked Paz.

“Plant? My God, there’s a whole pharmacopoeia in this. The harmalines here are botanical psychedelics, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, incredibly powerful, used by shamans in both the New World and Old World tropics. In the New World they come from the Banisteriopsis vine, they call it yagé or ayahuasca; in Africa they’re derived from Leptactinia densiflora. As to which we’ve got here, I’d have to look it up, but this set of indoles they have listed looks like typical contaminants from Leptactinia preparations. Yohimbine is from Alchornea floribunda, African again. Ibogaine is a powerful stimulant and psychedelic, also African, from Tabernanthe iboga. It’s called the cocaine of Africa. It may not be purposeful here because it’s a common contaminant of yohimbine preparations. It’s an intoxicant and supposed aphrodisiac. Ouabain is an African arrow poison, from Strophantus species. It’s a cardiac glycoside.”

“A poison?”

“Yes. Extremely potent. I don’t know what it’s doing here. Was the woman poisoned, too? I read the story in the paper this morning. I thought it was an evisceration.”

Paz decided to yield a scrap of information. “Apparently she died before she had time to bleed to death. Her heart stopped. Could this ouabain do that?”

“No question. In Central Africa they use it to kill elephants.” She gestured at the tox report. “As I said, this is remarkable. The cocktail of substances?I have no idea what the result of this combination would be.”

“We figure he wanted to knock her out, so he could, um, do his operation.”

“I don’t know.” She put her finger on one of the polysyllabic names. “This one here is a phenanthrene.”

“What’s a phenanthrene?” Paz had his notebook out and was scribbling in it.

“A narcotic. Morphine and codeine are phenanthrenes. I’d have to check, but I think it’s the one derived from Fagara zanthoxyloides, which is widely used as a narcotic in West Africa.”

“So that would have knocked her out.”

“In the right dose, yes. But then why this other stuff? Some of them typically make the user run around hallucinating like crazy. But who knows what they would do in combination? And we don’t know what the original dose was. What about the stomach contents?”

“Zip. She took it in through the nose or skin.”

“Hmph! That’s unusual, but not unknown?snuffs and salves applied to the mucosa. Usually they ingest an infusion or eat the raw plant matter. Fascinating. And then there’s this. tetrahydra-ß-carboline. What’s that doing there?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not a botanical. It’s an alkaloid found naturally in the brain and especially in the pineal body. In her lungs ? It’s interesting because it’s chemically related to ibogaine and the various Banisteriopsis and Tabernanthe alkaloids.”

“Why is that interesting?”

Dr. Herrera allowed herself a sigh. “It’s fairly complicated and I don’t see what forensic value it has. And, as I thought I had made clear, I’m extremely busy …”

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of forensic value. Just give me the dummy version.”

“Fine.” She spouted rapidly and in monotone. “Question: why should chemicals produced by plants have profound psychotropic activity in human brains? Answer: because plants have evolved to produce analogues and antagonists of alkaloids and neuroactive substances present in the brains of animals so that if animals eat them they will get sick and learn not to eat them. Opiates, for example, imitate brain endorphins and bind to the same sites, hyoscine competes with the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, the harmines and other indole derivatives are chemically similar to serotonin, which is an important neurotransmitter in brain regions associated with emotionality and perception. It’s probably why they can act as hallucinogens. The fact that tetrahydra-ß-carboline is related to ibogaine, et cetera, is interesting for the same reason. What it means, we don’t know. The pineal gland’s function is obscure?it seems to be some kind of endocrine gland in antagonistic relationship to the pituitary, and hence intimately connected with a whole range of physiological and psychological control functions. In fact, now that I think about it, there’s another pineal hormone, adrenoglomerulotropine, that’s identical to a psychotropic botanical, 6-methoxytetrahydroharman.”

Paz had more or less stopped listening. Her spiel was completely beyond him, not that he would ever admit this. The last named gobbledygook, however, was familiar. “That was in the corpse, too, wasn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes. But don’t ask me what it all means, because I don’t know. Nobody does. You’re at the frontiers of psychopharmacology here.”

“Would Dr. Salazar?”

Herrera frowned. “Maria? Of course not. Less than I do, certainly. She’s an anthropologist.”

“I don’t mean the hard science. I meant the particular mix of drugs. Maybe she’s seen it before.”

She shrugged. “It’s unlikely. Santeros don’t typically use powerful psychotropics. They’re more into elacampane and sarsaparilla, and botanical symbolism. Now … will that be all?”

Paz stashed his notebook and stood. “Yes. You’ve been very helpful, Doctor, and I want to apologize for any misunderstanding with your secretary.”

A slight smile. “You mean you wouldn’t have had me locked up?”

“Only in an extremely comfortable cell. And, if the Miami PD can ever do you a favor …”

“Thank you. If you catch this guy, I’d love to talk with him. About plants.”

“Let’s catch him first. By the way, do you happen to know when Dr. Salazar will be back? I called her house and got a message …”

Dr. Herrera looked down at her desk. “Yes, but I can’t help you there. Maria keeps her movements somewhat confidential.”

“And why is that?”

“You’d have to ask her,” said Dr. Herrera, not smiling at all anymore.

Paz left, feeling he had missed something important. He didn’t like being on the frontiers of science, and he did not see how the dense slug of information he had extracted from the ethnobotanist brought him any closer to the murderer, who now seemed to be not only a skilled surgeon, but a master of psychopharmacology. Ordinarily, putting an unknown suspect in a new class was a good thing. If you knew your guy was a plumber and you found he liked bass fishing, that was good. If you found out he bred beagles, even better. It was possible to interview all the bass-fishing, beagle-breeding plumbers in Dade County and ask them where they were on the night of, and there you had it. Skillful eviscerators who knew a lot about tropical pharmacology should have generated a similarly small class, but … where to begin looking? Hunters? Actual surgeons? Butchers? Veterinarians? With a sideline in tropical plants?

Paz stepped from the shade cast by the science building and the morning sun socked him in the face. He put on his Vuarnets and crossed Memorial Drive almost unseeing, deep in his own head. The vision: a black man slipping around a corner, climbing the stairs to Deandra Wallace’s apartment. A black man because the vic was black, and that was the way it almost always went: people kill their own, plus there was Deandra’s boyfriend’s testimony about the African witch doctor, they had to take account of that, too. And a white fellow at night in Overtown would have registered like a comet in the minds of neighbors and passersby. An intelligent black man. He’d left no obvious clues, besides that damned nut, and they knew that Youghans’s violent outburst had been responsible for it ending up under the bed. The killer had lifted the rest of the opele , obviously, but missed the one nut. So, not so perfect. But the attempted frame was clever, and if not for Barlow’s religio-cracker intuition, Youghans would have gone down for it. So, an intelligent, educated black man. Not a homeboy. But a race man. Interested in Africa, in African ritual and culture. That’s how he had hooked Deandra, who had also been an aficionado of sorts. Rebelling from the striving, conventional parents. And the African angle was looking more interesting. The plants that had produced the drugs in the victim’s body were African plants. Could the guy be an actual African? He used an African-sounding name. That would be something else to check.

He was in shade again; the tower of the Richter Library loomed over him, and obeying an impulse, he entered the building. Like any autodidact, Paz knew how to use a library. He spent an hour or two in the pharmacology section, copying down chemical structures to go with the substances found in the victim and those Herrera had mentioned. He couldn’t follow the neurophysiological material very well?there seemed to be an inordinate number of substances involved in producing thought, rather more than seemed necessary to Paz, given the extremely simple nature of most people’s thoughts. But he read enough to recognize that Herrera had been right when she said that not much was known about the connection between the soup of chemicals and the production of mental states. Abandoning these researches, he went to seek more wisdom on the use of psychotropic botanicals by traditional shamans. His beeper went off?Barlow calling?but he ignored it and continued his pacing through the stacks. The University of Miami does not have a graduate program in anthropology, but it does have a department of Caribbean and African Studies, and a special collection in Richter to go with it. This has its own room, a typical special-collection establishment: counter with a clerk, several long blond wood tables, ceiling-high shelves all around, a few display cabinets exhibiting books and photographs.

Two dark women were working quietly at one of the long tables. They glanced up when Paz came into the quiet room and went back to what they were doing. At another table, surrounded by books and papers, sat an elderly woman writing in a notebook. The hair stood up on the back of Paz’s neck as he recognized her.

He noted that her hands were ink-stained, that she used an old-fashioned fountain pen, that her white hair was thick and wiry, springing out from the sides of her head in two wedges, like pieces of angel cake. She was wearing a fawn-colored linen dress with a pointed collar and a row of closely spaced jet buttons down the front, and she had thrown a dark mohair cardigan over her shoulders against the air-conditioned chill. He stared at her; she looked up briefly and went back to her writing. He sat down opposite her and said, in Spanish, “Dr. Salazar, if you could spare me a minute or two, I very much wish to speak with you.”