This time the woman actually did smile, just a little, with one corner of her mouth. “About two thousand years ago. You’re a little late on that one, Sherlock.”
“Is there anything else you can think of that might help?” Deborah asked.
The woman shook her head. “Help with what? There might be some psycho loser out there who read Aleister Crowley and lives on a dairy farm. How would I know?”
Deborah looked at her for a moment, as if trying to decide if she had been offensive enough to arrest, and then apparently decided against it. “Thank you for your time,” she said, and she flipped her business card on the counter. “If you think of anything that might be helpful, please give me a call.”
“Yeah, sure,” the woman said, without even glancing at the card. Deborah glared at her for a moment longer and then stalked out of the door. The woman stared at me and I smiled.
“I really like vegetables,” I said. Then I gave the woman the peace sign and followed my sister out.
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71
“That was a stupid idea,” Deborah said as we walked rapidly back to her car.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” I said. And it was quite true, I wouldn’t say it. Of course, it really was a stupid idea, but to say so would have been to invite one of Debs’s vicious arm punches. “If nothing else, we eliminated a few possibilities.”
“Sure,” she said sourly. “We know it probably wasn’t a bunch of naked fruits, unless they did it two thousand years ago.”
She did have a point, but
I see it as my job in life to help all those around me maintain a positive attitude. “It’s still progress,” I said.
“Shall we check out the place on Eighth Street? I’ll translate for you.” In spite of being a Miami native, Debs had whimsically insisted on studying French in school, and she could barely order lunch in Spanish.
She shook her head. “Waste of time,” she said. “I’ll tell Angel to ask around, but it won’t go anywhere.”
And she was right. Angel came back late that afternoon with a very nice candle that had a prayer to St. Jude on it in Spanish, but other than that his trip to the place on Eighth Street was a waste of time, just as Debs had predicted.
We were left with nothing, except two bodies, no heads, and a very bad feeling.
That was about to change.
T E N
The next day passed uneventfully and we got no closer to any kind of hint about the two murders at the university. And life being the kind of lopsided, grotesque affair that it is, Deborah blamed our lack of progress on me. She was still convinced that I had special magical powers and had used them to see straight into the dark heart of the killings, and that I was keeping vital information from her for petty personal reasons.
Very flattering, but totally untrue. The only insight I had into the matter was that something about it had scared the Dark Passenger, and I did not want that to happen again. I decided to stay away from the case, and since there was almost no blood work involved, that should have been easy in a logical and well-ordered universe.
But alas, we do not live in any such place. Our universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic. At the moment, the chief of these was my sister. Late the following morning she cornered me in my little cubbyhole and dragged me away to lunch with her boyfriend, Kyle Chutsky. I had no real objections to Chutsky, other than his permanent attitude of knowing the real truth about everything. Aside from that, he was just as pleasant and ami-
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73
able as a cold killer can be, and it would have been hypocritical for me to object to his personality on those grounds. And since he seemed to make my sister happy, I did not object on any other grounds, either.
So off I went to lunch, since in the first place she was my sister, and in the second, the mighty machine that is my body needs almost constant fuel.
The fuel it craves most often is a medianoche sandwich, usually with a side of fried plátanos and a mamey milk shake. I don’t know why this simple, hearty meal plays such a transcendent chord on the strings of my being, but there is nothing else like it. Prepared properly, it takes me as close to ecstasy as I can get. And no one prepares it quite as properly as Café Relampago, a storefront place not far from police HQ, where the Morgans have been eating since time out of mind. It was so good even Deborah’s perpetual grumpiness couldn’t spoil it.
“Goddamn it!” she said to me through a mouthful of sandwich.
It was certainly far from a novel phrase coming from her, but she said it with a viciousness that left me lightly spattered with bread crumbs. I took a sip of my excellent batido de mamey and waited for her to expand on her argument, but instead she simply said it again.
“Goddamn it!”