Tropic of Night by Michael Gruber Read Free Book Online

left the bedroom. Paz pointed to the wall. “There’s a picture missing.”
    Barlow looked. “Uh-huh. And somebody went to some trouble to draw our attention to it. We’ll ask the family about it.”
    “We know who the father is?”
    “They will,” said Barlow.
    Outside the building, the crowd had dispersed somewhat, or rather had moved across the street to where a couple of television vans had parked, and its younger members were posing for the cameras. Paz and Barlow walked down the street away from this. A PI officer would supply vague semifalsehoods for the twenty seconds of coverage that Deandra Wallace’s death would get on the local news that night, absent some more spectacular carnage involving whiter people.
    A middle-aged, brass-haired, leathery woman in a nice grass-green cotton suit stepped out from between two parked cars and stood in their way.
    “What’s up, guys? I hear it’s bad.” Doris Taylor had been the crime reporter for the Miami Herald since shortly after the invention of movable type, and she was good at it, which meant that Barlow ignored her and Paz cultivated her. Paz was a modern cop and understood publicity and what it could do for one’s career, while Barlow thought that reporters and the people who read them were ghouls and unclean spirits. It was an area where the two men had agreed to disagree. Barlow stepped around Taylor without a word, as if she were a dog dropping, while Paz smiled, paused, said, “Call me,” in a low voice, and moved on. Taylor flashed a grin at Paz, flipped a bird at Barlow’s retreating back, and walked back to the murder scene to gather color.
    At the next corner, Raymond Wallace, brother to the deceased, was waiting in a patrol car with a uniformed officer. Paz recognized him from the graduation picture in the apartment. He was in the backseat with his head resting against the rear deck, looking stunned. The rear door of the car was open for air, and to demonstrate that the young man was not a prisoner. Like many of the people associated with the morning’s activities, he had thrown up, and his brown skin had an unhealthy gray cast to it. Barlow stuck his head in the window. “Mr. Wallace, we’re going to head back to the station now so you can make your statement.” Raymond Wallace sighed and slid from the car. Paz noticed that his eyes were reddened and there was a splash of yellow puke on the toe of one of his white AJ’s.
    “Can I call my mother?” Wallace asked.
    “You need to let us do that, sir,” said Barlow.
    “Why? She gonna be worried sick if I don’t call and say why I’m not back yet.”
    They arrived at Paz’s car. Barlow said, “The reason is that when there’s a homicide it’s important that the police are the first people to tell the family about it. Sometimes we learn important things from their reaction.”
    “You think my momma connected up with …”
    “No, of course we don’t, sir, but we have to do everything according to the book. And I’d like to say now, sir, how sorry I am about your loss.”
    He meant it, too, thought Paz. He feels for these people, for all of them, the bad guys and the victims both, and yet it doesn’t reduce his heart to slag and pus. Paz himself did not let himself feel anything but the coldest and most refined anger.
    They traveled down Second Avenue in silence to Fifth, to the police station, a newish six-story dough-colored concrete fortification. In one of the interview rooms in the homicide unit’s fifth-floor office Raymond Wallace told his story. He lived with his mother in Opa-Locka, northwest of the city, in their own house. He’d taken his mother’s car to pick up his sister. They were going to go to a mall to buy baby things. Here he broke down. Barlow let him recover himself. Paz asked him about the missing picture and got a blank stare.
    Barlow changed the subject to the family. There was just him and his sister. His father had been an air force sergeant, dead five