Tropic of Night by Michael Gruber Read Free Book Online Page B

had not been the summit of the Wallaces’ dreams for their girl, but kids today … what could you do? Mrs. Wallace had never been in her daughter’s apartment, and she confirmed her son’s story of their estrangement over her affair with Julius Youghans. Julius Youghans was high on Mrs. Wallace’s list of suspects.
    “Did he ever threaten your daughter, Mrs. Wallace?” Paz asked.
    “He didn’t want her baby, that was for sure,” said the woman. “Julius, he just wanted the one thing.”
    By this time, Mrs. Wallace was surrounded by neighbor ladies fanning her with palm fans and paper church fans, and comforting her with the homilies of their desperate, bone-hard religion. After some routine questions confirming the whereabouts of her and her son on the previous night, the detectives left their cards and departed.
    Driving back south, Paz ventured, “You starting to like Youghans?”
    “Could you do that to a woman you been with? You saw the baby. Could you do that to your own flesh and blood?”
    “If I was drunk, or zonked behind angel dust or crank, and if she just told me the baby wasn’t mine? And I had a knife handy? Yeah, I could. Anybody could. It explains how the killer got into the apartment; the vic let him in. And the missing picture fits there, too. It was Julius’s picture up there, and he snatched it off the wall when he left.”
    “That wasn’t the only thing he took out of there,” said Barlow pointedly.
    “There’s that, yeah, but if we assume he’s crazed …”
    “And your crazed jealous killer takes the time to drug his lady friend before he slits her open? And to do what looks to me like a neat little operation on that baby?” He looked at Paz sideways, out of the long white eyes. “You’re about to fall in love, you’re not careful, son.”
    That was the first rule of Barlow. Don’t fall in love with a suspect until you know all the other girls.
    “Okay, point taken,” said Paz, not at all offended. He had no problem admitting that Barlow had more experience than he did, was at present a better detective. After a brief silence, Barlow said, “I’ll be real interested in what the doc says about those cuts.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, I seen some hogs butchered, and deer, and calves, and done it myself a time or two. I seen it done by people knew what they were doing and by people didn’t have an idea in the world how to go about it, and you can tell. What I mean to say, the man that did that, what we saw up there in that apartment, knew what he was doing. He done it before.”
    This last remark hung in the air like a smear of greasy smoke.
    “I don’t want to hear that, Cletis.”
    “No, and I don’t particularly care to say it, neither, but there it is. The hearing ear and the seeing eye, the Lord hath made both of them, Proverbs 20:14. We got to follow the ear and the eye wheresoever they may lead.”
    “Cletis, all I’m saying, can’t we just hope it’s a regular domestic? Because if it’s a serial, a loony, well, it’s going to tie us up forever and have the politicians on our necks and the guy is probably in Pensacola anyway …” Paz gave up. He was conscious of the faint blips in his communication, little subvocal hiccups where, had he been speaking to a regular person, he would have inserted the verbal lubricants fucking, hell, goddamn. He also sensed that Barlow knew this and was enjoying it, to the extent that Barlow could ever be said to enjoy something. Barlow said, low-voiced, almost to himself, “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? No one.”
    There seemed to Paz no good comeback to this, and the two men drove the rest of the way to their station in silence. There they found that Julius Youghans had a modest sheet on him, some drunk driving and two counts of receiving stolen property. Paz was ready to go out and pick him up for a conversation, but Barlow said, “He’ll keep. If he ain’t run yet, he’ll set. I want to go